Opinion Piece Examines Assumptions Behind the US-Israel War on Iran

Last updated: 15 October 2026

A man walks past an Iranian flag fluttering above the wreckage of a car in Tehran, on 4 March 2026. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

On March 5, 2026, The Guardian published an opinion article by Ali Vaez examining the assumptions behind the current US-Israeli war effort against Iran. The piece argues that much of the campaign appears to rest on a simplified view of how the Iranian state behaves under pressure, and suggests that military planners may be underestimating the regime’s capacity for adaptation, survival, and narrative control. Because this is an opinion essay rather than a straight news report, its claims are presented as analysis and interpretation rather than as independently established conclusions.

The article begins by describing the campaign launched on February 28 as a classic air war built around several familiar objectives: weakening air defenses, degrading missile and drone capabilities, damaging naval assets, and killing senior commanders in order to disrupt decision-making at the top. In that framing, the military logic is direct and operational. Once hostile airspace is opened, the attacking side can rely more heavily on cheaper and more abundant munitions, while repeated leadership strikes are meant to create confusion, slow responses, and reduce coordination inside the targeted state apparatus.

From there, the essay shifts away from tactics and toward the deeper political assumptions driving the war. Its central claim is that outside powers have long tended to misunderstand Iran in one of two opposite ways: either as a rigid, ideological theocracy that does not respond rationally to pressure, or as a brittle dictatorship that might collapse if hit hard enough. The article rejects both of those models. Instead, it portrays the Islamic Republic as a system in which ideology matters, but where the instinct for institutional survival is just as important. In this reading, Iran is neither irrational nor passive. It is presented as a political order capable of adjusting its behavior while still protecting its core structure.

To support that argument, the essay points to the 2015 nuclear agreement as an example of pragmatic calculation inside a revolutionary system. It says Iranian leaders were able to maintain harsh anti-American rhetoric in public while still authorizing direct negotiations when sanctions pressure threatened domestic stability. The point made in the article is not that Tehran abandoned its ideology, but that ideological posture and strategic calculation can coexist. That distinction is important to the author’s broader argument, because it suggests that pressure does not necessarily produce surrender or collapse. It may instead produce selective compromise, tactical adjustment, and a renewed focus on survival.

The essay further argues that this history matters because some current policy thinking appears to assume that enough military pressure will force the Iranian system to capitulate or fragment in predictable ways. The author treats that assumption as highly uncertain. The article notes that after last year’s 12-day war, Tehran suffered serious damage but still framed the outcome domestically as a success because the state remained intact. In this interpretation, survival itself becomes a political victory. Even a damaging confrontation can be recast as evidence of resilience if the governing system endures and retains enough control to shape the narrative afterward.

One of the more distinctive parts of the piece uses historical imagery to explain this mindset. It refers to a well-known fresco in Isfahan depicting the Battle of Chaldiran, where the Persians appear triumphant despite the historical reality of an Ottoman victory. The essay uses this image to illustrate a broader political habit: defeat can be reframed as heroic endurance, and endurance can then be presented as triumph. This is not treated as a decorative aside, but as an explanation for why raw military damage may not always produce the political or psychological effect outside powers expect. A state that can convert loss into a story of resistance may remain more stable than its adversaries assume.

The article then turns to Iran’s wartime response. Rather than trying to match US and Israeli power directly, it says Tehran is pursuing a strategy designed to stretch the conflict across both time and space. Iranian drones and missiles, according to the essay, have targeted not only Israel but also US bases and commercial infrastructure across the Gulf. These attacks are described as limited in some cases, sometimes involving only a small number of projectiles, but cumulative in purpose. Their role is not necessarily to achieve a single decisive battlefield breakthrough. Instead, the article says, they are meant to create friction, force several fronts to be defended at once, and gradually increase the economic and psychological cost of continuing the war.

That slower tempo is portrayed as deliberate rather than accidental. The essay argues that Iranian planners likely understand that missile and drone production sites are prime targets and may not survive long under sustained bombardment. For that reason, the article suggests, Tehran may be trying to avoid exhausting its capabilities too quickly. In this interpretation, restraint is not necessarily a sign of weakness. It may be a way of preserving options for a longer confrontation. The conflict is therefore framed as a contest between different timelines: one side seeking rapid degradation of Iranian capabilities, the other betting that endurance and managed escalation can outlast the political appetite for war.

Another major theme in the essay is the uncertainty surrounding any attempt to turn military damage into regime change. It warns that even if the current campaign significantly weakens Iran, that does not mean it will produce the specific political outcome some outside observers hope for. Particular emphasis is placed on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the article describes as far more than a military institution. It is portrayed as an economic power center, a political actor, and an ideological pillar of the state. Because of that deep institutional role, the piece argues that targeting its headquarters or commanders may disrupt repression and weaken internal coordination, but is unlikely by itself to dismantle such an embedded structure through air power alone.

The essay also spends significant time on Iran’s internal social landscape. It argues that outside commentary often assumes the country can be neatly divided into a regime on one side and a society ready to rise up on the other once enough pressure is applied. The article presents that view as too simplistic. It says ethnic minorities have real grievances, but many are wary of any process that could lead to fragmentation of the state. It also notes that even some Iranians who oppose the current system may still fear total state collapse, because the likely alternative could be chaos rather than orderly change. In that sense, the article draws a distinction between wanting reform or even regime change, and wanting national disintegration.

Connected to that is the issue of regional spillover. The essay mentions reports that Kurdish militants near Iran’s western frontier, allegedly backed by the United States and Israel, may be preparing for a ground assault against the central government. Whether or not such a scenario unfolds, the article argues that these reports feed broader fears of fragmentation. It adds that serious instability inside Iran could spill into Iraq, where the political order remains fragile, and could further intensify tensions with Turkey, which sees Kurdish autonomy in the region as a major security threat. In this way, the piece portrays the war not as a contained bilateral confrontation, but as a crisis with the potential to export disorder across an already unstable region.

At the same time, the essay does not claim Iran is immune to defeat. In its later sections, it stresses that the country’s leadership may also be prone to serious miscalculation. The article notes that Iran could run short of ammunition or lose access to parts of its firepower before the United States and Israel exhaust theirs. Unlike Ukraine, it says, Iran does not have a major external backer continuously resupplying it. The piece also argues that Tehran’s strategy of widening the conflict could alienate neighboring states and gradually push them from defensive caution toward more openly hostile positions. These observations complicate the broader thesis: the state may be more resilient than its adversaries assume, but that does not make it invulnerable.

The article also underscores Iran’s domestic weaknesses. It describes a regime that is broadly unpopular and a country whose economy and environment have been pushed close to collapse. These vulnerabilities are treated as real and serious, not secondary details. For that reason, the essay does not end with a categorical prediction. Instead, it leaves open two possibilities: the war may fail to break the system in the way its attackers expect, or it may in fact do so, but at a very high cost and with consequences that reach far beyond Iran itself. That gives the piece a cautious tone despite its strong argument. It is not claiming certainty, but warning against strategic overconfidence.

Taken together, the article is best understood as a strategic critique of the assumptions behind the current war. Its main idea is that battlefield success does not automatically produce political success inside a state’s governing structure. By stressing resilience, narrative adaptation, and the risks of regional spillover, the essay argues that the conflict may unfold in ways that differ sharply from the expectations of those conducting it. Rather than presenting the outcome as straightforward, it frames the war as a confrontation in which all sides may incur serious losses, regardless of who appears to dominate the battlefield in its early stages.

Another notable feature of the piece is the way it links military strategy to political imagination. The argument is not simply that Iran can absorb punishment. It is that wars are often shaped by what governments believe about their opponents before the fighting even starts. If those beliefs are overly simplistic, then military planning may achieve visible tactical gains while still missing its broader political objective. The article uses Iran as an example of a state that can be ideologically rigid in language, pragmatic in method, and highly adaptive in crisis all at once. That combination, in the essay’s view, makes the conflict more uncertain than a conventional air campaign might suggest.

The piece also draws attention to the limits of force as a tool of political engineering. It implies that weakening a state militarily is not the same as determining what replaces it, how society reacts, or how neighboring countries absorb the fallout. In that respect, the article situates the war within a broader history of external powers trying to shape political outcomes through pressure while underestimating the complexity of the systems they are confronting. The essay does not deny that military force can be highly destructive or even decisive in some areas. Its warning is that destruction and political transformation are not always the same thing.

Conclusion

The article presents the war as more than a campaign of air strikes and retaliation. It argues that the deeper issue is whether the states leading the campaign correctly understand the political system they are trying to weaken, and whether military pressure alone can produce the transformation some policymakers appear to expect.

More broadly, the essay helps explain why the conflict is drawing such close attention. It connects questions of regime durability, regional instability, and strategic miscalculation, suggesting that the final outcome may depend not only on military damage, but also on endurance, political perception, and the wider consequences of escalation across the Middle East.