‘Israel,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said four years ago, “is a cancerous tumor” that “will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”
As subsequent events proved, he meant what he said. The turbaned cleric and his regime were major players in the war that Hamas’s October 7 massacre sparked. Now, as the war draws to a close, three questions arise:
How much was this war Iran’s doing; what is Iran’s cost-benefit balance in its aftermath; and what should the world do about Iran?
IRAN WAS clearly this war’s inspiration, and possibly also its mastermind.
Iran reportedly helped plan the attack and also green-lighted it at a meeting with Hamas officials in Beirut on October 2 (“Iran helped plot attack on Israel over several weeks,” The Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2023). Whatever its micro-involvement in the massacre, Tehran’s inspirational culpability and logistical assistance are beyond doubt.
Statements like Khamenei’s calls for Israel’s disappearance lent any attack on Israel Islamist legitimacy and diplomatic encouragement. Regular shipments to Gaza of Iranian cash and arms turned bellicose words into military deeds. Hamas became a link in the chain of jihadist proxies that Tehran stretched across the Middle East.
It follows that the war Israel has just endured was an Iranian project, even before one considers its eventual arrival on Iranian soil, and the role played in it by Iran’s Lebanese arm, Hezbollah. Now, considering the blows Iran was dealt in this war, directly and indirectly, it is tempting to lump together Hezbollah’s decisive defeat with Iran’s situation and to define the blows Tehran sustained as a knockout. That would be a grave mistake.
Iran was the main loser of the war
IRAN SURE was a loser in this war. Its Lebanese militia was dismembered and its Syrian outpost collapsed. Worse, its Syrian protégé was elbowed by the Syrian Sunnis, who Iran helped slaughter and displace.
Most embarrassingly, the Afghan, Pakistani, and other non-Arab mercenaries that Tehran had deployed, fled the battle once surprised by the anti-Assad assault. Iran’s imperial project thus lost not only its clout but also its credibility.
This is besides what happened when the war reached Iran itself.
The Israel Air Force’s successful breach of Iran’s air defense, and the consequent attacks on its nuclear installations, missile plants, military bases, senior commanders, and nuclear scientists – were massive blows for the regime.
Worse, as the warring unfolded, Iran learned that its major diplomatic supporters, China and Russia, are not really with it. While fire and brimstone befell the Islamist Republic, Moscow and Beijing issued faint declarations in praise of peace, but failed to criticize Israel’s cause.
The two anti-democratic superpowers seemed impressed by Israel’s guts, underwhelmed by Iran’s military performance, and annoyed by its jihadist zeal. This geopolitical cold shoulder underscored the collapse of Iran’s grand ambition to impose itself on the Middle East by bullying its Sunni Arabs and molesting the Jewish state.
Lastly, the war that Iran kindled cost its people big money. Tehran reportedly invested at least $30 billion in the Syrian civil war, besides an annual $700 million transferred to Hezbollah, in addition to an annual $100 million to Hamas, which this decade rose to $350 million, and an unknown, but clearly higher sum, to Yemen’s Houthis.
Iran’s losses in the war it brought on itself were thus multi-layered and exorbitant. Militarily, it emerged crippled, diplomatically it became isolated, and economically it is now strapped.
Still, the victory Israel and the US achieved in this part of the war is woefully incomplete.
UNLIKE HEZBOLLAH, which at the end of the day represented but one portion of a Lilliputian land, Iran is home to 85 million people and owns the world’s third-largest oil reserves.
Moreover, the regime that presided over Tehran’s debacle in this war emerged from it fully intact. So did Iran’s security forces. No one knows what the Iranian government’s conclusions from the war are today, much less what they will be in the future, but the world cannot afford to assume that Tehran will now abandon its jihadist ideology and schemes.
The working assumption must be that Iran will strive to renew its nuclear program, resume its regional meddling, and repair the military that failed in front of a bewildered world’s eyes.
Postwar-Tehran’s first aim will likely be to build a modern air force. The natural candidates for sponsoring such an effort, Russia and China, will expect cash that Iran may currently lack. However, neither will have any moral inhibitions about supplying the ayatollahs the kind of modern fighter jets they so glaringly lacked when they needed them last June.
The working assumption must also be that the ayatollahs will work hard to replenish and upgrade their missile arsenal. Worse, Tehran emerges from its misadventure only further motivated to attack Israeli and Jewish targets worldwide. And worst of all, as momentum to expand the Abraham Accords once again gathers, Tehran remains equipped and doubly motivated to sabotage peace between the Muslim world and the Jewish state.
It follows that Tehran has not been defeated as long as its regime has not been toppled.
Sadly, the war displayed the non-existence of an underground movement in Iran. The mass arrests and killings that followed the 2009 demonstrations were effective.
That Iranians are fed up with the leadership that robbed Iran’s riches, impoverished its people, and destroyed their freedoms is well known. Clearly, there are in their midst potential leaders and fighters. However, without organization, money, and arms, their potential will never be realized.
The creation of a popular threat to the Iranian regime should therefore be a supreme goal for the rest of mankind. In its absence, the next Iranian-inspired October 7 somewhere around the world is only a matter of time.
Third in a 5-part series
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The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.