The Mirage of a New Middle East: War With Iran Won't Reshape the Region the Way America Wants

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Hat tip, Reddit

The Mirage of a New Middle East

War With Iran Won’t Reshape the Region the Way America Wants

Dalia Dassa Kaye
March 6, 2026


After a strike on a police station in Tehran, Iran, March 2026
Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

DALIA DASSA KAYE is a Senior Fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and the author of Enduring Hostility: The Making of America’s Iran Policy.

Eager to show that he can do what no American leader has done before, President Donald Trump has chosen conflict over diplomacy and gone to war with Iran. The Islamic Republic, knowing that this fight is existential, retaliated quickly with deadly missile and drone attacks on Israel, U.S. bases in the Middle East, and targets in Gulf states and beyond. This is now a regional war with global impact, disrupting oil and financial markets, supply chains, maritime commerce, and air travel. Threats to Americans and the death toll in Iran mount by the hour. These growing risks were predictable ...

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[Bayard]

1. America doesn't want this war

Polling shows most of us think trump is stupider than ever for it.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. Geology as warfare: Iran put its missiles where physics, not diplomacy, keeps them safe

CNN satellite analysis and Alma Research findings show Iran’s underground tunnel cities, with internal rail systems that move missiles to blast-door exits, have survived the bombing campaign largely intact. The geology, analysts say, is the real defense.

Link to tweet

https://www.thestatesman.com/world/iran-underground-missile-railway-tunnel-us-israel-strikes-operation-epic-fury-1503573121.html

Three weeks of intensive US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure have destroyed radar systems, collapsed tunnel entrances, and cratered ventilation shafts across dozens of sites. Iran keeps firing. The reason, according to satellite analysis by CNN and assessments by Israeli security research centre Alma Research, lies not above the ground but hundreds of metres beneath it; inside a network of underground missile cities connected by internal railways, carved into mountains that no bomb in the current American or Israeli arsenal can fully reach.

Iran’s underground missile programme is not a recent improvisation. Reports that emerged as far back as 2020 claimed an automated railway system running through cavernous tunnels, transporting ballistic missiles between assembly halls, storage vaults, and blast-door exits. What is becoming clearer now, as Operation Epic Fury enters its fourth week, is the scale of what was built and the limits of what air power alone can do against it.....

The central constraint is geological, and it has now been publicly stated by Iran itself. Former IRGC Aerospace Force commander Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said that Iran built its missile bases across provinces and cities at a depth of 500 metres.

The most powerful weapon the United States has for destroying hardened underground targets is the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator – a 30,000-pound bomb built specifically for this purpose. It can penetrate “approximately 60 metres of reinforced concrete or roughly 40 metres of moderate rock. Granite is harder than moderate rock. Five hundred metres is more than twelve times the weapon’s maximum penetration depth. The gap between the bomb and the tunnel is not a margin of error.”....

“IRGC did not prepare for this war by building rockets. It prepared by building railways inside mountains. The rockets are replaceable. The railways are permanent. And the granite that protects them was formed before mammals existed. The strait is 21 miles wide. The mountain is 500 metres deep. And the railway inside it is still delivering missiles to the surface,” he added.

Link to tweet

Iran has continued to fire ballistic missiles throughout Operation Epic Fury, including the attempted strike on the joint US-UK base at Diego Garcia. Trump has said the operation is running weeks ahead of schedule and that Iran’s military is finished. The satellite imagery and the institutional assessments tell a more complicated story: one in which the visible war, fought above ground, has made genuine progress, and the invisible war, fought half a kilometre underground, has barely begun.

There is a reason why only one-third of Iran's missiles have been destroyed. Iran has been preparing for these attacks for decades. Iran's missile facilities are beyond reach of bunker buster bombs and there is no practical way without a very large number of troops to take out these missies.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. B-52Hs have been seen taking off from RAF Fairford with just such weapons.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/117817512

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. I have also seen these reports

The Iranian tunnels were constructed with these bunker busters in mind.