Iran is next on the chopping block and US neocons have been drooling at an excuse for a long time.

"my brother in mohammed" might work better

I don't really think this is the right way to view this.

There simply aren't enough air-to-surface missiles in the entire Western arsenal to defeat Iran. They would have to run bombing missions. The F-16 combat radius fully loaded is not enough to run bombing missions from Israel without mid-air refueling. Iran might not have the ability to shoot down an F-16 easily, but it does probably have the capability to shoot down the IDF's tankers.

The issue with conducting an IDF bombing mission against Iran is that it requires the IDF to fly through someone's airspace. Iran might not have S-400s, but Russia does have S-400s in Syria. Should the choose to, they could move them out of Latakia and into a position that would make flying through Syria a bad choice.

That leaves the IDF flying through at least Jordanian airspace, which brings us to the real threat that Iran has. Anyone who let's the IDF operate on the ground or in their airspace is immediately putting a target on their back. Iran might not have an air force capable of making Jordan pay for letting the IDF use their airspace, but what it does have is a bunch of rockets and ballistic missile they can use to launch a missile barrage at it. That also applies even more so to any of the Gulf states/Azerbaijan that would let the US or the IDF run bombing missions from one of their airbases. Iran has more than enough fire power to destroy the oil production of the GCC and the Azeris, bringing global economy (and the Israeli economy and war machine in the case of the Azeris and the BTC pipeline) to a screeching halt in the process. What happens to the UAE when they can't produce/refine and foreigners are too afraid to go spend money in Dubai? What happens to KSA when their refineries are blown up and NATO is too busy to repel an Ansarallah invasion?

That leaves you with US aircraft carriers as the option with the least amount of blowback on the West's comprador states. I feel like this sub has heard enough about the potential weaknesses of those vis-a-vis the Millennium Challenge and Iran's preparations to deal with the US Navy through the US of fast attack torpedo and missile boats.

I've talked before about how there are options between sitting on their hands and total war, and Iran needs to start engaging in some of those things. This is why. The US and it's allies, to some extent or another, are afraid of this war really exploding, but they know that Iran is afraid of it, too. They have betting (and so far correctly) that they play chicken with Iran, leveraging its fear of regional war to get them to do what the US/Israel wants, be that coordinate "retaliations" with the people they are supposed to be retaliating against, or holding off on retaliating against Israel entirely with promises they have no intention of following through on. Iran has to show the West that it is not afraid to climb the ladder of escalation, and to drag the rest of the region into chaos with it.

Great post again, and I'd like to add that pezeshkian is probably still naive enough to believe that the west won't really hit Iran.

He probably just said that stuff about being lied to by the west to save his ass bc he knows Iranians are probably feeling some strong buyer's remorse rn.

Gullible neolib thinks everyone around him is as dumb as he is.

Would be very funny if he dies by 🚁 tho