It is now clear that the US and Israel wanted to kill the supreme leader. Israel believes in the power of assassination as a strategy. In the last two years it killed the leaders of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and many of their lieutenants.
The Islamic regime in Iran is a different matter. It presides over a state, not an armed movement. It is not a one-man show. If a supreme leader is killed, he will be replaced, most likely by another cleric supported by the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which exists alongside the conventional armed forces with the explicit task of defending the regime against threats at home and abroad.
Trump offered them immunity if they laid down their arms or certain death. The IRGC is unlikely to be tempted by his offer. Martyrdom is a constant motif in the ideology of the Islamic Republic and in Shia Islam.
Trump believes that the primary motivating force in politics and life is transactional – as his book puts it, the art of the deal. But dealing with Iran requires factoring in the power of ideology and belief. That is much harder to measure.
As this crisis has built since the turn of the year, and America assembled its armada, there have been increasing signs that the leadership in Tehran saw war as unavoidable. They engaged in talks, conscious that talks were going on last summer when Israel attacked and the US joined them.
They do not trust the US or the Israelis. In his first term Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, which restricted the Iranian nuclear programme and was the marquee foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration.
There have been signs that Iran might have been prepared to accept a JCPOA mark two deal, at the very least to buy time. But the US appears to have also been demanding severe restrictions on its missile programme and its support for regional allies that oppose Israel and the US.
That was unacceptable to them, amounting to a capitulation. Giving up missiles and allies might even in the minds of the leadership make it much more vulnerable to regime change than the threat – and now reality – of attack.
Iran’s remaining leaders will now be calculating how to ride out the war, how to survive and how to manage its consequences. Their neighbours, led by Saudi Arabia, will be dismayed by the huge uncertainty and potential consequences of today’s events.
Given the capacity of the Middle East to export trouble, the eruption of renewed and intensified war deepens the instability of a region and wider world that is already turbulent, violent and dangerous.
