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Notes -
Iran's strength is worrying, IMO. They hold the strongest hand of cards. We won't get any accurate information on the damage done (aided by Russian satellites) to US bases and forces, but I suspect it's significant, given how unafraid and bold Iran has seemed lately.
I think conceptualizing the situation as Iran being strong is the way to think about it, holding the best hand is much better, but mixing up these two confuses some things.
Iran is a homeless man with a gun outside of a guy's office building. Threatening? Sure. But it is a homeless man with a gun. The man in the office can go buy some body-armor and a shotgun, he can hire some thugs to beat the guy up, and so on. He doesn't because he's worried about inconvenience and cost and other people in the building bitching at him.
Iran's calculus as it has been for the last several decades is to find a way to ride the annoying line and not trigger an actual response. Yes they can be a physical threat (especially with Russian and Chinese intelligence) but fundamentally they continue to only exist because the U.S. cares about civilian casualties what happens afterwards, nagging third parties.
As a politically entity the U.S. can be defeated and that's the goal, but it is a mistake to lose track of the force disparity.
The US can't beat them militarily. How would they? Use nukes? A small scale invasion would fail. A massive invasion isn't practical at all.
Yes they could destroy all power stations etc, but Iran would retain the capability of levelling all the sensitive areas of the US allies in the region, and would do it.
Iran succeeds because the U.S. and Israel (despite propaganda to the contrary) fight with two hands tied behind their back.
If we fought like Russia fought, or even worse like a country in WWII we'd "win" pretty quickly.
Iran does not have a peer military, it has an ineffective organized military and essentially a very well organized insurgency and excellent doctrine that takes advantage of Western militaries primary weakness (political will).
The U.S. has the ability to stab Iran in the gut and step back and wait for it to bleed out, Iran knows this and therefore made sure that their combat model is making as much trouble while they bleed out as possible. They've also given themselves a very large helmet so they can't just be shot in the head (IDK the metaphor fails).
So we don't.
Making this further complicated is the fact that we don't actually hate the Iranian's, and figure that leaving them in a good state is better for us later.
Make no mistake, Iran knows our exact strategic posture and how to take advantage of it but that doesn't mean that we can't just do something different if we want to. That's what got us into this, Trump called Iran on some of the threats and went to town, but now he has to clean up and go home before the midterms.
That's not Iran being "strong" it's masterful use of the cards they have.
A question - why hasn't Iran pushed a major terrorist attack on US soil? They could probably pull it off, but they don't because they know that if they do and they miscalculate how bad it is then America will actually come for them for real.
That only ends one way.
How, exactly? How would the US really hurt Iran without Gulf allies being hurt really bad too? Most of their missile and drone capacity remains.
One of America's war aims is to leave the Iranian people in a better position after the war than before. Likewise modern Western armies have an incredibly strong taboo against civilian damage, to the point where we made a missile that acts as a fucking blender so it can kill literally one guy.
This level of restraint is basically a new invention, and most non-American armies don't bother (see: Russia). It's the equivalent of besieging a city and allowing food in "so that the civilians don't starve."
It's incredibly stupid but has been at times sustainable because the U.S. is that powerful and because most of our adversaries understand that the primary move is to use propaganda pieces to perpetuate fighting warfare in this way.
Loosen restrictions and things open up immediately.
The Iranians can't do much if 16 million people in the Tehran metro area are starving to death. Now that's pretty abhorrent but this is how wars were fought throughout history and America has the ability to make it so.
Without drifting that far into awful behavior you can still force evacuation of cities, destroy critical infrastructure and all kinds of other stuff we are very very voluntarily not doing and a good chunk of which is totally valid even with this restrictive mode of warfare.
I ask for the third time: How do you do this nasty stuff to win the war without millions of US ally citizens suffering the same fate? How do you stop the countless hidden/hardened Iranian missile/drone sites from being used against Gulf desalination plants, power plants, etc etc?
How is that relevant?
First you have to suppose that the disruptive threats are still possible in an actual war. Iran will not be able to manage the resupply required to keep things going very long if the country falls apart. An army requires logistics which is why attacking logistics is the first job of any military. We aren't really doing that now. If the Iranians have to choose between feeding and watering their population or warfare then the war won't last long, you'd get some insurgency afterwards but the organized military response would be over very quickly.
That also presupposes we care. Most of the negative impact seems to be on the gulf states, who are enemies if you'd ask the average American for most of the last 50 years. Suddenly lots of people think Saudi Arabia is an ally and while that's true to some extent it's certainly a wild swing for both the left and the right.
Outside of the gulf states it's the Europeans who are refusing to help with the problem, that's pretty easy not to care about, and again you can shut down the gulf disruption pretty fast by just tanking the country.
Of course nobody wants to leave millions of Iranian starving and homeless, and nobody wants to turn the entire country into a misery factory or something that requires an occupation for another couple of decades.
That doesn't mean we can't.
It's relevant because American power projection and global export economy relies on other countries preferring to have you as patron vs. the alternatives. If the choice for Iran is genocide and America running their country vs. letting China come in and run some chunks of their country, which do you think they're going to pick? And what are you going to do when making Iran play nice involves bombing Chinese citizens and tripwire forces?
Likewise the Gulf States. They don't like each other much and America has been pretty good at keeping things stable and paying for oil - far from perfect, but good. When it's a case of "any American President may genocide us because half the electorate considers us enemies", guess how fast they will seek a new Patron? And guess how fast they will seek nuclear weapons?
America has up until now made the calculation that one uppity little regional power that is fairly isolated is much better than big groups of regional powers who agree on little else except the need to have tripwire alliances and patrons to guard against the US, and are happy to pay for it with resources that America's global adversaries want.
TLDR: America's foreign policy has always been founded on putting together lots of NATOs that allow it to project influence, and to avoid becoming the target of NATOs owned by other superpowers. That means being careful how you escalate.
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