Iran has struck civilian targets in roughly a dozen countries in response to the U.S.-Israeli military campaign - most of which had nothing to do with the attack, a leading defense analyst has reported in The Atlantic, as "Hvylya" reports.
Eliot A. Cohen, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, wrote that the Islamic Republic "behaves with utter disregard for its citizens' lives, having massacred them in the thousands, and thinks it sound strategy to lash out at civilian targets" across countries that played no role in the conflict. The attacks demonstrate a pattern of escalation that has carried the war well beyond its original zone.
The retaliatory strikes build on decades of Iranian aggression. Cohen catalogued a record stretching from the sponsorship of Hamas and Hezbollah to the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, assassination plots against Trump, and the stabbing of author Salman Rushdie - all pointing to a regime he described as fundamentally hostile to the United States and bent on Israel's destruction.
"The history of the Islamic Republic is drenched in blood," Cohen wrote, noting attacks on Jewish communities, direct strikes on American personnel, and a pattern of state-sponsored terror spanning four decades.
Iran has also developed a large arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones and "was bent on expanding that arsenal to the point that no country could mount adequate defenses against it." Cohen warned that if the regime were left unchecked, a nuclear-armed Israel might not wait passively for attacks it could not fend off, and countries such as Saudi Arabia could pursue their own nuclear programs. The current wave of retaliatory strikes, he argued, only reinforces why "the Iran problem" cannot simply be ignored.
Also read: Iran's Secret Weapon: Friedman Describes the "Mosaic Force" the US Failed to Anticipate.