What the Americans and Israelis are attacking in Iran and how they are going about it.
The United States and Israel, on Saturday, unleashed a massive air bombardment campaign against Iran, primarily targeting Iran’s national leadership and major Iranian war-making capacity.
Some of the strikes sought to kill top-level Iranian officials, most others attempted to smash major Iranian weapons like warships, weapons stores and long-range missile launchers. The overall allied objective was to smash the Iranian capacity to resist militarily. An immediate, shorter-term objective was to establish total air dominance over Iran so that it would be easier for more massed strikes to hit whatever was still in one piece in later attacks, so that all resistance might be quickly crushed.
Cruise missile, ballistic missile, bomb, and rocket strikes delivered by hundreds of aircraft and launchers hit all over Iran, without a declaration of war, almost simultaneously. New, theoretically unstoppable weapons were deployed as part of a planned overwhelming attack, like bombs designed to penetrate hundreds of meters into underground bunkers, anti-missile lasers, the latest version of US Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) (a very accurate ballistic missile), and Israel’s Black Sparrow munition (a very accurate hypersonic missile dropped from a bomber).
Parallel with the planned overwhelming military assault, US and Israeli strategists are promoting and arming political players in the targeted country, Iran, that might become new centers of power and help bring down the old regime. Most prominent is Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah of Iran, who has lived in exile in Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico and the United States following the 1979 revolution that threw his father, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, out of power.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 28, 2022, the military objective was to crush and destroy the Ukrainian ability to resist in a few days, by combining purportedly overwhelming military force with a regime change operation aiming to decapitate the Ukrainian national military leadership by assassinating or capturing as many of them as possible. Using a tactic dating back to the pre-WW2 years, the Kremlin accumulated major forces in a neutral country, Belarus, and then launched giant tank columns and air strikes from Belarusian territory. In Ukraine’s east, some local officials agreed to turn coat and welcome invading Russian forces, and some Ukrainian senior officers, once the invasion started, refused to order their troops to defend their ground and later defected to Russian territory.
Per the Kremlin invasion plan, once Ukrainian resistance collapsed, the Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych, a felon elected Ukraine’s President in 2012 and forced to flee to Russia by anti-corruption protests in 2014, would return to power in Kyiv and lead a Ukraine friendly to Russia. He has been in exile in Rostov, Russia.
How the Americans and the Israelis used diplomacy to mask their plans for military attack and to weaken, they hope, their adversaries.
The United States and Iran restarted talks on the potential of Iran’s nuclear program in early February, and those talks continued through the month. The last round of talks was scheduled for Feb. 26, in Geneva, and participants on both sides, following those talks, told media there had been “significant progress” or “good progress” in those exchanges, and announced plans for technical-level follow-up talks in Vienna the following week. At the same time, the US commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump, told the media he preferred getting a deal on Iran’s nuclear program peacefully, saying in his State of the Union address on Feb. 25: “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy. But one thing is certain: I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon.”
In Russia’s run-up to the invasion of Ukraine, almost exactly four years previously, senior Russian officials and Russian state-controlled media repeatedly denied plans to launch a major war in Ukraine. Among the best-known Kremlin players claiming peaceful intent shortly before launching an invasion include Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (Jan. 28, 2022 – “If it depends on the Russian Federation, there will be no war. We do not want wars.”), Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov (Feb. 17, 2022: “Russia will not attack, strike, invade, quote unquote, whatever Ukraine…”), and Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson (Feb. 9, 2022: “We don’t have these aggressive plans... It’s absurd to say Russia nurtured any aggressive plans about Ukraine.”
Along with the massed Israeli and US air strikes, “foreign” support has appeared in the hands of Kurdish groups in northwestern Iran who, per recent news reports, have decided the present is the right time to rise against the regime in Tehran.
When Russia invaded Ukraine’s east in February 2022, state-controlled media spun the Russian armored columns as “liberators” and profiled local officials and citizens purportedly opposing the regime in Kyiv and wanting independence. Units armed with Russian weapons raised locally in Russo-occupied Ukrainian territory were shown fighting on the Russian side and called “Russian patriots” in those reports.
The American justification for sending its naval and air forces to bomb and missile hundreds of targets in Iran, including Iranian government officials, wasn’t so clear at the outset.
White House officials in the first 72 hours of combat operations against Iran named a surprisingly wide range of reasons the US military was ordered to attack: (1) a compelling US national security need to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons soon (2) Iranian intransigence at nuclear limitations talks forcing the US to start a war so that Iran might negotiate seriously (3) support to democracy and freedom for the Iranian people (4) the need to attack Iran at the same time Israel attacked Iran, because the alternative was Israel starting a war with Iran on its own (5) retaliation against Iran for its purported support to terrorist networks (6) a need to destroy Iran’s ballistic/space missile program to protect US allies and US bases in the Middle Eat from Iranian attack (7) asserting US geo-political might to demonstrate that the Trump regime is willing to use military force, in contrast with allegedly weaker administrations that preceded it.Kremlin casus belli as expressed at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine were similarly richly varied. Per Moscow rhetoric at the time, the elected Ukrainian national government needed to be eliminated and replaced with a leadership not hostile to Moscow, for the sake of regional stability and security.
Ukraine, moreover, needed to guarantee it would not ally itself with countries potentially hostile to Moscow, because Russia could not accept that potential threat. Repressions of Russian-speakers in Ukraine were, Russia alleged, in progress, and those purported repressions (there weren’t any, actually) needed to be stopped for the sake of humanity. But the top Russian war justification was that the Ukrainian military needed to be emasculated of most heavy weapons, reduced in size and its officer corps be purged of service members antagonistic to Moscow in a “denazification” process – because if that didn’t happen Ukraine (population 36 million, no nukes) might attack Russia (population 143 million, world’s biggest nuclear arsenal).
A common background reason given by Russian media to voters for the Russo-Ukraine War was that Russia is a naturally strong, assertive country and the natural state of a weak country like Ukraine is to be controlled by Russia. Some Kremlin outlets argue that’s what the Ukrainians really want.
The Americans are saying it will be clinical, it will be quick, and that they know what victory looks like.
Although there has been some inconsistent messaging by White House officials about why the US went to war with Iran in the first place, the narrative to the US public about the probable length of hostilities is already remarkably specific – more than four weeks, probably around six weeks, but certainly not months or years.
By the third day of the war, US officials were fairly consistently describing what victory would look like: That would be Washington determined Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons, to build weapons capable of attacking its neighbors at long range, and its capacity to support “terrorism” in the Middle East would be destroyed. In practical terms, this would mean the elimination of the present Iranian military along with most Iranian military production capacity, and an Iranian national government unwilling to challenge Israel or the US militarily or cooperate with regimes hostile to Israel and the US, like North Korea.
Russian state media at the outset of the war widely predicted Ukrainian collapse and surrender on Moscow’s terms, within one to two weeks of fighting. News of defeats of Russian tank columns and Russian assaults stalling against prepared Ukrainian defenses was suppressed, and sometimes inexplicable Russian army activity – at one point, attacking forces north of Kyiv were stuck in a 40-kilometer (25-mile) traffic jam because the Ukrainians had opened dikes and flooded the landscape – was spun as sophisticated Russian military tactics that would soon deliver victory. The Russian public would not have to wait long because the Ukrainian national leadership was unpopular and resistance to Russian invasion would shortly collapse, Russian state media reported at the time.
For the next two years, Kremlin spokesmen argued the war was always going well, because although more slowly than planned, Russian forces were always advancing, but by mid-2025, even state-controlled media in Russia had backed off on the narrative that everything was going to plan, and had begun openly reporting the invasion of Ukraine hadn’t gone as planned. However, even in March 2026, the official Russian position is that victory is inevitable and Ukrainian resistance will soon collapse.
What’s different between the US/Israel-Iran War and the Russo-Ukraine War?
At least in its initial phases the US/Israeli “decapitation” plan worked; air strikes killed Iran’s national leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other precision attacks appear also to have killed the Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, the Secretary of Iran’s National Security Council and at least 40 more high-ranking military/political leaders.
The US/Israeli operation to crush Iranian air defenses appears likely also to have succeeded, with the Iranian air force largely unable to take to the skies, most air bases in Iran hit and damaged, along with much of the Iranian military’s air defense radars and anti-aircraft missile launchers. Most of the major warships in the Iranian navy were sunk, hollowing out Iranian threats to close the Straits of Hormuz.
The Russian shock and awe plan for Ukraine failed. The Russian Air Force proved unable to dominate Ukraine’s skies against strong air defenses, losing five-to-10 aircraft in the first day of operations, including loaded troop transports. A massive air assault operation to take over a major airport north of Kyiv, so that reinforcements might be flown in to take over the capital, failed when helicopters carrying Russian paratroopers flew into anti-aircraft missile ambushes. The survivors were then attacked by Ukrainian artillery and special forces troops stationed at the airport. A column of Russian spetsnaz commandos tasked with driving to the center of Kyiv to murder Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a lightning operation came first under fire by armed civilians, then police, then Ukrainian army units, who hunted down and shot dead most members of the assassination group in a firefight near the Kyiv city zoo.