War on Iran Backfires: Losses all around for Israel and Trump
By Jeremy Salt
At all these levels, any claim that Israel ‘won’ the war on Iran is incongruous. At all levels, the defeat – this setback – is the worst in Israel’s history.
No question about it. Netanyahu’s attack on Iran, followed by the US attack on Iran’s nuclear reactors, ended in a victory for Iran. Israel took damage it had never experienced before, never remotely experienced before.
The attack on Iran had clearly been planned for years. Iran was seeded with Mossad spies and agents trained to operate missile-loaded drones. At the lowest level, many were recruited from among the millions of refugees who poured into Iran during the US war on Afghanistan.
With this network established, Israel began its attack by attempting to decapitate the military leadership and assassinating some of the country’s leading nuclear scientists. It would have murdered Ayatollah Khamenei, but could not find him. The intention was to spark off internal collapse, but instead, Iranians closed ranks behind the government.
Caught off guard, it quickly recovered, to Israel’s dismay. It had planned for this event, so gaps in the military leadership were instantly filled while the same process took place in the ranks of nuclear scientists.
Iran then began its retaliation with drone and missile strikes, expanding every day, in number and the size of the payload in the missile warheads. Israel’s layered missile ‘defence’ system failed to stop Iran’s missiles breaking through. By the 12th day, it appeared almost completely ineffective, Iran culminating its strikes with a massive attack on the occupied Naqab city of Bir al Saba’ (Beersheba).
Thousands of residential buildings, government research institutes, and ministries, including the so-called ‘defence’ ministry where this war was planned, were damaged or destroyed by the Iranian ballistic missiles that Israel could not stop.
There is no doubt that it was Netanyahu who wanted the ceasefire, when it was clear he could not win the war he started. Israel has no respect for ceasefires and only sought one because it could not stop Iran’s missile attacks.
In fact, no official ceasefire was ever declared. Netanyahu just said Israel would stop fighting if Iran did and Iran agreed. Some will regret that Iran did not keep going and bring Israel to its knees, but that would have involved a full-scale war with the US.
Overall, the attack on Iran has to be judged as a failure. The Iranian government did not collapse; if anything, it emerged stronger than before. As was the case in Gaza and southern Lebanon, Israel did not care how many civilians it killed in the targeting of specific individuals. More than 600 civilians were killed and nearly 5000 wounded, many children among them, in both categories. Whole apartment buildings were destroyed, just like Gaza and Beirut.
The treachery of the ‘west’ and the killing of civilians have weakened ‘pro-western’ Iranians for a long time to come. The projections of collapse and the return of the shah’s son were media fantasies.
The victory was bigger than Iran’s missile triumph. The world, outside the warmongering governments of the US, the UK, the Europeans, and their remote former colony allies, Canada and Australia, could see the treachery and illegality of the Israeli attack. The door was opened by the IAEA board of governors on May 31 when it issued a report saying verification and monitoring of Iran’s nuclear plants had been “seriously affected by the cessation of implementation by IRAN of its nuclear-related commitments under the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.” This was later backed up by a formal statement on June 12. In the knowledge that an attack on Iran was imminent, this was red meat to the US and Israel.
Rafael Grossi, the IAEA’s director-general, said after the attack that while he had no concrete knowledge, it was possible Iran’s enriched uranium had been moved to an ancient site near Isfahan, setting it up as a possible target in the next attack on Iran.
The fact is that Iran lost trust in the IAEA long ago. Of the JCPOA members – the UN Security Council’s ‘P5 plus one’ (Russia, China, France, the UK, the US and Germany) plus the EU and Iran – most are hostile to Iran for reasons well beyond nuclear energy. They choose to see Iran as the threat to Middle East peace, not Israel, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Iran has not fought a war since being attacked by Iraq in 1980.
Israel, by comparison, never stops going to war. Tens of thousands have died in its attacks since the establishment of the Iranian Islamic Republic, yet not once has it been sanctioned. It lives in standing violation of international law on the question of Palestine, but that doesn’t disturb those who profess to uphold international law. They prefer to uphold a genocidal state.
The leader of the anti-Iran pack, the US, on behalf of Israel, has been trying to break Iran through sanctions since 1979. In 2018, Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA and decided to apply “maximum sanctions” against Iran by tightening sanctions against Iran still further, not that there was much further to tighten.
Iran has the same right to develop nuclear energy as any other state. It said from the beginning that it is not developing nuclear weapons, and no one has ever proved that it is developing them. Unlike Israel, which is thought to have from a low of 90 up to several hundred nuclear weapons, Iran has signed on to the NPT and thus the requirement not to develop nuclear weapons. Israel’s nuclear blackmail is aimed at the ultimate intimidation of any government that dares to challenge it. Arab states and Iran are apparently expected to live under this threat forever.
The nuclear campaign against Iran is based on limiting uranium enrichment below the level it would need to develop nuclear weapons. The negotiations with Iran were formally continuing when the US attacked, even though they had reached a dead end when the US negotiator, Steve Witkoff, moved from saying Iran could be allowed some enrichment to demanding that it totally abandon enrichment. Such an impingement on any country’s sovereignty could never be accepted.
Of the JCPOA members, the EU applied US sanctions against Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas without asking any questions. Hezbollah and Hamas apparently have no will of their own. They are just Iranian proxies. Both are designated terrorist groups, when their clear cause is resistance to an aggressive occupying power. Not one EU state has taken action to stop the Gaza genocide. Not once has Israel been subjected to international sanctions for the endless crimes it has committed and has been allowed to get away with by the same political and media crowd baying for Iran’s blood.
The US, the UK and Germany have continued to arm Israel despite the genocide, and all supported the illegal attacks on Iran by Israel and the US. As Iran sees it, the IAEA as another weapon in the armoury of these western governments to be used against Iran in the service of Israel.
Trump – the self-professed anti-war president – soon joined Israel’s war on Iran. Having said that the US was not involved, he soon admitted it was. Almost flippantly, he said the US knew where Ayatollah Khamenei was but had decided not to kill him “at least not for now.” After Ayatollah Khamenei said Iran had delivered a “slap to America’s face” he claimed in a social message that “I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH, and he does not have to say, ‘THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!’”
The message contradicts the admission by the Israeli ‘defence’ minister, Israel Katz, that Israel would have killed Khamenei if it knew where he was. Furthermore, Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear sites were “totally obliterated” is a wild overstatement, measured against the consensus view that the sites were damaged but not destroyed. Iran admits to “significant” damage, but within days it was repairing Fordow, the main target of the US attack.
As the total destruction of the nuclear plants was the stated objective, the US attack has to be judged a failure, along with the Israeli attack. The fallout for Trump includes the split in the MAGA movement caused by the no-war president going to war.
The Gaza genocide and the US/Israeli war on Iran have further opened the eyes of the world to the genocidal nature of the Israeli colonial-settler state. Israel is now reviled as never before, but deservedly so. Its government, its military, its parliament, its media, and its people are responsible for some of the worst war crimes and crimes against humanity the world has seen in modern history.
Israel has turned Gaza into an open-air death camp. The detailed application of the Israeli government and military to mass murder every day, including the bombing of tents and the continuing slaughter of totally defenceless Palestinians lured into queuing for food at a false Israel/US ‘food hub, ’ sets a new standard for depravity in the history of genocide. Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) has described these murders as “slaughter masquerading as aid.”
Topping off the defeat Israel suffered in the war on Iran, the people of New York have chosen as their Democratic candidate for the mayoralty Zohran Mamdani, born in Uganda of Indian (Gujarati) Shia Muslim descent. Mamdani supports BDS, agrees that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide and as a New York state assemblyman, has sponsored resolutions to boycott trading in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.
For a Muslim critical of Israel to win this nomination for mayor in the world’s biggest Jewish city outside Tel Aviv is astonishing, and a sign of how quickly the wheel of history is now turning against Israel. A recent poll showed that only a minority (46 percent) of Americans are sympathetic to Israel. Hostility to Israel is especially strong among young people. This would have been inconceivable just a few years.
At all these levels, any claim that Israel ‘won’ the war on Iran is incongruous. At all levels, the defeat – this setback – is the worst in Israel’s history. Reprieved by the halt in fighting with Iran, Israel will now be plotting the means of reopening the war with the same goals as before.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.