The regime’s armed forces are mounting the very offensive that was expected to accompany the theocracy’s final moments.
The regime’s armed forces are mounting the very offensive that was expected to accompany the theocracy’s final moments.
T he way Donald Trump talked about the Iranian regime in the run-up to this war, it sounded a lot like the president envisioned a wholesale regime-change operation. But the president might have also wanted to keep a Venezuela-style option in his back pocket — a half measure in which the existing regime sues for peace following its decapitation. It seems, however, that the decapitating was too thorough for that.
“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl over the weekend. By “candidates,” he meant more pliant figures within the Islamic Republic’s firmament who might have taken over for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
The Iranian regime has likely noticed that the vigor with which the U.S. and Israeli air forces have approached this war aligns with Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s pro-regime-change rhetoric. For the Islamic Republic, this is the last stand. Despite the early disruption to Iran’s chain of command, the regime’s armed forces are mounting the very offensive that was expected to accompany the theocracy’s final moments.
At the outset of the war and perhaps with little guidance from above, Iranian drones and missiles emanated in all directions from the Islamic Republic. Their targets seemed relatively indiscriminate. Hotels, civilian airports, commercial ships, and port facilities as well as U.S., Israeli, and Gulf region military installations were struck by the rockets and UAVs that made it through layered air-defense networks.
If the regime’s strategy was to ensure that Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf felt as much of the pain of this war as possible with the expectation that America’s partners would lobby Washington to abandon its strategic goals, the strategy failed. “Many people in the Gulf woke up Saturday pissed off at the United States and Israel, and went to sleep pissed off at Iran,” former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense William Wechsler told the Wall Street Journal. “Rather than seeking an offramp,” said the Journal, “the prevailing mood in the Gulf — at least for now — is that the Iranian regime can’t be allowed to get away with this unprecedented onslaught on its neighbors.”
These small-scale attacks only irritated their targets. Iran would have to mount a more sustained assault on strategic infrastructure in the Gulf if it was going to impose costs on the U.S. and its regional partners such that they would alter their calculus. But perhaps Iran lacked the capability to pull off something akin to its 2019 attack on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities, which temporarily crippled global oil production. It turns out that Iran still has cards to play.
“Saudi Arabia’s state oil giant Aramco shut its Ras Tanura refinery following a drone strike, an industry source said on Monday, after Tehran launched strikes across the region in response to the US-Israeli attack on Iran,” the Jerusalem Post reported today.
The facility has been shut down as a precautionary measure for the time being. Its shuttering will contribute to rising oil prices and trepidation in the energy market — fears heightened by the Iranian navy’s long-anticipated efforts to throttle commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, with limited success (Trump claims that U.S. forces have “sunk” at least nine Iranian navy ships).
And it’s not just Iran’s Gulf neighbors whose facilities are in the Islamic Republic’s crosshairs. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed an attack on a British-flagged oil tanker and attempted a drone strike on a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus. These attacks seem to have stiffened rather than sapped Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s resolve.
Iran’s goal is to raise the costs of U.S. military action and support for America’s activities in the region. And the war to end the Iranian regime has already had costs: At least three U.S. service personnel were killed and five more were “seriously wounded” in an Iranian attack on a Gulf region military facility. Overnight, three American F-15 fighters were shot out of the sky over Kuwait, their crews safely ejecting, when Kuwaiti air defenses mistook American planes for the enemy’s.
These are serious losses. But, along with Iran’s strikes on soft and hard targets around the region, they are the losses we can see. Inside Iran, the fog of war prevails, though every indication is that the U.S. and Israeli air campaign is rolling up the last vestiges of the Islamic Republic.
Within 48 hours of this campaign, this joint operation secured air superiority over western Iran and had established an air bridge to Tehran, where strikes on regime targets are continuous. American and Israeli warplanes have targeted and destroyed many IRGC and Basij (elite paramilitary police) facilities. They’ve razed Iran’s Law Enforcement Command and the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Tehran — two of many imposing symbols of regime authority — to the ground. The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is gone. In addition to the military targets that have been neutralized (missile launchers, air-defense systems, munitions stockpiles, and the buried, reinforced bunkers that were designed to withstand this very onslaught), the Islamic Republic’s political presence in Iran is being systematically dismantled.
For now, time is not on the regime’s side. It is engaged in a desperate effort to externalize this war, but its ability to effectively disrupt the day-to-day affairs of its neighbors will deteriorate as major combat operations continue. And it’s not the 20th century anymore. The United States, itself a major energy exporter, can act as a “stabilizing force” for global energy markets — at least for a while.
What remains of the Iranian regime hopes to withstand the U.S.-Israeli assault and present the West with the unabsorbable costs of continued hostilities. But the regime in Tehran has made itself such a problem for so long that it would have to mete out a lot of pain to convince the world to acquiesce to its continued existence. That may be beyond Iran’s capabilities.