I have a number of questions, Claire, that you may or may not know the answers to but some of your loyal readers might. Northwestern Iran, particularly the provinces of East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan, and Ardabil, is home to a significant ethnic Azeri population, maybe as many 20 million. Azeris make up a substantial portion of Iran’s total population. These regions share cultural and linguistic ties with Azerbaijan, and some Azeri nationalist movements have historically advocated for greater autonomy or even unification with Azerbaijan.
We know that Israel has cordial relations with Azerbaijan and that these relations were enhanced by the crucial role played by Israel in helping Azerbaijan retake Nagorno-Karabakh during the recent war with Armenia. What I'm wondering is whether Azerbaijan might be providing airbases to Israel which would dramatically cut down on the flight time needed by the Israeli Air Force.
I'm also wondering whether its possible that Azerbaijan might use a victory by Israel in its war with Iran to annex the Azeri regions of Iran. If it did, there's reason to believe that Azeri Iranians would jump at the chance for either independence or to be absorbed into Azerbaijan.
If you or your readers know anything about this it would be great to hear your thoughts.
In the Southeastern part of Iran, the population consists of ethnic Balochs who are overwhelmingly Sunni. The population is impoverished and restive and clashes with Iranian government forces have not been uncommon. The Balochs who live in Pakistan have not been particularly enamored of their national government either. If Israel is victorious, and in the event that the Mullahs are driven from power, how likely is it that the Baloch’s will seek independence from Iran? If either the Azeris or the Baloch’s seek independence, how is the West, particularly the Europeans likely to react. How are the Russians and the Chinese likely to react? We already can guess how Trump will react; he surely couldn't care less one way or the other.
I believe the Pakistani Baloch were part of a Russian plan to seize power in the Gulf, after the early 1970s Arab oil embargo revealed western economic vulnerability. They supported the communists in Iran, who were the other half of the revolution alongside Khomeini's Islamists. They installed a communist government in Afghanistan. And Pakistan faced a Baloch insurgency in the second half of the 1970s (Salman Rushdie wrote about it in one of his novels), in which Russia was presumably supporting the Baloch communists. Balochistan has a port and also borders Afghanistan, so "Afghanistan plus independent Balochistan" was a Plan B for Russia to reach the Gulf, while Communist Iran was Plan A.
(I probably got most of this from reading long ago a book by Selig Harrison, who was an American regional specialist. I may have some details wrong.)
As we know, the USA instead backed the Islamists, first in Iran (during the revolution), then in the Afghan war of the 1980s. Pakistani Balochistan I believe was part of the supply chain for the Afghan mujahideen. (Whether this is related to the fact that the masterminds of the attacks on the World Trade Center, "Ramzi Yousef" and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are Baloch, is left as an exercise for the reader.)
What's the situation now, decades later? China runs the Balochistan port, Gwadar. India is probably the main sponsor of Baloch separatism these days, at least in Pakistan. India also aspires to a role in Chabahar, the main port in *Iranian* Balochistan, and a centerpiece of Indian plans to develop their own trade network to rival China's; but India has disappointed and exasperated Iran by going slow whenever America threatens sanctions against India for working with Iran.
Most Iranian Azeris are Shias, and there is a fair amount of intermarriage with Persians. There doesn’t seem to be an ethnic tension - perhaps because Persia has been multilingual for a long time, and modern Iran carried that with it as ‘normal’. They also seem chilled with their Armenians. Less so with Sunni Baloch and somewhat Sunni Kurds. Ethnicity is not a universal default for most important identity.
Great article Claire. I think I can basically tell you where the m^{1/3} is coming from. When a meteorite hits the ground, the diameter of the crater tends to be proportional to that of the meteorite (this is fairly intuitive I think, and it should apply to the depth as well). Since volume (and therefore mass) is proportional to the cube of diameter, this should mean that diameter (and therefore depth) should be proportional to the *cube root* of volume (and therefore mass).
Btw FYI the m^{1/3} quantity shows up all over the place, particularly when dealing with random processes involving materials (e.g. percolation). This is a link to a paper I wrote a while back on random walks on trees, and in this case as well the m^{1/3} term emerges.
It was on its way to publication before I bailed on academia, so I never bothered to see it all the way through. So perhaps if you still can’t find the essay I sent you in your emails, you can publish this instead! 😛
Its not just Iranian aspirations being pulverized, its the rancid foreign policy legacy of Barack Obama being pulverized. Obama fervently dreamed of an asendant Iran to counterbalance the Sunni Arab States (especially Saudi Arabia) and Israel.
I do think it's charming you went on a deep dive into advanced ballistics physics, Claire, and I salute your omnivore curiosity. That said, in all three of your recent pieces there appears to be a notable reluctance to critically judge the wisdom of the Netanyahu cabinet doubling down, yet again, on regional escalation, though this latest bulletin is less triumphalist. Still: no comments on domestic Israeli considerations, Netanyahu narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote, or the widely spread notion his administration will only survive fifteen minutes after ceasing hostilities. The Magician has succeeded in putting off that day of personal reckoning again. The public, in turn, has grown accustomed to the idea that the invincible legions of the IDF will fix all the nation's problems forever. Will it, though? Even with all the super heavy ordnance in the world?
The question to which I keep returning is this: Assuming that the Iranians can build a nuclear bomb, can they build one that’s deliverable by the means they have available? That is, can they produce a nuclear weapon in the form of a missile warhead or an aerial bomb? My guess—that’s all it is—perhaps a bomb but maybe not a missile warhead, at least not right away.
That aside, I think that while Israel cannot destroy Iran’s key nuclear facilities, it can do enough damage to supporting infrastructure to screw it up. Target the regime, I say, keep bumping off the leadership. Smash up as many military assets as possible. Demonstrate to the Iranian people that their overlords cannot defend the country. I’ve recently been rereading B.H. Liddell Hart, and here, I think, is a situation in which his strategy of the indirect approach would work.
The top buyer of Iranian oil was China, but until a few years ago India wasn’t far behind, and South Korea and Japan bought quite a bit. Wouldn’t be surprised if India was still quietly getting some. It will be interesting to see who objects to the strikes on Iran’s oil and gas.
If the US will not help, maybe Israel should make an explicit promise of support for an uprising in Iran to end the Islamic Republic and they could include repairing the damage and getting Iran's oil flowing at full capacity part of the deal in exchange for permission to completely dismantle all nuclear facilities in the country post-war.
Israel has achieved all of this without any US air or navy support. Let that sink in - we heard for so long from so many ‘experts’ that what’s been done so far is impossible. The distance is too great. Iran is bristling with Russian and homegrown air defense systems. Iran’s cyber capabilities defend them from real intelligence penetration. All those predictions have been groupthink that missed the point.
There are several other options for how to deal with Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Israel has entered similar facilities to Fordow dug under Syrian mountains with special forces, ones built by Iran for Syria. With air superiority such an action becomes possible.
I’m also not sure why the delivery of a tactical nuke into Fordow hasn’t been mentioned as an option.
To be fair, until recently, most of that was true. You can't reasonably expect experts (or anyone else) to be able to predict the future so perfectly that they anticipate a chain of events that begins with October 7, then proceeds through the pager operation *and* the collapse of the Syrian regime. For Operation Rising Lion to be possible, Hezbollah has to be taken out and Syria neutralized, first. If there's anyone who predicted all of that, he's a legend on the order of Nosferatu. (I suppose if your assumption is, "God is on Israel's side and he'll make everything work out," you might come up with that, but that's religion, not responsible political forecasting.)
This is true, but that entire sequence of events was achieved by Israel after Iran and its proxies attacked Israel, and all done without accepting the calls for restraint from the US and EU. One by one the biggest Islamist terror armies, all armed, funded and trained by Iran and Qatar, have been crushed by Israel alone, no thanks to the backstabbing losers in Europe, and despite Biden’s progressives seething at Israel’s aggression in defense of itself.
I remember “military experts” the NYT and WaPo consulted with claiming that Israel can’t successfully fight Hamas in Gaza. Clowns.
That said--who said Iran’s cyber capabilities defended them from real intelligence penetration? That person's just an idiot. There was no reason to think that.
Dire is subjective, no? Socialists have no problem with Israel being destroyed by Islamists. Progressives have no problem with a nuclear weapons armed Iran. Israelis found Iran’s rush to a bomb pretty dire, especially in a war started 21 months ago by Iran and its proxies. Let’s stop ignoring that reality.
I don't think you'd need a nuke. A big enough conventional munition would work. That actually sounds like a plausible idea to me--it might be feasible, given that Israel seems to be able to place its equipment just about everywhere else in Iran. (Man, I hope one day we get to read about how they've done all of this.)
I have a number of questions, Claire, that you may or may not know the answers to but some of your loyal readers might. Northwestern Iran, particularly the provinces of East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan, and Ardabil, is home to a significant ethnic Azeri population, maybe as many 20 million. Azeris make up a substantial portion of Iran’s total population. These regions share cultural and linguistic ties with Azerbaijan, and some Azeri nationalist movements have historically advocated for greater autonomy or even unification with Azerbaijan.
We know that Israel has cordial relations with Azerbaijan and that these relations were enhanced by the crucial role played by Israel in helping Azerbaijan retake Nagorno-Karabakh during the recent war with Armenia. What I'm wondering is whether Azerbaijan might be providing airbases to Israel which would dramatically cut down on the flight time needed by the Israeli Air Force.
I'm also wondering whether its possible that Azerbaijan might use a victory by Israel in its war with Iran to annex the Azeri regions of Iran. If it did, there's reason to believe that Azeri Iranians would jump at the chance for either independence or to be absorbed into Azerbaijan.
If you or your readers know anything about this it would be great to hear your thoughts.
Khamenei and Pezeshkian are both Azeri or part Azeri
Thanks. I didn't know that.
In the Southeastern part of Iran, the population consists of ethnic Balochs who are overwhelmingly Sunni. The population is impoverished and restive and clashes with Iranian government forces have not been uncommon. The Balochs who live in Pakistan have not been particularly enamored of their national government either. If Israel is victorious, and in the event that the Mullahs are driven from power, how likely is it that the Baloch’s will seek independence from Iran? If either the Azeris or the Baloch’s seek independence, how is the West, particularly the Europeans likely to react. How are the Russians and the Chinese likely to react? We already can guess how Trump will react; he surely couldn't care less one way or the other.
I believe the Pakistani Baloch were part of a Russian plan to seize power in the Gulf, after the early 1970s Arab oil embargo revealed western economic vulnerability. They supported the communists in Iran, who were the other half of the revolution alongside Khomeini's Islamists. They installed a communist government in Afghanistan. And Pakistan faced a Baloch insurgency in the second half of the 1970s (Salman Rushdie wrote about it in one of his novels), in which Russia was presumably supporting the Baloch communists. Balochistan has a port and also borders Afghanistan, so "Afghanistan plus independent Balochistan" was a Plan B for Russia to reach the Gulf, while Communist Iran was Plan A.
(I probably got most of this from reading long ago a book by Selig Harrison, who was an American regional specialist. I may have some details wrong.)
As we know, the USA instead backed the Islamists, first in Iran (during the revolution), then in the Afghan war of the 1980s. Pakistani Balochistan I believe was part of the supply chain for the Afghan mujahideen. (Whether this is related to the fact that the masterminds of the attacks on the World Trade Center, "Ramzi Yousef" and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are Baloch, is left as an exercise for the reader.)
What's the situation now, decades later? China runs the Balochistan port, Gwadar. India is probably the main sponsor of Baloch separatism these days, at least in Pakistan. India also aspires to a role in Chabahar, the main port in *Iranian* Balochistan, and a centerpiece of Indian plans to develop their own trade network to rival China's; but India has disappointed and exasperated Iran by going slow whenever America threatens sanctions against India for working with Iran.
Most Iranian Azeris are Shias, and there is a fair amount of intermarriage with Persians. There doesn’t seem to be an ethnic tension - perhaps because Persia has been multilingual for a long time, and modern Iran carried that with it as ‘normal’. They also seem chilled with their Armenians. Less so with Sunni Baloch and somewhat Sunni Kurds. Ethnicity is not a universal default for most important identity.
Thanks very much.
Great article Claire. I think I can basically tell you where the m^{1/3} is coming from. When a meteorite hits the ground, the diameter of the crater tends to be proportional to that of the meteorite (this is fairly intuitive I think, and it should apply to the depth as well). Since volume (and therefore mass) is proportional to the cube of diameter, this should mean that diameter (and therefore depth) should be proportional to the *cube root* of volume (and therefore mass).
Btw FYI the m^{1/3} quantity shows up all over the place, particularly when dealing with random processes involving materials (e.g. percolation). This is a link to a paper I wrote a while back on random walks on trees, and in this case as well the m^{1/3} term emerges.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07375
It was on its way to publication before I bailed on academia, so I never bothered to see it all the way through. So perhaps if you still can’t find the essay I sent you in your emails, you can publish this instead! 😛
Its not just Iranian aspirations being pulverized, its the rancid foreign policy legacy of Barack Obama being pulverized. Obama fervently dreamed of an asendant Iran to counterbalance the Sunni Arab States (especially Saudi Arabia) and Israel.
How's that working out?
I do think it's charming you went on a deep dive into advanced ballistics physics, Claire, and I salute your omnivore curiosity. That said, in all three of your recent pieces there appears to be a notable reluctance to critically judge the wisdom of the Netanyahu cabinet doubling down, yet again, on regional escalation, though this latest bulletin is less triumphalist. Still: no comments on domestic Israeli considerations, Netanyahu narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote, or the widely spread notion his administration will only survive fifteen minutes after ceasing hostilities. The Magician has succeeded in putting off that day of personal reckoning again. The public, in turn, has grown accustomed to the idea that the invincible legions of the IDF will fix all the nation's problems forever. Will it, though? Even with all the super heavy ordnance in the world?
What time is the Zoom tomorrow???
Glad to reading you again, Claire.
The question to which I keep returning is this: Assuming that the Iranians can build a nuclear bomb, can they build one that’s deliverable by the means they have available? That is, can they produce a nuclear weapon in the form of a missile warhead or an aerial bomb? My guess—that’s all it is—perhaps a bomb but maybe not a missile warhead, at least not right away.
That aside, I think that while Israel cannot destroy Iran’s key nuclear facilities, it can do enough damage to supporting infrastructure to screw it up. Target the regime, I say, keep bumping off the leadership. Smash up as many military assets as possible. Demonstrate to the Iranian people that their overlords cannot defend the country. I’ve recently been rereading B.H. Liddell Hart, and here, I think, is a situation in which his strategy of the indirect approach would work.
The top buyer of Iranian oil was China, but until a few years ago India wasn’t far behind, and South Korea and Japan bought quite a bit. Wouldn’t be surprised if India was still quietly getting some. It will be interesting to see who objects to the strikes on Iran’s oil and gas.
If the US will not help, maybe Israel should make an explicit promise of support for an uprising in Iran to end the Islamic Republic and they could include repairing the damage and getting Iran's oil flowing at full capacity part of the deal in exchange for permission to completely dismantle all nuclear facilities in the country post-war.
Israel has achieved all of this without any US air or navy support. Let that sink in - we heard for so long from so many ‘experts’ that what’s been done so far is impossible. The distance is too great. Iran is bristling with Russian and homegrown air defense systems. Iran’s cyber capabilities defend them from real intelligence penetration. All those predictions have been groupthink that missed the point.
There are several other options for how to deal with Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Israel has entered similar facilities to Fordow dug under Syrian mountains with special forces, ones built by Iran for Syria. With air superiority such an action becomes possible.
I’m also not sure why the delivery of a tactical nuke into Fordow hasn’t been mentioned as an option.
Andrew Fox went into quite a bit of detail about how Fordow can be taken out by commandos
https://substack.com/@mrandrewfox/note/c-126076743
To be fair, until recently, most of that was true. You can't reasonably expect experts (or anyone else) to be able to predict the future so perfectly that they anticipate a chain of events that begins with October 7, then proceeds through the pager operation *and* the collapse of the Syrian regime. For Operation Rising Lion to be possible, Hezbollah has to be taken out and Syria neutralized, first. If there's anyone who predicted all of that, he's a legend on the order of Nosferatu. (I suppose if your assumption is, "God is on Israel's side and he'll make everything work out," you might come up with that, but that's religion, not responsible political forecasting.)
This is true, but that entire sequence of events was achieved by Israel after Iran and its proxies attacked Israel, and all done without accepting the calls for restraint from the US and EU. One by one the biggest Islamist terror armies, all armed, funded and trained by Iran and Qatar, have been crushed by Israel alone, no thanks to the backstabbing losers in Europe, and despite Biden’s progressives seething at Israel’s aggression in defense of itself.
I remember “military experts” the NYT and WaPo consulted with claiming that Israel can’t successfully fight Hamas in Gaza. Clowns.
That said--who said Iran’s cyber capabilities defended them from real intelligence penetration? That person's just an idiot. There was no reason to think that.
It is not an option that any rational person would recommend, except as a dire last resort.
Dire is subjective, no? Socialists have no problem with Israel being destroyed by Islamists. Progressives have no problem with a nuclear weapons armed Iran. Israelis found Iran’s rush to a bomb pretty dire, especially in a war started 21 months ago by Iran and its proxies. Let’s stop ignoring that reality.
I don't think you'd need a nuke. A big enough conventional munition would work. That actually sounds like a plausible idea to me--it might be feasible, given that Israel seems to be able to place its equipment just about everywhere else in Iran. (Man, I hope one day we get to read about how they've done all of this.)
Nothing like operating in a country where 70% of citizens despise their totalitarian regime.
I can’t wait for more and more mobile launchers to be eliminated so the ballistic missile barrages keep shrinking.
They're going to run out of missiles, too.
The Houthis are already down to one every few days to still puff their chests, the idiotic, illiterate goat herders that they are.