Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Donald Trump's decision to strike Iran might, in hindsight, be seen as a "huge miscalculation", according to one analyst. (Reuters: Nathan Howard)
Donald Trump called Iran the "world's number one sponsor of terror" when announcing the US strikes on the country on Saturday.
Whatever the title meant to the US president — in terms of his fluctuating war aims in Iran — Iran's support for terrorism over the past four decades can explain much about how it is now conducting its war in response to the US and Israeli attacks.
It is particularly useful in explaining its aggressive and escalating attacks on neighbouring states that had been desperately trying to stop the conflict, and now find themselves dragged into it.
Terrorism and counter-insurgency are generally the resort of the side that does not have access to the power and weapons of their opponents — the Irish, the Viet Cong, the Palestinians and, in the early days leading up to the foundation of the state of Israel, the Zionists determined to force the British out of Palestine, to name a few.
It involves finding ways to neutralise the military superiority of your foes with unconventional tactics and limited weapons. And it shows scant regard for making innocent bystanders its victims in the name of the cause.
The lightning speed with which Israeli and US forces killed Iran's supreme leader and many of the country's military and political chiefs cast the first days of the war as being firmly controlled by the military might of the US and Israel, and their high-tech intelligence.
But the war in the Middle East has rapidly descended into a much more complex and messy affair where that superiority looks nowhere near as certain.
That's largely because of Iran's counter tactics, and particularly its attacks on neighbouring countries.
To many people, this made little sense.
A large blast rocks the US consulate in Dubai after a suspected Iranian drone strike.
The Gulf states themselves — countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia — were shocked that Iran was attacking their civilian targets and infrastructure, not just US military assets in the region.
This was seen as an ultimately self-defeating miscalculation — why would you want to isolate yourself even further from the rest of the world? Including from countries that have desperately tried to stop the US-Israeli action?
"Your war is not with your neighbours," the diplomatic adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates, Anwar Gargash, said on Sunday.
"Return to reason, to your surroundings, and deal with your neighbours rationally and responsibly before the circle of isolation and escalation widens."
Iran betting Trump won't want a long war: analyst
Iran's strategy has always been to maximise its perceived power to influence events through proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
By attacking neighbouring states, Iran can potentially achieve two strategic ambitions.
The first is that it can maximise the economic and political pain on its neighbours in a conflict in which they are not combatants, and through them inflict pain on the global economy.
The value of that is that it increases the economic and political pain on Trump in continuing his involvement in this war.
It also increases the pressure on all those neighbouring countries to weigh up the costs or benefits of joining the fight.
The second ambition, however, is that Iran has been forcing the Gulf states, as well as Israel, to use up their expensive defensive, high-tech weapons systems fighting often relatively cheap drones, possibly leaving them vulnerable down the track to a relentless bombardment by Iran if they run out of the expensive gear.
It's a similar dilemma that has been facing European countries in recent months: being forced to use weapons like Patriot missiles — originally designed to defend against major missile attacks, or even to scramble multi-million dollar fighter jets — to fend off attacks from suspected Russian drones invading Western European airspace.
The tactic effectively uses the might of superior weaponry against perceived opponents to run down their defences.
Iran is betting that Trump's love of the idea of a quick intervention, seen in the earlier attack on Iran in June last year, and then in Venezuela, reflects an intolerance for staying in the fight for any length of time.
Particularly if he is facing pressure at home from an intolerant public and a price shock coming from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on Gulf gas production.
Strikes on Iran throw spanner in the works for inflation as oil and gas prices surge. (Ian Verrender)
Pre-eminent Iranian-American political scientist and Iran expert Vali Nasr told the Foreign Policy podcast on Monday that "low-cost drones can neutralise multimillion-dollar military assets".
"The main actors here — Iran, Israel, the United States — each of them has a different pain tolerance of how much they're able to sustain in terms of civilian losses, infrastructural damage, military damage, before they might radically change any of their calculations," he said.
In Iran's case, he said, "I think they have made a decision that the only way that the Islamic Republic, the revolution, and people in the country, in their eyes, will survive, is actually to persevere in this fight."
Iran has a fairly high pain threshold, he argues, particularly since repression means it is unlikely to face any political backlash, despite all the brave talk from Israel and the US about the Iranian people being given the opportunity to rise up and seize their country.
By comparison, "the United States is the Achilles heel of this, particularly a president who has been skittish about messy military entanglements. His base doesn't like this."
Gulf states 'stuck between a stone and a hard place'
Trump, Dr Nasr says, is the most likely to cringe at higher gas prices and at the substantial damage and bad optics they would generate in the United States.
"It makes sense for the Iranians to actually put their thumb on that vulnerability," he said.
"So it's really a test for President Trump as to 'did he completely miscalculate and discount how messy this can become?'
"I think we may end up seeing this as a huge miscalculation on the part of President Trump based on misreading, if you would, what the adversary's thinking is."
Certainly, the changing and conflicting rhetoric coming from Washington — from Trump himself, from his vice-president, and secretaries for war and state — about how long the conflict might go for and what exactly is its aim, suggests a clear lack of strategy about what would happen once the Ayatollah had been removed.
And the global shock waves — in oil prices, share markets and now speculation of rising interest rates — do not sit well with a Trumpian narrative about how things are all going to plan.
Dr Nasr says the Gulf countries face a dilemma.
"They host US bases that are there in order to attack Iran or protect against Iranian attacks," he said.
"But in reality, these bases are not able to provide protection to the Gulf countries.
"Iran has also made a decision that it's going to go after them — not because of lashing out or because of their support for the US, although that's the excuse — but to really go after their economies.
"Because impacting the Gulf countries' economies, and impacting energy supplies, impacts the global economy."
Donald Trump claims to have "knocked out just about everything" in Iran.
Dr Nasr says the problem the Gulf countries have is that unless the Iranian regime goes away, they can't actually change the military balance if they join the US fight.
"But if they join, and the regime survives, then they're going to be under a risk of an Iranian attack for decades," he adds.
And that will ruin their economies.
"If they don't join and the regime survives, the risk from Iran doesn't go away," Dr Nasr says.
"In other words, they're stuck between a stone and a hard place."
So despite their immense wealth — and even their past capacity to influence the globe through their control over oil prices — the Gulf States don't have much ability to influence events that could cause them immense harm.
Iran is hoping it can ride out Trump's preparedness to keep fighting and is maximising the pressure on him — and the global economy.
Trump and Israel are maximising the pressure on Iran by relentless bombardments in the hope that they can exhaust Iran's supply of weapons.
In the meantime, analysts speculate about whether the Gulf states could find themselves even more vulnerable if they run out of air defence systems, and also have to confront incoming missiles from Iran's proxies to their south — the Houthis.
Laura Tingle is the ABC's global affairs editor.
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