Fallout From The Anglo-Zionist War On Iran (2)

Let’s just present Warlord’s bottom line analysis:

Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW

Now that the ceasefire seems to have solidified, my thoughts on the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran.

As an initial matter, no armistice that leaves Iran with a direct path to nuclear arms by Christmas can be considered a victory for Israel. And that's where we are.

Controversial? I don’t think so. What’s coming out today appears to confirm that the US strike was part of a deal to get a ceasefire for Israel. To “save” Israel, as Trump put it.

Let's run through this.

1. First and foremost, this war was an act of entirely unprovoked aggression by Israel, assisted - at least according to Trump, who may or may not be telling the truth about the matter - by American perfidy in conducting bad-faith negotiations with the Iranians designed only to increase their vulnerability to attack. This isn't even a matter of controversy, the Israelis haven't even tried to claim they had a casus belli and Trump's said on the record that he coordinated with them. This action by the Trump Administration dishonored the United States of America.

It also destroyed any lingering trust in anything Trump says.

2. This was Israel's "big show" against Iran. Its results did not meet the effort expended. The most effective weapon the Israelis had wasn't their vaunted Air Force but instead an elaborately constructed attack network inside Iran courtesy of Mossad - an attack network that is now gone and which likely cannot be reconstructed. To use a hacking analogy, Israel burned all of their "zero-day" exploits in Iran in the last two weeks. Infrastructure can be repaired, weaponry can be replaced, but they're not going to be able to reconstruct this attack network.

This has also been my impression—that the assassination campaign was actually more effective than the standoff strikes.

3. For all of Israel's talk of taking down Iran's air defense system, the war was almost entirely fought with standoff weapons on both sides. The Israelis flew drones into Iran - and lost a lot of them. They do not appear to have risked their manned aircraft flying "downtown" except in marginal cases. Reports of Israeli aircraft operating with impunity deep in Iran appear to have been misidentification of Iranian Air Force planes at best and propaganda at worst.

4. Both sides' stockpile of standoff munitions appears to have been relatively limited - even with the US likely backstopping Israel with cruise missiles late in the war. This explains the rather limited tempo of strikes on both sides after the first few days far better than claims the Israelis had somehow "suppressed" Iran's missile forces - claims the Israelis "substantiated" with dozens of videos of the same drone strike.

I would also add that the relatively slow pace of Iranian strikes was also a result of Iranian hoarding of offensive weapons in anticipation of 1) an attrition strategy that was very much in their favor, and 2) the withholding of their most advanced weaponry in anticipation of direct US involvement. News accounts have tended to confirm that few of Iran’s newest missiles were used. Was this due to low inventories—or was this done only for demonstration purposes?

4.a.This also, by the way, explains why Hezbollah seems to have had so many fewer rockets available during Israel's abortive incursion into Lebanon last year than had generally been believed. In an ironic twist and contrary to (consistently wrong about everything!) brOSINT reporting, it seems that it's the Russians with the bottomless doom stockpile of missiles and the Iranians had relatively few on hand.

5. Iran demonstrated a consistent capability to pierce Israeli missile defenses and damage or destroy Israeli infrastructure and combat systems - several IDF air defense missile batteries were in fact struck and destroyed on video in this war. While the reverse is obviously true, given the respective sizes of the combatants Israel would have had to be destroying Iranian critical infrastructure at a rate of approximately ten times what they themselves were suffering just to break even. This did not happen. In fact Iranian "white" civil-use nuclear sites - tertiary targets, militarily speaking - absorbed much of the IAF's wrath.

6. Tying into my point above, there's little indication that even Iranian "nuclear gray sites" such as Fordow or the Natanz bunker were meaningfully damaged in the war. The damage that can be seen on the ground is simply inconsistent with the use of earthquake bombs as claimed by Trump and the Pentagon - although the polite fiction that the sites were destroyed is perhaps helpful to keep the peace. There's little indication the US or Israel even has a clear idea of where Iran's true "nuclear black sites" are actually located, let alone that they effectively struck them during the war.

7. Which leads directly into the point I made upfront. As near as anyone can tell - and if they don't already have them - Iran simply has a straight-line path to nuclear warheads at this point. Their enrichment infrastructure, stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and the black sites at which the work would be done to finish enrichment and manufacture warheads all appear to be intact. And the war that Netanyahu has been threatening for decades to prevent an Iranian nuclear breakout just happened... and succeeded in perhaps disrupting Iran's timetable by a few weeks.

8. The American role in all of this is... well, perhaps "mysterious" is being generous. "Schizophrenic" may be more accurate. Tying the arc of Trump's Truth Social pronunciamentos together with observed actions on the ground gives one the impression that the Trump Administration wrote Netanyahu a blank check in Iran, closely coordinated the road to war with the Israeli government... and then did an about-face when an avalanche of criticism poured in from the American public and it became clear the Iranian state was far from the Syriaesque house of cards that I'm sure Netanyahu painted it as.

9. All of this means that the way forward for Iran is, for once, largely in the hands of the Iranian government. This ties into a broader point of analysis I've touched on several times, which is the Iranian regime's move from being a disruptor-state in permanent revolution towards geopolitical normalcy, industrialization and national growth. BRICS isn't a maniacs' club. To do this they've largely cut loose their constellation of "Axis of Resistance" proxies and reoriented their posture towards conventional defensive deterrence. And, well, it wasn't pretty but I think Israel and the US did in fact get deterred in the end.

10. Very conveniently for anyone in Iran wanting to "normalize" the state and the military going forward, the IRGC took a beating in this war both in terms of raw attrition among its senior leadership and in terms of organizational credibility as a decisive deterrent against Israel. Almost like a lot of people got hung out to dry for blowing Syria and failing to take responsibility, but I digress. The logical way to develop Iranian power and prestige going forward isn't just nuclear warheads but the development of a strong conventional military and intelligence apparatus - something that has sat on the back burner for decades while the IRGC got infiltrated by Mossad and wrote an entire encyclopedia on military gimmicks.

11. This is paradoxically at least somewhat positive for Israeli security going forward. An Iran with a weakened and discredited IRGC, that is integrated into global economic and political systems, is an Iran that will not be seeking confrontation with Israel. It will merely look quite a bit different than Netanyahu's preferred solution of setting everywhere in the Middle East that hasn't been subverted into an Israeli proxy on fire.

So who won? Well, I don't think Iran won - but Israel sure lost.

This has been a theme of Warlord—that the Iranian professional military emerges as a winner from this war, as opposed to the IRGC. The result may well turn out to be a considerably more powerful Iranian military. I would add that Warlord’s remark concerning the IRGC’s counter intel failures deserves emphasis. No country under threat can afford to allow domestic terrorist threats—largely manned by foreign nationals—to proliferate to the extent that appears to have been the case in Iran.