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Notes -
Iran-Israel War(?)
Well it's happening gents. Iran has launched a massive attack at Israel, consisting of at least 100 drones followed up by cruise missiles, and with ballistic missiles assumed (possibly confirmed) to follow. Presumably this is intended to saturate and overwhelm Israeli Air Defenses. Iran has stated this is a response to what is claimed to be an Israeli strike on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, which killed seven members of the Revolutionary Guard including two top commanders. Israel has not claimed responsibility for this attack, but it is largely agreed by those in the know that Israel did it. Without attempting to consensus build, I will assume arguendo that Israel did in fact bomb the Iranian Consulate unless I see evidence to the contrary. Netanyahu has convened his war cabinet, the British PM has condemned the attack, and President Biden while apparently initially going to address the nation has instead called a "lid" meaning no more announcements today.
Civilians in Tehran and across Iran are preparing for what is believed to be an inevitable Israeli counterstrike.
As of writing Israeli, British, American, and allegedly Jordanian jets are in the process of intercepting drones and missiles en route to Israel. The attack appears to be against exclusively military targets, a pleasant change of pace from the general behavior of Middle Eastern combatants.
Update: Well it appears this was much ado about what has become something of a nothingburger. While I hesitate to call a mass drone/missile strike by Iran against Israel nothing, well. Iran has stated that the matter is concluded, and Israel has claimed interception of 99% of the incoming drones and missiles. Israeli medical authorities have reported no casualties as of a few minutes ago, aside from a Bedouin 10-year-old girl in serious condition. This number may rise, but it is my opinion that it is unlikely to break mid double digits.
Update 2: After a phone call between Biden and Netanyahu, it appears that Israel no longer intends to retaliate. The tit has been tatted, and since no Israel citizens have died, and only the one poor girl was injured, the Netanyahu administration seems willing to just let this one go instead of escalating.
I have no idea why the hell Israel decided that right now was a good time to kick the Iranian hornets' nest or what they hope to achieve out of it. Isn't Gaza enough on their plate? Are they really deluded enough to think "Uh-oh, international community is not buying that we are poor blameless victims anymore, better start something to make it look like we're poor blameless victims"?
We're damn lucky things cooled down so fast, but again - what the hell was Israel hoping to achieve by this?
Did Hamas not publicly laud him as the main IRGC point man on Hamas funding and the October 7th op?
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They are trying to pull in Russia and the USA into a hot conflict. They have been for a while.
Israel is pretty friendly with Russia, many of Putin’s close allies have Israeli citizenship and the FSB uses Tel Aviv as a spy hub; in the Wirecard case the FSB’s operation was controlled by a Jewish ex-FSB/KGB senior figure whose son (an Israeli lawyer) assisted with the laundering of the funds to support Russia-aligned Libyan rebel groups and Chechen friends of Putin. The last thing Israel wants is a US/Russia war, they don’t like Russia’s alliance with Iran and Assad and therefore participate in some of the power conflict around Armenia/Azerbaijan etc, but Russia isn’t an enemy really.
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They don't get to decide when they get actionable intel that a specific target is likely to be in a place that is reachable in a strike and poses acceptable risk of collateral damage or other mishap.
He decided to go to Damascus at that time and to run a sloppy opsec ship. That's what dictated the timing.
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I think Bibi needs a war to stay in power. The west has been looking to replace him with someone more global west friendly for a while. Israel probably also recognizes that it's long term prospects are quite bad. Demographic issues. Surrounded by enemies and probably the most hated country in the world with large parts of Africa and almost all of the ME being against it for religious regions. West also seems to be losing support especially younger generations due to increase in immigrants and the upper classes obsession with oppressor/oppressed dynamics that they then racialize and apply to the global population. It probably feels now or never for them.
I think it’s mostly a myth that most of the ME is against them. It feels to me like they are now just a chip in geopolitical games. The Saudis supposedly helped with air defense yesterday. Long-term MBS seems to understand that oil will not always be the economic tool for Saudi Arabia and he does not want his country to go back to being goat herders. Israel and tech transfer seems to be a part of his long-term game. If Israel wasn’t friends with the Arabians I would guess that Iran would be openly interested in deal-making.
While it is true that the modern crop of leaders in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all exhibit competent understanding of geopolitical considerations and the obligations therein, I would caution against presuming the general public in each country has made the similar calculation. Main Street in every arab capital was filled with racuous celebration of Oct 7, and arabic twitter and telegram was afire with excited pronunciations of Israels destruction by the Iranian strike before the lack of Tel Avivs destruction became too evident for such celebrations to continue. Even now arab twitter has merely shifted conspiracism from 'the coverup of Israels destruction must be so great if they cannot bear to show a single destroyed building l' to 'Israeli/American perfidy causing the Arab government to betray the realization of Israels destruction'. Israel remains a thorn in the Middle East, a permanent reminder of failure that started with the loss in 1948, and will always remain so even if the Israelis all take a 20 year cruise and let the Arab civil war commence 2 seconds after the last jew sips their welcome margarita.
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That IRGC QF general was a prominent leader with a job description that boiled down to “kill Israelis.”
Israeli leaders judged him worth killing to reduce capabilities and send a strong signal. They were aware of potential Iranian responses in doing their calculations.
Hamas would not be nearly the threat it was without years of IRGC QF support. See also: Hezbollah. While Iran appears to not have been directly involved in the 7 Oct attack, Iran is the primary source of all the terrorist threats Israel faces because of the support they provide.
Israel has been killing QF officers in Syria for years, often when blowing up supply dumps. Syria is essentially a major QF logistics hub to ship weapons to Hezbollah. This recent attack was simply a prominent example of that.
It’s surprising to you only if you don’t know that fighting Hamas in Gaza is but one front in a larger war that has been going on for decades between Israel and Iran and its proxies/allies.
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Given the effectiveness of missile interception, I think it is hard to argue with the results. From Israel's point of view, the Iranian regime already hates them maximally and is kept in check purely by military consideration, not a lack of desire to wipe Israel of the map.
Purely military speaking, trading two generals plus change against a random civilian is a tit-for-tat game that Israel wins. There is also the costs of attack and defense to consider, which might be more favorable to Iran (launching a rocket is way easier than intercepting one), but on a scale of a few hundred missiles this is a minor concern.
I would guess that Iran wanted higher casualties, but also did not want to invite instant retaliation. I guess they might have wanted to achieve a dozen causalities or so. They erred on the side of too few, which is a lot better than erring on the side of too many for everyone. On the plus side, they learned something about Israel's missile defense capabilities.
I think you are right that killing the generals in the embassy might have been a bad move for Israel because of tail-heavy risks. They put Iran in a spot where the decision makers felt they had to retaliate not for military reasons but just to remain credible to their own peers. If they had killed a few hundred Israelis instead, then that would have put Israel in exactly the same spot, resulting in a war which both sides would lose.
I think it comes down to what a general is worth, militarily speaking. If Persia had managed to kill Alexander 'the Great' early on, history would have gone quite differently, but we are not in the antique any more. Instead of depending on having a king who is by chance a military genius, meritocratic systems common in the modern world should churn out a reliable stream of competent generals. From my gut feeling, modern militaries do not depend on a genius who sees a weakness during battle and exploits it in a way which nobody has ever thought of before but more on skilled but replaceable craftspersons employing their craft. You do not need Alan Turing to build Amazon, after all.
So killing two generals seems more of a papercut than a decisive blow, and Israel's actions can be likened to climbing a wall free solo: the fact that it went well for them this time does not make it any less foolish.
This assumes that Iranian leaders are constrained to believe in the Israeli government and media's official reports. They are not. Iran is free to spread to its own people that significant damage was done to Israel and that the Jewish world media conspiracy is covering it up.
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The overlap between 'general' and 'political faction leader' in nondemocratic countries is often a very small circle. While there may be limited military value in a single general being killed, any relationships he had are killed along with him. Organizational continuity being disrupted, if not outright destroyed, has a very high value even in an ostensibly unified policy. No one may remain to verify which ongoing operation needs its next tranche of funding, for example.
Nevertheless, the Iranian attack straddles the line between 'attempted saturation attack' and 'internal stakeholder presentation'. The lack of concurrent Hezbollah launches leans towards the latter, but the fact that Hezbollah still hasn't been triggered means this was a costly exercise. There were other ways to demonstrate an attempt at striking the Little Satan without revealing launch sites and expending a limited ballistic missile inventory.
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Most countries spend most of their time at peace. Meritocratic systems tend to produce generals that are really good at politics.
That's why countries spend the first couple years of a war (if they're lucky) fighting the war they prepared for.
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Generals have a lot of connections, within their government, within their army, and even outside their own country, that can't be easily replaced. There's a lot of human capital there that isn't really replaceable very easily. The knowledge and experience a general has is pretty hard to simply build institutionally, and it isn't every day you get a good leader, no matter how well-structured your institutions are.
I have no doubt that someone like Soleimani was absolutely irreplaceable. I don't think his death is the difference between greatness and ruin in the way Alexander might have been, but I still do not think Iran has recovered from his loss (and thank god for that).
Besides, kill enough generals, and you won't really have any replacements lined up- you can't really recruit someone with that level of command ability in a day.
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The Israel-Hamas (plus Hezbollah) war is already in part an Israel-Iran proxy war. They didn't so much kick a hornets' nest as overstep a very fuzzy line. And Iran getting its back up over the inviolability of an embassy is pretty amusing for those of us who remember 1979.
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...you, uh, are aware that Iranian-aligned and supplied groups have been shooting rockets into northern Israel for months now, right? Like, well into the hundreds of rockets. To a degree that 60,000 Israelis were mandatorily evacuated from parts of northern Israel due to the ongoing campaign.
And you are aware that one of the main groups doing so, Hezbollah, is regionally seen and understood as an Iranian proxy-ally, with significant degrees of coordination / support / direct armaments?
And you are aware that the primary agency of Iran that conducts this coordination/arming is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose commander was the one targeted in the strike?
This is really not a mystery. Iran has been participating in the Gaza conflict for several months. It has been directly instrumental in its efforts to expand the conflict to a second front in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which it has been arming and coordinating with via its positions Syria. It's not even the first effort to cause a multi-front war, which date to the start of the conflict.
The metaphor of kicking a hornet's nest relies on the implicit pre-state that the hornets are not already out and trying to sting you.
Are you, “… uh … ”, aware that America and Israel have funded insurgency groups in Iran’s backyards for more than a decade now? Groups that went on to kill civilians in Iran? Iran is no more responsible for Hezbollah as Israel is to the insurgent terrorist groups that attack them domestically.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/2018-09-08/ty-article/in-syria-israel-secretly-armed-and-funded-12-rebel-groups/0000017f-e2ea-d568-ad7f-f3eb54ff0000
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-usa-syria-idUSKBN1A42KC/
Considering how I posted multiple times over the years on various external supporters for groups in the Syrian Civil War, sure.
Just as you are no doubt aware that Iran was supporting insurgency and terrorist groups to attack its geopolitical enemies for decades before the Syrian Civil War, and as such the Israeli/US involvement in the Syrian civil war was neither the instigating factor nor the basis for Iran adopting such a tactic.
Per your own citation excerpt- and what's not hidden behind a subscription wall- the groups supported by Israel did not, but rather had members who defected to other groups, which were not being funded or directed by the US or Israel to do such.
In fact, the correlation in the citation- of group members who defected to the Islamic State- is a notable contrast with the policy purpose- which was for groups to fight the Islamic State and keep it from the Israeli borders. While a conflation of groups is indeed a convenient and common policy to try an critique Israeli and US policy in Syrai, as far as the policy purpose of 'funding insurgency groups', the rather clear purpose here is not 'to attack Iran.'
Now, while there is certainly an argument to be made for responsibility for unintended/undesired consequences of policy, that argument would be far broader and also self-incriminating to Iran itself given the influence it and its proxies had in kickstarting ISIS. Which, while interesting, negates any real relevance to why Iran is supplying and helping direct hundreds of missile strikes into Israel over the last 6 months, and why that context shouldn't be relevant to why a country might retaliate to that.
If Israel were to arm and direct insurgent terrorist groups for the purpose of attacking Iran to the degree that tens of thousands of Iranians were displaced by conflict, they would indeed be deemed responsible by most reasonable persons.
Now, unless you intend to argue that Iran is to be deemed less responsible for what it has done than Israel is to be in your hypothetical, I'm pleased to see we have a consensus that Iran is no more, and no less, and indeed just as responsible as Israel would be were Israel to pursue an equivalent policy of provocation.
Now, as Israel did not pursue such a policy, but Iran has and is...
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