The U.S. will not
win this war

The United States obviously didn’t learn its lessons from the 12-day war that Israel started against Iran in June last year. As a result, U.S. personnel and matériel are being destroyed at a rate unforeseen in America’s short and brutish history.

The Iranian Armed Forces are conducting this war differently. The aggressor parties made a strategic mistake at the outset. They assassinated Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on day one of the war, thereby suffusing the Iranian Armed Forces with that most potent of all weapons: righteous rage. The Iranians aren’t being as self-restrained as last time. All U.S. and Israeli assets are now being hit wherever the Iranians find them, in military bases, bomb shelters, private hotel rooms, Iraqi skies, or out in some Israeli-held desert. The implications cannot be overstated (including for China and Russia, which, in spite of the abstentions at the Security Council vote on Iran on Thursday, have such strategic stakes in the depletion of U.S. intelligence and military assets that cannot be publicly stated for now).

As in the 12-day strikes, the ongoing war’s primary goal of toppling the Iranian state didn’t materialize. Neither did the long-held Israeli wish of having Iran disintegrated into smaller chunks. Nor did the sparking of the revolt that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hoped would happen last time too.

The sea “armada” that U.S. President Donald Trump bragged about before the war is evading waters near Iran altogether, idle and inoperative, because it has proven an easy target for the Iranian missiles and drones.

U.S. and Israeli fighter jets taking off from ground sites, though, appeared to do relatively easy and deadly sorties over Iran until recently. To deal with that problem, the Iranians devised a plan.

It was refueling aircraft — airplanes carrying massive tankers of fuel — that enabled the fighter jets to fly distances into Iranian airspace, including all the way over to the capital, Tehran, without running out of fuel. If the larger aircraft and fuel jet supplies were depleted, the sorties over Iran would be naturally affected too.

The Iranian Armed Forces found ways to target the larger aircraft in the air, hitting at least two of them and making the skies near Iran unsafe for mid-air refueling operations. To hit the logistical aircraft in protected military bases in the territories of Arab countries in the Persian Gulf, the Iranians executed an effective plan that came in phases. They started out with firing swarms of relatively lower-cost missiles and drones at U.S. and Israeli bases, at once overwhelming their defense systems and depleting their arsenals of projectiles. Then, the Iranian Armed Forces began taking out strategic radar sites that gave the Americans and the Israelis much visibility both for offensive and defensive purposes. In the darkness that followed, the Iranians turned to the refueling aircraft sitting on the tarmac and the jet fuel depots. That has effectively ended many of the deadly fighter jet sorties over Iran.

With Iranian control exerted over the Strait of Hormuz, meanwhile, oil prices are rising. Slowly but inexorably, the U.S. economy is taking notice.

As military and economic pressure mounts on Washington, U.S. leaders are starting to show a symptom invariably associated with the floundering party to a war: confused rhetoric. A stylized talking point in the U.S. has been that the war is “way ahead of schedule,” an assertion in abject contrast to the realities on the ground. Now, they have been talking of potential land operations against Iran.

The U.S. and Israeli forces started the war in the air, where they thought they held superiority. If land operations are launched, Iran is even likelier to deal massive blows both because of extensive experience in ground warfare and perfect knowledge of its own terrain. How could the Americans be way ahead of schedule” but have to move from a mode of combat that is supposedly working so well to a much riskier one? Increasingly, the United States military is looking like its “commander-in-chief”: shrill, confused, erroneous, scared. Soldiers know they can never prevail in a war like this even in a movie.

*Hossein Jelveh is an independent journalist.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of qodsna.)