It was a long time coming, but Israel finally responded to Iran’s ballistic missile attack.

After weeks of backroom discussions with the White House, the IDF conducted what looked — initially anyway — like limited strikes against IRGC targets in and around Tehran early Saturday local time.

According to Pentagon officials who spoke to the press, Benjamin Netanyahu gave the US advance notice. This time. The Biden administration received no such warning on September 27, when Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah just minutes after walking away from the rostrum at the UN General Assembly, where he (Netanyahu) delivered a defiant speech to an unamused, sparse crowd.

Notwithstanding the usual calls from Israel’s far, far right for aggressive attacks on Iran’s oil facilities and nuclear program, Netanyahu understood and accepted that the assassination of Nasrallah would elicit some manner of direct response. The regime couldn’t turn the other cheek even if they wanted to.

I’m going to quote from “Regime Maintenance,” which I penned a few hours after Iran launched missiles at Israel in April in retaliation for a brazen IDF strike on a diplomatic compound in Damascus, where Mohamad Reza Zahedi — a high-ranking, uniformed IRGC officer — was killed along with several deputies. To wit:

Autocracies often rely heavily for their faux legitimacy on the presentation of bête noires. The story’s always the same. The regime’s not despotic. Rather, some external antagonist — or a cabal of nefarious conspirators — is responsible for the oppression experienced by everyday Iranians, Russians, North Koreans and so on. Only the regime can provide for the security of the oppressed populace. That’s the linchpin of the autocratic narrative. When something happens to threaten that — when the regime’s exposed as weak, particularly vis-à-vis their ostensible antipode — autocrats have to (must) save face. Otherwise, the whole thing falls apart.

In recent months, Iran experienced an absolutely brutal succession of humiliating losses at the hands of Israel, including the assassination of Hamas’s political chief in his Tehran “safe” house and the systematic dismantling of Hezbollah in the short space of six weeks.

The destruction of Hezbollah is existential for the regime. There’s nowhere to go from here. Iran’s “forward military base” in Lebanon (as analysts generally describe Hezbollah) is severely degraded. Khamenei’s backed into a corner, just as he was in January of 2020, when the IRGC was “allowed” (if you will) by the US to lob a few missiles towards American troops stationed at the al-Asad Airbase in Iraq following the assassination of Qassem Soleimani.

Now, as then, Khamenei had to save face. There was no not responding to Nasrallah’s death. To not respond would arguably be a bigger risk than chancing an Israeli strike on critical Iranian infrastructure. The regime’s proxies — what’s left of them anyway — are now well apprised that the IRGC can’t protect them. And the Iranian public surely knows it isn’t going well. Every other week there’s a high-profile mourning ceremony for a celebrity martyr.

All of that to say it probably wasn’t difficult for Biden to talk Netanyahu out of striking Iran’s oil and the nuclear sites. The events of October 1 weren’t a surprise. The IDF knew it was coming, and although the IRGC did take a few more chances with that “attack” than they did with the slow-moving, farcically-choreographed fireworks show on April 13, no serious effort was made to overwhelm the Iron Dome or to kill any Israeli civilians. In a testament to the tragedy that is the Palestinian condition, the only person killed by the IRGC’s October 1 missile volley was a Gazan who escaped the besieged enclave to work in the West Bank, only to be killed by a falling Iranian missile fragment. (You can’t make this stuff up.)

Information about Saturday’s Israeli strikes on Iran was initially hard to come by. The IDF was somewhat vague about its targets, and Iranian officials were very keen to pretend, as best they could, that nothing much happened. More details will surely emerge over the next several hours, but suffice to say Saturday morning’s events likely won’t be remembered as the trigger for World War III.

As The New York Times noted, Israel did want to make some noise, though, even if they didn’t want to do much else. “[T]he blasts occurred close enough to the Iranian capital for them to be heard by residents, bringing a war that for Iranians had previously felt far away precariously close to home,” Patrick Kingsley, Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman wrote, adding that the strikes “marked the first time a foreign air force struck Iran since its war with Iraq in the 1980s.”