Iran has revealed just how impotent it is against Israel

Hezbollah is effectively the mullahs’ army of occupation. Lebanon would be better off without it

Iranian missiles have just rained down on Israel. Israeli air defences – among them the famous “Iron Dome” system – are some of the strongest in the world, and are likely to have received assistance from the only ones which are even stronger, those of the US Navy. In the previous Iranian attack on Israel in April, US warships in the Mediterranean shot down Iranian ballistic weapons outside the atmosphere.
Nonetheless, no air defence network is perfect and some Iranian weapons are likely to have struck their targets. In other cases, falling debris will have caused damage even when incoming weapons have been successfully shot down. People are likely to be killed and injured; some injuries have already been reported.
But Israel is a country of almost ten million people. It has the 26th largest economy in the world, and the 15th largest defence budget. Even if Iran fired every missile capable of reaching Israel it possessed, the next day Israel would be there, bloodied but still strong, almost exactly as powerful as it was before.
The truth is that this missile strike is little more than a gesture. Humiliated by the decapitation of their proxy, Hezbollah, the mullahs are lashing out – but they are showing impotence, not strength; incompetence, not skill.
Compounding this humiliation is the fact Israel has just shown the world how you strike an enemy effectively. All the pagers and radios which were detonated in Hezbollah members’ hands will have, altogether, contained far less explosive than a single Shahab-3 ballistic missile – but they inflicted hugely more damage than all the Shahabs which fell tonight. The Israeli strikes which killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief, and so many of his inner circle – not to mention an Iranian general – involved less weaponry than Iran has used tonight, but it is most unlikely that any important Israeli officer or politician has been harmed.
This feeble, petulant response by Iran is not even in the same league. All it has achieved, given that it has been launched in response to actions against Hezbollah, is to underline what everybody knows: that we should make no distinction between Iran’s proxies and its Revolutionary Guards Corps. Hezbollah is in effect an Iranian army of occupation in Lebanon, and the sooner the people of Lebanon can be liberated from it, the better.