Everyone is a winner
So far, so good—the Russian S-400 air defense systems have worked as promised, and the official Iranian state media narrative is not being challenged online. According to Wikipedia, Iran has a hybrid air defense system comprising a bit of everything they could acquire at a bargain.
Reportedly, three drones were downed during the early hours of dawn local time. Now, Iran may claim a “100% success rate” and try to outdo Israel's 99%.
Everyone's a winner… and who better to create that aura than the Americans. Hopefully, both sides can go back back to their comfort zone of shadow wars with plausible deniability.
The main difference here is that there is a strong distrust of state media amongst a majority of Iranians. We're fast heading in that direction.
For all we know, it might have been a covert intelligence gathering exercise disguised as a foiled attack. All questions well above our pay grade and security clearance.
It's a tough one—in the absence of certainty, untrustworthy sources fill the vacuum with conspiracy theories, regardless of their plausibility. But, how does a state control the information space in a way that's not an overreach and abuse of power?
That's also, above our pay grade. It's much easier to call out a problem than to fix it.
Best of luck! And Shabbat salome inshallah.
Updates
As usual, we totally forgot to mention the simultaneous attacks in Iraq and Syria (the forgotten people) where images of debris are being posted online for the OSINT community to study.
The Israelis are using the exact same rhetoric as Iran after this weekend's operations—this was meant to send a signal to Tehran. It probably did.
In this case, if one side is lying and the other is telling the truth, that's your innate bias displayed in front of you.
We have our own case of cognitive dissonance going on here with respect to my (personal) stocks down and Treasury yields down call.
I'm going against Craig and Alan's views on US rates. The problem is that they're far more knowledgeable on the interest rate markets, and usually right.
At least US Treasuries demonstrated safe haven properties (still) in a risk-off market.
