VDH: Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End?
Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.
Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.
Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shiite neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?
Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?
Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?
Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon — as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?
In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression — and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.
But where will all those leftist Americans on their New York Times “holidays in hell” tourist junket visit instead?
Related: Soviet-era tech and 1970s American jets: inside Iran’s ageing air defenses.
Iran’s air force is a particularly weak point in any potential conflict with Israel. Tehran is believed to only have a few dozen working strike aircraft, including Russian jets and US-made F-4s and F-5s that were acquired before the 1979 revolution.
[The International Institute for Strategic Studies] has reported that it has a squadron of nine F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, one squadron of Russian-made Sukhoi-24 jets, and some MiG-29s, F7 and F14 aircraft.
The Sukhoi-24 jets were first developed in the 1960s. Amir Vahedi, Iran’s air force commander, said this week they were in their “best state of preparedness” to counter any Israeli strikes.
Israel has hundreds of F-15, F-16 and F-35 jets, which all played a role in counter-mining Iranian drones.
Iran’s strength is believed to lie in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ stockpiles of ballistic and cruise missiles.
At least half of the missiles that Iran fired at the weekend were said to have failed before reaching Israel, raising doubts over the claimed ability of its domestically built air defenses.
No wonder the Iranian mullahs lust after owning the bomb: The Growing Biden Incentive to Go Nuclear. “Everyone who watched that 2011 operation understood that the US and EU would have never attacked Qaddafi if he had nukes. That includes Iran.”
And they could be very close to getting it: “Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s theoretical definition. That means Iran’s so-called ‘breakout time’ — the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb — is close to zero, likely a matter of weeks or days,” Reuters reported on Thursday.