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If the war is called off now, the IRGC will press to finish developing nuclear weapons, engage in an extraordinary program of domestic repression and ultimately emerge as the much firmer, more cemented, and even more indisputable ruling elite of Iran. Will they nuke Israel after a cessation of hostilities? I doubt it. If there is a nuclear attack it will happen during a long war of at least several months, probably a rough or dirty bomb using the current 60% enriched material, put together quickly over a month, smuggled into Israel, Dubai, or somewhere else by an IRGC remnant unit operating under limited central authority. Someone like Pezeshkian wouldn’t even know about it until it happened.
The problem is, all of that might happen anyway, underscoring what a poor decision this war has been so far. As I said, there was only one chance to do this and it would have been while 2m+ Iranians were protesting, take out the leadership, police stations, basij, IRGC hubs, then hope that the institutions get overwhelmed with the sheer mass of human movement before anyone regroups, and then bring in US forces to ‘defend’ the (counter)revolution either overtly or quietly. Doing it after all the most aggressive / low inhibition protestors have been killed is pointless, a bunch of scared middle class people in Tehran are now supposed to, what, message each other on Telegram and try to storm parliament, when there are 800,000 soldiers, some who care and some who don’t, and 150,000 deeply ideologically committed IRGC fighters out to avenge their spiritual leader?
I agree. My only.assumptiom is that they really wanted ~2 carriers in region to be able to put together big enough strike packages that they could SEAD/DEAD to their hearts content. Which to be fair, seems to be working quite well. I'm not following this war closely but I think three F-15s have been shot down and it's all friendly fire? So American hardware taking down American hardware.
They definitely should have just flown whatever they had around and relied heavily on the IAF stealth jets so they could sieze the moment. But they probably assumed that Iran actually scoring kills on American hardware would be too embarassing. Or the IAF said "yeah, we could, but wouldn't it be nice if you just did it for us? You're so much better at it 😍" and as always, we decided to set billions and billions of dollars on fire for our greatest ally.
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Trump could offer a Palestinian State and the expulsion of the Jews from the West Bank in exchange for significant compromise on Iran's nuclear capabilities and tech.
No nuclear enrichment, lift sanctions, Palestinian state, expel the Jews from the West Bank and make the West Bank part of Palestine. No Israeli presence in Syria.
The real problem is the only sane offramps would go against Israel, we aren't actually in an unresolvable situation, it only seems there's no offramp because we aren't allowed to compromise the interests of Israel for the interests of America and the rest of the world.
Would Iran also have to publically dismantle its Doomsday Countdown Clock?
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Given the last 40 years there is no reason to believe that either party would take those limitations seriously so you might as well premise your "peace" deal on alien space bats and magical unicorn farts.
The Palestinians and Arab States have had multiple opportunities to implement a two state solution and they've blown it up every time.
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Broadly I agree with that kind of two state solution but it’s also very explicitly against the absolute antizionism embedded in the foundation of the Islamic revolution, in which any Israeli state ie ‘Zionist entity’ is illegitimate; this was the Iranian position even when in the late 1980s and early 1990s a two state solution that involved the removal of most Jewish settlements was on the table.
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You don't think this measurably increases the chance of a proactive nuclear attack? (terrorist or otherwise).
I imagine the more religious end of Iranian politics would push hard for it.
It increases it hugely during a conflict. Afterwards the incentives change, especially after a very shameful US withdrawal / unilateral cessation of hostilities, in which case the smart move for them is to complete the bomb, display it publicly, make clear there are many spares distributed across hardened underground facilities, and so a state of nuclear MAD has been reached with Israel.
Twelver Shias really do have a millenarian eschatology but I don’t think that says much about how likely they would be to use that nuclear weapon. In addition, there would be a price to pay for breaking the 80 year nuclear taboo diplomatically, including with Russia and China (since a successful wartime use of a nuclear weapon would almost certainly lead to Poland, Japan and others getting the bomb, which is contrary to the political desires of those states).
Lastly, it’s unclear that a nuclear attack on Israel, depending on scale, would 100% be the end of Israel or (viable) Zionism. It might well be, and presumably this theory involves the subsequent storming (after the deaths of 800k+ Israelis) of the country from multiple sides by an army of angry Muslims, both ‘axis of resistance’ and otherwise Sunnis from Egypt, Syria etc just caught up in the nature of things. But it also might not, Israel would retaliate with nuclear attacks, the population is well armed, it’s possible the US could intervene, there could be a period of anarchy before a Jewish state of a kind is restored, there a number of scenarios.
So certainly it increases the chance, yes. But I don’t think that a regime that survives intact under, say, Khamenei’s son will necessarily do it. That an Iran that survives will get nuclear weapons though is inevitable, surely.
Does Iran even have a sufficiently reliable delivery mechanism for this to be viable? At least a decent chunk of their ballistic attacks have been intercepted. Landing a nuclear warhead might have some (debatable) tactical/strategic benefit, but a bunch of spicy isotopes getting detected after a ballistic missile interception only has all of the fallout (heh). Existing nuclear powers trying to limit the viability of proliferation, and so forth.
And given Israel's intelligence victories over Iran previously, it seems likely they'd have advance knowledge of such an attempt, and likely have interceptor missiles earmarked specifically for, uh, non-conventional warheads.
The odds are so bad. They'd have better luck trying to snuggle a bomb in, and good luck with that lol
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