It is high time to resume the US-Israeli campaign against Iran
The facile truce that was tentatively declared by the United States government in April became unsustainable the very moment it was prematurely announced by the White House.
It was not an entirely unexpected folly to arbitrarily halt the offensive air component of the US-Israeli campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran before any strategic objectives had been met, since all of the objectives are ambitious in nature and therefore not easily secured.
Nevertheless, the dubious assumption that those very strategic aims could, however, be attained in a peacefully negotiated settlement with the same Iranian regime that can claim an almost unbroken history of intransigence in its stately conduct was either born of utter hubris or naive wishful thinking. In any case, the President and certain members of his administration were clearly projecting their own impatience and fading appetite for their campaign onto Iran‘s leadership.
If a state is, in fact, willing to appease, accommodate and conciliate an enemy, it is not all too difficult to point to numerous indicators that would suggest at least a modicum of submission and exhaustion on the part of the weaker of the warring sides. The surving functionaries of Iran‘s ancien régime, who were left in power by the abrogated first phase of the campaign, have displayed no genuine interest in any settlement on US-Israeli terms. Nor should that have come as a surprise. Tehran mistakenly sees itself in control of the events surrounding this conflict and, consequently, in control of its own fate. Both assumptions are not just folly but delusional and yet they are regrettably reinforced by an unfathomable commitment by the President to a diplomatic initiative that has not only unmistakably failed but is, moreover, inherently antithetical to US interests in the region.
As things stand, there is no other way to responsibly neutralize Iran‘s threat in the short-term than to physically eliminate its remaining offensive capabilities which were left unscathed or which were at least not irreparably damaged or rendered completely irretrievable during the first phase of the campaign.
However, the short-term objective of decimating Iran‘s missile and drone forces cannot address the long-term danger that Tehran poses to the Middle East and the world at large.
The only remedy to Iran‘s persistent hostility is the fall of the Iranian regime and its replacement by a government by the people, for the people and of the people.
The rule of a small clique that represents but a fanatical minority of Iran‘s great and diverse people has brought nothing but ruin, repression and recurring massacres to a nation that can pride itself on having the will and the strength to build and maintain a free country given the further enfeeblement of the state‘s capacity to cling to power.
A resumed air-naval campaign has to focus on three separate lines of effort.
Firstly, Iran‘s remaining stock of drones, missiles, missile launchers, coastal batteries and command and control nodes have to be degraded until they‘re both negligible and militarily manageable i.e if close to 100% of the remaining projectiles can be intercepted.
Secondly, Iran must be strategically disempowered and that will require a forceful re-opening of the Persian Gulf through sustained freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) and tanker convoys to ensure that enough oil reaches the open seas to put an economically sustainable ceiling on world oil prices while the blockade of Iranian oil remains in place. This way, the IRGC will ineleuctably lose any material leverage over the course of the war. To support these operations, islands in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz should be secured through amphibious landings thus making the local geography an ally of the United States while depriving the Iranian regime of a crucial natural advantage.
Finally, the Iranian regime must be persistently destabilized through recurring and indiscriminate leadership decapitation strikes, a prolonged blockade of the country’s ports, tightened sanctions, further strikes on the entire spectrum of the Iranian internal security forces and surgical strikes on Iran‘s domestic sources of economic and financial self-sufficiency, including energy production and electricity generation.
A regime governing a country with no income from energy exports, faced with mass unemployment, hyper-inflation, rolling blackouts, a restive population, a shortage of fuel for transporation and with no funds to pay the salaries of state employees, cannot sustain itself indefinitely.
Concomitantly, the U.S and Israeli joint intelligence operations should relentlessly support and facilitate the organization of ethnic Persian and Azeri opposition groups, eventually arming them once they have been consolidated while also encouraging the defection and coup-plotting of dissenters within the ranks of the Iranian political and security apparatus. In time, protest waves on the ground will resurface and can be protected and empowered by hyper-local drone strikes by coalition forces to disrupt the regime‘s response to a renewed large-scale uprising across the central political and cultural hubs of the country.
This three pronged campaign will have to be continued until the regime visibly disintegrates and pro-American forces seize control in Tehran. Until then, any negotiations with the current regime must be studiously avoided.
It was not an entirely unexpected folly to arbitrarily halt the offensive air component of the US-Israeli campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran before any strategic objectives had been met, since all of the objectives are ambitious in nature and therefore not easily secured.
Nevertheless, the dubious assumption that those very strategic aims could, however, be attained in a peacefully negotiated settlement with the same Iranian regime that can claim an almost unbroken history of intransigence in its stately conduct was either born of utter hubris or naive wishful thinking. In any case, the President and certain members of his administration were clearly projecting their own impatience and fading appetite for their campaign onto Iran‘s leadership.
If a state is, in fact, willing to appease, accommodate and conciliate an enemy, it is not all too difficult to point to numerous indicators that would suggest at least a modicum of submission and exhaustion on the part of the weaker of the warring sides. The surving functionaries of Iran‘s ancien régime, who were left in power by the abrogated first phase of the campaign, have displayed no genuine interest in any settlement on US-Israeli terms. Nor should that have come as a surprise. Tehran mistakenly sees itself in control of the events surrounding this conflict and, consequently, in control of its own fate. Both assumptions are not just folly but delusional and yet they are regrettably reinforced by an unfathomable commitment by the President to a diplomatic initiative that has not only unmistakably failed but is, moreover, inherently antithetical to US interests in the region.
As things stand, there is no other way to responsibly neutralize Iran‘s threat in the short-term than to physically eliminate its remaining offensive capabilities which were left unscathed or which were at least not irreparably damaged or rendered completely irretrievable during the first phase of the campaign.
However, the short-term objective of decimating Iran‘s missile and drone forces cannot address the long-term danger that Tehran poses to the Middle East and the world at large.
The only remedy to Iran‘s persistent hostility is the fall of the Iranian regime and its replacement by a government by the people, for the people and of the people.
The rule of a small clique that represents but a fanatical minority of Iran‘s great and diverse people has brought nothing but ruin, repression and recurring massacres to a nation that can pride itself on having the will and the strength to build and maintain a free country given the further enfeeblement of the state‘s capacity to cling to power.
A resumed air-naval campaign has to focus on three separate lines of effort.
Firstly, Iran‘s remaining stock of drones, missiles, missile launchers, coastal batteries and command and control nodes have to be degraded until they‘re both negligible and militarily manageable i.e if close to 100% of the remaining projectiles can be intercepted.
Secondly, Iran must be strategically disempowered and that will require a forceful re-opening of the Persian Gulf through sustained freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) and tanker convoys to ensure that enough oil reaches the open seas to put an economically sustainable ceiling on world oil prices while the blockade of Iranian oil remains in place. This way, the IRGC will ineleuctably lose any material leverage over the course of the war. To support these operations, islands in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz should be secured through amphibious landings thus making the local geography an ally of the United States while depriving the Iranian regime of a crucial natural advantage.
Finally, the Iranian regime must be persistently destabilized through recurring and indiscriminate leadership decapitation strikes, a prolonged blockade of the country’s ports, tightened sanctions, further strikes on the entire spectrum of the Iranian internal security forces and surgical strikes on Iran‘s domestic sources of economic and financial self-sufficiency, including energy production and electricity generation.
A regime governing a country with no income from energy exports, faced with mass unemployment, hyper-inflation, rolling blackouts, a restive population, a shortage of fuel for transporation and with no funds to pay the salaries of state employees, cannot sustain itself indefinitely.
Concomitantly, the U.S and Israeli joint intelligence operations should relentlessly support and facilitate the organization of ethnic Persian and Azeri opposition groups, eventually arming them once they have been consolidated while also encouraging the defection and coup-plotting of dissenters within the ranks of the Iranian political and security apparatus. In time, protest waves on the ground will resurface and can be protected and empowered by hyper-local drone strikes by coalition forces to disrupt the regime‘s response to a renewed large-scale uprising across the central political and cultural hubs of the country.
This three pronged campaign will have to be continued until the regime visibly disintegrates and pro-American forces seize control in Tehran. Until then, any negotiations with the current regime must be studiously avoided.
