By K. Hosseini
Even for many supporters of the Islamic Republic, the scale of the Israeli attacks, the killing of senior IRGC commanders and other military and security officials, came as a shock and surprise. If Israel’s claims are true, Iran is facing the largest airstrike in its history.
The killing of dozens of senior IRGC commanders, as well as the successful Israeli air strikes in the absence of any air defenses, is a severe blow to the credibility, authority, and even legitimacy of a government that suddenly appears incapable of defending itself.
These attacks have exposed the world to an unprecedented scale the many weaknesses of Iran’s security and defense forces, and that Tehran’s security strategy, which for more than 40 years has been based on asymmetric warfare, has lost its effectiveness as a deterrent.
Iran’s political and economic isolation over the past four decades and the experience of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War created the appearance that the country had an effective defense strategy, where Iran did not have to fight head-on with a much more modern and sophisticated military. The IRGC elites were proud of this, justifying their existence as a military force and a parallel army. However, it was all propaganda.
The situation is so critical that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called it a “declaration of war” by Israel. According to international law and the UN Charter, there is no formal “declaration of war” by Israel on Iran. Israel claims that it attacked “preemptively” in accordance with the right of self-defense, which is also enshrined in the UN Charter. However, preemptive strikes are illegal under the UN Charter. What Article 51 of the Charter says about the right of states to self-defense clearly applies to a situation where one state attacks another. Iran has not directly attacked Israel recently. Even a glance at the political events of recent months shows that there was no threat that Iran would inevitably attack Israel.
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