Because wars are largely played out on TikTok these days, the Israeli warplanes hitting Iranian military targets were largely female pilots. At least the flight helmets covered their hair in Iranian airspace. It wasn’t a bad maneuver – designed to win back Western progressives howling for Netanyahu’s head, certainly now that Israel’s parliament then voted to ban UNRWA - the UN’s aid agency for Palestinians – from operating inside the country. True, the agency is riddled with Hamas operatives, but again, it’s the optics of the thing.
With the theatrics of this slow moving dumpster fire always a priority, the retaliation for Iran’s 1 October strike were military targets: Ballistic missile production sites and air defense systems near energy production facilities, but not on the facilities themselves.
For Tehran, this is a visceral fear: Iran has the fourth-largest oil reserves, and the second largest of natural gas – but extraction is notoriously inefficient because sanctions from pestering the rest of the planets makes getting modern equipment difficult. It’s policy of pestering its own people have created a brain-drain. Iran’s main terminal, Abadan, was once the world’s largest but was destroyed at the start of the badly named Whirlwind War with Iraq (1980-88) - and has only now reached pre-war production levels. For the record, this is still only about 60% of production during the fading days of the Shah, when Americans and Brits took care of extraction.
How will Iran respond? Allah only knows, but carefully is a good guess. Those production facilities are laid bare, and it took 40 years to get them up to speed last time. The regime has downplayed the damage and Netanyahu announced that the attack had met all of Israel’s objectives. The flip side is that while taking out Iran’s energy facilities would account for about 4% of global production, the first thing that Iran would do is block the Strait of Hormuz, which would bottle up about 20% of world supply.
Seeing a potential off-ramp, Egypt has taken the opportunity to kick-start cease-fire talks with a limited hostage/prisoner swap. And while you never can tell about with true believers< Iran may take the opportunity. There are some signals that it will: A bus terrorist attack hit Tel Aviv. To say that this is a good thing would be over selling it - but it does signal an attempt return to the grim status quo of simple assassinations and terrorist murders as opposed to state-on-state military strikes.
Politicos and the press are in a tizzy, but the markets have been more philosophical about it - after dropping 6.1% on Monday after not hitting Iranian oil facilities, prices rose 1% today. The market isn’t always right about geopolitics, but it’s got a but it’s got a better record than politicians and the media. So there is that.