Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that Israel was justified in launching a surprise attack on Iran because it was close to developing a nuclear bomb. Yet in March, the Director of US National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he suspended in 2003”.
A triumphant Netanyahu has said that his war has the further objective of regime change in Tehran, calling for “the Iranian people to unite around its flag and its historic legacy, by standing up for your freedom from the evil and oppressive regime.” But no such outcome is likely in the tightly controlled Islamic Republic of Iran, which has a core of committed adherents as well as many dissidents. A far more likely outcome is a prolonged conflict – as in Gaza and Lebanon – in which Israeli airpower ranges freely and destructively over Iran, striking at will at political, military and economic targets.
Yet Iran is a country of 91 million people compared to just 2.4 million in Gaza and six million in Lebanon of whom two million are Shia Muslims – the community from whom Hezbollah recruits its fighters. Given that Israel has not been able to end these small wars, it is highly unlikely to be able to win a decisive victory against a far larger and more powerful country like Iran.
Since Israel attacked early on Friday morning, Iranian air defence has been either destroyed or proved ineffective. Television screens are filled with pictures of destruction in Israel caused by Iranian missiles, but Iran’s capacity to retaliate is insufficient to deter Israel from stopping its much heavier bombardment of Iran. In Tehran, some 60 civilians were reportedly killed in a single apartment block which was hit by an Israeli missile.
In an ominous development, Israel has started to destroy Iran’s energy industry, setting ablaze a giant gasoline depot and an oil refinery in the capital. Another attack was on South Pars, the world’s biggest gas field, which is located offshore in the Gulf in Iran’s southern Bushehr province and is shared with Qatar. Iran has partially suspended production there after the Israeli strike caused a fire.
Experts differ on how permanently Iran could choke off a significant part of the world’s oil supplies, but it could certainly do so for a time by use of sea mines, drones, missiles and torpedoes.
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Oil facilities everywhere in the Middle East are more vulnerable than in the past because the mass use of drones has become an omni-present weapon of war. In September 2019, a drone attack blamed on Iran hit oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, briefly cutting the Kingdom’s oil output by half.
To sustain its war effort, Israel must try to drag in the US as an active co-belligerent in the war, but even this may not produce a final victory for Israel over Iran – any more than the US succeeded in long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
People who are being bombed seldom rise up at the call of those who are doing the bombing. As the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre once remarked about those invading other countries promising regime change: “No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.”
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