| “Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia” But on a more serious non-political note, what is the end game here? It's not hard to see a future with a barren and destroyed landscape of Middle Eastern energy infrastructure, where neither the Gulf states nor Iran can reliably produce and export their energy due to continual risk. The US can never fully defang Iran, unless it happens internally. And from history, we know that aerial bombing campaigns typically don't reinforce the civilian will for revolution. So now we have a pariah state with a decapitated leadership structure, an array of Gulf states who cannot reliably defend their energy assets, and no will for a global detente because of the thousands of entangled interests that sit in the Gulf region. Either this festers, or escalates, but no party seems to be willing to step down and accept a loss. |
1) It's the current Iranian state has always been at war. They are at war with "the little Satan" (Israel) and "the Big Satan" (US). I know this sounds like a joke but they're absolutely 100% serious.
Serious enough to organize massacres ("terrorism") on unrelated individuals, like the Argentina bombing in the beginning and the Hezbollah massacres in Syria just last year.
And yes, there was a time of military cooperation between Iran and Israel (just after the beginning. Israel was instrumental and helped Iran avoid getting conquered by Iraq/Saddam Hussein and got intelligence on the Iraqi nuclear program in return). This has not changed anything for the ayatollahs.
And btw: the Soviet Union has had a much similar experience. They helped the mullahs get to power, helped defend against Iraq, and got an enemy in return, because the mullahs ... well presumably they saw what was happening in Afghanistan.
2) Blocking of the strait of Hormuz by Iran did not start when the current war started. Iran has always created problems for ships' passage through the strait. It has obviously been 10x'ed as a result of the recent aggression, but it's not like they left it alone before.