The Twelve Day War: The U.S.-Israeli “Victory” That Wasn’t – 2

1.

On June 13, 2025 Israel launched a surprise attack against Iran, the goal of which was to overthrow the Iranian government. The attack targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, the country’s top military commanders (killing 29 top leaders), predicting that as a result of the ensuing chaos that the Iranian population would rise up and overthrow the government.

It was Washington’s goal to replace that government with one more amenable to U.S. and Israeli strategic interests. As Israel’s situation deteriorated with each Iranian missile hitting a strategic target in Israel, the Netanyahu government went begging to Washington to intervene military to prevent what was becoming a total rout. The Trump Administration responded with Operation Midnight Hammer

None of Washington’s or Tel Aviv’s strategic goals were met.

While Iran suffered widespread damage, Iran’s nuclear program remains, by most accounts in tact; the Trump Administration’s bombast that the program was entirely destroyed cannot be taken seriously. Yes, the “decapitation” of Iran’s military leadership was undoubtedly a serious blow; but this was not a repeat of the cell phone assassinations of Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon. The new Iranian military leadership stepped up almost seamlessly. The cyber-attack was repaired.

Within twelve hours after Israel initiated hostilities, the Iranian government absorbed the blow, and it turned its fire power on Israel. The results of Iran’s counterstrike were devastating for the Israeli state which had seriously underestimated Iran’s military stamina, the strength of the government in Teheran and the amount of public support the Islamic Republic enjoyed from the Iranian population,

Targeting/eliminating Iran’s nuclear energy program was always at best a secondary, if not tertiary goal, a ruse for what for decades has been a coordinated U.S.-Israeli goal of regime change in Iran. It didn’t work. The world – and the American public in particular – were led to believe a lie, that in recent weeks Iran has become close to developing a nuclear weapons and that if Iran’s nuclear program was not frozen in its tracks by a major military strike, Iran would soon be in possession of a nuclear bomb, thus changing the regional balance of power throughout the Middle East.

What is somehow (purposely?) unstated in the mainstream media, or at best underplayed, is the fact that, as Trita Parsi has pointed out that “two nuclear weapons states (U.S., Israel) have bombed a non-nuclear weapons state, Iran, without having been attacked. This will send shockwaves throughout the world, and more countries will conclude that they will need nuclear weapons to deter existing nuclear weapons states.”

While the hysteria created about the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program reached the height of shrillness, throughout this crisis there was virtually no mention of the fact that Israel has been developing an arsenal of nuclear weapons (with U.S., French and UK assistance), probably going back to the 1950s, that it has refused to join the United Nations based nuclear weapons monitoring program, the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA). Nor has it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear energy. Iran is a signatory to both.

2.

As noted above, the main goal of the U.S.-Israeli blitzkrieg on Iran was less about destroying Iran’s nuclear program and much more a well-planned, twice rehearsed plan to overthrow the Iranian government, regime change using Iran’s nuclear program as a ruse or pretext, failed. It was not a spontaneous decision made in the heat of battle based on phony Palantir analysis that Iran is about to have or already has a nuclear weapon as was shouted from the rooftops by both the U.S. and Israeli mainstream media.

Frankly Washington’s plans to overthrow the government of Iran have been in the cooker almost since just after the victory of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Operation Midnight Hammer is simply the latest variation on this theme. although with just a little research it is possible to uncover most of the U.S. plans at regime change in Iran that go back decades.

Although there are such plans even earlier, in 1996 already Netanyahu and then U.S. President Bill Clinton initiated “Operation Clear Break“. Operation Clear Break was a long-term plan to overthrow or partition the governments of seven countries: they were Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, and Somalia. Last but not least on the list was Iran. The fact of the matter is this has been a long-term policy that has played out over more than thirty years, the overall consequences of which has resulted in the deepening destabilization of the entire Middle East region; herein lies the disaster that is U.S. Middle East policy.

Key players in this destabilization by what amounts to as an ultra-Zionist alliance of Lindsay Graham, Richard Blumenthal, Tom Cotton, the C, I.A., Mossad and others. With wars raging across North Africa, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, an Israeli genocide Gazan Palestinians, and now add to this a war with Iran and a more accurate picture of Clear Break “accomplishments” comes to the fore.

Then in 2009 the Brookings Institute, along with the (Zionist) Saban Center, published  “Which Path To Persia“, which detailed a long-term program to destabilize and overthrow the Iranian government (Islamic Republic).

Why even bring up these old foundation reports now in 2025?

There is good reason because it indicates that the pretext for the recent U.S.-Israeli major aggression against Iran is not a result of recent, patently false news that Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons based upon the Palantir analysis more focused on projections that actual facts. In accepting Palantir’s analysis the Trump Administration rejected the National Intelligence Estimates (work of 16 U.S. intelligence organizations) that Iran has no program to develop nuclear weapons.

As Brian Berletic points out Which Path To Persia is nothing less than a blueprint for what different administrations (doesn’t matter if they are Democrat or Republican) have tried to implement since. As reported in the Israeli press, twice before actually implementing its bombing attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites, the U.S. and Israel did two previous trial runs.

Add to this the fact that preparing such strikes, which included a cyber-attack on Iranian anti-missile sites, transporting and assembling drones, identifying targets as a result of satellite and human intelligence, identifying the people (“targets” as they are called) to assassinate both among the military leadership and the country’s top nuclear scientists as well as building up the logistical base for such operations took a considerable amount of time – “months of planning“.

Weirdly (to my way of thinking anyway) the targeting of Iran’s nuclear energy plants was nothing less than a ruse for the overall goal of regime change. There was a clear pattern to the attack:

• decapitate the Iranian line commanders gathered at a meeting
• at the same time assassinate key Iranian nuclear scientists as well as their families and many other civilians who lived in the same apartment complex
• disabling air defenses in the central and western regions of Iran using electronic warfare
• (afterwards) apparently Israel also attempted to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei

The attempt of this long planned combined offensive was to create such a shock to the body politic of Iran that the government would collapse. The sudden combined shock of decapitation, assassination and cyber warfare in one single strike combined with loss of air defense systems which were taken down – that all this would provoke a collapse of the state itself. The Iranian state would become paralyzed, the logic goes, the population would become demoralized and paralyzed; chaos would result, and the state would collapse.

There were several models for this:

• The Israelis were “impressed” with the Hezbollah cellphone assassination/decapitation campaign
• American neo-cons (Bolton and Co.) were very much taken with the collapse of the Assad government in Syria, the way that in response to sanctions and an intensive counterinsurgency campaign that Syria imploded, just fell apart.

Both the Israeli and U.S. neo-cons followed such logic and believed that Iran would just collapse like a house of cards on the first day. Not only did they anticipate such a result but further, they were counting on another “color revolution” to overthrow the Iranian government that would include “all of the usual elements” – car bombings, civil unrest, blowing up the state press and information services, so that the state would not be able to recuperate.

But the plan failed.

Iran was able to redress the cyber-attack on its missile defense system. The Iranian population, if anything, rose as one – or close to it – in defense of the Islamic Republic government. Then a few days later Iran launched its missile response to Israel, stunning the Israeli leadership, doing greater strategic damage to Israel than it has ever suffered in any previous war … and in the process, changing the balance of power in the Middle East and probably beyond.

More on that in the next part of this series.