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But those contingencies are contingencies for a reason. Obviously it is not an ideal state of affairs for your entire civilian and military upper ranks to be decapitated! Now the former Ayatollah was an old man getting up in the years, dying of cancer and willing to martyr himself. But his wife? His son's wife? All of his subordinates, too? It's not like Israel or the Americans are stopping with just them. They're going down the entire chain of command, killing anyone who even has a whisper of command authority.
How can you plan for that? You can't. Planning for a war where there is no central leadership and your state is degenerated into regional warlords is a shit plan.
And there is degrees of international pariah: there's being on American's shit list, and there's 'bombing the Strait of Hormuz and being treated as a rogue state by everyone'. The Gulf State Arabs were neutral before this. Now, they're in a coalition that INCLUDES Israel in shooting down missiles and drones. That's a sea change! Iran had no friends before this war. Now, it doesn't even have business partners. (Not that they could pay for anything now.)
Iran casually discarded all that remained of its international clout and recognition to strike a doubtful blow against American hegemony. It will take their neighbors a long time to forget about those attacks, and China and Russia are in no rush to bail them out. All to spike oil prices for about a day before the market settled back down. It wasn't worth it.
It’s a good point. The only way this could serve the interests of Iran is if the foundation of their cultural and religious identity revolved around the collective mourning of a massacre which mirrors what happened to Khamenei in important ways. What you don’t want to give Iranians is “a template for the public expression of collective solidarity and moral feeling”. But, like, what’s the probability of that? Thankfully the CIA is advising Trump and not two random real estate developers and a guy with a Kafir tattoo written under his Deus Vult tattoo.
Maybe they can, I have no idea, but it’s not a given, as Iran has tons of mountains and Russian / Chinese communication tech.
One of those real estate developers negotiated the most comprehensive peace in the Middle East in generations. "Jared Kushner is advising Donald Trump" is not actually a slam-dunk proof that America doesn't have a sense of what it's doing in the Middle East.
Some peace deal if this is what happens a few years later.
Notably, this is a war between the countries that signed the deal to enforce its terms on a country that didn’t.
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Yes, I know what jihad and religious martyrdom is. I also think it's stupid. Making the other dumb bastard die for his country has been the American warfighting strategy for over a century now, and if the Iranians want to indulge in dumb sand people strategies they're more than welcome to.
Also... what the hell gives you that impression? If they have Russian/Chinese communication tech, they're not using them. They're meeting in person, for God's sake. They're so thoroughly infiltrated by Mossad they've given up on communication technology altogether.
In previous conflicts they were not able to reign missiles down on Tel Aviv. Also we had other crazy sand people dying for us. Neither Americans nor Israelis are able to sustain consistently high sand people mortality figures. The key questions of this war IMO are (1) can we actually find all the ballistic missiles and (2) how easy is it to make a TEL. I haven’t found any expert even hazarding a guess on these except to say that making a TEL is pretty trivial stuff.
I don’t think anyone has a clear idea what is happening. But we have not announced any new leaders being killed after the “trick your opponent into coming to the negotiation table and then slaughter their family” strategy, right?
They didn't have to because Hezbollah and Hamas did it for them. But they can't now, because we destroyed them.
Hezbollah just launched the largest volley of the war a few hours ago so clearly you've got a funny definition of "destroyed"
If Iran is "destroyed" yet they continue lobbing missiles and drones at every country with an American presence and the Strait remains closed weeks if not months later then clearly being "destroyed" doesn't count for much
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This presumably depends on the technology for your missiles: if they're dumb ballistic things, you probably need to be very confident of where you are launching from and where they're going to point them the right way. If they're liquid-fueled you may need extra
targetstanker trucks to fill them once they're vertical. Smarter missiles help a lot with that (see why the Navy now uses VLS instead of missile turrets), but doesn't necessarily solve your problems like precisely initializing guidance systems.More options
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