“The idea of the war works like this,” says a senior security official:
“With one hand we grip the regime’s throat with force. With the other hand we shake it unexpectedly—again and again and again—until its neck snaps.”
The first hand is the orderly military effort: first the air-defense systems, then the ballistic missiles, then the remnants of the nuclear project, and then the regime’s repression headquarters.
The second hand was the surprises Israel had planned. As of yesterday, those surprises have been delayed. The Mossad and the IDF disagree about who is responsible. There has never been great love between the two organizations, ever since the days of Rising Lion, and now there is a battle over credit for success.
The assessment in Israel is that even the military chokehold itself, if it continues as planned, will cause irreversible damage to the regime.
“It is fascinating to see a boutique and an industrial factory working together,” they say in Israel. Our Air Force meticulously plans attacks that are enormous by Israeli standards, yet still always rely on ingenuity—on squeezing 150 percent of the potential from the equipment and munitions. The Americans arrive and simply grind the targets into dust with disproportionate firepower. They have never heard of munitions economy.
“War is not a choose-your-own-adventure program,” Netanyahu said this week. Only in state commissions of inquiry can you demand a perfectly detailed plan in advance that unfolds exactly as designed.
Planning existed, of course. The prime minister detests PowerPoint presentations almost as much as he detests Khamenei, and he has been waging war against them in meetings for years, with little success in eliminating the threat. And yet, when he met Trump at the White House exactly a month ago, he arrived with a presentation—seven slides laying out the full principles of the joint war.
“How do you endure it?” Trump asked, referring to two and a half years of war with another round still ahead.
“You are a prehistoric tiger, with sharp teeth,” he said. “But we are the honey badger—a small animal, tough, but wild and relentless.”
The wounded Iranian beast’s way of fighting the badger and the tiger is surprisingly similar to Hamas’s. Sinwar relied on exploiting Israeli society’s sensitivity to hostages and the Western world’s sensitivity to civilian casualties. The Revolutionary Guards are relying on Western sensitivity to rising energy prices. They are counting on dragging out the clock.
In Israel, the new rule is to focus on achieving the objectives, not the calendar: not dates but processes.
