Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : The third dimension of Khamenei’s death lies in Karbala. In Shia Islam, the sacrifice of Imam Hussain, grandson of Prophet Muhammad, is not merely a seventh-century tragedy remembered through annual rituals. Karbala represents a permanent moral command: stand against tyranny, refuse submission to oppression and remain beside the victim even when resistance carries an unbearable personal cost.
The symbolism is now visible throughout Khamenei’s funeral ceremonies. His coffin is to travel through Qom, Najaf and Karbala before his burial in Mashhad. Black mourning flags recalling the martyrdom of Imam Hussain hang over Iranian streets. The journey itself connects Khamenei’s death with the religious geography and historical memory that have shaped Shia political consciousness for centuries.
Iran has consistently interpreted Palestine through this ideological prism. Palestinians have endured displacement, occupation, bombardment, hunger and repeated military devastation. Gaza has been reduced to rubble on a catastrophic scale, families have disappeared beneath destroyed buildings and civilian suffering has horrified much of the world. The confrontation has repeatedly expanded into Lebanon, spreading destruction across a region already exhausted by decades of conflict.
One may condemn particular tactics used by Hamas, Hezbollah or other armed organisations and still ask why these groups continue to exist and retain support. Their political justification is deeply connected to the unresolved Palestinian question. Resolve that conflict justly and the strategic architecture of armed resistance begins to lose its rationale. Without the wound, organisations created around resisting that wound face an inevitable crisis of purpose.
A credible two-state settlement could fundamentally transform the Middle East. Give Palestinians the right to choose their government, protect their social and religious traditions, preserve their language and maintain a recognised connection with their land. Once Palestinians possess dignity, political agency and a viable national future, the justification for maintaining a permanent kinetic posture against Israel will inevitably weaken.
Iran could have chosen silence. It could have followed the cautious path adopted by much of the Muslim world. Türkiye, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and numerous Muslim states have spoken for Palestine diplomatically, but none willingly absorbed the scale of military, economic and strategic consequences Tehran accepted by directly challenging the Israeli-American strategic order. Iran understood the price of its policy and still refused to retreat.
Had Tehran treated Palestinian suffering as somebody else’s problem, it might have secured economic comfort, sanctions relief and international accommodation. Yet a state that invokes Karbala cannot easily preach the sacrifice of Imam Hussain at home while remaining permanently silent when it believes another people are subjected to occupation, collective punishment and overwhelming military force abroad.
This explains why Khamenei’s martyrdom may prove strategically more powerful than his political life. His killing did not eliminate the philosophy of resistance associated with his leadership. It liberated that philosophy from the limitations of an individual ruler and embedded it more deeply in Iran’s national consciousness. His coffin, moving towards Qom, Najaf, Karbala and ultimately Mashhad, has itself become a travelling symbol of that narrative.
Iran’s military response subsequently demonstrated the logic of asymmetric warfare. Tehran did not need to match the United States aircraft for aircraft, carrier for carrier or dollar for dollar. It expanded the battlefield horizontally, imposed costs on military infrastructure supporting attacks against Iran and threatened strategic arteries upon which global economies depend. Conventional military superiority was confronted by calculated strategic disruption.
Iran’s calculation was brutally simple. It did not have to defeat the United States in a traditional battlefield contest; it only had to make continuation of the war economically, politically and strategically unbearable. By stretching the theatre of confrontation and exploiting regional dependencies, a militarily weaker state demonstrated how disproportionate costs could be imposed upon adversaries possessing vastly superior weapons and resources.
The war intended to fracture Iran instead strengthened its cohesion. The campaign justified by fear of an Iranian atomic bomb killed the religious leader whose fatwa had restrained nuclear weaponisation. The attempt to destroy a philosophy of resistance provided that philosophy with its most powerful martyr. These contradictions now hover over every funeral procession moving through Iran and Iraq.
The presence in Tehran of senior representatives from Russia, China, Pakistan, Iraq and other states adds another dimension to the moment. Iran was supposed to emerge isolated, humiliated and broken. Instead, as Khamenei lies in state, representatives of major powers and regional governments are standing before his coffin, while the funeral journey prepares to cross national borders and the great centres of Shia faith.
As Khamenei is carried towards his final resting place in Mashhad, the ultimate irony is difficult to escape. His enemies possessed superior aircraft, larger arsenals, advanced intelligence systems and enormous financial resources. Yet his death gave Iran something military technology could neither manufacture nor easily destroy: a renewed story of sacrifice, dignity and collective resistance.
The superpower possessed the larger arsenal, but the martyr left behind the stronger story. History repeatedly demonstrates that military power can destroy buildings, eliminate leaders and devastate economies, but it cannot always determine which narrative survives a war. In Khamenei’s case, the attempt to kill a leader may instead have immortalised his cause and strengthened the nation his death was intended to break.

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : Ayatollah Ali Khamenei lies in state in Tehran, his coffin surrounded by black mourning flags as Iran begins a week of funeral ceremonies before his burial in Mashhad. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, senior Chinese lawmaker He Wei, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Iraqi President Nizar Amedi were among the foreign leaders and officials joining Iranian clerics, generals and mourners to pay their respects. Their presence gave the ceremony a significance extending far beyond Iran’s borders.
The gathering of such senior dignitaries from major powers and important regional states offered a striking answer to those who expected Iran to emerge from the war diplomatically isolated and internally broken. Khamenei, killed with members of his family in the opening US-Israeli airstrike on February 28, was being mourned not merely as Iran’s Supreme Leader but honoured by representatives of countries commanding enormous geopolitical weight.
Equally important was the attendance of Gulf delegations, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman, at a moment when Israel and the United States had expected Arab and GCC states to stand firmly against Iran. The reported presence of Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Waleed Al-Khuraiji and other Gulf representatives sent a chilling diplomatic message: the war had not ruptured Iran’s relationship with its neighbourhood. Despite deep differences, geography, religion, neighbourly necessity and regional fraternity had again pulled Iran and the Gulf states towards one another, showing that their ties could not be broken simply by the strategic wishes of Israel and the United States.
The funeral, therefore, is more than the burial of a leader who ruled Iran for 37 years. It is a moment to measure the consequences of the decision to kill him. The United States and Israel apparently expected that removing Iran’s most powerful religious figurehead would deepen despair, fracture an already pressured society and accelerate conditions for regime change. Four months later, the question is unavoidable: did his killing weaken Iran, or did his martyrdom strengthen its national cohesion?
The assumption behind leadership decapitation appeared straightforward. Iran had endured years of sanctions, economic hardship and recurring internal unrest. Remove the man at the centre of its religious and political structure, deepen the psychological shock by killing members of his close family and the state might collapse under its own contradictions. Without Khamenei, Washington and Tel Aviv seemingly calculated, Iran would lose its ideological anchor at the moment of maximum military pressure.
The calculation proved disastrously wrong. Khamenei’s killing, together with his daughter, son-in-law, baby granddaughter and another close family member, did not tear Iran apart. It transformed a political and military crisis into what millions of Iranians perceived as an existential national struggle. Domestic disagreements suddenly competed with the image of foreign powers killing the country’s supreme religious leader and members of his family in the opening strike of a war.
Martyrdom achieved what decades of speeches, military parades and revolutionary slogans could never have accomplished with comparable force. It brought large sections of Iranian society closer to their armed forces and transformed Khamenei from a controversial political ruler into a symbol of resistance. Even Iranians dissatisfied with their government were confronted with a distinction between opposing domestic policies and allowing foreign powers to determine Iran’s political future through bombs.
Instead of creating a leadership vacuum, the strike created a martyr. Instead of producing national despair, it generated anger, defiance and an instinct for survival. The attempt to weaken Iran by eliminating its most recognisable figurehead elevated Khamenei beyond the limitations of a living political leader. The black flags hanging across Iranian cities demonstrate how rapidly political death can acquire religious permanence in a society deeply shaped by sacrifice.
The second contradiction of the war is even more consequential. The United States and Israel justified their attack by claiming Iran was racing towards nuclear weapons. An extraordinary atmosphere of urgency was created, as though Tehran were only days or weeks away from converting fissile material into atomic bombs and preparing to use them against Israel. Yet the man killed in the opening strike was arguably Iran’s strongest institutional barrier against nuclear weaponisation.
For years, Khamenei maintained a religious prohibition against the production and use of nuclear weapons. His fatwa rested on the argument that atomic weapons are inherently indiscriminate. They cannot distinguish between soldiers and children, aggressors and innocent civilians. Their destructive effects extend beyond battlefields and generations and were therefore, in his religious reasoning, incompatible with Islamic morality and the fundamental principles of humanity.
This decree cannot simply be dismissed as ceremonial theology. Iran’s armed forces operate within a system in which the supreme leader exercises ultimate command authority. When that authority explicitly prohibits nuclear weapons on religious grounds, converting enriched material into an atomic arsenal becomes more than a scientific or military decision. It directly challenges the religious and command structure under which Iran’s military and nuclear institutions operate.
The uncomfortable question must therefore be asked: who actually prevented Iran from developing an atomic bomb? Was it Israel’s threats and airstrikes? Was it American sanctions and military pressure? Or was it Khamenei’s fatwa? My conclusion is that the principal internal restraint was neither Washington nor Tel Aviv but the religious prohibition imposed by the very man their bombs killed.
This is why the narrative of an immediate nuclear emergency deserves rigorous scrutiny. Israeli explanations have repeatedly blurred the critical distinction between possessing an operational atomic weapon and travelling along a technological path that might eventually provide the capability to manufacture one. A country may possess scientists, enrichment facilities, technical knowledge and fissile material without assembling a bomb or taking the political decision to use it.
If Iran was on a path that might have enabled it to produce a weapon years later, that was undoubtedly a serious proliferation concern. It was, however, fundamentally different from being days away from launching a nuclear attack. The image of an imminent Iranian bomb created the urgency necessary to justify war, but urgency cannot substitute for verifiable evidence and technological capability cannot automatically be treated as proof of immediate nuclear aggression.
There is another historical irony. Iran, whatever criticism may legitimately be directed towards its regional policies, has not built its modern national history around repeatedly invading neighbouring countries. Israel, by contrast, has remained in almost continuous military confrontation across its neighbourhood. Yet Iran was presented as the uniquely imminent aggressor whose possible future intentions justified a preventive war before the alleged weapon even existed.

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : Israel is discovering a hard strategic truth: the country that wants absolute freedom of military action cannot easily free itself from the very superpower that makes that military action possible. For decades, Israel has depended on the United States not only for diplomatic protection, but also for the aircraft, bombs, interceptors, missiles, spare parts, emergency resupply, and financial aid that sustain its defensive shield and offensive reach. Now, as Washington tries to restrain Israeli escalation against Lebanon in order to preserve a wider regional ceasefire and protect its own diplomatic understanding with Iran, some Israeli voices are arguing that Israel should reduce or end its military dependence on America. It is an emotionally attractive slogan, but economically and militarily it is close to a mission impossible.
The facts are stark. The United States provides Israel with about $3.8 billion annually under the 2019–2028 military aid memorandum. But the real value of American support is much larger than that figure. It includes access to advanced aircraft, precision-guided munitions, air-defense cooperation, intelligence sharing, emergency replenishment, and direct U.S. military support during regional crises. In recent wars, American forces have helped intercept drones and missiles aimed at Israel, while U.S. political backing has shielded Israel from far greater diplomatic isolation.
Israel is not a weak military power. It has one of the world’s most advanced defense industries. Its cyber capabilities, drone technology, radar systems, electronic warfare, missile defense, and intelligence tools are globally respected. Israeli defense exports reached record levels in recent years, showing that the country can design and sell sophisticated military technology. But exporting advanced systems is not the same as independently sustaining a multi-front war, replacing U.S. aircraft, producing deep stocks of precision bombs, and maintaining strategic air dominance without Washington.
The most important vulnerability is air power. Israel’s offensive doctrine relies heavily on U.S.-made F-35s, F-15s, and F-16s. These aircraft are the backbone of Israel’s ability to strike Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran-linked targets, and other distant theatres. Israel can modify these aircraft with domestic systems, but it does not independently manufacture them. Nor does it independently control the full supply chain for engines, advanced components, spare parts, and future upgrades. If the United States stops supplying or servicing these systems, Israeli offensive capability would not collapse overnight, but it would steadily degrade.
The numbers explain the dilemma. Israel’s military expenditure surged to about $46.5 billion in 2024, equal to roughly 8.8 percent of GDP. That is already one of the highest defense burdens in the world. To become meaningfully independent from the United States, Israel would likely need to spend around 12 to 15 percent of GDP on defense for many years. That means an additional annual burden of roughly $18 billion to $35 billion, depending on the level of independence pursued. Such money would not come from the sky. It would come from taxes, borrowing, civilian cuts, reduced welfare, delayed infrastructure, pressure on education, and weaker investment in health, housing, and productivity.
In simple terms, Israel would have to choose between becoming a more militarized economy and remaining a prosperous civilian economy. The deeper the pursuit of military independence, the greater the sacrifice imposed on ordinary citizens. Hospitals, schools, universities, transport networks, housing programs, technology investment, social services, and family support would all face pressure. Israel could build more factories, more missile plants, more ammunition lines, and more domestic systems, but every shekel moved into permanent militarization would be a shekel removed from civilian development.
Time is another obstacle. Israel could reduce some dependence in five to eight years by expanding domestic production of ammunition, drones, interceptors, electronic systems, and some missiles. It could reduce dependence further in 10 to 15 years with a massive industrial program. But true independence in combat aircraft, stealth technology, strategic engines, large precision weapons, satellites, and wartime resupply could take 20 to 30 years, and even then may remain incomplete. No small country can easily replicate the industrial depth of the United States.
This is why the idea of cutting loose from Washington in one year is unrealistic. If Israel attempted it suddenly, its economy could face an additional 3 to 6 percent of GDP in defense pressure. Its offensive capability could be weakened by 40 to 60 percent over one to two years, especially if precision munitions, aircraft parts, and resupply pipelines were disrupted. Its defensive sustainability in a prolonged multi-front war could fall by 25 to 40 percent. Its ability to sustain occupation, control hostile territories, and conduct repeated military operations across several fronts could become 30 to 50 percent harder.
This is the central contradiction of Israeli strategy. Some Israeli hardliners want complete freedom to strike Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Iran-linked groups, and other regional adversaries without American restraint. They also want to pursue a maximalist vision of regional dominance, sometimes expressed through the dangerous idea of a “Greater Israel.” But such ambitions are possible only because the United States has historically supplied the military oxygen. Remove that oxygen, and the same expansionist project becomes far more costly, risky, and perhaps unsustainable.
This is also why many Israeli analysts and strategic thinkers warn against alienating Washington. The United States is not merely a donor; it is the main strategic pillar of Israel’s military architecture. American support gives Israel technological superiority, financial relief, diplomatic cover, and crisis-time backup. Without that support, Israel would remain powerful, but it would be a more vulnerable, more expensive, more isolated, and more constrained military power.
The recent U.S. attempt to restrain Israeli action against Lebanon shows that Washington still has leverage. Israel may resent that leverage, but it cannot easily escape it. If the price of independence is the weakening of its air force, the squeezing of its economy, the reduction of civilian prosperity, and the erosion of its ability to sustain long occupations, then independence becomes less a strategy and more a self-inflicted wound.
Israel therefore faces a choice. It can continue chasing permanent military dominance at the cost of economic balance, regional stability, and moral legitimacy. Or it can accept the limits of force, respect international boundaries, reduce occupation, and become a responsible member of the international community. The wiser path is not to militarize the economy further, but to demilitarize national thinking.
The lesson is clear: Israel cannot bomb its way into permanent security, nor can it easily break away from the country that underwrites its military power. Military independence from the United States may sound like strategic courage, but in reality it would expose Israel’s deepest dependency. For Israel, the path to security does not lie in endless expansion or in defying its principal ally. It lies in restraint, diplomacy, lawful borders, and recognition that no state can build lasting security by living permanently at war with its neighborhood.
Israel’s mission impossible is not merely military independence from America. Its real mission impossible is trying to remain economically prosperous, militarily dominant, politically unrestrained, and regionally expansionist all at the same time. That equation cannot hold forever.