Originally Posted by
MechEngr
Religious extremism wants control of their followers and they cannot keep that control without an external threat.
Indeed. The proclamation of the United States as The Great Satan was part of the message sent during the Islamic Revolution. In broader terms, however, it isn't just religious extremists who use that.
A number of posters on this sub-forum participated in the 1982 Falklands War. A contributing factor to that war even coming to pass was the perceived need by the regime in Buenos Aires to focus discontent on some external threat or source of frustration.
Returning to the topic of this thread and your observation:
Not long after Iranian state TV informed the nation that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had launched hundreds of drones and missiles, people poured into the streets in Tehran and other cities to show their support for Iran's first-ever direct military action against Israel. Iran had vowed to retaliate for the killing of seven IRGC officers about two weeks earlier, in an airstrike that hit an Iranian consulate in Syria's capital.
One
might argue that the leadership in Tehran had a core audience for the missile and drone launches: the home audience.