Iranian Arrogance or the Saddam Syndrome

With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that the Iranian regime, now forty-seven years old, is currently facing only two options, with no third alternative available. Either it surrenders to American conditions, which do not differ significantly from Israeli conditions, or it faces a war with the United States from which Iran would not emerge unscathed.

Is the “Islamic Republic” capable of acknowledging that there is no escape from dealing with the new reality in the region, instead of persisting in arrogance in the manner of Saddam Hussein? At the beginning of 1991, Saddam, the ruler of Iraq, believed that he would be able to negotiate with the United States on equal footing, despite the fact that the position of the administration of George H. W. Bush was perfectly clear. He was left with only two choices: withdraw from Kuwait unconditionally, or expose Iraq to a war that would return it to the Stone Age. The late Iraqi ruler did not understand the region, the world, or the meaning of balances of power.

It is not the habit of the United States to deploy a military force of the scale it has deployed in the Middle East and the Gulf merely to stage a symbolic display of strength. A country the size of America does not move such power without clearly defined objectives. These objectives consist of reaching an agreement with the “Islamic Republic” that includes, at a minimum, ending the Iranian nuclear program, ending the ballistic missile program, and dismantling their launch platforms. The missiles are important, and the platforms are equally important, if not more important.

There remains a third condition related to Iran’s regional arms. The most prominent of these arms is Hezbollah in Lebanon, which continues to practice stubbornness while ignoring that it has lost the “Gaza support war” and that its weapons have never been anything other than weapons serving Israel and serving everything that can contribute to the destruction of Lebanon. The most striking example of this remains the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in these very days of the year 2005. The party, which is nothing more than a brigade within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, assassinated Rafiq Hariri in order to eliminate a serious attempt to return the country to the regional map and to halt its use as a card in the promotion of the Iranian expansionist project toward the Mediterranean.

A second American aircraft carrier will arrive in the region: the Gerald Ford. It will come to join another aircraft carrier already present in the Gulf, the Abraham Lincoln. There are American intentions that cannot be ignored. Iran will have to submit, either peacefully or by force. It cannot be ignored that the “Islamic Republic” has lost all the wars it has fought on the margins of the Gaza war that erupted on October 7, 2023. There is no need to repeat that the jewel of the Iranian expansionist project, namely Hezbollah, no longer exists in the form it once did. The party now possesses nothing but the card of threatening the Lebanese with civil war in the context of its attempt to retain its weapons, despite the fact that it has been proven that these weapons are of no notable use when it comes to confronting Israel. Moreover, the party refuses to acknowledge that Syria is no longer under Iranian dominance.

At the beginning of 1991, a meeting was held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva between the American Secretary of State James Baker and the Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. Baker explained to Tariq Aziz and to the delegation accompanying him that there was no room for negotiation and that Iraq had no option other than withdrawal from Kuwait. The Iraqi minister read the letter handed to him by the American Secretary of State, then left it on the negotiating table, claiming that the language used made him unable to transmit the message to Saddam Hussein. The letter remained in its place. I personally saw it lying on the table in the room where James Baker and Tariq Aziz had met. I later learned that this historically important letter is still preserved in the hotel’s safe.

Has Iran understood, in light of the negotiations that took place in Muscat between its Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and the American delegation composed of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, that there is no possibility of betting on differences between the United States and Israel? Has it understood that there is no escape from recognizing that the file of ballistic missiles and their launch platforms is no less important than the file of the Iranian nuclear program and the file of the arms affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard in this Arab country or that one?

The regime in Iran has no choice other than seeking to benefit from the experience of Saddam Hussein, whose political blindness prevented him from understanding the meaning of the United States assembling a military force in the Gulf immediately after the Iraqi army’s occupation of Kuwait. Saddam believed that America was joking and that his army was still capable of holding out in Kuwait. He never understood balances of power. What is alarming in 2026 is that Iran appears to be committing the same mistake that Saddam committed in 1991 and repeated in 2003 when George W. Bush and his aides decided to remove him from power.

What further complicates matters in Iran is the internal situation in the country. External failure is accompanied by internal failure at every level, particularly in the economic sphere. It is not true that there is an Iranian majority that embraces the slogans launched by the regime. There is an Iranian majority that prefers a culture of life over a culture of death. If this were not the case, the Iranian people across the country would not have been in revolt against the regime since the beginning of the year. There is no doubt that American intelligence services are fully aware of what is taking place in Iran, as is Israel, which had already realized in 1979 that the Shah’s regime had ended and called upon Iranian Jews to leave the country. Most Jews left Iran at that time in response to the instructions of the Israeli embassy, headed then by Ori Lubrani.

Within a few weeks, it will become clear whether the Iranian regime has chosen to follow the path of Saddam Hussein or the path of prudence, which requires acknowledging that there is an inevitable price to be paid as a consequence of losing wars, just as Germany and Japan did at the end of the Second World War.