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Bombing Iran [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-19
Air Campaigns don’t Win Wars on their Own: Why Israel will largely Fail in Iran is an article written on June 18 by history professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. He begins:
Israel’s militarily useless, entirely unprovoked and wholly illegal air war on Iran differs significantly from its previous wars in the region, which involved ground invasions with armor and infantry.
Cole points out that Israel defeated Egypt in 1956 and again in 1967 with “a combination of air force and armor and infantry.” In Iran, he says:
Israel has no land forces or armor in Iran, though it may have some small intelligence or special ops units on the ground. Its war on Iran is solely an air war. No war has ever been won entirely from the air.
Cole adds that Israel cannot overthrow the Iranian government “through serial assassinations.” If Iranian generals are killed, “colonels will be promoted.”
Killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the clerical Leader of Iran, would simply lead the 88-member Assembly of Experts — the Iranian equivalent of the Vatican’s College of Cardinals — to elect a new August Leader. In addition, there is a popularly elected president and parliament.
Iran is a large country with 90 million people. Cole says it has more people than Germany, and its geographical size “equals that of Germany, France and Spain combined.” Cole records that when George W. Bush invaded Iraq, it was a country of 25 million people and was much smaller geographically than Iran. He says:
Unless an enemy army takes Tehran, as the US military took Baghdad in 2003, this four-branch government cannot be gotten rid of by a foreign power. Bombing the capital won’t do the trick.
Cole adds:
the US bombed Vietnam for a decade and still lost the war, despite having 500,000 troops on the ground. The US bombed Afghanistan for twenty years and still lost the war despite at some points having 100,000 troops on the ground. Air power alone would have produced even less impressive results.
Cole says if Trump joins Israel in its bombing campaign, “it is difficult to see what military victories that might bring.”
The Israeli bombing campaign has probably set back Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program a few weeks, but since the country has a great deal of engineering and science expertise and has uranium mines, these bombing campaigns cannot remove Iran’s nuclear know-how.
That delay seems to Cole “the main advantage that might accrue to Israel from the war.”
All previous seekers of a nuclear bomb that were serious about the acquisition — India, Pakistan, North Korea — were able to construct one fairly quickly. If Iran wanted a bomb, it would have one by now. What Tehran wants is for its nuclear capability to deter any attempted invasion.
Cole adds that “Iran could probably make a bomb in only a few years if its scientists and engineers were ordered to undertake this task” but he doesn’t think Iran is pursuing a bomb at the moment.
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