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Comment by enlightenedfool | Hacker News Reader

Iran just needed to survive. There is no expectation for it to win against the nuclear super powers. It's a wonder it survived even for this long.

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There is almost no example where tactical bombing ever achieved a strategic victory - without real boots on the ground. (Even the atomic bombs in Japan may not have worked if Russia had not also invaded the same week.) Remote bombings historically only strengthen resolve.

Bombing Iran into surrendering was never a realistic outcome.

Controlling whole country after that is even bigger question. Someone living there and being bombed could make them think that you are ready for lot of pain for lot of years to come. You only need enough drones every year or every other year.

It got much more than that - they blockaded off the entire Persian Gulf. They are a few shots away from removing the East-West Pipeline. Their proxy in Yemen had already demonstrated that they can block off the Bab al-Mandab Strait - even a replacement US aircraft carrier is going around Africa right now just because the threat exists. This is a proper clusterfuck if you understand the logic of global freedom of navigation, as enforced by the (clearly declining) superpower. No wonder the leader of Kuomintang went to Beijing to talk things out with Xi Jinping.

The leader of the KMT going to Beijing shouldn’t be read in too much. They haven’t been in power for a long time and their whole support for “one china” is why they remain politically unpopular in Taiwan.

Houthis are not an Iranian proxy, they have autonomous strategic decisions. They are/were funded by Iran to be a pain for the Saudi. The Saoudi published articles about it. People there know more about the local situation than western pundits.

This is different, but does it relate to the aircraft carrier taking the long route?

The revolutionary guard probably view it as a win for them. No more clerics or civil bureaucracy to argue with now they are fully in charge. They don't need their navy or airforce to assert even more control over the civilian population. Bombing them further will probably be about as successful as it was with the North Vietnamese (another chain of tactical successes while failing strategically).

There was regime change, just not in the direction anyone else wanted.

It's worse than that, they used to be a police branch, they now basically replaced the army as well. In a way, that makes the Iranian regime way less resilient in the long term though.

To use a WWII metaphor, it's as if we killed Hitler in 1934 and instead of the Night of the Long Knives, the Sturmabteilung are now running the whole country.

Except it may be even worse than that. While you might expect some infighting among SA factions, the Revolutionary Guard is a distributed force that's ideologically united by both a common religion and a common cause.

No wonder at all. They took 500,000 casualties in the Iraq war, including from chemical weapons, and survived to fight the next one.

90 million people, and fairly well educated and industrious at that. Iran is not some tribesmen at low development in Afghanistan, they would actually be a solidly developing country on par with China if they weren’t heavily sanctioned and held back by the clerics and revolutionary guard.

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