Strategic expert: Iran seeks to expel America from the region this year. William Wechsler: Iran and its proxies have a long-standing pattern of slowly and steadily pushing escalation steps as far as they can go.
Washington tried to deal with this behavior in other ways, and believed that this escalation could be dealt with and controlled within acceptable limits. There is operational success that comes from what Washington says that the strikes were successful, meaning that they wanted to do the damage they wanted.