Brief Notes on the Nasty Mess

Gonna be on local radio to talk about this in a few minutes so briefly…

1. Bibi does not appear to be worried about expanding the conflict, in that he’s taking no steps whatsoever to de-escalate with any of the other players (Hezbollah, Houthis, Iran, Hamas). Seems to me that more war is his political survival strategy.
2. Iran and Hezbollah seem likely to respond in some fashion but it’s still not obvious that either wants all out war with Israel at this point.
3. One brake on escalation may be the fact that Israel just demonstrated that it can kill anyone anywhere at anytime it likes… Yahya Sinwar excepted. I am as a general rule extremely reluctant to grant the “peace through demonstration that you’re willing to kill anyone” theory of deterrence, but I imagine that the Tehran attack is quite unsettling on a personal level for Iran’s senior leadership.
4. There was a lot of debate after the Haniyeh hit about how it was conducted, none of which looked good for Iran. Either a) Iranian air defenses were so helpless that they couldn’t even detect a precision airstrike, or b) Iranian security services are shot through with Israeli agents. Looks like it was B, which on balance is probably worse.
5. There’s not going to be a ceasefire before the election in November. Or at least it looks incredibly unlikely. I don’t know how Bibi thinks this might affect the Presidential election, but given that the Republican coalition is unified on this conflict and the Democratic coalition is not unified, I don’t think the effects are going to be good for our side.

Some links:

• Bomb hidden two months ago. That’s some serious Sandbagger shit.
• Beirut hit was an airstrike.
• I wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that the penetration of Iranian intel tells us something very useful about the stability of the Iranian state.
• Israel confirms another Hamas leader killed in Gaza.