What all these people are saying:

  • Iran has an endless arsenal of missiles and they haven’t even used their best stuff
  • Iran’s announcement that it’s blocking the Strait of Hormuz will wreck the global economy
  • Israel and the US will run out of interceptor missiles and then Iran will flatten everything in Israel and the Gulf states
  • A US ground invasion would be a nightmare (the one thing they are right about)

All these conclusions ignore:

  • that Israel and US can bomb Iran’s missile launching capabilities, launchers, stockpiles, command centers, factories. Sure, some of this is deep under the ground, but not everything is invulnerable
  • that the Iranian navy is being ruined
  • that the world is not going to sit by and do nothing just because Iran says it will burn every ship in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian officials like to make threats. Way back when in Iraq Saddam’s people also made all kinds of threats they could never make good on. Trash talk is not the actual fight, it’s just talk
  • that we don’t know how badly Iranian forces have been compromised from the inside
  • that Iran may have been bluffing all along
  • that a decrease in missiles launched at Israel doesn’t have to be part of some clever strategy, but it may simply mean that full US and Israeli air superiority over Iran is taking its toll on what Iran is able to do
  • that Iran doesn’t have allies to really support it
  • that some Israelis will leave the country, yes, but that doesn’t mean they never come back
  • that Hezbollah is clearly much, much weaker than previously assumed and that coordination between Iran and its so called proxies was never strong or even tactically coherent
  • that oil prices have fluctuated before and that there is no telling now how long markets will be affected by this, things have a way to normalize faster than the media let on. Without some a steady flow of dramatic events this will vanish from the headlines. Just like Ukraine is now suddenly gone from the news and just like back in February 2022 Covid instantly vanished from the front pages

Conclusion: Iran will probably manage to avoid regime change, the US and Israel will sell whatever happens as a major victory (‘we stopped the lunatics from getting a nuclear bomb!!’), Israel will keep stealing land and create more and more of a buffer zone, Netanyahu might very well win re-election because he is doing exactly what the majority of Israelis love and Trump will lose interest and whenever pressed will present whatever happened as a fantastic success.

The only real big negative for Israel and America is that perhaps finally some European countries will drift away from American hegemony and will not allow Israel to do whatever it wants. Spain’s course is promising in that regard.

If you want to see cracks between western allies it’s also promising that Trump is insulting Starmer by saying he is ‘no Churchill’.

Iran didn’t deserve this vicious attack, the media will never allocate much time or energy to showing us the many civilian victims in Iran and sadly, no matter how much we may wish to see real evil actors get their comeuppance, for the time being things are still relatively going to plan for shamelessly self-serving people like Netanyahu and Trump, for whom loss of human life means nothing.

Except that this regime change in Teheran may stay elusive for some time to come.