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There’s an old saying from the hippie era: What if they threw a war and nobody came? There were other prominent variants on the saying, which is meant to evoke the anxiety of planning a party only to have no guests arrive. The Iranian regime has got to be feeling a bit like that right now. They planned a significant offensive against Israel, and the whole thing just fizzled.
After weeks of warnings from US intelligence agencies that something was coming soon, Iran finally made its bid to expand the conflict in Israel to a regional war, launching a massive barrage of drones and cruise missiles—only to see few of them make it through and not a single Israeli death. The ineffectual barrage is already being mocked back in Iran, where the regime is widely hated, in a video that compares it to throwing toothpicks at a giant.
Yet this really was intended as a major attack—and it would have been, if we had not prevented it. Let me give you the full rundown.
Consider the scale of the Iranian effort.
Iran launched waves of drones and missiles toward Israel on Saturday in retaliation for Israel’s attack on an Iranian site in Damascus, Syria, this month. A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said Iran fired over 300 ballistic missiles, UAVs, suicide drones and cruise missiles. The vast majority were intercepted outside of Israeli territory, according to the IDF….
Iranian missile and drone attacks were launched at Israel from positions in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, according to the Iranian state-run Tasnim News Agency. In a statement, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli barracks in the Golan Heights, an Israeli-occupied strip along the border with Syria, with a barrage of rockets after midnight local time.
There has been some debate over whether Iran really wants a war, or if they have just been stirring up chaos in an attempt to appear relevant, but without really wanting to escalate. I think it’s pretty clear that they do want a war, that they’ve been desperate to use the October 7 attack as the springboard to a wider regional conflict. It doesn’t matter that this is a huge risk and not in their rational interests. Dictatorships are known for acting irrationally, religious dictatorships particularly so, and this is the moment at which all of the world’s bad guys are very much inclined to throw the dice and see what they can get away with.
This attack settles the debate. Had it succeeded, it might have been another October 7 in the scale of the death and horror inflicted on Israeli civilians, and it would have necessitated a full-scale Israeli response.
But instead it was a dud.
Iran’s attack had been expected for days and, in the end, almost all of the missiles and drones were intercepted. An Israeli air base in the Negev desert sustained light damage and a 7-year-old girl was seriously wounded.
This is a spectacular failure for the Iranians and a huge achievement for us.
Star Wars
Check out a video of one of the intercepts. This is what the war looked like from the Israeli perspective—something happening way up there, practically in space.
The most interesting response to this was from Noah Smith, who offers a mea culpa of sorts from those, mostly on the center-left, who for years opposed investments in missile defense systems.
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