Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds wrote on Substack about the Iran campaign:
The attacks on the Islamic Republic of Iran are going almost comically well. Where before Iranian leaders used to mock the “Great Satan” as a pitiful helpless giant, now most of them are dead. The ones left alive are, well, comically begging “don’t drone me, bro!” like Iranian President Mazoud Pezeshkian, hilariously pictured below.
During yesterday’s Intelligence Committee hearing, one of the Democratic senators referred to our Iran campaign as a “fiasco.” What on God’s green earth was he talking about?
War critics have been reduced to worrying that there will be no one left to make a peace deal with if we kill all the leaders. I think we’ll find someone.
What’s going on is summarized pretty well in this post from Sean King:
I am taking the liberty of reproducing that post, as Glenn did. King makes a number of salient points and offers a perspective much more optimistic than I have ventured:
The US’s and Israel’s strategy for regime change/reform in Iran is glaringly obvious and will eventually prove effective. Likely by mid to late April, Iran will be led by somebody amenable to US interests. Here’s how that will happen:
1. Quickly assassinate any prominent or semi-prominent regime official hostile to the US agenda, and continue doing so forever until a moderate one eventually takes power.
2. Destroy the regime’s ability to fund itself and pay its thugs by (a) taking and holding or disabling Kharg Island (through which 90% of Iran’s oil flows), destroying Iran’s other oil distribution structure (the remaining 10%), and (b) destroying the bank, including its backup servers, that the Republican Guard uses to pay its people.
3. Relentlessly target police checkpoints and police officers in general with drone attacks, making it difficult for the regime to control the movement of the Iranian people.
4. Use superior drones to down or disable the drones that Iran uses to surveil and suppress the populace.
5. Provide drone air cover to anti-regime protestors.
6. Ensure that regime officials cannot reliably use electronic communications for fear of being surveilled, or worse, geolocated.
7. Ensure that regime officials cannot gather in person to communicate and coordinate for fear of being killed en masse with precision guided bombs (this has already happened multiple times).
8 Restore Internet (via Starlink or otherwise) so that anti-regime folk can communicate and coordinate.
9. By these means and others make defection by rank and file regime members the only sane move.
10. Have the people and defectors take to the streets and overthrow their Islamic oppressors.
Last night was a test run for number 10. With US and Iranian air cover and support, and with police stations and checkpoints systematically destroyed, Iranians took to the streets en masse to celebrate the “Festival of Fire”, a holiday with Zoroastrian roots that is DISDAINED by the Islamist regime and normally brutally suppressed. By all accounts the festival celebrations were large and mostly unmolested. The regime was unable to stop them this time. The test run was successful.
Regime change/reform is coming. Soon. I’ve said all along that I expected it to happen within 60 days of the initial hostilities. That would be the end of April. But it may well happen before then.
Glenn thinks that Sean King is “basically right.” I fervently hope that they are correct.
