Iran's deep investment in asymmetric warfare is paying serious dividends. You wouldn't expect a nation that's being bombed day and night, essentially at will, to still hold so many cards. Not only is the US completely incapable of strong-arming the straight open, but the rate of missile and drone attacks out of Iran and its proxies has been accelerating the last few days, as has the rate of successful hits.

My Iranian ex colleague shares very interesting opinion. They trained during his army time to blow everything in the region up. So if things escalate badly the oil and gas importing countries will stay with a fraction of needed oil and gas for years. There is no backup infrastructure anywhere in the world. It will take years to rebuild the infrastructure. It will destroy world’s economy better than nukes.

Since 1979, every US president has known that the US can send a couple of aircraft carriers and bomb the shit out of Iran.

And yet none did. Because they listened to their security chiefs and advisors who would tell them, Iran is a highly complex multiethnic geographically complex country. If you can contain it with diplomacy, that’s preferable.

When listening to “experts” becomes taboo, there will be consequences.

The inhabitants of the Iranian plateau have been the subject of the ire of the military superpower of their era quite a few times. Alexander the Great conquered them and set their capital and their sacred books on fire and yet a mere 70 years later his Hellenic dynasty was gone. They were conquered by the Arabs and were forced to give up their religion but somehow, unlike Egypt and Syria/Lebanon and many other ancient places, these guys somehow kept their language and distinct culture intact. They were decimated (maybe even worse ) by Genghis Khan and followed quickly by Tamerlane and yet, it was their Turco-Mongol rulers who ended up adopting their language and culture.

The inhabitants of this land have deep memory of knowing how to suffer, to endure and to survive. It wasn’t that long ago that from Constantinople to New Delhi, the language of the Imperial Court was Persian.