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"We really decided to learn nothing from history."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/us/israel-us-iran-strategy-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.UFA.a3o3.RdQVqIImHfaJ&smid=nytcore-android-shareWhile President Trump and other top U.S. officials repeatedly boast that Iran’s air force is extinct and its navy sits at the bottom of the sea, analysts noted that the country was never expected to take on the United States in a direct confrontation using a conventional military.
Instead, it relies on asymmetrical warfare, tactics designed to extend the war indefinitely until, it hopes, the cost saps the will of the Trump administration and Israel...
In the Gulf, for example, the naval wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has long used smaller craft to lay mines and deploys speedboats to mount lightning attacks. On land, Iran dispersed its forces to avoid their being vanquished in one fell swoop...
Externally, drone and missile attacks strike targets that include military bases, oil infrastructure and airports in nearby Gulf countries not directly involved — all meant to stretch the battlefield as far as possible. “The main idea of their response is to expand the pain and inconvenience of this war for as many countries in the world as possible,” said Afshon Ostovar, the author of “Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East.”
...
The regime has long put its own welfare above that of the population, analysts noted. “If it survives, it can claim victory, no matter how much destruction the country suffers,” Saeid Golkar, a military expert and a political science professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, wrote in an online essay...
Wars intended to reshape the Middle East in recent history have instead taken ever more violent detours.
In August 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli minister of defense, predicted that by driving out the Palestine Liberation Organization, “the whole infrastructure of violence and revolution has been broken.”
Within months, a nascent Hezbollah dispatched suicide bombers against Israeli troops with devastating effect. Israeli forces have returned to Lebanon repeatedly in a conflict that ebbs and flows but never really ended. The latest incursion came this month after Hezbollah opened a second front in the war in support of Iran...
Mr. Milstein noted. “I really don’t like all these engineering ideas that we will redesign the Middle East and will change the hearts and minds of the people,” he said. “We really decided to learn nothing from history.”
Instead, it relies on asymmetrical warfare, tactics designed to extend the war indefinitely until, it hopes, the cost saps the will of the Trump administration and Israel...
In the Gulf, for example, the naval wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has long used smaller craft to lay mines and deploys speedboats to mount lightning attacks. On land, Iran dispersed its forces to avoid their being vanquished in one fell swoop...
Externally, drone and missile attacks strike targets that include military bases, oil infrastructure and airports in nearby Gulf countries not directly involved — all meant to stretch the battlefield as far as possible. “The main idea of their response is to expand the pain and inconvenience of this war for as many countries in the world as possible,” said Afshon Ostovar, the author of “Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East.”
...
The regime has long put its own welfare above that of the population, analysts noted. “If it survives, it can claim victory, no matter how much destruction the country suffers,” Saeid Golkar, a military expert and a political science professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, wrote in an online essay...
Wars intended to reshape the Middle East in recent history have instead taken ever more violent detours.
In August 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli minister of defense, predicted that by driving out the Palestine Liberation Organization, “the whole infrastructure of violence and revolution has been broken.”
Within months, a nascent Hezbollah dispatched suicide bombers against Israeli troops with devastating effect. Israeli forces have returned to Lebanon repeatedly in a conflict that ebbs and flows but never really ended. The latest incursion came this month after Hezbollah opened a second front in the war in support of Iran...
Mr. Milstein noted. “I really don’t like all these engineering ideas that we will redesign the Middle East and will change the hearts and minds of the people,” he said. “We really decided to learn nothing from history.”