From Fire in Tehran to Flames Across the Middle East: Dissecting the US-Israel Operation
- Abhinav Shukla
- Mar 3
- 10 min read
The Strike That Changed Everything
At dawn on Saturday, February 28, 2026, the skies over Tehran witnessed something no Iranian had seen in living memory ie: Operation Roaring Lion by Israel and part of what Washington called Operation Epic Fury, eliminated approximately 40 senior Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. It was the most significant targeted military action in the Middle East since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Washington insisted the immediate trigger was the elimination of imminent threats to the United States. But the causes run far deeper, threading through decades of enmity, domestic political calculations on two continents, and a slow-burning conviction in both Tel Aviv and Washington that the Islamic Republic's clock had finally run out.
The Long Road to February 28 and Trump's Motivations
To understand why this happened now, you have to go back to 1979, the year that never really left American foreign policy. The Iranian hostage crisis, in which 52 American diplomats were held for 444 days, became the original wound that successive US administrations never quite healed. Trump himself cited it in his initial public addressal following the operation, framing the strikes as a reckoning nearly five decades in the making. To back that up, the US deployed its largest naval fleet in Middle Eastern history.
Trump's political world is deeply entangled with pro-Israel money. The Adelson family which is among the wealthiest Jewish-American Republican donors contributed $250 million to Trump's campaign. Similar support is anticipated for 2028 US Presidential Elections. Their singular condition: unwavering support for Israeli security interests.
Trump's broader donor ecosystem includes figures like Larry Ellison of Oracle and other major Republican financiers such as Bill Ackman with strongly Israel-aligned geopolitical views. From the start of his first term, Trump was systematically persuaded by this lobby network to tear up the JCPOA, the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal despite US intelligence confirming Iranian compliance. He dismissed it as "the worst deal in the world." That decision set the current war on its trajectory.
The Three Demands That Were Never Really The Point
For months before the strikes, Washington presented Tehran with three conditions: halt uranium enrichment, dismantle its ballistic missile programme, and end support for regional proxies like Hezbollah.
Oman's Foreign Minister who was the chief (back-channel) mediator between the US and Iran, publicly signalled via a tweet that Iran was prepared to accept all three demands. The war went ahead anyway. That tells you everything. The demands were never the destination. They were the justification. Nuclear negotiation was never truly the problem Washington wanted to solve.
Netanyahu's Personal Crusade
For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the strikes represent the culmination of a decades-long strategic obsession: the permanent neutralisation of what he regards as Israel's existential threats which he believes it to be neighbouring foes; Hezbollah severely weakened, Hamas leadership decimated, Syria fractured (many believe Netanyahu made it clear to the then Obama administration not to intervene in Syria which led to it self-destructing during Arab Spring in early 2010s) . Iran was the last piece.
Netanyahu faces elections in the coming months. His domestic legal troubles are well-documented. For a leader who has long drawn strength from projecting himself as Israel's indispensable guardian, the optics of presiding over the killing of Khamenei, the man who repeatedly called for Israel's destruction, are politically invaluable. Critics will call it electoral opportunism. Supporters will call it historic. Both are probably right.
The neoconservative alongside the Israel-lobby whispered in Washington corridors in 2003 to take Iraq into it's own hands. Some analysts draw a line back to George W. Bush, who many believe wanted to finish what his father started during the Gulf War, a deeply personal motivation layered onto a geopolitical one.
Israel has stated openly that it intends to kill past, present, and future Iranian leadership. The assassination programme has now extended across the mullocracy's judiciary, executive, and military command. This is the full decapitation of a state apparatus. Israel is operating with a window and that so-called window is called Donald Trump. As one prominent observation goes: if someone from the Democratic Party, in the mould of Barack Obama, returns to the White House, Israel's current operational freedom ends completely. Israel is maximising this moment because it knows the moment is finite.
The Problem With Decapitation
History offers a consistent lesson here. When Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed, his replacement came in more radicalised, more vengeful, and operationally sharper because survival itself is the ultimate training ground. The same logic applies to Iran. You kill the moderates and the pragmatists first. What fills the vacuum is harder, colder, and more indoctrinated. Those who survive assassination campaigns develop sharper instincts, deeper hatred, and stronger resolve. Decapitation strategies have a poor track record and Iran is not Hamas. It is a nation-state with a rich civilizational heritage.
Hezbollah: The Axis That Is Crumbling
Hezbollah was a direct byproduct of the 1979 Iranian revolution, created to export revolutionary ideology into Lebanon and serve as a permanent deterrent against Israel. For decades it functioned as the crown jewel of Iran's "Axis of Resistance." Today, it is a shadow of that. Its military capacity has been gutted, its leadership decimated, its political influence in Lebanon hollowed out. The near-collapse of Hezbollah has nullified a significant portion of Iran's deterrence architecture. Without Hezbollah as a credible forward threat, Iran's ability to impose costs on Israel is dramatically reduced and Israel knows it. The Axis of Resistance is not an axis anymore. It is a broken spoke.
Regime Change Without Ground Troops Is Fantasy
The blueprint being floated, airstrikes leading to popular uprising has failed before, repeatedly. The NATO bombing of Kosovo worked because there was an armed rebel front already fighting on the ground.
In Libya, the British, French, and American airstrikes succeeded only because rebel forces were positioned to capitalise. In both cases, the air campaign supported an existing ground movement.
Unarmed Iranian civilians cannot overthrow the IRGC without significant external ground support, which is considered to be one of the most loyal, well-funded, ideologically indoctrinated military institutions in the world. There is no organised rebel front inside Iran today. Airstrikes alone will not produce regime change. Trump has not ruled out deploying ground troops. But his own base doesn't want it and that contradiction sits at the centre of this entire operation.
Trump's Domestic Problem
Here is the central contradiction of this war. The MAGA base, the people who put Trump in power, do not want another Middle Eastern war. They watched money and lives disappear into Afghanistan and Iraq for two decades and got nothing back.
Trump's approval rating has already dropped to 36%. The US midterms are scheduled for November 2026, and they are looking increasingly dangerous for Republicans. The soldiers who would die in any ground escalation will disproportionately be lower-income young men which is exactly the demographic that forms the Republican voter base. Trump is fighting a war his own supporters don't want, funded by money they resent spending, with lives drawn from communities that vote for him.
The lesson of Vietnam and Afghanistan is simple: prolonged wars drain public support, treasuries, and political capital. Iran knows this. Tehran's strategy is likely to absorb the attack, sustain the pain, and wait. Iran wants to outlast the aggressor, not defeat it conventionally. Despite this, Trump has explicitly not ruled out ground troops if he deems it necessary.
Iran's Catastrophic Miscalculation
Iran, knowing it cannot win militarily, has decided to drag the entire region down with it. That is a catastrophic strategic error. Striking civilian infrastructure, Palm Jumeirah and Saudi Aramco Oil Facility, apartment buildings in Bahrain, international airports in Kuwait is not only a violation of international humanitarian law, it is geopolitically suicidal.
Gulf nations that initially declared that Iran retaliation on US military bases on their own soil would not be considered attacks on their sovereignty, were content to stay on the sidelines. Iran's targeting of civilians has now handed those same countries a reason to enter the conflict thus multiplying Iran's enemies at the worst possible moment. Whatever sympathy Iran may have gathered as the aggrieved party has now completely evaporated.
This is not without precedent. During the first Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait, Iraq fired missiles at Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and even Israel — a country with no direct role in that conflict. The tactic of widening the war to internationalize the pain is an old one. It has never worked. It didn't work for Saddam. It won't work for Iran.
The psychological impact of striking Dubai which is globally marketed as the Middle East's premier safe haven and financial hub is deliberate. Iran's goal is to trigger short-term economic panic, undermine Gulf financial credibility, and force the world to feel the cost of this war through markets. But in doing so, Iran has made enemies of countries that were otherwise neutral, and handed Israel and the US a broader coalition by accident.
The Ramadan Gambit That Failed
Iran attempted to invoke Ramadan solidarity, appealing to the Islamic world to rally behind it against Western and Israeli aggression. It did not work. The 1973 Yom Kippur War, launched by Egypt and Syria on the Jewish holy day, showed that religious timing can be wielded as a weapon.
But Islamic solidarity in 2025 is fractured beyond repair. Even Pakistan launched aerial strikes on Afghanistan during Ramadan, demonstrating that religious calendars no longer constrain military action among Muslim states. The appeal fell flat.
The Afghan Blowback Problem
America's intervention policy in Afghanistan created a generation of radicalised fighters with real combat experience, ideological motivation, and institutional knowledge of asymmetric warfare. Those fighters now have fresh motivation. A US-Israel war on a Muslim-majority nation, framed as regime change, is exactly the recruitment narrative that extremist networks have been waiting for.
The Strait of Hormuz and the Oil Shock
The Strait of Hormuz is now under direct threat. Approximately 40% of global oil shipments, including one-third of all seaborne oil passes through it. Any sustained disruption spikes global oil prices immediately. West Asia is already registering a 13% increase in oil prices. The ripple effects are not theoretical but are to be seen in markets too.
Khamenei's Martyrdom and the Symbol He Chose To Become
Khamenei could have retreated to a bunker deep in the Iranian mountains. He likely knew his death was coming, sooner or later, the targeting would reach him. He chose to remain visible, among the people, in public. His son was also killed in the strikes — leaving Iran without a clear succession and forcing the regime to prove it is not broken, even as it demonstrably is. A nation that has just lost its supreme leader and his heir must now perform strength it may not possess.
The narrative constructed around Khamenei's death deliberately echoes Mahatma Gandhi and Socrates, figures who chose death when escape was available, believing their sacrifice would serve their people and their cause more powerfully than their survival ever could to the people of Bharat and Athens, respectively.
Both chose to stay and face the consequence. Whether Khamenei's death earns that moral stature is debatable. But as political symbolism inside Iran and across the Shia world, it is extraordinarily potent and the IRGC will use it.
Who Is Actually Running Iran Right Now?
This is the question nobody is answering clearly. With political leadership decimated, the working assumption among most serious analysts is that the IRGC (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) is now effectively running operational decisions. The IRGC is not a conventional military. It is a parallel state within a state, with its own economy, intelligence apparatus, and ideological command structure. It is also the most Iran-nationalist institution in the country. Its decisions will not necessarily reflect what a weakened political leadership might have chosen. This is a dangerous unknown.
China and Russia: Bystanders by Design
China will not bail out Iran. Beijing's last direct military intervention was the Korean War in 1950. China does not do alliances. It does not do loyalty. It does strategic calculation and Iran does not currently fit that calculation in a way that justifies intervention. Russia is consumed entirely by Ukraine and has neither the bandwidth, the appetite, nor the leverage to enter this conflict. Iran is effectively alone. Any hope Tehran had of great power support has not materialised and will not.
Bharat's Position:
Bharat has neither condemned the strikes nor issued alarmist or celebratory statements. That deliberate silence is itself a geopolitical position which is a refusal to be pulled into a Western-Gulf-Israel binary. It signals strategic autonomy while protecting trade relationships across all sides.
Bharat wants Iran contained and quarantined, not collapsed. The vacuum serves no one in the region except the most extreme actors waiting in the wings. A power vacuum in Iran does not serve Bharat's interests. A collapsed Iran risks warlordism an ISIS-style fragmentation.
However here is Bharat's specific dilemma: a Hormuz crisis pushes buyers toward Russian oil, which is cheaper and more accessible. Bharat has been quietly purchasing discounted Russian crude since the Ukraine war began. But one of the central demands in ongoing Bharat-US trade negotiations is that Bharat significantly reduce its dependence on Russian oil. If the Hormuz crisis makes Russian oil the rational economic choice again, not just for Bharat but for buyers across Asia and Europe, what happens to that trade deal? This is an active tension New Delhi is navigating in real time, without making noise about it.
Another aspect is The Ministry of External Affairs had issued travel advisories for Bharatiyas in the region months before the escalation. Social media is now flooded with stranded Bharatiyas asking the government for emergency help. The hard truth is this: advisories must carry consequences. If there are no incentives for compliance or penalties for ignoring them, they will continue to be ignored. The Bharatiya government should seriously consider formalising accountability around such advisories. Otherwise they are just noise.
Conclusion
In 1979, Iran's GDP per capita was higher than both Taiwan and South Korea. It had the infrastructure, the educated population, and the oil wealth to become a dominant regional economic power. It chose four decades of ideological confrontation instead and has been paying compound interest on that choice ever since.
The scale of American naval deployment in the Middle East is not a symbolic maneuver; it signals strategic intent. When the United States positions one of its largest maritime forces in the region alongside close intelligence coordination with Israel, the message extends beyond deterrence.
Leaders under internal pressure often find that external confrontation reshapes public narratives. Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump have faced significant domestic challenges at various moments in their political careers. History shows that external assertiveness can consolidate political bases, redirect media cycles, and reframe leadership images around strength and security.
And finally — I am reminded of Niccolò Machiavelli from The Art of War.
“One may know how to begin a war, but one never knows how it will end.”
THE END
Great Read!