By Osman Softic || 22 June 2025
The Israeli-Iranian military confrontation is raging for the ninth day without any signs of either Israel or Iran backing down. Unlike what happened in the most recent confrontation between India and Pakistan, one month earlier, no peaceful resolution of the conflict seems to be on the horizon and within reach neither is it the decisive Iranian defeat. Israel planned to accomplish decisive victory by deception when it illegally attacked Iran in a surprise attack on Friday in what could be described as a blitzkrieg-type of air raid.
The Israeli air force attacked Iran under the cover of US-Iranian nuclear negotiations scheduled to continue in Oman two days later. Israel was aided by thousands of “hell fire” missiles delivered only days before by the Pentagon, a clear signal that its aggression has been carefully coordinated with its western allies, employing shared intelligence, naval, satellite, radar and other technological capabilities on Israel’s behalf. Israel arrogantly and viciously exploited the impending nuclear talks to sabotage diplomacy and purportedly attacked Iran without Washington’s knowledge or approval.
The US complicity
This was later found to be untrue as Americans knew it all along. Israel achieved temporary tactical but short-lived advantage over the Iranian air defenses caught unprepared. Israel murdered some of the highest-ranking Iranian military commanders, nuclear scientists and hundreds of civilians, in what Americans and Israelis like to call a shock and awe operation, hoping it would paralyze the Iranian counter attack which followed soon after. But Israel miscalculated.
What followed was the fast reaction by Iran and a decisive response. Within 18 hours Iran was ready to respond decisively by launching ballistic missiles and swarms of drones on Israeli military targets from a distance longer than 1000 kilometers. Iran has so far launched 18 waves of missiles on Israeli military, intelligence, strategic and infrastructure targets across Israel in a tit-for-tat escalation.
Iranian legitimate and justified response under the international law proved devastating which no one in Israel expected would happen. This was the first time in modern history of warfare in the Middle East that Israel confronted a real adversary, a sovereign country capable of inflicting severe blows to Israel. Israel attacked a large country with 92 million people with vast territory and a history of fiercely resisting aggression on it by Iraq, which was aided and abetted by the entire political west. Iraq, in the end, could not defeat Iran after eight years of bloody trench warfare. Germany provided chemical weapons (nerve agent and sarin gas) to Saddam Husein’s regime which he used on the battlefield against Iranian soldiers and civilians alike as well as against its own Kurdish population.
Iran’s rich civilization
Israel is confronting the Islamic revolutionary state and a proud inheritor of an ancient Persian civilization which invented the statecraft and government administration as we know it today and a civilization whose roots go back thousands of years in history. Iran is a sophisticated civilization and society which, incidentally, also saved the Jewish people from their slavery in what used to be known as the Kingdom of Babylonia in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq). So much for the accusations for the so-called “Iranian antisemitism” Israeli propaganda often parrots while disregarding the fact that the largest Jewish community in West Asia or Africa, outside of Israel, lives in Iran, where the Jews enjoy freedom and civil and religious rights including political representation and a right to visit Israel and come back if they so wish.
The Iranian military with its formidable and effective defensive capabilities managed to pierce through multiple layers of Israeli and allied missile defenses in sufficient numbers to inflict serious damage onto Israel. Israeli top missile expert and the chief architect of its missile defense system Uzi Rubin and a former American CENTCOM commander, general Kenneth McKenzie, acknowledged only a few years ago that Iran possessed short and medium range ballistic missile capability in sufficient numbers, including the most recent Fattah missiles. These missiles can reportedly reach the speeds of up to Mach 15 and evade any air defense systems Israel has. These missiles are tipped with highly destructive conventional warheads and are equipped with precision guidance systems and maneuverable reentry vehicles at missile’s terminal stage, which enable missiles to travel in a meandering trajectory to avoid missile defenses, ultimately hitting its targets with high precision and at lightening hypersonic speeds of up to Mach 10 and beyond.
Analysts debate whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s real goal in launching an attack on Iran is to destroy the Iran’s advanced civil nuclear program, which Israeli leader claimed it represented existential threat to Israel, undo the Islamic revolution (the so-called regime change) and installing a new, pro-western and pro-Israeli puppet regime to serve neo imperialist interests of Israel and the west, or to redraw the political map of the Middle East entirely. Israeli ultimate goal is indeed eliminating the Iranian revolutionary government, the last standing bastion of resistance to Israeli expansionist policies and western hegemony over West Asia and the only state in the wider region which seriously supports the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide.
Hypocrisy of the West
Iran is truly the only country in the region which dared to challenge the US hegemony in West Asia and resisted Israel with force unintimidated by Israeli hubris, arrogance, and a sense of invisibility backed by nuclear blackmail. As Israel started an unprovoked aggression against Iran the world appears to be sliding into a Hobbesian state of unrestrained brutality. The might has become right in this new world of unrestrained use of military force, disrespect for international law and diplomacy, deception, murder of civilians, deliberate displacements of civilian populations and an outright genocide, including killing women and children in their tens of thousands, which Israel has been committing in Gaza for the past 20 months under the pretext of fighting Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic resistance.
The so-called civilized west is unwilling to take any meaningful action against Israel to halt its genocidal campaigns. It is now plainly obvious to all that Israel took upon itself the right to attack its neighbors, “preemptively” as it claims, without any reasonable justification in international law. In fact, Israel has demonstrated on a number of occasions that it sees itself above international law. The so-called “rules-based international order”, so often parroted by western political leaders and diplomats alike, especially when they preach to “less civilized” countries of the “global south”, is being dismissed when it comes to Israel.
Countries of the so-called political west have been sheltering Israel from justifiable international scrutiny and subordination to international law while being adamant to apply it to other states in the international system perceived to behave contrary to western interests. Israel keeps bombing Iran at will as it did Lebanon and Syria and even faraway Yemen, according the script of Gazan destruction and genocide. The western governments meanwhile keep lambasting Iran, the victim of Israeli aggression, instead of condemning Israel, the real aggressor, and a real nuclear threat not only to the region but to the entire world, especially given irrationality and lunacy of its most extremist political leaders some of whom called for using nukes on Gaza.
The US strategy of regime change
It is instructive to note that Israeli goals are in tune with long term American strategy to conquer Iran and institute a regime change operation in this Islamic republic. This has been meticulously planned and even published in detail. One such work is a policy paper published by the Brookings Institute, one of the most influential strategic and foreign policy think tanks in the United States which provides advice to the American administrations irrespective of who the president is, or who sits in the Congress. The detailed and meticulously argued study titled “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran” was published in June 2009. It is now 15 years since it was published.
The study in question was authored by six most renowned American thinkers for the Middle east. One of them was Martin Indyk, an Australian/American Jewish strategic thinker who lived most of his life in America where he served many US administrations as advisor and envoy for the Middle East and even ambassador to Israel. I attended one of his lectures in the Sydney Lowy Institute for International Policy back in 2006, when Indyk vigorously argued that America should not recognize the Hamas democratic election victory, but rather stick to Abu Mazen, as he liked to call his friend Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. Indyk was one of the most influential Zionist policymakers in Washington, almost on par with Henry Kissinger, whose biography Indyk also published a few years ago.
The study offered a clear guidance as to how the US should maintain its regional hegemony in West Asia, how to destroy the anticolonial Axis of resistance, making possible the total colonization of Palestine, albeit in not exactly the same lexicon. It also includes methods on how to prevent Iran from building nuclear capabilities, as well as how to overthrow or at least weaken Iran’s independent revolutionary government. Some analysts in the west, such as Benjamin Norton, interpreted the study in a way that it aimed at scaring other countries in the region that may seek to move away from the US dollar, especially the Gulf monarchies and to preserve the petrodollar system hence ensuring continued demand for US dollars.
The study, according to Norton, also contained some input into how to divide the global south and to disrupt the multipolar project. One particular chapter in the study, titled as “Leave it to Bibi: allowing or encouraging an Israeli military strike, toppling the regime, the Velvet revolution, inspiring an insurgency supporting Iranian minority and opposition groups etc. Therefore, it is important to understand that American presidents, including Trump, are only tasked to execute plans and strategies prepared log in advance. It is for this very reason (understand how US strategy) that giving too much undeserved agency to any US president is not only wrong but foolish. Iranian supreme leader is perhaps most aware of the way American policy decisions are taken, hence his continued skepticism and a degree of caution when it comes to trusting American negotiators in relation to nuclear talks.
The Orwellian World
We are living in an Orwellian world of inverted truth as political west attempts to preserve its hegemonic design over the Middle East in order to exploit its energy resources, maintain its firm grip over its major trade routes and economic corridors and projected future energy pipelines, while shoring up Israel as its strategic enforcer enabling Israeli and western supremacy in a strategically important West Asia. Contrary to earlier predictions that the US’s imperative to pivot to east Asia in order to be able to meet the challenge (or a “threat” in Trumpian lexicon) of the rising China, may have compelled Washington to relinquish its firm grip on the Middle east which it controlled relying on Israel and some conservative Arab monarchies and sheikhdoms, for the past 70 years, leaving a vacuum for various regional actors who have been jostling for a chunk of the Middle east and its lucrative oil wealth.
However, Americans had a different plan altogether. Whilst determined to do indeed pivot to East Asia, Washington is simultaneously determined to empower Israel so it could subdue and control the entire West Asia on behalf of America. This fits perfectly with America’s strategic doctrine known as “offshore balancing”, leading from behind by proxy rather than relying on keeping large troop presence in the Middle East on a permanent basis. Washington therefore decided to fortify the Israeli military machine to make it undefeatable and unchallengeable.
It therefore instituted the policy of Abraham Accords to entice as many Arab countries as possible to normalize relations with Israel and to enlist them as obedient Israeli vassals, whilst disregarding the unresolved question of Palestine and the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people as inconsequential and secondary issue. Israel, as the most trusted US ally, and a proxy in the Middle east at the same time, has been anointed as the central node for controlling region’s populations, its energy and water resources, as well as paramount overseer of trade corridors from India via Arabian Peninsula, Jordan and Israel to Greece and the rest of Europe.
This plan was officiated by former US president Joe Biden at the G20 summit in September 2023 in New Delhi. The project is officially known as India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC), promoted as an alternative to the China-based Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), announced by Chinese president Xi Jinping in 2013, in Astana, Kazakhstan. Intellectual progenitor of IMEC was Dr. Michael Tanchum, an academic formerly based at a university in Singapore.
Osman Softić is a Research Fellow at the Islamic Renaissance Front. He holds a BA degree in Islamic Studies from the Faculty of Islamic Studies of the University of Sarajevo and has a Master degree in International Relations from the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He contributed commentaries on Middle Eastern and Islamic Affairs for the web portal Al Jazeera Balkans, Online Opinion, Engage and Open Democracy. Osman holds dual Bosnian and Australian citizenship.
