Over three hundred projectiles were lobbed at Israel from Iran and its sycophants. A Bedouin girl was seriously injured and an air force base was slightly damaged. The Iranians are claiming victory.
I remember Desert Storm. Thirty-nine Scud missiles were fired at Israel by Saddam’s forces. One person was directly killed by the impact of a Scud missile. This result stood in contrast to the Iran-Iraq War, where the average death toll from a Scud was 500. There was even an academic paper that tried to understand the extraordinary disparity. The general view was that Scuds were a joke. One that fell south of Beer Sheva even had concrete in the place of explosives in its warhead. People groused that Saddam was out of stock when the reality was that this particular missile was directed towards the nuclear facility in Dimona, with the goal of smashing the reactor and causing a nuclear spill.
People wrote off the Scuds until one fell in Saudi Arabia near the end of the war and killed 27 members of an Army Reserve unit. At that point, people began to realize the killing potential of these big missiles. That they had not killed many beforehand was the anomaly, not the rule.
I was reminded of the Gulf War when sirens went off at 1:48 a.m. Saturday night. Explosions could be heard all around us. A friend sent me a video from his bedroom window showing missile interceptions over our neighborhood. While the numbers seem to change, the overall delivery from Iran toward Israel, for the first time ever, appears to have included the following:
170 drones
30 cruise missiles
110-120 ballistic missiles
These numbers do not include rockets fired by Hezbollah and Iran-supported groups in Iraq. This is a huge number of projectiles, and if even a few got through, the death toll could easily have been in the hundreds. But they did not. In an amazing coalition, formal or otherwise, Jordan, the UK, the US, France, and possibly other local states shot down the aerial vehicles. We were told that drones would take nine hours to arrive, cruise missiles 2 hours, and ballistic missiles 12 minutes. All of the drones and cruise missiles were intercepted outside of the borders of Israel. The joint US-Israel Arrow and David’s Sling systems apparently took care of the ballistic threats. One girl was seriously injured in the south, where an IAF base also suffered minor damage.
The cost of aerial defense is apparently in excess of $1 billion. Blowing that much money in a few hours of the night is quite a feat. But Israelis getting up in the morning and finding that buildings were not demolished or hospitals overrun with seriously wounded was a pleasant surprise. Bonchie over at RedState claims that Joe Biden gave a green light—“within limits”—for Iran to hit Israel. One cannot stress how reckless this state of affairs is, if true. It would only take one missile to get through the layers of air defense and kill a few dozen people, and the 10 million people of Israel would have been sent hurtling back to the horrors of October 7th. Biden, loser par excellence, supposedly told Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu “to take the win” and not respond. I don’t pretend to know what Israel is going to do, but I can imagine that Biden promised more support for a Rafah operation if Israel did not take this opportunity to retaliate and wipe out Iran’s nuclear installations. In two weeks, as his poll numbers reach his shoe size, Biden will again tell Bibi to stay out of Rafah. As one sees in the Iranians babbling like John Kerry about making a response, but not too much of a response, Israel’s killing of the Iranian general who planned the October 7th massacre rattled their leadership. Wiping out their nuclear potential after defanging their missile threat might be enough to bring about internal regime change.
People are already pooh-poohing the wonders we witnessed in the early hours of this morning. Israel and its partners had hours to eradicate most of the threats, or the Iranians threw their old stuff at Israel, but whoa, wait for the new-fangled rockets and drones. Why the Jordanian Air Force shot down many drones I do not know, but I am certainly grateful that they and the others did so. That all of these countries, some possibly without formal relations with Israel, worked to destroy hundreds of missiles and drones in and of itself is quite a wonder. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the armed groups in Iraq—all roads lead back to Tehran. At some point, one will have to destroy the epicenter of terror. Israel has the opportunity now at hand. Will she take it or be jawboned by Biden, Cameron, and others to stand down? Stay tuned.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member