Trump gambled on destroying Iran’s regime. Instead he gave it a new life

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Thousands of US soldiers are poised to launch ground attacks aimed at capturing Iranian territory in the Gulf or at seizing Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. “I can say tonight the we are on track to complete all of America’s policy objectives shortly, very shortly,” said Donald Trump, who may order the offensive in the next few days. “We are going to hit them very hard.”

Governments worldwide study the bombastic blather of Trump’s speeches in order to tease out hints about his future direction in his war against Iran. They do so in the knowledge that the President makes up policy as he goes along and knows neither where he is going nor where he is coming from. He has claimed to have won the five-week war a dozen times by one count, saying that newly-installed moderate Iranian leaders – replacing fanatical predecessors killed by US/Israeli air strikes – are pleading for a ceasefire.

Supposing the US does undertake an assault on Kharg Island, the Iranian oil export terminal in the north of the Gulf, or on Iranian-held islands in the Strait of Hormuz, what will the impact of the escalation be on the region and the world?

Some 3,500 US Marines and naval personnel arrived in the Gulf last weekend, with a similar number on the way, joining up with Special Operation Forces already there. After a well-publicised build-up like this, not using them will look like a failure of nerve – the famous Taco (Trump Always Chickens Out) jibe that the President’s enemies, even when they may think a US ground war a disaster, will inevitably throw at him.

If Trump does escalate, what will the outcome be? Going by the precedent of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, US military operations tend to go well in their first days, but then bog-down as the situation gets messier and more unpredictable. What will be the reaction in America, when the US military suffers significant numbers of dead and wounded?

Some 66 per cent of Americans already say they “somewhat disapproved” or “strongly disapproved ” of “the US decision to take military action in Iran” according to a CNN poll. This makes the war far more unpopular that the Afghan and Iraq wars, which had majority support when they were in their initial triumphalist stage, before it became clear that American troops were being killed and maimed in conflicts which had no end in sight.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, it took to time to emerge that the wars could not be won by military means alone. US generals claimed that, given enough reinforcements, the enemy would be decisively defeated, and it took years for this to be exposed as delusory. But in Iran it is clear that a limited ground offensive will not be a game-changer and the conquest of a country of 93 million people is not feasible.

Amazingly, for all its military might, the US is facing a strategic defeat because the war has provided Iran with the opportunity to take control of the Strait of Hormuz, something it is likely to keep in so far as it can in any post war settlement. Given that 138 vessels were passing through the Strait every day before the war and Iran is currently charging $2m (£1.5m) to some oil tankers making the passage, the financial, as well as political gains, for Iran may be huge.

Such long-term benefits provide little comfort for Iranians barely surviving under relentless US-Israeli air bombardment, with the whole of Iranian society being pulverised as in Gaza and Lebanon. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency has confirmed 1,212 military and 1,606 civilian deaths in Iran since the start of the war, including at least 244 children.

Communal punishment of all Iranians has replaced earlier hypocritical claims from the US and Israel that a purpose of the war was to free Iran from an oppressive regime. “We are going to bring them back to the stone age, where they belong,” said Trump, later posting a video of the US bombing a newly constructed bridge connecting Karaj to Tehran, killing eight and wounding 95 people according to Iranian state media.

Iran differs from Gaza and Lebanon as it still has the means to match escalation with counter-escalation, directed primarily at the US-allied Arab Gulf states. Steps on this escalatory ladder include Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen possibly closing the Bab al-Mandeb chokepoint between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, stopping Saudi oil exports diverted from the Gulf.

Another escalatory option for Iran might be targeting the 400 desalination plants turning seawater into fresh water on the Arab side of the Gulf. Without these plants, cities like Abu Dhabi, Doha, Kuwait City and Riyadh would become uninhabitable, and they are extremely vulnerable to Iranian drones and missiles. This was demonstrated last week in a video that showed the burned-out wreckage of a $290m US surveillance aircraft destroyed at Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia. Trump brazenly claims that Iran is no longer capable of “projecting its power abroad”, but the opposite is the case with Iran hitting a desalination plant in Kuwait on Friday.

How far do Trump and his sycophantic courtiers like Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, believe in their delusory picture of a glorious victory just over the horizon? Such fantasies have a practical purpose because, uncritically transmitted by Fox News and the pro-Trump media, they reassure core Trump supporters that all is going well in the war. But will Trump now take the greatest gamble of his life and start the ground offensive to finish the job?

Does he really believe that there is a new Iranian leadership eager for a ceasefire? Though depleted by the Israeli/US assassination campaign, the new Iranian security leaders appear more uncompromising than the old. The recently appointed national security adviser, the most powerful security official in Iran, replacing the assassinated Ali Larijani, is Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr. Such was his reputation for hawkishness within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that one of its former top commanders, Qassem Soleimani, himself assassinated in Iraq in 2020, once criticised Zolghadr as “too extreme”. Moreover, the Iranian security elite appear confident they have the upper hand in the war and, if they hold their nerve for a week longer than Trump, they will win.

Instead of ending a moribund Islamic Republic, much reviled by most of its own people, Trump’s high-stakes gamble on war has so far succeeded only in giving it fresh life.

At a moment when the news is so unrelentingly grim, the Morgan McSweeney phone theft story provides some rich and much needed amusement. Sir Keir Starmer and ministers try to brush it aside as a conspiracy theory, but 74 per cent of the public, according to a poll by More in Common, believed McSweeney definitely or probably faked the theft of his phone in order to conceal messages between himself and his disgraced associate Peter Mandelson.

The scandal has something in common with “Partygate”, which badly damaged Boris Johnson when prime minister. Johnson tried to pretend it was all trivial stuff, but the petty mendacity about the parties in Downing Street did more to besmirch his reputation than far worse failings. Likewise, Starmer is bruised by the scandal because he has to say that, contrary to common sense, the circumstances surrounding the loss of the phone are not highly dubious.

For those unfamiliar with this riveting tale, at its centre is the theft of the phone of McSweeney, then chief of staff to Starmer, which he says was snatched at 10.28pm on 20 October last year by a bike rider, as McSweeney walked home from a restaurant in Pimlico. The call log published by Scotland Yard shows McSweeney reporting the crime to an officer. Unfortunately, he gave them the wrong location, saying his phone was stolen in Belgrave Street, which is in east London, rather than in Belgrave Road, which is in Westminster. The police’s routine attempt to recover CCTV film of the incident was therefore bound to fail because they were looking in the wrong place. Now they are looking at the CCTV footage again, but is it still available six months later?

The theft looks suspicious because of McSweeney’s close associate Mandelson, who had been sacked as UK ambassador to Washington a month earlier because of revelations about his close association with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. MPs were intending to obtain full disclose of correspondence between them that might explain why somebody with a record like Mandelson’s had been appointed in the first place – an appointment allegedly pushed through by McSweeney. What was on the stolen phone may never be known as McSweeney’s messages were apparently not backed up.

Scotland Yard might have treated the case with greater urgency had McSweeney revealed that he was chief of staff at Downing Street. He gave them his Scottish rather than his London address. When the police subsequently phoned to ask McSweeney if he had located the missing phone using its inbuilt tracker, he did not reply according to The Daily Telegraph. His every action on the night of the theft nominally follow the rules, but in practice made it more difficult to repossess his phone.

The tangled web of dubious explanations which people devise when they want to get rid of their phones, or pretend they never had one, have become a staple of real life and fictional drama. The accidental dropping of a phone from a boat into the North Sea was a high point of the Wagatha Christie saga. In the television series Breaking Bad, Walter White goes to great lengths to conceal from his wife Skyler the phone with which he communicates with his drug dealing associates.

The first time I visited the Gulf in the late 1970s, a British consultant proudly explained to me the complex working of a desalination plant he was building. I was fascinated by the technology and became aware that the capacity to turn salt water into drinking water is as essential as the production of crude oil and natural gas for turning the desert kingdoms of the Gulf into flourishing urban societies.

Some 40 per cent of the desalinated water in the world is produced in the Gulf. Reliance on desalinated water is about 90 per cent in Kuwait and Oman, 85 per cent in Bahrain, and 70 per cent in Saudi Arabia. People in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Kuwait City and Jeddah could not live there without this method of obtaining potable water. The threat of water deprivation is existential for the Arab states on the south side of the Gulf, even though they could make cuts in their current consumption.

The vulnerability of the desalination plants was always known, but only in the last five weeks have people begun to think through its implications for the region. Potential destruction of the plants is the not-so-distant prospect on the escalatory ladder in the US-Israel war with Iran. If the US and Israel attack essential infrastructure in Iran, then the Iranians will undoubtedly retaliate in kind. Iran itself only depends on desalination for 3 per cent of its water, but this figure understates the reliance on desalination in its dry coastal regions and in inland cities where it is used for industrial projects.

Trump has vaguely threatened to destroy Iranian desalination facilities, but it was Israel that attacked a small plant supplying water to 30 villages on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz this week.

The problem for Gulf rulers is that Israel does not care what it destroys in Iran – the more the better – and it equally does not care what Iranian retaliation against Gulf states is provoked by its actions. On the contrary, the degradation of Arab Gulf states as regional players is in Israel’s interests.

The Conversation has a good piece explaining how, “unlike oil pipelines or storage terminals, desalination plants cannot easily be bypassed or replaced. They are fixed, highly complex installations requiring large energy inputs, specialised membranes or thermal systems, and continuous chemical and mechanical treatment processes. Repairing serious damage to a major plant could take months or longer.”