The gap between the victory albums and the war goals reveals more than anything else our deep hunger to finally win. The primary goal set for the war was to dismantle the Iranian nuclear core and remove the existential threat, as the Prime Minister put it. Well, there are still question marks regarding the damage caused by the bombings, but a fairly broad consensus has already formed: Iran still possesses uranium enriched to 60%. This is the assessment of the European Union, U.S. intelligence, and Israeli intelligence. Apart from Donald Trump, no one claims otherwise. It’s unclear whether Iran still holds all 408 kilograms, or if part of it was split, some buried, but what it does have is enough to serve as a basis for building several atomic bombs.
The implication is that the project has only been set back by a few months. If the damage is less, the celebration of a historic victory hasn’t moved the project back one minute. In terms of motivation, it may even have pushed it forward. The Iranians want to throw off the monitoring cameras and are unwilling to accept the IAEA chairman.
The second goal was to eliminate the ballistic missile project, which Benjamin Netanyahu also called an “existential threat.” Here, even the army and Netanyahu don’t claim the project was destroyed. Throughout the war, estimates were given on the percentage of launchers destroyed. The highest was 60%. Even if that number is correct, the Iranians still have hundreds of ballistic missiles and launchers remaining. During the war, army briefings claimed that the ballistic missile production capability was destroyed. However, this claim was eventually abandoned, and a senior military official admitted privately that there was no intelligence basis for it.
The third goal Netanyahu set was that Iran would no longer fund terrorist organizations — a goal he only added midway through the operation, during the wave of euphoria. By the end of the operation, he stopped talking about this goal, and currently Iran is not restricted in continuing to fund the Houthis, Hezbollah, Shiite militias in Iraq, or Hamas.
A puzzling part of the euphoria concerns the price we paid. It’s worth mentioning that although the country is paralyzed, many of us are trembling in bomb shelters, buildings are collapsing, and Ben Gurion Airport is shut down, this is still far less than the "reference scenarios." Moreover, many Iranian attacks went unreported. The Iranians managed to hit many IDF bases and strategic sites. Censorship forbids publishing the exact locations of the hits, claiming it would help the Iranians target their missiles. This is a weak argument. If they hit Weizmann Institute, oil refineries, and Soroka Hospital — and those are just the reported places — it seems they don’t need Israeli media reports. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that the real reason is a semi-Iranian excuse in essence: public morale, propaganda. The truth is that we too were hit hard, and it’s no wonder Trump keeps saying both sides are “exhausted.”
So how can a war that failed to achieve any of its objectives and came at such a heavy cost be branded as such a successful war? The answer lies in the fantastic performance of the Air Force, intelligence, and the Mossad. The Iranian regime was exposed at its greatest moment of weakness since the revolution, including the protest waves of 1999 and 2009. Hopefully, exposing this weakness will affect its ability to hold onto power. Our military strength certainly boosts our standing worldwide, especially in the Gulf states, which received an important lesson about who has the military power to restrain the monster at their borders.
In 2009, Israel’s first real round against the new ruler of Gaza, Hamas, took place: “Operation Cast Lead.” It was considered a fairly successful round, “the Hamas fighters were already ready to shave their beards,” the IDF used to say. We remember how that story unfolded.