At a news conference following the unfolding of the US-Israeli war on Iran, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed that there would be “no stupid rules of engagement” and boasted that the US military would shower Iran with “death and destruction from the sky all day long”.
Hegseth, who insists the campaign has so far achieved unprecedented successes, was echoing his commander-in-chief, US President Donald Trump, who has been declaring victory since the war against Iran started on 28 February and insisting that the Islamic republic’s leaders are “about to surrender”.
Rhetoric has always served as a vital strategic tool used by leaders to justify wars, demonise adversaries, mobilise popular support, and foster a national front. Iran is not a stranger to such a propaganda technique.
As a researcher and reporter during the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s, Hegseth and Trump’s bellicose and confrontational tone stirred memories for the present writer of Saddam Hussein’s vengeful rhetoric during that eight-year conflict.
Given that that war carried strong sectarian overtones, Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime often resorted to Islam’s holy book, the Quran, in its war propaganda. Its favourite verse was “so strike their necks and strike their fingertips.”
The Iranian propaganda machine was no less reliant on rhetorical strategies to fight back and survive the war. In their war discourse, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his associates used to refer to Saddam as Yazid, the mediaeval Umayyad caliph who Muslim Shias blame for the butchering of Imam Hussein, one of their most revered saints.
The Israelis also have their own war narrative that is deeply rooted in their biblical culture. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted the Torah to compare Iran to Amalek, invoking a command for “total annihilation” as he escalated the war.
A hardline Israeli columnist in the Jerusalem Post even wrote that the on-going war on Iran echoes across generations of Israelis from the Battle of Khaybar in the 6th century CE when an emerging Islamic army led by the Shias’ most revered leader, the Imam Ali bin Abi Talib, drove the Jewish tribes from the Arabian Peninsula.
Such rhetoric, however, seems to be hiding perceptions, beliefs, and identities in order to manipulate enemies and serve as a tool to confuse and even to sap conventional military power.
In Iran’s case, where the country has to face Trump’s idiosyncratic mode of war, a psychological and asymmetrical mode of warfare targeting the enemy’s mind and making it guess at the endgame has become the Islamic republic’s strategy.
As it becomes increasingly clear that the goal of the war being waged by the United States and Israel, now approaching its fourth week, is regime change and dismantling Iran, the Iranian leaders realise that for the regime to survive and Iran remains intact they have to play a long game while keep hitting back.
It is clear to the Iranians that the American-Israeli side maintains operational and weapons superiority, putting them at a disadvantage and lowering the level of Iran’s defence capabilities.
Militarily, Iran is no match for the firepower of the US and Israel. Their combined campaign has done great damage to Iran’s leadership, missile sites, navy, and other targets.
While the American and Israeli air forces have maintained superiority over Iran, their cyber-technology has also played a large role in the so-called “pre-positioning” for the war.
For example, surveillance networks were effective in the preparations for the strike that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several of his commanders at the outset of the war with the intention of creating a power vacuum in Iran.
The strikes have also targeted civilian infrastructure such as oil hubs, fuel depots, power stations, and ports, hoping to trigger a popular uprising that would pave the way for the regime’s collapse.
However, instead Iran’s position has remained steadfast without a palpable change, underscoring its resilience to the United States and Israel and its choice of a wider confrontation over compromise.
The Iranian leaders have defied Trump and sought to undermine and even ridicule his and Netanyahu’s claims of victory, describing their war as a lost cause.
They were quick to put their house in order after the killing of Khamenei and the appointment of his son Mojtaba as his successor. The move was a humiliation for Trump, who had earlier demanded a new leader of his choice.
The regime seems to be in control in Iran and rallying behind the new leader, with new appointments being made to key military posts to succeed those who were killed and sending a message to Trump that the regime will not be cowed by the military campaign.
Three weeks into the war, Iran, already struggling under the weight of economic sanctions, has been copping with the war, although with the expected difficulties and despite the climbing death toll and destruction.
Iran appears to have conducted a significant breakthrough in its military posture in the war despite the disparity in capabilities between its armed forces and those of its adversaries.
Its operational tactics indicate that it aims at widening the conflict to frustrate Israel and the United States. Its strategy, meanwhile, suggests it is not fighting for victory in any conventional sense but for survival.
Given the technological superiority, intelligence capabilities, and advanced military hardware of the US and Israel, Iran has invested heavily in its ballistic missile capabilities, long-range drones, and a network of allied armed groups across the region.
The Iranian ballistic missiles used in the war against Israel have proven to be more effective than in previous conflicts, as are the short-range rockets fired at the Gulf countries.
Independent observers have noticed that the ballistic missiles with cargo warheads carrying cluster sub-munitions fired at Israel have been successful in avoiding ground-based interception and Israel’s air defences.
Iran’s drones, especially the low-cost one-way attack Shahed-136 type fired at Israel and the Gulf nations, have proven to be deadly.
Vastly more consequential in the war, however, has been Iran’s effective shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz in response to US military strikes on its oil and shipping infrastructure. The key waterway serves as the only gateway to the rest of the world for huge amounts of oil and natural gas.
The closure of the strategic passageway out of the Arabian Gulf has sent out global shockwaves, raising energy prices and disrupting supply chains worldwide.
Iran’s response in the Gulf has forced Trump to abandon one of the pillars of the US strategy in the Middle East when he refused to send warships to unblock the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Broadly speaking, Iran appears to have built a strategy around deterrence and endurance that it hopes will succeed in frustrating its adversaries and lay bare their miscalculations about its response to a conflict that it sees as an existential threat.
Iran’s leaders have been preparing for this moment for years, and it can be traced back to the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran War. Like in this campaign, that war also provided the Islamic regime with a rallying cause for mobilisation and survival.
As a researcher at Iraq’s War College during the war and later a battlefield reporter, I recall how the then underdog regime of Khomeini exhorted Iranians to defend their homeland and Islam in the face of more powerful Iraqi “invaders”.
One of the pressing questions that occupied the minds of Iraqi army commanders and foreign analysts then was how the Iranian regime with significantly lower combat capabilities was able to remain steadfast in a war considered the longest in the 20th century.
Among Saddam’s objectives in launching the war was to weaken the newly installed Islamic regime in Iran in order to contain the Iranian Revolution, replace Iran as the main regional power, and promote his own pan-Arab leadership.
Trump’s declared maximalist goals like insisting that Iran names a leader who will submit to him is a no less menacing danger than Saddam’s goal forty years ago.
Iranian culture deeply values patience, often emphasising that persistence brings success. On Saturday, many defiant Iranians posted on social media a post that read “this, too, shall pass,” underscoring their endurance.
One of the images from the Iraq-Iran War still vivid in my memory is of an old Iraqi villager appearing on national TV and telling Saddam that waging war on Iran was a miscalculation.
“What made you fall into this trap,” he asked. “They [the Iranians] are strong-headed,” the old man, who could hardly be heard, told the Iraqi dictator in a video broadcast on television to showcase his publicity stunts among the people.
The unexpected address by an elderly man to Saddam that night remained in the thoughts of many Iraqis during the war, which saw the deaths of one million people from both sides.
Iran did not win the war with Iraq, but its Islamic regime survived and outlasted the Saddam regime in Iraq. This collapsed in the US-led war on Iraq in 2003 and was replaced by a Shia-led government.
That “victory” was attributed to Iran’s defensive structure that ensured that the country could continue fighting even after losing battles. It was a strategy of endurance and deterrence, blending unconventional, asymmetric warfare with conventional military capabilities in an effort to project Iran’s power in the face of a stronger opponent.
This hybrid doctrine, given the name of “Mosaic Defence,” has been continuously updated and upgraded over the decades and is built around a structure of multiple command and operational levels to provide flexibility and longevity.
The concept and control aims to set a defensive structure that integrates multiple power resources instead of concentrating power in a single command chain that can be paralysed by decapitation strikes.
Rhetoric aside, in the present war it would be naive to assume that the Iranian strategists are planning for a straightforward battlefield and an all-out victory against the military prowess of the United States and Israel.
Iran’s offensive and defensive paradigm is a realistic war philosophy that explains how states can operate when they are at a disadvantage against a superior power such as the US-Israel coalition.
This hybridity is often misunderstood by Western and Arab analysts when they argue that in 1988 Khomeini had to drink from a “poisoned chalice” by agreeing to a ceasefire with Iraq or when they ridicule Iran’s current asymmetric methodology.
The country’s long-term approach succeeded in foiling Saddam’s hopes of a quick victory over Khomeini’s regime in the 1980s. It taught the Iranians a lesson in navigating defeat and to put off aiming for any straightforward battlefield victory.
The Iranian leadership today is trying to frame its survival in the face of two superior and determined powers with the aim of delivering a humiliating defeat to Trump and Netanyahu, who in turn insist that they will not accept anything less than Iran’s surrender.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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