Blow after blow for Iran

Iran is a big loser following the toppling of Bashar al-Assad. And it followed two other big whammy blows in its tit-for-tat missile battle with Israel and the devastating Israeli assaults on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran is losing, losing, losing. What are they going to do about it? Well, first of all, so far Tehran has failed to retaliate for the last missile attack by Israel. They vowed to respond and they haven't. So, theoretically that is still to come. But now, with the fall of Assad, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been deprived of the easy land route for supplying weapons to Hezbollah. The sea route is too vulnerable because the Israeli navy and US navy are on constant look-out for dodgy freighters. So Hezbollah has been mangled for the foreseeable future. Israel will get full blessing from Donald Trump to do whatever it takes to destroy its enemies and, with the loss of Syria as a friendly state in the Middle East, Iran has been sideswiped, stamped on and put in its place. That definitely won't please the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Quds Force overseas bunch of malign operators. They will want revenge and they will want the Supreme Leader to give them carte blanche to get on with it. Could this include rushing, if rushing is technically feasible, to develop a nuclear bomb? Uranium-enrichment in Iran has already progressed to beyond 70 per cent, just 20 per cent away from reaching bomb-grade fissile material and they could probably get to the required level in a matter of months, although it would take another year or more to fashion the enriched uranium into a usable bomb. But if they did that, to try and frighten the world, the likelihood is that the US, under Trump, with Israel alongside, would smash up their nuclear facilities with air attacks. Could Iran dare risk another blow like that? I doubt it. So the IRGC and Quds Force have, for the moment, been immasculated. But it would be unwise to underestimate Tehran and the ayatollahs. The fall of Assad will make them even more angry and desperate.