The Institute for the Study of War still estimates that Iran will mount an attack similar but larger than the April attack on Israel.
However, it notes that everything Iran does or doesn't do has a downside that puts it into a position it does not like.
Iranian leaders may decide that Iran cannot successfully design and execute a strike that would penetrate Israeli air defenses to establish deterrence, despite strong statements by its officials and media. A second failure to penetrate Israeli air defenses would not restore deterrence and would therefore be counterproductive. Such a failure would demonstrate that Iran has limited effective answers to Israeli attacks on its senior leaders and inside its territory. Iranian decisionmakers could calculate that the negative effects of another failed attempt to strike Israeli territory outweigh the internal and regional reputational damage Iran would experience from not attacking Israel after openly discussing the attack...Iranian leaders may additionally calculate that the risk of triggering a large-scale Israeli response is too high to justify conducting a coordinated large-scale missile and drone attack. Israeli military leaders’ public statements and back-channel messages from the United States have emphasized to both Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah that Israel would respond forcefully to an attack that kills Israeli civilians or causes significant damage.
Iran wants to establish deterrence, which means it must succeed in directly getting some missiles to hit sensitive Israeli military targets.
If it doesn't attack, especially after ten days of threats, it looks weak; if it attacks and it doesn't succeed like in April, it looks weak; if it attacks only through proxies, it looks weak. All of those things hurt its honor but little else.
On the other hand, if it doesn't calibrate its attack and kills civilians or causes more damage than Israel is willing to absorb, that forces Israel to respond and attack Iran's infrastructure. That doesn't just make Iran appear weak - it actually weakens Iran.
And those aren't Iran's only constraints. It wants to coordinate the attack with Hezbollah, but Hezbollah has different goals and honor-based imperatives. If anything, it has the same honor constraints as Iran but more so: Israel isn't actively attacking Iranian leaders or Iranian targets daily as it is with Hezbollah. But Hezbollah also must be somewhat sensitive to dragging all of Lebanon into a war that the people it pretends to be defending most definitely do not want.
There is another factor I have not seen anyone else mention. Iran pretends to be following international law by informing the UN that it plans to attack Israel in self-defense. However, self defense has a temporal component: to make that claim the counterattack has to happen in a reasonable timeframe afterwards under most interpretations of international law. You can't wait a year and then claim you had to attack then for self-defense reasons. Every day Iran waits, its pretense for claiming "self-defense" gets even more ludicrous.
Because honor is an important factor, Iran feels compelled to do something. Perhaps it will target an Israeli diplomat elsewhere in the world and claim equivalence to Haniyeh's assassination. Maybe it will smuggle a bomb to explode outside Israeli defense headquarters via a West Bank terrorist (or time such an attack to coincide with a rocket barrage.)
Iran is trying to thread a needle that may have an eye too small to fit.
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| IRGC head Major General Hossein Salami at a press conference today |
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