Iran might be a problem, but Israel is a bigger one.

COMMENT/ANALYSIS

An Israeli strike against an Iranian oil facility. Credit: AP.

In the last 21 months Israel has turned the Gaza strip into rubble and reduced its two million inhabitants to a state of famine, disease, and desperation.

It has kneecapped Hezbollah, the dominant political force in Lebanon, and pushed that country, already a failing state, deeper into poverty, disfunction and despair.

And it has dramatically accelerated a decades-old land grab in the West Bank where thousands of Palestinians are losing their homes and livelihoods and millions live in fear of armed Zionist settlers and the Israeli Defence Forces that protect them.

If that weren’t enough Benjamin Netanyahu, kept in power by two far-right allies who have openly espoused ethnically cleansing Gaza, has now launched an unprovoked attack on Iran, one of the region’s centres of power.

Based on the premise that only the Jewish State should have nuclear weapons in the Middle East, Israel is bombing densely-packed Iranian cities and attempting to decapitate a regime that has been in power since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Leaving aside the human toll of all this – more than 55,000 have died at the hands of Israeli bombs and bullets in the region, at least half of them women and children – the past tells us that this ethno-nationalist project will not end well.

Recent history is chock full of examples of leaders who have overreached – either to preserve their own position or out of revenge or hubris – and left decades of suffering and conflict in the wake of their actions.

Case Study 1 is perhaps the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war I spent many months covering on the ground.

Buoyed by its success of decapitating the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, Washington decided that it was time to sweep away Saddam Hussein, the bloody ruler in Baghdad, and replace him with a proxy that would better serve its values and interests.

In the beginning all seemed to go swimmingly. The American military overwhelmed the Iraqi Republican Guard – a cadre we had been led by US spokesmen to believe was one of the world’s premiere fighting forces - and soon captured Baghdad.

But then the problems began. After the occupying forces ousted Saddam’s Baathist party and banned its officials from office the entire infrastructure of the country began to collapse. The militants seized the moment and a brutal Sunni-Shia civil war ensued.

Thousands of foreign troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed in the following years. Eventually the Islamic State swept to power in large swaths of the country and began launching horrific terror attacks across the region and into Europe.

Case Study 2 is the very same invasion of Afghanistan that was initially held up to be such a success. (I spent more than a year in country watching that debacle unfold.)

It is true that in the early years the Taliban and their al-Qa-eda allies melted away. But later they began to regroup, bolstered by Islamic fighters from across the border in Pakistan. After two decades of war the Americans ignominiously fled Afghanistan and handed power back to the Taliban, who rule to this day.

The entire endeavour is estimated to have cost Washington more than $2 trillion and 2,000 lives and caused the death of countless more Afghan civilians.

Cast Study 3, and perhaps the most relevant, is the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a conflict mostly forgotten in the West. It ended with more than a million dead.

In 1980 Baghdad, supported by the Gulf Arabs and most of the western world, attacked Iran. It used poison gas, components of which were provided by western companies, that killed thousands.

But even as western capitals confidently predicted Iraqi victory, Iran marshalled its youth and sent them across minefields until Baghdad’s forces could no longer hold them back. Soon it was Teheran’s troops that were on the advance.

It took nearly a decade and there was no clear victory in the war but Saddam, the western ally in that fight, was eventually forced into humiliating ceasefire negotiations.

If the Nazi Holocaust is the bedrock of modern Jewish identity, the 1980s war plays the same role for the generation that is in power in Iran.

And so we come to the modern day.

The rule of the Mullahs in Iran is nothing if not brutal. I have visited the country and watched the morality police patrol the capital’s streets and the servants of the regime whip up hatred against the west. (I even ended up in criminal court there once.)

The Ayatollah’s men have mercilessly put down several popular uprisings in the last 20 years.

But as the regime has aged it has become a corrupt, inefficient and self-serving oligarchy that is hated by many of the people it claims to serve.

While predicting the end of any system is a fool’s game, there was a sense that the writ of the holy men was slowly coming to an end.

But Netanyahu’s attack has given the Ayatollahs a new cause. Nobody likes to be bombed – least of all by a country with a long track record of subjugating and persecuting its Muslims – and many Iranians are rallying around the flag.

Netanyahu’s claim that attacking yet another country will somehow bring long-term peace and security to his citizens is as outlandish as it is self-serving.

Of course, the Middle East is a hard neighbourhood and nobody is pretending that simply by trying to get on with everyone life will be good.

But, bolstered by a high-tech economy and American money and weaponry, Israel has fallen into the trap of thinking it can wall itself off from those around it and smash up its neighbours with impunity.

Instead of building on its relationship with Egypt (pretty good), Jordan (not bad) and Saudi Arabia (improving), and offering the Palestinians a deal they can live with, it has sought to divide, rule, conquer and kill.

All this need never have happened. In 2015 Iran signed a nuclear deal with the west which even its critics said it was adhering to. It was a complicated arrangement that stipulated that Teheran would receive some sanctions relief in exchange for not enriching uranium to weapons grade.

Then, in 2018 during his first term, Trump scotched the deal.

When Trump returned to power Netanyahu saw a historic opportunity to bring down a sworn enemy. Last week he sent bombers into Iranian skies to decapitate its military and attack its nuclear and oil facilities.

Netanyahu has tried controversial gambits before.

For years he nurtured Hamas in a bid to weaken the Palestinian Authority who were lobbying for a two-state settlement. That ended with the infamous attack in Oct 2023 that left more than a thousand Israelis dead and sparked the current round of violence.

He was one of the loudest voices urging George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, telling him that without Saddam the Middle East would become a beacon of democracy (and America would get a lot of cheap oil).

And now he is apparently badgering Trump to send B-2 bombers to attack Iran’s nuclear facility in Fordow which is built under a mountain.

Trump loves the theatrical and the grandiose - dropping a 30,000lb bomb will be tempting. During his first term he bragged after dropping a similar bomb in Afghanistan that killed a number of IS militants.

Furthermore Trump might have a penchant for berating allies. (This week it was Emmanuel Macron, the French president, who was the subject of his spite.) But when it comes to standing up to the likes of Putin and Netanyahu the Trumpian backbone seems to soften.

But, if the Iranian regime, backed against a wall, responds with terrorism in Europe or America, a dirty bomb outside an Israeli port city, or even a low-grade nuclear device slung at a western country or ally, bombing Iran may not look like such a wise decision.

This is a war of choice. And no one knows how it will end.