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An Assault on Iran’s Future

The essay argues, through an analysis of wartime targeting patterns, that the U.S.-Israeli campaign was not a limited strike on military or nuclear sites but a systematic war against Iran as a whole, extending even to the material conditions of its future life.

تعرض به آینده‌ی ایران

Iranian Diplomacy · By Mohsen Mahdizadeh · 12 June 2026 · read the original in Persian →

An attempt to understand the logic of war:

An assault on Iran’s futureتعرض به آیندهی ایران

Author: Mohsen Mahdizadeh. Mohsen Mahdizadeh holds a degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology and is a doctoral student in international relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva. His research focuses on international political economy.

Iranian Diplomacy: Twenty-four hours before the aggression against Iran began, Badr al-Busaidi, Oman’s foreign minister, who had been mediating the Iran-U.S. negotiations, hurried to Washington and, in an interview with CBS, recalled that Iran had made important concessions and warned that diplomacy should be given more time. In the first days of the war, he repeated the same position even more explicitly in The Economist: “The United States and Iran were on the verge of reaching a real agreement on the most difficult issue between them: Iran’s nuclear program and U.S. concerns over its possible militarization.” Given this, what was the logic of the attack on Iran, this costly and illegal act? In the opening days of the war, I waited above all for Trump’s first remarks. Perhaps the commander in chief of the country that had launched this aggression held the answer to that question and could dispel the confusion.

In his first comments after the war began, Trump declared that the aim of the operation was to eliminate Iran’s “imminent threats.” He later explained that by these threats he meant Iran’s alleged effort to obtain nuclear weapons, and stressed that America had “tried many times to reach an agreement,” but that “Iran did not accept it.” This account did not accord with what Oman’s foreign minister had said. Between the account of al-Busaidi, the respected foreign minister of Oman, and Trump’s, it was clear to me, at least, which was the more truthful.

Trump then offered a list of other objectives for the war, including the destruction of Iran’s missile capability and the elimination of the country’s navy. In the end, he called on the people of Iran to “take control of their government,” thereby, in practice, adding regime change to his list of aims.

After these initial remarks, Trump issued, in a short span of time, a series of contradictory messages that only deepened the ambiguity of his position. On Esfand 10, he announced that “the war is effectively over,” adding that Iran “no longer has a navy, its communications systems have been disabled, it has no effective air force,” and that much of its missile and drone capability had also been destroyed. Yet only a few hours had passed before his tone changed. This time he described the war as unfinished and said: “We have won in many ways; but we have not yet won enough.” In his view, then, the war had to continue until the complete defeat of Iran’s political leadership and military apparatus. Some time later, however, he returned to his previous position and spoke of the war’s imminent end. This position was also in stark contradiction with the statements of the U.S. secretary of war, who had written on his social media account: “The war has only just begun.”

Thus neither Trump’s words nor the statements of other Israeli and American officials helped one understand the logic of this war, a war that in its first hours alone had taken the lives of 168 children. For that reason, I abandoned the effort to understand this war through the words of American and Israeli officials and chose another path: to focus on what they do rather than what they say. To do this, it was enough to see what targets they were bombing in order to understand why they had waged such a war against my country. After all, speaking is easier and less costly than dropping bombs and missiles, and perhaps following the trail of those very bombs and missiles can help us better understand the logic of this war. To do so, we must see what targets America and Israel expended their military weapons on. From this perspective, the present note may be read as an attempt to solve a personal riddle: why America and Israel thought that pouring such a volume of pain and destruction onto my country was a rational decision, especially when the existing facts showed that there was no necessity to choose this mistaken path.

To lay the groundwork for this analysis, I collected all war-related posts from seven Persian-language Telegram news channels during the period of the war. I then analyzed the collected material with ChatGPT 5.3 in order to extract every instance of an attack on Iran, together with its location, time, and target, and to place each target in one of six categories: civilian, military, infrastructural, nuclear, regime-change-related, and other.

This classification is based on the nature of the targets: “military” targets include military bases, weapons facilities, and infrastructure related to missile industries. By “civilian” targets I mean residential areas and crowded spaces that have no military character. “Infrastructural” targets include energy facilities, airports, universities, transportation networks, and health infrastructure. “Nuclear” targets refer to Iran’s atomic facilities. And “regime-change-related” targets include government buildings, security and intelligence institutions, senior figures of the ruling order, and state media centers. I will now present the principal results of this analysis.

The most important finding of my research was that whenever the intensity of American and Israeli attacks increased, all six categories of targets mentioned above were also attacked more often, from military and regime-change-related targets to civilian and infrastructural ones. The latter two categories, civilian and infrastructural targets, are targets bound up with people’s lives. Therefore, contrary to the claims of the shameless supporters of war, people’s lives, too, were an inseparable part of America and Israel’s overall strategy in this war.

Put more simply, how many civilian or infrastructural targets were attacked on a given day depended to a great extent on the overall intensity of attacks that same day. America and Israel were not targeting Iran selectively. The data tell us that this was a war against Iran in its entirety, and that attacks on civilians and infrastructure were not merely collateral damage. For if these attacks had been simply accidental or unintended, one would expect them to be more scattered and to have a more irregular appearance. But what we see in the data is something else: attacks against civilians and infrastructure, like the other target categories, follow a relatively coherent and recurring pattern.

In addition, this pattern remained almost unchanged throughout the war. This suggests that we are probably dealing with major decisions made at high levels of command and policymaking, not scattered and isolated actions by forces in the field. Such a regular and meaningful pattern of targeting civilians may carry important legal and political consequences for high-ranking decision-makers in relation to the commission of war crimes.

The data from the final days of the war reveal another important point. The share of attacks on critical infrastructure rose from an average of 55.4 percent during the first thirty-four days of the war to 74.6 percent in the final five days. At the same time, attacks on civilian targets fell from 55 percent to 44.4 percent. The sum of these percentages exceeds 100 because a single attack could include more than one type of target. By contrast, the other main categories, namely regime-change-related, military, and nuclear targets, underwent no significant change. This is of particular importance because it shows that the strategy of the war’s final days did not involve a sudden turn toward regime change, military targets, or nuclear targets.

Instead, what changed more than anything else was the pattern of targeting critical infrastructure. As the war drew closer to a ceasefire, America and Israel increasingly turned toward the infrastructures that make governance and the continuity of collective life possible. They targeted the material foundations that every society and every government needs in order to survive. On this account, the logic of the final phase of these attacks was to leave behind a country in which the injuries of war would not end with the ceasefire, but would carry the traces of destruction for years to come.

Where did the bombs fall?

During the war, critical infrastructure accounted for 25.6 percent of all attacks, regime-change-related targets for 24.4 percent, and civilian targets for 23.5 percent. These three categories accounted for the largest shares of attacks, and the distance between them was small. Attacks on military targets made up 20.7 percent of all attacks. This means that attacks on civilian targets and on critical infrastructure, each taken separately, exceeded attacks on military targets.

Given this, one can say that civilians and the country’s infrastructure did not stand at the margins of this war; they stood at its center. In other words, for every military target, roughly 1.14 civilian targets were also attacked. This cannot be the pattern of a war focused only on military objectives; rather, the figures show us that we are facing a war whose violence is meant to be drawn into the very fabric of social life as well.

The illusion of differentiated targeting: civilians, regime-change-related targets, and military targets

The data also indicate a very strong positive relationship between the targeting of civilians and the targeting of regime-change-related and military objectives. This relationship can be seen in the charts below. They show that these three categories move almost in step with one another over time.

The correlation coefficient between civilian targets and regime-change-related targets is 84.0. This figure indicates a very strong and meaningful relationship between the two categories. The coefficient between civilian and military targets is also 73.0, which similarly points to a significant relationship between the two. In other words, as attacks on regime-change-related and military targets intensified, attacks on civilians also increased.

A war against Iran in its entiretyجنگی علیه ایران در کلیت آن

All four main categories of targets, namely infrastructure, civilian, military, and regime-change-related targets, which received the greatest number of attacks, had a high correlation with the total number of daily attacks. This finding strengthens one of the central arguments of this piece. The correlation coefficient between regime-change-related targets and the total number of attacks is 94.0. The figure is 90.0 for civilian targets, 87.0 for critical infrastructure, and 86.0 for military targets.

These high figures show that the main target categories did not follow separate logics. The more the total number of attacks increased, the more attacks in the main categories also intensified.

The relative stability of each category’s share over time confirms the same pattern. The degree of fluctuation in the daily share of the main categories relative to total attacks was very low: about 1.97 percent for critical infrastructure, 1.12 percent for regime-change-related targets, 1.12 percent for civilian targets, and 1.19 percent for military targets.

Put more simply, as the war intensified, attacks on all categories expanded almost simultaneously, and their figures remained more or less stable relative to the total number of attacks. This observation means that the overall structure of targeting throughout the war had a remarkable, and to some extent surprising, stability. Establishing this point is of special importance. For if this pattern of targeting were the output of scattered decisions, field errors, or constant shifts in tactical priorities, we should have seen greater fluctuation in the data. But what we see is entirely different: throughout the war, and as the intensity of attacks changed, a similar structure of targeting was reproduced again and again. The observed pattern points to the existence of a kind of order and strategy in the attacks.

This same point creates serious and substantial doubts about the notion that harm to civilians was merely a side effect or an unintended consequence. The data analysis leads us to the conclusion that attacks on civilian targets were a systematic pillar of this war. These attacks stood outside neither the war’s logic nor its design; they were an essential part of that logic.

Taken together, the four main target categories corresponded to the main components of the Iranian state: population, infrastructure, military capacity, and governing institutions. For this reason, this war cannot be regarded as a limited and precise campaign designed only to bring about regime change, destroy Iran’s nuclear program, or weaken the country’s military capacity. The American and Israeli attack on Iran was a war against Iran in its entirety.

The logic of the war’s final phase: destroying the foundations of lifeمنطق مرحلهی پایانی جنگ: تخریب بنیانهای زندگی

The data add another important layer to this analysis. They do not only reveal the nature of the main targets of this war; they also show how it came to an end. The clearest change in the days leading up to the end of the war was the focus on Iran’s critical infrastructure.

In the final five days of the war, the share of attacks on critical infrastructure, which until then had stood at 55.4 percent, reached 74.6 percent, an increase of more than 19 percent. By contrast, regime-change-related and military targets retained their stability. The share of nuclear targets also increased only slightly, from 5.9 percent to 7.8 percent.

On this account, one can say that the final phase of the war did not correspond to the objectives most emphasized in official propaganda. Contrary to the claims of America and Israel, the principal focus was not regime change or the destruction of Iran’s nuclear and military capacity; rather, the main objective was the destruction of the country’s critical infrastructure.

As the war approached a ceasefire, America and Israel increasingly targeted the systems that make a country livable and governable: energy, transportation, health infrastructure, logistics, and the other material foundations of society. These are not merely technical systems; they are the instruments that make collective life possible. They are the infrastructures and facilities that allow hospitals to function, make movement possible, bring energy to homes, maintain the circulation of goods, and, more broadly, give societies the possibility of life and governments the capacity to govern.

The first part of this analysis showed that this war was not a limited and precise campaign; it was a war against Iran in its entirety. But the final phase of the war adds a darker layer to this picture: America and Israel did not target only the Iran of today with missiles and bombs; they also targeted Iran’s future.

From this perspective, the logic of the war’s final phase was to leave behind a country whose essential infrastructure had been damaged, where the continuity of collective life had become more difficult, and whose future must necessarily begin from a point at which long-term destruction is an inseparable part of it.