Edward Luttwack
Unherd, Dec. 10, 2024
“Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what?”
Damascus has fallen — something that has as much to do with Iran as with Syria. Tehran had long kept the Assad dictatorship in power, with its Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, the largest non-state army on Earth. But starting in late September, Israel demolished Hassan Nasrallah’s organisation in a series of punishing attacks. Iran’s response was to launch ballistic missiles against Israel, which its own Arrow missiles efficiently intercepted.
But when Israel’s air force counterattacked on 26 October, destroying targets in more than 20 locations across Iran, not one of its aircraft was even challenged. Exposed as vulnerable in its own capital, the Ayatollah regime is weaker than ever. And now, perhaps, the revolutionary wind that engulfed the Assad dictatorship could blow all the way to Tehran, as Iranians throw off their fundamentalist masters.
The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be manoeuvred into fighting a war against Iran. Conscious of what had happened to Bush when he ordered the invasion of Iraq, Obama started his tenure by apologising for America’s erstwhile support for the Shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.
As late as this January, when an Iranian drone killed three American soldiers in Jordan, there was no US retaliation against the Islamic Republic. Israel, too, was subject to Obama’s rule. On 13 April, Iran launched 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles against the Jewish State. Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor and a former Obama official, was frantic as he acted to prevent any Israeli counterattack, implicitly threatening the loss of US military aid if Israel retaliated. A bewildered Pentagon official wondered if Sullivan had close relatives living in Tehran. …SOURCE