news

To start us off, Simplicius.

Now, there's a somewhat common trope, particularly among pro-Russia and pro-Resistance commentators, of the "allowed strike"; that is, a military strike that both sides know is about to happen and mutually agree to happening for some reason (usually to save face or allow some diplomatic objective). Unfortunately for somebody like me, who thinks conspiracies along these lines are a form of cope and are usually conveniently unable to be disproved because neither side will admit to it, there are actually recent confirmed cases of this happening, like an Iranian strike on a US facility after they assassinated Soleimani that allowed Iran to save face, or a 2017 Tomahawk strike on the Syrian Shayrat base that just so happened to miss all the important targets and deal little damage.

You know where I'm going with this - Simplicius posits that the Fordow strike was allowed to occur by the Iranians in order to provide Trump with a way to appease neoconservatives but also exit from a budding forever war. I personally don't think this is the case, but I can't say it's certainly untrue (again, because they do actually sometimes happen). The evidence he suggests:

• Some sources say that Trump informed Iran that he was about to strike Fordow and that the strikes are intended as a "one-off"
• Iran didn't even attempt to engage with the B2 force. It's not even as if they tried to hit it and missed, even the US doesn't say that they bravely battled Iranian fighter jets to reach Fordow - Iran did not do anything at all despite having time to prepare and knowing what the US would strike a week in advance. Yemen, with much, much less air defense than Iran even in its current state, posed a more significant threat to B2 bombing raids than Iran did during this bombing raid. There is still basically no evidence that Israel is able to fly directly over Iranian territory due to Iranian air defense, and yet the US could reach central Iran entirely unmolested.
• It was a relatively small strike, not consisting of enough bunker busters to be sure to destroy the facility.
• Images of the holes left over show that the bunker busters were not stacked up, which many experts expected would have to be the case to breach the facility - essentially a daisy-chain of destruction down to Fordow.
• In the days prior, Iran used a bunch of flatbed trucks to seemingly stack dirt into the entrance tunnels, presumably to provide a degree of reinforcement to stop them caving in if they were struck. This feels a little strange to do in any case, but protecting the entrances to a facility that they claim is evacuated and that the US is claiming they will soon obliterate is weird; why would you need to re-enter it if there's nothing left?

Again, I disagree with the above. I think it's more likely that the US did actually try and destroy Fordow but simply failed, which could have been for a number of reasons, including that they didn't put much real effort into it because they were perhaps aware that Iran had already evacuated the facility of anything important. There are a limited number of these massive bunker busters, after all. No point wasting a dozen of them on empty facilities.

But anyway, regardless of what happened at Fordow, there's not a lot else to report. The same attritional dynamics are at play here and the ball is in Iran's court, so we'll have to see what they do; perhaps they are waiting for the Iranian visit to Moscow to conclude before making any significant moves.