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Source: https://www.ynetnews.com/opinions-analysis/article/hypcytp1fx
How to Break Iran's Stalling Game
(Ynet News) Ron Ben-Yishai - Since the days of founder Ruhollah Khomeini, the regime in Tehran has viewed the restoration of Shiite Islam to what it sees as its rightful place in the Muslim world as a sacred mission. Its ambition is to export the revolution. The U.S. is demanding that Iran give up the main tool for carrying out that mission: its nuclear program, which is intended both to protect Iran and to provide a security umbrella for exporting the revolution and for Shiite proxies acting on its behalf across the Middle East. Beyond that, in the Shiite ethos, surrender is humiliation, which is worse than death. Experts and security officials in the U.S. and Israel believe the regime will be forced to soften its position only if it faces a combined campaign of siege, economic sanctions, and destructive kinetic strikes on sensitive infrastructure such as electricity and oil. But that assumption is not necessarily justified. The regime's senior figures act to a large extent out of a sense of religious mission, and are not particularly sensitive to the suffering or economic distress of the people. Moreover, the regime has built powerful defense mechanisms with the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia, which have already shown they have no problem killing thousands of civilians to suppress protests and unrest. In addition, the Iranian regime believes it can withstand several more months of the American economic siege, while believing that Trump will be unable to withstand opposition to war in the U.S., rising fuel and food prices, and the need to justify a global energy crisis. The Iranians also believe that they can inflict heavy casualties and material damage on the Americans, Arab oil producers and Israel using the missiles and drones they can still operate. This leads the Iranians to think that time is working in their favor. In light of this, instead of a short and powerful strike on essential infrastructure, what may be required is an intensive and broad joint military operation by the U.S. and Israel lasting one to two weeks across almost all of Iran, while avoiding harm to civilians as much as possible. The goal would be to expand the damage to what remains of Iran's launch and production sites for missiles and drones. The feeling that Iran is exposed and suffering losses without the ability to respond is what led Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988 to accept the UN ceasefire terms, which effectively amounted to surrender in the war against Iraq.