Iran and Israel are fighting their demons, not a war. They are prisoners of their nightmares

The Print

18-06-2025

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he is hoping to provoke regime change in Iran. This strategy isn't born out of madness. While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)'s assessments suggest Iran's uranium enrichment programme has been hit hard, hardened facilities like Fordow and Isfahan seem to have escaped damage. Few experts believe Israel will be able to permanently halt a future Iranian push for a nuclear bomb through military means alone.
Five times, the mad faith of Iran's revolutionary soldiers almost overran the armed forces of Iraq: Each time, Iraq hit back at its enemy's cities with Soviet-made combat jets, artillery, and SCUD missiles. The so-called War of the Cities would claim some 12,240 lives, historian Egle Murauskaite has estimated. The war itself claimed well over 10,00,000 lives.
Each carried his death with him: a symbolic funeral shroud and a headband wrapped around his head proclaiming the greatness of Allah, as well as a plastic key slung around his neck, which promised him entry to paradise. The soldiers of the Iranian Basij militia, some as young as 12, marched towards the Iraqi lines. Some blew up on anti-personnel mines in their path, others fell to gunfire or poison gas, and still others died by electrocution from the live wires that had been laid through the ditches. The bodies would later be bulldozed into a single mass grave .
The poet Qaisar Aminpour, a child of Iran's revolution, wrote of the War of the Cities:
'I said to myself that the deformed lines of my poem
Are no better than the houses in the town.
Let my poem, like the people's clay houses
be shattered, ruined, soaked in blood.'
Each missile falling on Tel Aviv and Tehran is driven by primal fears: Israel's fears of annihilation by a theocratic regime which has often made genocidal threats, and Iran's experience of the slaughter of a generation, which the West enabled and encouraged. This is not a war of strategic ends, but one shaped by nightmares.
Also read: Israel crushed Ayatollah's regime, but stopping Iran's nuke programme will need total overthrow
The shadow of the bomb
The facts show this war isn't about an imminent nuclear threat. Iran, the IAEA knows, conducted several experiments on bomb-components before 2003, at secret facilities in Turquzabad, Lavizan-Shian, Varmin, and Marivan. Even though the work ended, that knowledge remains, and the country also has upwards of 400 kilograms of uranium. Tulsi Gabbard, the United States' Director of National Intelligence, said in March that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, and most experts believe it would take at least two years to produce one.
Israel's calculation, clearly, has little to do with these timelines. Instead, it believes circumstances allow it to crack open the clerical regime. From 2023, a conjunction of interests—as well as Russia's growing preoccupation with the war in Ukraine—enabled Israel to work with Turkey to dismember Bashar al-Asad's military regime. That meant Iran could no longer supply Hezbollah, its proxy in Lebanon. Iran was thus at its weakest position in decades.
Tehran had long known it was operating from a position of military weakness. The country's doddering Air Force operated aircraft purchased before 1979, and Russia was no longer in a position to supply it with modern equipment. From 2005—sensitive to sanctions issues, but also the concerns of Saudi Arabia—China discontinued military supplies, providing ballistic missile components, but not combat aircraft or modern air-defence systems.
In essence, Tehran was left with one weapon in its arsenal: The missiles it had hoarded since the War of the Cities, threatening its enemies with the carnage it was once subjected to. Air defence, though, has dramatically improved in the last two decades, making the threat less fearsome than it once was.
Except, that is, if one of those incoming missiles is mounted with a nuclear bomb—and that's a prospect Israel hopes it will never have to confront. To make sure, though, Israel has to do more than bomb Iran's nuclear plants: The Ayatollahs will have to be overthrown, once and for all.
Also read: No country can stop Israel-Iran war now. For Netanyahu & Khamenei, it's a zero-sum game
Is a coup possible?
There is a curious feature of Iran, which marks it out from its region. Each of its neighbours and near-neighbours—consider Pakistan, Iraq, Qatar, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Egypt—has suffered a military coup d'etat since the 1979 revolution. The Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, maintained tight control of his commanders, binding their career prospects to his patronage, and encouraging them to undermine each other.
Likewise, the Islamic regime used networks of clerics to tightly bind its armed forces to its ideological project, much like militaries in the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam, political scientists Rebecca Cann and Constantin Danapolous write.
Lessons were learned from the errors of the Shah, who lavished favour on his élite of 50,000 troops, leaving a resentful rank-and-file of 120,000 conscripts who defected to the new regime. Iran's regular army, of some 220,000 conscripts, are relegated to low-grade roles guarding the border. The regime's core military functions are vested with the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, some 100,000 strong. Like Pakistan's Army, the IRGC is tied to the regime by financial interests, which run across construction, the oil and gas sector, and even Iran's financial, banking, and telecommunications.
As scholars Hesam Forozan and Afshin Shahi have written, efforts by reform-minded leaders like President Mohammad Khatami were undone by the IRGC's commanders, who threatened to use force unless liberalisation was rolled back. Khatami's successor, President Hasan Rouhani, failed to touch the IRGC's economic interests, despite his promises to end nepotism and corruption. The IRGC has consolidated its hold, putting up former members for election in key positions.
Israel's assassination campaign in Iran, named Operation Rising Lion, has targeted these key pillars of the establishment: Iran's Chief of General Staff, Mohammad Hossein Afshordi aka Mohammad Bagheri, worked his way up after joining revolutionary forces as a 20-year-old in 1980; IRGC's Aerospace Force commander Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh fought in the Iraq war at 19.
Easing out these top leaders, though, isn't the same as creating an alternative. The large-scale protests by youth seeking greater cultural and social freedoms in 2023 demonstrated there was a depth of resentment against the regime's sclerotic theocratic ideology. Yet, it also demonstrated the absence of any organised force to push it. Forces like the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the country's largest dissident group, provide cadre and operatives to Mossad, but have no political legitimacy or base within Iran.
Also read:Iran-Israel conflict: Decades of covert operations and proxy warfare to current confrontation
The missed off-ramp
Iran's existential paranoia, and American blindness, led it to miss the chance to emerge as a prosperous state at the heart of the Middle East. Following 9/11, Tehran reached out through Switzerland, offering cooperation against Al-Qaeda. The positive momentum, though, was shattered by President George Bush, who infamously named Iran as part of an Axis of Evil. The threat of regime change—disastrously exercised in Iraq, with Netanyahu promising removing Saddam Husain would have 'positive reverberations'—pushed Iran into a corner.
Iran agreed to end enriching uranium in the 2015 deal, brokered by President Barack Obama. The deal was killed-off by President Donald Trump, though, in 2018. Iran could have given up its uranium enrichment programme after the deal collapsed, and worked with European powers and Saudi Arabia to bring about its reintegration into the international system. The regime, however, decided to hold out for more—with consequences that have proved catastrophic.
For its part, Israel needs to consider the disasters that could lie ahead. Iran now has good reason to move rapidly towards producing a nuclear weapon, to secure regime survival. The regime might well be stopped through war, but a chaotic and dysfunctional Iran will give space to organisations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. This, without doubt, will have dangerous consequences in Israel's near-neighbourhood, including Syria, Egypt and Lebanon.
Leaders awake to the abyss that lies ahead are needed—but there are no signs of any, not in Tehran or Tel Aviv, nor in Washington.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)