Paul Rogers
OpenDemocracy / January 30, 2026
What would a US/Israel operation in Tehran look like? Research carried out two decades ago offers some answers.
On his way back from Davos last weekend, Donald Trump warned the Iranian leadership of a naval force heading for the Middle East with an implied threat of military action. Since then, an aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln has arrived in the Indian Ocean bordering the Arabian Sea and within the US Central Command’s area of operations.
Trump’s previous promise of US intervention in Iran if anti-government protesters were killed appears to have had little impact on the Tehran regime. Nearly 6,000 people have died and 41,800 detained, according to human rights groups, although new evidence suggests the death toll could be as high as 30,000 amid a determined cover-up by the state.
Even so, Trump’s current naval build-up seems less concerned with the mass killing of protestors than a US-led military operation to change the Tehran regime.
The US already has some 30,000 military personnel in the Middle East, with a carrier strike group now there as well. But, as I noted in my column last week, the Pentagon would prefer to have overwhelming power in the region for any operation against Iran, and a second carrier strike group headed by the USS George H W Bush, the world’s largest warship, is headed to the region.
A key issue is whether a joint US/Israeli operation is being considered, and that now seems likely. It would certainly fit in with the Netanyahu government’s vision for Israel’s future.
Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar suggests this vision goes a lot wider than Iran. Speaking during an official visit to Kazakhstan this week, Sa’ar said: “Proxy terror states in the Middle East – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen – must be dismantled. Without doing so, there will be no regional stability, and this is our objective.”
If a US/Israeli attack on Iran was on the cards, what would it look like and what might be the impact? Some possible answers can be found in Iran: Consequences of a War, a detailed analysis of a possible attack by the United States that I wrote for the Oxford Research Group 20 years ago.
That analysis assumed that the main target would be Iran’s nuclear ambitions, rather than regime change, and focused on a unilateral US attack with little direct Israeli involvement, rather than a joint operation. Yet it raised several issues that remain pertinent today.
The first is that both Israel and the US would put a premium on avoiding casualties among their own military. For Binyamin Netanyahu, deaths among Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) personnel are to be avoided like the plague, and for any IDF soldiers to be taken hostage in Iran would be disastrous.
Trump, too, would avoid the domestic opprobrium at all costs, which means that “collateral damage” from US air strikes will be tolerated rather than putting US troops on the ground. Heavy Iranian casualties would be acceptable to both Netanyahu and Trump, and the 2006 Oxford Research Group report forecast thousands of Iranian deaths. After all, the Israelis have killed 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with thousands more missing, and the US led two wars in Iraq and Syria that killed more than twice as many.
As to the attack itself, it now seems that early aims would include disabling Iranian air defences, killing the religious leadership in Tehran and the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (the police and the security forces responsible for killing protestors). If that was considered successful by the Israelis and Americans, then a short pause might follow to allow anti-regime elements the space to force a change of government.
Given their perceived successes in Venezuela, Gaza, the occupied West Bank and southern Lebanon, the US and Israeli leaderships do not lack confidence bordering on hubris.
They may get what they want, but if significant elements of the religious and security leaderships survive, then the next phase of the war would be days of intense attacks from Israel and the US, directed primarily at the IRGC and other military and paramilitary elements of the Iranian state.
If the theocratic regime survives and domestic mass public opposition to it fails to show itself, even after the thousands of deaths, then the IRGC and others could then begin to look to the future.
They might even threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, a significant shipping channel between Iran and the UAE, which Iran has reportedly already warned it will conduct live-fire naval exercises in next week. Closing it altogether would incite a global increase in oil prices and take us back to the disastrously stagflation-ridden days of the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, the war would continue.
If that sounds unlikely, then remember two quite separate factors. The first is two failed wars, in Afghanistan from 2001 and Iraq from 2003. Both appeared at first to be easily won but then took disastrous turns, with overoptimism verging on hubris playing a role.
The second is the big unknown when we look at how the IRGC and the Iranian military might react. It is easy to assume that Iran’s security establishments, already crippled by the overwhelming attacks by Israeli and US forces, will be in no position to offer much resistance, but that doesn’t factor in Iran’s development and large-scale production of cheap short-range armed drones over the past decade.
These drones have already been used to chilling effect in Ukraine by Russia, are easily hidden and their manufacture can be readily dispersed to numerous small factories. While few have the range to cause damage in Israel, many are well within range of plenty of US military forces, including its largest air base in the region, in Qatar, and the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
If there is one thing the Trump government cannot afford is American casualties. In a “normal” White House, we might hope that sensible strategists would think things through and would successfully advise caution this time around. In Trump’s White House, we are dealing with a singularly abnormal and unpredictable president who is losing support at home and badly needs a foreign diversion.
Paul Rogers is Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College
