A war that cannot be won: Israel and US bomb Iran

Vijay Prashad

Having just formed the ‘Board of Peace’, the United States and Israel have begun the board’s first war, this time on Iran.

The US-Israel attack launched early on 28 February, on sites in Iran has already caused devastation, including the deaths of at least 60 little girls from an elementary school in Minab in Hormozgan province, and dozens of others across the country. The latest estimates put the death toll at 201.

In fact, the 28 February attack on Iran was not the first strike on Iran. Israel and the US have been in a state of war against Iran for decades, either through direct military strikes (as recently as June 2025) or through the long hybrid war imposed on Iran (including punitive US sanctions that began in 1996).

Neither Israel nor the US value the United Nations Charter, whose Article 2 has been routinely violated by both (neither face condemnation in the UN Security Council, which affects the reputation of the Charter).

For decades now, the US and its Global North allies have demonised Iran, treating its politics as terrorism and its government as dictatorial. They have essentially created the argument that attempts to overthrow the government in Tehran are legitimate even if they are a violation of the UN Charter.

However, US President Donald Trump does not have the appetite for a long war. He has a short attention span and seeks quick victories that can quickly give him a headline for the news cycle, like the kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro on 3 January, and the executive order to prevent the sale of oil to Cuba on 30 January.

Trump hoped for a similar outcome: the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or the President, Masoud Pezeshkian. Reports have confirmed that Iran’s supreme leader was in fact killed in the Israeli-US attack.

However, despite Trump’s call for regime change, so far there has been no change in political leaders. The Israeli-US strike in June 2025 did not destroy Iran’s nuclear energy project, nor did the strike in February 2026 destroy Iran’s political system.

History of unilateral strikes on Iran

The current Israeli-US military campaign against Iran began in January 2020, when the US States assassinated Gen Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq.

Gen Soleimani was the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the architect of the “axis of resistance”, which was the first circle of defence for Iran: the idea that if the US or Israel tried to strike Iran, then Iran’s close allies from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Ansar Allah in Yemen would strike both Israel and the US military bases.

The killing of Soleimani was a blow to the axis, but three years later, a set of events disrupted the axis that he had designed. Israel’s genocide against Palestine weakened Hamas. Its war in Lebanon disrupted Hezbollah, especially the assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024, And the installation of the former al-Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa as President of Syria in January 2025 led to the removal of all pro-Palestinian groups from the country.

Having relatively broken this first circle of defence, Israel and the US struck Iran in June 2025 with some Iranian retaliation, but nothing like it would have been had Hezbollah and the factions in Syria been able to strike Israel.

After the June 2025 strike on Iran’s nuclear energy facilities, Israel and the US said that it had destroyed Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons.

If this was the case, then why didn’t the US make a deal with Iran and withdraw sanctions? After all, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian came to power in 2024 with a ‘reform’ agenda, formed a cabinet that included a neoliberal finance minister, Ali Madanizadeh, and therefore showed he was willing to be concessionary to Western-controlled institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

However, in response to the US-Israeli strikes in June 2025, Iran ended its inspection agreements that it had made with the IAEA. The IMF noted the weak outlook for Iran but saw that this was largely due to US-imposed sanctions and – from its perspective – the subsidy regime in Iran.

Madanizadeh placated the IMF by pushing an austerity budget. This created the social distress that was inflamed when the US intervened to disrupt the Iranian rial and deepen the economic crisis in the country.

Sections of the bazaaris or the small traders in Iran, the base of the Islamic Republic, who felt the blunt of the inflation turned against the government but not necessarily against the system itself.

The US and Israel, as well as the foreign media, deliberately misread the situation, proclaiming erroneously that the people of Iran are against their republic.

Despite the attempt by Pezeshkian’s government to meet the US on its terms, the US and Israel pushed for an unrealistic maximalist end game, namely the overthrow of the Islamic republic.

Nuclear programme or regime change?

That maximalist end game was driven by the US-Israeli demand that Iran end an illusionary nuclear weapons programme.

Iran has, for decades, said it is not interested in nuclear weapons, and Pezeshkian’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi repeatedly has said that Iran will never develop such weapons.

Iran has said it is willing to discuss the issue of its nuclear programme, but that it will not put the reality of the Islamic republic on the table (or the actuality of the December 1979 Iranian Constitution).

Hours before the February 2026 attack, negotiations between Iran and the US had come close to an agreement. Oman’s Foreign Minister, Sayyid Badr Hamad al-Busaidi, said that a “peace deal is within our reach” and that Iran agreed to zero stockpiling. In other words, Iran had been ready to accept most of the demands being imposed upon it against its nuclear energy programme.

That the US-Israel attacked in this context shows that Iran’s nuclear project is not the real issue for Washington and Tel Aviv. They are committed to regime change.

If the US-Israeli war is a war for regime change then it is a war that cannot be won without enormous loss of human life. There are nearly 100 million people in Iran, a large section of whom will defend their republic till their death.

A few days after the US kidnapped Maduro, Khamenei went to the shrine of his predecessor Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1900–89). It is interesting that Khamenei is now 89 years old, the same age as Khomeini when he died. It was almost as if he went to see his old friend and mentor to take courage from him.

An assassination of Khamenei [which has now materialised] will not demoralise the supporters of the Islamic republic but will instead lift him into the sphere of martyrdom and strengthen their resolve.

With Iran, the US and Israel have no realistic strategy to win. They might kill large numbers of people. But they cannot break the will of Iranian patriotism. – Globetrotter 

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of 40 books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

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