Iran: failure and mat, and after? | Radio-Canada

The famous “failure and mat” expression, taken from the chess game and which means the end of a game with the defeat of a player and the victory of the other, has a completely different meaning in Persian, a language from which she draws her original etymology.

This expression, derived from Persian chah matliterally means The king is caught in ambush or The king is surprised.

Indeed, in the chess game, so that a player can declare his victory, he just has to take the king trapped, to wedge him so that he no longer finds any emergency exit.

No need to capture it or make it fall as is the case with the other parts of the game, including the queen.

The situation in which the supreme guide of Iran is today, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presents many similarities with the notion of chah mat.

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The art of surprising

To failures, to trap the opposing king, we must master the art of surprising.

For Iran, the surprise was double. The first occurred on June 13 when the Israelis led a series of attacks on Iranian soil, killing several senior officials from the revolution guards as well as nuclear scientists.

To quickly carry out its strikes without them without them being detected by Iranian forces, Israel used a secret mossad operation, its intelligence service, which involved the use of drones manufactured in clandestine installations located inside Iran.

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The second surprise for the Islamic Republic occurred on Saturday, late evening, during the American strikes on its nuclear sites. Admittedly, the American president Donald Trump has been brandishing for several days already the threat of bombing the Iranian atomic sites and had even cut short his stay in Kananaskis, Alberta, where he participated in the G7 summit, under this pretext.

However, doubt still hovered on Saturday morning and President Trump even gave a two -week schedule in Tehran, thus paving the way for a possible diplomatic solution to the conflict.

Misleading

To succeed in their operation, baptized Midnight hammerAmerican forces have used misleading tactics aimed at lure The Iranians, said on Sunday morning the chief of staff of the American army, Dan Caine.

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This military intervention included several deception maneuvershe said. For lure The Iranians, some B-2 bombers took off from the United States to the west and to the Pacific, while others Discreetly headed east, with a minimum of communications throughout the 18 hours of flight.

In the eyes of the Iranians, international diplomacy was the victim of deception, not them.

According to the Iranian diplomacy chief, Abbas Araghchi, the United States and Israel made explode diplomacy by deciding to cross an important limit.

We were in negotiations [sur le programme nucléaire iranien] With the United States when Israel has decided to explode this diplomacyhe wrote on X, adding that when Iran was chatting with European Union countries, the United States decided, in turn, to do explode This diplomacy.

They cannot speak of diplomacy, they have betrayed diplomacysaid the spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the CNN channel.

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No one knows what will happen later, but what is certain is that the responsibility for the consequences of this war must be assumed by the United States and Israelsaid Esmaïl Baghai without specifying how Tehran has ripposted.

Iran has the right to exercise its right to self -defensehe added again.

Peace by force

Another point of similarity with the game of chess: the end goal is not to bring down the opposing king but to wedge it.

This is the objective that the United States is at least publicly. President Donald Trump, his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his head of diplomacy, Marco Rubio, in turn repeated on Sunday that the operation Midnight hammer did not aim to bring down the Iranian diet.

Trump administration says she wants achieve peace by using force And says he is ready to discuss with Iran about its civil nuclear program.

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The Iranian diet must wake up and say to itself: “Ok, if we really want nuclear energy [à des fins pacifiques] In our country, so there is a way to do it “said Marco Rubio during an interview with the Fox News channel. The offer is still there, we are ready to talk to them tomorrow.

The ball is therefore now in the Iranian camp. The Mullahs regime may have lost strike capacity in the region, its allies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen having been weakened after more than a year of war with Israel, but Tehran still has imposing nuisance capacities that can hurt the United States and the international community more generally.

Possible scenarios

Revolutionary guards can, for example, decide to block the strategic strait of Ormuz, where almost 20 % of global oil demand transits, thus raising the price to the pump, especially in Asia. This is the least explosive option on the military level.

Iran can also decide to release the big game. Although its military equipment is largely aging due to the difficulty for Iranians to obtain spare equipment because of international sanctions, Tehran has the greater arsenal of short and medium -range ballistic missiles in the region. This is what the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) is said in its 2024 report on military capacities in the world.

The Iranians could also opt for one of the most feared scenarios by targeting the American military bases in the Middle East. Some of these bases have already been targeted by Tehran allies in the region, but a direct intervention by the Iranians would bring conflict into unknown terrain.

Anyway, the game still seems far from over, and players will still have to wait before tidying up their pawns.