One month after the start of a war that US President Donald Trump said was going to last at most “four to five weeks”, it is obvious that it is not going to end anytime soon. Nothing has gone as Trump had expected. As of this writing, all US calculations, and most of those of his bosom friend Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, have gone awry.Iran has all but destroyed all five US military bases in the Persian Gulf – the Al Udeid base in Qatar, the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia and a naval base in Bahrain that houses the US Fifth fleet, as well as logistics and training bases in Kuwait and the UAE. These will remain unusable for months if not years.The war has destroyed the mystique of Dubai, once a home base for gold smuggling into India that had converted it into one of the richest countries in the world. Iran has driven the largest US aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, and its escort vessels a thousand kilometres into the Arabian Sea and kept them there by firing four long range missiles at it, of which the fourth was brought down only 600 yards from the ship.Within Iran, the government has been able to shrug off the lethal “decapitation” strikes on three generations of leaders and their advisers, and it has launched progressively more lethal drone and missile strikes at Israel that have all but exhausted its interception capacity, leaving the country (Tel Aviv and Haifa in particular) at its mercy. What is still more unpalatable to Israeli civilians is that Israel’s military has all but exhausted its three layers of interception missiles, giving Iran the capacity to launch its most lethal missiles with impunity.Today, the few videos of these attacks that have got out despite Israel’s draconian punishments for anyone who tries to report on the war, show that half or more are hitting their designated sites in Israel.News reports that have leaked out of Israel show that the population of Tel Aviv and Haifa are in panic. Many families are now refusing to leave the air raid shelters even after the all-clear has been sounded. As a result, some families are having to stay in the open through the next bombardment, praying for their survival. Netanyahu and his advisers understand their plight. They have decided, therefore, to take out insurance against future electoral defeat by snatching a small victory from the war. To do this, Netanyahu announced that Israel would not only drive the Hezbollah out of south Lebanon but annex all of southern Lebanon till the Litani River.But that, too, is not happening. For this time the Israeli forces find themselves facing not untrained Hezbollah guerillas armed with shoulder-launched missiles and small arms but fighters trained in guerilla tactics and armed with some of the missiles that Iran has held in reserve for the American ground forces when they land in Iran. Video footage, presumably released by Hezbollah, shows these fighters have immobilised an entire column of Merkava tanks by crippling the first and last tank to immobilise the column, turning the area into a kill zone.The Hezbollah’s claims of the number of Israeli tanks it has destroyed and personnel it has killed are almost certainly inflated, but video footage also shows the crews of these immobilised tanks abandoning them and scrambling up the surrounding hillsides in search of cover.The Israeli army is therefore facing a challenge it has never faced before – of having to fight a modern war on two fronts at the same time. But even this is the lesser of its worries. The greater worry is the unwillingness of Israelis to join the fight. When the government first called up 3,00,000 Israel Defence Force (IDF) reservists, 1,00,000 failed to turn up. Netanyahu has issued a second summons to 4,00,000 reservists. Observers in the US and elsewhere are waiting to see how many of them will respond.Netanyahu’s chief of staff has told him that the IDF is facing “a terminal collapse” and has reportedly urged him to find an “off-ramp” solution to end the war. But this is the one thing that Netanyahu cannot afford to do, for the cessation of the war without any tangible gains for Israel will almost certainly force him out of the prime ministership and make him face trial on three cases of breach of trust and accepting bribes, lodged against him in 2019. Under Israeli law, the trial had to be held in abeyance while he remains prime minister.Also read: No Substitute for Victory: A War the US Has Failed to WinKnowing that conviction could land him in prison, in November 2025, Netanyahu made an unprecedented request to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, to grant him a pre-conviction pardon in the three cases that he faced. Herzog referred his request to the justice ministry. On March 9, twelve days after Israel’s surprise attack on Iran, the request was turned down. The only way now open for Netanyahu to avoid being tried, and possibly going to prison, is to remain prime minister in perpetuity. He can do this only if Israel wins a crushing victory over Iran that ends the threat it poses to Israel once and for all. The temptation to use nuclear weapons against Iran must be growing stronger for him with every passing hour.Trump is in a similar , if not quite so dire, predicament. He did not want war with Iran but allowed himself to be dragged into it by Netanyahu. Americans are now revisiting the significance of Netanyahu’s six visits to the White House and Mar-a-Lago in 2025. Each visit came after Trump had made a half-baked peace overture to Iran. They are also rapidly revising their opinion of not only Trump, who appears more and more uninformed, weak and vacillating by the day, but of the half-baked , ignorant advisers with whom he has surrounded himself.Public opinion polls in the US show that both he and his war on Iran are losing support day by day and that the Republican party is almost certain to lose its majority in the coming mid-term polls. And this slide downhill has only just begun, for Americans are only now beginning to feel the pinch of skyrocketing gasoline prices. So Trump is trying to do the impossible: appear victorious while actually preparing to cave in to several of Iran’s demands. The result, to put it bluntly, is that he is looking more and more unfit to be president of the US.The potentially most lethal of the many stupid decisions he has taken since coming under Netanyahu’s sway is his decision to send 7,000 marines and airborne commandos to launch a ground war against Iran, probably with the object of seizing Kharg, a small rocky outcrop in the Red Sea from where Iran ships nearly all its oil. Almost all military commentators who have appeared on American podcasts have warned the government that sending a handful of troops against a well-entrenched enemy that has been preparing for this eventuality for months if not years will be sending them to their deaths. But Trump and his advisers – not one of whom has spent a day in any previous US administration or in the US army – are immune to such warnings.There is still time for Trump to change his mind and keep the marines and commandos out of ground battle. But he will have to weather a seventh visit by Netanyahu in the White House, or wherever he happens to be, to be able to do so. The next week or more will show how much spine he has. If he shows no more than he did during Bibi’s previous six visits, then the world will need to hunker down and prepare for a nuclear onslaught on Iran and the nuclear winter that will follow.Not surprisingly, since this war was started by the US, a country that claims hegemony over the entire world, and Israel, a rogue nation indicted by the International Court of Justice of having committed genocide in Gaza, neither of its leaders can afford to back down. The US sent a 15-point set of demands for Iran to meet if it wanted to end the war. Teheran dismissed these with contempt.But the US has almost run out of options, because if it cannot force open the Strait of Hormuz, and with all oil and gas supplies from the Gulf states already disrupted, the entire global economy is now at Iran’s mercy, and all of the sufferers, including the population of the US, will pin the blame on Trump and Netanyahu.The immense and needless suffering that these two ‘leaders’ have caused to the people of Iran was described by its Foreign Minister Sayyed Abbas Araghchi at an emergency meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 27. It is worth reproducing in full, if only to bring home to readers, and to the wider world beyond them, the extent to which Netanyahu and Trump have ceased to be human beings capable of human compassion:“Dear colleagues, Iran stands today in the throat of an illegal war imposed by two bullying nuclear armed regimes, the United States and Israel. This war of aggression is blatantly unjustified and brutal. They initiated this aggression on 28th February while Iran and the United States were engaged in a diplomatic process to resolve Americans’ alleged concerns over Iran’s nuclear program. They torpedoed diplomacy for a second time in the course of nine months by torpedoing the negotiating table.“Among the most harrowing manifestations of this aggression was the calculated, phased assault on Shajarat Hayaba Elementary School in the city of Menab, south of Teheran, where more than 175 students and teachers were slaughtered in cold blood. This barbaric attack is but the visible tip of a far bigger iceberg: one that conceals beneath its surface a far graver catastrophe, namely the normalisation of the most abhorrent violations of human rights and humanitarian law and the audacity to commit atrocity crimes with impunity. At a time when the American Israeli aggressors, by their own assertions, possess the most advanced technologies and the highest precision military data systems, no one can believe that the attack on the school was anything other than deliberate and intentional.“Targeting Shajarat Hayaba was a war crime and a crime against humanity, one that demands unequivocal condemnation by all and unambiguous accountability from the culprits. To denounce such a merciless assault on a place where the most innocent reside and pursue knowledge is not merely a legal obligation. It is a moral and human imperative.“Shajarat Elementary School has not been the only casualty of American-Israeli atrocity crimes during the past 27 days of their illegal war. More than 600 schools have been demolished or damaged across Iran and more than 1,000 students and teachers martyred or wounded. The aggressors, who are arrogantly shouting ‘no mercy, no quarter’ and threatening to strike Iran’s vital infrastructure have been attacking hospitals, ambulances, health workers, Red Crescent rescuers, refineries, water sources and residential areas. [The terms] war crime and crimes against humanity are not sufficient to describe the gravity of the atrocities they are committing.“The aggressors’ targeting pattern, accompanied by their rhetoric, leaves little doubt as to their clear intent to commit genocide. Distinguished colleagues, this unjust war of whims by the United States and Israel against the noble nation of Iran is the direct result of silence in the face of earlier manifestations of lawlessness and atrocity in occupied Palestine, Lebanon and elsewhere. Indifference and silence in the face of such injustices will bring no security and peace. It will invite more insecurity and human right violations. The United Nations and the core values it embodies, as well as the overall human rights framework, are at serious stake”.Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist and commentator.