Nuking Iran certainly isn’t beyond the range of possibilities in the Middle East. It may be the only way the U.S. and Israel can get the regime change they want. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:
If Iran resumes enrichment while rejecting IAEA inspections, then Trump will target Iran’s underground facilities with a low-yield B61-11 nuclear weapon
You can usually tell which side won a war by simply observing ‘what happens’ after the hostilities end. Following the announcement of a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, millions of Iranians poured onto the streets of Tehran, chanting patriotic songs and waving flags in a spontaneous display of jubilation. In contrast, there were no festivities or celebrations in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem where the mood was noticeably more somber and gloomy. What this indicates is that most people believe that Iran won the war.
We are not ignoring the fact that Iran’s threshold for success in the conflict was much lower than Israel’s. As the aggressor, Israel needed to achieve its strategic goals to claim victory, while Iran only needed to withstand the assault, which it managed to accomplish with great ease. Regardless of whether this benchmark is equitable, the result is evident: for 12 days, Iran held its own, matching Israel’s aggression blow-for-blow, eventually forcing Israel to seek a ceasefire. In short, Iran won.
Israel made a number of miscalculations in its approach to Iran which severely undermined its chances of success. It’s two biggest mistakes, were its overconfidence in its own multilayered air defense systems (Note– Arrow 2, Arrow 3, David’s Sling, Iron Dome and THAAD) which proved to be woefully inadequate in defending the country’s strategic assets. Israeli war planners also grossly undervalued Iran’s impressive ballistic missile capability which exceeds Israel’s dated arsenal and ranks among the best in the world. In last week’s article, we provided a long list of the key military, intelligence, industrial and energy facilities that were obliterated by Iran’s precision guided ballistic missiles and which Israel’s ineffective air defense system failed to intercept. We now believe that Israel’s military experts must have realized –no more than a week into the fighting– that they were gravely over-matched and needed to find a diplomatic off-ramp pronto. But –for whatever reason– they stubbornly persisted with their anemic offensive for nearly a week hoping for a miracle. When the miracle failed to arrive, Netanyahu goaded Trump into bombing Iran’s nuclear sites in order to establish a pretext for ending the conflict. In short, Israel had been looking for a way to end the hostilities long before the fighting formally ended, which means they knew their strategic aims would not be achieved.
