The US-Israeli strategy failed to defeat Iran quickly – now they are moving to plan B | Paul Rogers | The Guardian
From the start, this is a war that has not gone according to plan. The idea was to assassinate the supreme leader and as many of the religious and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leadership as possible, in order to damage the power of the state so the theocracy would collapse. That failed miserably, as one US intelligence assessment had predicted. The regime has a new leader and there will no doubt be one or more “reserves” already selected in case Mojtaba Khamenei is assassinated.
The other element – much more significant – is concentrating more on Israel’s traditional approach in such circumstances: destroying an enemy’s domestic support. This is the Dahiya doctrine: if an insurgency cannot be ended or the leadership of a state cannot be subdued, the route to victory lies with the relentless punishing of the civilian population.
It is being used in Lebanon, as Israel’s destruction of Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiya gets under way, the suburb having given its name to the doctrine back in the 2006 war against Hezbollah.
Critics point out that the doctrine has been used on a huge scale against Hamas in Gaza over the past 30 months. That resulted in at least 70,000 Palestinians being killed, an even greater number wounded and most of the territory reduced to ruins. Yet Hamas survives, and parts of Gaza are still under its control.
Despite this, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the US air force are now applying the doctrine to the war on Iran, with mounting evidence of attacks on infrastructure. The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, warned on Tuesday that it “will be our most intense day of strikes inside Iran”, and “Iran stands alone, and they are badly losing on day 10 of Operation Epic Fury”.