I've been following the war actively and so far this is where we're at as far as I can tell from being some layperson with special interests in geopolitics and war:

Iran's modern history is that of a country that after WWII had a short-lived democratically elected government that tried to nationalize its oil industry. this pissed off the west and they installed the Shah as dictator (they are now currently trying to whitewash his son as the democratic choice for Iran), who was so unpopular that when the Iranian Revolution happened in 1979 it had 10% of the population participating. Iran is a powerful modern country and one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and the west has been sneeding ever since that they failed to subjugate Iran to western colonial interests.

fast-forward to last year: the US and Israel waged an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression in June with the same pretext that was used for the Iraq War in 2003 on supposed WMDs that don't exist. this is because Iran is a key strategic ally in the middle east with Russia and China that supplies a lot of oil to China especially and is the most powerful Islamic state in the middle east resisting western imperialism. if they topple Iran, the destabilization of the middle east will become that much more of a done deal, and will be one step towards encircling China and Russia, which is their stated plan going back to 2009 in a paper called "Which Path to Persia?" published by the Brookings Institute, a think tank funded by all the usual unelected corporate deep state oligarchs.

once again being attacked in an illegal and unprovoked war of aggression, Iran knows that it's now or never. they're either going to survive this war or the US and Israel will topple their regime to replace it with a puppet state or leave it in a state of perpetual civil war as happened in Libya. after the 12 Day War last year in June, Iran began preparing for war; they have a chain of command in place called the "mosaic defense" which is essentially the "networked insurrection" John Robb talks about in Brave New War but on the level of a nation state instead of just lightly armed guerrillas. Iran is designed to function without central command if necessary and has a decentralized command structure of various lower level officers who all have orders to carry out independently, which is why the decapitation strikes that took out Khamenei didn't stop them from retaliating to defend themselves.

their strategy of attacking every US base and ally in the region is designed to essentially cause as much chaos as possible and wage economic warfare by targeting Gulf State oil refineries because this will have a ripple effect for the global economy and force the world into paying attention to what's happening as well as put pressure on the US to withdraw or dig a deeper hole for itself. they have been doing this using asymmetrical warfare that again is like that of insurgents: using relatively cheap drones to attack miles and miles of oil infrastructure that is impossible to defend and orders of magnitude more expensive to lose than the investment Iran is putting into their attacks. the same is true for all the interceptor missiles the US and Israel have gone through, which are technologically sophisticated devices that can't be easily and quickly replaced by my understanding. Iran is hoping to outlast the barrage of bombings long enough that the only option is for a ground invasion, because if things get to that point the US is going to be in another quagmire forever war on top of all the problems it currently is experiencing domestically as its empire continues to fracture.

one other thing I forgot to mention re: Khamenei. the US clearly took him out because this conflict is following the same script that has happened in the past with the Vietnam War: the invading imperial power sees the war from the perspective of a foreign aggressor where if you kill the leaders the enemy will collapse, and the smaller country being bullied by the empire knows that it needs to adapt to this. but the interesting thing about Khamenei is that he very clearly wanted to be killed in the strikes because he was a revolutionary to the end and wanted to be martyred. what the idiots in Washington don't realize is that they gave Iran what they wanted and have provoked a fanatical commitment to fight this out or die. as with the kidnapping of Maduro which was also illegal and unprovoked, the US clearly was hoping that killing Khamenei would be good PR to terrorize the world into thinking that the US is unstoppable when quite the opposite has happened.

@whitequark holy fuck yeah that's insane. something else I had neglected to mention in the post is that the US-Israel strategy that they've relied on before has been to hit the enemy with overwhelming force early on to get the situation resolved as quickly as possible, but if the war drags on as it looks like is going to be the case, then the weaknesses of their military starts to show, in this case with how all their expensive toys start to become a liability if a decisive victory isn't achieved early on.