Iran Withstands Barrage of Attacks, Raising Doubts About America’s Target List

Thursday morning’s renewal of an air assault has yet to move the needle on a seeming wartime stalemate in which Tehran dictates the pace and America merely reacts. As President Trump promises to beat the Islamic Republic hard, questions are growing about the goal of military bombing campaigns in Iran. Following this week’s Iranian targeting of American personnel at bases in Jordan and two ships in Egypt, American assets in the region “successfully completed a heavy wave of strikes against Iran,” according to the U.S. Central Command. “The strikes aimed to further diminish threats posed by Iran and its proxies to American forces, commercial shipping, and neighboring Gulf countries.”Iranian press outlets report in a rare acknowledgement that three members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were killed Thursday morning at its base in Zanjan province. Centcom said it was one of a “dozen” guards centers targeted in southeast Iran. Targets included missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites, and maritime capabilities. The area near Hormuz has been targeted in past campaigns but attacks were halted to reach a hopeful deal with Tehran’s leadership. Iran’s IRGC, however, refuses to accept American demands for facilitating free navigation and ending Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. This week’s Iranian attacks on Jordan and Egypt violated the latest ceasefire agreement. Targeting the Hormuz area in the hope of dominating the strait is a Sisyphean task, notes the editor of the Long War Journal, Bill Roggio. Shipping can be stopped by a single drone, a small boat carrying sea mines, or even a light mortar shot from a hiding place on shore.“We bombed the Taliban for 20-plus years, and they still had capacity,” Mr. Roggio, tells The New York Sun. “The Iranian problem is far greater: It’s a state that’s been accumulating capacity for 47 years, and it can’t be fixed in days or a month or even five months, which is what we’ve been at it for.”What new Iranian targets can be struck, if at all, is reportedly highly debated inside the Trump administration. Centcom’s commander, Admiral Brad Cooper, has said recently that targets around Hormuz Strait have been mostly exhausted. “These targets are soft,” an Iran researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. “Iran is a huge country. Regime operatives and regular citizens hardly notice what happens in remote areas in the south. It’s time to hit the big cities — Tehran, Isfahan, and the like.”Admiral Cooper is proposing a campaign to last up to two-weeks, aimed at obliterating the ballistic missiles and launchers that the IRGC uses to attack American bases in the region, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Mr. Trump has said that up to 80 percent of those missiles have already been destroyed. Yet up to 3,000 missiles remain, according to estimates. Currently, American strikes are “very damaging” to the Iranian leadership, and they can lead to a regime collapse if sustained for months, Mr. Sabti says. Yet a monthslong bombing campaign might be problematic for America, as well as for Israel, as the two countries are in election years. Leaders, specifically military commanders, including the IRGC chief, Ahmad Vahidi, must be targeted too, Mr. Sabti says, adding “Hormuz is not in Hormuz. Hormuz is at Tehran.” So far, though, Washington has resisted targeting of regime leaders. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, is advising caution against a major widening of the campaign, according to the Journal. In internal debates he says that Iranian retaliation could deplete the American interceptor inventory. Bases in the region and beyond could become vulnerable to attacks, lacking missile defense batteries. At the same time, a takedown of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal could diminish the need for a large number interceptors to counter these missiles. Reports of missile defense shortages are being used as an “excuse” to limit the military campaign, scoff commentators pushing back on the claim.Israel, meanwhile, advocates regime change, arguing that no other method would resolve the challenges posed by the Islamic Republic. A military campaign is “of no use as long as this regime remains in power,” Israel’s energy minister, Eli Cohen, told Kan News Thursday.

Iran Withstands Barrage of Attacks, Raising Doubts About America’s Target List

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