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Iran has everything to lose and nothing to gain by declaring nuclear capability.
Reaction to this top-level post on Iranian nukes.
It's very possible Iran ALREADY has the weapons in their arsenal.
But the weapons are militarily and strategically useless for Iran in this particular situation.
Because every current adversary already has nuclear weapons, and more of them, and could retaliate forcefully.
Why they probably have them:
Between how much time they've had to develop them, and that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days), it's nonsensical to believe Iranians do not already have nuclear weapons or couldn't have them. Making an detonating an implosion uranium bomb is something the Chinese managed in 1963 or so. Today, with supercomputers and more mature nuclear physics knowledge out there, it's not hard at all.
The 15 bombs Iran could have if we take IAEA at their word, which if used, would result in destruction of Tehran and other major cities, could kill perhaps 300-500k Israelis. It'd not destroy the country, cause it to be overrun etc.
Iranians know that if they nuked an Israeli air-base, Israelis who have more bombs would H-bomb all of their major military sites and production facilities. They're probably working on hydrogen bombs, but have not conducted a test yet. So, there are no useful targets for these bombs at all. There's no reason to say you have something you cannot even use.
Israelis do not have the resources for a sustained campaign, so why strike them? They were going to give up their campaign sooner or later.
So, in conclusion:
Obviously, even if they had the bombs, they'd keep them secret, locked up in a bunker and work on producing hydrogen bombs and ICBMs and enough of a tunnel network to guarantee survival of a second strike capability.
Announcing that they have the bombs would
the only upside would be boosting national pride.
So your claim is "Iran has the bomb but it is useless to them".
So why did they build it? Is it just a stepping stone to the hydrogen bomb?
Also, it is not widely claimed that Iran has bombs, which would require some explanation. Does Mossad know? If yes, then why do they not make that claim? How can it be both in Israel's and Iran's interests to keep the world in the dark? If not, then how were they able to hide it?
Does the US know? Am I supposed to believe that Trump could avoid blabbering about it? Was Trump's bombing targeting finished bombs, or was it just a charade and if so for whose benefits?
This seems plausible. 400kg of 60% U-235 corresponds to roughly 240kg pure U-235. If you start from natural uranium, you would have needed to process 34 tons to get that much U-235. If your bottleneck are centrifuges rather than raw uranium and fluorine (which seems likely), you will likely have processed twice that much because squeezing out the last 0.1% of U-235 is just not worth it.
Naively, I would expect that separation efficiency is proportional to the product of the fraction of both species, so the easiest percentage gain is going from 49.5% to 50.5%. However, you do not have to go back to 99.3%, because 85% is enough for a weapon. Plus you are dealing with much less material.
(Actually, the WP article on SWU contains the relevant formula. Producing 400kg 60% enriched U takes at least 34t SW. Splitting that into 140kg 85% and 260kg 46% takes about 140kg SW, or just 0.4% of the total separation work. Even separating it to the point where your tails are just 0.7% again will just take 1.3t SW.)
There is still some overhead, probably. Perhaps the Uranium is not stored as UF6 but in a more reduced form, and it certainly will take processing after it is sufficiently enriched. The mechanics of a bomb can be prototyped with depleted uranium, but at the end of the day you either need to test your device or trust your computer models. With regard to the latter "someone falsified a fission cross-section in literature" seems like an unlikely story, but so does "someone hacked the air-gapped Iranian centrifuge network".
The first stage of a hydrogen bomb is basically an implosion type fission bomb. They may also be aiming for a boosted fission weapon to get into high tens / low hundreds of kilotons range.
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Yeah, pretty much.
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Iran could threaten the use of a salted bomb on the grounds of the Temple Mount, maximizing radioactive contamination. The ultra-religious have enormous political influence in Isael. This would act as deterrence in a way that targeting a major city would not, while minimizing loss of life. Al-Aqsa isn’t super important for Shia Muslims, but the Temple Mount actually needs to be the place of construction for the Third Temple.
last time I checked Temple Mount was in Jerusalem, a major city
The whole city is not within the limits of the Temple Mount, and nuclear weapons are made in different magnitudes. So this could conceivably be accomplished with negligible loss of life.
As Temple Mount is part of Jerusalem you cannot target Temple Mount without targeting Jerusalem.
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Intentionally bombing a mosque would be unacceptable even if it wasn’t a particularly important world cultural heritage site. And like @No_one was saying, it would lead to immediate massive nuclear retaliation by Israel and probably also by Pakistan and the United States.
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So, they could do virtually zero damage, mortally offend most of the entire western world by deliberately targetting a religious site, and get properly nuked in return? The offense to deterrence ratio on that plan does not pencil.
Nuclear threats are for deterrence. You want the other country afraid to risk it. Israel’s highly religious minority cannot risk the grounds of the Temple Mount becoming contaminated, because it is unequivocally essential for their end of times prophecies. The entire religion is predicated on the Messiah returning and the Temple being rebuilt on these grounds. Some Haredi even believe that the Shechina is especially found at the Western Wall:
When nuclear weapons are being launched, no one cares about offending someone’s sensibilities (lol). The threat may be enough to cause the ultra religious population of Israel to take a more diplomatic approach to Iran, unless their foolishness is the thing that causes the impossibility of their religious prophecy. That would be a big deal. An example of how serious they treat this stuff — the infamous tunnel under Chabad in NYC was to fulfill Rebbe Schneerson’s wish to attach two buildings together. So the literal world Chabad headquarters built a secret tunnel underneath Manhattan to connect the two buildings, and rioted when the police put an end to it, in order to fulfill the will of the Rebbe.
Iran should obviously see their current predicament as one of civilizational survival. Are they going to surrender to Israel for the rest of time, having no ability to ever fight back because of the pace of technological development, or are they going to try to retain sovereignty over their land? I know that if I were Iran, i would be nuke-maxxing and doing whatever it takes to ensure I have sovereignty in my country. Even if it is “offensive”
Would the Messiah not just remove the fallout? If anything, it'd be a pretty good indicator that it was time to rebuild, plus now there's no existing competition for the site.
And radiation actually maps pretty well to existing divine wrath, specifically the Ark of the Covenant curses from 1 Samuel.
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Why would it be impossible to rebuild the temple on Temple Mount if it's nuked? Just have the builders wear hazard suits.
Because if it’s rebuilt it’s like a whole thing. Sacrifices have to resume daily etc. And just the idea of the holiest of holies land becoming contaminated is a dissonant thought.
Should be possible to slaughter a calf in a rad suit -- the L*** helps those who help themselves, y'know?
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It's mostly a film plot thing and also a way to get nuked. What would be the point ?
I've got a gut feeling that blasting Temple Mount into a shallow crater would make most Jews horrified but secretly relieved.
They've been Jews this long and had God wanted them to rebuild the temple, there'd have been a sign.
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This seems to be missing the point. Iran doesn't need enough nukes to win, they just need enough to make the cost of a nuclear exchange so high Israel would never risk it. Think about Saddam Hussein in 2003, if he has 10-15 nukes would the U.S. be willing to invade? How many nuclear strikes on Israel, are an acceptable price to pay for getting rid of him?
That's what I am saying.
But the only way to do it is thermonuclear weapons.
20*20 kilotons on Israel would be catastrophic but it'd be survivable for Israel.
It'd not be survivable for Iranian government.
100*400 kilotons would destroy Israel, possibly even partially prevent retaliation.
That's the moment when Iran would have true deterrence and MAD with Israel.
Being able to wound the enemy and then assuredly die is not deterrence.
Counterpoint- while Israël has plenty of crazy people in it, they don’t yet have the critical mass to trade Tel Aviv for the destruction of Iran. And if they ever do get that critical mass, the ‘extermination of Israël’ will not stop them because they believe building high rises in specific patches of desert will change the metaphysical structure of reality so Israël can’t lose.
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States are made out of individual humans which make their decisions, not some abstract grand strategy player. For example, 9/11 was only a papercut for the US, something on the level of an animal killing a villager in Age of Empires, perhaps. But it still ended up shaping a decade of US politics, because people care more about this kind of things than deaths from traffic.
Getting nuked would be like 9/11, but worse. Normally, this is the place where I would say that there is no way Netanyahu would survive this politically, but given him doing just fine after the Hamas attacks suggests I do not have a working model of Israeli politics.
Politicians pay attention to tail risks, and try to avoid them. For a conventional Iran, the 1% most unfavorable outcome for Israel of an Israeli airstrike is that Iranian rockets fired in retaliation kill a couple of hundred Israeli. For a nuclear Iran, the 1% outcome is that they nuke a few Israeli cities, killing tens or hundreds of thousands.
The other thing to remember is that there is an escalation ladder even once the nukes start flying. For example, a nuclear Iran might nuke an Israeli airbase in retaliation to a conventional bombing. In this situation, Israel would not get a pass for whatever retaliation they might visit on Iran. Glassing Tehran would not be an option, at most they could nuke an Iranian base. Even if things get to the point where cities are nuked, Israel might get away with killing 10x as many Iranians as they kill Israelis, but not with 100x. If they glass all of the Iranian cities, they will get the same repercussions than if they had nuked them without provocation, so whatever considerations are keeping them from nuking Iran right now would still be the same.
Finally, we can use past prisoner exchanges to get an idea of how much citizens and enemies weight in the Israeli utility function (to the degree that it is coherent). The exchange rate peaked in 2011 at 1027 Arabs per Israeli, but has cratered since Hamas has taken their hostages. But I imagine that killing 2M Iranians for 100k Israeli, while being a favorable exchange rate given both population sizes, would not be seen as favorable by Israel.
It shaped politics that much because it was basically a godsend, a moment some of the PNAC crowd have been secretly praying for.
Funny:
They were actually not that stupid and wanted to axe new carrier construction, but did not manage to do so.
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If this were true, why would the animal world be full of animals that are mildly poisonous, taste bad, have spines etc.? Why do bees sting large animals that threaten the hive?
As long as your enemy's value function includes terms other than your destruction, any damage you can inflict upon them can be a deterrent. If Israel destroys Iran, having eaten one small nuke in the process would still leave it weaker vis-a-vis its other enemies going forward, and simply make it harder for it to thrive as a nation. These are all considerations that might, in some situations, change the balance and make Israel decide to leave Iran alone even if they would rather attack it otherwise.
None of these animals are enemies of their predators, they're merely snacks. Those features you listed exist to induce the predator to choose another snack.
Nothing in my original post implies Israelis do not know this. Obviously they, the HOG are certain to know Iranians have nukes, or are right at the threshold. They're probably hard at work trying to get high-res photos of said nukes because accusations without proof aren't that interesting today.
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But this has further implications that you omit.
If Iran has the bomb, they can provide it to a smaller, far more suicidal group of allies (the Palestinians) to lock the Israelis into their current borders unless they negotiate with Iran. Technology transfers, taxes, religious rites/rights, not purchasing American weapons, etc. is what that looks like.
In this way, the Hamasi would serve as the permanent Iranian veto over the [Ashke]nazi. Because they simply don't care if the Israelis nuke them in response- the fact is, the Israelis get hurt far more than the Palestinians, the Palestinians are suicidal, and that is sufficient to accomplish this goal.
Conversely, if Israel believes that Iran will, or already has, or will inevitably soon obtain, a bomb like this... then their only response is to start removing the local kebab as fast as humanly possible. They didn't like the paragliders the first time; imagine how much they're not going to like them when the settlers further encroaching on their territory prompts an air-borne SADMization of the Israeli countryside.
The Iron Dome can stop a lot but the bomber is going to get through. And sure, Hamas could always attack from another country (perhaps one in which they seek refuge after the dust settles), but in that case that other country [and its people] are collateral the Israelis can threaten such that Hamas is kept down- since if Hamas manages to get an attack off then it's the entire host nation's problem, and Israel becomes the one with the nuclear veto.
Israel is obviously not going to agree to that. If Iran provides Hamas a bomb, Hamas will use it; Hamas does not have the self control to merely threaten for long, nor the ability to hide it for long (which means "use it or lose it" makes sense), regardless of what Israel does (aside from cease to exist). If Iran threatens to provide Hamas a bomb, that's the same as Iran threatening to nuke Israel; the presence of Hamas changes nothing.
Little nukes like that don't change much unless they can get them into the Knesset. (And the settlers are irrelevant; every Israeli could fuck back off behind the Green Line and the Palestinians would still demand the river to the sea)
I don't think they'd going to threaten to do it, I think there would be no warning until some very important Israeli infrastructure just all of a sudden disappears. Besides, Israel "doesn't have" that kind of bomb anyway.
The point is to nullify the strategic advantage Israel has because it has enough bombs to check Iran (and outside US intervention is the only reason they haven't been conquered yet), and a smaller blatantly suicidal people are just the delivery vehicle Iran needs to do that. It doesn't matter if Israel then goes full Old Testament and kills every last Hamasi in the area (and maybe the US stops them, or maybe they don't, but if they stop they'll absolutely try it again)- the attack went off, that's what matters.
All the better if it hits something actually important (like, say, where Israel gets its water from), and while Hamas is surely too stupid to manage that... well, what if they aren't?
Useless to Iran, because Israel and the US will know damn well who provided the bomb. I don't know what happens if a country starts a nuclear war, but the other nuclear powers of the world going "Oooh, aren't you tough, we'll just give you whatever you want" is not going to be on the table.
Israel's nukes aren't really doing much with respect to Iran. Because Israel can't start a nuclear war without the shit hitting the fan any more than Iran can, they can only be used in a retaliatory manner. And there's no need for that, because Israel is conventionally strong enough to defeat all comers. (Whether you think that's because of the US or not)
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Iran would never give the Arabs they sponsor that kind of independent power.
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No, you can't 'provide a bomb'.
It'd be obvious from the fallout where the bomb was from and you would end up being treated the same as if you had fired it yourself.
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Couldn't your conclusion that 'If Hamas manages to get an attack off it's the entire host nations problem as well' apply to Iran giving them a nuke in the first place? Couldn't Israel just state preemptively they will regard any use of nukes by hamas as use by Iran and will nuke Tehran in response? In this case would the Iranian regime be willing to chain themselves to asa suicidal ally and provide Hamas with bombs in the first place?
I don't think having a suicidal ally changes the logic of mutually assured destruction much. That relies on your enemy drawing some arbitrary distinction that doesn't serve their interests.
No, because Iran is the only one capable of retaliating (in a nuclear fashion) hard enough to discourage that. And Israel doesn't need to go nuclear if this happens; a conventional war would be just as destructive for these nations and peoples. Perhaps that is part of why the neighboring countries are unwilling to host the Hamasi as refugees.
Maybe, but I don't think Israel can win a war with Iran (hence the emphasis on keeping them down/contained). They're sufficiently equipped to wreck any country Iran allies with outside of that lovely mountain range that defines the western Iranian border, but unless the Americans want to put their boots on the ground and suffer the 3:1 attacker casualty rates to conquer Iran then Israel can't really touch them. Israel doesn't have those numbers, Iran's a peer nation (except for the nuclear weapons), and if either tries in the future are the Israel-hating Blues (and even Reds; Israeli influence might not be as stable in an era of Red reforms) even going to lift a finger?
Remember, the ultimate problem Israel is fighting is that, absent Rome/Europe/Washington and its religious fixation on holding Jerusalem, it is the natural geopolitical state of Judea to be in the Persian orbit. Hence the rhyme with Biblical times- Jews evict the Canaanites, then the Persians conquer the Jews.
This is a very particular view of history that completely discounts the centuries the territory of Judea was held by Greece, Rome, or Babylon (probably missing a few). If anything, it is the natural state of Judea to be fought over by adjacent great powers.
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It’s an interesting question. Consider the following points:
Half the world’s Jewish population lives outside Israel. Most are Zionists. Large reservoirs of highly fecund 6+ tfr Orthodox Jews live in the United States and indeed in Western Europe. It is unlikely that Iran nuking Israel would kill more Jews than the Holocaust, which the Jewish population will recover from in less than 100 years. The question is therefore some variant of “would a nuclear war between Israel and Iran spell the permanent end of (at least this iteration of) Jewish settlement in the Levant?”.
Rich American and European Jews have the money to fund the reconstruction of Israel, which is possible unless it is overrun. If it is overrun then all reconstruction is impossible, since there are probably no mercenary armies capable of retaking it and even the US likely wouldn’t. However, Iran alone can’t mount a ground invasion of Israel and Iranian proxies have been badly damaged by the recent conflict. The overrunning scenario therefore involves a kind of organic jihad - post nuclear strike - in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, marching across into a ruined Israel and taking it. This is entirely possible and that should be acknowledged. However, such a march could be stymied by Western air support in service of a surviving Israeli civilian, military and mercenary force in theory, depending on the global geopolitical situation.
I think the answer is unclear. I don’t believe Israel would invite nuclear war. But that they would lose is not fully certain, even if it is likely for reasons of Israel’s Arab neighbors and Iran’s strategic depth and lower population density.
I think the idea is that Israel might want to avoid lots of its people dying, even if it wouldnt lead to ultimate defeat. Your analysis makes sense only if you think the conflict has to be to the death in the log term.
Video game ass logic.
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The current Supreme Ayatollah declared a fatwa against nuclear weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against_nuclear_weapons
Now, obviously, the degree of adherence to this is obviously not strict (why else have such facilities capable of it?) but the Islamic clerics may not know to what precise degree their nuclear program is progressing, or have the technical know-how to really understand it. So it's hard to say if Iran 'knows' anything, or to ascribe rational-actor motives to them, if only because the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. How much information is the IRGC relaying to the clerics that supposedly rule the country?
I suppose only the Mossad really knows what is actually happening.
Good, didn't know about this.
Great way to promote ambiguity, though only very naive people will fall for it.
Generally, religious people actually believe in their religion. Politicians lie all the time, like Ulbricht denying the plan to build the Berlin Wall, Bush lying about Saddam having WMDs or Putin denying his intent to invade Ukraine. Clerics deceiving their followers about matters of religion are at least rarer.
For a theocracy like Iran, having the leaders following god's will is their fundamental claim to legitimacy. When religious leaders reveal that a proclamation of doctrine (e.g. a fatwa or encyclical) was just a ruse to mislead the unbelievers, they are making a mockery of the religion. Nor do they control their population to a degree where they can just retcon everything -- "We were always at war with Eurasia" / "The ayatollah had always said that nuclear weapons are great tools of the jihad".
This does not mean that I would update very much on an anti-nuke fatwa -- I would certainly read the fine print, consider how often these things are overturned and so forth, but I would likely update a fair bit more than I would on Putin's claim that his troops were just conducting a military exercise.
Of course, a fatwa against nukes would also be a good reason why Iran -- despite having reached 400kg @ 60% enrichment, which is very much within grasping distance of a nuclear weapon stopped just short of building nukes for now.
On the contrary, lying about one’s true beliefs for the purpose of self-preservation is explicitly permitted in Twelver Shia jurisprudence.
I would argue that there are important differences here. A central example of Taqiyya seems to be to pay lip service to whatever religion the local strongman tells you to follow. At the worst, this creates an ambiguity about whom of the locals are still faithful to Shia Islam.
The grand ayatollah proclaiming false doctrine would be much more serious than that, because it would create ambiguity about the teaching of Shia Islam.
Indeed, WP states (My emphasis) :
Obviously, this is also doctrine, so if a religion allowed preaching false doctrine, this would be suspect. Realistically, clerics will balance temporal advantages and the need to keep their faithful unified. If pretending to be anti-nuke had caused the world to send tons of HEU to Iran and sped along their nuclear weapon program by two decades, then perhaps a cleric might be tempted to proclaim false doctrine (at the cost of his followers forever worrying if he and his successors mean what they preach).
But the world predictably did not update on the fatwa a lot, it being proclaimed was not the difference between life and death for Iran. Not worth setting up a precedent weakening religious unity for.
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Look, I have more of a theory of mind for highly clerical religious prohibitions- there’s disassembled bombs held by the IRGC. Maybe ‘disassembled’ is the wrong word- it’s something that’s technically more of a lump of HEU but can become a bomb in about an hour, with a technician-not-engineer level of expertise.
Why wait for Iran? Pakistan has nuclear devices available for sale to destroy the Zionists.The same problem for the Iranians would exist for the Pakistanis: how do you trust that Jihadi Jamal really is able to execute his plan to bomb Tel Aviv and is not compromised or incompetent. Russia could have sold any of its nuclear devices as well, but that runs into the additional problem of getting the cash into a usable form.
No nation outsources strategic capability to external actors, and Irans employment of such a strategy for the Axis of Resistance showed how hollow such a strategy ends up being. Lack of direct oversight saw Hamas pulling the trigger on bad assumptions and Hezbollah getting thoroughly compromised. Whether Iranian direct control would have been better is unknown, but if the benefit of strategic ambiguity is wasting money on incompetent stooges then the decision maker needs to be put on performance review ASAP.
In what way was Hamas' action incompetent or harmful for Iran?
Hamas's actions were causal for Hezbollah's decision to open the northern front artillery campaign after Oct 7, which in turn led to foursignificant strategic setbacks for Iran that made their recent performance in the 12 day war possible.
First, it drove and culminated in the bushwhacking of Hezbollah's leadership via the pager and other campaigns, neutering Iran's premier proxy-ally-extension in the region. Hezbollah is a direct partner of Iran's IRGC, which is Iran's primary power-projection force, and this lost an ally whose reason for existing (from the Iranian backing perspective) is to help out in the kind of conflict that they just did not.
Second, because Hezbollah (and non-trivial amounts of its Syria-based infrastructure) were whacked by Israel, Iran lacked a proxy militia to stabilize Assad in Syria, allowing the momentum building that saw Iran's primary state-ally/client/main supply route into Lebanon cut while Iraqi-based militia groups were trying to drive over the desert. The loss of Syria was a loss of not just an ally, but a decade of significant investments in trying to establish and protect that interest.
Third, because Assad fell, the Syrian air corridor between Israel and Iran opened up. Israel was able to access previously denied airspace with vulnerable but capability-extending aircraft (like tankers and slower drones) that enabled the air war over Iran that led to Iran losing control of its own airspace. Israel would not have been able to generate as many air sorties over Iran as it did were Asad still in power.
Fourth, because the anti-Hezbollah campaign was being coordinated from an annex of the Iranian embassy in Syria, when Israel struck that in response, the Iranian response-response was the missile campaign between Israel and Iran. Not only did this deplete a considerable share of Iran's missile force, it also led to the Israel strikes on the Iranian air defense systems that also contributed to Iran's recent not-so-great showing.
As for Hamas's incompetence, that depends whose theory you want to subscribe to. Allegedly, Sinwar (the departed head of Hamas in Gaza who led the Oct 7 attack) was planning on reaching the West Bank and sparking a general uprising / Intifada. This not only did not happen, but the West Bank was so uninvolved that Hamas' only 'direct' allies in the conflict they wanted to make into a race war were... Hezbollah (who paid a high price) and the Houthis (who blockaded most of the Arab states from benefiting from of the primary Arab ethno-nationalist interests, the Suez Canal).
In so much that Sinwar's Plan B for the conflict was to have Gaza be pummeled in hopes the world would take the Palestinian's side, he certainly got Gaza pummeled, and the actual benefits for the Palestinians are sure to manifest any
dayweekmonthyear now.A common thread I saw on the gazanow telegram channel (now deleted) was that Hamas was uploading their livestream of civilian massacres not for goreporn likes, but to prove the IDF was a hollow shell without the USA and that the entire rotten edifice was kicked open so the rest of the arab world, especially West Bank but Hezbollah and Syria too, could roll in to clean out the yahudi with no effort. I still don't know if this was a particularly inspired attempt to justify the gleeful livestreamed executions and rape aftermaths as serving some strategic reason, or if it was a sincerely held belief that Israel was nothing without the USA and Hamas had struck the singular crippling blow, or y'know, both.
The one thing that really baffles me is whether Hezbollah also failed to reign in its own militants itching for action given their lack of full greenlight from Tehran or likely Nasrallah himself. For all its failures and cosplaying at being a fighting force (uniforms for nasheed tiktoks, journalist vest for publishing in reuters, the senior Hezbollah leadership must have known that keeping its cards in reserve for any Israeli incursion was the right play no matter what Hamas did.
Maybe trading bodies for international sympathy could work as a viable end state wild card, but previous trends don't really bear it out. The intifadas didn't result in a materially improved ground condition for the Palestinians and for all the hatred Israel gets it still has a growing population and economy. If that is losing for Israel, I'm sure Israel will collapse immediately like most of the world wishes it would.
'The entire rotten edifice will go down with one good kick' ranks up there with 'and then the enemy will lose the will to fight' in my personal list of 'big indicators of really bad strategy.' There are historical examples of it happening, and you can even identify trends that make it more likely to happen, but strategies that bet on it happening, as opposed to factor in the possiblity, tend to be poor strategies.
This presupposes that they didn't have as much of a greenlight as could be expected, with the patron parties distancing themselves from Hamas's decision after it became clear it wasn't going to spark the regional bonfire. Which, from my memory of those first few weeks, was pretty apparent in the first day(s). Hezbollah in particular had a pretty big anticlimatic drawdown in which they spun up the media organs like they were going to directly enter the conflict, demurred, and then 'quietly' began the artillery campaign after a bit later.
Though to be fair to past considerations, I am on record as believing that Iran has kind of lost the plot on managing its proxy warfare strategy. The curse of the deep state / cult of the offense strikes again, conflating strategic means with strategic ends and over-leveraging a strategic asset (the proxy network) beyond diminishing returns and into outright counter-productive tendencies.
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