On paper, it looked like a mismatch. Iran is not only one of the oldest and most established places in the Persian Gulf but also at least 75 times the size of Israel, with a population nine to ten times larger. Size for size, it’s a modern-day David and Goliath match-up, with ancient history squarely on Iran’s side.
At the height of its reign, especially under Cyrus the Great (545-525 BC), the Persian Empire, modern-day Iran, extended as far as Egypt, and its military might was unassailable. In more contemporary times, Iran defended itself against the aggression of Saddam Hussein during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War.
Sudden tide
Yet, since June 12, when Israel struck Iran’s nuclear site and killed at least 14 atomic scientists and 16 top military officers, Iran’s response has been something of a damp squib. A leaked intelligence report by the White House suggests that, but for President Donald Trump’s intervention, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, might have been killed in the recent Israeli strike.
In response, a barrage of Iranian missiles was fired on Tel Aviv and Haifa, with civilian casualties. This has been perhaps the most significant dent on Israel’s defence system in the last five decades. However, the response has been far below the notion of Iran as a nation of warriors and the potential nemesis of its precocious neighbour, especially after the fall of Syria’s Hafez al-Assad.
Things got so bad for Tehran that, at one point, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even claimed that Israel was “in full control of the Iranian skies,” a claim that Tehran could not deny.
What happened?
How did mighty Iran lose its military footing so calamitously, so quickly? The weakening of Iran’s military strength is not as sudden as it appears.
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It is the result of years of isolation and economic sanctions, driven mainly by three suspicions: One, that the Shia variety of Islam (and its allied franchises) subscribed to by Iran’s ruling elite is the mainstay of radical and extremist terror groups; two, that it is the main sponsor of at least two radical Islamic groups and arch-enemies of Israel – Hamas (in the Gaza) and Hezbollah (in Lebanon); and three, that its nuclear enrichment programme is not for peace, but for war.
All three points are interlinked, and by 2015, the lack of progress on the third one was the beginning of economic sanctions by the US, Britain and France, amongst others, targeting and undermining Iran’s receipts from oil sales and weakening its economy.
But Iran remained a major military force despite the sanctions. It cultivated closer ties with China and Russia, made desperate attempts to diversify its economy and used fronts to sell its oil.
Burden of history
All this time, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted to strike. He pressured the US to tighten the screw on Tehran and maybe back a pre-emptive Israeli strike, but his repeated claim that Iran was only “months, years, or even weeks” from the final stages of getting the bomb, fell on a sceptical, if not indifferent, Democratic White House.
After the debacle in Iraq, where the US lost over 900 troops and spent over $2 trillion based on faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, no Democratic president, whether Barack Obama or Joe Biden, had the appetite for another full-scale war in the Persian Gulf without a convincing reason.
Then, two things happened that changed the dynamics of power and politics in the Persian Gulf. Hamas, long regarded as Iran’s proxy, attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 Israelis and abducting 250. This act of terror not only transformed moderate elements in Israeli politics, but it also further hardened extremists like Netanyahu, who vowed to crush Hamas and Hezbollah and make Iran pay a heavy price.
Trump factor
When Donald Trump was elected president, one year after the Israeli-Hamas war broke out, the US president’s brand of tweet-and-deal-making diplomacy, not to mention his close ties with Netanyahu, meant that Iran was on very thin ice. The stalemate in negotiations between Iran and the nuclear inspectors, including the expulsion of the veteran IAEA officials, further raised suspicions about Iran’s claims that its nuclear programme was for peaceful purposes.
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Yet some argued that Tehran’s reluctance to cooperate and its rigmarole were merely bargaining chips to ease sanctions and repair its moribund economy, that it was still a long way from the bomb.
Even though the Wall Street Journal reported recently that US intelligence still doubts Netanyahu’s claims of a smoking gun over Iran’s nuclear enrichment, Tehran appears to have exhausted its card, and the days of the old regime may be numbered.
Pre-emptive or not?
With President Trump mulling direct US involvement in the war, I asked a source in the Israeli Foreign Ministry on Monday if this was a pre-emptive strike, a move that the Nigerian government had condemned in a statement during the week.
“It is not a pre-emptive strike,” the source replied. “It is a targeted military operation to remove a concrete threat after the pre-established period of negotiations has elapsed. The objectives have been set: the nuclear programme and the ballistic capabilities.”
What has changed?
Here is how Israel systematically weakened and significantly degraded Iran’s military capacity, especially in the last two years, forcing the mullahs in Tehran to shelter behind the veil in what may prove to be a decisive new phase in the war in one of the world’s most troubled regions.
One, Iran’s regional allies – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Bashar Hafez al-Assad in Syria – have either been neutralised, rooted out or forced to flee. The pager attack by Israel on Hezbollah members and affiliates in Lebanon and Syria last September was particularly devastating. At least 13 members of the group were killed, while Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was injured, revealing a major breach in Hezbollah’s security, causing panic in high places in Iran.
Although the Houthis have occasionally threatened security in the region, they have also been significantly contained or dispersed, making Iran even more isolated and vulnerable.
Two, apart from the losses in the ranks of its proxies, Israel has also carried out precise strikes on Iran’s military leadership, assassinating ranking members of Iran’s military, including the Chief of the General Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, General Mohammad Hossein Bagheri, who is only a heartbeat from the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The country’s air defence system has been degraded, and even though it has managed to fire hundreds of missiles toward Israel, their potency and impact have been largely limited.
Three, the economic sanctions have limited Tehran’s ability to modernise its military, while support from its main ally, Russia, has been curtailed by Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine, leaving Tehran largely on its own.
Unlikely mediators
It’s an irony that, in its moment of travail, Iran is now looking to Qatar and Egypt, two countries that it has long despised, for mediation with Israel and the US. Netanyahu still has to answer for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and hopefully, that should keep him on a tight leash in his next conquest.
After centuries of military, cultural and geopolitical conquests, is the sun finally about to set on the “Gunpowder Empire?” Or is there still one magic spell left under the mullahs’ turban?