Even considering the usual fog of war, this entire Iranian operation is hard to read. The rescue inside Iran is obviously the headline moment, and it is genuinely impressive on its own terms. The United States, working with Israel, manages to get a weapons officer out of the interior of Iran after hours of uncertainty, and they do it in a way that suggests they can more or less operate in Iranian airspace when they want to. That is a big statement, whether anyone says it out loud or not.
At the same time, I cannot shake the sense that this rescue sits inside a much larger and more unstable picture. We are now several weeks into this conflict, longer than what was originally floated, and the gap between what the United States can do militarily and what Iran can do defensively feels enormous. If Iran’s best success is what amounts to a lucky shot bringing down a plane, and even then they cannot capture the people involved, that tells me their conventional position is extremely weak.
