For the month before the war, the view from Tehran should have looked frightening. As Iran looked over its western horizon, dozens of US and Israeli combat aircraft and warships were in the region, all pointed towards Iran. The President of the United States had said that strikes would begin if Iran did not make a deal to his liking, and yet, Iran did not blink. Looking back at this miscalculation, it might seem that Iran’s thinking was crazy or a reflection of religious zeal, but there was a strategic logic to it.

For decades, one of the nightmares that kept the Iranian government up at night was the possibility of a direct war with the US or Israel. Their previous experience of war, while successful, had been costly. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s demonstrated to the Iranian leadership that they could not prevent enemy missiles or aircraft from screaming through their skies and could ill afford the hundred thousand or more casualties and damage to cities that war on their own territory would bring. The rapid success of the US and coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003 further cemented Iran’s fear. Iran developed three approaches to preventing the war that they dreaded. The first was “forward defense” – using proxies to fight far from its borders. The second was what was referred to as “mosaic defense,” in which Iran would create defenses in the country that could........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)