Iran’s Latest Miscalculation Could Prove Fatal – OpEd
Iran’s attack on Israel on October 1 is undoubtedly the greatest military blow ever dealt to Israel. Unlike Iran’s first direct strike on Israeli territory in April of this year, the salvo of nearly 200 ballistic and hypersonic missiles – even if almost all of them were intercepted – represented a serious and uncalculated escalation, in the knowledge that Iran had given no advance warning, as it did the last time.
Iran described the attack as defensive, targeting only three Israeli military sites, and as a response to Israel’s assassination of militant leaders and its aggression in Lebanon and Gaza. However, this action indicates a shift in Iran’s position and a new willingness to risk an avoidable war in its ongoing efforts to carve out a dominant role in the region.
Israel masterfully eliminated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, along with numerous top lieutenants, local commanders, and even foot soldiers. It came barely a year after the Hamas attack on southern Israel, considered the most serious threat to the Israeli state in its 75-year existence. This act, however, likely dealt a severe blow to Iran, which no longer adheres to the customary rules of engagement and asymmetric warfare that have prevailed in the Middle East for over thirty years.
Tehran’s forceful response demonstrated that the country’s leaders have realized that they cannot remain passive, even at the risk of all-out war against a superior enemy. Hezbollah has long served as a critical component of Iranian power, spearheading its militant strategy both regionally and internationally and ensuring that Iranian influence extends beyond Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Iran has also benefited from Hezbollah’s underground networks, extending them to Africa, Latin America, the United States, and Europe. This has given Iran and its regime’s ideology unparalleled reach.
This strike and its timing also show that the hawks in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard undoubtedly felt vulnerable, if not frightened, after the onslaught against Hamas in Gaza and the near decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership and command structure in Lebanon. Tehran saw this situation as critical, in addition to the serious breaches in Iran’s defenses. Following the bombing of Hezbollah’s headquarters, which resulted in Nasrallah’s death, Iran quickly moved its supreme leader to a secure location and ensured a thorough review and update of all security measures.
The explosion of Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies and beepers had already prompted Iran to re-evaluate the communications tools of its military and security forces, with all the disruptions that might entail. Following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at a government guesthouse in Tehran in July, a similar security assessment of key state installations must have proved crucial.
Iran’s usual pragmatism seems to have failed this time, as the regime appears to be facing overwhelming challenges. The decision to retaliate directly against Israel could certainly have serious consequences for the regime’s future, as Israel, backed by the United States, has vowed to retaliate with force.
The strikes are also likely to have undermined any démarches made by Iran’s new president and his quasi-moderate government at the United Nations a few days after the bombing. In New York, President Masoud Pezeshkian and his foreign minister spoke of Iran’s desire to revive the nuclear deal with the U.S. and its European partners.
Pezeshkian certainly didn’t expect that the “new era” he alluded to in New York would come back to haunt the regime and, instead of ushering in a new era of rapprochement with Iran’s enemies, plunge the country directly into the abyss of potential direct war.
Tehran must have seen Israel’s slaughter of Hamas and now Hezbollah as a prelude to the slaughter of other players in the so-called “axis of resistance” and, by default, of Iran’s influence and power in the region. However, Iran has never abandoned its core ideological principle of exporting its Islamic revolution or waging asymmetrical and contested warfare through its militant proxies, even at the height of its openness and expressions of moderation.
Before retaliating for Nasrallah’s assassination, Iran could have relied on Hezbollah to orchestrate a withdrawal of its forces north of the Litani River in Lebanon, while Israel sought to secure villages and towns closer to the border.
Miscalculations may have sunk Hamas and destroyed Gaza. Miscalculations have also led Hezbollah to maintain its threats against communities in northern Israel, near the Lebanese border, in support of a flagging Hamas. Iran’s direct attack on Israel is likely to be another miscalculation, as it is clearly a declaration of war, and while we can discuss how it began, we cannot anticipate or predict how it will end.
The misperception that Israel is internally weakened and that its people lack the will to fight, even in the face of an existential threat, forms the basis of these miscalculations. I think this has been compounded by a mistaken belief among the forces of the “axis of resistance” due to an overconsumption of stories about the erosion of the West and conclusions that the US is about to descend into civil war.
Those who might keep their cool and try to pull the region back from the brink are sadly absent as America lives out the final weeks before its presidential election, bringing with it a series of failed initiatives to broker a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel in Gaza. Paris and Washington proposed a 21-day ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel, but it failed to gain traction before Nasrallah’s assassination.
We live in a world full of conflict, marked by division and the near collapse of multilateralism, with a growing rift between the United States and its Western allies on the one hand, and a Russia that is waging war on Europe’s eastern front for the first time since World War II, alongside countries such as China and Iran. The fear is that instead of the world ending the war between Israel and Hamas and in Ukraine, Iran’s miscalculation will lead to greater instability, even if it means the end of the revolutionary regime in Tehran. After all, it clearly lacks popular support at home after years of sanctions and economic failure, compounded by corruption, mismanagement and foreign adventurism that the Iranian people never signed up for.