Iran is likely jamming Starlink
timesofisrael.com
timesofisrael.com
It's a pattern by now: whenever a government wants to do something awful, it shuts down internet access - so that no one can hear it, see it or coordinate a response. And Starlink becomes a lifeline that the regime would rather people didn't have.
This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place. If you give a government a capability to restrict access to whatever it wants and enact a network blackout whenever it wants, it's a matter of time until it gets abused.
Not even Starlink has the balls to oppose the likes of Russia and China directly - they aren't operating there without a permit, sadly. But at least they don't kneel before every two-bit dictatorship and cave to every single "we want you to do censorship on our behalf" demand. Way better than what most tech companies do now.
And this makes sense for an organization thats so highly reliant on federal support, vs Apple and Google who only have to just stay somewhat in the states good graces.
Apple and Google have done more than just stay in good graces of governments by getting rid of apps governments don't like, they haven't enforced their terms against X, and given tens of millions to Trump's ballroom.
Could you expand on that? Are you saying that the US state wants destabilization in every place that Starlink is accessible? Like the UK, Australia, and USA itself? Which group are you considering the "US state" for that?
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
> This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place
This is a kind of colonialist thinking that is, IMO, a problem in the western society. There are indeed drawbacks in a lack of freedom, but assuming that a government should not be able to filter the content diffused to the population is wrong in principle. You don't get to choose what is right or wrong in every part of the world: that is a very USA-centric way to view the society and easily leads to "export freedom and democracy" acts. It's a very USA-friendly way to frame things. Not necessarily the right way to frame things.
One logical conclusion to this would be to protect people from that via censorship.
Many recent examples of the US doing this as well (Covid, Russia, etc.). Of course, the US delegates this to its cooperations, so it can publicly say its hands are clean.
People do remember the Twitter files though, and the US government has massive spying and monitoring capabilities, so its hands are not actually all that clean.
With this in mind, no, I don't share the view that a strong government should trust the people: people can easily be steered by foreign parties that want to gain soft power (example: Russia and recent anti-EU propaganda in Poland, Romania and Georgia). It's very hard to draw a line between what is "right" and what is "too much", but I don't think that excessive freedom is an obvious route to an healthy society (that is, a society that has peace and people are happy).
Straw man.
Nobody is arguing for maximal freedoms for Iranians. This is literally whether some Iranians are able to get their hands on Starlink terminals if they want to.
The Iranian state has not shown itself to be one that is very convenient for us to temporarily overlook its flaws, and the people it governs frequently show that they would prefer a different form of government (otherwise, why not let them vote in fair elections?). It should be a no brainer that Americans and their government should be on the side of the people, not the theocracy.
Also the US has massive protests aswell, would it be okay for china to liberate the USA, since china itself is lead by a "democratic party"? They could argue the USA isn't a real liberal democracy.
> why not let them vote in fair elections? Elections can be faked, people can be mislead, oppositions and media can be bought.
So to respond directly:
> Why should anybody trust them with another country?
They should not and should not need to trust them with another country
> would it be okay for china to liberate the USA
no, it wouldn't. But if China felt that the USA gov't was like, not cool, they could impose sanctions or not trade with USA.
I won't go down the path of "fair elections", since I don't think it applies to USA.
Edit just to clarify: presence of billionaires that are not hostile to the regime does not mean they are allies either.
My point is that, even in self-proclamed democracies, it's quite hard to actually give power to the people, precisely as in regimes. It's not a "it's all the same" position, of course: I mean to say that taking some values as absolute is not great if we don't clearly define what we are optimizing for. The USA model of democracy doesn't optimize for individual freedom nor for general population happiness.
Putin and Xi are billionaires. So are their cronies. They get richer faster than the rest of their population because they’re literally billionaires in control of the regime with no peaceful path to removing them.
The wealthiest entity in the USA is the government itself. It's not even close.
Further, if currency was not able to influence things then that eliminates the main purpose of fiat currency, there is obviously a place for it in any case. Just because you don't like the direction it's being used doesn't mean you have a reasonable position either. Fiat is a benefit to the government in all ways and its in it's best interest to uphold the strength of their currency, not just for the locals to the land in the borders, but if they want to influence the rest of the world.
You should go down the path of "fair elections" because you otherwise lose all points for being vague and imprecise that no one can contest you on because you don't think we are worth the argument.
Fair elections: in the US there are a bunch of practices related to vote that I don't consider fair. First and foremost, how votes are counted. Then, how money can be used to finance parties and campaigns. Gerrymandering is another one.
Why?
() edit: no, I was partly mistaken with these examples. I provided example of things that are known and widely accepted to be damaging of other liberties, while I meant to provide something more subtle, like fake news.
Iran has commanded empires for millennia. Longer than continental Europe.
Iranians getting their hands on Starlink terminals is as “colonial” as revolutionary France helping the American colonists usurp the British.
> "But Starlink receivers use GPS to locate and connect to satellites. “Since its 12-day war with Israel last June," The Times says, “Iran has been disrupting GPS signals.”"
Edit to add: I do not mean the GPS satellites or the starlink ground terminals. That was not the question so that is not my answer. I mean the starlink satellites
I don’t think the almanacs are necessary for the system to work, in theory. But I believe they’re commonly used by receivers to narrow down the range of possibilities when trying to find a PRN match for a signal they’re getting.
(I’ve dealt with GPS and similar navigation signals for work but am not an expert, this is just the impression I’ve gotten over a few years)
Most jamming is horizontal and limited to a few bands. So by having a directional antenna and listening to all services for now it seems to work. But this is a cat and mouse game.
https://furuno.eu/gr-en/marine-solutions/gnss-positioning-ti...
If the user inputs a bogus lat/lon, it would simply fail to connect. There's no way to 'spoof' your location on this type of global satellite comm network.
EDIT It will be interesting to see what anti-censorship and anti-DOS hardening features are coming in future software updates. Full GPS denial bootstrapping is the most obvious, and actually this should be possible without needing to input a location. Adding offline update packages, so signed anti-denial firmware updates can "sneakernet" across oppressive regimes to recover DOSed terminals, would be even better.
Something else is going on here - perhaps there’s an edge case where Starlink can be made to perform poorly without falling back away from GPS, but I wouldn’t expect this since it’s been “tested” in the most GPS hostile places for quite some time now.
According to [1], “[o]ne of the current generation of GPS satellites (Block III) weighs over 2,200 kg (4,850 lb), the weight of an average pickup truck. The body of these satellites are 1.8 m x 2.5 m x 3.4 m (5.9’ x 8.2’ x 11.2’) in size”. In comparison, “the current V2 Starlink satellite version weighs approximately 1,760 lbs (800 kilograms) at launch, almost three times heavier than the older generation satellites (weighing in at 573 lbs or 260 kg)” [2]
[1] https://novatel.com/an-introduction-to-gnss/basic-concepts/s... [2] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
Thanks you provide some great insights on why starlink didnt use gps but still if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc. I feel like they can probably do this after this recent incident
I just can't feel but sad right now because starlink was still providing activists ways to report outside and that helped protestors a lot and information. Now even starlink got removed because starlink tried to save money and I think might not have thought about what if gps itself gets blocked.
This is giving very bad signals for Iran. Is there any way now that Protestors are able to communicate to the outside world/ activists be able to report data outside?
I’m not sure Musk would actually want that though, especially these days.
In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20] SpaceX executives repeatedly stated that Starlink needed to remain a civilian network;[21][22][12] in late 2022, as Starlink was being used as a tool in combat in Ukraine, SpaceX announced Starshield, a Starlink-like program designed for government customers.[23][21] Musk is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.[24]
Musk, like Trump, has an interesting relationship with Russia. The investigations into that have been quashed, so we don’t get to find out about the rumoured Kremlin calls he was making.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/business/dealbook/musk-pu...
that made me laugh!
So I guess we get to stick with your story.
[1] https://xcancel.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659
But there's an even simpler way to reach this conclusion: given everything you and I know about Pompeo's politics, is there any reason to believe he'd want to introduce doubt about the legitimacy of popular protest in Iran?
[1] https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/aemDocuments/documents/F...
But really, why doesn't Starlink device allow to simply enter coordinates manually? After all, if someone enters wrong coordinates (say to enable operation in a place where Starlink has no service), it won't work because it won't find satellites where it expects them to be.
Or is there something here that i'm missing?
If it can serve a basic web page with a world map, it may be justifiable to include it for the price of the dish (yes will require some flash storage).
I'm sure the Iranian regime would live to jam starlink, but i don't think we have any ability to know what is actually happening here.
The article claims 80% packetloss. That's still 1 in 5 packets getting through. That is annoying but not going to stop information getting out.
I also wonder, if all other coms are cut off, is it possible star link in the country is just overloaded?
https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barri...
[Of course you could say the same thing about TCP i suppose depending on which congestion control algorithm is in use]
So like they are very heavily DPI censored though and maybe govts able to spy on any messages you send right now but I feel like there is a still possibility that for the average communication, they might still exist but although heavily heavily censored/bad and I feel like protestors might not be able to communicate (which I feel like is the question you meant to be asking)
https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/ir
So TLDR: protestors must have a hard time sadly and they may be using bluetooth mesh or other tech, only they can tell after we figure things out but also lets say some major services websites might still exist after all if they bypass the dpi censorship for IPv4 services.
In my opinion, I feel like Protestors must be using mesh based technologies as you mention. We'll see what really ends up happening after we get some reports from Iran.
can you please take a look at cloudflare radar and see what the current ipv4 connectivity means? Even Ipv4 was blocked for sometime but then it got back to normal in the graph shown in cloudflare radar
Can you please tell me what you mean by plug for all peering? Like complete internet blackout?
> A high-speed covert tunnel that disguises TCP traffic as SMTP email communication to bypass Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) firewalls
I hope though that perhaps rural villages can shelter activists but who knows what happens in the ground level, perhaps news development from tehran doesn't reach the villages in the first case, maybe they block anyone entering and leaving the city I am not sure
This seems to be a really bad development for protestors. There were reports that some protestors were killed by the govt and now I am genuinely worried about them even more. This tyranny needs to be stopped.
Antenna arrays aren't perfect so it still picks up some energy omnidirectionally, but it should be possible to shield it with some metal plates in a way that only sky is visible.
Also, the antennas on starlink dishes are still pretty small, likely to pick up some hard-to-remove sidelobes and the tech to cancel them properly might be export-controlled. You still need to be within electromagnetic visibility to jam them, though.
To add to my point, with multiple antennas it's also possible to spatially separate signals. Not sure if Starlink is doing that, but I think it should be possible to escape GPS jammers by using two antennas with some distance between them. Two antennas can pick up the direction of the signals and with some math they can be separated, at least in theory.
Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations.
A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground, and running a fine-tuned classifier to identify Starlink Dishies which require a clear line of sight to the sky.
People who think Starlink is unblockable, or somehow anonymous IRL are unimaginative. Iran is well-versed enough with electronic warfare that it tricked a RQ-170 Sentinel land on it's territory - how hardened are Starlink terminals against responding to a spoofed signal and exposing their locations?
It probably is hard to jam, but you don't need to jam it if you can pinpoint terminal locations and send in on-the-ground enforcers to confiscate the equipment and make arrests. TV detector vans were introduced in 1952[1], the principles for finding sources of RF emissions isn't cutting edge technology.
This is just 1 passive RF-based approach, and there are others (e.g. drone-mounted FLIR surveys done at 3 am)
That said, this would only be true if there were enough people with terminals.
Russia isn't in control of Ukrainian territory, where the starlink terminals are, which would be the prime targets of any disruption operation. The situations in Iran and Ukraine are materially different.
Old article about Starlink (see bottom of page). Competitors have similar solutions in development.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90681156/elon-musk-starlink-sate...
Media is information rich. Maybe we're beyond a samzdat moment and the value in comms is contextual immediacy of live feeds, text can squeeze alongside.
Long ago, broadcast quality TV was shipped as slow feed. Maybe a tiktok generation goes back there: use a phone on the street (probably surreptitiously) do post production and upload asynchronously on 30% packetloss or worse for redistribution.
The people filming protests in iran are probably not in range of their home starlink connected wifi. They are almost certainly filming stuff offline then uploading it later, not livestreaming.
I would be surprised if GPS blocking is enough to completely can starlink. It improves positioning but if you don't jog the antenna, given these things are in predictable orbit, you can probably get good-enough S/N without GPS info.
1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran.
2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.
3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.
Not at the frequencies in question - this isn't 2.4GHz where a magnetron ripped out of a microwave oven will wreak havoc, these are highly-directional, beamformed signals. Also, ostensibly, there should be zero unapproved energy whatsoever in those bands.
I guess with motivated actors anything is possible.
Jamming on such a large scale is expensive, but it's hardly impossible.
It was a small, triangular ship that blasted big asteroids, which in turn spun off and collided with other asteroids…
Jamming RF is easy in general. Nowadays we can even do beamforming so i guess it would be trivial.
It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.
> Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it to no avail.
Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
I just wanted to point out that it felt rude to call it funny but I understand what you mean and what intention but please be more sincere about such issues.
> Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
Someone mentions that there is a huge packet loss but its still possible. Other mentions that its possible to do this in rural villages and there are many nuances. I genuinely dont know the technological reasons or know how of what it is or what the ground state of reality is and what's actually happening but I hope that starlink still works or can have a work-around for the activists. We will see in sometime what really happens in the ground state as I must admit I still don't know if its 100% censored or what the reality is.
1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran
2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.
3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.
Could you get at least 1mbps from a phone to LEO now for email and non-realtime data?
The emergency SOS feature is optimized down to the byte to ensure it can work with poor signal and low bandwidth.
Having a terminal that doesn't suck puts less strain on the satellite side and, thus, scales better. But for emergencies and serving middle of nowhere, "direct to cell" makes sense.
Lora? Shortwave radio? Or nothing at all?
my real answer : I think at that point in time effort is best spent trying to arrange escape.
my technical answer : depends on the scene. directed optical/laser or microwave is very hard to track if that can facilitate the links you need -- but realistically most war-time off-grid comms historically has been established via runners, dropboxes, or community radio systems ; all options with very real inherent risks.
Maybe more practically in Tibet I had a Thuraya sat phone which you weren't supposed to have but I don't think there's much they could do about those except maybe search you.
There are two main issues with such an application that I can think of:
1. Addressing. How would the nodes know where to send the packet? But I assume there are ways to deal with that which come from the P2P networks like Tor.
2. Edge connectivity. Even if it would be possible to communicate between the regular nodes of the network, those packets would not be able to reach the outside world. So, from abroad or even from the out of town, they would still appear offline. Some kind of edge bridges would probably be necessary to reach connectivity with the outside world.
As in all conflicts, there's always a "fog of blame" where there isn't absolute certainty about who is right and who is to blame. Though it's not that hard. Because their survival depends on it, dictators are very good at blaming others--anybody, really--for their own shortcomings, and they usually wield the kind of hard power that makes them extremely costly to topple in terms of suffering and human lives.
Life is too short to have to deal with despots. We need a better, perhaps less-crowded or less xenophobic world where every person can protect their right to exist by simply packing and leaving as a last resort.
Also there's now guowang to contend with. I'm not sure how widely available access to it is.
I would assume both sides are heavily jamming the frontlines. But presumably long range drone operations are more likely to use it.
Iran protesters cant find or destroy jammers though.
I am an RF ignoramus. It all seems like black magic to me. I have seen "80% packet loss" being thrown around in these discussions, and also that it is just GPS spoofing.
My main question is that is there anything novel happening here? What is the actual range of disruption?
However if you are a protester without any advanced weapons, then you can't do anything against that.
I've been curious myself about why the activist class seems weirdly quiet on this issue.
On a quick scan of media feeds I've seen a couple of things that stand out (I do not confirm or deny how true these claims are)
1) Current Iran is a enemy of the USA and thus activists can't support the destruction of the current regime. Iran is able to create nukes so can put pressure on the USA in Middle East Politics (esp. Palestine and Israel)
2) The uprising and the Shah are CIA/Western Backed and thus supporting the protestors is de-facto colonialism/imperialism.
3) Contrary to popular belief Iran is not actually a Muslim nation, only the leadership is. The population is significantly more varied and people do not want to be seen supporting the firebombing of Mosques because Islamphobia.
I don't know how widespread these opinions are, but it IS very strange how I don't see more outrage.
Sure one side would march for pride and the other hangs gays on cranes.
However, in foreign policy both explain anything as some product of colonialism, a phenomena that essentially disappeared 60 years ago.
This is due to the effect Edward Said had on US humanities, which was in turn was influenced by Muslim Brotherhood thought in his home country of Egypt
1. Iran has frequent large protests that consistently get crushed. So while I assume the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iranian government, it’s hard to get worked up for the 5th, 6th time.
2. The US doesn’t support the Iranian government. We already sanction them. What additional support can US citizens lobby for? In the case of Israel, decreased US support would have a tangible effect. Unclear how increased US support for Iranian protestors would matter.
The US does support the Saudi government, though, and the collective response from the concerned citizens brigade about their relentless 10+ year pulverization of Yemen has been... nothing.
BTW its not just left here, I originally hail from India and you can feel the pin-drop silence from left on Iran there too. They just hope the rebellion gets crushed by regime like other ones and they'll pretend status quo.
My TLDR takeaway: Muslims only care about when they are oppressed & Left is completely aligned with them right now.
However, I have seen these thoughts spread to more seemingly mainstream geopolitical subs as well. I am not sure how much astroturfing is going on here. Probably quite a lot.
But that's the most optimistic take I can conjure.
The activists want the excessive death and suffering to end in Palestine, and they want to avoid death and suffering in Iran.
Many politicians want to use the protests as a pretext for military intervention in Iran, and my blunt opinion is that they don't actually have the interests of Iranians in mind. There are many reasons to believe it will end up worse for both America and the Iranians than our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A valid response would be to say that you think abuses in Iran are bad enough that a military intervention is justified and that it will lead to a better outcome for Iranians. My intuition would be to disagree with that, based on the results of past interventions, etc...
Also... Are the executed protesters not also death and suffering? What about victims and conflicts resulting from the groups Iran funds?
And the executed protesters are a bad thing. But I don't think military intervention will lead to a better outcome.
Supporters of Palestine had pretty specific requests, none of which apply to Iran (conditioning weapons sales, divestment, etc...)
And yet they are silent on the death and suffering in: Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo, Myanmar, Libya. Just to name current active conflicts where people are dying, to say nothing of all the others that have flared up and subsided in my decades on this earth as I've watched "activists" ignore them all so they could hyper-focus on whatever Israel was doing at the time to protect its citizens and the Jewish diaspora. The word "exhausting" doesn't even scratch the surface of how it feels to deal with otherwise smart, educated people who roll around in this hypocrisy-laden dogpile.
Considering that reality, does it not make sense that Americans would be more vocal when it comes to this conflict, because we actually have agency to affect it?
I genuinely want to know what your response is to that argument, because it's not a new one, and seems very obvious to me.
The United States is far and away the Saudis' most important and pivotal ally. We almost single-handedly ensure their security and and diplomatic standing. Now, many believe the "side causing excessive suffering" in that conflict is actually the Houthis. I would be interested to know if you fall in that camp, while (it would seem) not feeling the same way about Hamas, as that would do a better job of making my point than I could ever do on my own.
Beyond that, the Houthi / Saudi conflict is a lot less asymmetric, which I think plays a factor in people's response to it. The Houthis have more territorial control, weapons, agency. It's closer to a state-state war. Gaza is quite literally boxed in--air, sea and land.
If you're actually interested in the geopolitics of this I suggest you just spend some time tonight reading about these relationships and their history.
I do think there are particular aspects about US support for Israel, outside of humanitarian concerns, that lead to people being more critical about US involvement in the conflict.
Well, yes. If someone doesn't like Jews (and many many many people do not), that is the only "particular aspect" they need. The one good thing about antisemitism is that it's been around for so long that it's pretty easy to spot, even when the bigots try to swap some of the terminology around.
Yes it is a value judgement, but Iran's government is nothing if not oppressive and authoritarian. Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
I tend to believe the US is already past that point. It's just people are not really realizing that yet. Might take the next election for them to realize. That will be to late however.
I hope so much that this is wrong and the US turns out to be more resilient than it looks like from the outside though.
Pretty fuckin' big rock you've been living under for the last couple years.
Since you say "last couple years" I'm guessing you mean the articles, it's only in the past year that the government has become undemocratic and authoritarian through the destruction of its constitution, the abdication of checks and balances by Congress and the Supreme Court, and an authoritarian running unchecked and saying that the only thing controlling him is his own morality.
Or perhaps I'm being too pedantic, but if you're going to accuse me of living under a rock hell yes I'm going to be pedantic.
Isn't this "son of the late Shah" a guy from the US?
Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2026-01-10/ty-artic...
It's almost sure that both US and Israel are meddling with the current situation. That doesn't mean the situation isn't also started by and wanted by the population.
For a comparison point in the past, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the US were grass-roots movements started by local people with legitimate claims. At the same time, opponents of the US like USSR were involved in stirring these movements, because of course they would.
There isn't much you can infer about the legitimacy of a movement by learning that the movement is helped by foreign intelligence agencies.
The best way you can avoid this kind of confusion is 1) make a society in which malicious actors don't have many latent issues to stir, and 2) make it so your country's intelligence agencies aren't malicious actors. There isn't much else to do.
Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.
Sharing anything but the prompt you wrote is useless and arguably harmful.
Way worse outcomes.
> Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them
so under those circumstances anything goes to defeat the likes of Mossad and associated foreign entities doing their thing on Iranian soil.
[1] https://xcancel.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659
Iranians wouldn't be on the streets right now if the government had listened to its own water engineers over the years. But the new political culture in our government is more interested in braggadocio than achieving real change. I doubt that if the protesters succeed that Iran would become friendly to the West. At the same time there is probably a not too contrived worry among the Iranians that Netanyahu will seize the opportunity to attack if a political transition occurs. Bluster like this only hurts the cause.
Ordinarily I'd have faith the governments were smart enough to know better, but at this point I've lost hope.
On the other hand, if the bombing is indiscriminate, or has an unacceptable error rate (oopsie, those weren't IRGC command posts, they were kindergartens), then I would expect a rally-round-the-flag effect. If the sniper misses and hits the hostage, well... people are going to be unhappy.