Wars rarely go according to the military playbook.
In 1944, just days after the successful D-Day landing, pessimism began to permeate the Allied senior ranks. “The enemy is fighting hard and skilfully,” Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American commander, wrote to Washington on 12 June. “Things are not going quite as well as we had hoped,” Alan Brooke, the head of the British army wrote in his diary on 14 June.
In the end, it took months of intense fighting for Allied troops to force the Germans across the Rhine and it almost a year to force the Nazis into and unconditional surrender.
Though the present US-Israeli air campaign in Iran is hardly analogous to the Second World War, the lack of visibility just 10 days into the operation is. Just as in the summer of 1944, it’s far too early to declare ‘Mission Accomplished’.
That hasn’t stopped the commentariat from predicting the worse, of course.
“So oil at $110 a barrel and another Khamenei in charge of Iran. Operation Epic Fury is in danger of turning into Operation Epic Failure,” quipped Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times on social media.
It’s a good line but it obscures the progress the US and Israel have already made in blunting the Iranian threat. Not only have they destroyed the Islamic Republic’s navy and air force, they’ve also done massive damage to its ballistic missile programme and put the regime’s internal security apparatus on the back foot.
Is the job done? No. But to pull back now because petrol and gas prices have skyrocketed would not just be shortsighted, it would plant the seeds for disaster – especially for Europe. It is, as President Donald Trump said in a rare moment of clarity, “a very small price to pay” to keep Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening Europe with its ballistic missile arsenal.
Imagine what turn Iran will take if the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, succeeds in consolidating his power there. Widely described as more of a hardliner than even his own father, deceased supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameinei, Mojtaba would be unchained.
Not only have the air strikes killed his father, they also took out his wife and mother, while leaving some of his children – and himself – injured.
Should he survive the US-Israeli attempts to assassinate him, Mojtaba Khamenei will have a score of scores to settle. So will his main backer, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the vast paramilitary organisation in Iran that controls the repressive internal security apparatus and much of the country’s economy.
Europe, where several countries, including Germany, have voiced support for the US-Israeli operation, will be at the top of the hitlist – and not for the first time.
Europe has long served as a staging ground for Iranian terrorist attacks, from the assassination campaign against former members of the Shah’s entourage in the 1980s to the foiled attempt in 2018 to blow up a meeting of Iranian exiles in Paris.
While we have yet to see a reprise of the mass street protests in Iran – which began two months ago this week, triggering the regime’s brutal crackdown – it is clear the public is itching for change.
Anyone who has an opportunity to free themselves from the regime’s brutal rule continues to seize it as we saw Monday as several members of Iran’s women’s football squad sought asylum in Australia, where they were visiting for a match. That courageous step follows Friday’s defection of more than 200 Iranian sailors in Sri Lanka, as reported by Euractiv over the weekend.
Ten days into the war, the best outcome for Iran, the Middle East, the West and the rest of the world remains an end to the regime. It won’t be easy – energy prices will rise, more people will die. But it remains necessary, despite the myriad challenges and tragic missteps, such as the apparent bombing of a girls’ school by US forces.
Consider the alternative: an Iranian regime under an ever-more radicalised Mojtaba Khamenei intent on exacting revenge and acquiring a nuclear weapon.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it best on Monday in Brussels: “Europe must focus on the reality of the situation.”
What that means in practice is that there is no going back. To do would indeed be the ultimate ‘epic failure’.
Source:
www.euractiv.com