Comment by worik
4 days ago
Time to pay the piper.
IMO Iran is the winner (least damaged) out of all this. Their proxies are smashed, but the core strength is still the same.
Israel has blown all its international credibility. The International Court of Justice verdict will be very interesting. If it goes against Israel then BDS will (should) become the policy for all countries.
Iran invested all its resources into proxies waging wars for it. Them being smashed means Iran is ruined on all those war investments. With economy in shambles and expansionist war failed, it's hardly "least damaged".
This is untrue on multiple levels. Iran invested most of its resources on its own military - the proxies are extremely cheap - and Iran's most powerful Iraqi proxies are fine, while the Houthis actually came out of this stronger.
Iran lost influence in Lebanon and Syria and these countries, for now at least, pose a much smaller threat to Israel. Perhaps we will even see normalizations in the nearer future.
Leaders in the middle east are also driven by their constituents, which still harbor a lot of resentment against Israel, but that will pass as well. I think this was the last chance of a significant insurgency to reorder powers in the middle east and Iran and its proxies lost a lot of influence.
Houthis have a strategic position and Yemen probably has one of the largest market for illegal weapons. But their capabilities are very limited and their raison d'être is a death cult with no future. At some point other Yemini forces will take charge.
For Israel it seems possible to strike through Iraq with some effort, and technically they are still at war after Iraq attacked Israel in . But that war is quite cold and there is some exchange at least with the Kurdish part of Iraq.
They aren't cheap, at that scale they required huge expenses. And the more they wanted to expand, they more expenses it meant. They overstretched in hopes of that paying off, and it all went crashing down.
The only upside for them now is that those expenses suddenly became unnecessary, but it's not going to stop them from trying to do it all over again.
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who's the strongest proxies? i thought it was Hezbollah, who are now in shambles
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Israel already violated multiple clear orders from the ICJ so I honestly don't see what mechanism would hold them accountable.
> Israel already violated multiple clear orders from the ICJ so I honestly don't see what mechanism would hold them accountable.
That is the point of BDS
After all it was scantions from the West that bought down the other apartheid regime in the 1990s
Iran has not escaped this war. Both the US and Israel have made strikes within the country
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/consequences-i... (from Nov) | https://www.understandingwar.org/publications?type%5B%5D=bac... (daily report history)
With other conflicts wrapping up, there are people expecting more attacks into Iran, especially by Israel. They are in a weakened state. Their missile attacks amounted to nothing. Much like Russia, they likely look better on paper than in practice. That being said, one nuke from them against Israel would be devastating, but also likely mean the end of the regime