October 15, 2025: There is a new war going on in the Middle East between Israel and Iran. This is a propaganda war using Artificial Intelligence/AI systems to come up with the most compelling and convincing propaganda. The Israelis have a qualitative edge while the Iranians have a larger population to work with. This advantage is diminished by the fact that the religious government of Iran is unpopular with most Iranians. Since the religious leaders, or Ayatollahs, began running the economy, the economy has been a mess. The Ayatollahs tend to be honest but they have family members who are not and are often very corrupt. These children and other kin of the Ayatollahs make the most of their opportunities and that is resented by the majority of Iranians. Israel has taken advantage of this by supporting the Iranian resistance. They do this with money, weapons and advisors.

There are still a lot of descendants of Iranian Jews in Israel When Israel was founded in 1949 the Jews living in Moslem countries throughout the region, were no longer welcome. They fled to Israel where they could find safety and more prosperity than was available in their previous homelands. It also provide the Israeli secret service, the Mossad with qualified recruits for spies and intelligence analysts who could monitor what was going on in the neighboring countries. Gradually, Israel worked out peace and trade agreements with their neighbors. Egypt and Jordan were the first. Eventually the Gulf Arab states found Israel a useful ally against the Iranians. Before Iran underwent its religious revolution in the 1980s, the Israelis and the Iranian monarchy were on good terms. Many current Iranians would like to return to that relationship with Israel.

Israel and Iran have been enemies since 1979, when Iran got a new government. Out went the monarchy and in came a religious dictatorship pretending to be a democracy. The new government had elections and the nominally elective officials ran the government. There were some restrictions, with the senior religious leaders, or Ayatollahs, able to approve who could run for office. The senior Ayatollah has a job that involves more politics than religion. An important difference between Iranian religious leaders and those found in Arab countries is that the Iranians are Shia Moslems, while over 80 percent of Moslems are Sunni. Shia and Sunni usually get along, although there are some disagreements over which is the more legitimate form of Islam.

Israel takes advantage of these differences and sides with the Sunni Arabs against the Persians, as some people in the region still call the Iranians. The term Iranian began to replace Persian about a century ago but the term Persian will never completely disappear. The Shia Iranians and Sunni Arabs never got along. Until oil was discovered and exported a century ago, these differences never amounted to much. But the oil wealth changed the relationship between Iranians and Arabs. The Arabs had far more oil than the Iranians, but the Iranians used their oil to improve their armed forces. The Iranians always had a military advantage over the Gulf Arabs because Iran was a country with lots of agriculture and natural resources. The Arabs living on the adjacent Arabian Peninsula had little arable land and survived with coastal towns or cities importing goods that could be traded with the interior tribes. In the far south of the peninsula there was Yemen, which had no oil but did receive enough rain to support agr

In terms of religion, the Gulf Arabs and the Iranians saw the Israelis as enemies of Islam and a group that must be destroyed and removed from the region. The Israelis proved impressively resistant to these extermination efforts. Over the last few decades the Gulf Arabs have come to see the prosperous and militarily powerful Israel as a useful ally. This was especially true as Iran moved closer to developing nuclear weapons. This was something no one else in the region wanted to happen. The nations that bought the Persian Gulf oil agreed with that assessment.

All this played a role in the massive June Israeli-American air strikes on Iran that eliminated most Iranian offensive weapons and production facilities for those weapons. The Israeli informant network in Iran identified key military, intelligence and security officials who could be killed during the attack.

Israeli military planners took advantage of how Iranian leaders misunderstood what was going on. The Iranians believed that Israel would take no action before the next round of nuclear weapons negotiations. Iran believed that it was all Israeli propaganda to obtain concessions from Iran. This was a fatal mistake, because the Iranians failed to implement their safety protocols. These included leadership only meeting in secure locations. Instead the leaders met at a military base and Israeli operatives inside Iran noted this and reported it.

Israel has hundreds of operatives inside Iran. Most are Iranians dissatisfied with the religious dictatorship misruling the country. Most Iranian leaders don’t believe the Israelis could recruit and use these operatives. As in so many other areas, the Iranian misunderstood what was really going on. In 2018 it was these operatives that allowed Israel to get half a ton of Iranian nuclear weapons program documents out of the country. Iranian arrogance about Israeli capabilities has often turned into a fatal flaw.

Israel exploiting Iranian errors has worked multiple times because Iranian leaders refuse to believe the Israelis would operate like that, that their own people hate them so much that they willingly cooperate with Israeli intelligence, and in particular that Israel has penetrated Iran’s regime security forces. Yet, during the June 13 Israeli attack the Iranians once more made some very expensive miscalculations. Israel managed to kill several senior military leaders, destroyed most Iranian air defense systems, ballistic missile operations, and crippled, with an assist from the Americans, the underground nuclear material processing operations.

The June 13 attacks made Iran’s leaders very angry and they retaliated, but all they could launch were about a hundred missiles and drones which survived the Israeli attack. Some got through, caused about two dozen Israeli casualties and damaged some buildings. Iran made some subsequent attacks that caused more damage.

Meanwhile Iranian problems are multiplying and escalating. These include a new program to cripple Iranian oil exports by imposing severe financial penalties on nations that buy Iranian oil. This will not halt oil sales but will reduce them to a certain extent and reduce the amount of cash Iran has to cause mischief in the region.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei survived because the American B2 bombers that damaged Iranian underground nuclear facilities were not used to kill him. The Israelis and Americans agreed that it was best to leave Khamenei alone. He was a known unpleasant quantity. His successor would likely be worse.

In the end this brief Iran-Israeli war left over 5,000 Iranians dead or wounded. Israel lost 29 dead and nearly 3,500 injured. Iranian errors and Israeli ingenuity and quick action won again. The war did not end, but the Iranians got another reminder that the Israelis are not to be underestimated. Next time should be different, because the Iranians never stop trying.