The end of the 12-Day War: why did the US and Israel make this blunder?

As the Iran-Israel war entered its 12th day, with Israel's announcement that it had accepted a ceasefire, it seems to have stopped for now. Although in the first hours Israel announced that Iran had violated the ceasefire with a missile it launched and that they would respond, it appears this will not continue. The prevailing atmosphere, the objective conditions, and the course of the war up to now require a ceasefire at this stage for all parties.

In fact, the ceasefire at this stage, just like the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that took place in December, points to a result in which Israel's nose has been rubbed in the dirt. Israel, which plunged into this war with great arrogance, relying excessively at first on the weapons and full support it received from the US and, in fact, on its perception of and intelligence about Iran, found at the end of 12 days that it faced a situation in which the calculation at home did not match the market at all. The intelligence it had on Iran took it only so far on the battlefield, but afterward it was left alone with the realities on the ground.

The reality on the ground is that, during the cold war it conducted for 50 years, Iran developed defense technology beyond estimates, and the possibility at each stage of its trying a new weapon it never expected turned within a few days into a complete nightmare for Israel. The nightmare turned into a real catastrophe for Israel when its much-trusted iron dome was riddled with holes and rockets began raining on the streets of Tel Aviv, the ports of Haifa, oil facilities and air bases.

Just as it had not expected such heavy resistance, indeed beyond resistance a tremendous fighting power, from Gaza and Hamas, which it has for 17 years been trying to keep virtually in a prison, in a concentration camp, it did not expect to be harmed by Iran's war technologies either. Even the intoxication of victory it had fallen into early on with its assassination attempts against important names on the first day turned into a bar that is now impossible for it to clear.

Although Iran lost so many important men, in the following days, as if nothing had happened, it rained down on Israel as a terror with the hypersonic rockets it tried for the first time.

When a comparison is made between the parties' losses in the war, it may reveal an asymmetric situation. But when a comparison is made in terms of the effect of these losses on the parties, we can say with ease that Israel's loss is far greater and that this is the real factor that forced it to a ceasefire at this stage.

Just as at the stage reached so far in the war it launched against Gaza, Israel is far from achieving its initial goals. It is said that Iran's nuclear facilities were hit, but it is also very clear that this was only for show. In fact it had to be so from the US's standpoint as well; it was not to go further. Could it have gone further, was Iran empty-handed on this matter, was there no measure it could take? We can ask these questions one after another. Iran has already announced that, having been informed well in advance that its facilities would be bombed, it had smuggled out its enriched uranium. Moreover, with the power of resistance it showed both against Israel and against US bases, it showed that, in the event of a possible escalation, its hands were by no means empty. This situation showed that going to a balance by weighing mutual power was a more reasonable path for both sides.

It must be understood that an Iran that has lost its nuclear threat power would have no functionality left for the US's Middle East policy, and therefore even if the US could go further it could not risk it, for this reason alone. Further weakening Iran would have deeply shaken the balance the US envisages for the region. But even up to this stage, this attack has already shaken the US's balance concerning the Middle East considerably. Because from this hour on, the Iran card that the US used against the Gulf countries has been considerably eroded as a card. The outcome of the Foreign Ministers meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul showed that, in the face of such an attack to which Muslims have been exposed by the Israel-US alliance and with Western support, the threat perceptions they harbored toward one another have been replaced by the threat posed by the Crusader-Zionist alliance. From this hour on, we have entered a path in which the relationship of tutelage operated by presenting Iran as a threat to the Gulf countries will no longer work as it did before.

That Trump was so eager for a ceasefire in the war he described as a 12-day war also had a side that exposed Israel's tutelage over US policy. Trump was in fact dragged by Netanyahu into a war with Iran that he did not want at all. The tutelage that Netanyahu can use so easily over US foreign policy on behalf of Israel has come to the fore again as a serious problem to be questioned above all by US citizens. The extreme inconsistency Trump, who is already distinguished by never keeping to what he said, has displayed during this war must have driven distrust of US policy to the extreme. An article published two days ago in the Wall Street Journal underlines that US national security has in the medium term taken a devastating blow as a result of its political inability to say "no" to Israel. The same article said that Israel's missiles are running out and that the US does not have enough missiles left to supply it. The same article also says the following: "Israel uses a four-part missile defense system, and the Arrow 3s, the interceptors of long-range ballistic missiles, are the 'crown jewels' of its systems. Israelis claim they have shot down about 90 percent of the 370 missiles Iran has fired. But the problem has always been the same: the Iranians have more long-range ballistic missiles than the Israelis have missile defense systems. If the missile defense systems run out and Iran still has launch capability, this will create great chaos in Israel simply by looking at the numbers.

The US is helping, but its resources are also quite limited, for the years ahead. This is a known, for years known, large gap in US defense that I and others have written about for years but that has not yet been addressed.

The US has enough smart missiles to sustain a full-scale war for 3-4 weeks, and then it would take 4-6 years, continuing to produce missiles without firing them, to reach current levels. During that time the US, Israel, Ukraine, Europe and others have no missiles."

In the rest of the article it is said that the US, which Israel trusted so much, has no capacity to sustain a war with Iran in the long term, and moreover that US security is also put at risk by weapons expected to be used against China being spent cheaply and needlessly here.

Indeed, Israel, which set out to destroy Iran's nuclear program and war capacity, could withstand the response it received from Iran for at most 12 days. Today Iran is much closer, from the standpoint of implementing its nuclear program, than before the war. Israeli aggression has given it a chance to regroup strength greatly at the national level and has also virtually given it a vindication in the international arena. After all, there is no greater threat, for all humanity, than Israel, which sees Iran's nuclear program as a threat. Even if the nuclear threat has some reality, it is not for Israel, a perpetrator of genocide and a threat to humanity, to take measures against it. Indeed, with this aggression it has distinguished itself as a great danger that deserves every kind of measure against it, including nuclear ones.