Iran’s latest miscalculation could prove extremely costly

Iran’s attack on Tuesday night marked its biggest ever military blow against Israel. Unlike its first ever direct strike against Israeli territories in April this year, the barrage of nearly 200 ballistic and hypersonic missiles represented a serious, uncalculated escalation, even though almost all of them were intercepted, as Israel claimed, despite Iran not giving any prior warning like last time.

Iran described the attack as defensive in nature, solely aimed at three Israeli military facilities and being a response to the Israeli killings of militant leaders and its aggression in Lebanon and in Gaza. However, this action points to a change in Iranian posture and a newfound readiness to risk an avoidable war in its continued efforts to carve itself a dominant regional role.

Clearly, Israel’s elimination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, alongside many of his top lieutenants, local commanders and even foot soldiers, was a masterful strike. It came just under a year after Hamas attacked southern Israel in what was seen as the most serious of threats faced by the Israeli state in the 75 years since its inception. But that act must have been one blow too many for Iran to digest, meaning it could no longer stick to the usual rules of engagement and asymmetric warfare practiced in the Middle East for more than three decades.

The forceful Iranian retaliation showed that the gloves are now off in Tehran and, even at the risk of an all-out war against a superior enemy, the country’s leadership seems to have reached the conclusion that it can no longer sit idly by. Hezbollah has long been the “jewel in the crown,” an enabler of Iranian power and the spearhead of its militant architecture regionally and internationally, ensuring Iranian influence stretches through Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon all the way to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Iran also benefited from and helped to stretch Hezbollah’s underground networks across Africa, Latin America, the US and Europe. This afforded Iran and its regime’s ideology an unparalleled reach.

Tuesday’s strike and its timing also show that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard hawks have undoubtedly been feeling vulnerable, if not outright scared, as a result of the routing of Hamas and the near-total decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership and command structure. Tehran viewed that as critical, on top of the serious breaches of Iranian defenses. After the bombing of Hezbollah’s headquarters that killed Nasrallah, Iran rushed to move its supreme leader to a safe location, surely with all security measures reviewed and updated.

The exploding Hezbollah walkie-talkies and pagers had already prompted Iran to reassess its military and security forces’ communication tools, with all the disruption that might cause. A similar security assessment must have proved crucial at its key state installations after the July assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed while staying in a government guest house in Tehran.

The leadership in Tehran seems to have reached the conclusion that it can no longer sit idly by

Mohamed Chebaro

It seems that Iran’s usual pragmatism could not prevail this time, as the regime must feel that its back is against the wall. The choice to retaliate directly against Israel could surely lead to severe consequences for the regime’s future, as Israel, with the US behind it, has pledged to hit back forcefully.

The strikes are also likely to have undermined all the overtures made by the new Iranian president and his quasi-moderate administration at the UN last week. In New York, President Masoud Pezeshkian and his foreign minister spoke about Iran’s readiness to revive the nuclear deal.

Surely Pezeshkian did not expect that the “new era” he alluded to in New York would come back to haunt the regime and, instead of heralding a new age of accommodation with Iran’s foes, would throw the country straight into the abyss of a potential direct war.

Israel’s routing of Hamas and now Hezbollah must have been seen in Tehran as a prelude to the routing of other actors in the so-called axis of resistance and, by default, the influence and impact of Iran in the region. It must be said, however, that, even at the height of its openness and expressions of moderation, Iran never abandoned its key ideological tenet of exporting its Islamic revolution or its asymmetric, deniable warfare through its militant proxies.

Before its retaliation for Nasrallah’s assassination, Iran could have leaned on Hezbollah to orchestrate a retreat of its forces north of the Litani River in Lebanon, as Israel aims to secure the villages and towns closer to the border.

Maybe miscalculations have sunk Hamas and destroyed Gaza. Miscalculation also led Hezbollah to sustain its threats to the communities living in northern Israel, close to the Lebanese border, in support of a losing Hamas. Iran’s direct attack on Israel is likely to be another such miscalculation, as it is clearly a declaration of war — and while we can argue about how it started, we cannot anticipate or predict how it will end.

These miscalculations have been built on the poor assessment that Israel has been weakened internally and its people no longer have the will to fight, even when faced with an existential threat. That I believe was compounded by an incorrect belief among the axis of resistance forces due to an over-consumption of narratives pointing to the erosion of the West and inferences that the US was about to descend into a civil war.

The cool heads that could try to pull the region back from the brink are unfortunately absent, as America is in the final weeks before its presidential election, carrying with it a string of failed initiatives to broker a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel in Gaza. There was also the 21-day truce between Hezbollah and Israel, proposed by Paris and Washington, that did not gain any traction prior to Nasrallah’s assassination.

We are in a world full of conflict, one governed by division and the near-breakdown of multilateralism, with divisions becoming more prominent between the US and its Western allies on one side and, on the other, a Russia that is waging war on Europe’s eastern front for the first time since the Second World War, along with the likes of China and Iran. One can only fear that, instead of the world extinguishing the fires of war between Israel and Hamas and in Ukraine, Iran’s miscalculation will only mean more instability, even if it might mean the end of Tehran’s revolutionary regime. After all, it clearly lacks popular domestic support after years of sanctions and economic failure, compounded by corruption, mismanagement and foreign adventures that the people of Iran never subscribed to.

• Mohamed Chebaro is a British Lebanese journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering war, terrorism, defense, current affairs and diplomacy. He is also a media consultant and trainer.