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Notes -
Deal reached to end Iran war
Details of the deal are not publicly available right now. However, Trump has authorised an end to the US naval blockade, and Iran has agreed to reopen the Strait.
Not surprisingly though, Israel continues to bomb Lebanon and refuses to cede lands seized in southern Lebanon.
But MORE surprisingly, Trump actually reprimanded Bibi.
So it seems we were lucky to return to the pre-war status quo, even Trump had to tepidly admit that he bit off more than he can chew and Iran's regional dominance is not going anywhere.
Not that this was anyone's plan but we learned/reconfirned some things.
Iran learned some things too
All in, I think life for Iranians gets steadily worse from here but at least they can say they're scoring points for the Islamic revolution.
Iran can blockade the strait to cause pain but it's not limitless. We can blockade them back and inflict pain too. Eventually both sides lose the will to keep going, but it might be an inconvenience to Trump whereas it's a lot more punishing for Iran.
Anyway, maybe we can try a decapitation strike again in a few years and see if we do any better at
I think Russia was helping supply a lot of the intel that helped Iran hit US and Gulf military assets.
'Helped' is a bit of a catch-all. Most US and Gulf military assets hit were on bases that have been in the region for decades.
Right, but the intel is whether there's anything left on the base worth targeting, and precisely where it is.
Most things worth targeting that were reportedly hit, as in that the Iranians made pubic boasts about, were more or less static targets. There are only so many ammo depots, supply sheds, airfield buildings, and so on. And given that the American decision to go to war was reportedly done a couple of months before the war, most things were going to be where not only where they had been a few months prior, but years or decades prior. Iran has presumably been working it's intelligence assets for as long, as opposed to starting from scratch.
There is also a point that one of the major changes of the last 25 years in the world is the rise of high-fidelity commercial satellite imagery. It's not exactly a great power capacity today, and while I doubt anyone will know relative amounts, there was at least media coverage of allegations of Chinese commercial imagery going to Iran.
One higher-profile Iranian success was that doesn't seem to have necessarily been supported by Russian intel, for example, was the US AWACs destroyed on the ground by a combined UAV and missile attack. That was a very expensive aircraft and is legitimately a strategic win... but using UAVs is a poor weapon choice for catching one on the ground given the time-distance delays. Holding back on firing the ballistic missiles to attack the target until the UAVs arrive is a good indicator that the Iranians didn't know the target was on the ground, because that would have been the exact sort of target to justify ballistic missiles alone for speed's sake.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying nothing relevant came from Russia. It's just that you may have a stronger opinion of the amount / value / impact than has so far been may be warranted, as opposed to Russian intelligence support serving a supporting / confirming sort of what the Iranians already had. This wouldn't even be an unreasonable conclusion to take from publicly available information. There are a lot of interests to a lot of players to play up the impact of Russian assistance- and not just for the Russians or even Iranians- as part of the information environment conflict.
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