Israeli missile strikes against Teheran and Iran’s counter offensive entered its fifth day on June 17 Tuesday with U.S. President Donald Trump dramatically cutting short his stay in Canada for G-7 meeting for Washington indicating that he would be busy in peace moves in the next few hours for organizing a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. French President Emanuel Macron also informed at the summit venue that Iran sought Trump’s assistance for ending the war.
If we look at the chronology of the developments since the early morning of June 13, we will see that the entire course from the beginning of the sudden Israeli strikes to the dramatic exit of Trump from G-7 meeting, was a part of a stage managed event prepared by Trump-Netanyahu duo to achieve the Trump objective of Iran coming to the next round of US-Iran nuclear talks with bended knees with virtually little bargaining power. Trump wants to emerge as a peace maker by bringing victorious Netanyahu and shattered Iranian leaders in the negotiating table.
The sixth round of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme was scheduled for June 15, Sunday in Oman. Trump wanted to precipitate the deal on his own terms, but he did not get positive signal. The Iranians with their nuclear programme monitored by some top scientists, were not in a mood to surrender to the US President’s diktat. They were getting ready for hard bargaining which Trump could not tolerate. The missile strikes by Israel began two days before the scheduled meeting. In the last four days, the nuclear facilities have been damaged in a serious manner, nine top scientists have been killed. With Israel guaranteeing high tech protection to Tel Aviv’s air defences, the Iranian missiles could not damage much. It was an uneven war between Israel and Iran in terms of missile quality and technology.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was candid when he said that the Israeli objective was to eliminate any Iranian threat to Israel. He even gave a call to Iranians to rise in revolt. In fact, the Israeli defence forces are still targeting Iran’s supreme head Ali Khamenei who has been shifted to a secret shelter by the Iranian authorities fearing attack on him. Trump himself said that Israel had a plan to kill Khamenei, but he rebuffed that. This was a way of making it clear that he was not involved if by any chance the Iranian supreme leader got killed.
Interestingly, Israel gave advance information to the US President after attack, after that only Trump said that it was Israel’s war against Iran, the US had nothing to do with it. Days before, the US government warned its citizens in Israel and asked the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem embassies to be careful in the next few days and look for shelters.
An analysis by Zaineb Riduoa for the Washington-based Hudson Institute says that , Israel prepared for its June 13 operation over years of sustained intelligence preparation, real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and deep infiltration. Israeli military planners achieved full-spectrum disruption by dismantling and infiltrating Iran’s command and control networks, severing high-level communications, and injecting uncertainty into the regime’s decision-making processes.
As our IPA analyst Asad Mirza mentioned in his piece on June 16, by the time Tehran could react, the damage was already done. Its upper command was wiped out, and its defensive systems were disabled. Crucially, Israel did not rely on cross-border operations. It had pre-positioned remote-activated strike platforms inside Iran and deployed them with surgical precision. This shows its preparations and depth of its infiltration of the Iranian security apparatus.
Israel combined a decapitation strike with cognitive disruption. The psychological warfare element – that the strike had come from Iranian soil – amplified the attack’s kinetic effects, leaving Tehran paralysed. Unable to determine whether it had been infiltrated or outmanoeuvred, the regime’s ability to respond took time to recover and initiate countermeasures. But these were inadequate to penetrate the highly sophisticated air defence system to protect Tel Aviv.
In the last 48 hours, there have been intensive discussions about the possible US role in Israeli attacks. In US media, the right wing channels and podcasts have been showing how the Israeli defence forces have shattered the defence system of Iran and how Teheran has got isolated. Among the conservative whites, there is a sort of pleasure at the humiliation of a Muslim nation. Experts mention that the Trump-Netanyahu duo are planning for a regime change though officially, the US state secretary Marco Rubio has ruled that out. The leaders at G-7 however in a signed statement supported Israel’s right to self defence and put the blame on Iran for bringing instability in Middle East.
The G-7 leaders ruled out regime change as a solution in Iran but their identification with Israeli attack against Iran calling it right of self defence, makes it apparent that despite some high sounding liberal sentiments occasionally, they will go with Trump on Iran. Trump earlier wrote a post in his media platform saying that he had given Iran many chances to reach a nuclear deal with USA’ He even said that he warned Iranian leadership that they are facing an attack that’s much worse than anything they could imagine. What more is needed to prove that Trump and Netanyahu was in collusion? (IPA Service)
