Conventional Wisdom

I referred to the conventional wisdom on the Iran war in yesterday's post. Later in the day, Iran announced that after several days' delay, Mojtaba Khamenei had been designated Supreme Leader, succeeding his father, something that had been generally expected. In yesterday's post, I quoted AI:

Experts and intelligence assessments as of March 2026 indicate that Iran’s political alignment and regime structure are likely to endure despite significant U.S. and Israeli military strikes. While these attacks have decapitated top leadership—including the confirmed death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on March 2—the state's foundational institutions were specifically designed to survive such losses.

. . . Analysts from the Brookings Institution suggest that deeply embedded networks like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Assembly of Experts provide a power structure that remains advantaged over any internal challengers.

We'll have to see how this shakes out, but the news of a new Supreme Leader isn't entirely good for the other side:

Mojtaba Khamenei has risen to the appointment of Iran Supreme Leader, as the country’s national television news service confirmed Monday, however it has since emerged the man following his father into the post has been wounded in an unspecified incident at a time and place unknown.

AP reports television news anchors referred to the mid-level Shiite cleric as “janbaz,” or wounded by the enemy, in the “Ramadan war,” which is how media in Iranian regime refers to the current conflict.

. . . The younger Khamenei has yet to be seen since the conflict began. Indeed he has barely been seen in his entire life.

Mojtaba Khamenei has never held government office, nor given public speeches or interviews, and only a limited number of photos and videos of him have ever been published.

It sounds like if he's stayed in the background all his life, and if he now has medical difficulties, he'll continue out of the public eye, especially given the Israeli promise to take him out. In any case, he appears to be the puppet of the Revolutionary Guards, who applied heavy pressure for his designation.

I quoted another piece of conventional wisdom below that one:

Academic experts, such as Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, warn that air campaigns historically fail to unseat regimes or change their fundamental political alignment, often leading instead to prolonged escalation.

But I asked the oracle, "Was aerial bombing a major factor in the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945?" It answered,

Yes, aerial bombing was a major factor in the defeat of both Germany and Japan, though its impact varied by theater and remains a subject of historical debate regarding its decisiveness compared to ground and naval forces.

. . . While German industrial production actually increased through 1944, the bombing eventually paralyzed the economy by targeting critical "bottlenecks" like oil refineries and transportation networks.

. . . The air campaign against Japan was more concentrated and, for many historians, more directly linked to the final surrender.

. . . Low-altitude firebombing, such as the Operation Meetinghouse raid on Tokyo, destroyed roughly 40% of Japan's urban areas and cut industrial output in half.

. . . The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that Japan would likely have surrendered by the end of 1945 even without the atomic bombs or a Soviet declaration of war.

On the other hand, the bombing of North Viet Nam was subject to intermittent pauses, which gave them opportunities to regroup and rebuild, severely limiting its effectiveness. But as long as we're talking about Robert Pape, he has a new piece in Foreign Affairs, Why Escalation Favors Iran:

[W]ithin hours, any hope that the precise decapitation strikes would limit the scope of the war was dashed. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones not only at Israel but also across the Gulf. Air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Missiles slammed into interceptors over Doha and Abu Dhabi. At Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar—the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command—personnel took shelter as interceptors streaked overhead.

. . . Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered retaliation, the flailing lashing out of a dying regime. Rather, they represent a strategy of horizontal escalation, a bid to transform the stakes of a conflict by widening its scope and extending its duration. Such a strategy allows a weaker combatant to alter the calculus of a more powerful foe.

But other analysts like Tom Nash, whom I cited Saturday, claim the indiscriminate retaliation against non-combatant states across the region had the effect of driving those states toward Israel and the US, especially as some players were looking for an excuse to justify just this move. Here's a remarkable op-ed in Al-Jazeera:

The Gulf states have spent years trying to broker peace between Iran and the West: Qatar brokered nuclear talks, Oman provided back-channel diplomacy, and Saudi Arabia maintained direct dialogue with Iran through 2024 and into 2025. Iran attacked them anyway. The idea that the Gulf states have a responsibility, a moral one, to protect Iran from the consequences of its actions because of good neighbourliness is now grotesque in context. Iran did not return good neighbourliness. Iran returned ballistic missiles.

. . . Targeting the territory of other sovereign Arab states in response to the policy decisions of the United States is neither necessary, since diplomatic and United Nations avenues are still available, nor proportional, since it imposes military consequences on states that are not a party to any conflict with Iran.

. . . The record of Iran’s compliance with IAEA regulations, including the enrichment of uranium to a purity level of 60 percent or more in 2023–2024, interference with inspections, the removal of monitoring cameras, and the overall violation of the non-proliferation regime, has undermined the credibility of the state significantly. A state that is itself a violator of the legal regime cannot claim the role of a law-abiding state seeking protection under the norms of the legal regime.

As I noted yesterday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian "issued a statement apologizing for attacks against neighboring countries and claiming that some attacks were carried out independently by regional commanders without directive due to loss of communication". However, the foreign ministry continues to insist that the attacks against non-combatant countries are legitimate acts of self-defense:

But this goes against the supposed advantages of Iran's "mosaic defense", another part of the conventional wisdom:

In anticipation of exactly the sort of missile attack that targets senior members of the Islamic Republic, plans had been put in place that creates a decentralized control of the military, according to military analysts.

If the leadership is killed, then cells of soldiers take direct control of the military materiel under their control and continue fighting without the need for orders coming down from a central command that no longer exists, Gulf News reported on March 2.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi claimed that Tehran can withstand sustained US-Israeli military pressure, able to defend the regime despite a successful “decapitation” hit. . . . He added that the bombings have "no impact" on Iran's ability to conduct war as its capacity to fight does not hinge on a single command centre, city, or leader. Decapitation doesn’t work if there is no one to decapitate.

But whether or not President Pezeshkian wants Iranian forces to stop attacking non-combatant Gulf states, the "mosaic strategy" puts the matter outside his control. This can hardly be to the country's overall advantage; it has no way to manage policy as conditions change; it's suicide or nothing.

But this question is increasingly moot: in another independent analysis of the war's progress, datareublican says,

As of Day 6, Adm. Brad Cooper (CENTCOM) confirmed Iranian missile attacks declined roughly 90 percent since strikes began [ISW, March 5, 2026]. Per joint intelligence assessment (IDF/CENTCOM briefing), approximately 75% of all launchers destroyed; 100–200 remain. The IRGC Aerospace Force — Iran’s primary instrument of long-range conventional power projection — has been catastrophically degraded in nine days. “Hundreds” of warheads destroyed (conventional missile warheads — Iran has no deployed nuclear warheads). Defense industrial base under systematic attack. This is not a setback. This is the functional end of Iran’s power projection capability.

There are other aspects of conventional wisdom that I won't cover here for the time being, such as the effect of closing the Strait of Hormuz on energy prices and the US economy. And I'm not yet claiming the conventional wisdom is wrong, just that there are reasons for skepticism that it's automatically right. But mainly, I just want to get it spelled out so we can check it later on.