IIran Threatens Missile Attacks, Hoping Trump Sees Strength Not Weakness

Tehran unleashed a barrage of around 500 missiles that struck civilian and military locations in Israel last June but did little strategic damage. Though Israel pounded Iran’s missile launchers and storage sites during a 12-day war in June, the regime emerged from the bruising conflict with much of its remaining arsenal intact. More important, Iran learned how to get more of its missiles past Israeli and American defenses as the war went on. It is threatening to fire them again on a broader set of targets around the region if Trump orders an attack. . . . Building Iran’s missile arsenal was the life’s work of Amir Ali Hajizadeh, a figure so important that Israel killed him in an airstrike during the opening salvo of its surprise attack last June. . . . He was “an ideological hard-liner who was obsessed with the idea of destroying Israel,” said [UANI Senior Advisor] Saeid Golkar, an authority on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard who teaches at the University of Tennessee.