As the clock ticks away toward US President Donald Trump’s latest “negotiate or I unleash hell” deadline, the Iranian regime thinks that it’s winning.
In the West, the serried ranks of “experts” also think that America and Israel are heading either for a deepening quagmire or a humiliating retreat. It’s not possible to predict how the war against Iran will end — or even what the next day will bring.
But on the face of it, Tehran’s claim that it has the upper hand — echoed by Western commentators who said before the war even started that it would be a disaster, have kept saying that it is a disaster and predict that it will undoubtedly end in disaster — is demonstrably absurd.
On every available metric of war, the regime is clearly losing.
Its air defenses are all but obliterated, its navy is largely sunk, its stocks of missiles and launchers have been decimated, its senior ranks are being progressively eliminated, and its nuclear programme has been further damaged.
In these respects, the United States and Israel have had so far a spectacularly successful war.
Yet despite all this, not only is the regime not yet defeated but it still presents fearsome challenges. It has turned the Strait of Hormuz into a lethal weapon by choking off most of its normal shipping channels. Israel and the United Arab Emirates are still being bombarded by missiles every day, causing damage, injury and death.
Washington is reportedly chewing over the likely costs to its own forces if it tries to seize Kharg Island to gain control over Iran’s oil production or free the Straits of Hormuz. Trump is likely weighing up the damage to his own political future from a domestically unpopular war that may start drawing American blood.
The stakes are enormous. If the Iranian regime isn’t totally defanged but survives to recover and re-arm, it will not only continue to menace the region. Such an outcome will also advertise that the leader of the free world is a paper tiger.
That will hugely embolden China, Russia and North Korea. Israeli defence expert professor Dan Schueftan says that if America doesn’t prevail in this war, it will be the beginning of the end for the West.
“These processes don’t happen overnight,” he told the Israeli commentator Haviv Rettig Gur. “But if the United States is incapable of dealing with the Iranian challenge, the ability of the Chinese to change the world order will be much stronger than before.”
So why can’t the West see this? Why do so many Americans and Brits view Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as their greatest threat rather than Iran, the world’s No. 1 terrorist state, exporter of violence and cultural destabilisation to the West, and crucial hinge of the world’s axis of evil powers?
Partly, this is because the Trump administration has never properly made the case for war to the American public, while governments in Britain and Europe are actively hostile.
Partly it’s because of the belief that whenever the West ventures into the Middle East cauldron, the outcome is disastrous.
While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended in a debacle, however, the obdurate refusal by the West to take commensurate action against Iran has resulted in a conflict that is now infinitely more difficult and damaging than it would otherwise have been had the threat from Tehran been countered earlier.
Richard Williams, a former commander of Britain’s SAS commando force in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote in Britain’s Mail that he witnessed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps up close as they and Iranian proxies killed hundreds of British and American soldiers.
Saying that this gave him an understanding of the “utter evil that is the Iranian regime,” he wrote: “We have let the regime fester and grow since the revolution in 1979 as a result of the cowardice and indecision of our political leaders.”
By doing everything it could to avoid war with Iran, the West made this terrifying and now desperate war inevitable. The catastrophic 2015 nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama allowed Iran to cheat and make steady progress over the years towards building nuclear weapons.
Some 440 kilograms of enriched uranium — enough to make 11 nuclear bombs in two weeks — is reportedly still in Tehran’s hands.
Sanctions were also nearly useless because the regime simply bypassed them and sold its oil to China.
It did not use this revenue to look after the basic needs of the Iranian people. It used it instead to construct missile cities below ground — some buried deep inside mountains, apparently out of reach even of America’s most powerful bombs, and from where the regime continues to fire missiles at Israel and its neighbors in the Gulf.
The death and destruction being inflicted as a result — not least upon the oppressed Iranian people — is the real disaster. This should be laid at the door of a West that has sung the siren song of appeasement for decades.
It’s done so largely because it subscribes to the dogma that war is pointless, and all conflicts can and should be settled by negotiation and compromise. No longer valuing its own historic identity, which it has dismembered through multiculturalism and victim culture, it has become suicidally defeatist, believing there is nothing to fight or die for.
The reason Israel survives and thrives as it does is because it is never defeatist and believes there is everything to fight or die for.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE also understand the mortal threat posed to them by the Tehran regime. That’s why they are urgently pressing Trump to finish it off rather than declare a totally false victory and walk away.
Trump is incredulous that the regime won’t accept that it has lost the war. This may be merely Trumpian rhetoric designed to humiliate Tehran. More ominously, it may be that he’s trying to reshape reality to what he wants it to be, but isn’t.
But on another level, he’s applying the wrong metric. It may well be that in terms of conventional warfare, the regime can’t possibly win. But fanatical Islamists like this think in completely different terms. To them, mere survival is victory.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Aragchi, gloated this week: “No nation in history has stood for nearly a month against the greatest nuclear-armed power on earth and stopped them from achieving a single goal. This is a point of pride for all of humanity.”
The West simply doesn’t understand religious fanaticism. It doesn’t understand that for the Islamists of Tehran, who believe that causing an apocalypse will bring the Shia messiah to earth, “martyrdom” — their mass deaths — is accordingly to be embraced with ecstasy.
The West also fails to grasp something Israel has been forced to accept for decades. The Iranian regime may be outgunned by America’s superior military might, but it can outfox it through its use of “asymmetric warfare,” which refuses to recognise the conventions of war laid down by the international community.
This means that while the West takes care not to target civilians or hit the essential civilian infrastructure of electricity or water supplies, the Iranians will not only target all such enemy lifelines but will unhesitatingly sacrifice all their own people, too.
Accordingly, they think that the more missiles they continue to fire, the more they’ll demonstrate defiantly that they hold all the cards and so America must “negotiate” on the terms they have laid down.
The only acceptable response to that is to redouble the effort to defeat them utterly and completely.
Let’s hope Trump has come to the same conclusion.
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE
On every available metric of war, the regime is clearly losing.
Its air defenses are all but obliterated, its navy is largely sunk, its stocks of missiles and launchers have been decimated, its senior ranks are being progressively eliminated, and its nuclear programme has been further damaged.
In these respects, the United States and Israel have had so far a spectacularly successful war.
Yet despite all this, not only is the regime not yet defeated but it still presents fearsome challenges. It has turned the Strait of Hormuz into a lethal weapon by choking off most of its normal shipping channels. Israel and the United Arab Emirates are still being bombarded by missiles every day, causing damage, injury and death.
Washington is reportedly chewing over the likely costs to its own forces if it tries to seize Kharg Island to gain control over Iran’s oil production or free the Straits of Hormuz. Trump is likely weighing up the damage to his own political future from a domestically unpopular war that may start drawing American blood.
The stakes are enormous. If the Iranian regime isn’t totally defanged but survives to recover and re-arm, it will not only continue to menace the region. Such an outcome will also advertise that the leader of the free world is a paper tiger.
That will hugely embolden China, Russia and North Korea. Israeli defence expert professor Dan Schueftan says that if America doesn’t prevail in this war, it will be the beginning of the end for the West.
“These processes don’t happen overnight,” he told the Israeli commentator Haviv Rettig Gur. “But if the United States is incapable of dealing with the Iranian challenge, the ability of the Chinese to change the world order will be much stronger than before.”
So why can’t the West see this? Why do so many Americans and Brits view Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as their greatest threat rather than Iran, the world’s No. 1 terrorist state, exporter of violence and cultural destabilisation to the West, and crucial hinge of the world’s axis of evil powers?
Partly, this is because the Trump administration has never properly made the case for war to the American public, while governments in Britain and Europe are actively hostile.
Partly it’s because of the belief that whenever the West ventures into the Middle East cauldron, the outcome is disastrous.
While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended in a debacle, however, the obdurate refusal by the West to take commensurate action against Iran has resulted in a conflict that is now infinitely more difficult and damaging than it would otherwise have been had the threat from Tehran been countered earlier.
Richard Williams, a former commander of Britain’s SAS commando force in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote in Britain’s Mail that he witnessed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps up close as they and Iranian proxies killed hundreds of British and American soldiers.
Saying that this gave him an understanding of the “utter evil that is the Iranian regime,” he wrote: “We have let the regime fester and grow since the revolution in 1979 as a result of the cowardice and indecision of our political leaders.”
By doing everything it could to avoid war with Iran, the West made this terrifying and now desperate war inevitable. The catastrophic 2015 nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama allowed Iran to cheat and make steady progress over the years towards building nuclear weapons.
Some 440 kilograms of enriched uranium — enough to make 11 nuclear bombs in two weeks — is reportedly still in Tehran’s hands.
Sanctions were also nearly useless because the regime simply bypassed them and sold its oil to China.
It did not use this revenue to look after the basic needs of the Iranian people. It used it instead to construct missile cities below ground — some buried deep inside mountains, apparently out of reach even of America’s most powerful bombs, and from where the regime continues to fire missiles at Israel and its neighbors in the Gulf.
The death and destruction being inflicted as a result — not least upon the oppressed Iranian people — is the real disaster. This should be laid at the door of a West that has sung the siren song of appeasement for decades.
It’s done so largely because it subscribes to the dogma that war is pointless, and all conflicts can and should be settled by negotiation and compromise. No longer valuing its own historic identity, which it has dismembered through multiculturalism and victim culture, it has become suicidally defeatist, believing there is nothing to fight or die for.
The reason Israel survives and thrives as it does is because it is never defeatist and believes there is everything to fight or die for.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE also understand the mortal threat posed to them by the Tehran regime. That’s why they are urgently pressing Trump to finish it off rather than declare a totally false victory and walk away.
Trump is incredulous that the regime won’t accept that it has lost the war. This may be merely Trumpian rhetoric designed to humiliate Tehran. More ominously, it may be that he’s trying to reshape reality to what he wants it to be, but isn’t.
But on another level, he’s applying the wrong metric. It may well be that in terms of conventional warfare, the regime can’t possibly win. But fanatical Islamists like this think in completely different terms. To them, mere survival is victory.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Aragchi, gloated this week: “No nation in history has stood for nearly a month against the greatest nuclear-armed power on earth and stopped them from achieving a single goal. This is a point of pride for all of humanity.”
The West simply doesn’t understand religious fanaticism. It doesn’t understand that for the Islamists of Tehran, who believe that causing an apocalypse will bring the Shia messiah to earth, “martyrdom” — their mass deaths — is accordingly to be embraced with ecstasy.
The West also fails to grasp something Israel has been forced to accept for decades. The Iranian regime may be outgunned by America’s superior military might, but it can outfox it through its use of “asymmetric warfare,” which refuses to recognise the conventions of war laid down by the international community.
This means that while the West takes care not to target civilians or hit the essential civilian infrastructure of electricity or water supplies, the Iranians will not only target all such enemy lifelines but will unhesitatingly sacrifice all their own people, too.
Accordingly, they think that the more missiles they continue to fire, the more they’ll demonstrate defiantly that they hold all the cards and so America must “negotiate” on the terms they have laid down.
The only acceptable response to that is to redouble the effort to defeat them utterly and completely.
Let’s hope Trump has come to the same conclusion.
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE
10 comments:
Bad news for you MAGA supporters. The Iranian regime isn’t going to be totally defanged unless ground troops take over the country as they did with Iraq, with similar consequences. The reality is that Iran will just rebuild and become stronger, backed by their BRICS allies, who will be joined by a growing number of countries concerned about America's aggression and the disruption to the world economy.
I'm not a fan of RNZ news, but I like their recent headline: "Trump is baffled that Iran won't end the war he started."
“defeat them utterly and completely”? This lady doesn’t know anything about history or the Middle East.
'The only acceptable response to that is to redouble the effort to defeat them utterly and completely.'
Now explain how to do that; Trump clearly has no idea.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear the Zionists wet dream is not going so well.
Iran was the second country in the region to recognise the newly-found State of Israel (after Turkey; the first overall was the USSR). It was only in 1979 that the [now] Islamic Republic of Iran withdrew that recognition.
There are two extremes involved in this war, both emanating from religion. The first is the Islamic Republic's refusal to recognise the right of the Jews to a State in Palestine because of Quranic verses that claim their god initially gave Palestine to the Jews who screwed up badly and so the right to those lands was transferred to the Muslims. (To labour the point, this was NOT an issue under the Shah; Iran was mostly Shia-Muslim before 1979 too but the fundamentalists did not rule the roost as they did after 1979.) The second extreme is the insistence of the Zionist hard-right faction that their god has awarded them all lands over which Israel and Judea held sway during the time of King David and Co. Most secular Jews disagree with that but the ultra-orthodox parties hold the balance of power in the Knesset and so Bibi et al have to play along. Meanwhile, 'settlers' from illegal settlements terrorise the local Arabs as far from home as the West Bank (there are frequently reports about this on France 24).
Take religion out of the equation and the way forward would be dead simple: trade Teheran's [re]recognition of the Israeli borders of 1948 for an official Israeli rejection of the Zionist 'Greater Israel Project' and withdrawal of the illegal settlements. Unfortunately, this is unthinkable to both sets of extremists, and they appear to be the ones setting the agendae.
I saw a clip from the BBC about the influence of fundamentalist religion on US Middle Eastern policy that scared the living daylights out of me - all those religious psychopaths praying for Armageddon. Between them and the Iranian religious far right I'm not sure which I would rather have to deal with.
We non-believers had better start countering the political clout of these vile people on both sides or they might even get their wish - a thermonuclear Armageddon.
Why can't the west see this? Because it is Trump, therefore it is wrong. Most of the world, in particular those on the left, would rather become an Islamic state than support Trump. The hatred makes them blind to the self damage they are causing.
CXH: "Most of the world, in particular those on the left, would rather become an Islamic state than support Trump."
I don't have an opinion about Trump: he isn't our president, after all. But in my view, he and Netanyahu have made a potentially catastrophic strategic mistake. This doesn't in any way imply that I support Iran. I don't. It's simply that over my considerable lifetime, I've watched the US meddle repeatedly in the Middle East, and the tragic consequences are there for all to see. I cannot see how attacking Iran will turn out better. It looks to me that we in the West have a problem with islamism because of, rather than despite, US involvement in that area.
"Take religion out of the equation and the way forward would be dead simple: trade Teheran's [re]recognition of the Israeli borders of 1948 for an official Israeli rejection of the Zionist 'Greater Israel Project' and withdrawal of the illegal settlements."
Indeed. I remember Lloyd Geering's opinion that a secular state is the best solution. But unfortunately, as with your solution, the political situation has moved far beyond that. Rising fundamentalism and fanaticism on both sides have put paid to it.
"....a clip from the BBC about the influence of fundamentalist religion on US Middle Eastern policy that scared the living daylights out of me..."
I've recently seen something similar: Pete Hegseth beating the drum for fundamentalist Christianity. I've known for many years that the US is a theocracy - laughed about it with family members - but listening to Hegseth and Trump, I've realised that they sincerely believe this stuff. It's scary as hell, that's for sure.
"Between them and the Iranian religious far right I'm not sure which I would rather have to deal with."
Yup. A choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, huh?
The author states 'the West takes care not to target civilians or hit the essential civilian infrastructure of electricity or water supplies" but when she says the 'West' she cannot mean Israel can she - the same Israel depriving the population of Gaza of drinking water and the bombing of hospitals in Southern Lebanon?
Re: settler violence, see today's Euronews special report: https://www.euronews.com/2026/03/29/exclusive-israel-to-crack-down-on-settler-violence-in-the-west-bank
"A document from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office seen by Euronews outlines unprecedented measures against settler violence as the army is set to pull some troops away from Lebanon to the West Bank to rein in Jewish extremists."
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