Israel Strikes . . . .

Everywhere

In the past few weeks, we’ve had one major development after another on what for want of a better phrase, I’m going to call the Global War Front, since it includes actual and potential warfare in the Middle East, Central Europe, and Asia.

But in this post I’ll restrict myself to a flurry of recent developments in the Iranian war: the IDF strike on the Houthi port of Al-Hadadyah, the IDF hits on the top leadership, and the resulting quandary this has created for Tehran.

Although these events are noted by the major media, their significance is minimized or unexplained. Mostly the emphasis is that this or that event could be/might be/may lead to “an all-out war,” as one headline expressed it.

There’s never a clue as to how this might happen, but through repetition it becomes worrisome even to the most cynical observer. And everyone else can be forgiven for being on the verge of panic.

The Strike Against Yemen

The Western coalition has been intercepting Houthi air and sea attacks against Red Sea shipping for some time. As I pointed out earlier, in my judgment those haven’t been successful. As one perceptive expert put it more recently, they’ve engaged in “perfunctory air strikes” with “minor results.”

But the IDF attack on the Houthi port of Al-Hudaydah was different. I should add both a linguistic and a geographical note here. Since the name is being transliterated, it appears in some places as Hodeida, and in others as Hudaida. But if the subject is Yemen’s port on the Red Sea and the name has a leading H, it’s the same port.

The geography is important, because Yemen only has this one port on the Red Sea, and it’s the only port controlled by the Houthi. The Houthi are blocked on the land side by Saudi Arabia and the actual government of Yemen. So the port is basically the only way Iran can ship them armaments and whatever else they need for support, like fuel.

Although the IDF strike was provoked by the Houthi drone that in some way managed to finds it wave to Tel Aviv, it still came as a double surprise. Given the distance involved (around 1,700 kilometers) everyone assumed that the Houthi were beyond the range of IDF aircraft, and as I have explained several time in previous posts, conventionally tipped ballistic missiles simply don’t have the explosive payload that aircraft can carry. The explosive payload of one ordinary missile (ballistic or cruise) is only a fraction of what even a WW2 medium bomber carried.

In fact, although we still use the old fighter/bomber differentiation, Contemporary “fighter” planes (F-16, F-35) can carry somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of the bomb payload of the medium bombers of the Second World War, and the configuration of the payload is such that they can much more damage, simply because their targeting I much more accurate.

The problem is range. Even the standard medium bomber of WW2 (e.g., the B-24) would have had trouble covering the 1,700 kilometers from Israel to Yemen, and there’s no way contemporary fighters could even get there without a good deal of in-flight refueling.

So the Houthi assumed, reasonably enough, that they could keep on firing ballistic missiles and sending off drones with impunity, because the coalition would never make them pay for their actions.

Although all along Iran and its minions have grossly underestimated Israel’s military capabilities, in this instance the error wasn’t just wishful thinking.

So the IDF attack on the port was an enormous surprise. Two surprises, in fact, since Iran had equipped the Houthi wit a decent air defense system. But first notice the Houthi had of the strike was when objects started blowing up: mostly fuel fuel storage tanks. However, the strike also basically destroyed the port’s facilities for unloading, including such vital pieces of equipment such as cranes.

So the Houthi are basically out of business. They have some missiles and drones left they can fire off (and they already have).

Not surprisingly, Houthi spokesmen denied the damage, said they would continue the fight. However, there are reports that the results of the attack have triggered a violent widespread reaction against the Houthi in the part of Yemen they control. The mainstream media is either unaware of that, or not bothering to report it, but it’s significant.

The Escalation of the War Against Hezbollah

The immediate cause of this escalation was the deaths of a dozen or so children as the result of an Iranian missile Hezbollah fired. Now one thing we’ve learned—or should have learned, as a result of the Ukrainian war, is that the various types of missiles being used, whether genuine Russian objects or Iranian and North Korean copies, aren’t all that accurate. So there’s no reason to suppose the soccer field was deliberately targeted.

On the other hand, if you keep on firing missiles of all kinds randomly into someone else’s country, eventually you’re going to kill some civilians and they’ll retaliate.

And I’m not sure the massacre was the real cause (although it was certainly justification enough), because earlier the IDF had spotted a Hezbollah drone either targeting or surveilling Israel’s gas extraction platforms in the eastern Mediterranean. That had never happened before, suggested Hezbollah was seeking to expand the war.

Israel’s retaliation has already started, with aerial strikes all over Lebanon and heavy artillery barrages across the border. If you‘ll recall, we went through this same charade with Rafah: everyone was warning Israel that an IDF offensive into the border city would cross some sort of line (or something), and IDF tanks were already there.

But this round of strikes didn’t just degrade Hexbollah’s offensive capabilities. A strike eliminated Hezbollah’s top commander, Fuad Shukar, who was one of the men heavily involved in the 1983 explosion that killed nearly 250 American marines.

There are two points of interest here. Shukar was in Beirut, and judging from the photographs of the aftermath, right in the middle of the city (technically in the southern suburbs). It’s not just that the decapitation is at least as significant as the earlier July 2020 hit that took out Sulemani, it’s the implications, perhaps the most important being that if Israel gets serious, no one is safe.

At the same time, Israel confirmed the death of Muhammad Deif, the other senior Hamas commander in Gaza, who’d been hit by an earlier strike. So that means Sinwar is the only senior military commander left.

There are credible reports that a third strike, in Damascus, took out Ami Ali Hajizadeh, the Iranian general in the IRGC in charge of what’s euphemistically called its aerospace operation, i.e., missiles. But there’s not only no confirmation, but hardly even a mention.

Then, the top political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyah, got hit, even though he was in a supposedly heavily guarded compound in Tehran. There was some initial confusion about how this had happened, with early reports claiming it was another missile strike, and later reports saying it was caused by a bomb placed under his bed.

Since Israel hasn’t formally claimed responsibility, we don't really know. But as far as the leadership in Tehran goes, either alternative is bad news. Either they have to admit that the IDF can take out a target in Tehran more or less like they did Beirut, or that their regime has lousy security—and a lot of internal resistance.

Most people jumped to the second option owing to western news media. On the other hand, someone in Hamas who’s in a position to know (he claimed he was there), said flatly it was a missile.

In all of these cases, the message Israel is sending was pretty obvious: no one is safe.

So I’ll say it again. In dealing with criminal gangs, you take out the leaders.

It’s easy to tell these are major blows to Iran, simply by looking at the outrage they’ve generated among its numerous minions and sympathizers, and Iran’s “supreme leader,” the Ayatollah Khamenei, immediately called for an all out attack on Israel. So there’s a lot of panic.

Thus far, the only serious response is been that Tehran and its minions are having a meeting to decide what to do.

So a few words about threat analysis are in order.

Threats

In evaluating threats, three factors have to be considered: the level of specificity of the threat, the previous behavior of the entity or person making the threat, and the capability of executing it. The theory is simple but the details are the opposite, because not only is our knowledge almost always incomplete, but the evidence invariably supports multiple, or even, opposing conclusions.

Finally, threats are made by human beings, and their behavior can be not just hard to predict, but reveal fundamental mistakes, as we saw with Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine.

So although threat analysis is boring and tedious, it’s necessary, since there’s clearly a tendency in humanity towards panic. Being a certifiably old guy, I experienced that during the Cold War.

Now for a very long time, Iran and its minions in the Middle East have been saying they aim to destroy both Israel and the United States. The threat isn’t specific, but it reveals an attitude, and it should have been treated accordingly.

That it wasn’t. Instead, there were all sorts of overtures and negotiations, which, however well intentioned, have clearly not worked. But I sketched that out in a a late March of 204 post (“The War Against the Jews”), so I’ll get to the last part: the extent to which the threat can be accomplished.

I’ve previously explained Iran’s fundamental weakness: not having much of an air force, and lacking the resources to create one, they’ve had to rely on missiles and drones. So when Khamenei calls for an all-out attack on Israel, the question of how this threat can be accomplished has to be considered.

Tehran has already mounted one “all out attack” on Israel, launching hundreds of drones and missiles on 13 April 2024. I wrote about that in its immediate aftermath (“Iran Jumps the Shark”), so this is just a reminder: that was an abysmal failure, and the IDF response was obviously intended to convey the message that if pushed, the IDF could hit Iran pretty much at will.

It’s possible that Tehran believes that a coordinated attack involving both Iran and Hezbollah could overload Israel’s air defense systems, do serious damage.

But I would argue that Khamenei simply doesn’t understand the techincal details of modern warfare. He’s 85 years old, his education consisted of studying the Koran, and his experiences have been almost exclusively in the hermetically sealed world of the Shia theocracy.

And since a great many supposed experts in the west are having difficulties grasping how the application of new technology has transformed warfare, I don’t see any reason why we should expect him to have enough of an understanding to realize that when the Israelis say anyone who attacks them will pay a heavy price, they have the means to accomplish that.

For that matter, as I’ve observed about Vladimir Putin, his minions may not be giving him all the bad news. There are other possibilities, all pointing to a lack of understanding of the situation. None of them are good.

The least bad is that as a politician, he’s accustomed to making public statements designed to intimidate, without having any intention of acting on them.

The bottom line is this. I don’t believe that Tehran really understands Israel’s capabilities, even though they've repeatedly demonstrated them. This blindness is reciprocated by the even more absurd belief in the Western powers that they can de-escalate the situation (any situation) through “negotiations.”

In the conventional sense, negotiations are impossible when the explicit and repeated aim of one party is the destruction of the other. That leads to a fair question, since given how I’ve stated the problem, it seems that negotiations are impossible.

But they’re not. You just have to see the process differently. For the curious, I would suggest studying the Corleone family.

But at this point (three PM on Saturday 3 August in Tel Aviv) we’ll simply have to wait and see.