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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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