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Well sure, war has consequences.
Consider that it might be Israel doing it and not the US. If Iran conducts a major missile/drone attack on Israel and does real damage then Israel has said they’re going to take the gloves off. I believe them.
I don’t think the US would attack non-mil infra unless Iran picked a fight with us directly and did some real damage.
Iran would be a failed state pretty quickly if its oil revenue dried up and Israel can destroy that infrastructure from the air. I’m not sure exactly how many strikes it would take to say eliminate half of Iran’s oil output for ~months+, but oil fields, refineries, and pipelines are easy targets that can’t really be hardened.
Of course, the more pressing threat for Israel is if they need to invade Lebanon to attack Hezbollah and its missile sites, in which case they’d be devoting the vast majority of their air power to that operation.
What would be the Israeli game plan for invading Lebanon, I’m genuinely curious?
Like Hezbollah is more than competent enough to assume they’ll take 40% of the country back after Israel leaves. They’ve survived Israeli occupation before. You’d have to get rid of the Shia population that provides their demographic base somehow, and I guess Syria and Iraq might be far enough away for comfort but you’ve gotta assume that Hezbollah will just set up shop again.
I’m not saying Israel won’t regard this as a future problem. But, well, they’re surely aware that a) Hezbollah is too entrenched in Lebanese society to get rid of without restructuring that society and b) lebanon’s population mostly hates them and so won’t cooperate in that endeavor.
Israel’s game plan in the event of war with Hezbollah is to attack as many facilities and kill as many leaders and combatants as they can from the air and then see if they can prop up anyone else in Lebanon who isn’t Hezbollah at that point. If they can’t, they’ll leave and the cycle will repeat itself.
But yes, the general reality that the Sunnis are deeply internally divided grifters, the Christians are all lazy kleptocrats with French passports who want to make their bag and retire to Paris / the South of France and the Shias are the only ones with the discipline and will to make a play for the actual country remains the case. Lebanon lurches from crisis to crisis, but as long as Hezbollah continues to be well-funded by Iranian oil money it has enough funds to buy large amounts of support (which is often more financial than ideological when it comes to many Lebanese, even Shiites).
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Well the main goal would be to wreck Hezbollah.
No idea how they would decide whether to occupy southern Lebanon again.
I’m guessing they wouldn’t opt for an occupation. Gaza is going to be enough of a problem.
But yeah, overall Israel knows it can’t take out Hezbollah the way it can Hamas.
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