America has no plan. Donald Trump has admitted that the people Washington had in mind to run Iran are now dead – and other candidates may soon die. So it may appear that the US-Israeli war machine will achieve no victory because there is no definition of what that may look like.
But it is, to quote Senator Elizabeth Warren, who spoke after an in-depth White House briefing on the war, “much worse than that”.
We have been here before – and learnt very few lessons.
The lies told before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the incompetence that followed, had, at least in part, their roots in the same soil.
The view, among hard-right Israelis and their Christian evangelical supporters, is that Saddam Hussein in Iraq and now the theocracy in Iran needed to be toppled to preserve the long-term security of the Jewish state.
This was spelt out in a 1996 document entitled A Clean Break – A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which was prepared for Benjamin Netanyahu by men who went on to become powerful figures in the Bush administration – notably neoconservatives Douglas Feith and David Wurmser.
They worked hard with, and in, a secretive Pentagon intelligence cell called The Office of Special Plans to come up with the lies that al-Qaeda was supported by Saddam, and that he was close to building a nuclear weapon, which were used on both sides of the Atlantic to justify the catastrophic Iraq war.
These were lies. Just as it is untrue that Iran was close to completing a nuclear weapon, and posed an imminent threat to the US (or its allies), or that the US cared a single jot for the vast numbers of Iranians desperate for emancipation from the violent oppression of Iran’s ayatollahs.
The toppling of Saddam might have suited Israel back in 2003. And Netanyahu may be a devotee of Vladimir Putin’s military chief, Valery Garazimov, in believing that chaos in the ranks of the enemy is victory.
So Israel’s agenda in Iran is clear. Smash the place up and let someone else sort it out. If Iran, like Iraq, collapses into civil war – so be it. Tehran won’t have any nukes, it won’t be able to sponsor groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, or the Houthis in Yemen, and thousands of years of Persian culture can go down the plughole of chaos and anarchy.
In 2003 and now in 2026, toppling Middle Eastern regimes suits Netanyahu and his far-right ultra-nationalists.
Smashing the way to peace in the region is a gamble that Israel has been happy to make, while simultaneously grabbing territory on the West Bank and now in Gaza.
The gamble may not pay off, but there is a real-world case to be made for such ruthless bloodletting.
For the US and its allies, if they’re sucked further into the Iranian quagmire, it’s “much worse than that”.
