Donald Trump’s vision for how the war against Iran should end is simple: “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!!!!”
Wait, no! Donald Trump also wants a veto on who will be Iran’s next leader — although, as he said: “The attack was so successful that it eliminated most of the candidates. It won’t be someone we thought of because they are all dead.”
Israel’s preferred outcome is more complex. At a pinch, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would settle for regime change that brings a friendly government to power in Tehran. However, he would certainly prefer a number of post-Iran ethnic successor states that are too consumed with sorting out their new borders to have time for conspiring against Israel.
As for Iran, the regime of the ayatollahs is in pure survival mode: nothing else matters and no sacrifice that preserves it is too great. They had a near-death experience with a popular revolt in January, but by drowning it in blood they have won at least a few months before people dare to come out into the streets again. Will they use that time to make a deal with Trump?
Different goals require different strategies, and there is a gulf between the Americans and the Israelis that will soon become visible.
Being (apparently) omnipotent is fun and Trump is enjoying the ride, but as usual he is looking for a quick victory and a “deal”. It doesn’t matter to him if, as in Venezuela, it’s a deal that leaves most of the “bad guys” in power.
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Trump has already said so himself. The “candidates” he accidentally “eliminated” with the bombing were all members of the regime; he just hasn’t found the Iranian version of Delcy Rodríguez yet. But he needs to find that person soon, or he will be going into the US mid-term elections in November with a crippled economy and a live war on his hands.
Netanyahu, by contrast, wants the war to continue until Iran is crushed and the reign of the ayatollahs is permanently terminated, and the vast majority of Israelis agree. He is a very persuasive man, especially where Trump is concerned — he talked him into this “war of choice” — but three months from now Trump will be desperate to get out of it.
Indeed, I suspect that there is already a clandestine race going on in which Israel is trying to identify and kill potential collaborators inside the regime before Trump’s people can make deals with them. There is no honour among thieves.
This all assumes that the Iranians can hold out for three months or so under a constant rain of bombs and missiles, but that’s a fairly safe assumption.
Iran is a country three times the size of France with 92 million people, so the US-Israel alliance can’t just turn it into a giant replica of the Gaza Strip.
There is also a religious dimension in Iran that is absent in most of Trump’s dealings: even 45 years after the revolution, the fervour of that time still resonates in many parts of the country. Much of Iran’s population is pious and believes the regime’s propaganda. Most urban people probably don’t, but the regime has given them good reason to fear it.
The Israelis always knew that it wasn’t going to be a four-week war and Trump’s people are reluctantly arriving at the same conclusion.
The Israelis are now switching to attacks on police stations, especially in the northwest where they are hoping to unleash a Kurdish uprising. The Americans are following suit, but again their political goals are different.
Trump is hoping that the threat of one or more civil wars will persuade enough people in the regime to make a deal with him and stop the war.
Netanyahu likes the idea of lots of civil wars in Iran because he wants to tear the country apart. He does not want a deal that effectively leaves the current regime in power.
So, we are back to the question of whether Trump can find somebody in the regime who will make a deal and can carry most of the regime’s surviving senior members with him, preferably within three months.
That’s a very tall order, because most of those men are true believers.
Many of them have grown corrupt over the years, but the entire regime is essentially made up of people who not only believe in God but are in a constant internal conversation-cum-bargaining-session with Him.
Trump will be familiar with comparable evangelical Christians in the MAGA movement, but he probably does not realise that he is faced with similarly devout and inflexible men in Iran’s Shia Muslim hierarchy.
He may not find any men who are credible to this community to make a deal with.
- Dyer is a London-based independent journalist. His new book is titled Intervention Earth: LifeSaving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. His previous book, The Shortest History of War, is also still available.