The New Yorker:

The regime in Tehran knows it likely can’t win the war, but it can certainly globalize the pain of the conflict—even if it’s ultimately at its own expense.

By Ishaan Tharoor

Days after Israel and the United States launched a bombing campaign that decimated the upper echelons of Iran’s leadership—killing the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and more than forty top officials, according to the Israeli military—the regime in Tehran has shown little sign of breaking. Instead, Iran has been launching waves of drones and missiles across the Middle East, in an escalation that has plunged the whole region into war. Iran-linked strikes hit U.S. positions in various Gulf countries, and even reached a British air base in Cyprus. nato was pulled into the action, on Wednesday, when it shot down a ballistic missile that was headed toward Turkey.

The Iranian regime had vowed retribution after Khamenei’s death. “You have crossed our red line and must pay the price,” Iran’s speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, told the U.S. and Israel, in a televised address. “We will deliver such devastating blows that you yourselves will be driven to beg.” But it’s Iran’s neighbors that have been feeling the brunt of the pain so far. The attacks have elicited a rare response from the militaries of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia: Qatar said it downed at least two Iranian fighter jets, and Emirati authorities said they have intercepted hundreds of Iranian drones and ballistic missiles. Officials in these countries insist that their inventory of defense munitions can cope with the Iranian onslaught, but there are fears that as the conflict drags on, stockpiles could run low. The missile math may not be in their favor: it costs far less for Iran to launch a cheap drone than it does for the U.S. and its regional partners to shoot it out of the sky. “A war of attrition that exhausts missile defense inventories is the most beneficial outcome for Tehran,” the Soufan Center, a global intelligence consultancy, noted in a recent analysis. “Iran knows this is a war it cannot ‘win’ militarily, but the regime in Tehran may believe they can survive it.”

Go to link