Date: 2025-08-22 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028761
IRAN
COMMENMTARY: MAX BOOT ... JUNE 22, 2025
Iran badly miscalculated. Now it’s paying the price.
COMMENMTARY: MAX BOOT ... JUNE 22, 2025
Iran badly miscalculated. Now it’s paying the price.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news
conference Sunday after the U.S. military struck three sites in Iran.
(Alex Brandon/AP)
Original article:
As Iran is learning, the consequences of military action are hard to predict.
Opinion ... Max Boot
June 22, 2025 at 9:42 a.m. EDT
The U.S. attack on Iran is another ripple effect from Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The more time that goes by, the more significant 10/7 looms. It is one of those hinge points in history — like 11/9 (the day the Berlin Wall fell in 1989) or the 9/11 terrorist attack in the United States — after which nothing will ever be the same again.
Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
In launching its barbaric assault on Israel, the Iranian-backed Hamas wanted to draw its regional partners into a broader war that, it hoped, would lead to the destruction of the Jewish state. But instead of destroying Israel, Hamas set in motion a train of events that resulted in the destruction of Iranian power across the region. In the more than 600 days since, much of Gaza has been razed and more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed (according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry). Hamas, though it still exists, is a shadow of its former self. Yahya Sinwar, the architect of 10/7, is dead, along with his brother, and most of Hamas’s commanders.
The Iranian-backed Hezbollah, while it did not join in the initial assault on Israel, followed up by rocketing northern Israel for many months. Last fall, Israel struck back with an offensive against Hezbollah that began with the “exploding pagers” operation. Now, its longtime leader, Hasan Nasrallah, is also dead, along with most of its senior commanders. Its military infrastructure has been decimated and its ability to exert power in Lebanon considerably diminished. Hezbollah missiles no longer pose a significant threat to Israel. With Hezbollah essentially defeated, another Iranian client, Bashar al-Assad, was toppled by rebels in Syria late last year. Now, Syria is ruled by a Sunni government with no love lost for the Shiite mullahs of Iran.
Though Iran still has powerful proxies in Yemen and Iraq, its strategy of encircling Israel with a “ring of fire” has been largely dismantled. That has allowed Israel to directly strike at Iran in a way it had always hesitated to do before.
On June 12, Israeli airstrikes decapitated Iran’s senior military leaders and destroyed its air defenses. Israel’s objective was to stop, or at least to significantly set back, Iran’s nuclear program. That objective now draws closer to realization following President Donald Trump’s momentous decision to employ U.S. B-2 Stealth bombers armed with 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles to target Iran’s three major nuclear sites: Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.
The degree of damage inflicted by U.S. airstrikes is as yet uncertain; as Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday morning, bomb damage assessment takes time.
But one thing is already clear: Iran made a terrible miscalculation by dragging its feet on negotiations with, first, President Joe Biden and then Trump on a nuclear accord to replace the one Trump (unwisely) exited in 2018. Iranian negotiators, overestimating their country’s power and leverage, took a tough line by resisting U.S. demands to give up all of their enrichment capacity. Even while talking with the United States, moreover, the Iranians kept enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels, raising alarms in Jerusalem. They thought they could get away with it. They were wrong. Now, their major nuclear complexes — developed at vast cost over many decades — have been hit and hit hard.
Yet, tempting as it is for many Israelis and Americans to engage in triumphal chest-thumping, it is a temptation best resisted. Because the lesson of 10/7 — that war is unpredictable and that conflicts which begin with victories sometimes end in defeats — applies not only to the Iranian regime and its proxies. The same lesson holds for any country launching a war, as Israel learned during its long war in Lebanon (1982-2000) and the United States in its long post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump might think that, with one big airstrike, he is ending the war with Iran, but he might be just beginning it. In his Saturday night statement announcing the attacks, he said, “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.” Let’s hope that is what happens, but the Iranians were not sounding conciliatory on Sunday. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi vowed to respond and said that the Trump administration understands only “the language of threat and force.” The Iranian regime rules by fear, and it will feel compelled to strike back in some fashion to avoid conveying an impression of weakness to its own populace.
Even in its wounded state, Iran has plenty of options for retaliation, ranging from terrorist strikes in the West to missile attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East to mining the Strait of Hormuz. The most worrisome possibility is that Iran still rushes to build a nuclear device.
The U.S. and Israel have undoubtedly set back Iran’s nuclear program, probably by several years, but, while bombs can eliminate facilities and kill scientists, they cannot erase the nuclear know-how that the Iranian regime has accumulated over many years. Nor is it even clear that the airstrikes have eliminated the roughly 900 pounds of uranium that, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran had already enriched to near-weapons-grade quality.
Iran might now feel compelled to, if it can, try to build a nuclear device — something that the U.S. intelligence community insisted it had not decided to do just a few days ago — to deter further attacks. Or, having seen how thoroughly Israeli intelligence has penetrated their power structure, the Iranians might not be eager to provoke another attack. We simply do not know how they will react — and, as the U.S. military says, the enemy always gets a vote.
In initiating the latest offensive against Iran, Israeli leaders appear to be gambling that they can set in motion the overthrow of the Iranian regime. That, at least, is something Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for. But there is no precedent for regime change from the air; more often, air attacks — whether from German bombers targeting London in 1940 or Russian drones and missiles targeting Kyiv today — cause a civilian population to rally around their leaders. Even many Iranians who hate their theocratic regime say that the attacks on Iran will not loosen its hold on the country. So the likelihood is that the United States and Israel will still have to deal with the Islamic regime for years to come. A wounded, cornered predator can still be dangerous.
At this early date, the consequences of the U.S. attack on Iran — Operation Midnight Hammer — remain uncertain. All we can say for sure is that wars have unpredictable consequences and that reverberations from 10/7 will continue to reshape the Middle East for years to come.
By Max Boot
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller 'Reagan: His Life and Legend,' which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess