2 countries with the best war technologies on earth must work together to have a war with embargod-country-for-decades.
And those 2 counties are founder of Board of Peace.
The reason it is hard is not due to a power balance. Both of those countries could have sent nukes with minimal efforts.
But their goal is targeted and precise attacks, that effectively destroy targets based on specific, and high quality intelligence.
The other part is that defense against missiles is significantly harder and more expensive than sending missiles. Iran, while relatively poor, has dedicated a significant part of its economy for missile development and production.
Day one and they've already bombed a school and killed dozens of children. The goals, strategy and tactics have not been clearly communicated. You can pray they are using high quality intelligence, but history tells us they are not at all concerned with collateral damage. They likely want to degrade Iran's military capabilities, but they also want them cowed and bleeding.
Israel is interested in the fall of the Iranian regime, a thing that can only happen if the Iranian people will rebel against it. The last thing Israel wants is to have the Iranians rally behind the state’s flag.
Based on this cold calculation, bombing a school full of children would be counter productive, even if you believe the Israelis are just collecting children's blood to make matzahs (passover is just around the corner!).
On a more serious note, do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.
> Israel is interested in the fall of the Iranian regime, a thing that can only happen if the Iranian people will rebel against it.
I personally don't believe in such appeals to rationality of parties waging wars. The issue is: if you wage a war, you can't control precisely what is going on. No one can. Like MH17 was shot down by pro-Russian separatists: who was interested in it? No one was, but still MH17 was shot down.
Israel bombed schools, it probably did it without clear intent to bomb them, but at the same time it means it is not very concerned about a couple of hundred of underage causalities. Like it was (and it is) not at all concerned about Palestinian causalities in Gaza. Moreover to my mind, it is the strategic stance of Israel: to be as brutal as possible to make neighbors to fear Israel. Israel does it for decades, it does it every time it wages a war. It means that now it just cannot wage a war without demonstrations of brutality. Even if it wanted to it just cannot, because on all levels of command people were taught to demonstrate brutality, and they were not taught how to wage war surgically. You can't overcome such a training on so many levels with a carefully crafted prompt.
> do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.
> Ok, so the Iranian regime itself published this news? And you don’t even question it?
I question everything, and in this case I'm choosing to believe it. Such fakes are hard to forge, and as recent history shows such news are not fakes. Look at Russia which claimed that it did nothing wrong for how many times? Russia all the time tried to declare that everything is a fake forged by Ukraine. And if we look at what Ukraine did to Russia, we can't find a single example of a fake news forged by Russia.
A priori probability of this being a fake is low, and if you look into it, it is a pretty good "fake". No one still questioned it, while you can see some news from Iran that are clearly anti-regime news.
So, no, without clear evidence for this being a fake, I believe it is not a fake.
It's all over. NY Times writeup points to multiple sources and videos of destruction that they have authenticated. I don't think any body count has been independently verified.
You are relying on unreliable news sources, the strikes are incredibly precise. See the aerial photo of Khamenei's residence that was bombed [1]. You can see how the surrounding area remains surprisingly clean in face of the utter destruction in the middle.
One nice thing about Reddit, is that if someone posts fake news, people refute it (which is not the case in this post). So there is active fact checking in place.
That photo is taken directly from AP news reporting, taken by Airbus.
Reddit is a shithole, even more so after it went public a year ago..
Anyway, I don't think the AP pictures are too convincing. Sure it might look like smoke in there, but it looks more like the entire right side of the image was carpetbombed - not just the building complex in the middle
My greater concern is the people of Iran. Especially since Iran has conscription so the people who end up dieing in a war didn't even consent to being made soldiers.
They've funded Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis for decades. They've assassinated dissidents on foreign soil. They sentence people to death for apostasy and flog women for not wearing hijab correctly.
The sanctions aren't about race. They're about behaviour.
Nobody said that. But they are a sovereign country that did not attack America. Bombing them because you find their internal politics distasteful is appalling, to say the least.
That’s not why they’re being bombed. They’re being bombed because they strive for nukes and ICBMs with ever larger range, all the while calling “death to america”.
P.S. downplaying their behavior to “distasteful”, is, well, distasteful.
There are no "good guys" in real-life. If you as an individual revile proxy conflict, assassination of dissidents abroad, torture and summary execution, then it's hard to stand on the American soapbox and demand change. Many Iranians still remember SAVAK, and are told stories of the last time they tried nationalizing their resources.
The US doesn't need an interventionist policy with Iran any more than we need to invade North Korea. Israel needs it though, and their entire strategy is to risk American lives for their meaningless expansion campaign.
No. But they are a sovereign nation who didn't directly bomb the US or its allies.
>They've funded Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis for decades. They've assassinated dissidents on foreign soil. They sentence people to death for apostasy and flog women for not wearing hijab correctly.
You want to know who the US has funded? You want to know who Israel has funded?
I mean, shit, the US took out Iran's democratically elected government in the 1970s and was a huge fan of the Mullahs because they let us steal Iranian oil. The same secular Iranian government that was quite literally the first middle eastern country to recognize the existence of Israel, and was a leading secular state in a region of ass-backwards religious nutcases.
Israel has refused to acknowledge the obvious existence of its nuclear weapons program while Iran is a full member of the IAEA and allows for full international inspection of its uranium facilities.
Fuck, the Israelis engage in massive blackmailing operations of their own "allies" (see Epstien, Jeffrey) , attack their own "allies" (see USS Liberty attack), and have tried to goad its "allies" into carrying out attacks on their behalf. They are a tiny bully that starts shit they cannot handle themselves, and American lives are sacrificed because of it.
I'd say being an apartheid state and conducting a live-streamed genocide could possibly be a minor issue. Just a PR issue mind, Lord knows we've given up on our souls long ago.
For what it's worth, I think the American activists on this issue bungled the messaging to disastrous effect (in the same way we bungled criminal-justice reform). It's a saturated issue with low political salience outside a specific (and increasingly constrained) demographic.
A win in Iran will be a short-term boost, in America and in Israel. Then we'll go back to being pissed about rising prices.
When it comes to Israel, polling was always lower in younger populations, although yes - the trend worsened.
Israel chose to trade popularity for having real geopolitical gains on the ground. Popularity could be won back later, but removing the Iranian ring of fire around it is a real and tangible achievement that would last decades and change the Middle East.
> No. Any other questions, or do you want to just continue feigning interest in having an actual conversation?
This is an actual question. It seems to me that you only care about Arabs dying. Jews can die left and right in the hands of Arabs and you won’t blink an eye. Am I correct?
I just want to clarify it for others who reads your comments to see.
Not really sure what to say here. Maybe it’s a lack of empathy or imagination because the victims are Palestinians?
Perhaps a good thought experiment would be to swap out Israel and Palestine with some other similar (real or fictional) conflict to help you think through your apparent confusion.
About a third of American Jews now agree that Israel is an apartheid state and committing genocide against Palestinians.
It remains to be seen what impact this will have, but it will certainly impact the ability for everyone to claim that criticism of Israel and sympathy for Palestinians is motivated by antisemitism.
The democrats lost the last election in part because of their stance on Israel.
With a bit of luck this could lead to a shift in policy within a generation.
American "activists" (didn't know being anti-genocide was a fringe belief but here we are) clearly won the narrative. Most Americans now oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza and want all support to this country to stop ASAP. This support for Israel cost Harris the election, as shown in their latest post-mortem of the 2024 election, and is making Trump and his administration ever more unpopular.
Killing kids on camera, burning people in hospitals alive, running them over in bulldozers is pretty much genocide. You can easily find these videos on internet (I don't recommend watching them even if you watch cartel beheadings for fun)
No, these things do not constitute a genocide. Genocide is the purposeful extermination of a people. What you’re describing are other alleged war crimes. While it’s a catchy and horrifying word that’s very useful against Israel, it’s dishonest to use it in this case.
All the things you described are indeed horrifying on their own, and I believe there are cases where Israeli forces did some of these things unjustifiably.
You must be asking yourself what the hell could be justified. Well, I’ve heard first accounts of kids being sent first as scouts in the battlefield, into a kill box, trying to pinpoint Israeli forces. Once the scout goes back and reports on the force’s location, an accurate barrage of RPGs will be shot at them. You can’t go into the kill box to stop them by arresting them. What would you have done? I do not envy the person that has to make that call, they are now scarred for life.
Justified? No? You pick between the life of that kid and the lives of the people under your command. Both choices are bad, this isn’t Hollywood.
Most of what you watch is edited purposefully and doesn’t give you any context for the purpose of recruiting the public opinion. It’s working amazingly.
These populists, so called leaders, don't represent everyone and are hated by many. In war everyone loses, and you seem to ignore the fact that there are two sides here. Normative people don't wake up in the morning wanting to murder children for fun. Your cartoonish image of Israelis as some kind of horned monsters is ridiculous.
I keep hearing that Israel is the only democracy of Middle East. And they keep getting elected, which means they are not some kind of extremists, but represent opinion of general population
The American/Israeli media empire is 100x larger than anything Hamas can disseminate. The "media is dishonest" excuse doesn't apply to Hamas any more than it does to the Israeli Military Censor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Censor
I don't watch, I talk to real people who are first hand witnesses.
Second, Israel doesn't own any media empire, what exactly do you mean?
Third, Hamas doesn't need to dismantle any media organization, they got Qatar with their own world wide media empire of AlJazeera.
Iran was likely going to do that themselves by the massive inflation they caused through reckless financial policies such as Venezuelan style price controls. Russia is managed to weather sanctions decently, Iran's economic leadership is far more incompetent despite being a petrol state. Even in Tehran they can't get enough water because of the failure of infrastructure and planning (despite plenty of money being available for certain failed regional military projects).
There was a study showing almost every revolution happened not because of ideology but over the price of bread.
> There was a study showing almost every revolution happened not because of ideology but over the price of bread.
His name was Marx. ;)
Yeah. We'll see. Under what conditions will you consider yourself right or wrong? My prediction is after killing a few more heads of state, disabling some more striking capability that they'll back off under pressure from the Arab states. Trump will declare it as a victory regardless of what happens and everyone will forget about it. Iran will eventually rebuild itself as it just did, but this time it will take longer (Trump even said that himself, contradicting himself earlier).
Even if Trump doesn't care, Israel is very motivated to make regime change happen. They want to be permanently rid of Iran's nuclear threat, its funding of terrorist groups, all of it. Honestly I think Trump or at least his administration is on a similar page, and if not the Israelis can clearly be pretty persuasive.
No, my worry is whether it will be a regime change that benefits the Iranian people or some kind of sick puppet state. But of course:
> Trump will declare it as a victory regardless of what happens
...This goes without saying.
Edit: worth noting the Arab states tend to hate Iran as well, and Iran has already sprinkled some ballistic missiles on them just in this war. They're not going to speak up for Iran unless they think the escalation is getting too dangerous for themselves.
> Even if Trump doesn't care, Israel is very motivated to make regime change happen.
It doesn't matter. There are zero cases in history of successful regime change by air only. Iran, of all countries, has an extremely robust succession plan and at a last resort the IRGC itself will take over.
> Iran has already sprinkled some ballistic missiles on them just in this war
I can see you're not following this too seriously.
You didn't give objective criteria for how to judge whether you're right or wrong yet.
You should follow more seriously which usernames you're talking to. But as far as objective criteria, if a regime change happens I don't expect it to be subtle or debatable. Seeing the IRGC disbanded would be a pretty solid signal, though.
Obviously it's not going to be done 100% from the air. The Iranian people will have to play a big role. I just hope they manage to seize initiative from Trump and Netanyahu as far as how their government is run.
I do note that we've strayed a bit from the thesis of "Iran is so powerful Israel and the US have to gang up on it". :D
Sure. Anyway, did you have a factual critique of my statement about Iran throwing ballistic missiles around the Middle East, or did you just find my tone insufficiently serious?
