So, I imagine there are perhaps unconventional options available to a country which is fully willing to fund terrorist groups for decades against a country with a very large amount of largely unprotected infrastructure.
But who knows? It just seems a bit premature to argue Iran's defeat. Feels a bit... mission accomplished.
I'm not saying it's easy, but there are many soft targets in America.
But yeah, who knows. The wise choice here is to go home and not play. The US and Israel are not about to invade with ground forces.
And if they were it'd be without support from European countries.
It does not mean that their ability to gather intelligence or use it is 100% gone. It most likely means they are a bit in disarray because of their top-down command structure. And maybe it takes a day or two until they put someone in charge.
One data point I heard recently was 80% of Iranians oppose the current regime. That said I've also heard there is wide support for Iran to have a nuclear program. Presumably as a matter of national pride. I would still imagine the secular population to be less inclined to go to war with Israel in general.
The only Iranians I've personally talked to are ones that live in the west. They generally want to have peace with Israel and want to see the regime removed. Again very anecdotally they are still not happy about Israel bombing Iran but if the regime is actually somehow magically removed I don't think attacking Israel would be a high priority for a hypothetical secular or democratic regime.
> if the regime is actually somehow magically removed I don't think attacking Israel would be a high priority
Attacking Israel hasn't been a high priority for Iran. When Israel bombed an Iranian consulate, Iran referred it to the security council and waited, but the security council took no action. When Israel carries out an assassination within Iran, Iran did the same thing. Only after the UN refused to do anything to hold Israel to account did Iran retaliate. Then recently Israel launched a massive series of strikes against Iran, assassinating top members of its military and blowing up apartment buildings. It seems clear that the Iranian government didn't want to go to war with Israel, but at a certain point they ran out of options.
First letter: https://digitallibrary.un.org/nanna/record/4043282/files/A_7...
Second letter: https://digitallibrary.un.org/nanna/record/4055716/files/S_2...
[0] https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
I meant that demographically, if your populace isn't as poor, battle hardened and religious (like Afghanistan) maybe going into a long ground war is less politically feasible?
In Afghanistan they had basically just been fighting a war, where the last war in Iran was 30 years ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War
Excerpts:
> 95,000 Iranian child soldiers were casualties during the Iran–Iraq War, mostly between the ages of 16 and 17, with a few younger
> The conflict has been compared to World War I: 171 in terms of the tactics used, including large-scale trench warfare with barbed wire stretched across trenches, manned machine gun posts, bayonet charges, human wave attacks across a no man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as sulfur mustard by the Iraqi government against Iranian troops, civilians, and Kurds. The world powers United States and the Soviet Union, together with many Western and Arab countries, provided military, intelligence, economic, and political support for Iraq. On average, Iraq imported about $7 billion in weapons during every year of the war, accounting for fully 12% of global arms sales in the period.
But given the size of the existing Iranian population and geography, and the lack of any significantly sized pre-existing anti-government military faction, I’m not sure the US military is large enough to even occupy Iran in the first place, absent a draft.
Israel is very clearly, without any question or doubt, a serious threat to every one of its neighbors.
You can't really compare WWII dumb bombs dropped from 25,000 feet to modern precision weapons that can hit precisely the weakest point on a target, times thousands of targets, within the span of a few hours or days.
I mean, we literally just watched a massively successful strategic bombing campaign over the last week! Desert Storm was massively successful, Iraqi Freedom (the actual invasion, pre-nationbuilding part) was massively successful, Israel's bombing of Hezbollah was massively successful. I don't know how anyone can argue that strategic bombing with precision munitions isn't successful.
