The War on Iran and the famous “Weapons of Mass Destruction”

The pretext for the war that Israel started on Friday June 13 by massive attacks on Iran, is to hinder the Islamic Republic from developing a nuclear bomb. This attack came just before the sixth round of talks between US and Iranian representatives on the Iranian nuclear issue, which was planned to be held in Oman on June 15. The Israeli attack is an act of aggression under international law, and more surprisingly it came while high level negotiations were ongoing, and diplomacy might have been able to avoid war, while there is no evidence that Iran was close to developing the n-bomb.

The attack started with some 200 Israeli warplanes launching massive raids deep inside Iran. The raids targeted Iranian military command and control, air defences, airports, and nuclear facilities. Iran’s energy infrastructure was also targeted: such as Bushehr refinery, and the South Pars gas field, meaning that Islamic Republic’s main source of income is also under attack. Hundreds of Iranian civilians were killed and injured as a result. Israel succeeded in assassinating many Iranian military leaders including army chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri, and the leader of the Revolutionary Guards Hossein Salami, as well as several nuclear scientists. This was just the beginning, as the initial Israeli declarations said that the attacks will continue for at least two weeks.

One mystery is how did Israeli warplanes manage to attack Iran and return to their bases? Israel seems to have used its most advanced F-35, as well as F-15 and F-16 warplanes, all US made. Yet, those machines cannot attack targets inside Iran, at a distance superior to 2’000 kms, while the F-35 has a radius of no more than 1’093kms, while F-16 has only 550kms, which means that Israel received external support, either in the form of aerial refuelling (from the US), or military bases from one of the regional states. At any case, Israel does not have the capabilities for a long aerial campaign against Iran without support from the US with arms, ammunition, and intelligence.

Politically, the Israeli attack reminds us of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 in search of “weapons of mass destruction”, and for alleged collaboration between the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Back then, US president George Bush announced that he was fighting an “axis of evil”, which, next to Iraq, included Iran and North Korea. The invasion led to thousands of Iraqi casualties, and many others tortured in prisons like Abu Ghraib. But no weapons of mass destruction were to be found. As for al-Qaeda, and after years of “war against terrorism”, on May 14 this year the US President Donald Trump smiled to cameras while shaking the hand of Ahmad al-Sharaa, now the ruler of Syria and once a commander of al-Qaeda. Whether Islamist, terrorist or al-Qaeda, ideologies, even value systems and alliances, are less important today than ever before.

Militarily, the current war on Iran is more like the war Israel launched against Hezbollah in Lebanon last year. In fact, Netanyahu was on the record saying that the decision to attack Iran was taken shortly after the assassination Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, killed in a massive air raid on Hezbollah headquarters on September 27 last year. Israeli forces also decapitated Hezbollah’s military leadership in targeted bombings, revealing high level of intelligence because of complex levels of human intelligence – spies within Hezbollah, as today within the Iranian hierarchy -combined with the usage of sensors, Artificial Intelligence and data mining.

Iranian response is through barrages of drones that aim to saturate Israeli air defences, followed by ballistic missiles. While some of those missiles succeed to penetrate Israeli air-defences and produce spectacular images, their military significance seems limited, as Iran lacks the intelligence, and the air force capable of precision strikes.

Iran’s weakness is not just military, as were the cases of Iraq and Syria: it is the nature of repressive regime which has successively repressed social movements demanding change, started with the post-electoral protests in 2009, against economic hardship in 2017-18, against raising of fuel prices in 2019, and in 2023 against the killing of Mahsa Amini. The rigid nature of the Islamic Republic and its refusal to reforms created the cracks through which Mossad could penetrate and recruit.

The war against Iran might not be for preventing nuclear weapons in Iran, as the war against Iraq was not about Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”. But the Israeli intention is clearly declared by Netanyahu: the destruction of the Islamic Republic, and its replacement with a decentralised entities something like Iraq or Syria today. If the US invasion of Iraq unleashed two decades of wars and disasters and led to the creation of a monster like Daesh the destruction of the Iranian state will be no less than a civilizational catastrophe of a large scale.

Israeli obsession with its (in)security will not end in Iran. We already see new geopolitical tensions between Israel and Turkey, which now for the first time have a common frontier in the south of Syra. A stable Syria allied with a regional power like Turkey is a danger for Israel. Turkey also has a civilian nuclear programme, supported by Russia, another source of worry for Israeli decision-makers. Turkey, in its turn, is worried about the growing regional reach of Isael, including over Kurdish entities in Iraq and Syria, which could in the future become a threat to its own territorial integrity. Those tensions were the subject of talks between Israeli and Turkish leaders in Baku, yet the question is: how far Turkey is ready to go to concessions to satisfy Israeli concerns?

The attack on Iran might become the biggest war in the Middle East. But it will surely not be the last.