The Other McCain

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One Standard Deviation: How Israel Targeted Iran’s Top Air Force Leaders

Posted on | June 13, 2025 | 2 Comments

Say hello to Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh and, while you’re at it, go ahead and say good-bye because, as Clemenza said of Paulie, you won’t see him no more:

The commander of the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] air force, Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Iran overnight, the IDF announces.
According to the military, the top brass of the IRGC Aerospace Force was killed alongside him as they met in an underground command center to prepare to attack Israel.
The command center was struck by fighter jets, the IDF says. . . .
Among the senior officials killed were the commanders of the IRGC’s drone unit and air defense unit, the military says. . . .
“Hajizadeh publicly pledged allegiance to the idea of destroying Israel on multiple occasions in recent years and played a central role in formulating the plan to destroy Israel,” the army adds.

Did you know Jews are smart? I mean, on average, despite such utter dummies as Joy Behar. “Jews — specifically, Ashkenazi Jews of European origins — test higher than any other ethnic group. . . . [T]heir mean IQ was .97 standard deviation above the rest of the [U.S.] population” (The Bell Curve, p. 275). A “standard deviation” is about 15 IQ points, the difference between “bright normal” and genius.

Israel is a nation born in war, and which has been under attack regularly since its modern founding in 1948. Since the 1980s, Israel has had an influx of Ashkenazi migrants from the former Soviet Union, including many ultra-Orthodox Jews with large families. Thus you have a nation of approximately 7 million Jews, the entire population of whom are, on average, one standard deviation smarter than their Arab neighbors, and devoted to military activity as their only hope of survival.

The Israelis fight smart, you see:

As it became clear Israel was about to attack, the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ air force convened in a bunker to coordinate the response.
But Israel knew that emergency protocol, and the location of the bunker. They destroyed it, killing the overall commander and the heads of the drone and air defense forces. “The fact that there was nobody to give the order neutralized an immediate Iranian response,” an Israeli official said.
They were among the more than two dozen Iranian commanders targeted in a sprawling attack on Iran’s military command-and-control. The heads of the IRGC, the Iranian military and Iran’s emergency military headquarters were all eliminated in the opening salvo.
Another key target was Iran’s air defense systems and radars. Israeli intelligence mapped their locations, and most were hit by the Israeli Air Force in the opening strike. That gave the IDF virtually unchallenged freedom of operation in Iran’s skies.
Meanwhile on the ground, Israel’s Mossad spy agency was conducting a series of covert sabotage operations deep inside Iran to take out air defenses and ballistic missile launchers. . . .
n central Iran, Mossad commando units had positioned guided weapons systems in open areas near Iranian surface-to-air missile launchers.
In another area inside Iran, Mossad covertly deployed weapon systems and sophisticated technologies hidden in vehicles. When the Israeli attack began, these weapons were launched and destroyed Iranian air defense targets.

You see why I started out with a Godfather allusion. Like Michael Corleone eliminating the heads of rival Mafia gangs, Israel is settling all the family business in Iran. And they’re just so much smarter than the Iranians, it almost seems unfair. Can you imagine the kind of long-term surveillance and planning that went into this operation? Like, figuring out where the Iranian air force leaders would meet in an emergency, mapping out the location of that bunker, giving them some kind of signal of an impending attack, then watching them scurry to their bunker and — WHAM! — you took out the leadership at the outset of the campaign, so “that there was nobody to give the order” for the Iranian counter-attack. Meanwhile, you’ve got Mossad spies sneaking around all over Iran, ready to play their part in wrecking the enemy’s air defenses, so that the Israeli Air Force can fly in without danger of getting shot down.

One standard deviation — it’s a lethal advantage.

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Category: Iran, Israel

Comments

2 Responses to “One Standard Deviation: How Israel Targeted Iran’s Top Air Force Leaders”

  1. Instapundit » Blog Archive » STACY MCCAIN: One Standard Deviation: How Israel Targeted Iran’s Top Air Force Leaders.
    June 14th, 2025 @ 7:45 am

    […] STACY MCCAIN: One Standard Deviation: How Israel Targeted Iran’s Top Air Force Leaders. […]

  2. Peering Through the Fog of War – MAGAtoon
    June 15th, 2025 @ 5:54 am

    […] McCain described what I saw, a brilliant military campaign by Israel. He compared what we saw to Michael Corleone’s elimination of rival Mafia […]