Weekend long read

1) A number of sources provide resources on topics relating to the current events in Iran and the broader region:

2) At the Daily Wire, Mark Goldfeder and John Spencer explain why Ending A Campaign Of Violence Is Not Starting A War.

“Saturday’s strikes on Iranian terrorist infrastructure have predictably revived the familiar debate about “preemptive” self-defense under international law. But the debate often misses the practical, fact-bound question: was the United States responding to a speculative future risk, or to an ongoing campaign of hostile action that has already crossed the threshold? On the public record, Iran’s hostility looks less like rhetoric and more like sustained operations.

This distinction matters. In strategic theory, there is a difference between initiating violence and terminating a pattern of violence, between starting and ending a conflict. Iran’s campaign against U.S. military forces and interests did not begin this week. It has spanned decades. The relevant legal and strategic question is not whether Tehran might one day act. It is whether a pattern of armed attacks, proxy operations, missile strikes, and assassination attempts already constitutes an ongoing armed attack under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter.”

3) UANI provides possible answers to the question Who Will Be Iran’s Next Supreme Leader?.

“Iran’s constitution provides broad guidance on the characteristics sought in candidates for the position of supreme leader. Article 5 stipulates that the ideal individual be: “just, pious, knowledgeable about his era, courageous, a capable and efficient administrator…” Article 109 elaborates that the individual should have “[s]cholarship, as required for performing the functions of religious leader in different fields; required justice and piety in leading the Islamic community; and right political and social perspicacity, prudence, courage, administrative facilities, and adequate capability for leadership.” It’s this conglomerate of religious, administrative, and political qualities that will prove pivotal in determining the right figure for the job.”

4) Hussein Aboubakr Mansour discusses Iran’s Gulf Gambit.

“It is perhaps a good day to remember that, despite the facial hair affinities, Iran is not Hamas. Its missiles are not home-made projectiles lobbed without guidance systems from the rubble of a collapsed UNRWA building. When an Iranian drone strikes the airport or the Fairmont in Dubai, it strikes them because someone in Tehran decided it should — a deliberate strategic choice, not an accident of indiscriminate targeting.

There is a clear strategy here. The question is whether it is a sound one.”

5) Zineb Riboua explains Under Beijing’s Wing: Iran’s Arsenal.

“In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was sold to the American public and to the world as the definitive answer to Iran’s nuclear threat. The agreement placed extensive restrictions on uranium enrichment, centrifuge capacity, and stockpile levels, but said almost nothing about the one thing that would actually deliver a nuclear warhead to its target: ballistic missiles. Nothing about cruise missiles either. No limits on the development, testing, production, or deployment of the very weapons systems that transform a nuclear device from a dangerous secret in a bunker into a weapon that can destroy a city. A bomb is only as threatening as your ability to deliver it, and the JCPOA left Iran’s ability to deliver it completely unconstrained.

For Iran, this distinction matters more than it does for almost any other country on earth.”