In a nutshell, the most recent military conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the U.S. can be summed up as follows:
* Iran is getting close to developing nuclear weapons.
* Iran wants to remove Israel from the face of the Earth and that is why it is developing nuclear weapons.
* Iran has not very long ago launched missile and drone attacks on Israel.
* The Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank in Israel, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are all Iranian proxy forces. Iran was deeply involved in facilitating the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
* Iran has had periodic military engagements with U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf.
* Israel carried out a major airstrike on Iran, mostly using F-35I stealth fighters with conformal fuel tanks to boost their range allowing them strike and return without aerial refueling, targeting Iran's nuclear program and key individuals in that program. Many of these targets were successfully struck and/or killed. But, one of Iran's most important nuclear facilities is in a very deep bunker in Iran.
* The U.S. used seven B-2 stealth bombers and with two "bunker buster" bombs each, to strike this very deep bunker with Iranian nuclear facilities (although probably only setting it back a few months), and used one of these and other carrier based aircraft to attack two other Iranian bases.
* It isn't clear that the U.S. has non-nuclear strike capabilities sufficient to truly destroy Iran's most secure nuclear program resources in its deepest bunker sufficiently to set its nuclear program back all that far.
* Before attacking Iran, the U.S. threatened it and evacuated personnel and ships from a U.S. naval base in Bahrain, and moved more carrier groups into the region.
* Iran counterattacked Israel and a U.S. military base in Qatar. Interceptor missiles apparently stopped all of the strikes on Qatar, and 80%-90% of the strikes on Israel, although this was not entirely successful and there was Israeli casualties. These defenses may not be sustainable, since Israel is running very low on key missile defense interceptor missiles that are part of its "Iron Dome" anti-missile and anti-drone defenses. But Iran's supply of effect long range missiles and armed drones and strike aircraft that can reach Israel is also not unlimited, and it has no quick source from which it can resupply itself (and Russia does not appear to want to get involved in this fight).
* Iran has been a major supplier of armed drones to Russia for it use in the Ukraine War.
* Iran has regularly interfered with shipping in the Persian Gulf and has a fairly impressive naval made up mostly of submarines and small missile boats, although it is building a drone carrier and has shipping container ballistic missiles as well.
* Many decades of sanctions have caused Iran to develop its own military industrial complex.
* Iran's government is officially under the supervision of a Shi'ite Islamic theocratic supreme leader since the Islamic revolution in 1979. But it has a democratic secular elected government, screened to remove candidates contrary to the regime or contrary to Shi'ite Islam, that has gradually been growing more powerful and more moderate. In part, this is because its economy is at least as dependent upon a diversified mercantile class as it is upon oil and gas exploitation (which is about 20% of its GDP) and agriculture.
* Iran is religiously diverse despite being a theocracy. It is home to many minority religions, that are tolerated, and its people are less religious in their daily lives and more secular leaning, than most countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and many other places in the Islamic world (like Pakistan and Afghanistan). Devout Shi'ite Muslims make up only a plurality of the population (about a third of the population) at most.
* Iran, not having the luxury of abundant oil wealth shared by a small population of citizens with real work done by temporary foreign laborers, like the Arab oil monarchies, has a substantial grass roots movement that wants fewer restrictions on women, more modernity, an identity that embraces its historical Persian roots rather than an exclusively Shi'ite Islamic national identity, more political freedom, and more freedom of speech. This said, there is wide grass roots opposition to and hate of Israel and the United States in Iran. In general, Shi'ite Muslims have been less backwards than Sunni Muslims in the Middle East. Iranians, and in particular, Iranian women, are also better educated than many Middle Eastern countries.
* But for its attacks and proxy attacks on Israel, its direct and indirect attacks on Persian Gulf and Red Sea commerce, its nuclear program, its military support for Russia, the sensible thing to do would be to allow Iran to percolate with its own internal conflicts and political developments without foreign interference. This would probably have led to considerable moderation and maybe even disestablishmentarianism, either politically or through a counterrevolution, sometime in the next five to twenty years. But, its violent foreign policy has made intervention more urgent.
* Israel was basically already at war with Iran and was entirely reasonable in taking action to prevent Iran from obtaining military capabilities that would be used to obliterate it.
* On the merits, U.S. military support for Israel in its strikes on Iran's nuclear capabilities was not unreasonable.
* The U.S. has, without really intending to do so, defanged Iran's main potential military opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan, through invasions of those countries, freeing up Iran's military resources to take on Israel and to interfere with Persian Gulf trade and to become an arms supplier to Russia.
* Neither the Israeli strikes nor the U.S. strikes appear to have done all that much to degrade Iran's air defenses, its air forces, its drone forces, its long range missile capabilities, its Persian Gulf navy, its anti-ship missiles, or the military industrial complex it uses to supply itself, Russia, the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah. But, if the U.S. and Israel are going to be attacking Iran anyway, those seem like sensible additional targets.
* A sustained ground invasion of Iran makes no military sense. There is no likely scenario in which the U.S. sends hundreds of thousand of U.S. group troops to Iran, possibly as part of a multi-national coalition like those in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or needs to new military draft. This a a conflict involving strikes with aircraft, missiles, and drones, and defenses against counterattacks by similar means and at sea, and in terror attacks (most likely not primarily on U.S. soil, and more like the U.S.S. Cole attack by al Qaeda on October 12, 2000 in Yemen, and Shi'ite militia attacks on U.S. forces in Syria and Jordan in the waning days of the Syrian civil war).
* It isn't at all obvious that regime change can be achieved in Iran without a ground invasion, or that killing key political and theocratic leaders in Iran would result in much of a change in Iranian policies. Indeed, attacks by Israel and the U.S. on Iran probably strengthen the regime against these common enemies in the short run. Iran has plenty of adequate potential successors to its current leaders who wouldn't seem much different in their policies towards Israel, the U.S., and maritime commerce.
* A claimed U.S. brokered cease fire hasn't really held at all, for even t twenty-four hours.
* The Israeli-U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear program wouldn't have been necessary if Trump hadn't ended an Obama negotiated deal with Iran related to its nuclear program in 2018.
* Both Israel's leadership and the U.S. leadership have reasons to divert attention from domestic affairs to this conflict. It does have a genuine solid military motive, but the timing may very well be politically motivated.
* It isn't clear that President Trump had the legal authority to strike Iran in support of Israel without Congressional authorization which was not sought or obtained. This strike is not within the scope of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), or any of the authorizations made in connection with the Iraq War.
* The MAGA right is divided on the desirability of this strike and it isn't clear that Trump could have promptly secured backing from Congress to make the strike if he'd asked it to do so.
* While a military strike directly on Iran from the U.S. no doubt does increase the likelihood of retaliation on the U.S. from Iran, the notion that we should be suspicious of Iranian-Americans, many of whom are medical professionals working in rural America, is very doubtful. There are probably not lots of Iranian "sleeper cells" in the U.S. who want to commit terrorist acts in the U.S.
* Political protests against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is long standing on the American left, and has legitimate justification, particularly given an Israeli military response in Gaza to the October 7 attacks that, while understandable, particularly because Hamas continues to hold Israeli hostages and refused to surrender, has been overkill. Notably, however, the October 7 attacks had widespread support in Gaza long after the blowback it suffered from them became clear. The U.S. opposition to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is predominantly not anti-Semitic, and isn't even predominantly anti-Zionist. It is mostly a very general pro-human rights driven movement.
* The Israeli response to October 7 in Gaza has been so completely destroyed that the enclave that it can support only perhaps a third or a half as many people as it had before the attacks (see also here). While there have been tens of thousands of Gazan deaths so far there, the clock is ticking and there will soon be either many hundreds of thousands to millions of Gazan deaths from starvation, lack of water, and illness, or a mass exile of people who are currently in Gaza, which no Islamic countries are volunteering to sponsor.
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