Iran's strategic blunders paved the way for humiliating defeats, experts say
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Less than two years ago, Iran’s government sounded triumphant.
It was November 2023, just weeks after Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and a senior Iranian general was predicting that the regime and its proxy forces in Gaza and Lebanon were poised to vanquish Israel, the United States and other enemies.
“We are fighting America, Zionism and all those who are targeting the greatness and honor of the Islamic Revolution of Iran,” Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said in a speech in the city of Kazvin.
“We are on the verge of conquering great heights. ... We are completely overcoming the enemies.”
Now Iran is in its most precarious position since the early 1980s.
Its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon have been devastated, Hamas has been eviscerated in Gaza, Tehran’s nuclear sites have been heavily bombed, and Israel’s military now owns the skies over Iran.
As for Salami, he was killed in an Israeli airstrike this month.
How Iran got here can be traced to a series of miscalculations and strategic blunders, experts and former officials say, a result of decisions made both decades and only months ago.
Tehran’s often obstinate diplomacy, overreliance on regional militants and shoddy security left it vulnerable to adversaries with much more powerful militaries. And at a crucial moment, the regime’s leaders failed to grasp the intentions and capabilities of its arch foes in Jerusalem and Washington, with no foreign partner ready to come to its aid.
“Iran was too inflexible when it had to be less stubborn,” said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group think tank. “It never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Among its more recent missteps, Iran failed to learn from how other countries managed their relations with President Donald Trump or how the ground had shifted after Israel devastated Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, Vaez said.
But perhaps Iran’s biggest mistake was counting on those Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon in the first place to serve as a “forward defense” against any possible attack by Israel. That approach worked for years, and it dealt Israel a blow when it sent ground troops into Lebanon.
But everything changed when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Iran had armed, trained and financed Hamas, and the group’s onslaught set off a chain of events that has left the regime in Tehran severely weakened and its regional power diminished.
“I think there is a direct line from Oct. 7 to today,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior intelligence official.
While Israel hammered away at Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza after Oct. 7, Iran and its Hezbollah allies prepared for an eventual ground attack from Israel into Lebanon. Instead, Israel took a different tack, targeting Hezbollah’s commanders and its top leader through airstrikes and booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah’s members. Israeli forces staged only a small incursion into southern Lebanon.
Alex Plitsas, a former Defense Department official with the Atlantic Council think tank, said, “The dominoes that fell after Oct. 7th left Iran’s proxy network in shambles, eroded deterrence and reduced its counterstrike capabilities.”
But he said Iran failed to adapt and refused diplomatic overtures from Washington despite its increasingly vulnerable position.
Seth Jones, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that after the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Tehran invested heavily in arming and training militias in the region through its Revolutionary Guard Corps, with Hezbollah as the anchor of an “axis of resistance.”
The scheme worked for decades, Jones said, but it neglected the country’s armed forces, which have fallen far behind.
“What it means is that your conventional forces don’t get the same level of focus,” Jones said.
During Israel’s air campaign, “the Iranians were fighting an enemy that’s got fifth-generation F-35 stealth aircraft.”
“They just don’t have an answer to that,” Jones added.
Iran has also faltered on the diplomatic front.
In talks over its nuclear program, Iran’s leaders stuck to an uncompromising stance mistakenly believing they could buy more time and secure more concessions from Trump, as well as his predecessor, Joe Biden, experts said.
Over four years, Iran dragged its feet and delayed talks with the Biden administration, which had expressed a willingness to revive and revise the 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump had abandoned in 2018, Western officials say.
When Trump returned to the White House, his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, offered Iran a way to continue to enrich uranium for a period of years, while other countries in the region would help it develop a civilian nuclear energy program. The Israeli government and Republican hawks were worried that Trump’s offer was too generous. But Iran appeared to misread Trump, calculating that it could extend the talks over a longer period, experts and Western officials say.
In the end, the billions of dollars and decades of effort Iran devoted to its nuclear program “provided the nation neither nuclear energy nor deterrence,” Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote on social media.
Relying on Russia
Apart from its regional network of proxy forces stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, Iran had long relied on the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad as its only genuine ally. But Sunni rebels ousted Assad in December, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers are no longer welcome in Damascus.
Iran also had portrayed its increasing cooperation with Russia as a “strategic” partnership, with Tehran providing thousands of Shahed drones for its war on Ukraine, as well as technical advice to help Moscow build the unnamed aircraft on Russian territory. In return, Iran acquired some Russian air defense systems, but promised fighter jets and other hardware never materialized.
Over the past two weeks, Israel’s air force destroyed Iran’s radars and Russian anti-aircraft weaponry, with Tehran losing control over its airspace.
Russian President Vladimir Putin made no mention of providing military assistance to Iran when he met Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, in Moscow on Monday.
Despite Iran’s hard-line rhetoric about conquering its enemies and its extensive intelligence and security apparatus, Israel has repeatedly carried out sabotage and assassinations of top military officers, nuclear scientists, the leaders of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the leaders of Hamas in Gaza. The operations have humiliated Iran’s regime and shown that the country’s intelligence services are unable to protect top-ranking officers or other key figures.
“Iran’s entire investments in its forward defense, missiles program and nuclear capabilities evaporated in the course of 12 months of regional war and 12 days of war on its own territory,” said Vaez, of the International Crisis Group. “Judging by that outcome, there is no question that Iran miscalculated at every turn.
I would add they mistakenly believed they would be seen as the savior of the Palestinians and vanquishers of the Jewish infidel occupiers. There has been reaction to the Israeli and American attack on Iran but unlike Gaza it feels rote. For one Iranians are Persians not Arabs. Then there is the Sunni Shite enmity. Iran for many reasons are not seen as David heroically resisting Goliath. I think many who view the Israelis as the modern day Nazis and in theory believe Iran has as much of a right to a nuke as the Israelis deep down realize they would do the same thing to a country that consistently for 46 years has been promising the destruction of Israel and death to America.
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