Alireza Tangsiri’s dead, if that means anything to you.

Another IRGC lifer who traces his military career to the Iran-Iraq War, the 64-year-old ran the Guard’s navy since 2018, when he was promoted by Ali Khamenei with a mandate to enhance the naval arm’s interoperability and expand its arsenal. He was the sixth person to hold the position since the IRGCN’s inception 41 years ago.

Tangsiri was belligerent even as IRGC commanders go, which goes a long way towards explaining how he ended up commanding the navy in his mid-fifties. Tangsiri’s anti-American rhetoric was so aggressively hostile it could’ve been mistaken for North Korean propaganda.

In 2021, while addressing an audience at the so-called Den of Espionage Museum — the Basij-run propaganda venue which occupies the former US embassy in Tehran — Tangsiri boasted that his navy had delivered “nine unforgettable slaps” to the US in recent years. “They have come to realize the Islamic Republic’s superiority at sea,” he went on. (Ask the IRIS Dena about that.)

Last year, Tangsiri said Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump had purchased one-way tickets “to the depths of hell.” A couple of weeks later, he warned the Pentagon that America’s navy was hopelessly overmatched by the IRGC’s maritime capabilities, a claim so ludicrous not even he believed it.

Like Will Ferrell movies, it’s hard to make a ranked list of Tangsiri quotables arranged in descending order of farcical absurdity, but if I had to a pick favorite for the number one spot, it’d probably be Tangsiri’s threat, made in and around his 2018 promotion, to “chase [the US Navy] all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.”

So, maybe don’t go to Cancún on spring break this year. You might see Tangsiri. Only not, because on Thursday the IDF killed him in what Israel Katz described as “a precise and lethal operation.”

If you believe Katz, and on these sorts of pronouncements you probably should, Tangsiri made the same mistake that (far) too many senior IRGC officials made in recent years: He met in the same place, at the same time, with his deputies. They were “eliminated” too, Katz claimed.

And, so, the man whose name and face was synonymous with the Iranian obstruction in the Strait of Hormuz is gone now. Gone to that glorious war room in sky, where Khamenei, Hassan Nasrallah, Qassem Soleimani and Mahdi al-Muhandis are hosting an eternal who’s who — a VIP gala for martyrs that’s by now standing room only.

“This individual was directly responsible for naval mining and the blocking of the Strait,” Katz went on. In addition to his bottomless bag of bombast, Tangsiri was famous for insisting on the detention of sailors aboard ships caught in Iran’s territorial waters.

Obviously, Tangsiri’s death (I’m not prepared to describe this IDF strike as an “assassination” — if anybody still alive in that regime counted as a legitimate military target, it was surely Tangsiri) doesn’t “fix” the Strait of Hormuz. The Guards will install somebody else in his role, signing that person’s death warrant in the process.

But Tangsiri’s demise is yet another testament to the notion that even if critics are correct to assess that the IDF’s “decapitation strategy” can’t bring about regime change on its own, Israel can keep this up all day long.

You can’t go on as a nation if every decision-maker in the government and ranking member of the military is subject to kill-on-sight orders and you have no air defenses.