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Notes -
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
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More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
Donald the Dove strikes again.
This seems... incredibly late to capitalize on anti-government sentiment. If you were going to try and provide military support to protests/deter their violent suppression, it probably would have been more effective to do it before they all got killed.
In the meantime, I don't see how a bombing campaign is going to succeed. I don't have anything sympathy for the Iranian regime, but if you're going to go to war you can't just lean on "my adversaries are evil" to justify it. If you don't have a credible plan to succeed you're just squandering money and killing people without purpose.
It remains to be seen. Iran is a big country with a huge population, many of whom are young and angry. Did the crackdown with 30k dead kill all the individuals or groups able and willing to engage in risky, intensive protesting? Did they break the will of most of those wanting the regime's downfall? Perhaps not.
You could argue that, even though the US didn't have nearly as much hardware in place back then compared to what they've spent weeks putting in place now, they could have carried out limited strikes that might have been enough to tip the balance. I'm not sure what the right answer is here.
But I do think it's too early to conclude that Israel and the US won't be successful in killing off the regime.
Well, they stopped protesting, so they are likely quite demoralized. And an airstrike campaign is unlikely to resolve the fundamental issue, which is that the regime's enforcers have weapons and anti-government protestors do not. As long as the Iranian government can find people willing to shoot protestors, the government will be able to manage internal dissent. And, as you say, Iran is a big country. A lot of that population is pro-government. It doesn't even need to be a majority, just enough to staff the instruments of repression, a hurdle they clear easily.
The track record of airstrike campaigns alone achieving decisive results is basically nil, and any plan which entails "and then the people will rise up" is begging for embarrassing failure at best and bloody disaster at worst. It's possible this will all succeed, but the historical record is against it.
So what do you think is the most likely way it will play out in the longer term? No regime change. Trump falsely claiming "obliteration" and success after lots of bombing? He's very clear on the "no nukes" thing though, so just letting the regime rebuild in peace next year seems like it can't happen.
I'm not going to pretend to have a high confidence prediction of what will happen; merely what probably won't happen. Which is to say, it is unlikely that the outcome will be that the IRI regime will be toppled and replaced with a US-friendly one or that Iranian nuclear ambitions will be put decisively to rest. I think it is likely that whatever does occur, Trump will claim massive success, even if it is a massive shitshow.
I don't really see what the failure case is here. Trump's unlikely to send in ground troops, so the most probably worst case outcome from the US' POV is that a heavily degraded IRGC maintains control of the country. That's not any worse for the US than the status quo.
The failure case is that the US spend a bunch of money and depletes materiel stockpiles (not to mention reputation) to bump off a decrepit and ultimately replaceable theocrat while losing any chance of a negotiated solution to Iran developing nukes. If the US isn't going to mount a ground invasion, we're left hoping that either a revolution finally succeeds or that they can keep the IRI nuclear program in check forever with nothing but air raids.
The time to bomb Iran was a month and a half ago, but we were too busy with Operation Caribbean Shakedown.
How much in the way of resources does the US realistically stand to lose here? I'm definitely not a military expert, but it looks like the Iranians seem to have little ability to attack anything of significant military value. They've set a hotel in Dubai on fire and killed one Israeli AFAIK. And I don't particularly buy the Iranian line that they're holding back, but next time they'll really retaliate.
I also disagree on the reputational front. Striking when the protests were at their peak would of course have been ideal, but carrying out a strike now after having moved so many military assets into the region and having made so many threats seem strictly better for the US' reputation at this point than not doing anything at all and demonstrating that none of the threats or posturing had any credibility from the start. I also do think that demonstrating that the US isn't afraid to eliminate the leaders of actively hostile states does affect the behaviour of these leaders even if it by itself doesn't revolutionise the state in question.
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