Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment, a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials say has “only just begun.” The findings, confirmed to The Washington Post by three people familiar with the report’s contents, raise doubts about President Donald…

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The Guardian reports: The president of Iran has rejected Donald Trump’s call for the country’s unconditional surrender as a “dream”, while issuing a rare apology for Iranian attacks that hit neighbouring states, even as missiles and drones continued to strike Gulf countries. In a prerecorded address broadcast on state television on Saturday, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said the country would never capitulate, responding to remarks by the US president, who said on Friday that only Iran’s total submission could bring…

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Axios reports: Iraq’s Kurds are caught in a three-way vise as the Iran war spills across their border: They’re uncertain, based on President Trump’s messaging, whether the U.S. actually wants regime change next door. They’re under pressure to open the border from Iranian Kurds who want to fight the regime. And they’re facing a public threat — backed by a private warning — that Iran will retaliate if those militants attack from Iraqi Kurdish soil. Why it matters: The Kurds of northern Iraq…

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  Iran’s strategy isn’t to defeat the US militarily. Trita Parsi argues that it’s to make the cost high enough, fast enough, to collapse domestic support before Iran loses. With MAGA turning against the war, oil markets destabilizing, and both parties alarmed by talk of ground troops, Trump urgently needs a face-saving exit. Plus, Parsi believes that Iran’s revolutionary system was built to withstand exactly this kind of pressure.

The Washington Post reports: Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to attack American forces in the Middle East, the first indication that another major U.S. adversary is participating — even indirectly — in the war, according to three officials familiar with the intelligence. The assistance, which has not been previously reported, signals that the rapidly expanding conflict now features one of America’s chief nuclear-armed competitors with exquisite intelligence capabilities. Since the war began Saturday, Russia has passed Iran the…

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Marc Lynch writes: Iran’s bombardment of its Gulf neighbors has inexorably dragged them into a war that they had desperately hoped to avoid. The potential entry of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia into direct war alongside Israel and the United States represents the first full-scale manifestation of America’s ambitions for the Middle Eastern order it has overseen for decades. Washington has always dreamed of Arab-Israeli cooperation against Iran without resolving the Palestinian issue. Here it is. It…

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Ellie Geranmayeh and Julien Barnes-Dacey write: Europeans had weeks of notice that US president Donald Trump was about to trigger a war in the Middle East. The conflict is now wreaking carnage in the world’s most energy-rich region on an hourly basis, increasing the direct costs to Europeans and boosting Russia’s war coffers. But Europe’s collective response has been, at best, a fiasco—and at worst, strategic lunacy. Europe on the sidelines Instead of looking for ways to press Trump to…

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The New Republic reports: The U.S. Navy’s attack on an Iranian frigate, the IRIS Dena, on Wednesday was the first time an American submarine has sunk an enemy ship since World War II. But the Dena may not have been armed because it was returning from an international exercise in the Indian Ocean, and the U.S. Navy likely knew it because it was taking part in the same exercise. Both the United States and Iran were taking part in the…

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