Iran-Israel Situation Report: Day Seven
Continuing Escalation and the Possibility of American Intervention
An explosion in Tehran. Source: NPR
On the morning of Friday, June 13, the Israeli military launched Operation: Strength of Lion. Teams of Israeli commandos, already embedded deep within Iranian territory, opened fire on Iranian anti-air missile sites with ATGMs as subsequent airstrikes neutralized Iran’s air defense network. A subsequent salvo of Israeli missiles struck military targets across Iran, including several linked to the country’s covert nuclear weapons program. Additional strikes eliminated senior members of Iran’s military leadership and the remnants of its air defense systems. Within 48 hours, Israel had established effective control over Iranian airspace. The Israeli government has declared this campaign will last “as many days as it takes,” with the stated goal of fully dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Secondary targets appear to include the destruction of the IRGC’s senior command.
Following the initial shock, Iran launched a counteroffensive. Waves of loitering munitions and ballistic missiles initially failed to breach Israeli defenses, but by Sunday, June 15, Iranian projectiles began striking strategic targets in cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa. Analysis of the models of ballistic missiles used by Iran suggests that Tehran may have used older, slower munitions to expose and deplete Israel’s air defense systems before shifting to more advanced weaponry. The pattern mirrors Russia’s strategy in its ongoing attacks on Kyiv. Civilian infrastructure has been a clear focus, perhaps intended to pressure Israeli public opinion against prolonged war. As of June 20, there is no sign of de-escalation.
This war didn’t erupt in a vacuum. The Israeli strikes are not just a reaction to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but a deeper crisis of confidence in the United States under the Trump administration. With Iranian proxy networks across Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza degraded by prior Israeli strikes, and American negotiations with Iran ongoing, Israel’s leadership appears to have calculated that neither American diplomacy nor deterrence would prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. The perception that the Trump administration lacks a coherent regional strategy or the resolve to back its allies may have compelled Israel to act unilaterally.
Now the United States is on the brink of intervention. President Trump has been ambiguous in his public statements, but the repositioning of a third carrier group to the region is telling. Washington may be preparing to join Israel’s campaign, perhaps to help maintain air dominance, intercept incoming missiles, or directly target Iranian infrastructure. Yet, the administration has made no case to Congress, nor the American people, about why this fight is ours. Congress has a constitutional role in authorizing war and this moment demands transparency and deliberation, not executive ambiguity.
Any American involvement, particularly the use of advanced bunker-busting munitions that only the U.S. possesses, carries immense complexity and consequence. This raises urgent questions about our objectives. Are we simply supporting Israeli operations? Are we attempting to deter Iranian escalation? Or are we now co-owners of a campaign to dismantle Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities? These are not academic questions; they are matters of war and peace, and history offers sharp lessons. The Gulf War showed the effectiveness of a limited, goal-oriented air campaign. But the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror demonstrated the perils of short-sighted regime change and open-ended warfare.
If the objective is to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, Trump must define what that means. Is success measured by destroyed facilities and dead scientists? A change in Iranian policy? A negotiated surrender? Without clear metrics, we risk sliding into yet another quagmire with no defined exit and no shared understanding between allies. The American people deserve more than secrecy and drift. They deserve a strategy and they deserve a choice.
I can not but wonder just how much of this grandstanding by Trump is related to his economic conflict with China. Being of simple historically ill informed mind, perhaps he sees shutting down Iranian oil exports to China, which would be an immediate consequence of any US conflict against Iran, as a proxy pressure point. His China tariffs have not delivered automatic submission by Xi the way he thought they would.
I have been inevitably taken back to the first time that we decided that it was unacceptable for another nation to have nuclear weapons - Cuba in 1962 - the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war. I was seventeen at the time, and I can still remember all too clearly the terror with which I waited for resolution or Armageddon. The end result was a worldwide upsurge in anti-nuclear protests resulting in the SALT talks and all the rest of that. But we’re long past that time of relative sanity, and the swords are being rattled all around us.
Then, of course. it was a Democratic administration full of men who had fought in WWII in that other time before nuclear weaponry. President Kennedy’s very sober and utterly unTrumplike speech announcing the situation to the nation and the world was, nonetheless, not unlike what Trump and his myrmidons are proclaiming now. "Get rid of the weapons or else”.
Then, too, there was a history of opposition to the Castro regime, including attempts to assassinate him at the behest of Bobby Kennedy as well as to topple his administration (the Bay of Pigs fiasco planned by the Eisenhower administration but carried out under Kennedy’s aegis) in spite of the fact that for a time during his early uprising Castro had been seen as a revolutionary hero overthrowing a corrupt and dictatorial regime.
Failing to learn that lesson, the Kennedy administration and its Johnsonian successor got us into the first of our futile ‘forever’ wars, still the most costly and divisive of all our military adventurism. Besides that catastrophe, Iraq and Afghanistan pale in cost. And our pullout from Vietnam was a far more costly, messy, and humiliating experience than Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan, despite all the Republican rhetoric.
My point here is that neither Republicans nor Democrats have any legs to stand on when it comes to foreign folly. The fact that on the face of it, the Kennedy administration was packed with far more thoughtful, competent, and experienced people than Trump’s collection of lickspittles does not excuse their failure to recognize exactly what they were getting us into or to prolong it through deception and lies. .
I’m nowhere near wise enough to know exactly what we ought to do in regard to Israel and Iran. In point of fact, the Middle East is and always has been a cockpit of conflict, going back to the dawn of civilization when organized warfare itself was born in the hot wastes between the Tigris and Euphrates. Sometimes in my fantasy world, we expand Israel’s Iron Dome over the whole area, leaving the whole mob trapped under it to either destroy themselves at will or learn to get along without involving and endangering the rest of us.
But in more sober moments my greatest concern is that whatever we do now, we do so with a firm understanding that once the dogs of war are loosed, the consequences cannot be calculated with any degree of certainty except they will almost certainly exceed whatever estimate which may have been made during the initial phase. This was the wisdom of the Biden administration in regard to Ukraine. It was crucial to attempt to contain Putin’s imperial ambitions for the sake of all Europe and the US, but not to trigger a wider conflict (or god help us, a nuclear war) if at all possible. As the Canadian war historian Gwynne Dyer once put it, “There’s nothing in the world worth blowing it up for”
Not that I have any confidence at all in Trump and his myrmidons. It is hard to imagine that there could be a more incompetent bunch in control at this fraught period.
I’m just over 80, and at times it seems that I’ve lived my whole life in the midst of one political storm or another. I’m also a plank owner in the first human generation to live under the threat of mushroom clouds. There were not a few times during the height of the Cold War when I was convinced I wouldn't survive my teens. Clearly I did so, and that thought gives me some hope that we are still at least wise enough to avoid ending the world over “some damn fool thing in the Balkans' or the Middle East or the Ukraine of the Straits of Taiwan (speaking of echoes, anyone out there old enough remember how much rhetoric was spend on Quemoy and Matsu. during the 1960 campaign) or anywhere else.
But my god, for a species with the hubris to name itself Homo sapiens, we have sure proven our selves to be anything but.