Cautious Optimism about Iran

Iran vs Israel/US - where we are now

I started writing this post the day before President Trump announced that there would be a ceasefire. I didn’t expect that, but as you’ll see if you read this, Iran was pretty much out of options. I’ve tried to go through and edit the bits I wrote beforehand to make sure they still make sense but if something sounds odd it’s probably because I missed it

The defanging of Iran by Israel with some bunker busting US assistance is going to go down in the history books as one of the faster and more one-sided wars ever. Assuming the announced ceasefire holds that is. I suspect it will for a few months anyway because Iran’s rulers need to rebuild their forces before they can do anything [Update: Iran is sending more missiles hours after the ceasefire was supposed to start, so maybe it won’t hold. Doesn’t change the analysis that Iran can’t do anything effective].

For Israel the war went very well. Iran appears to have absolutely no control over its airspace and effectively zero air defenses. We know this because, at least at night, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) is performing airborne refueling operations over Iran.

“No gas stations at a 9,000 meter altitude. Good thing we bring the fuel with us.” Source: @LTC_Shoshani, IDF

I don’t think there’s a polite way to put this, but Iran is, at this point, utterly defenseless. The only thing they could do is hide while blustering about revenge and seeking terms for a ceasfire. Hiding is of course not helpful when you also want to strike back. Yet because of the IAF’s control of Iranian airspace and consequent ability to have loitering reconnaissance drones¹ when Iran did try to launch missiles the launchers were frequently destroyed in the process of trying to launch a missile. As a result of this, and the repeated attacks on places where Iran is believed to have stored missiles as well as the factories where they are made, Iran no longer appears to be the missile launching threat it was expected to be. In fact after the first two or three days, missile launches dropped down to waves of perhaps a dozen at a time and sometimes just one or two. Now some of those got through and caused destruction at random places in Israel (including, ironically, two historic mosques in Haifa) but the fears (hopes?) of many that Iran would overwhelm Israeli missile defense seem to have been misplaced.

Since this graphic was produced I think there have been around 50 missiles launched and 5-10 impacts in Israel.

TACO

Then there’s that idiot Trump, who “always chickens out”, and his inability to keep his yap shut…. or rather the ability of Trump and his SecDef and the USAF to actually keep extreme OPSEC while misleading the Open Source Intel community - apparently they learned something from Signalgate. I think it is fair to say that Iran was taken completely by surprise by the B2 raid on Fordow, even though they may have removed almost half a ton of 60% enriched uranium in advance

Mind you this is the NY Times being briefed off the record by anonymous officials so it is entirely possible that this, too, is a partial or total untruth. There’s no doubt in my mind that Trump, Netanyahu, and their closest aides and officials are taking advantage of the widespread dislike of them by the Western media and so on to plant stories that are completely at odds with the truth.

I don’t think that Trump is a 5D chess master super genius, but also I don’t consider him to be as stupid as many of his critics seem to think he is. My guess is that the Iranian leadership simply can’t understand the baseline concepts of freedom of speech and therefore repeatedly misunderestimate Trump because they can’t believe that a powerful and effective President of the USA would allow people to say such things about him. Trump on the other hand is quite capable of trolling the press and commentariat secure in the knowledge that his supporters completely understand what he is doing and share his contempt for the critics. This BTW also applies to other regimes too such as West Taiwan and Russia.

New book announced….

Likewise I think world leaders have issues with Trump doing his foreign policy meetings and so on in public, either in person or on Truth Social. That clearly screwed up Zelensky but he’s not going to be the last world leader who discovers that Trump is quite happy to have potentially important discussions in front of the cameras where it is tricky to try coercion or bribery and where Trump can make the other party look like a moron.

Trump is for the most part a man of his word and he’s certainly uninterested in kickbacks, backhanders or similar, so he’s quite happy to make policy in the open. This is so completely contrary to how everyone else does diplomacy and foreign policy that it confuses both politicians and the media. Keep that thought in mind for later.

Mind you his straight talking appears to cause others to do the same and not necessarily in a positive way

Iranian options

Iran’s usual way of responding to these sorts of things in the past was to get its various proxies to attack on its behalf. This time it seems like the obvious proxies (the ones beginning with H) have generally declined to get involved. In the case of Hamass that’s because they can’t, in the case of Hez(no)bollah and the Houthis it seems to be more that they have done the sums and realized that retaliation for such attacks will be personally fatal because neither the US nor Israel are bothered about international opinion at this point and it has become apparent that their human shield strategy only worked when leaders were concerned about what the Western media said.

So no proxies.

A second option was the launching of “sleeper cells” in the US and elsewhere to commit terror attacks. This, we are told, is something the Iranians tried to threaten Trump with before he bombed Fordow. They may indeed try this in the future, but I don’t think it will work to dissuade the US, let alone Israel, from attacking Iran. As I wrote in my previous post², (fear of) attacks like this and the missile attacks are what is driving Israel to dismantle Iran’s forces and proxies. Threatening more civilian casualties just means the Israelis will respond more harshly to make sure that this kind of threat is understood to not work at all. The US, under Trump at least, is undoubtedly of similar mind. In fact Trump, having had experience as a NY property developer with mafia sorts of people, undoubtedly understands that folding when threatened this way just emboldens the bad guys.

Moreover the people that generally support Trump and his efforts to take out Iran are not in the places where Iran is likely to attack. Rather Iranian terror attacks will probably take place in Democrat cities like New York or LA because the Iranian sleeper cells will be only too well aware that if they try something in, say, Texas, the generally armed population is likely to kill them before they get very far, whereas in generally unarmed blue cities it will take a while for the police to react. Yes being a NYC Jew is probably very dangerous, one hopes the various communities there have taken suitable steps, but in general attacking random parts of the US in revenge is just going to drive more support to the “glass Iran” school of thought.

So no sleeper cells

A third option was closing the Straits of Hormuz. Unfortunately that would have had a greater impact on Europe and Asia than it will on either Israel or the US. In particular it would have a major negative effect on Iran’s sole superpower kind of ally - West Taiwan. The Chicoms are almost the sole purchaser of Iranian oil thanks to sanctions and they also get a lot of the rest of their oil and LNG from Iraq, Kuwait and so on which are inside the straits. If Iran decided to close the straits, the PLAN is likely to be one of the navies involved in reopening them and that’s only the first way that such an attempt hurts Iran. Indeed one suspects that the PRC leadership may have had strong words with their Iranian contacts explaining to them in simple words that if they want to keep the PRC on their side they need to not threaten chaos to the PRC’s economy.

But the impact on west Taiwan is not the only reason why closing the straits was a bad idea. Look up above where I noted that Iran is basically Israeli airspace. If Iran got froggy about the straits of Hormuz then, while Israel could intervene itself, it could also simply let the upset neighbors handle the problem. I don’t have a hugely positive opinion of Arab armies and air forces, but I’m pretty sure they can hit static targets that can’t shoot back and that, in a nutshell, describes Iran right now. So we might see Saudi, Bahraini and even Qatari airplanes blowing the crap out of Iranian naval forces and missile launchers along the coast while the Israelis continue to pound the IRGC in the rest of the country. Having Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords by allying with Israel in pounding the crap out of Shia Iran would probably be the ultimate in irony given that the original Hamass attack from Gaza was probably intended to make sure that Saudi Arabia did not sign the Abraham Accords

So closing the straits wasn’t viable either

Which leads to a problem. Because the regime pretty much has to do something in retaliation or face the fact that it has lost completely and there aren’t any other moves. I mean sure it did send a dozen missiles at the Americans in Qatar, but everyone knows that was purely symbolic in that they sent a warning first. The issue is that just as Israel can’t put boots on the ground in Iran, neither can Iran do the same in reverse because there are hundreds of miles of other country in between and those countries will certainly object to Iran driving an invasion force across them. Plus given Israeli air dominance an invasion force is basically a large slow moving target.

Finish the Bomb

One thing Iran could try to do is finish the atomic bombs. That depends on several unknowns. First and most obvious is whether the various attacks have put the Iranian stock of suitably enriched uranium out of reach. Given the report that almost half a ton of 60% enriched having been taken from Fordow that may be possible. On the other hand, Marco Rubio suggested that the uranium was in Isfahan and is now safely buried there. Rubio also noted that Iran is under Israeli surveillance which makes moving it hard

I doubt they moved it… they can’t move anything right now inside of Iran. I mean, the minute a truck starts driving somewhere, the Israelis have seen it, and they’ve targeted it and taken it out.

While details of the ceasefire are still, as of this post being written, sketchy, I very much doubt that they will prevent Israel and/or the US from continuing close surveillance of sites of interest in Iran and the tracking of persons of interest by Israel’s spies.

Note that a “fizzle”/dirty bomb where the bomb fails to fully pop but still spreads lots of radioactive stuff everywhere may be sufficient as long as the bomb explodes over Israel (or the US) so 60% HEU may be sufficient for the purposes of revenge. But even assuming the regime can build a suitable bomb it also has to get it to Israel and that is a big gamble because having the thing blow up or be destroyed before it gets there would be catastrophically bad. This is a very similar argument to why Russia prefers to threaten Ukraine with nukes but not actually try to use one. A failed nuke is a sign of weakness not strength and a sign that the people who tried to set it off need to be taken out right now before they try again and maybe get it right.

However even if the uranium is available there’s the question of who builds the bomb? Many of the top scientists were killed in the first day or two and it looks like a lot of the key locations were taken out out too. Maybe someone has a USB stick with the construction details on it? Maybe there are missiles hidden somewhere that can have a nuclear warhead attached? Maybe someone can get the stashed uranium, attach it to the missile and successfully launch it.

[Similar arguments apply to the “someone will give Iran the stuff” argument]

Um there’s a lot of maybes in that. I do not believe either Trump or the Israelis would have agreed to stop the war if they thought there was a chance Iran could still build a bomb in the near future so I expect that some or all of those maybes are not in fact actual possibilities. Plus there’s the likelihood if they put the bomb on a missile, Israel will hit the missile somewhere up above the atmosphere on its descent so the uranium ends up spread in bits across some combination of Israel, the West Bank, Jordan and Syria. A ton (to be generous) of HEU even if it lands more or less in a lump is not a major hazard even if the crunching into the ground makes some of it get close to critical mass. In fact given prevailing winds (westerly) any radiation is going to irradiate Jordan, Syria and Iraq before hitting, um, Iran. If the Iranian leaders want all the Arab Sunni muslims to attack them there really isn’t much they could do better short of blowing up Mecca.

It is possible the mullahs think this is a winning strategy. Or alternatively that they realize they are going to lose so they do this to cause the 12th Imam to appear or whatever. I don’t see it helping and it may not in fact be possible. And I don’t see any other options. Given that they appear to have agreed to a ceasefire where they stop attacking first and then Israel does 12 hours later it looks like they agree with me

OK so what happens next?

Probably unrest in Iran up to an Iranian civil war. Best case someone (the crown prince?) manages to put together a broadly acceptable alternative government that manages to seize power swiftly. Best case for the mullahs is that they manage to keep their hold on Iran as the reorganize and rebuild from their losses. I suspect more likely is somewhere in between where Iranian opposition forces manage to organize enough that they attack the IRGC and regime loyalists but that they don’t have enough people/weaponry to successfully take out enough for the regime to collapse. Al BBC has interviews with Iranians who seem to expect the regime to remain even though many would like it to go. Israel’s most recent attacks seem to be about attacking IRGC bases and places like the Evin prison which suggests they are trying to make an Iranian uprising possible. I hope that succeeds, but I am not optimistic

1. OK Iran shot one drone down. Big deal. This appears to be the sole loss of equipment to date including jets that are 40-50 years old

2.