The Iran regime is fighting for its life. If the US attacks, its goose may well be cooked
We stand on the cusp of new transformations in the Middle East, and the potential defeat and eclipse of the main engine of political Islam.
Day five of the war against Iran. A new era, we are told. Certainly it has brought new variations on familiar themes. The Home Front Command has developed a new way of informing us of imminently incoming ballistic missiles.
Now, a few times a day, my phone suddenly begins to make a curious sound clearly intended to convey danger. On inspection on such occasions it flashes up a message that begins in English: “Emergency – extreme alert.”
This cheerful salutation is then accompanied by a set of Hebrew instructions advising me to make my way to a covered area (“the proximity of a shelter should be sought”, it says) and remain there until further notice.
I’m not on some special list for English speakers. This has caused me to wonder why the Home Front Command has chosen to begin its message with an English heading. It may be because officials think that Israelis instinctively regard instructions in English as more grown-up, less negotiable, than anything in their own language. They’re probably right.
So far, here in Jerusalem, we are untouched by the bombings. We receive warnings because the ballistic missiles are going to fly over our heads on their way to the densely populated coastal plain and Tel Aviv. Sometimes you hear booms in the distance. Sometimes closer, sometimes further away.
It has all rapidly become part of the routine of daily life. Still, things have changed. It’s wartime, emergency routine.
The streets in the town centre are not entirely deserted but there are no crowds. Just a few people walking around, a Jerusalem mixture of regular people on essential errands and a fair sprinkling of the would-be prophets, soothsayers and eccentrics the city has always attracted, who don’t feel bound by the instructions of the Home Front Command.
Most shops are closed. Just pharmacies and food stores have remained open. People prefer to be at home, close to the shelter, unless absolutely necessary.
On a recent trip to the town centre I was happy to see my favourite hummus restaurant had bucked the trend and remained open. This place is a Jerusalem institution, established by a Kurdish Jewish family a few decades ago.
Ducking inside, I saw there were no diners but they were preparing a huge supply of takeaway orders. I am friendly with the owner, who was overseeing the preparation process. For some reason this man decided a long time ago that I am a schoolteacher and ever since has refused to be persuaded otherwise. I stopped trying a while ago.
“No classes today, uh?” he said to me as I entered. I shrugged in agreement, trying to convey a sense of the knowing, stoic acceptance that might be expected from a senior educator.
Wartime normality settled very rapidly. It took a day or so. There was about a half day of uncertainty during which supermarket shelves were rapidly cleared and people waited to get the measure of what had changed. Then things calmed down.
An annoying aspect of purchasing patterns in this country is that when a crisis begins, the first thing to disappear from the shelves is eggs. I have no idea why a collective decision to stock up on eggs seems to descend on the mass of people here as soon as the first siren is heard. But so it is.
Sure enough, on Friday morning at my local supermarket, the section usually stocking eggs was bare. All that remained on the grey shelf was a sign proclaiming that the eggs theoretically available at the store were fully kosher. I made a mental note on seeing this that the store down the hill in the Arab section of Abu Tor always had fresh eggs during Covid.
A long time coming
This has all been a long time coming, and there is a sense of inevitability about it. For Israelis of my generation, the Iranian regime has been a steady and unwelcome presence in our lives for as long as anyone can remember.
I should speak about myself, perhaps, rather than try to claim some spurious representative status. When I was a young soldier, in the early 1990s, the active front for the army was south Lebanon, where an Iranian proxy militia was engaged in an (eventually successful) insurgency against us.
I think about those times and I can see before me the face of my platoon commander from those distant days, Lieutenant Harel Shrem, who was killed outside Sujoud, in late 1993. A few remembrance days ago, I looked him up online. There was a movie clip of him at home, I suppose a few months before he was killed. What struck me mainly was how impossibly young he was.
I think many other Israelis have memories like that. It was how we first met the Islamic Republic of Iran, and its intentions towards us.
The Second Intifada, of 2000-04, was in large measure a product of Hezbollah’s successful insurgency in the preceding years.
This seemed to offer a model to the Palestinian Islamist organisations for how Israel could be dislodged and driven back without the necessity for negotiation and compromise. The model proved flawed in those years, but proving that cost the lives of 1000 of us and about 3000 Palestinians.
In 2006 we fought another inconclusive, higher-intensity war with Hezbollah. That was my war and I’ve written about it elsewhere and don’t want to dwell on it here.
But though the results were ambiguous, Iran and its allies recorded it as a victory for themselves, and for their model of “resistance”.
This strategy, called muqawama in Arabic, was intended to bring about Israel’s destruction by subjecting it to a long war of attrition, to be carried out by hybrid political-military organisations seeded along Israel’s borders.
These groups would be financed and trained by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, but preferably without direct Iranian involvement in combat.
The idea, based on earlier Arab and Palestinian theories of revolutionary warfare, was that Israel would be slowly weakened and whittled away, subjected to threats and pressures to which its population would prove unequal, and then, once weakened and depleted, finally overrun and destroyed.
The Iranian regime predicted that this would happen by 2040 and put up a clock in Tehran moving towards that date.
In 2007, the Iranian-allied Hamas organisation took power in Gaza. In 2008, Hezbollah brushed aside its local opponents to emerge as the unchallenged power in Lebanon. The siege seemed to be proceeding as planned.
Behind this, in Iran itself, the regime worked on the other elements of its power projection, its missile program and behind that, looming and ominous, its nuclear ambition.
The subsequent years were similarly auspicious for Tehran and its muqawama strategy. The instability that rocked the Arab world from 2010 proved conducive to the goals and methods of the IRGC.
In Iraq, US drawdown and subsequent sectarian strife enabled Tehran to raise up Hezbollah-style militias, then to pilot them to permanence and a dominant political status in the country.
In Yemen, the toppling of the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh led rapidly to the Iran-supported Ansar Allah (Houthis) militia making a grab for the capital and much of the coastline.
In Syria, the IRGC and its methods, along with Russian airpower, preserved the Assad regime from destruction at the hands of its Sunni Islamist opponents. I covered those years across the region as a journalist.
I well remember the seeming power, potency and utter ruthlessness of the muqawama axis from close up.
I remember Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis outside the oil town of Baiji in Iraq during the Islamic State war, rallying his forces in some dusty base before they entered the town to fight the rival Sunni jihadis of ISIS. The senior officers in uniforms of the Iraqi Army and Federal Police deferring to Muhandis’s position of command.
And earlier, in Syria, in defenceless Dar al Shifa hospital in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, the regime aircraft targeting the hospital, the people there helpless, the brutal resolve and cruelty of the Assad regime and its allies apparent.
And that was where the matter rested on the eve of the present war. Change had blown across the region and departed. Israel had weathered the storm.
But a constant slow drumbeat had characterised every chapter and development in the Middle East for a quarter century. It was the slow and steady, seemingly inexorable advance of Iran and its allies, and its methods.
The eclipse of the axis
In retrospect, it now seems that October 7, 2023, represented the high-water mark of the Iranian regional project.
Hamas pulled the trigger too soon, before things were really ready. The regional alliance behind Hamas then sought to intervene, but in piecemeal fashion, hesitantly, in some instances only symbolically.
In so doing, the Iranian regime, hitherto so masterful in using irregular methods to advance its state interests, committed two cardinal errors.
First, it failed to co-ordinate a united response. This enabled Israel to deal with each component of the alliance piecemeal, rather than face a co-ordinated, united and simultaneous assault.
The Israel Defence Forces first destroyed Hamas’s organised resistance in Gaza. Then, in the second half of 2024, Lebanese Hezbollah was decimated through combined air, ground and intelligence warfare.
The Lebanese organisation, once noted for its particular gleeful and triumphalist rhetorical style, quietly bowed out of the fight in November that year.
Israel responded to two direct Iranian assaults in April and October 2024, and in so doing managed to keep the Iranians on the sidelines. The Iraqi Shia militias made a small number of attacks on Israel and on US forces, then in December declared their further non-involvement also.
The Houthis and Yemen signed a separate ceasefire with the US in May 2025 to end their campaign of attacks on shipping in the Gulf of Aden-Red Sea route. They have proved unable to systematically penetrate Israel’s airspace.
Finally, as an unexpected by-product of Israel’s weakening of Iran and Hezbollah (and Russia’s focus on its grinding war in Ukraine), the Sunni rebellion in Syria succeeded in destroying the Assad regime, leaving Hezbollah cut off from Iran’s ability to resupply it.
All this, together, amounts to the reversal of the advance, and then the eclipse of the Iran-led proxy alliance, the slow advance of which had been proceeding during the previous three decades.
The second error the Iranians made was a more fundamental one. The Iranian regional project represented an attempt to wed the methods and advantages of irregular warfare to a state-led project.
A core lesson of irregular warfare is that the insurgent force must not allow itself to be drawn into open battle against its adversary. In a straight fight, the technological and material advantages of the adversary must prevail.
Iran and its allies maintained this rule for three decades, then broke it on October 7, 2023. The results have not been auspicious for the muqawama camp.
Israel’s conventional assault on Iran
Israel’s long-awaited direct attack on Iran is the product of the events of the past year. With the Iranians depleted and weakened but their ambitions in no way tempered, it was an opportune moment.
Perusal of the known targets struck by Israeli air power and by Israel’s assets on the ground in Iran indicate that the Israeli intention goes beyond weakening or removing the nuclear program.
Air bases, IRGC intelligence centres, government ministries, even installations in the South Pars gas field have been hit.
The objective, very clearly, is to cripple the Iranian regime. The hope is that it will be overthrown by its own people. Even if it is not, it will take Iran years to recover what has already been lost. Having been shorn of its regional assets, the regime in Tehran is fighting for its life at home.
So where may things be headed? There are several possible scenarios. Most fateful is the question of possible US entry into the war.
If the Trump administration comes in, then the regime’s remaining nuclear sites (most importantly the enrichment facility at Fordow) face the prospect of rapid destruction and the regime’s goose may well be cooked. It will represent a historic defeat for the Islamic Republic, and may well lead to widespread popular unrest and to splits within the regime elite.
The latter would become particularly likely if supreme leader Ali Khamenei were to be killed. Khamenei already has handed over significant decision-making powers to the Supreme Council of the IRGC. His death would be met with joy by a large section of the population, and by a mutual desire to replace him among rival factions of the regime elite.
A second scenario is that Iran, facing the prospect of US intervention, chooses to surrender its nuclear program to preserve regime survival. Should Tehran agree to the complete dismantlement of its nuclear project, this would (legitimately) be presented by Donald Trump as a triumph for his particular combination of diplomacy with the threat of force.
Iran’s regional project would be gone. The regime itself, however, would live to fight another day.
A third possibility is that the Americans do not enter the war, Israel continues its long decimation of regime personnel, facilities and centres of governance, and this combines with Iranian popular unrest to bring the regime to the edge and perhaps over the precipice to its destruction.
Finally, if there is no US intervention, no major split in the regime, and no popular movement from below, then Israel may continue its pulverisation of Iran until such time as it concludes that there is nothing further to be gained. It will then declare victory and leave.
This would be the least optimal outcome from an Israeli point of view. The nuclear project would have been damaged but not destroyed. The regime would be shaken but would have survived. Its missile program would be depleted but outside of external scrutiny. In such as scenario, the prospect of an accelerated Iranian effort to break out to a nuclear weapons capacity also would become likelier.
Even in the event of this scenario transpiring, however, it appears the Iranian regime does not possess sufficient force to induce Israel to cease fire before a time of its choosing.
The regional assets have been decimated. The much vaunted ballistic missile program has elicited damage but at a smaller scale than anticipated. If the Iranian regime cannot find a way to improve its current performance in this regard, it will be unable to force a cessation of the Israeli campaign.
Inflection point
The Middle East stands at a historic crossroads. In the period ahead, a long shadow that for years seemed to be advancing across the regional landscape may finally be lifted.
There are no guarantees for what will come after, but the removal of the Islamist regime in Tehran is surely a necessary, though not assuredly sufficient, condition for the region to have a chance for successful development in the 21st century.
In the meantime, the new wartime normality in Jerusalem and on the coastal plain continues. Maintaining coolness and calm, even or especially when such a response seems counterintuitive, is of the essence in such situations.
The people here seem to be good at this. More than you’d expect if you were used to seeing them in quieter times. But much about this country is paradoxical.
In the era of Arab nationalism, and the subsequent one of advancing political Islam, the people here have managed to establish, maintain and preserve a flourishing non-Arab, non-Muslim polity, unique to the region and against the trend.
We may now stand on the cusp of new transformations. Perhaps even (whisper it) the defeat and eclipse of the main engine of political Islam and hence of instability, repression and suffering across the region for the past half century may be imminent. We’ll know in a little while.
Jonathan Spyer is director of research at the Middle East Forum and author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel Islamist Conflict.
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