Iran executes Khamenei's plan to spread regional war (opens in new tab)

All of the Gulf satrapies are de facto Iran's enemies by virtue of playing host to U.S. bases in exchange for certain goodies handed to their ruling elite structures. Iran's goal is to hit them hard enough to make them pressure the U.S. to sue for peace.

Also, many of the hotels that have been targeted are ones where Iran likely had intelligence that U.S. soldiers had been moved after the bases were abandoned before the U.S. launched its "preemptive" attack.

The US spent trillions of dollars and many lives during their last escapade into the sandbox, and still went home having lost. What evidence leads you to believe a coalition of countries can stamp out autonomous, independent, ideology driven, potentially perpetual attacks? The potential attack surface is enormous, and attackers need to win only once versus needing a constant, successful defense against them. “What is your threat model?”

Iran is already demonstrating how to exhaust a supply of $4M patriot missiles with $50k drones. Broadly speaking, chaos is cheap when asymmetrical power is available and successful and soft, undefended targets are numerous and readily available. The cost to defend everything at once is untenable, and in some cases, it is almost impossible to defend the target at all (artillery against an LNG loading facility, for example).