How a war on Iran could go spectacularly wrong: Ivo Vegter

As the world grows more uncertain, clarity matters more than ever. BNC#8 brings together some of the smartest and most experienced minds to help you cut through the noise and navigate the turbulence with greater confidence. Tickets are selling out fast, with only 40 left. Don’t waste time, book your place at BNC#8 by clicking here or on the image below..Key topics:US-Iran war risks regional instability and prolonged conflict.Iran’s regime is battle-hardened with strong military capacity.Strait of Hormuz disruption threatens global oil and economy..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Ivo Vegter*.There are many ways in which the Israeli-US war on Iran could end in disaster, and very few in which all goes well.This is the war against the Great Satan that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been preparing for since 1979.The phrase “Great Satan” was coined by Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini on 5 November 1979, in contrast with “Lesser Satan” for the USSR, and “Little Satan” for Israel.“Death to America” was the chant that accompanied the Ayatollah’s triumphant accession to autocratic power.Anti-Western sentiment in Iran goes back more than 100 years, since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and Iran’s division by Britain and the Soviet Union into “spheres of influence”. Then America and Britain sponsored a coup in 1953, consolidating the power of a despotic Shah in defence of Western oil interests.Political IslamThe Ayatollah’s “cultural revolution” entrenched a form of political Islam – as opposed to religious Islam, which represents a majority of Muslims – which in principle stands opposed to all non-Islamic forms of government, and views the liberal democracies of the West as decadent, corrupt, violently imperialistic and illegitimate.It rejects secularism, on the grounds that politics cannot be separated from religion and religion is the only source of morality. It rejects democracy, on the grounds that all power derives from Allah, and sovereignty cannot, therefore, be vested in “the people”. It rejects liberalism, on the grounds that it condones moral permissiveness.It views Western culture in general, and American hegemony in particular, as an existential threat to Islamic identity and values. Striving against this influence (“jihad”) is the holy duty of every Muslim, in this ideology.Battle-hardenedIran is not unprepared. It is not weak. This war was always going to be its destiny..Read more:.FT: Iran executes Khamenei’s plan to spread regional war.It has a population of over 90 million and between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the regular army can field near a million soldiers. It has the institutional depth of a major regional power.Its Shi’ite regime withstood the brutal invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-controlled Ba’athist Iraq in the 1980s, at the cost of up to a million souls. Far from weakening it, this war strengthened Iran’s national identity and resilience.Ever since, Persian-dominated Iran has been the heavyweight on one side of the sectarian scale between Shi’ite and Sunni Islam, with Saudi Arabia being the Arab-Sunni counterweight. Saudia Arabia probably sees Iran as more of an existential threat than even Israel does.Iran’s government successfully put down several major insurgencies and separatist uprisings, including by Kurdish-Iranian nationalists.It has weathered decades of sanctions and covert operations against its military and nuclear infrastructure. It has survived assassinations of senior political and clerical figures.The hardline Guardian Council survived and successfully undermined the reformist impulses of President Mohammad Khatami around the turn of the century. It survived and brutally repressed several waves of internal protest.Iran’s clerical, bureaucratic and military institutions are robust and decentralised. They include volunteer militias, called “basiji”, which some sources speculate could number many millions.Its regional armed proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen have been weakened, but are not insignificant. Iran can claim responsibility for much of the instability that turned the 2003 invasion of Iraq into a two-decade quagmire.Iran’s regime is battle-hardened, and its people are heavily indoctrinated in the religio-politics of the Islamic Revolution.Decapitation strikeThis is why Iran was not easily cowed by a decapitation strike, as Venezuela was. It had warned that it would rain down fire across the Middle East should it ever be attacked, and it is doing so.It has struck at military, infrastructure and soft civilian targets in all the countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which had been lobbying hard to dissuade the US from supporting Israel in an attack on Iran.Those countries are none too pleased with Iran’s violent response, of course. Iran might have hoped that they would blame the Great Satan for their fate, but for now, they are targeting their responses at Iran.Flushed with hubrisIsrael has also been preparing for this war for a long time. Many times it asked for, but never received, support from the United States.And yet, it seems that an impetuous US president, flushed with hubris after co-opting Venezuela proved to be cheap, quick and easy, dived headfirst into this geopolitical cauldron, blindfolded.It is unclear whether he has a well-developed strategy beyond seeking to impose his will upon Iran, and hoping to wipe an evil regime off the map.Perhaps he has just been sufficiently bribed by Saudi Arabia and Israel. Perhaps he just wanted an electoral boost. Perhaps he wanted to create the conditions to declare a wartime emergency so he could rig the mid-term elections, or perhaps he is just strutting around the world high on adrenaline.Trump and his senior officials keep contradicting each other on why they attacked Iran and what their objectives are.They acted in defiance of both international and domestic law, although it looks like the US Congress is unwilling to put a stop to it.While all of the stated objectives we periodically hear – regime change, destroying Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities, curtailing Iran’s ability to project power, and liberating Iran’s people – are admirable goals, nobody seems to have an actual plan.Free democracyEarlier this week I sketched what such a plan would need to achieve in order to leave Iran, its people, and the greater Middle East better off than it was a week ago.I am not at all optimistic that such a plan exists, or can succeed even if it does.Achieving anything like a free democracy in Iran is exceptionally unlikely.Iran has had a grand total of four autocratic leaders in the last 100 years: Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925-1941), Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979), Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini (1979-1989), and Ayatolla Ali Khamenei (1989-2026).Its population is 99.4% Muslim, of which 94.1% are Shi’ite and 5.3% are Sunni. It is unclear how extensive pro-democracy and anti-mullah protests have been, but it is unlikely that a majority of Iranians are suddenly going to be well-disposed to forming a pro-Western democracy, just because the Great Satan finally did what the Supreme Leaders had always said they would do: attack.The second-best outcome, of a restoration of the monarchy under a benevolent Shah, also doesn’t seem likely. The former Shah ran a police state. Although modernising, it was pretty fascist in nature. He was overthrown for a reason. And the son of that Shah, Reza Pahlavi, who says he wants to help Iran transition to democracy, does not have unanimous support, even among the Iranian diaspora, let alone inside Iran.The US probably doesn’t care who runs Iran after the war, as long as they’re pro-American, or at least acquiescent to US demands. They’ll take an IRGC junta, or a puppet Ayatollah, if that’s all they can get.Even that, however, might not be easily achievable.They’re all deadI’ll quote Donald Trump, as quoted in the New York Times: “I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person. Right, that could happen? We don’t want that to happen. It would probably be the worst, you go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who’s no better.”That’s hardly confidence-inspiring. So who does Trump want to see take over?“Most of the people we had in mind are dead. Now we have another group, they may be dead also, based on reports. So you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”That’s the unfiltered mind of a man in his dotage at work.ScenariosLet’s consider a few possible ways this war could go.The assassinated Ayatollah is now a martyr. Martyrs are revered in Islamist countries. His death will most likely rally Iranians around the flag and intensify anti-American sentiment, instead of provoking a popular pro-American uprising.It will be well-nigh impossible for aerial bombardment alone to dismantle the entirety of Iran’s governing infrastructure. Iran’s government was built to withstand attack. The military will regroup; the clerics will regroup. In the absence of boots on the ground, the Iranian government will likely survive.American boots on the ground will likely be disastrous. It will make Iraq 2003 look like a cakewalk. Iran has the terrain on its side. It has its sheer size on its side. It has its large population on its side. If the US marches into Iran, don’t expect it to be welcomed with open arms. Expect another “forever war”. (Given how many campaign promises Trump has broken already, I won’t bother pointing out that he promised an end to forever wars.)Enter the KurdsThe US has been talking to Kurdish groups in Iraq and Iran, in the hope that duly motivated Kurds might spark a popular uprising in Iran. That could go all sorts of wrong.The Kurds, who live in Türkiye, Syria, Iraq and Iran, have wanted their own state for over a century. It’s a long story, but when the Ottoman Empire was getting carved up, the Brits did a deal with the Turks, and Kurdistan disappeared from the map.The Kurds were instrumental in supporting several foreign interventions in the region, including the Iraq quagmire, and the Syrian civil war, but have very little to show for their loyalty. They may not be so keen to tackle Iran’s large army on behalf of American chicken-hawks.Even if they are, they are mostly Sunnis, and are seen as separatists inside Iran, which will be a red line for any forces that remain loyal to the Iranian regime.The belief that Kurdish militias could effect a popular overthrow of the regime in Iran seems founded more on naïve hope than on strategic planning and deep intelligence work.The drone threatIran has a large conventional army, but its commanders certainly are aware that its military equipment can’t hold a candle to the full might of a US-Israeli attack.The US is bragging about sinking Iranian rust buckets with torpedoes, like grampa did against the Hun, but Iranian leaders probably didn’t expect anything else.Iran has a lot of ballistic missiles, which it has been using with some success against targets throughout the Middle East. Missile launchers can be targeted, though, and missiles are expensive. They’ll eventually run out.Iran has been at the forefront of drone development, however. It exported both drones and drone plans to Russia, for use against Ukraine. Its Shahed “loitering munitions” are highly sophisticated and very affordable. Iran has shipped tens of thousands of them to Russia, and it likely has at least as many deployed across the country.The US, Israel and the GCC countries have been targeting both incoming missiles and Shahed drones with Patriot interceptor missiles. They don’t have a lot of those. At the rate they’ve been firing them, some Gulf countries will run out in only a few days, others in a week or so.That Trump is worried about running out of munitions is evident in the fact that he summoned Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin executives to yell at them to make more, faster. The current rate of production is about 80 per month.Also, Patriot missiles cost about $3 million each. Several are needed to shoot down one incoming threat. If that threat is a drone worth $30,000, well, you do the math. It doesn’t math.It’s no wonder that the US and Gulf states have been begging Ukraine for help in defending against drones. They have never faced anything like it.US spokespuppets, when they’re not giving pep talks to the press or contradicting each other, say that the volume of Iranian missile fire and drone attacks has been decreasing, which they claim to be evidence of success. It may be. It may also be an Iranian strategy to economise until its enemies run out of interceptor missiles.Iran lashing outIran has been lashing out by attacking infrastructure and civilian targets around the Gulf, and it will continue to do so: seaports, airports, data centres, water desalination plants, oil refineries, skyscrapers and tourism hubs.It has destroyed a billion-dollar radar system at a US base in Qatar.It has hit residential and other civilian targets in several cities, including Dubai. It has hit airports in the UAE and Kuwait. It has struck at Riyadh, Oman and Bahrain. Global air travel has been severely disrupted.This is shattering the Gulf states’ reputation as safe places to visit and do business, and without desalinated water, the Gulf’s cities will run dry in only a few weeks.The straitIran has essentially closed the Strait of Hormuz. Hardly any traffic is risking the transit, and ships are piling up on both sides of the strait.Trump’s announcement that the United States Development Finance Corporation will, “at a very reasonable price”, offer insurance to maritime traffic, and that the US Navy would escort oil tankers through the strait, smacks of outright panic.One fifth of the world’s oil goes through Hormuz, and the global oil and gas market is a lot more fragile than it appears. This will hit businesses and consumers around the world hard, and could substantially hurt the US dollar. If the strait remains closed for long, it could even spell the end of the petrodollar, and the status of the US dollar as a global reserve currency.Perhaps equally importantly, the vast majority of the Gulf region’s food supplies flow through the Strait of Hormuz. The GCC states will not survive a closure of the strait for long.Instability, or a new autocratThe most likely outcome of this regime-change campaign is pretty much the same as that of previous American regime-change campaigns: an extended period of instability in Iran.The IRGC could go underground. So could formations of regular army and basiji. Although Iran is fairly uniformly Shi’ite, it is composed of numerous ethnic groupings. In a power vacuum, rival groups would clash to claim power..Read more:.Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in US-Israel strikes as Donald Trump warns of expanding regional war.In the case of boots on the ground – whether they’re American or Kurdish – Iranian militias could probably sustain a guerilla war for years. It could also deploy a virtually infinite supply of small first-person view drones – basically a $500 drone from Temu with a bomb strapped to its belly.After some time of instability, a leader might emerge, and he might look a lot like an Ayatollah, or like a Putin.In principleI am glad to see the back of the Ayatollah. I oppose Iran’s regime and its influence in the region and around the world. I am all for regime change, in principle.In practice, however, this war is far more likely to end in economic disaster for the world, and widespread instability in the Middle East.I’d love to say that I am confident this war will end with the liberation of the Iranian people, and signal the dawn of a new, secular democracy that upholds universal values of individual freedom and human rights.I am, instead, confident that this will not happen. How exactly it will play out remains to be seen, but that it isn’t going to be pretty, for anyone, is a sad but safe bet.The late, great Scottish poet Robbie (Robert) Burns wrote, in To a Mouse, On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785:…foresight may be vain:The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ MenGo oft awry,An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,For promis’d joy!.*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets..This article was first published by Daily Friend and i republished with permission.

How a war on Iran could go spectacularly wrong: Ivo Vegter

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