Twenty Years of Investment for a “Great War” with Iran
WANA (Dec 03) – In Washington and Tel Aviv, for nearly two decades there existed a project that was not treated as an emergency contingency, but as a standing security scenario: preparation for a direct confrontation with Iran.
Joint military drills, periodic intelligence assessments, public warnings from political leaders, and countless media dossiers were all pieces of a puzzle designed to lead to a single endpoint — a “decisive battle with the Islamic Republic.”
Yet the events of the twelve-day war and the failure of the U.S.–Israeli project to achieve its declared objectives revealed a harsher reality.
Years of planning, rehearsing, and threatening did not yield the outcome that had long been envisioned. Today, many analysts describe this result as the squandering of a long-term strategic investment built on a failed doctrine.
Iran’s Supreme Leader recently referred to this very project, stating: “By some accounts, the Zionist regime had planned and prepared for this war for twenty years… Twenty years of planning for a war to erupt inside Iran, to stir up the people, to bring them into alignment with the attackers, and to have them fight against the system.”
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Placed alongside two decades of reports and documentation, this statement carries a precise meaning: the recent operation was not an isolated clash, but the culmination of prolonged investment in a hybrid war against Iran — one intended to be simultaneously military, political, and psychological.
One of the most revealing pieces of evidence comes from a direct admission by Donald Trump. In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, he said: “The pilots told me they had practiced this route three times a year for 22 years — every year for 22 years. They said you were the only president who let us do our job.”
This extraordinary disclosure demonstrates that the concept of attacking Iran was never a short-term idea or the innovation of a single administration. It had become a standing operational scenario within U.S. military planning — passed down and rehearsed across generations of personnel.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister meeting. Social media/ WANA News Agency
On the ground, these preparations took concrete form. Joint military drills known as “Juniper Cobra” were held almost every two years beginning in 2001.
These exercises constituted the backbone of U.S.–Israeli operational coordination for simulating a war with Iran — ranging from countering ballistic missile strikes to defending regional bases against large-scale retaliation.
Western media, even at the time, openly acknowledged sustained Israeli pressure to draw Washington into war. Roughly seventeen years ago, The Guardian reported that Israel had requested a “green light” from the United States to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Quoting then–Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the paper wrote: “Economic sanctions are effective, but they are not enough… They must continue until Iran shuts down its nuclear program.”
The remark reflected Tel Aviv’s long-standing dual strategy: economic pressure to weaken Iran internally and military force as the ultimate blow. Disagreement between Israel and the United States never centered on whether to strike Iran, but rather on the likelihood of success and the scale of failure.
In 2015, CNN revealed the leak of a confidential audio recording featuring former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
The recording showed that Israel, in collaboration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had designed direct attack scenarios against Iran on three occasions — in 2010, 2011, and 2012 — though none proceeded to execution.
That same year, The Times of Israel published similar findings, confirming that military operational plans against Iran had advanced to serious stages of preparation.
The key question, however, remained: why, despite this degree of readiness and pressure, did war not erupt at that time?
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Once again, the answer surfaced in The Guardian. American sources cited two primary concerns driving the Bush administration’s refusal to authorize the strike:
First, Iran’s capacity for retaliation — a capability that could target U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and threaten maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf.
Second, Israel’s operational inability to permanently disable Iran’s nuclear infrastructure through one — or even several — limited strikes. Such an effort would require entry into a full-scale war, with costs far outweighing any anticipated gains.
These two realities laid the foundation for what later became firmly known as “Iranian deterrence”: a combination of regional retaliatory capability and strategic depth that effectively prevented the formation of any low-cost war option against Iran.
People attend the funeral procession of Iranian military commanders, nuclear scientists and others killed in Israeli strikes, in Tehran, Iran, June 28, 2025. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency)
Now, following the twelve-day war, the picture has become even clearer. More than twenty years of military drills, operational planning, and psychological pressure failed to impose the equation that Washington and Tel Aviv sought to force onto Iran.
Neither the project of regional containment reached a decisive conclusion, nor was the nuclear issue resolved through military coercion. And the myth of a “short, low-cost war” never became reality.
What remains is a strategic paradox:
- A power that prepared for war for two decades recoiled when confronted with its true costs;
- and a country subjected to continual pressure succeeded in raising its deterrence to a level where war shifted from an executable option into an uncontrollable risk.
Perhaps Iran’s greatest achievement in this confrontation was not merely passing through a short conflict unbroken, but demonstrating a deeper truth:
That regional deterrence no longer rests on “absolute military superiority,” but on the perception of costs. And in that arena, the twenty-year project of war against Iran yielded not victory — but a historical lesson for its architects.
