Choosing war over diplomacy against Iran, the United States and Israel on Saturday launched waves of airstrikes against military and civilian targets in cities across the Islamic Republic.
The first US-Israeli attacks occurred at 9:45 am local time in Tehran. Iran’s supreme leader’s compound and the offices of the president and the Supreme National Security Council (among a multitude of nuclear and missile targets across the country) were reportedly attacked.
Iran immediately counterattacked, firing volleys of missiles at Israel, as well as Arab and Gulf nations Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, which have hosted U.S. forces or facilitated the attacks. Loud explosions were heard as missiles hit or were shot down by air defenses from Tel Aviv, Israel, to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Why do we write this?
Nearly half a century into its existence, the Iranian regime – already weakened by attacks led by the United States and Israel last summer – now faces a potentially existential threat.
President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized that the goal is regime change.
The US attack was “massive and continuous,” Trump said in an eight-minute video posted on Truth Social, warning Iranians to take shelter because “bombs will fall everywhere.”
“Now is the time to take control of your destiny,” he said, addressing the Iranian people, “and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is within your reach.”
Netanyahu said the United States and Israel had “embarked on an operation to eliminate the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran,” which had “shed our blood, murdered many Americans and massacred its own people.”
Joint strikes, he said, would allow the “brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands” and “free themselves from the yoke of tyranny.”
Trump said the campaign would ensure Iran “never has a nuclear weapon” and offered broader context for retaliation, highlighting a list of anti-American actions by the Islamic Republic during its 47 years in power. The United States would destroy Iran’s missile arsenal, “annihilate” its navy and stop the threat from Iran’s allied regional militias, he said.
Majid Asgaripour/WANA/Reuters
“The goal is to create all the conditions for the fall of the Iranian regime,” a senior Israeli official told Israeli journalist Barak Ravid of Axios. “We are targeting the entire Iranian leadership – political and military – past, present and future.”
“This is a war of regime change,” says Ali Vaez, director of the International Crisis Group’s Iran project.
“From what the president says – and everything indicates that this is going to be a massive deployment and use of air power to overthrow the Iranian regime – it is not intended to solve a limited set of problems, nor any specific problem with Iran; it is to solve the problem entirely by getting rid of this regime.
“The fact that there is no precedent for regime change with the exclusive use of air power is a different issue,” he says. Dr. Vaez.
As U.S. forces built up around Iran in recent weeks, Trump warned Iranian leaders they would be “hard hit” if January street protests were put down with lethal violence. However, at least 7,000 people died in an unprecedented crackdown that lasted two days.
The White House has since expanded its reasons for attacking Iran to include not acceding to the United States’ stated demands to abandon its nuclear program, limiting the range of missiles and dismantling its regional network of allied militias.
In an attempt to deter an attack, Tehran promised that even a limited attack would be met with a fierce and all-out response that would target Israel, US bases across the Middle East and US allies in the region.
Iran has been preparing for this since last June, when Israel killed a high-level Revolutionary Guard commander and the United States attacked nuclear sites with bunker-buster bombs during a 12-day military campaign. The regime has taken steps to ensure that its command structures – from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on down – identify in advance at least four levels of successors to continue the fight, should senior leaders be killed.
“This is a ‘use it or lose it’ moment for the Iranians,” says Dr. Vaez, contacted in Geneva. “It’s not about calibrating their response, because if they don’t respond with everything they have, they won’t get a second chance.
“From their perspective, this is an existential threat and therefore they would have to come out with everything they have,” he says. “If they don’t, it means they can’t. And if they can’t, it means the United States has managed to neutralize their capability before they could use it.”
The US-Israeli strikes began just hours after Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, who has been mediating the nuclear talks in Geneva between the US and Iran, announced that “significant progress” had been made in the third round on Thursday. He told CBS News on Friday night that a deal was “within our reach,” if the primary goal, in fact, was to ensure that Iran could not build a nuclear weapon, “forever.” Discussions were scheduled to resume on Monday.
The Israel Defense Forces issued an “urgent warning” to Iranians to leave weapons production factories and military infrastructure, or risk their lives.
Analysts say the risks of a prolonged campaign in Iran echo those of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which successfully toppled dictator Saddam Hussein but led to a years-long military quagmire that left more than 4,000 U.S. service members dead. Trump has criticized this foreign intervention and the “forever wars” waged by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If the Islamic Republic is overthrown, America’s success also depends on the day after. Trump told the Iranians: “This is the time to act. Don’t let it pass.” Trump called on Iranian security forces to “lay down their weapons” in exchange for “total immunity” or face “certain death.”
“This is a war of choice with consequences that could last a generation,” which “clearly shows that the United States has not learned the lessons of Iraq,” says Dr. Vaez.
“I think it’s wishful thinking to think that people will come out after this war and finish the job,” Dr. Vaez says. “It is highly unlikely that the United States will be able to completely disarm and dismantle the Iranian state. If there are any remnants of the security forces surviving, they would still have the advantage, in terms of monopoly on force.
“Yes, people are frustrated with the Iranian regime and would like to see the back of it, and some would welcome an intervention,” he adds. “But foreign intervention without troops on the ground has never resulted in regime change anywhere in the world; there is simply no precedent for it.”
