When Has Western Intervention in the Middle East Ever Gone Well?

Welcome to our new reality, one in which the US and Israel have hit the fast-forward button on catastrophe with no discernible plan. And while nobody knows exactly how things will play out in the coming days and weeks, history suggests ‘not well’. 

Since Saturday, Iran has been under sustained attack from the US and Israel. Its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed, along with dozens of key government figures. In response, Iran has unleashed a barrage of drone and missile strikes across the region. Israel has been most intensely targeted, but sites in half a dozen countries housing the bases of the US and its allies have been hit, from Cyprus to Oman. 

Does Operation Epic Fury – not exactly a name hinting at a rational plan – have an endgame? Is Iran’s response strategic or the wild flailing of a doomed regime? We don’t know. We do know, however, that there’s no such thing as a contained war in the Middle East. And that Western military fury has, in the past, only delivered epic fails.

US president Donald Trump has said the country’s illegal attack on Iran may continue for up to four weeks. That’s a lot of time for things to go very wrong. Already, three US service members have been killed in Iranian retaliatory attacks on, according to reports, a base in Kuwait. 

Of course, that’s a lot fewer casualties than the hundreds killed across Iran. These include well over a hundred people – mostly children – reported killed in a missile strike on a girls’ school in the country’s south.  

But if there’s one thing Americans are allergic to, it’s seeing their soldiers sacrificed on foreign adventures. Especially by a president who promised an end to military interventions abroad. It’s a sight American will likely have to grow used to, though, the longer the war – and it is a war, make no mistake – continues. 

After all, if Iran knows it can’t win outright (it can’t), it’s in its interests to hasten an end by making the unprovoked US attack maximally politically costly for Trump. They’ve got a headstart: just one in four Americans currently support the assault. So, US soldiers in the region will be prime Iranian targets.

Trump knows this – which is why he’s said there’ll be no US boots on the ground. What that means, though, is that there’s no real plan for Iran’s future once the bombing stops. You can destroy the regime from the air. But you can’t change it. 

In an address on Sunday night, Trump once again called on members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to “lay down your arms”. Who, though, is going to pick them up? He also promised an amnesty if they do. But without US or other forces in place, what guarantees their safety from the many regime-opposed Iranians who’ll – perhaps fairly – be interested in revenge? In that situation, the rational choice for the IRGC will be to cling on – fighting to the end, both internally and externally, to keep it.  

Iran may want to make the war costly to the US’s partners too. One of the more shocking sights over the weekend were missiles falling over the heads of Western influencers, vacationers and assorted tax-dodgers against the luxury skyscapes of Doha and Dubai. Those cities’ shiny slave-built hotels will look a lot less glamorous now that customers realise the war being waged just a hundred or so kilometres from their private beaches is no respecter of borders.   

Meanwhile, Britain’s prime minister Keir Starmer affirmed on Sunday night that the UK would dip its toe into the aimless action, lending the US military our bases in the region to launch attacks on Iran’s missile supplies. Within hours, a British base on Cyprus was struck by a drone. 

Fighting has also now spread to Lebanon, following a Hezbollah attack on Israel. 31 people have been reported killed in Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Beirut and south Lebanon. That’s a pattern that may well continue as other militias, from Yemen to Iraq, are activated by spreading violence and the political vacuums left in its wake. 

Trump, for his part, appears to believe that the Iranian people will rise up and take over their government. Perhaps. But a man with a desperate need to be recorded as one of history’s greatest statesmen is also a man easily persuaded to folly. There’s nothing harder to achieve than peace, especially when you’ve started a war. 

The more likely outcome is chaos: a failed Iran, riven by decades of internal strife, splintered into factions and constantly at war with itself. And there’s nothing Israel would like more.