The price of permanent enmity is what the Shia-majority Iran will have to live with in a region dominated by Sunni Muslims. But this is what the regime of theocrats, who are hardly in control of their protector in the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps, has had to risk because it can hit back at the US more directly
The Iran war is not a world war but the world is paying the price for it as oil prices soar, trade routes lie distorted and travel has been thrown out of kilter. When the war ends would depend on who can call it off. Not the US President Donald Trump who is so deep into it now and is being prodded by Gulf states to step up operations and emasculate Iran’s military prowess so that it cannot pose a threat in the future.
Iran pleading for an end to the war seems distant because it sees this attack by USA and Israel as an existential threat and has the ideological urge to keep fighting. That all’s fair in war is a given, but how logical is it even in military and strategic terms that Iran should lob ten times the number of missiles at the Arab nations in the Gulf as it has aimed at Israel itself?
The price of permanent enmity is what the Shia-majority Iran will have to live with in a region dominated by Sunni Muslims. But this is what the regime of theocrats, who are hardly in control of their protector in the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps, has had to risk because it can hit back at the US more directly.
It would stand to reason that air power alone will not deliver the political objectives of a true regime change or revolution in a country like Iran that thinks nothing of killing its own as it has in hundreds of thousands over five decades to suppress revolt, dissension, and even criticism of a brutal rule.
Having got the war that it always wanted to wage against its sworn enemy with an ambition to build nuclear bombs, Israel is not in a mood to stop now though all it can do is to take aim at the leadership with intelligence inputs as it always has and continue the missile and drone war.
The Gulf nations did not expect Iran to cross every red line with them but now are stuck with more deadly expectations from the war as their image of safety and security so carefully built over decades has been compromised.
Such is the irony of war that Russia, the invader of Ukraine, is posing as an interlocutor but even that country must now view the Iran war as a bonus as it is able to sell its oil at inflated prices as the US has done away with sanctions to take some heat off boiling energy markets.
