Like any siblings, the two allied countries share much of their DNA.
Both are governed by totalitarian regimes preaching a violent ideology with mystical overtones.
Both are bent on murderous expansion, although for the time being they go about that task differently. Iran does her murders mostly by proxy, whereas Russia is happy to do the dirty work herself.
Both seek to exterminate adjacent nations, to extend their own power and also just for the ideological hell of it.
Both have the strength of their criminal convictions. However, and this is often ignored, both show weaknesses common to many totalitarian regimes.
Since such contrivances rely on violence and propaganda to control their populaces, they know that large groups within their own countries despise their propaganda and detest their violence.
That’s why, when totalitarian leaders promote officials to prominent positions, they don’t necessarily go by the candidates’ intellect, industry and professional expertise. Coming to the fore instead are such qualifications as unwavering loyalty to the leader and a knack for paying gluteal obeisance.
Even aspiring authoritarian leaders of democratic countries, such as Donald Trump, may suffer from the same weakness, putting loyalty to them personally before competence.
Thus a chap whose sole experience lay in the area of flogging New York properties got the world’s most sensitive diplomatic job of negotiating with Russia, the Ukraine and Iran. Or a half-crazy anti-vaxxer got the health brief. Or a bibulous, heavily tattooed TV journalist was put in charge of defence.
But at least a civilised country has (one hopes) mechanisms in place to protect itself from excessive damage such incompetents can cause. Totalitarian regimes have no such mechanisms, which makes them vulnerable to otherwise preventable disasters.
Thus, within the space of less than a fortnight, both Russia and Iran suffered strategic damage at the hands of their smaller but ingenious and intrepid adversaries.
On 1 June, Ukrainian special services executed Operation Spider’s Web, using drones to destroy some 30 per cent of Russia’s strategic bombers. These were sited in remote airfields, some of them thousands of miles away from the Ukraine’s border. And yesterday, the Israeli Air Force hit Iran with Operation Rising Lion, targeting the country’s nuclear facilities and killing some of Iran’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists.
The scale of Rising Lion was greater than that of Spider’s Web. But the two operations shared one aspect that has to do with the inherent weakness of totalitarian regimes. Both relied on large networks of operatives on the ground.
The logistics of the two operations seem different in other respects. The Ukrainians only used drones launched from within Russia’s territory. They had to be no farther than some five miles from their operators, and their range to target was roughly similar.
This means Ukrainians had to drive those drone-launching lorries across the vast expanses of Russia, park them within 10 miles of the targets, launch the projectiles and then return to base undetected and unharmed.
The Russians actually suspected that something along those lines was afoot, which is why they had moved those bombers to remote airfields. And yet they failed to protect that strategic resource from that daring raid. One gets the distinct impression that Russian security forces are at their best roughing up dissidents, not doing a vital wartime job.
Ukrainians can pass for Russians easily enough, but that operation would never have succeeded without logistic support provided by local networks. Those lorries had to take days to get to the Siberian airfields, meaning that the vehicles had to be hidden overnight, while their drivers and drone pilots needed refuge and extensive guidance.
All of this points to a massive intelligence effort overlooked by Putin’s lackeys adept at praising their leader’s genius but themselves lacking most basic professional skills. The same goes for Operation Rising Lion.
Unlike those Ukrainian drones, Israeli planes took off from airfields within their own country. But they wouldn’t have scored such a remarkable success without a huge network of Mossad spies and – as important – local opponents of the mullahs.
Iran’s nationalists, monarchists, Westernisers and other implacable enemies of the Islamic Republic formed resistance groups that have for years collaborated with their natural ally, Israel.
Working hand in glove with Mossad and IDF, these courageous people identified a long list of strategic targets and also pinpointed the exact location of the officials slated for elimination. There was also much work done on the ground that was similar to Operation Spider’s Web.
The operatives created a drone base within reach of the targets and assisted in getting launching vehicles in position, which then went on to paralyse Iranian air defences. And, like their Russian colleagues, Iranian security services slept through all those extensive preparations.
Moreover, the Russians have had to contend with Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian resistance only since 2014, and especially since 2022. The Iranian security services, on the other hand, have had almost half a century since their 1979 Islamic Revolution to root out resistance. And yet they’ve failed spectacularly – in spite of having no legal or constitutional constraints on their gruesome work.
Western security services do operate under such constraints, and they too sometimes suffer from incompetence. That’s why they often fail to protect their countries from terrorist attacks. As I never tire of repeating, in this world we aren’t blessed with perfect institutions, including security services.
However, in the West such lapses aren’t symptoms of a structural malaise, and most Western countries at least try to promote capable and intelligent people to sensitive positions. Totalitarian regimes select their personnel on different principles, and this is part of the reason all of them come crashing down sooner or later. Alas, if it happens later rather than sooner, they manage to run up a horrific score of death and devastation.
For the time being, we must congratulate the Ukrainians and Israelis for planning and executing operations that will be studied at military academies around the world for decades. I hope that, having exposed the weaknesses of the two allied totalitarian regimes, they can now also hasten their demise.