Iran Screws Up & Gaza Death Toll

I saw a slice of life movie made in Iran, maybe back in the 90’s and I was shocked at the banal cruelty the people exhibited toward each other and their animals. I remember harsh and angry speech as a common characteristic. I thought if that’s true to life that’s a seriously screwed up culture.

It was just a movie, and I’ve never been to the Middle East, so I don’t know. I’ve heard some anécdota that corroborated the theme however.

If that portrayal and my perceptions gained carry some truth it would go a long ways toward explaining why the Arab world is leaving the Palestinians to be savagely slaughtered.

Iran blew its chance to do the right thing and bring the Zionist entity to its knees while helping to salvage whatever’s left of the Gaza killing fields.
Lastima.

In the last half of a day I’ve heard variously

-there was a ceasefire.
-no one agreed to the ceasefire
-they agreed to the ceasefire
-the ceasefire was broken by Israel and Iran disregarded it after
-there is a now a ceasefire
-nope that was false there isn’t a ceasefire
-Now there is a ceasefire

If Iran does/did decide to disengage and ceasefire what do we think the next attempt to destroy them will entail? Enough spins on the roulette table and regime change eventually occurs and if Iran is going to keep spinning…

It is beyond frustrating seeing how timid and indecisive the Iranian leadership can be, especially leaving their allies to get bent over without any assistance is just bizarre. I think the easy kicking over of Syria was one of the proximate causes of the Israeli’s attempting the same style regime-change operation on Iran – the Iranian’s should never have allowed Syria to fall as it did. But, having said that, are we sure that Iran actually does have the missile numbers to keep blasting away long term? Commenter PlutoniumKun made a comment on the NakedCapitalism thread that discussed possible Iranian missile stockpile numbers, and while I have no idea if he is accurate (and neither does he to be fair), I found the logic quite compelling. It would go a long way to explaining the declining launch numbers over time, and perhaps why they preferred a quicker exit to hostilities if it was available. I will reproduce part of his comment here: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06/us-attacks-iran-start-of-a-long-war.html#comment-4233690

Nobody, apart from Iranian insiders, knows the true numbers and capabilities of Irans missile forces. However, there is sufficient open source material to come to the following broad conclusions:

1. Up to around a decade ago, Iran was focused on its ‘near’ enemies – i.e. its immediate neighbours and those across the Gulf. For both technical and tactical reasons nearly all its missiles were of around 500km range. The strategic assumption is that its primary weapon against Israel was its proxy, Hizbollah, and their huge missile arsenal. It had a smaller program of much longer range missiles which seemed to be mostly as a negotiating tactic and as a launch back-up for a potential turn to nukes. In other words, if it decided to develop a bomb, it needed a platform. This is the Sejil missile (and possibly other variants). This is a very powerful missile, but there are no indications that they’ve built large numbers of them.

2. As the strategic situation changed, there was a renewed interest in longer range missile, both to cover all of KSA, plus Israel. They’ve built ranges of missiles, most notably the Emad and Ghadr-1. These are missile families, with a variety of capabilities depending on the guidance systems. Some are quite crude, with CEP’s of 100 metres or more, other seem to have very accurate, with terminal guidance allowing them to attack very precise targets. They also have hypersonic glide vehicles, which are a lot less useful than many think, but thats another topic. These missiles are for the most part very expensive to build, and the most advanced ones have only been in operation for a few years, so there has simply not been the time to develop large stockpiles (although there is a theoretical possibility that they may have matched more advanced guidance systems with older cheaper launch missiles).

3. They have also invested heavily in drones and cruise missiles, although in reality Israel is simply too far away for them to be a real threat, now that we know that the ‘intervening’ countries are not very happy with these flying over their airspace.

So this leads me to a number of conclusions. One is that while Iran has the capacity to strike Israel, it simply does not have the required stocks to do serious damage. 1000+km missiles were never its priority, and the effective ones they’ve developed are relatively recent designs, and very expensive to build.

Too many people on both sides seem very sure of what happened militarily. It is similar to the Ukraine War. I read some of the pro Russian sites and the mainstream Western sources and they often seem they are on separate planets and I am not talking about the issue of who is morally right, but simply about casualties and other purely military questions.

The naval war with Japan was something like this. In most battles both sides sincerely believed they had shot down more planes and sunk more ships than they really had. I remember there were some ships that were reported sunk three or four times.

Being “The Dog That Caught The Car” is a very difficult thing. Iran chased the car up until it could actually have caught it.

It is one of Russia’s great fears in invading Ukraine.