No, nor have I said a ground invasion will happen. It's also an inherently ridiculous thing to say -- if I am wrong about highly complex geostrategic outcomes then i should never think about them again? By that logic, the entire US foreign policy establishment would likewise have to suspend its activities.

In any case, I'm talking about inferred goals, capacity, strategy. I'm constructing a viable theory of what their strategy would be if they achieved their aims.

The goals of israel are regime change and nuclear disarmament -- these cannot be achieved from the air. It might be that israel is content to lose on these objectives, and so be it.

I expected that most of my comments here would be heavily downvoted, and its somewhat suprising that they arent. Most people are operating from a profoundly heavily propagandized view of foreign policy, and of their own countries -- and whenever one raises thinking about these issues in ways which suspend this propaganda one gets a very angry reaction: everyone one is a nationalist, either midly or extermely, but a nationalist never the less. Asking people to thinking critically about their nation is tantamount to asking them to thinking critically about their mother.

Either way, I comment regardless for the few who are able to think clearly on these matters.

> The goals of israel are regime change and nuclear disarmament -- these cannot be achieved from the air. It might be that israel is content to lose on these objectives, and so be it.

This is key. The only way for this set of actions to go well is if there is regime change, otherwise the most likely outcome is that Iran's resolve to acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible has been dramatically solidified.

Like you though, I struggle to see any clear path for positive regime change to occur. The nearest attempt would be boots (but whose?) on the ground, but even that seems unlikely to work out well. Maybe there could be some sort of internal resistance, but I don't see how they could operate successfully while the country is under external attack.

My assumption with how things are at the moment is that the actions by Israel and the USA have all but guaranteed that Iran acquires a nuclear weapon in the next few decades, and so have dramatically increased the risk of Israel being attacked with one. One has to assume that radical Islamist terrorism in western countries will increase too.

> No, nor have I said a ground invasion will happen

Oof, OK, I suppose not, you only said "The [my emphasis] ground invasion hasn't started yet". There is some degree of ambiguity there. Forgive me for thinking you were saying one will happen.

> The goals of israel are regime change and nuclear disarmament -- these cannot be achieved from the air.

Ah! Is that a prediction you insist will happen? That there will be no regime change and no end to Iran's military nuclear programme without a ground invasion? Great! That's a testable hypothesis. Let's see.

> It's also an inherently ridiculous thing to say -- if I am wrong about highly complex geostrategic outcomes then i should never think about them again?

No, not at all (and I certainly didn't say "think", I said "speculate"). It's just a way of seeing if you put your money where your mouth is. If there is an incentive to someone predicting wrongly I'm more likely to take them seriously!