Iran has had a miserable few weeks.
First the middle- and senior-level management of its top-tier proxy was taken out because, basically, Iran bought its communications network from its most hated enemy.
Then the next week what was left of the C-level suite of said proxy was taken out in its underground bunker by the same hated enemy.
Then the other day former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad declared that the agency dedicated to targeting agents of your most hated enemy operating in Iran was actually riddled with that same enemy’s agents, including the unit head.
I mean this is the type of buffoonery that you only find from the Three Stooges or the Biden administration.
So having been utterly humiliated on the world stage, what does Iran do to try to restore credibility? It decides to launch a massive attack, estimated at 180+ missiles, on that same hated enemy. The result? The same as the last time it tried, back in April, little to nothing.
After last April’s attack washed out, the Iranians could not have had any expectation that any future missile attack would be any different. In other words, Iran just squandered a big chunk of what is left of its credibility. The strong horse they are not.
Today’s missile attack is what it is like when a government has a nervous breakdown. If the last two weeks were a chess match, Iran has been so thoroughly outclassed that today’s missile strike is the equivalent of it hysterically throwing the pieces off the board at Israel and then curling up in a ball on the floor.
However, now things really get dangerous because as I have said, desperate people do desperate things, and desperate people with power do catastrophic things. Added bonus, back home the mullahs are hated and their praetorian guard, the IRGC, has been shown to be incompetent. These guys are fighting for their lives.
So, on our timeline, we are now at the point where the Iranians will probably try a really futile and stupid gesture. And unlike Israel, we in the US do not have our security act together.
16 thoughts on “This Is What It’s Like When Mullahs Cry”
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I also expect a stupid and futile gesture by Iran. The main question is whether anyone in power in Iran can recognize that committing that gesture against Israel is almost certainly going to be fatally counterproductive. Noting also that Israel, if provoked sufficiently, has options against either Iran’s political and economic power or against its theological power.
Further noting that Israel has the technology, economy, commonly available assets both human and physical, and means of delivery to totally take out either or both of those options at will.
It would be better for Iran, if they can realize it, to commit its stupid and futile gesture against the US under its current leadership as there is minimal chance of a regime-threatening effective counter by the US, and to be honest our current leadership would be thrilled to use said gesture for domestic politics outside the Constitution and laws.
The key is which Weltanschauung prevails in Teheran; theology or Clausewitz.
Subotai Bahadur
What SB suggested … perhaps this is why I had nightmares last night.
The result? The same as the last time it tried, back in April, little to nothing.
I have a different take.
Today on X I watched multiple videos that plainly showed ground impacts upon various targets. It was claimed that the targets were airbases, with 20-30 F-35s being destroyed.
I find that dubious, but it occurs to me that Israel is being set up. The Iranians fired a swarm of missiles at Israel, aimed at military targets of military significance, apparently causing almost no casualties.
I’m old enough to recall the entire War on Terror ™. Americans were routinely given insane rules of engagement that got many of my fellow countrymen killed. This went on for two decades, ending when the Biden regime denied permission to shoot a suicide bomber as US troops abandoned you-know, killing not only 13 American soldiers but over 100 Afghans. Presumably that was so those foreigners wouldn’t hate us.
Compare and contrast with Israel. The Gaza strip reminds me of every German and Japanese city circa late 1945, with a likely similar death toll. To kill the leadership of Hamas, Israel demolished a city block, killing…
Well… who did that kill? How many civilians? How many civilians does the rest of the world imagine were killed? And Israel is also bombing the **** out of Lebanon too.
How does that look to the swarms of disinterested foreigners who don’t care about either side?
I suspect it makes Israel look like the villain.
So- when Iranian nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles turn Israel into an ugly sheet of radioactive glass, uninhabitable by man or bug- the those folks will regard it as a fate well earned.
Time will tell.
If this goes on, the US Navy may need a few new aircraft carriers.
Xennady,
Your second point regarding a hypersonic nuke strike by Iran is well-taken, but my guess is we’re still several months off from that if only because of the engineering problem of fitting a nuke onto that type of missile. Not an if but a when that capability will exist, but yeah you get the vibe that if it comes to its use the world is going is going to state Israel had it coming.
This clip from the BBC is case in point
Then again who is going to be around longer? Israel or the Mullahs?
To your first point, I saw that clip of the missile explosions. Israeli AD, especially Iron Dome, uses an algorithm to track incoming trajectories and ignore the missile if it’s not going to hit anything valuable. Is that what happened here? Also unlike April, it looks like Iran exclusively used ballistic missiles
Of course sitting thousands of miles away it’s impossible to be sure but I’m going with the principle that’s awfully hard to hide stuff in a small country like Israel and therefore the Israelis aren’t going to squelch a lot of info. They do have some air bases that are more isolated than others, but this isn’t like the US where you can hide damage to a remote base.
It would be interesting to take those video clips and piece together from their orientation a rough idea of where the strikes were aimed at. I would assume that if Iran was serious about hitting anything it would do a saturation strike on air bases and avoid civilian areas. If those strikes which landed didn’t hit military targets then I’m going out on a limb and guessing that this was largely for show or…. to be earlier premise there is too much confusion in Tehran for any sort of coherent thought.
What Iran did do was expend a big chunk of its MRBM magazine. I don’t know how many 1,500 Km+ missiles it has in its inventory but 180+ is a big percentage of them and that’s including April as well. The Iranians better hope they got some return on that investment.
We’ll see, especially if there is a reduction in IDF aircraft sorties, and like I said in a small country like Israel its hard to hide damage but I’m going with this was all for show.
Anonymous
October 1, 2024 at 10:08 pm
I fear that we already do. But we cannot build them well anymore, cannot afford them anymore, cannot build and afford the air groups needed anymore, cannot afford to man them anymore, cannot afford the escorts anymore, and we seem to have lost the will and intentions to employ them effectively against our enemies.
Subotai Bahadur
Trump’s quip about the mullahs never winning battles but never losing negotiations is apropos. They might be more likely to try to con the US govt into paying them to call off their fight against Israel than they are to attack us.
How would an army that’s trying to inflict civilian casualties engage in urban warfare? cf, Grozny, Ukraine.
How would an army that’s conscientious about minimizing civilian casualties engage in urban warfare? cf, Gaza, Faluja.
How does that look to the swarms of disinterested foreigners who don’t care about either side?
As a Jew, I want to know if those are disinterested foreigners who want to kill the Jews or disinterested foreigners who merely don’t care about the Jews.
Any radioactive glass isn’t likely to be in Israel. Not that it will come to that.
We’ll know the answer later this week. The Israelis seem to be an order of magnitude better able to take care of themselves than we are with the clown show running our country. Our Navy is incompetent, the Army is riddled with DEI and the Air Force is choosing race over skill in pilots. For an enemy, what’s not to like ?
I still am worried that “The Attack” was a prediction. I had a similar fear when I was in college that “On the Beach” was a prediction but it was prevented by political leadership much smarter than we have now.
Within Islam, things only happen “if Allah wills it.”
So the Israelis have taken out a good chunk of Hezbollah’s leadership, smacked the Houthis, and reached into Iran itself.
Now, go find a Muslim and ask him what Allah might be thinking, in light of all this.
The USA used to intervene in the Middle East to forestall Soviet involvement, to maintain access to oil and for other reasons. We had mixed results. Shutting down the Suez invasion led to 1967, 1973, oil embargoes, and perhaps also to the rise of Saddam Hussein who followed Nasser’s model. The Oslo agreement led to multiple intifadahs and to the destructive Palestinian Authority (not that we were entirely at fault; the Israelis also deluded themselves). We arbitrarily halted the Gulf War and then went back in 2003. Many of our official actions made sense at the time, which is usually the best that can be hoped for.
The one policy that never made sense was the appeasement of Iran, which started in the 1980s, was formalized by Obama with the JPCOA, and was restarted by Biden. During the early years of our appeasement policy we hoped to gain some benefit from Iran. Later, under W Bush we hoped to forestall trouble, which came to us anyway in the form of terror attacks against Americans and American allies around the world, as well as direct attacks against US forces in the Middle East. But the Obama-Biden policy, which seeks to empower Iran to the point where it hamstrings us and Israel from preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, is insane. It is the product of Obama’s anti-Americanism and arrogant incompetence. It makes no sense in terms of US interests. Leaders of the WW2 generation, who understood history and risk, would never have considered such a foolhardy scheme. Trump was right to abrogate it.
If Israel fails to follow through against Iran in the current war, and if Kamala gets elected, the mullahs are going to get nukes and they might try to use them. Iran isn’t Pakistan, it’s an imperial power whose leaders have an apocalyptic worldview and a rational plan to follow through on it. Bibi is a cautious leader. Let’s hope he isn’t too cautious now.
“the mullahs are going to get nukes”
It is like Waiting for Godot
As BiBi likely said to Biden, “Joe, lots of people don’t know what’s going on, but you don’t even suspect something is going on.”
Death6
At least one prominent Moslem cleric thinks the Jews are using magic.
So apparently there was a missile strike on an IDF airbase, but Israel claims only support facilities were damaged. I would expect other info to have surfaced by now, if only from post-action recon, if there was more serious damage.
I go back to my original point. What on earth did the Iranians expect to accomplish with this? Unlike the strike in April which was done under the pretense of Israel hitting the Iranian consulate in Damascus, this was done in regard to Hezbollah.
I’ve seen reports that operationally Iran was looking to do a saturation strike on central Israel which do its dense population would require Israel to intercept every incoming missile.
ISW stated that the size of the attack and depletion of missile stocks showed that this wasn’t an Iranian show of force. I don’t see that, whatever tactical gains it might have made (and I doubt) it was a big strategic loss.
I would expect other info to have surfaced by now, if only from post-action recon, if there was more serious damage.
People on X claim that Israel immediately imposed censorship on reporting any damage or filming near any impact site. I find this logical because Israel has no reason to let Iran know how well or poorly its attack did.
What on earth did the Iranians expect to accomplish with this?
I’ll go back to mine, roughly- Iran made an attack on Israeli military targets that resulted in almost no casualties. That’s successful propaganda, considering the moonscape that the Gaza strip has become. Also, I’ve seen it claimed that Hezbollah has been degrading Israel intelligence assets over the last few months, supposedly with some success. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seems a reasonable goal. I’ve also seen it claimed that the defense against this attack expended $3 billion worth of ordnance. I don’t know if that’s true either, but just how many Iron Dome interceptors does Israel have? How many can it make?
ISW stated that the size of the attack and depletion of missile stocks…
Isn’t ISW one of the outfits that has been telling us that Ukraine is doing swimmingly against Russia? BTW, Ugladar fell a couple days ago. Anyway, I know in the US missiles are handcrafted by retirees called back to work because assembly lines are expensive, but other countries have different priorities. How do we know how many IRBMs Iran has and how many can it make?
I don’t see that, whatever tactical gains it might have made (and I doubt) it was a big strategic loss.
How?
Xennady:
You make a good point regarding the cost and attrition of missile stocks of Israeli interceptors. That’s a point that is lost on many people regarding our operations in the Red Sea, not just in the cost but also rate of manufacture – you can only shoot down things for so long.
I couldn’t dig up the source but I it stated that the 2 Burke class destroyers that fired interceptors the other night basically shot through a year’s procurement of SM-3s. Whether it was a year or not, it would unsustainable against the Chinese, especially since we cannot do VLS-reloads at sea.
Attrition works both ways. I was looking at ISW because I was looking for data; I am very skeptical of their analysis as well but I needed to know the order of magnitude of what people think the Iranians have in terms of MRBM. Saying they have 3,000+ missile is misleading because most of them don’t possess the 1,500-km range needed to hit Israel. Iran shot off 300 of that long-range stuff between this week and April how much do they have left? How fast can they manufacture them vs. Israel?
That interceptor attrition was probably major reason why Israel decided to settle accounts with Hezbollah and push them north of the Litani if not destroy them altogether. Hezbollah possess more cheap rickets than the Israeli have missiles and if Hezbollah ever put precision-guided packages on them, it would be a game changer. Pushing them north takes a lot of the shorter-range stuff out of play.
Iran did generate some tactical/operational advantage out of this. Between the most recent and April they derived a lot of data about effectiveness of their accuracy and capability of Israeli air defense through saturation. It’s hard to find analysis of this, but I did see this. If that’s the basic extent then yes Iran got 33 hits (out of how many shot at that location) isn’t clear and they really didn’t hit anything of value. So their CEP stinks, Iran cannot keep this up rate of fire for so little return. Not sure what their short-term solutions can look like.
The reason for strategic, is that Iran’s situation beyond the military is critical. The fact that they shot at Israel over the issue of Hezbollah to me is a show of weakness, they simply had no other viable options to rescue an ally but escalate to this? That’s a warning sign that they lack viable options and the ones they do have are major steps up the escalation ladder and they struck nothing of value. Iran as a dictatorship and imperial power is into the prestige business more than most and their ballistic missile program is probably as much a jewel in the crown as having Hezbollah…. and they showed it to be just as ineffective.
If Israel public ally strikes back where does Iran go from here? Their main strategic assets against Israel, Hezbollah and missiles , have proven ineffective and even if they are able to assemble a nuke it wouldn’t be a viable warhead for months.
If you come across any data or analysis regarding Iran’s MRBM stocks or effect/accuracy/attrition of their strikes, post it out I would love to get more info. Nobody I see seems to offer anything more granular than the 3,000 missile number and that just means they know nothing, 300 km Scud equivalent is useless in regard to Israel.