Eh, I don't know. Both sides have been doing the proportionate-response Safety Dance for a while. This time around it feels different. Benny's been aching to go hard after the Iranian nuke program for years, but there were always cooler heads in the room to talk him down. Somebody tell me who the cooler heads are today. The moderate voices in his cabinet have departed for one reason or another over the last two years over the Hamas fiasco, and our crew over at State and Defense isn't exactly the A-Team these days. Our ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee, ffs.
Meanwhile Iran has its own domestic problems. There's been serious domestic unrest and strikes for months. Especially after the hits they've taken in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, the absolute last thing the regime can do is afford to look weak in front of the populace and like it can't defend the country itself against the Zionist OccupiersTM. They've been playing up the nuke and missile programs to the country for the last twenty years as absolutely essential to Iran's survival, a symbol of its sovereignty, and that it was worth all the economic sacrifice and sanctions and hardships...not going to go well if they just sit back and let the IDF dismantle it now. I read some Arash-in-the-Street quote in an AP article today along the lines of, Our choice is either we fire our missiles at Israel, or surrender, and then they're just going to make us surrender our missiles anyway.
The White House will probably panic and start calling for a ceasefire once the markets really start to tank and oil prices shoot up - either the market will do it, or OPEC will - but then what? It looks like Netanyahu calls off the existential war of Israel's survival whenever Washington says so, and how's that going to play in the Knesset? The Israeli messaging this time around has been hard-line: when we're done, Iran will not have a nuke program anymore, full stop. Not "degraded," or "rolled back," but does not exist. So tell me how you back off of that with anything less.
The lid has been kept on all of this for years because there were always enough high-level decision makers who understood there was nothing to be gained by one side forcing the other's hand too far. This time, they're trying to play this game with bumper-sticker politics and pol-mil theory out of a fucking Tom Clancy novel.
In the quiet words of Gorgeous George: “This will get messy.”
