Aletho News

Is The War Against Iran Over?

It is easier to start than end wars, but this one appears to have run its course

By Mouin Rabbani | April 8, 2026

Is the war against Iran over?

The aerial massacre conducted by Israel in Beirut Wednesday, the Iranian response further limiting passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and a number of other incidents suggest the agreement reached Tuesday is not only fragile but on the verge of collapse.

Yet the more likely scenario is that these are the death throes of a failed war, and that Israel’s furious efforts to re-ignite a full-scale war will fail.

Let’s recall what happened on Tuesday. That morning the US leader, Donald Trump, threatened that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”.

Shortly before the 8pm deadline for yet another genocide in the Middle East, Pakistan announced that the US and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire. Iranians celebrated, Arabs and particularly those in the Gulf breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and Israel and its flunkies went into meltdown.

What changed?

As recent reporting in the New York Times makes clear, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in February successfully sold this war to Trump as one that would be short, decisive, and guaranteed to succeed. A quickie like no other.

With the exception of self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Trump’s advisors all had serious doubts about the Israeli plan, with one describing it as “farcical” and another dismissing the associated optimism as “bullshit”. But being loyal yes-men, they all signed off on it.

The war was intended to achieve Iranian capitulation or collapse within days, and failing that Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities were to be successfully eliminated within a few short weeks.

The Iranians would be so overwhelmed they would be unable to meaningfully retaliate, and the Islamic Republic would cease to exist before it could choke off the Strait of Hormuz and affect global energy supplies.

Success was so certain there was no need to prepare for any contingencies, let alone develop a Plan B.

More than a month later the US has accepted a ceasefire without any of its objectives achieved. Nor have Israel’s been. No regime change, no state collapse, no de-nuclearization, not even a significant degradation of Iran’s ballistic missile program. An attempted operation near Isfahan last week, the purpose of which appears to have been to establish a base within Iranian territory, went disastrously wrong.

More importantly, Iran was not only able to absorb a series of devastating blows and consistently retaliate against states throughout the region, and target and credibly threaten vital infrastructure, but Tehran also established unilateral control over the Strait of Hormuz. In response, the most powerful navy in history went out of its way to stay well over the horizon.

Iran, in other words, managed to transform the war against it into first a regional crisis and then a global economic crisis. While the US-Israeli bombing campaign continued to focus on the degradation of Iran’s military and industrial and civilian infrastructure, and although it inflicted enormous damage and killed thousands, the US focus visibly shifted to the economic ramifications of its war and re-opening the Strait of Hormuz by hook or by crook.

Washington shifted from achieving its original objectives to addressing the consequences of its own actions.

The US came to the realization that it had too eagerly purchased the counterfeit goods offered at a bargain basement price by Israel, and that achieving its objectives through warfare would require a massive commitment of additional resources. Not only was success still not guaranteed, but the disruption even success would entail would be prohibitively costly.

All the indications are that it was the US which called it a day, and that it was the US that engaged Pakistan, China, and others to bring its adventure to an end.

Trump’s genocidal threats about ending Iranian civilization appear to have been made after he knew a ceasefire was imminent, and as such may well have primarily reflected his need to look tough before accepting reality.

The suggestions that the US and Israel are using the two-week ceasefire to re-arm and resupply doesn’t really make sense. The equipment and weaponry most needed will take months if not years to replace, and the active war did not prevent the US from deploying tens of thousands of additional forces to the Middle East.

The coming days will demonstrate whether or not Iran is serious about bringing Israeli aggression against not only Iran but also Lebanon to an end. Indications are that it is. If indeed so, and as it has stated, Washington will need to choose between Israeli aggression and the Strait of Hormuz.

If that proves an insufficient incentive, and Tehran is serious, it has other options it can deploy. It is unlikely that the US will choose to fall into an Israeli trap, at even greater cost, yet again. Unlikely, but not impossible.

Over the course of the past six weeks Iran has sustained much more damage than it has inflicted. Yet strategically it emerges in a strengthened position relative to where it stood in late February. It neither capitulated, nor collapsed, nor sued for peace.

More to the point, absent this war Iran would not have been able to establish unilateral control over the Strait of Hormuz, and it is not going to fully relinquish this new-found power and leverage over the global economy. In real terms, this is worth more to Iran than a nuclear weapons arsenal, which it may well now develop anyway if negotiations do not result in a satisfactory agreement.

If and when negotiations commence, Iran will put less on the table, and demand more, than it accepted in either the 2015 JCPOA unilaterally renounced by the first Trump administration, or in negotiations with the US during the past year.

The US can make a deal, or refuse one, but at present it does not seem that resuming the war for the purpose of unattainable objectives is a realistic option for Washington. A return to maximum pressure is also no longer an option, because in the Strait of Hormuz Iran can now respond with maximum pressure of its own.

I’ve been wrong before and will of course be wrong again, and perhaps by tomorrow morning Israel or the US will have dropped a nuclear bomb on Iran or are preparing a ground invasion for next month.

Never underestimate the willingness of Americans to be led to disaster by their Israeli proxy. With actors as fanatic, irrational, and hubristic as the US and Israel, anything is possible.

Two issues to look for are Lebanon and Hegseth. Will Washington continue to indulge Israeli aggression against Lebanon, or will it order it to stop in order to wind this crisis down? As for Hegseth, if he is sent back to Rupert Murdoch to drown his sorrows in a succession of bottles, it means the US recognizes it has failed and has sacrificed him as its scapegoat.

The larger question is whether there will be a reckoning for Israel and the central role it played in this fiasco. If and when this reckoning arrives, this should start from the premise that it was Israel’s determination to permanently dispossess the Palestinian people that produced this crisis.

The refusal to properly address the question of Palestine, and the assumption that it can be resolved by armed force and slaughter, remains the root cause of the crisis that has now engulfed the entire region and beyond.

April 10, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Zionism