AS`AD AbuKHALIL: How Iran Allowed Israel to Attack

When the history of this period is written, Tehran’s 2015 nuclear agreement with the U.S. administration of a lame-duck president will be depicted as a trap.

By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News

The attack on Iran was not surprising; the ill-preparedness of the Iranian military and intelligence for it was shocking, however.  

After days of specific Israeli threats, relayed though compliant Western media, Israel struck on the very day when Donald Trump’s 60-day ultimatum to Iran to  come up with a deal on its nuclear program expired.  

Trump, who later indicated he was aware of the impending Israeli action, appears to have set up Iran up for the attack.  Teheran naively was prepared to attend the next round of talks with the U.S. in Oman two days after the Israeli missiles would hit their targets. 

Israel seems to have calmly followed the same playbook it employed earlier this year against Hizbullah in Lebanon — without the Iranian regime being prepared for it. 

News of an imminent Israeli attack on Iran was broadcast around the world and yet Iran kept on hoping for goodwill from Trump. 

Trump’s “generous offer” to the Iranian nuclear delegation was the chance to surrender, totally and unequivocally.  

The Trump administration started the nuclear negotiations with the assertion that the U.S. would never accept the weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program.  

Iran had offered to freeze enrichment to a maximum at level of just 3 percent enrichment under strict international control, while maintaining its nuclear capabilities. (90 percent enrichment is needed for a bomb). 

Iran should have learned from the Libyan example: Muammar Qadhafi surrendered the country’s entire infrastructure of weapons of mass destruction and allowed the U.S. to transfer it out of Libya. 

A few years later, NATO attacked Libya and overthrew Qadhafi, causing  then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to laugh at the news of his anal rape and murder by NATO-supported rebels. Rebels are still terrorizing Libya, many years after the NATO intervention “to save civilian lives.”  

Iran had been clearly eager to reach a deal with the Trump administration, especially since Republicans traditionally possess more political capital than Democrats, who traditionally act defensively on foreign policy and defense.  

There was a real chance of a deal between the two countries, and the U.S. sounded reasonable at first. But AIPAC presumably intervened imposing Israel’s will on the talks. 

Iran’s Response

Iran’s retaliation against Israel’s unprovoked attack so far has been significant with an even more robust response promised by Teheran, despite the wide gap in military and intelligence capabilities of the two countries. There are conflicting reports in Iranian and Israeli and Western media about the damage Iran has done. 

Iranian reports indicate several military and intelligence targets have been hit, including Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, but this is missing in Western and Israeli accounts. Someone isn’t telling the truth.

The Israeli daily Haaretz revealed officials are actively suppressing information:  “Israel Police said it deployed patrol units to halt broadcasts from foreign media outlets that were documenting missile impact sites and revealing precise locations.” A similar order pertains to Israeli journalists.

Israeli officials have conceded that the country’s missile defense systems are not “hermetic” and The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel is running out of interceptor missiles.  Iran may be waiting for this to happen before delivering its most advanced projectiles, including a reserve of hypersonic missiles. 

Clearly Israel stands no chance of reaching its war aims — to physically destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and to overthrow and replace the Iranian regime — without the direct military participation of the United States, and even then attaining those goals is far from certain. 

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So all eyes are on Donald Trump’s decision whether to yield to intense Israeli pressure to directly join the war or pressure from his MAGA base not to.  Trump has kicked the can down the road saying he will make a decision “within two weeks.”

If just preventing Iran from getting the bomb were the aim, Trump should never have pulled out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal, which was successfully monitoring Iran’s enrichment in exchange for lifting Iranian sanctions.   

Trump said he wanted a better deal. Iran has agreed to a limit of 3.67 percent enrichment with stringent monitoring, which is exactly what the JCPOA allowed. If Trump accepted that he would be back to the JCPOA deal, which means he would have withdrawn the U.S. from it for nothing. 

Hence he is demanding zero enrichment, something Iran says it will not accept. Teheran also says it won’t resume negotiations at all as long as Israel continues attacking.

After Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, Iran began enriching to higher levels. Even so, U.S. intelligence concluded as recently as March that Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon. That did not stop the U.S. from sponsoring a resolution passed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s board of governors a day before Israel’s attack last week saying Iran was in breach of its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations.

If the U.S. becomes directly involved militarily, it would be a questionable attempt to destroy a program that had been diplomatically under control, risking not only the release of radioactive contamination, but Iranian retaliation against U.S. bases and military ships in the region.

Iran could also hit oil and gas installations and energy transport, unleashing a wider war with potentially extreme consequences for the world economy. 

How Iran Let This Happen

Israel and the U.S. may have assumed that Iran was too weak to counter U.S.-Israeli aggression since Iran did not respond effectively — from its own realist standpoint — to the U.S. assassination in January 2020 of Qasim Suleimani, the head of  head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.

It is difficult to deter your enemy if it gets away with the assassination of your top commander.  You can’t make specific threats and then not  follow through without losing respect on the international stage.  

In recent years, Iran has increasingly sounded like the Arab regimes of yesteryears: grandiose threats and little action.  

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Iran has exhibited a series of weak postures.  For instance, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, responded to Israel’s assassination of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah by ordering the construction of a large gravesite in Lebanon and the production of a documentary film about his life. 

Israel also got away with the assassination of Hamas top official Ismail Haniyyah in the heart of Tehran, as well as the Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Both further exposed Iran’s weakness.  Iran effectively waited until last Friday to conclude that Israel had declared war on it. 

There are many reasons for Iranian weakness. The helicopter crash that killed President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, among others, in 2024 may have been an Israeli (or American) operation (though no firm proof has emerged), perhaps part of a larger scheme to undermine the Iranian regime.  (Iran officially concluded that it was an accident).

Developments since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel have accelerated the tendency to seek conspiracy theories to understand rapid shifts of power in the region.  Soon after President Raisi’s death, Iran quickly held an election and a reformer, Masoud Pezeshkian, was allowed by Khamenei to win.  

The new regime was most eager to calm tensions in the region and prioritize economic relief and prosperity partly by getting the cruel sanctions lifted. Iranian people were less interested in ideological slogans — and the defeat of the candidate of the Revolutionary Guards proved that. 

The new Iranian government was a continuation of the regime of Rouhani and the former foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, which had preceded Raisi and concluded the JCPOA. It prioritized seeking an agreement with the West and reconciling with Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia. 

This is despite the fact that Saudi Arabia funds Iran International (the Persian and English language propaganda TV outlet aimed at the Iranian people), and that Saudi and U.A.E. media continue to agitate against Iran and its allies to effectively serve Israeli war efforts.  Nevertheless, Iranian officials, who engaged in a widely hailed diplomatic reconciliation with Saudi Arabia in 2023, stressed brotherly relations with Gulf governments and sent conciliatory messages to Riyadh. 

[See: Seismic Iran-Saudi Rapprochement Isolates US]

The Nuclear Trap

When the history of this period is written, it will be said that the 2015 nuclear agreement was a trap: the Iranian government agreed to the deal in the last year of the second term of a U.S. president — Barack Obama — about to leave office. An American political expression (“lame duck”) would have informed the Iranians there is little value to an agreement in the last year of a sitting president who did not have the support of the Senate — the body that ratifies international treaties. 

It did not take Trump long to “withdraw” from the agreement when he had no right to withdraw: the agreement had the juridical stamp of the U.N. Security Council, which immediately made it international law. 

In effect, the U.S. government decided to announce to the world its intent to violate international law.  But the U.S. can do whatever it wants — just like Israel, its closest ally.  

Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign at the time the deal was concluded, exhibited signs similar to the now disgraced mentality of Yasser Arafat of the PLO: both thought that if they spoke reasonably and softly to the West that they could change their minds about key issues of foreign policy  

They both assumed the decision-making process of U.S. foreign policy is democratic and could be influenced by good foreign policy arguments, even by officials of hated foreign governments or entities (Islamic Iran and the PLO).  Zarif also expressed a view widely shared among segments of Iranian society; namely that the cause of resistance and Palestine is not worth fighting for, that money has to be spent at home and not abroad. 

This is not the Iran of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who made Palestine an integral part of the Shiite Twelver faith.

Trump’s ‘Deal’

There was a chance for Iran and the U.S. to reach an agreement: Iran agreed to lower enrichment to 3 percent for energy and medical purposes and to allow for a yet more stringent monitoring regime than the one installed by the 2015 agreement. 

Trump initially was receptive to the idea, but AIPAC and its mouthpieces around the world stepped in and made it clear that only the Libyan model would be acceptable. War was the alternative.  

Trump made confusing statements in response, but he may very well have been dissimulating, especially since Israel’s unprovoked war coincided with the 60-day period that Trump attached to the negotiations. 

Trump did not link negotiations over the nuclear issue with regional matters (a longstanding Zionist demand); but that could have been part of the deception.  The U.S., it seems, deliberately deceived Iran (on behalf of Israel) to think that an agreement was imminent.  Iran even exchanged drafts of an agreement with the U.S. delegation.  

If Iran had failed to respond to the Israeli attacks, it would have been exposed (before its people and the world) and would have lost legitimacy.

This is no longer the Iran of Khomeini, which enjoyed wide popular support.  The revolution has aged and few youths seem to exhibit revolutionary zeal.  

Khamenei is not Khomeini, insofar as his ability to mobilize the nation as the latter did in the Iran-Iraq war.   However, Iran has responded and continues to fire missiles at Israel. 

A Massively Changed Middle East

The region will be configured after this war; the entire Arab East (and a bit more) may come under the direct rule of Israel.  Lebanon’s powerful deterrent has collapsed, and Syria is now aligned with Israel under the table (Syria’s new ruler, Ahmad Sharaa told a Zionist interviewer that he shares enemies with Israel).  

Gulf countries have all issued condemnations of the Israeli attack on Iran, while likely sending private congratulatory messages to Israel.  

The entire region may fall under Israeli dictates and the hope of a Palestinian settlement is no longer part of the foreign policy  of any Western or even Arab government.

(A conference about a “two-state solution” being organized by France and Saudi Arabia, which has been postponed, is a mere show intended to project Saudi interest in helping the Palestinians. It could also pave the way for Saudi normalization with Israel.)  

I cannot think of a time when the region has changed as thoroughly and quickly since 1948 when the creation of Israel atop an existing Palestinian homeland shook the entire Arab region. 

Israel enjoys tremendous military and intelligence superiority vis-à-vis all Arab states and Iran thanks to continued U.S. and Western support. But Israel’s standing has sunk around the world —  even in Western countries whose governments merely follow U.S. dictates on foreign policy.  Israel would not have been able to carry out its war of genocide in Gaza without generous Western military support.  

But Iran is a proud nation. After Israel’s attack, some Iranians went to the streets of Tehran demanding the acquisition and deployment of nuclear weapons.

It did not take long for the U.S. to restore the shah to power in 1953, against the wishes of his people, but the reverberations from that operation lasted for decades and poisoned U.S.-Iranian relations.  

Israel is no longer trying to be accepted in the region.  It merely wants to impose its will through intimidation and murder. That was the same intention of past invaders whose only presence now lies in archeological ruins scattered around the region.

Joe Lauria contributed to this report.

As`ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New War on Terrorism (2002), The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004) and ran the popular The Angry Arab blog. He tweets as @asadabukhalil

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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