if iranian misleers responded to actual situation instead of their imagined apocalypse scenario, iran’s diplomatic position would be much better. planning like this removes lots of flexibility and reeks of hubris. they have probably assumed at time of writing that plan that brits will join americans in bombing campaign, which they didn’t, so striking cyprus is a blunder, because if they didn’t do that, brits wouldn’t send a ship to eastern med, which allowed american carrier to go to red sea. brits now are unlikely to pressure americans against this campaign, as well as french, turks, azeris and all of gulf states because all of them or their assets were bombed

if you only have missiles and fuel that you can carry, then you’re not prepared for a long war. if your TELs are plinked from air one by one because air defense was plinked day before, you’re not prepared for a long war. attrition goes against you if multimillion dollar ballistic missile gets deleted by 40k SDB. extremely charitably this is short term solution meant to make it look like everything works fine. it took ~week for iranians to recover and get new orders, this is not sustainable

it’s not new either. elements of this thinking appear in nuclear war planning as “spasm” response, which is uncoordinated, final response of low level elements in case of top brass removal (it’s all conventional so far of course, nevertheless war like this is probably planned to be existential for iran). apparently first iteration didn’t work, because tenure of that general who introduced it ended in 2019, and 2025 war didn’t include running around like a headless chicken and causing diplomatic incidents left and right. they have burned down so much goodwill for nothing, it’s lowkey impressive

who is the cause of that “momentous change in the region”, i wonder