The war of attrition: The Ayatollah has a plan to outlast West

NEW YORK: The US attack on Iran’s nuclear sites last weekend, following a weeklong Israeli bombing campaign, has marked a turning point for Iran. Washington’s involvement in the conflict represents one of the biggest challenges to the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979 and is a moment of truth for the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has maintained Iran’s hostility to the West during his 36 years in power.

Now the future of the country’s nuclear program, and the fate of the tenuous cease-fire with Israel, rests in his hands — and even in the face of a grave threat, he is unlikely to back down.

Iran’s rulers are no strangers to war. Many of the country’s top leaders, including its president, foreign minister and key military figures, are veterans of Iran’s long war with Iraq in the 1980s, a grinding struggle that cost Iran billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.

Under Ayatollah Khamenei, who served as president from 1981 to 1988 and became Iran’s supreme leader in 1989, the lessons of that brutal conflict have come to undergird the regime’s worldview — and its national security policy.

As Ayatollah sees it, Iran is locked in a struggle for survival with the United States and its allies, including Israel. The policies he has pursued in the decades since he came to power — domestic repression, nuclear expansion and support for proxy militias including Hamas and Hezbollah — have all been in the service of winning that contest.

His distrust of Washington has only deepened since Donald Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal Tehran negotiated with the Obama administration.

The Islamic Republic understands its limitations in this struggle. Its military is woefully inadequate in the face of more advanced US weaponry. Its economy has been severely constrained by international sanctions.

In recent years, Iranians have revolted against the regime’s policy of perpetual resistance against the West, as well as against the regime’s repressive domestic policies. The United States has also maintained a robust presence in the region, with tens of thousands of troops stationed across a network of bases.

If this history is anything to go by, Ayatollah will not retreat, let alone surrender. He has, for now, accepted a cease-fire with Israel — but only because he is confident that Iran held its ground in the face of US and Israeli strikes. In the past, too, he has made concessions when necessary.

Tehran entered both the 2015 nuclear deal and the most recent round of nuclear negotiations with the US to relieve economic pressure.

Ayatollah is uninterested in making compromises that could fundamentally change Iran’s trajectory. He is wary of even appearing open to compromise, which he believes the US would interpret as weakness. “America is like a dog,” he told his advisers in a meeting over a decade ago. “If you back off, it will lunge at you, but if you lunge at it, it will recoil and back off.”

Iran’s supreme leader has instead sought an equilibrium that can be summarised as “no war and no peace.” He wants neither confrontation nor normalisation with the US. What he wants is for Washington to stop containing Iran, unshackle its economy and allow Iran to embrace the status of a regional great power.

Ayatollah believes that Iran can achieve this goal in time. If Tehran perseveres, he thinks, it can outlast Washington and Israel’s appetite for a fight. For decades, his regime has built its military strategy on patience and endurance, reflecting its rulers’ takeaways from the Iran-Iraq war.

In 1980, Iraq launched a surprise strike against its neighbour, taking over thousands of square miles of southwestern Iran. Two years later, Iran was able to outmanoeuvre Iraq’s better-armed military through the use of guerrilla forces and so-called human wave attacks, allowing it to recapture much of its lost territory. The lesson, for Ayatollah and his peers, was that Iran is capable of wearing down better-equipped foes — even when the odds are stacked against it.

That lesson guided Iran’s response to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Convinced that Iran was next on Washington’s list, Ayatollah charged Gen. Qassem Soleimani — who was killed by a US drone strike in 2020 — to take advantage of the chaos and brewing Iraqi insurgency by bogging the US down in a quagmire. The strategy worked; by 2011, the US had withdrawn most of its troops after a prolonged and exhausting insurgency.

If the cease-fire collapses and war resumes, Iran may choose to attack US ships or bases in the Persian Gulf or close the Strait of Hormuz. Whether or not it does so, what matters is its ability to keep the world on its toes, using uncertainty to disturb energy prices and global business.

Should Iran attack, its strikes would probably aim to force Israel and the US to settle for a war of attrition. A long slog, Iran believes, will foil US and Israeli plans for a decisive victory and force them to compromise in the face of mounting costs and domestic backlash.

The New York Times