Iran faces massive destruction as Israel uses 'Gaza playbook'

There are plenty of reasons to believe both the United States and Israel expected - not just hoped, but expected - the Islamic regime in Iran to collapse once the top political and military leadership, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were assassinated. President Donald Trump announced the start of the war with an explicit call to the Iranian people to rise and seize control of the country. 

Nearly a week of bombings later, the prospect of swift "regime change" looks as distant as it did last June when Israel and Iran engaged in a 12-day war of long-range bombardment. 

Recognising the failure of the "decapitation strike" to disable the government in Tehran, the US has come up with different goals for the war. Or perhaps, what the President, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have said this week were the "real" reason for attacking Iran. 

Boastful Hegseth

What the top US leaders said while talking to the media this week was straightforward: the US aims to destroy Iran's ability to manufacture weapons that can threaten Israel, i.e. ballistic missiles and attack drones, and deprive Tehran of the ability with which to control the waterways by destroying its Navy. 

Following on from that, the US has announced a massive bombing campaign targeted at missile storage sites as well as suspected production facilities. It is also ramping up attacks on Iranian vessels in the Gulf. Yesterday (4 March), the US even announced the sinking of an Iranian Navy ship in the Indian Ocean, near Sri Lanka. 

In an extraordinary press conference at the Pentagon on Wednesday (4 March), Hegseth was extremely belligerent and boastful. "America is winning, decisively, devastatingly and without mercy," he declared. If words alone could force an enemy to capitulate, Hegseth used them all in one speech. 

Iran has been heavily sanctioned for decades, which has hampered its ability to acquire or build an effective air defence system, leaving it vulnerable, even in the best of times, to air attacks by Israel and now the US. But an Iran without its missile arsenal would be powerless to inflict any cost on Israel, thus leaving Tehran at the mercy of its enemies. 

There would be no deterrence, and Iran would have little choice but to comply with US-dictated terms for a ceasefire and longer-term peace.

The US has already declared control of Iranian airspace, and operation by strategic bombers such as the B-52, B-1 and B-2 over Iran. Hegseth further boasted that Iranian leaders would only see US and Israeli planes in their sky, bringing down "death and destruction." 

Israel's Gaza playbook

The US bombing campaign to cripple Iran's ability to defend itself is one aspect of the current war. The second aspect, which Israel is apparently carrying out, aims for social and administrative collapse. 

Israel is reportedly targeting police stations and other internal security-related infrastructure in Tehran and other cities. They have also been reported to have struck hospitals, schools and swathes of civilian areas. 

The destruction of police stations would make it difficult for the government to maintain internal security as well as social stability. The attacks on hospitals come straight out of Israel's Gaza playbook, designed to multiply the pain and suffering. The destruction of civilian homes would be expected to devastate morale and turn the people against their government. 

The result of such a campaign is already becoming visible - in four days, over one thousand civilians have been killed in the US-Israeli bombings, including 156 school children who were killed in the bombing of a girls' primary school in the southern city of Minab on the very first day of the war. 

Triggering a social collapse through the destruction of internal security and social infrastructure could lead to the original goal of regime change. But it would take longer than the "quick fix" expected from the initial decapitation strike.

Israel appears to be treating Tehran in the same manner it treated the Gaza Strip, and warning of killing new leaders in Iran in the same way it killed successive leaders of Hamas. But there are reasons to believe the Gaza playbook may not work in Iran, even with all-out US support. 

Challenge for the leadership

For a start, Tehran is more than twice the size of the whole Gaza Strip, and its population is four times bigger. Its the capital of a massive country with a population of 90 million. Supporters of the Islamic Revolution are spread around Iran, and provinces and cities have their own civil and security infrastructures. 

The idea that destruction of social and security infrastructure in the capital would bring the regime to its knees is not only a long shot, but it may also be just too fanciful. 

A lot would depend on the resilience of the Iranian leadership, the morale of the police, civil defence and the general population, and the ability of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to remain effective. 

The leadership has the emotionally and logistically difficult task of conducting the funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei and ensuring the election of his successor by the Assembly of Experts. While the funeral can be postponed indefinitely, the election of the successor cannot. 

Escalation in the Gulf

While Iran has been unable to prevent the bombs and missiles hitting targets across the country, it has clearly decided to treat this war, unlike the one last June, as an "existential threat" and escalated the conflict rapidly. 

It is not clear whether the US and their allies in the Gulf expected Iran to retaliate so quickly and, more importantly, escalate the conflict in the region itself. Iran's swift attacks on US bases and other facilities in the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq appeared to shock the region and forced the US to evacuate many facilities, including embassies. 

It is clear that Iran has decided escalation - and making the war a regional as well as a global headache - is their best option. It does not have the capacity to defend itself against a joint US-Israeli air onslaught; its ability to punish Israel will remain limited, especially as the US and Israel are actively searching for and attacking missile launch sites and launch vehicles across Iran. 

In such a backdrop, Tehran has apparently calculated that increasing the economic cost to the Gulf countries and the world as a whole offers the best chance of a ceasefire without capitulation. It is undoubtedly a gamble, and it remains to be seen whether the gamble will pay off.

Threat of disintegration

In addition to the US-Israeli destruction of defence capabilities and social infrastructure, there is a third threat hanging over Iran: the threat of disintegration known as "Balkanisation." 

The term comes from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century and the emergence of smaller nations in the Balkan region, which coalesced into one country, Yugoslavia, only to break up into six nations in the 1990s.

In Iran's case, similar disintegration remains a possibility, though a remote one. There are forces in the region and beyond which have been working diligently for years to foment ethnic revolt against Persian rule. The current war provides these forces another window of opportunity to push this particular agenda. 

Iran's vulnerability here lies along its borders. The Persian population - comprising around 60 per cent - is concentrated in the largest area of the country, in the centre and the east, along the Gulf. But there are significant ethnic groups along its eastern, northern and southern land boundaries. 

Azeris and other Turkic people are concentrated along the border of Azerbaijan, which is a close ally of Israel and Türkiye. Iran's Kurdish region borders autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan on the other side. The administration in Iraqi Kurdistan is also known to be close to Israel and the US. 

Further south along the Iran-Iraq border lies Khuzestan province with a substantial Arab population, while in the south, Iranian Baluchistan already has an active insurgency. 

Whether the ethnic insurgencies receive substantial aid from across the borders or not, the bigger picture does not bode well for Iran. The punishment meted out by the relentless and destructive attacks by the combined might of the US and Israelis has already been severe. 

In the coming days, the punishment for Iran is likely to get worse, as US and Israeli planes operate freely in Iranian airspace and hit targets with GPS-guided precision munitions. 

The big question is, for how long can Iran's leadership absorb such blows, while its own ability to deliver counter punches diminishes by the day? 

The writer is a former head of BBC Bangla and former Managing Editor, VOA Bangla.