By Yair Rosenberg
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
The latest round of the Israel-Iran war is over, and the
immediate outcome appears decisive. In just 12 days, Israel eliminated the
leadership of Iran’s military, air force, and intelligence agency; bombed
the country’s nuclear sites; and took out dozens of missiles and launchers on
the ground before they could be used.
Iran, by contrast, was unable to take down a single Israeli jet, and was
reduced to firing decreasing volleys of ballistic missiles at Israel’s
population centers, killing
27 civilians and one 18-year-old soldier at home with his family. All
active-duty military deaths were on the Iranian side.
Israel’s achievements were made possible by their
stunning intelligence penetration of the Iranian regime’s highest ranks. In the
first hours of the conflict, Mossad agents reportedly launched
drones from inside Iranian territory to neutralize air defenses, and lured
much of Iran’s top brass to a supposedly secret bunker that was then pummeled
by Israeli forces. These early coups enabled Israel to achieve air dominance
over Iran, a country some 1,500 miles away. To understand how the regime’s
leaders could have failed so utterly to suss out Israeli spooks, one needs to
understand another time when Israel was alleged to have taken control of
Tehran’s skies.
In the summer of 2018, Iran was experiencing a drought.
This is not an uncommon occurrence in the Middle East and would not have made
international news if not for the response of a regime functionary, who blamed
the weather on Israel. “The changing climate in Iran is suspect,” Brigadier
General Gholam Reza Jalali said
at a press conference. “Israel and another country in the region have joint
teams which work to ensure clouds entering Iranian skies are unable to release
rain.” He went on to accuse the Jewish state of “cloud and snow theft.”
This story seems like a silly bit of trivia until one
realizes that Jalali was also the head of Iran’s Civil Defense Organization,
tasked with combating sabotage. In other words, a key person in charge of
thwarting Israeli spies in Iran was an incompetent conspiracy theorist obsessed
with Jewish climate control. About a week after the Hamas attack on October 7,
2023, Jalali celebrated the massacre and boasted
in state-run media that Israel’s “military and intelligence dominance has
collapsed and will not be repaired anymore.” Unsurprisingly, it was on his
watch that Israel executed an escalating campaign of physical and cybersabotage
against Iran’s nuclear program, culminating in the war this month.
Jalali is but one of many high-level Iranian
functionaries who seemingly believe their own propaganda about their enemies.
Former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani once told Fox News that
Israel supported the Islamic State, despite ISIS executing
attacks
against Israelis. His predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, suggested
at the United Nations that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the U.S.
government.
It would be easy to dismiss Iran’s wartime failures as
unique to the country’s dysfunctional authoritarian system. But that would be a
mistake. Jalali and other top Iranian officials were unable to defeat Israel
not just because their own intelligence capabilities didn’t match up, but
because their adherence to regime-sanctioned fantasies made grasping Israel’s
actual abilities impossible for them. As a result, once Israel decided, after
October 7, that it could no longer tolerate the risks of constant aggression
from Iran and its proxies, the regime’s defenses quickly folded. In this way,
Iran’s predicament is a cautionary tale about what happens when loyalty to a
ruling ideology—rather than capability—determines who runs a society, and when
conspiracies, rather than reality, shape decision making.
Although the Iranian theocracy presents an acute case of
this phenomenon, the early symptoms are beginning to manifest in democratic
societies, including our own. Consider: Today, the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who has cast doubt on
decades of scientific research on the effectiveness of vaccines. He recently
fired the entire membership of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization
Practices and appointed several vaccine
skeptics to the panel, which is now planning
to review childhood vaccination standards. Kennedy attained his position as a reward
for endorsing Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has
suggested
that the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad did not use chemical
weapons against his own people in 2017 and 2018, despite extensive
documentation of the attacks, including by the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the previous
Trump administration. A former Democrat, she also attained her position
after endorsing Trump. Thomas Fugate, a 22-year-old recent college graduate who
worked on Trump’s 2024 campaign, is now the interim director of the Center for
Prevention Programs and Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security,
despite having no
apparent experience in counterterrorism. And that’s to say nothing of
Congress, where people such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of
Georgia, a conspiracy
theorist who once speculated that the Rothschild banking dynasty was
setting wildfires with a space laser, now sit on the powerful House Oversight
Committee.
Politicians have long rewarded their allies with plum
positions. But when allegiance replaces proficiency as the primary
qualification for advancement, and conspiracism replaces competency, disaster
looms. Flunkies guided by regime ideology lack the capacity to understand and
solve national crises. Just look at Iran.
When Jalali blamed his country’s drought on Israel,
Iran’s chief forecaster pushed back, but tentatively, seemingly afraid to upset
those in charge. The general “probably has documents of which I am not aware,”
Ahad Vazifeh, the director of forecasting at Iran’s Meteorological
Organization, said. “But on the basis of meteorological knowledge, it is not
possible for a country to steal snow or clouds.” He then offered a warning that
is as applicable to America today as it was then to Iran: “Raising such questions
not only does not solve any of our problems, but will deter us from finding the
right solutions.”
No comments:
Post a Comment