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Trump has given a "red line" to Iran about killing protestors, but we still aren't seeing US involvement as deaths move into the thousands, reportedly. If the regime follows through with its claims, it will be executing many if not most of the thousands it has arrested.
I have an essay on my view that the US/West/Israel should clearly intervene in the Transnational Thursday thread, but the Culture War dynamics strike me as interesting in that it's not really Culture War Classic material. Traditionally, the Left has been soft on Iran and the Right has been hawkish. Iran has tried to kill Trump and Trump officials, as revenge for the Soleimani assassination.
There's a strong anti-interventionist Right and Left. During the 12-Day War, Trump went from tweeting about regime change, to abruptly demanding cessation of hostilities, which Israel and Iran complied with. (I think had the war continued the regime would already have fallen, given how easily Israel was bombing them.) This is something that's already kicked off, unlike the Maduro rendition. My understanding is that action got more popular in the polls having succeeded, though it's an open question what Venezuela's fate will be.
The Right strongly criticized Obama for declaring a red line in Syria, and then backing off. In hindsight, I think it would have been correct to have intervened against Assad. Here, I think there's a clear cost-benefit analysis case, whether you care about the plight of the Iranian people or the amoral realist power dynamics for America First Global Superpower Edition.
How would attacking Iran benefit America?
Throwing missiles around isn't going to do anything significant. How many missiles has Russia dumped on Ukraine, how many thousands of drones and missiles have they fired off? They've largely broken the Ukrainian electrical grid yet Ukraine remains in the struggle after years and years of bombing and a large-scale ground invasion.
The Saudis bombed Yemen. The US bombed Yemen. The bombing did very little.
How many bombs did the Allies drop on Germany, they flattened whole cities with firestorms comparable to nuclear strikes! This did not break the will of Nazi Germany, they fought on till ground troops conquered the country. The US flattened North Korea, they literally razed the entire country such that people were living in holes in the ground because the buildings had been destroyed. The war ended in a draw and from then on North Korea devoted massive resources into armaments and bunkerization and has taken a very hostile stance to America, as one might expect. Bombing Vietnam caused considerable casualties for Vietnam but it did not achieve the political goal, Saigon was lost. The Russians bombed the hell out of Chechnya but needed a ground invasion to secure it.
Bombing has military relevance but the political effect is very weak, often counterproductive. If you want a political effect, you need to have ground troops for an invasion and this invasion needs to be in progress or very likely to succeed to pressure leaders into surrendering. Alternately, you can aim for a military effect in that bombing can swing the tide of a relatively evenly fought civil war as in Syria or Libya. Only the bombing of Serbia worked out per the 'air campaign only' concept. Iran is a lot bigger than Serbia and a lot further away from NATO airbases. Air campaigns only work in special cases, not generally.
The prior Israeli and American bombing of Iran did nothing, there was no significant military or political effect. The bombing of Fordow had no effect since Iran does not want nuclear weapons. The Israelis have been saying the Iranians are 6-18 months away from nuclear weapons for the last 30 years. The Israelis are lying. If the Iranians wanted nuclear weapons, they'd simply acquire them like other countries that want them. Pakistan didn't stay months away from nukes for decades, they just acquired them. Same with North Korea. Iran probably wants to be a latent nuclear state like South Korea or Japan, they'll only change this stance if threatened with imminent disaster.
Bombing Iran more aggressively is the surest path to them nuclearizing.
There are also a myriad of other costs of bombing Iran. Oil prices will rise and economic uncertainty will increase. The cost in munitions will reduce US strength in more important theaters like Asia. It will further worsen US diplomatic standing. Russia and China will support Iran to inflict costs on the US, they won't be alone like Serbia was. The Iranians will fight on since a ground invasion is totally impractical and a ground invasion is the only thing that can actually deliver the goal of regime change, unless there is a civil war.
If you think the regime might be collapsing and is totally unsustainable then why bomb, why should the US not just do nothing and save a lot of effort, risk and blood? If you're right then doing nothing is the most logical choice, if you're wrong (and the semi-annual major Iran riots are another nothingburger) and the US bombs, then it probably won't work?
Trump shouldn't make these rash proclamations, he should take some notes from Xi about doing nothing, developing internally and biding his time. This recent Venezuela campaign seems to be incoherent. Maduro is gone, some people are dead but the whole socialist structure is still there. Maduro is a clown, not some evil wizard holding the whole country under his thrall. Trump could've just unsanctioned Venezuelan oil if he wanted to buy it, would have probably been much cheaper than moving all these troops around. He thinks he owns Venezuela, people are making memes about conquistadors but conquistadors fought ground campaigns and actually conquered territory, putting it under their complete political control. That comes first, then comes resource extraction. Montezuma's vice-emperor didn't take over the Aztecs!
I agree that U.S. intervention is inviting disaster for no real upside, but I think your military comparisons are wrongheaded.
This wouldn’t be a civilian terror bombing campaign as seen in WWII; the civilians are already in revolt. It wouldn’t be comparable to Vietnam or Korea (or Ukraine?) since Iran has no superpower stiffening its resistance. They cannot expect a flood of Chinese conscripts or spare HIMARS.
The goal would be tactical air power. After a certain point, any time the Nazis got too many tanks in one spot, a flight of P-47s would come ruin their day. This had real effects on their ability to organize a defense.
But, as you pointed out, that only works with troops to press the advantage. I have seen little evidence that such organized opposition exists in Iran. Without a strong horse to back, air intervention goes nowhere.
Well, I’m not going to argue with you there. His vibes-based policy is not suited for an actual lose-lose situation. Unless an actual rebel army forms, his best bet is to stay out.
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If we’ve learned anything from the last five years of Happening, it’s that American and Israeli air power is really good. A modern extended bombing campaign against Iran would look nothing like the strategic bombing campaigns of the 20th century. It would look like what Israel did to Hezb. The ISAF and IAF would degrade Iranian air defense into irrelevance, then start dropping precision munitions on anyone regime associated who popped their head up. If you think that the American Air Force with target selection done by Israeli spies would get the same results that air campaigns with massed unguided bombs did 50-80 years ago you just haven’t been paying attention. It is true that you can’t just outright win a war, but you can cripple the command structure of an organization. In a country like Iran where there is lots of internal turmoil already, that could be enough to give the opposition an opportunity.
That doesn’t mean it would be a good idea. Iranians are mostly patriots even if they hate the mullahs, so there would be a rally around the flag effect. Regime officials would be able to hide in bunkers and move around. It is possible that enough of them would survive that they could continue coordinating resistance and ruling, and I think you are right that they would go balls to the wall for a nuke if they retained the capacity to do so. All your points about how this would deplete our munitions and damage us diplomatically are good points. We should not risk blowback just for a chance to destroy the Iranian regime.
Basically it seems like you think it definitely won’t work and we shouldn’t do it. I think it might work and we shouldn’t do it.
Besides the obvious previously mentioned example of Hamas, the USAF bombed Yemen relentlessly for over a year (over a decade counting the civil war) to basically no effect whatsoever, including under Trump. They failed to disable Houthi air defenses and nearly lost multiple jets including an F-35 as a result.
We have much worse intelligence against the houthies than the Mossad does against Iran, so I don’t think it is apples to apples.
As far as I know basically all the air assets we lost were reapers. If we are flying slow drones over the country at all, that means the air defenses are highly degraded. That’s like saying the VNAF won the air war because a lot of American airplanes went down. The reason the Vietnamese had so many targets to shoot down was because of our constant presence and dominance in the air.
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Was it really so relentless? There sure were a lot of videos of random explosions floating around, but the Yemeni cities that appeared in them never seemed to be anywhere near the total rubble state that the Gaza strip, or Ukrainian frontline cities, were reduced to. I would guess that there was some consideration for the Saudis there, who probably don't want one of those "joining a terrorist militia is the best/only career path available to young men" territories on their border.
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I agree that the capabilities of air power have changed.
I also agree that this does not mean that air power can suddenly deliver on the promise of strategic objectives. The US may well invest a few billions to force Iran to abandon its barracks and police stations. But nothing would stop the regime from evenly distributing their goons evenly over the apartments of Tehran. Even if the US can bust any bunker the regime might dig out, I am not convinced that the bunker busters are actually cheaper than digging out bunkers.
As others have pointed out, Hamas is a cautionary tale on what you can not do even with total air superiority.
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I agree completely with the rally-around the flag effect, I expect there's probably enriched uranium or plutonium dispersed or hidden somewhere too.
But also I think air power is a bit of a mirage.
If US/Israeli air power was so great, why haven't they been able to destroy Hamas? That was their goal right? Hamas didn't have any air defences whatsoever. Israel's bombing has been extremely intensive, they've wrecked most of Gaza and gotten lots of lefties upset with how intense the bombing has been, people have been throwing out terms like 'absolute destruction', just look at all the footage. In addition Israel controls entry and exit into Gaza so they've been able to quasi-besiege it and block off food imports. But it still wasn't enough to destroy Hamas!
Nobody in the West really likes Hamas that much, they're considered a terror group. Gaza is a pretty small mini-state right next to Israel. Hamas is a tiny fraction of the Iranian military in strength. There have also been Israeli ground attacks. Even if Hamas was destroyed and Israel achieved a full victory it would not necessarily show that airpower would work in Iran, since just about every factor is much worse for an Iran campaign. And yet Hamas is still around, they're shooting collaborators.
If air power was so great, Hamas should be gone, right? You can blow up a commander, they just replace him again and again and again. I suppose that Hamas and Gazans are highly motivated to be anti-Israel and this compensates for being bombed? But it also seems that the strength of airpower is overrated if in even a highly favourable environment it fails.
The Iranian opposition don't seem to be armed, unless they're armed I don't think they're too relevant, the government can crush them if they want Tiananmen style, it's just that they don't particularly want to.
I’m increasingly starting to suspect that the Gaza war was intentionally fought with the aim of going on forever while still leaving Hamas intact. It’s not great for Israel’s security, or the IDF soldiers deployed there, or for the civilian population of Gaza, but it is pretty good for having a permanent excuse to skip your court dates.
Sorry, court dates?
Who do you think is calling the shots in this scenario?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/court-agrees-to-cancel-pms-testimony-this-week-after-briefing-by-security-chiefs/
Oh. I guess that makes more sense.
I would still disagree with the suspicion, if only because I don’t see an obvious way to actually fix the problem.
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I would not consider Gaza a place where air power is well suited. Air power works on opponents who are at least moderately sophisticated and organized. A tiny band of terrorists who belt toddlers to themselves instead of bullet proof vests every morning is exactly the opposite of the type of target that air power works well on.
I think the way it works well is in combination with good intelligence to wage assassination campaigns against enemy leadership and important weapons systems. You can’t destroy an enemy organization, but you can degrade them and scare whoever the next guy is. I think the right way to think of it might be like a correction for a dog. If you just assassinate their top 10 guys every time they cross some line, they’ll keep filling those spots but the next 10 guys might start to think twice about being as oppositional. It’s definitely not a silver bullet, but I don’t think that means it is useless.
Or eventually you find one of those top 10 guys that you have a special relationship with and/or identify as a relative moderate, at which point you can then ensure the space above him is kept conveniently open and facilitate a regime change in which somebody you can actually negotiate with gets put into the top job.
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I know everyone seems to have forgotten but the US tried this against the Houthis. First Biden and then Trump bombed Yemen for over a year to stop them from attacking ships or launching missiles at Israel, they blew up a bunch of Houthi leaders including the "top missile guy" yet in the end the targets were replaced and the missiles continued even as Trump basically signed a separate peace that didn't even oblige the Houthis to stop firing missiles.
My suspicion is that an extended campaign against Iran would resemble the Yemen campaign, with the exception that Iran, unlike the Houthis, have the firepower to actually kill a significant number of Americans if they're backed into a corner.
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Obviously in this day and age you can't trust anything (and I can't even dig the video in question back up), but Russian telegrams were circulating something that purported to be a CCTV video of protesters acting like a not completely incompetent fire team with some sort of machine guns. I'm sure the Americans and Israelis would have no trouble getting some of them trained and equipped if they wanted to.
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Hamas are deep inside thousands of tunnels and tightly embedded among civilians, counting on Israel (who are being held to first world standards) to value Palestinian childrens' lives higher than Hamas does. They have solid intel on Israel and their capabilities and prepared for just such a war for decades. Why are you ignoring that?
I'm ignoring that because it's not true. The Israeli military has been eager to bomb and wreck Gaza and they've worked hard to limit and constrain food and medical supplies coming in, despite pressure from the US and EU. The ethos is not 'first world standards' but 'the bare minimum that can be dubiously defended as first world standards'.
Since when did first world countries routinely shoot children trying to collect food? Or claim just about every UN/human rights NGO is biased against them? Even Israeli sources have been going 'what is the point of this, what are we trying to achieve by setting these arbitrary lines and shooting people who try to cross them':
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000
It's definitely true that they prepared for decades against the war that Israel would wage, with thousands of tunnels and human shields. An air war would not succeed, because Hamas made sure of that.
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Could you quantify these "first world standards"? Because from where I'm sitting, the Israelis killed more Gazans in the average day prior to the "ceasefire" than the Iranians killed protesters even using the highest death projections despite the Iranian population sitting between 50x and 100x that of Gaza.
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[deleted by author]
The latter 99% of his post was about how attacking Iran wouldn't overthrow the regime?
My bad. I got lost. I read his comment and then came back to it a few hours later and thought it was a different one.
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The steelman for bombing working is that if you take out the C&C or communication nodes of the enemy and perhaps hit a few troop concentrations they will scatter, loose coordination, and then fall to pieces before the troops that are already on the ground (the protestors). Coordination is extremely important and if you deny that to the enemy they might collapse quickly.
FWIW I tend to think the US should stay out.
I appreciate that you can model the way this could work, even if you don't support it.
It's just "shock and awe" revolutionary edition. The security forces need to be scared to operate, and ideally think they'd be better off switching sides. That's true with or without air support, but air support would sure make it easier.
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Why do you think in any way it's a good idea to directly compare mass protests and regime change in Iran to Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
Those are not analogous scenarios. You've essentially provided a Gish Gallop of incredibly wrong military analysis.
It's actually something of a prevalent myth that strategic bombing in WWII didn't have a major impact on the outcome of the war, but that's also not an analogous situation.
I love that you leave out "China" when discussing the Korean War.
I don't know what evidence I could possibly provide here to change your mind, given all the available evidence you've presumably had the chance to encounter.
Seriously? I thought they didn't want weapons? What are they waiting for?
Where were they last June?
Ensuring victory of the opposition and reducing the chance of protracted conflict and bloodshed.
Imagine if you will how you would feel if Venezuela had been undergoing mass, violent protests?
At least when people bring up Libya they're conceding that air power in support of on-the-ground opposition can be quite effective at regime change.
You haven't provided military analysis at all, all you say in your little substack post is 'bomb and good things will happen'. At no point do you investigate the value proposition, the historic success rate of these air campaigns, consider relevant factors such as 'what are the risks of starting a major war in a key energy exporting area'? Go read a RAND report, there are far smarter ways to be hawkish.
Ukraine was in the middle of a civil war when Russia invaded, the rebels there had gotten FAR further than in Iran. They actually controlled territory, were well organized into their own mini-states in Donetsk and Luhansk. And even with the Russian bombing... Even with the Russian invasion... It's still turned into a mess for Russia because Ukraine (considerably smaller than Iran) is not easily toppled. Ukraine has outside support, so would Iran.
Yeah, the Chinese provided the ground troops that retook North Korea. They fought the bulk of the ground campaigns. Ground campaigns matter, I have stressed this. But the US destroying 75-90% of the standing structures in North Korea still didn't bring them to the negotiating table, do you think a few measly missiles are going to knock out Iran? Israel has bombed the shit out of Gaza and marched in troops several times, it took a long long long time to achieve a draw. And that's all they've achieved! Hamas is still in charge on the ground.
It's insanely dumb to go 'yes, the Israelis have managed, after years and years of shelling and bombing and ground invasion against a tiny poor state they outnumber and totally encircle, to get back their captives, while Hamas is still in charge - so the US and Israel can bomb a mountainous country 50x bigger than Gaza in population, 80x the size of Israel in size, a country with much greater military resources and somehow this will overthrow the regime, without even a ground invasion since even in my fantasy world that's still too far'
There's no reason why this would work!
Sending military aid takes time and depends on the situation, whether it's a tit for tat squabble or a major campaign. We've been through over 20 years of interventionists proposing 'easy' campaigns in the Middle East that almost always turn out to be long, expensive, failures and yet no lessons seem to be learnt. Iran is not even an 'easy' campaign, it is an extremely difficult campaign in a mountainous, highly populated, huge territory. It is the hardest campaign.
You understand the concept of theory of a hypothetical scenario, right? If it's warm, I don't need a coat. But if it's cold, I'll wear a coat. I might bring a coat in my bag if I think it'll suddenly get cold enough for me to need it! I'm a latent coat-wearer.
What opposition? Led by who? Can you even name them? What are their goals and ideologies? Have you justified that an air campaign would result in the success of this amorphous political grouping, as opposed to tarring them with comprador status (presumed to be in alliance with foreigners trying to bomb the country)?
'Feelings' are not supposed to come into it. Strategy via 'feelings' is stupid and usually immoral too in its final outcomes, inferior in all respects compared to sober analysis.
You continue to demonstrate you have no ability to understand reality.
You're still peddling "if we attack Iran they will really go for the bomb" AFTER the US and Israel attacked them six months ago.
You're still peddling "if we attack Iran they will get support from China/Russia" AFTER we've seen them do nothing to help Iran when it was getting pummeled six months ago.
You talk a big game about "sober analysis," but you are incapable of recognizing the use of the word "feel" in a context where I'm simply proposing you consider an alternate scenario. Instead of thinking about the posed alternate scenario--which would be inconvenient for you--you jump to a lecture on "feelings" not being a great way to analyze things.
At least the people who bring up Libya concede that air power in support of protests on the ground can be effective at toppling regimes.
Come back when you've worked out the difference between 'skirmishing' and 'attempted regime change'. You have no idea what you're proposing, an incredibly simplistic or outright ignorant view of the relevant dynamics.
Russia and China do not care much about skirmishes, they care more about regime change. The response would be different.
Hypothetical Venezuelan protests have little to do with the situation, unless they're well-armed enough to be credible threats to the state. I already addressed this but you don't seem to understand it.
I have a pretty good idea of what I'm proposing since I've spent some time in the Middle East, uh, working on US foreign policy.
Russia and China will not stick their necks out for Iran. Any support would be a mere token.
You have demonstrated you'll just throw analytic spaghetti at the wall even when it makes zero sense.
I don't think you grok my point about the Venezuela operation, were it to have been done in a context of a mass popular uprising.
It all makes sense now. Reflexive support of a totally unknown opposition. Great confidence in intervention, despite a poor track record. Complete assurance that this time, they really are developing WMDs... Very little interest in detail (what carrier groups are there to use for this attack, there aren't any deployed in CENTCOM right now) or any consequences of the attack. No attempt to weigh up pros and cons.
Yes, I can completely believe you worked on US foreign policy in the Middle East.
If the Venezuelan operation were done in the context of a mass uprising, who knows what would happen? A civil war, a new government or just more chaos? How does that help achieve US goals, how does that secure the oil Trump wants? These are totally different situations with different goals.
I'm not arguing this time they really are developing WMDs. Iran has long had an active nuclear research program with an at-least-latent weaponization angle. How close they are to break out capacity is hotly contested of course, after the Fordow bombing.
You were arguing that they would pursue the bomb if we intervene ... more than we already have of late. I don't think that's actually a real risk in that it's already baked in before this.
The opposition is not totally unknown in terms of its characteristics. They aren't Al Qaeda affiliates, for example. They aren't commies.
The US and Israel have a large number of potential options without a carrier group, FYI. I don't need to publish an OPORD to advocate for the basic idea of something we and Israel have a proven capacity to do.
We already have a good idea of potential blowback from Iran, since we just bombed them six months ago. They're worse off considerably than they were before.
We can also estimate the plausibility of various outcomes from toppling the regime and evaluate the costs and benefits.
You seem unwilling to do that in any reality-based way, since you lack a command of very basic facts about Iran in particular and military strategy in general. I think any objective observer who isn't suffering from Iraq Syndrome or a committed isolationist can see this is a good case for it.
Funnily enough, Iran also has a good deal of oil and gas. My point is just that in Venezuela Trump had Delta swoop in and rendition the leader, leaving everything else intact. Which is a strange situation! Will they get democracy? Who knows! In Iran, the mass protests for regime change are ongoing. If we were to assist with that regime change, the boulder is already rolling down the hill.
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Russia doesn't have the capacity to support Iran now and China just doesn't care (nor does it have the capacity to defend them). They're on their own.
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As far as I know, Kim Il Sung was absolutely willing to negotiate as early as 1951 because it was clear that his original war goals were out of reach. Continuing the war was not only pointless but also rather detrimental for North Korea. It was Stalin who insisted on continuing the war and supplying the Chinese to do so with Mao's acceptance because both of them decided to make the return of POWs a central issue in order to block any agreement (because there was no way the enemy was going to forcibly repatriate all North Korean and Chinese POWs) and thus prolong the war as long as possible as they apparently thought this'd harm American interests or something (or a case of commie 4D chess, maybe). It's no surprise that a ceasefire was only reached after Stalin's death. In fact, it's reasonable to assume that Kim was willing to negotiate a truce as soon as the winter of 1950 had MacArthur not insisted on continuing the UN offensive beyond all of its original aims.
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