In every modern conflict, the narrative precedes the bombs. Long before the first missiles are fired — months, sometimes years in advance — a carefully constructed story has already prepared world opinion to accept the unacceptable. The war against Iran is no exception to this rule. Yet something in this particular conflict resists the familiar logic of wartime communication: neither Washington nor Tel Aviv has ever clearly, consistently, or coherently articulated their strategic and tactical objectives. This absence of clarity, far from being an accident or a failure of messaging, constitutes in itself an analytical indicator of the first order.
For when wars are waged in pursuit of legitimate and acknowledged goals, those goals are proclaimed loudly and proudly. History remembers the precision with which the 1991 coalition defined its limited mandate: to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, nothing more. It remembers, too, the clarity — however grounded in deception — with which the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the war against Iran, that clarity is conspicuously, almost pointedly, absent. And this absence demands serious examination.
I. Strategic Incoherence as Symptom, Not Cause
Declared Objectives That Shift With the Wind
Since the outbreak of hostilities, the objectives officially proclaimed by the United States and Israel have undergone shifts so significant as to defy any coherent strategic logic. Depending on the period and the audience, the stated mission has variously been to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities, to neutralise pro-Iranian militias across the region, to weaken the regime of the Mullahs as a prelude to regime change, or simply to respond to whatever provocation happened to be most recent.
This instability of declared objectives cannot be explained away by the tactical improvisation inherent to any theatre of war. It reveals something more fundamental: the stated objectives are not the real objectives. Military strategists and geopolitical analysts call this the veil of strategic deception — the art of concealing one’s true intentions behind a screen of announced purposes designed to rally support, neutralise opposition, and obscure the adversary’s understanding of what is truly at stake.
The Absence of a Definition of Victory
A further and equally decisive analytical indicator lies in the incapacity — or refusal — of both belligerent powers to define what victory would actually look like. In every war fought for genuine and acknowledged purposes, political leaders can answer the question: When will we know that we have won? In the war against Iran, that question remains without a clear or credible answer. This fog is not innocent. It suggests that the war itself — its trajectory, its attrition, its destabilising effects — is the objective far more than any conclusive triumph.
II. The Anatomy of a Trap: Reproducing the Logic of the Iran-Iraq War
An Illuminating Historical Precedent
To understand what is truly unfolding, one must return to the precedent of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. That devastating conflict — which claimed between 500,000 and one million lives by various estimates — was in large measure encouraged, instrumentalised, and deliberately prolonged by external powers whose interests converged in the simultaneous exhaustion of both belligerents. The United States and Israel provided, to varying degrees and at different junctures, intelligence, weaponry, and logistical support to both sides — not to secure the victory of either, but to ensure that neither prevailed, and that both bled themselves to the point of ruin.
The consequences for the region were catastrophic: two neighbouring countries drained to the bone, economies laid waste, entire generations decimated, and intra-Muslim tensions — between Sunni and Shia — inflamed for decades to come. Meanwhile, Israel consolidated its strategic positions, extended its regional influence, and pursued its expansion in the West Bank and Gaza unencumbered by the prospect of a unified Arab-Muslim opposition.
Reproducing the Model: Setting the Gulf Ablaze Against Iran
The thesis advanced in this article is that the strategy deployed today against Iran seeks precisely to reproduce, under different geopolitical conditions, the devastating logic of the Iran-Iraq War. The undeclared objective would be to draw the Gulf states — Saudi Arabia foremost, followed by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and others — into a direct or proxy conflict against Iran, exploiting the historical, doctrinal, and geopolitical tensions between the Sunni Gulf world and the Shia Islamic Republic.
Such a conflict would produce exactly the desired effects: the exhaustion of the Gulf’s human and financial resources, the destruction of Iran’s military capabilities, the prolonged destabilisation of the entire region, and — above all — the permanent fragmentation of an Arab-Muslim space that, when united, constitutes a geopolitical force of an entirely different magnitude.
Netanyahou’s Declaration: An Inadvertent Confession
In this light, Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration — that Sunni and Shia Muslims alike are enemies of Israel — takes on considerable analytical significance. It constitutes, in its way, an inadvertent admission of the deeper logic at work.
For if Sunnis and Shias are indiscriminately perceived as enemies, then the objective cannot simply be the destruction of the Shia Iranian regime. It is something more fundamental: the weakening of the Muslim world as a whole, irrespective of its internal doctrinal divisions. In this worldview, inter-Muslim war is not a regrettable side effect — it is the purpose itself. It is the mechanism by which this comprehensive weakening is achieved without having to accomplish it directly, by leaving the peoples of the region to tear one another apart in the name of divisions that centuries of imperfect but real coexistence had, despite everything, managed to contain.
III. The Strategic Lucidity of the Arab World: Refusing the Trap
A Perception Sharpened by History and Suffering
That this scenario has not, to this point, fully materialised owes much to the strategic lucidity demonstrated by the principal Arab capitals. This lucidity did not descend from nowhere. It is the hard-won product of a painful history that has taught the region’s leaders to recognise the traps into which their predecessors stumbled.
The Gulf states, in particular, have absorbed the lessons of the Iran-Iraq War. They witnessed how that conflict — into which some of them had allowed themselves to be drawn, financially and politically, on the side of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — produced enduringly destabilising effects. They saw how Iraq, far from being the reliable ally they had been promised, turned upon Kuwait the moment the war was over. They measured the cost of a strategy of blind alignment with external powers whose interests do not coincide with their own.
The Normalisation Turning Point and Its Limits
The Abraham Accords of 2020 had seemed to open the way for the integration of the Gulf states into a regional architecture aligned with Israel and the United States. But the war in Gaza, unleashed in the aftermath of the events of October 7th, 2023, profoundly reconfigured the calculations of Arab capitals. The sheer scale of destruction in Gaza, Washington’s apparent indifference to Palestinian civilian casualties, and the increasingly overt expansionist declarations of the Israeli right made it politically impossible for Arab leaders to associate themselves publicly with the American-Israeli strategy in the region.
More fundamentally, the Gulf states came to perceive, with mounting acuity, that the logic of all-out confrontation with Iran would expose them to existential risks of considerable magnitude with no serious guarantee of protection from Washington. The question they have been asking themselves is not ideological — it is brutally pragmatic: In what kind of world shall we be living the morning after a major regional war? And the answer, in every Gulf chancery, is that this world would be immeasurably less favourable to them than the present order, for all its imperfections.
Arab De-escalation Diplomacy
It is, in this regard, deeply significant that the normalisation of Saudi-Iranian relations was achieved in 2023 under Chinese mediation. The choice of Beijing as mediator, in preference to Washington, constitutes a geopolitical signal of the first importance. It means that the Gulf states chose to engage directly with their Iranian neighbour, on the basis of mutual interests, rather than remaining prisoners of a logic of confrontation imposed from without.
This Arab movement toward de-escalation is precisely the dismantling of the strategic trap described in this article. By refusing to play the role that Washington and Tel Aviv appeared to have assigned them in a grand scenario of regional war, the Arab states exercised their own genuine strategic agency and delivered a stinging rebuttal to those who regard them as mere adjustment variables in a geopolitical equation whose parameters are held entirely by others.
IV. The Geopolitical Implications of a Trap Foiled
An International System in Accelerated Recomposition
The relative failure of the regional fragmentation strategy carries implications that extend far beyond the Middle Eastern theatre. It is part of a broader reordering of the international system, in which the American monopoly on defining the great regional geopolitical equations is being challenged with growing intensity.
China, Russia, Turkey, and to a lesser degree the European powers all have an interest in a Middle East not wholly subject to the American-Israeli logic. Their diplomatic interventions — at different levels and by different means — have contributed to keeping open channels of dialogue that might otherwise have been permanently closed.
The Potential Role of Algeria
Within this shifting landscape, Algeria occupies a singular position. Its history, its tradition of non-alignment, its consistent refusal to be drawn into the logic of competing blocs, its capital of credibility among the nations of the Global South, and its energy resources — which render it an indispensable partner for Europe — collectively endow it with a capacity for diplomatic influence that exceeds what a narrow measure of its military or economic power alone would suggest.
Algeria has maintained balanced relations with Iran without aligning itself with Tehran, preserved its ties with the Gulf states without endorsing their more adventurous policies, and maintained a critical distance from the United States and Israel without falling into the sterile posture of outright confrontational opposition. This equilibrium, so often misread, is in reality one of the most coherent expressions of a long-term strategic vision in a regional environment of exceptional volatility.
Conclusion: Hidden Wars and the Imperative of Clarity
The history of international relations is strewn with wars whose true objectives were not understood until decades after their conclusion. The Vietnam War, presented as a crusade against communism, was in reality an attempt to assert geopolitical control over a strategic region of Southeast Asia. The Iraq War of 2003, sold in the name of democracy and weapons of mass destruction, responded to oil and geostrategic imperatives that declassified archives have since brought to light.
The war against Iran belongs to this long tradition of double-bottomed conflicts, in which the official narrative serves to mobilise and legitimise, while the real objectives — more cynical, more deeply rooted, less admissible in polite company — pursue their course through the hidden corridors of strategic planning. The objective of fragmenting the Muslim world by fanning the flames of an Arab-Iranian war modelled on the Iran-Iraq conflict represents, in this light, the most coherent reading of a strategy whose declared contradictions find no other satisfactory explanation.
That the Arab states have, in their great majority, identified this trap and refused to fall into it constitutes one of the most significant geopolitical facts of this era. This collective refusal is not merely an act of national self-preservation: it is an assertion of strategic sovereignty, a rejection of tutelage, and a demonstration that the Arab world, steeled by its painful experience, is now capable of reading the great geopolitical manoeuvres with a lucidity that undoes the calculations of those who persist in believing it condemned to perpetual naivety.
History will judge whether this collective clarity proves sufficient to spare the region a devastating conflict. But even now, it stands as a geopolitical fact of considerable weight — one that deserves to be analysed, documented, and above all, understood in the full depth of its meaning and the full breadth of its consequences.
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