Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Hossein Salami, seen here in a poster in Tehran, was killed following Israeli strikes on June 16.ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images
Dennis Horak was Canada’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Yemen from 2015 to 2018 and chargé d’affaires in Iran from 2009 to 2012.
Israel’s decision to launch an attack on Iran should not have come as much of a surprise to anyone.
Iran’s regional proxies, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, were designed to be key elements of Iran’s forward defence and a deterrent. They were neutralized. A key regional ally, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, was deposed. Previous raids on Iran last year severely degraded Iran’s air defences, making it easier to complete the job this time. Seeing this unprecedented window of opportunity to finally and decisively deal with the Iranian threat, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acted, launching an operation that was certainly years in the making.
It is hard, at this stage, to see an obvious off-ramp. On the contrary, the conflict appears to be escalating as economic targets, such as infrastructure and oil and gas facilities, are now being hit. Israel’s ability to inflict immense damage seems infinite at this point.
While Iran has been capable of responding with attacks of its own, Israel’s air defences have so far been able to keep the damage and pain to manageable levels for Israelis, despite the increasing number of civilian targets being hit. It is a war of attrition that Iran seems destined to lose.
A damaged building in Petach Tikvah, Israel, after an overnight missile fired from Iran on June 16.Amir Levy/Getty Images
Iran has other options to end the conflict, like closing the important Straits of Hormuz, effectively shutting shipping through the Persian Gulf, but that would almost certainly bring other countries into the fight, which is something Iran would like to avoid at all costs.
Despite these tactical successes, Israel is unlikely to achieve its strategic goals. Iran’s nuclear program has certainly been set back, but it has not been eliminated. Key elements of the program remain out of reach, particularly the enrichment facility buried deep underground at Fordow.
Nor is Israel likely to achieve its other barely concealed goal of regime change. The regime is certainly under siege and its leadership is no doubt reeling. Regimes do fall unexpectedly. But the Iranian leadership is resilient and it does retain sufficient force to quell whatever unrest may emerge. Moreover, the longer this goes on and as civilian casualties mount, many Iranians could begin to rally around the flag, however much they might hate the current regime. Iranian national pride is fierce and hasn’t been dented by years of repression. Change may come to Iran, but it is unlikely to come while under foreign fire.
A timeline of the Israel-Iran conflict and tensions between the two countries
At some point, this round of fighting will end. War fatigue will set in, particularly as civilian casualties mount and the economy grinds to a halt. Israel will declare some kind of victory, although it is not at all clear what that will look like. The calculation for Iran is much simpler: Victory for the regime will be its survival.
Then what? Looking down the road, it is hard to imagine simply going back to last week.
Ideally, the Islamic Republic should come out of this conflict asking itself a fundamental question: What has 46 years of unrelenting hostility toward Israel gotten them? What have the billions spent on regional proxies to help fight Israel or an ambiguous nuclear program that has raised concerns across the globe actually given Iran? What have the decades of sanctions resulting from these policies cost Iran? The answer is in the rubble now piling up in Tehran.
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Such a rethink of fundamentals would involve a shift away from Tehran’s ideological commitment to resistance toward a more central focus on prosperity and co-existence, in much the same way that the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have. In other words, not “regime change“, but a change in the way the regime operates.
Sadly, that kind of shift in thinking is really not in the leadership’s DNA. The setbacks they have encountered in this conflict are more likely to drive them to double down, concluding that what they really need is a stronger deterrent, i.e. nuclear weapons, to level the playing field in their continuing struggle with the “Zionist entity,” as they call Israel.
Acquiring nuclear weapons is not easy, even if remnants of its current program survive (which seems likely) and the process of getting there secretly is risky, as we have seen. Regional and global powers will be watching closely. But hardliners within the regime who have long pushed for nuclear weapons for Iran have almost certainly been given a leg up by the way this conflict has unfolded.
The fighting will stop eventually, but sadly, it will likely only mark the end of another particularly brutal chapter, not the end of the story.