"Iran believes there can be no end to the conflict until it believes Trump has been shown the economic, political and military cost"

“The US military has three objectives in a war with Iran: destroy missiles, attack the navy, and penetrate deeper into the military base,” says Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. 

The Iranian 'defiance' is remarkable for a regime that at the start of the war 11 days ago was seeking little more than its own survival.

“In the first ten days of conflict, more than 50 Iranian Naval ships were destroyed,” Dan Caine says.

Former MoS External Affairs and BJP leader M J Akbar says, "Only God and President Trump knew when the war would begin, and maybe only God and President Trump know when it will end.. 

We can safely say that President Trump will not want to end the war before he can declare some form of victory. The costs of not being able to do so are very high for him... The credibility of his administration and term in office now rests on the outcome of this war... 

It is about as dangerous a game of brinkmanship as we could have imagined at this time of the century... The initial American euphoria at the success of the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been tempered by the reality that Iranians have proved that they are not a pushover. 

They have achieved significant successes... A $20,000 Iranian drone has shown itself capable of fighting against a millions of dollars worth iterceptors and far more expensive missiles. The Iranian missiles have also proved to be more accurate than the analysts thought they would. Israel has been repeatedly hit, which means that the Iron Dome has been proven to be porous. Iran has not fully deployed its supplementary resources. 

The Houthis still have not entered the war... There is an island just off the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf, Kharg Island. It is the oil hub of Iran...That is where the Americans could put boots on the ground to capture that island... The initial war objective was regime change. They have realised that regime change was not possible... 

Now they have to find a third definition of victory. I suspect that this could be something that is being examined carefully by the Pentagon."

Ending the conflict is not so easy:  

A unilateral declaration from Trump that the US had won the war would not bring an end to the conflict. The implication is that even if the US announced a willingness to end its attacks, Iran might be willing to continue the conflict.  

Iran believes there can be no end to the conflict until it believes Trump has been shown the economic, political and military cost. 

“If a ceasefire is to be established or the war stopped there must be a guarantee that aggressive actions against Iran will not be repeated. Otherwise if another attack occurs after a few months such a ceasefire would be meaningless,” said Kazem Gharibabadi, the deputy foreign minister.  

“We are absolutely NOT seeking a ceasefire,” the speaker of the parliament, Mohammed Ghalibaf, posted to social media. 

“Let the enemy know that whatever they do, there will certainly be a proportionate and immediate retaliation […] We are fighting eye for eye, tooth for tooth, without compromise or exception.”

Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said: “The regime overall think they can stay in this war and it might actually legitimise them because otherwise they have been a disaster for the country.” He blamed some of Israel’s attacks on energy infrastructure – which sent clouds of black smoke through Tehran – for alienating Iranian opinion.

“Over the course of 24 hours you could sense the shift in Iranian public opinion from a war against regime to a war on Iran,” he said.

Mixed messages from Trump leave more questions than answers over war's end. 

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