Mick Hartley

It's salutary to step back and take a cool look at Iran beyond the mullahs: a country with a rich history and vibrant culture trapped by a small coterie of fundamentalist bigots, who are driving the nation to penury and ruin in their ideological/religious obsession with destroying Israel and spreading their gospel of hate. It's not sustainable.

Ali Ansari in the Sunday Times:

Israel’s decision to retaliate after Iran’s attack last weekend will have surprised few in Tehran, but the speed and nature of the response was bolder and more pointed than many had anticipated.

The targeting of Iranian assets in Iraq and Syria was expected. The assault on an airbase in Isfahan, in the heart of Iran itself, was more striking, because it exposed the inability of the Iranians to defend their own airspace and because it may have been initiated by Israeli assets inside Iran.

This will have been a deliberate calculation by the Israelis to feed the paranoia of the political-military establishment in Iran.

The Iranian authorities dismissed Israel’s actions as an irrelevance not worthy of a response. This looks like the political establishment attempting to reassure itself.

Most Iranians — struggling to cope with rampant inflation and a sliding currency — are barely paying attention. The economy remains their single most important preoccupation and its failure is ascribed to regime mismanagement and incompetence….

Most Iranians are keen to avoid adding to their already significant economic difficulties with a fresh conflict in which they have no interest but for which they are likely to bear the cost. The regime’s struggle with Israel and the wider western world reflects an ideological conviction to which many cannot relate, and a vision for the future they do not want. Their demands are simpler: good governance, a sound economy and a secure existence in which Iran is integrated into the world and life can proceed with a degree of stability and normalcy that many of us in the West take for granted…. 

The Israeli reprisal has blunted much of the Islamic Republic’s messaging.

Tehran’s blustering bravado was intended to prevent any retaliation. It failed, but most in senior positions want to avoid a wider escalation lest it destabilise the republic. Instead, the regime is left to invent its own Orwellian reality in which the Israeli attack is dismissed as an impotent irrelevance that can comfortably be ignored.

Most Iranians are not so easily fooled.

As one noted political commentator protested in disbelief, the crisis of authority afflicting the Islamic Republic, its contempt for the people and its failure of leadership at all levels, is a self-inflicted catastrophe of extraordinary proportions. After 45 years there is only one thing, he concluded, that modern Iran has proven itself to be truly expert in: making enemies.

If the regime in Tehran falls, then Hamas, Hezbollah, the Youthis will surely follow – and the whole panoply of terror organisation plaguing the Middle Eastern landscape. The Iranian people are ready, but sadly the US isn't – having shifted its recent Middle Eastern strategy away from George Bush's "axis of evil" to Obama and Biden's misconceived efforts to accept Iran as a legitimate and responsible player.