Why did so many insist that regime change had to be the aim of any war against Iran? They paid no attention when Washington and Jerusalem both denied any intention of trying to change Iran’s government — and some persisted in pointing out the severe pitfalls of “regime change” even after Trump’s ceasefire order had abruptly ended the fighting.
The answer is not that complicated: the naysayers desperately longed for an Israeli defeat. Some, including Tucker Carlson, even wanted an American defeat, a thing only possible if either Trump or Netanyahu had been foolish enough to send an army all the way to Tehran through a vast country 80 times the size of Israel. The overlooked implication is that, absent a lunatic attempt at regime change by ground invasion, Iran’s defeat had to be a foregone conclusion: Israel is a very modern Western state, whereas Iran is only a superficially modernised theocracy.
For a generation brought up on “post-colonial” grievance studies, taught to despise and revile the Europeans who set out in their fragile little ships to conquer the world, it is distressing to think that so little has changed when it comes to the balance of military strength. Hating the West as they do, especially “settler” states like Australia, Canada, the US and more loudly Israel, they want to see their homelands humiliated.
But everybody now understands that Israel controlled the skies over Iran for just as long as it wanted, even though it did not have even a single long-range combat aircraft nor adequate refuelling tankers. Rather, it simply had a Western air force. In practice, that means its pilots and commanders are not mere chancers, but rather earnest professionals who accept the limitations of their equipment and strive to overcome them — for example with unique air-launched ballistic missiles used as range extenders.
The essential Western quality that wins wars is the willingness to acknowledge errors and defeats, and so avoid repeating them. Hezbollah’s now-dead founder Hassan Nasrallah openly admired Israel’s investigative report on the 2006 war he himself had started, a report which respected no military secrets nor reputations in harshly criticising both Israel’s prime minister and his military chief. Both subsequently resigned for the conduct of the war.
Given the surprise October 7 attacks, which cost the lives of so many, there will no doubt be many uncomfortable revelations this time too. Together, they will most certainly end Netanyahu’s political career, in spite of his undeniably victorious strategy, if only because of his inherent and undeniable prime-ministerial responsibility. Nor should he be surprised: after the 1973 war, which also started with a surprise attack, this time on the Suez Canal, it was Prime Minister Golda Meir who had to resign and leave politics, despite having just led her country to victory against Egypt and Syria.
By contrast, Ayatollah Khamenei opened his first post-combat speech by warmly congratulating the people of Iran on their “very great” victory and the brilliant successes of their armed forces, including their magnificent “True Promise IIII” missile offensive. Perhaps readers of the Tehran Times, who had just seen major buildings in their own city reduced to ruins, were consoled by reading that Iran’s formidable missiles had ravaged both Haifa and Tel Aviv. More emphatically, they are told that Iran’s missiles destroyed Israel’s ministry of defence in the heart of Tel Aviv, and the Mossad headquarters just north of the city, both of which passing Israeli commuters can still see are perfectly intact every day.
Unmentioned in Iran’s media was the very prudent conduct of the country’s pilots: not one dared challenge the Israeli aircraft overhead. That is unfortunate, for though their planes are certainly outdated, a dogfight could have ensured the IDF pilots ran out of fuel before they could return to base.
Nor is this an exclusively Middle Eastern problem. Neither India nor Pakistan has acknowledged its air combat losses in the fighting of two months ago. On the contrary, each side has proudly recounted how many enemy fighters its brave pilots shot down, even as their respective medias have duly broadcast fantasy videos of great victories.
That inevitably means that errors are never exposed nor corrected, even as the malpractice of strictly-by-the-book routine drills, instead of real combat training, continues unabated. This is hardly a new phenomenon. A Pakistani pilot who flew with the Jordanian air force as far back as the Six-Day War is still a celebrated ace in local media. Even now, it breathlessly recounts how terrorised Israeli pilots could not survive his deadly shooting — even as the historical record shows that Jordan lost every one of its combat aircraft on the very first day of fighting.
To be sure, neither the West nor the rest is homogenous. When it comes to military professionalism and truth-telling, Japan was certainly a Western power by 1905 when it defeated the Russians in the Far East. Even ten years earlier, in fact, Japan’s fleet of older and smaller vessels had already defeated China’s modernised navy of European-built ships. By contrast, there are, and have always been, European military forces that can neither fight in earnest nor acknowledge their crippling deficiencies in combat morale and leadership.
In recent years, some of their troops have even managed to participate in the occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq — without achieving anything, of course, but without being found out either. The US officers in charge did their part by assigning their allies to the least dangerous areas, but they themselves came up with their own creative remedies, including paying the enemy to allow them to pretend-patrol without being attacked. US and British officers higher up the chain of command were happy to indulge these tricks, studiously avoiding any inquiries that might have uncovered the truth.
The Biden administration did the same thing when Houthi attacks in the Red Sea disrupted global commerce. Though the Mediterranean ports in France, Italy and Spain were severely impacted, the three countries refused to intervene. Nevertheless, Biden dutifully sent the US Navy to join British warships in fighting the Houthis, while RAF aircraft flying out of Cyprus bombed Yemen too. Their French, Italian and Spanish allies, however, were nowhere to be seen, despite the fact that defeating the Houthis should have been a strategic priority for them.
But when Trump found out that the Mediterranean navies were entirely absent from the fight — despite boasting hundreds of combat vessels, including aircraft carriers — he abruptly ordered the US Navy to withdraw completely. With each US missile sent against the cheap drones and missiles of the Houthis costing $2.5 million, the White House refused to follow Biden in defending European economic interests without even asking them to join the fight. And, yes, there is a European Union naval mission. But its two small vessels are prohibited from cooperating with US or British forces, and are very carefully stay out of trouble in the upper Red Sea — ultimately achieving nothing.
China, of course, is the great unknown when it comes to combat. The country’s vast accomplishments of the past two millennia, in every realm of human creativity, were accompanied by an unending series of defeats at the hand of grossly outnumbered invaders, well documented since the Xiongnu of the 2nd century BC. Things continued like that until 1945, when the badly outnumbered Japanese troops who garrisoned much of the country could not be dislodged by either Nationalist or Communist troops, in spite of the ever-diminishing supplies they received from Japan under bombardment. Nor could the Chinese prevail against Vietnam in 1979, when they tried and failed to protect their Khmer Rouge allies in Cambodia from Vietnam’s advancing troops.
After failing to advance, and suffering some 26,000 dead, the People’s Liberation Army simply withdrew, abandoning the Khmer Rouge to its fate. Since then, China has become far richer, acquiring much more advanced weaponry in every category. But it is still unknown if Chinese units will actually fight. This is especially given the legacy of the one-child policy — now abrogated, but whose effects will linger for two decades — which means that every soldier is the only child of two whole families: both of which will be extinguished on his death.
Xi Jinping likes military parades and greatly celebrated Colonel Qui Faobao, who started the June 2020 fight with Indian troops up at the Galwan river in remotest Ladakh. But no army composed of single sons has ever fought in history, and the death of four Chinese soldiers at Galwan remained undisclosed for eight months, while the CCP made extraordinarily elaborate preparations to soften the blow once the announcement was made. And if there is even a minor clash over Taiwan, it is unlikely that only four will die.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Edward Luttwak
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://unherd.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
