The leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran have been indifferent to everything that the infidels have thrown at them. Their leaders have been killed. Their infrastructure is being degraded. New York Times:
Across Iran, more than 90 million people are trapped between two terrifying realities. American and Israeli leaders, whose bombs are razing ever more parts of their infrastructure, have called on Iranians to use this as an opportunity for liberation. And their rulers, determined to cling to power, have threatened more bloodshed against whoever dares answer that call.
A week after the U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mr. Trump expressed his desire to play a role in selecting the country’s new leader — perhaps from the very authoritarian system that he has urged Iranians to rise against. The authorities responded by appointing the dead leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-line cleric, as the successor.
For days, American and Israeli bombardments have pulverized Iranian military, intelligence and police sites across the country. And yet, there is no clear indication of a collapse in the government’s deeply entrenched and ideologically motivated security forces.
Apparently, Iranian leaders don’t mind being martyred and they certainly don’t seem to care if their subjects suffer. Does this highlight how dangerous Iran would have been with nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles? (the NYT said it would take them about “a decade” to build a significant number of nukes plus delivery missiles) How do you deter a nuclear power if the rulers of that power don’t care what happens to themselves or the country that they’re ruling?
Loosely related…
It’s the ultimate ad hoc military state, just unlimited improvised drones, unlimited supply chains from Russia, unlimited supreme leaders, the underground machine from Forbidden Planet. Suspect the weapons of mass destruction are the same as they were 25 years ago, an empty pile of dirt.
Saw a dude from Iran last night on PBS news saying they had credible evidence verified by a third party that a girls’ school in Iran had been taken out. He seemed to care. Please don’t jump all over me readers, just telling you what I saw.
If their weapons are sticks and stones, I guess they will be ready for Einstein’s 4th.
I read that the school was not far from the missle lanch site and that a faulty Iranian missle fell on it. That there were missle debris with Farsi signs on it and there was a clip of a missle flying into it on a low parabola from a launch sight nearby.
Unrelated whether it was AI-generated or not, it is surprisingly that the mullahs put a few military sites adjusted to civilian structures, with all huge territory that they control. No better then Hamas.
I thought WW2 demonstrated that you couldn’t win a war with bombing alone, unless you went nuclear. The bombs are more accurate these days, but collateral damage is more widely reported; I suspect it’s a wash.
NATO’s Kosovo bombing in 1999 demonstrated you could.
George: It depends on what you mean by “win”, I think. If a country can be bombed to the point that it can’t do anything externally then that could be a win. If the government is still in place and still exercises domestic power, but can’t build weapons or deploy them outside of the country then isn’t that a “win”?
It is an interesting point. There is an Israeli Islamicist Mordecai Kedar who argues that Shia Islam is based on a messianic idea that when the world descends into total chaos the Messiah will appear. So the Mullahs attacking everyone they can attack is intended to create chaos to hasten the coming of the Messiah – not to punish Qatar or Cyprus or Bahrain. He argues that westerners fail to take seriously the religious ideas that motivates the theocrats. Kedar has a number of videos in English available on YouTube.
Without this gentleman:
https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/alk1.jpeg
we would all be typing letters to each other on manual typewriters. /ducks