Hurricanes and typhoons cause great destruction to coastal areas all over the world every year. However, though scientist can not currently predict their paths from day to day, they can predict them from hour to hour. Their expected damage to infrastructure and monetary damages can also be predicted upfront and tracked, with all of these predictive models tracked and improved with each event. People can plainly see the eye of the storm both from space and ground zero.
Military actions against countries with autocratic regimes carry too many variables to predict changes and weakness within that country with any certainty at all. Control over the local information sources facilitates misinformation as officials release different information internally than they do externally. Officials sneak out of the country to escape actions against them. Backroom meetings are held that may never be known about. Plans are made that may never be implemented. Also, the fog of war clouds everything.
By the time U.S. forces found Adolf Hitler, he and his family were already dead. Every time a regime falls, there comes a tipping point—a time when the iron fist of control loosens and the government’s ability to govern is lost. The local population may or may not notice when it happens, but exterior forces acting against the country almost always miss the tipping point and only find out about it later. Right after the fall, other factions that have sat in the shadows see their chance to rise. Often, the criminal elements start moving first, seeking to commit theft and other kinds of harm to innocents. Then, political and cultural factions activate their long-hidden plans to take over. Still, this disruption happens secretly until after entropy finds itself unrestrained and boils over.
Iran now sits at Israel’s mercy. The Israeli Air Force possesses complete air superiority over all of Western Iran and all of the capital city of Teran, and continues to expand their control over the airspace while bombing targets of choice with complete impunity. Non-stealth aircraft, and even refueling tankers, fly over Iran’s airspace unhindered. The Israeli government enjoys almost complete target category selection freedom and can do to Iran what they did to Gaza any time they choose. If there is something Israel does not want Iran to have, they can hit it. Their Masad agents had already penetrated deep enough within the country to know up-to-the-minute locations on key players within the Iranian government, military, and nuclear weapons research teams so that Israeli bombs and missiles could fly in and kill them. They’d also pre-positioned drones and remote-controlled anti-tank missile launchers to take out Iran’s radar and surface-to-air missiles in the early stages of the campaign.
For my entire adult life, ever since the Khomeini theocracy took power over Iran in the winter and spring of 1979, its government has used its petroleum revenues to spread violence and terror not only against Israel, but all over the world. Now, the influence of that government is in decline, and it has been put on the ropes. While I’d love to see the end of this backward, violent, and repressive regime, it would be naive for any of us to think that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny would replace it. As bad as it is, it has moments of pragmatism that others in that region of the world would lack. Some Shites there would call for the accession of a Mahdi, an apocalyptic figure that preempts the world's end. Another possible scenario would be a hellacious anarchy in Iran, as individual factional and cultural warlords fight over control of the country.
We must learn from past mistakes and try not to push the Iranian government past its tipping point, which would cause the Iranian people immeasurable suffering and possibly destabilize neighboring nations with an influx of refugees. The Iranian government must have time and opportunity to change its policies, and maybe even pass control to another (hopefully slightly more reasonable) faction, before total collapse occurs.