Iran's supreme leader has been replaced by his own son - described as "a wounded, mediocre cleric still in hiding" - as the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign devastates the country's armed forces with no visible end in sight, "Hvylya" reports, citing analysis published in The Atlantic.
Eliot A. Cohen, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, noted that after two weeks of bombing a country "larger than Britain, France, and Germany combined," fundamental questions remain unanswered. "We do not really know what is going on inside Iran," he wrote, "and we cannot tell what the long-term consequences are of the devastation of Iran's armed forces."
The leadership transition compounds the uncertainty. The new supreme leader, the wounded son of his predecessor, has yet to emerge publicly. Cohen flagged the replacement alongside two other unknowns - the destruction of Iran's military capacity and the regime's "wanton attacks" against neighboring countries - as variables whose long-term impact remains impossible to predict.
Meanwhile, Iran has responded to the military campaign by lashing out at civilian targets in a dozen countries, "very few of which had anything to do with the attack launched by the United States and Israel," Cohen wrote. The regime "behaves with utter disregard for its citizens' lives, having massacred them in the thousands," and considers it sound strategy to escalate far beyond the original conflict zone.
"We do not know how this war will end, and it is fatuous to think that we would," Cohen concluded. He cautioned that wars never end the way those who engage in them expect - pointing to Woodrow Wilson's miscalculation about World War I, George H. W. Bush's mistaken belief that the Gulf War would topple Saddam Hussein, and the chaos that followed Obama's bombing of Libya in 2011.
Also read: Friedman: US Destroyed Iran's Government but Missed the Real Power Behind It.