An adjoining substation to BAH53 had one of it's two main buildings damaged/destroyed about 2026-07-16 per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-data-center-power-substation-bahrain-jul-16th-2026-142024
Then about 2026-07-22 BAH53 itself was damaged/destroyed per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-amazon-web-services-bahrain-jul-22nd-2026-142112
Possibly the least defended of the three sites as there is no air/missile defence battery in between this site and Iran.
No media reports about this data centre being attacked previously. Possibly the safest of the three as there are at least two (probably three) air/missile defence batteries in between this site and Iran.
Apparently the Batelco DC.1 data centre adjoining (and apparently critical to) BAH55 was damaged/destroyed about 2026-04-01 per https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk28nj0lrjo _or_ the adjoining substation to these two facilities was damaged/destroyed -- news articles are hard to follow as to what exactly might have been damaged and the extent of damage caused.
Middle ground for defence with one or two (maybe three) air/missile defence batteries between this site and Iran, depending on where drones/missiles are launched from.
If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492281507 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492953902). Based on the permanency of those air/missile defence batteries it doesn't look like the government of Bahrain are expecting things to get safer for data centre hosting in Bahrain any time soon.
Update: IRGC published satellite imagery a few hours ago showing an impact to BAH54, apparently impacted on 2026-07-24, alongside another undated image before the impact. From a quick comparison of both images with reliable satellite imagery sources (e.g. WV02 image dated 2025-02-21 on ESRI World Imagery Wayback) there are no obvious signs of image manipulation, with roof features and surrounding buildings/other features lining up as expected. Additionally the claimed post-strike image adds a significant number of vehicles to the site (when there are usually close to none present), which may correspond to fire fighting vehicles expected to be monitoring the site afterwards. Further, Sentinel-2 imagery from 2026-07-24 shows a dark patch (blast damage) on the roof of BAH54 per https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/?zoom=18&lat=26.0509...
Upon checking Sentinel-2 imagery for BAH55 from 2026-03-29 to 2026-04-13 (and all later imagery) there is also visible blast damage to the roof of BAH55, which would correspond in timing to media reports about damage caused about 2026-04-01. Sentinel-2 imagery appears to clarify AWS' claim of "while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities" to mean a direct impact to the building. However it seems likely from high resolution satellite imagery of BAH55 that the machinery rooms of the building perhaps took most of the damage, perhaps leaving data halls in a better shape elsewhere in the building (but possibly still unusable due to water/smoke damage).
> If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain
I've seen data centers that were built to withstand an aircraft impact (they were located on a major airport flight path). I wonder if they'd rebuild these to that standard or something even stronger, given these attacks. It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
Here's a Google Maps link to BAH53 (Manama), it doesn't look like the hardened data centers I seen (e.g. sloped walls like a bunker): https://maps.app.goo.gl/6DjhQs753p6EHQUu6
London has lots of datacentres in Slough (near Heathrow) and Docklands (London City Airport, but also many LHR planes transit over).
AWS/Azure/GCP/etc Colo in Equinix/Telehouse datacentres there, and those Docklands locations in particular were picked based on location to LINX (major London peering/interchange), and LINX was put in Docklands out of desire for relatively proximity to telcos, and London’s banking/finance industry.
Semi-related, there are some very cool converted datacentres in the UK.
The Bunker operates an underground datacentre out of a former military installation. Radar base if memory serves me. That’s definitely hardened from airplane attacks and I believe is used by some hyperscalers.
> It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
I think the two kinds of attacks are so different that they require different defenses.
Drones need not fly in straight lines. Data centers need ventilation, providing a path for drones. Putting grids in a ventilation shaft will stop the first drone, but a coordinated attack will use one drone to blow up defenses and a second/third/etc one to reach the target
Not all businesses want to pay the premium for that level of redundancy. Businesses with lower margins want resilient service at a lower price point. With AI and contributed shift to cloud, the demand for lowering TCO for a greater share of the larger pie becomes greater.
It's sad but also interesting that in someone's disaster recovery plan now they need to add a line item about analyzing which datacenters are behind air defenses.
These feel quite different. IRGC attacked Amazon compute. Ukraine attacked several warehouses. Comparing Wildberries to Amazon is also only half the truth. Wildberries is directly part of russian war machine as soldiers need to buy essential dual-use equipment there and they even sell weapons.
I suspect in both cases the primary motivation is "there's a huge box full of expensive stuff and if we get a drone inside the whole box burns to the ground".
Those factories are outside of Ukraine, in Europe. A lot of people (both pro- and anti- Russia) seem to be hoping that Russia will attack Europe to stop Ukrainian drone attacks.
European politicians are all about the war, champing at the bit to escalate, expanding militaries and reordering their economies around the MIC. As for insane MAGA and Euro-right, just go read any of them, they are all like that.
So I have to make it plainer. Those factories are not all in Ukraine. The governments of the countries who host the factories have switched their rhetoric from 2023. Back then it was "oh, we cannot arm Ukraine with weapons with range longer than 100 km, because then according to international law we are complicit in attacking Russia and Russia has a legal right to strike us back". But in 2026 attacks on non-military targets are celebrated by the same governments who are now proud to have contributed to the hits.
An aggressor state doesn't get to cry foul play. I don't care what Ukraine has to resort to so they can defend their sovereignty. If Russia doesn't like how the game is being played, they can take their ball and go home.
I admit I've had the privilege of not following the war between Russia/Ukraine very closely, but your question seems to assume that Russia has been clearly delineating between civilian and military targets. "UN Meetings Coverage and Press Releases : Russian Attacks in Ukraine Show ‘Clear’ Pattern of Targeting Civilians, UN Officials Stress, as Security Council Speakers Call for Urgent De-escalation" [1] from Jul 9, 2026 suggests that is not the case and claims "16,402 civilians, including 802 children, have been killed in Ukraine"
> Ukraine [...] are not openly targeting civilians.
Ukraine has been pretty openly targeting civilians since 2014 and didn't stop in 2022. It's just (very reasonably) judged differently when one country commits war crimes while aggressively attacking another and when a country crosses that line while defending themselves against a much larger foe.
Datacenters are full of metal. Warehouses are full of cardboard boxes and styrofoam.
A rack of 14 $5k servers is worth $70k. A half-pallet stacked two meters high with $50 rubber dicks, each in a 30x10x10 cm box, is worth around $24k, and has the same form factor. There are more expensive servers but there are also more expensive products.
But large data centers would be maybe 10k square meters in one building, while the largest building of the Elektrostal Wildberries warehouse was over 150k sqm.
A datacenter, if successfully and completely burned down, would of course cause disruption (although in a well designed redundant system it shouldn't), but doing so is harder and burning down a major logistics hub causes disruption too.
The warehouse also leaves a hard to deny, widely visible reminder to the population that the war has consequences, in the form of a Moscow-sized smoke cloud: https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=33.290517136221574,5... (plus endless videos of small sellers lamenting their fate).
Hitting the enemy where it hurts. It's much more effective to hurt Russian morale by making big explosions and petrol rain from striking a refinery or stopping/delaying shipments to the front line than by shutting down a center where a handful of people work and that won't directly impact the war. Ukraine must making fighting painful enough that the Russians withdraw, because the math of attrition favors the much more populous and richer Russians long term.
the point of hitting them is to cause commercial damage to american companies. In reality, this changes little in terms of US capacity. Doing the equivalent of this to Russia would be attacking their oil ports and infrastructure.
wildberries has been taken over by an oligarch and the only powers in Russia that Putin may hear are the oligarchs. There will be no 'overthrow of Putin' in Russia because there is no institutional support and it is well understood by literate people - a revolution is not just a disorganized uprising on the streets (what happens the next day? - return to normal) it requires years of planning and support.
This is incorrect. The founder and CEO of Wildberries of Tatyana Kim. She does not come from a wealthy family. She started that business as a young mother in 2004 and is self-made.
> a revolution is not just a disorganized uprising on the streets it requires years of planning and support.
Many Eastern bloc communist states fell with large public protests and did not "require years of planning and support". [1]
Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.
Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587
There were almost daily posts in HNs front page about it 4 months ago when it first happened, as well as front page headlines on CNN and WSJ and other news outlets, though they quickly got drowned out by all of the other Iran war stories when the war first broke out.
The reason it’s not really news this week is because both the Bahrain and the Dubai regions have been effectively non-operational for the last 4 months, so the IRGC saying they destroyed an already-destroyed region is less newsworthy.
Because individual HN users do the flagging and many are tired of the inevitable and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war that predictably erupts on any topic related to the Middle East.
The point is that every random going-on gets used as an excuse to rehash the entire conflict from 1947 onwards, and a lot of people are just not interested in that, and don't consider it relevant to the site.
For the same reason you chose to exclude the any mention of informing and reminding others about what Hamas did in the region.
You comment presumes that either the posted article or the comments are doing in any informing. I contend that neither do, they are both simply writing prompts for partisans.
Your comment also presumes that the entire earth is not already saturated in Israel v Palestine content. You not getting your desired outcome is not evidence that people are uninformed.
Whether they are or are not, you are also sidestepping an even more important question - why must all internet sites cover all topics? There's nothing wrong with any site making clear what topics they want to focus on. HN and it's users have made it clear they prefer to focus on tech and there are literally 70 million other places you can go to fight over Israel & Palestine. If that's your thing, have at it, you don't need to do it here.
In fact, I would argue that both HN and Israel v Palestine fight sites would be better for it. If all sites are for all issues then all sites just devolve to the same slop. If sites can focus, they develop their own unique community. The attempt to invade such spaces and force them to have the discussions you want them to have is just colonialism by another name.
> Why is it pointless to inform and remind others about what Israel did in the region?
It’s the act of comment warring that is pointless. [X/Y] partisans are not intellectually curious about statements coming from a [Y/X] partisan. Nobody’s minds are going to change either way.
There presumably some third parties who could hypothetically be swayed, but from what I’ve seen they’re few and far between.
It's been extensively reported on, and any AWS user that clicks on the health dashboard would also have seen it, even if they don't consume from news outlets.
As for use it gets: plenty of use, mostly when someone needs to have their worlds close to that area (usually latency or legal reasons). There are a lot of smaller businesses that lost a lot (or maybe even everything) because their never thought they would need to create backups in a different region. Most of that wasn't really reported on but instead gets shared on various platforms like Reddit.
> Are you implying that something that gets reported on, shouldn't be on HN?
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
> Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.
Or how good their HA/failover strategy must be.
Although losing one data centre from an availability zone seems like exactly the kind of issue AWS plan for and handle well, and does not take down the whole AZ. By contrast with "our BGP config got messed up".
There was a building hit near the data center on the first day of the war and that took down one AZ (unfortunately, two of my three EC2 instances were in that AZ). The hit on April 1 pretty much took it all down. Fortunately I had relatively up-to-date backups (both within 24 hours before each outage) so all I lost was a little email (spam) and some libera chat logs. I've moved to ap-southeast-1, which means trading a ~ 60ms ping to ~ 110ms.
I'm kinda surprised Amazon didn't send a team to collect all storage devices from the wreckage and ship them elsewhere to be connected to the network for recovery.
I didn't see any photos of the building/damages, but assuming it caught fire and fire surpression systems were activated, many to most of the drives would not be easy to recover data from, to say nothing of physical recovery.
You're expected to keep your data redundant in a 2nd region... I'm sure not everyone does, but I'd guess most AWS customers that only keep their data in a single region have chosen a different region (us-east-1 perhaps...)
It's not like Amazon doesn't have tactical teams on call - if that was a priority, I'm sure it would have been done. But like any good datacenter provider, they have offsite backups, and I'd expect the damaged hardware will just be written off.
The company line has been that they expect you to have your own backups in a region outside of the Middle East or you’re hosed until they can turn the (now destroyed) buildings back on.
I wonder if AWS even has the capacity to keep an entire region’s data elsewhere if they wanted to (I mean they could with their margins, but I doubt they do.)
Yeah, they have backups of their shit, not your shit. If you don’t use their cross-region backups, I don’t know what to tell you. Even us-east-1 isn’t entirely immune to disasters manmade or otherwise…
With how overpaid and with how poorly the average AWS employee treats those around them (especially their colleagues), I think a little bit of real action is massively overdue for the average AWS peon. Please ship them to a war zone! Please!!!
Earn those bananas! Bezos isn't rich enough yet! Work harder!
2. It’s expected and war, and while war is not good, I wonder about data backups and succession planning for this.
3. It makes sense they would’ve had a fire drill and reviewed since it’s a capital investment, 6 months of war, at the same time Bahrain is considered stable, so I really wonder about the conversation around this and if there was any disaster planning with this scenario in mind.
4. If there wasn’t, I’m sure there is now across all regions of AWS.
This month has been for me, a uptick in unique headlines that I wouldn’t have thought would happen.
The civilization in which you are a part of, this very mass that is greater than you and I, is evolving and changing. How can there not be new unique headlines?
Not “wrongly flagged dead”, insta-dead because commenter is a consistent shit-poster. Put down the history book and read the comment history. If you feel strongly about it, vouch for the comment instead of reposting.
I feel for both, people who where hosting there not expecting this war and this attack and the attackers, because they didn't attack just because they wanted but attacked as a response as stated earlier.
Bahrain hosts bases that the US uses to attack Iran, and Amazon is part of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program that provides the DoD with cloud services.
Bahrain is host to the headquarters of the US fifth fleet, a notable US airbase, and thousands of US military personnel. These assets are being used to attack Iran.
The article has actual quotations on Iran's justification: this is in response to a recent US attack on civilian infrastructure (an under-construction Iranian nuclear powerplant with no nuclear material present)
USA would look very bad if they started bombarding Canada over that, yes. Not even Russia does that. They protest but they haven't started bombarding neutral countries over such things yet. You don't see Ukraine bombarding Belarus either, even though Belarus is full of Russian bases.
This is an exaggeration of the truth. Here is what I found:
> Russia does not officially maintain a traditional independent sovereign military base in Belarus, but it operates two Soviet-era radar and communication facilities and heavily uses Belarusian military infrastructure, airfields, and new joint construction projects.
US burnt almost entire latin american down last century because "can't have communism in our backyard", even though these countries are quite far geographically than Bahrain is to Iran. Besides, under every international law about neutrality, Bahrain/Kuwait/UAE none of them are neutral.
If only we lived in the reality where this was possible. Americans living in the same fear they inflict on the rest of the world might mellow them out a little.
Why not defend it? You provide logistical support to US war of aggression, you become a legitimate target? What is this whitewashing of military involvement? (Both for Amazon and Bahrain)
What do you mean? It is very clear that Trump declared war on Iran. That's factual.
Civilian damage occurs all the time - often on purpose (infrastructure), sometimes not directly on purpose (drones getting off-target for various reasons, that also happens and not all of this is on purpose). What Iran does here is increase the cost of waging warfare against it, to make continuation of war as unappealing as possible. To claim the nearby countries are "uninvolved" while hosting military bases or providing targeting data to the USA is just propaganda. Why would you insinuate this? It is clearly an incorrect statement. One can debate whether targeting amazon is useful or not, but definitely you don't have an uninvolved country here, so much is clear. Besides, all companies of a given country at war, need to provide data and money anyway.
No, that is actually a lie, and quite obviously false.
In the United States, nobody can "declare war" except Congress. Our President has authorized military action against Iran and plenty of strikes, this is true. However, Congress has not passed a War Powers Resolution, much less an open declaration of war.
Therefore, nobody in the United States has "declared war on Iran", the current situation notwithstanding. That is why there are many arguments against it.
For the record, the US is a bit weird internationally about how it "declares" war. As a historical fact, the US never formally declared war against Vietnam. Anyone with a middle school education or greater would look at that "conflict" and say, "Obviously, that was a war." Weeks of aerial bombing of military targets in Iran? Again, common sense would say that is a war, regardless of what the US Constitution says.
But anyone who grew up during the conflicts in Korea or Vietnam will distinctly recall how controversial they were as "police actions" and calling it anything-but-a-war, because they were undeclared by Congress.
Obviously, anyone can look into the Wikipedia articles for any of those conflicts and see that they're all properly labeled as "wars", but it is also quite possible for a nation or entity to be a belligerent and participate in an actual war without formally and legally declaring it so.
So to say that "[President] Trump declared war" is definitely false, and it is rather amusing to me, reading the "Iran War" article, how often it says "Trump declared ..." something on X. Perhaps it's a fiction that haters like to hate with, like the way that the executive branch can't pass a law without all of Congress passing that law first, but they still take all the credit for passing those laws?!
I think that the US Congress is reluctant to declare wars because of the many ramifications for our own nation and the entire world. Nobody wants to see WW3 erupt, and WWII was well underway before the US was goaded into wholeheartedly joining the fray.
Was there really no other source than "houseofsaud.com" here? Seems like a strange source to be promoting on HackerNews. Their About, Contact, and Press pages don't even work. I can not find who owns this publication.
It does seem like we'd be better off with a more neutral source, but the only other article I could find from today (as opposed to 3 days ago) was https://iranwire.com/en/news/155401-irgc-claims-second-strik..., which doesn't look (or sound) like a neutral source either.
As an aside: I lack the vocabulary, but man those interactive "stats" cards scream LLM-written to me. No problem with it, necessarily, just something about that style seems to raise a flag in my mind.
They are certainly LLM-generated. I'm sure it's been done, but I would love to see a comprehensive look into what it is exactly that makes a UI seem LLM-generated.
From what I can tell, the issues are: Fonts are too small, secondary fonts have terrible contrast with their backgrounds, information is too dense/not enough white space, overuse of blinking/glowing status dots, overuse of bordered elements, and overuse of accented elements. I am surely forgetting some other issues.
I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
Lack of visual hierarchy. Lots of use of bold text to make numbers stand out, without bolding the corresponding labels. Reliance on heavily-saturated primary colors. Limited attention paid to alignment.
LLMs in general are pretty terrible at spatial arrangement. You should see some of the architects' critiques of AI-generated floorplans that are on YouTube; the LLM generates a layout that is just nuts. I've found them largely useless at putting together UI mocks; Figma or Photoshop is still way easier to work with if you just want to cut up UI elements and rearrange them.
I'm not sure I would consider it too dense. If anything I think they tend to be too sparse, although this could just be that they're often used for marketing type sites, which seem to want to make you scroll and click a lot for anything anyway, even if you have the screen space.
The status dots are a part of animations in general, which they overuse, especially things like transform/scale on hover and hover effects on many many elements.
I think it's not simply borders but contrasting-color borders often with box shadows.
> I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
Probably something to do with the training data and how it’s weighted. It’s the same how the writing is essentially full of overused phrases, the AI slop feel.
They're definitely Claude generated. People at my last company loved to generate pages & stat cards with Claude and they all had this exact same style.
My annoyance is that it's hard to figure out if it's actually up-to-date or not. If you click "Live conflict timeline →" it brings you to a collection of pages not updated since April (and at different points in April, oddly). The date count seems right, the oil price might have been correct when it was published but isn't "live" despite being labeled that way.
Between this and the Wildberries depot strikes in the Ukraine war, I think it really highlights how much peace was required to make the centralisation we've experienced work.
- Both require widely-separated resource opportunities. For whales, seasonally-abundant food such as krill or fish; for cargo, large-scale production and consumption of goods separated by water.
- Both require comparative safety from predators. Large adult whales have virtually no natural predators (orcas being a notable exception), until human whaling grew in scale largely since the 1500s and accelerating greatly through the 19th and 20th centuries, during which whole populations where annihilated. Maritime shipping depends on a lack of piracy or hostile naval warfare, with tremendous losses to traffic being seen during the 1st and 2nd World Wars in both the Atlantic and Pacific.
Highly-centralised or choreographed logistics chains are also fragile and subject to disruption. During WWII, the Soviet Union was initially inclined to One Big Dump supply depots, possibly a hallmark of centralised planning. These proved attractive targets and quite harmful to ongoing operations, and over the course of the war much more decentralised patterns emerged, or so I dimly recall from long-ago reading. Decentralised operations are integral to much guerilla / asymmetric warfare by the inferior party.
In Wildberries case (and Ozon's shortly), that centralization didn't require much peace at all - just a government that wasn't run by a fascist nutter who naively thought he could invade a neighbor without consequences.
The Gulf States are in fact military rivals and cold adversaries of Iran; Iran vs. the Gulf States is a more salient geopolitical conflict than Iran vs. Israel. Iran has, through the IRGC, been in hot wars with the Gulf States in the last 10 years.
They aren't neutral either. They're hosting military bases and miilitary assets that are being used to attack them. They are allowing their airspace to be used. Same with their waters and ports.
Which is to say that all the military assets in Gulf countries, including this Amazon DC, are valid military targets.
Russia has not formally declared they are at war. Some like Peskov have stated that they are in a state of war but that's different. In fact it is illegal in Russia to refer to it as a war. This law was introduced in 2022 and has not been repealed.
At least some of them, it depends on who you ask (Simferopol). But I had been using Ukraine as a shorthand for the conflict, so editing it to be clearer
Which reminds me: a friend made a wild mulberry pie yesterday with some dried mulberries shipped in from Chernobyl a year ago. He set it to cool overnight but when he checked in early morning and cut a slice, he found some of the berries glowed in the dark.
His quandary: should he eat it anyway? Seems like the radiation should be minimal, after all. Or maybe wait until this next Wednesday when he has a stomach x-ray and eat a small slice just beforehand to confound his primary care physician (they are both great practical jokers!)?
> How long will it take to rebuild those datacenters given the supply shortage?
Amazon will already have quite a lot of hardware queued up for new datacenter builds and expansions, some of that will presumably be redirected to this project once folks stop chucking missiles around. They also pride themselves on the speed of new datacenter rollout - even if they have to bulldoze the site and start from scratch, I doubt it takes as long as a year.
As someone who has lived most of his life in Iran, I ask those who find any alignment with the IRGC to please understand that it is a religiously fanatic military and terrorist group.
They are behind many atrocities in Iran and in the region including the situation in Gaza (partially). They also provided weaponry and support to Russia against Ukraine.
Iranian here, I have no love for the IRGC but I am glad they are keeping Americans from destroying our country right now.
We don't need Americans to "save us", we have 90M intelligent people and can resolve our own issues. It would be great if the West started respecting the sovereignty of other nations.
I have a hard time sympathizing with the Pahlavi supporters cheering the bombing of our home.
My comment wasn’t about the West saving us, nor was it about supporting Pahlavi (which I personally did, but of course I’m against the continued bombing of my country).
What I’m saying is that supporting one of the biggest terrorist group in the world by the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a grave mistake. It legitimizes one of the biggest, if not the biggest, reasons behind the current situation in Iran and some other bad situations in the region.
If you are an Iranian, you know what IRGC has done and keep doing, how good they are at propaganda and how nothing is beyond them including killing (and worse) anyone anywhere in the name of their god.
I know what IRGC has done, my cousin was spent 6 months in the Evin prison after the Mahsa uprising and her entire life was stolen from her. So I don't need a moral lecture.
But the IRGC is the only one defending my home right now. I also find it curious why you are not calling the US or Israel against this illegal aggression against our country?
Then we have both suffered from IRGC. as I have loved ones who were killed by them, and we both have a stake in the country’s security, since my family and most of my friends still live there.
What I’m saying is that we should not legitimize the IRGC. Trump is bad, the current Israeli government is very bad, and the IRGC is very bad.
On another note, the IRGC is defending itself, not us. They’ve killed exponentially more people in days than US or Israel has over in total. Again, all of these are bad.
Clearly the biggest tell that you are anything but Iranian. You might dislike the regime but no one calls their own government a “terrorist group”, a term reserved for foreign agents.
Don't be so self-centered. Supporting the IRGC to give Trump a presidency-ending war is the rational approach for non-US citizens. Iran has been so far a much more contained risk for them than the US.
I don't know if you realize - but the Americans have offered IRGC a pretty generous deal that essentially removes almost all sanctions in return to stop developing nukes, and the IRGC itself is escalating the situation, which could force America to bomb Iran again.
The American's ally broke the MoU nearly immediately after the signing by continuing to attack Lebanon.
> Point 1: The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war, by signing this MOU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.
As an American, I don't see how you can have serious negotiations with the US at the moment. You negotiate to an agreement, and then the terms change after agreement is announced. Or you show up to negotiations and your negotiation team is assassinated. Or your head of state is assasinated or kidnapped.
If you do get to a deal, there's no permanance and no means of enforcement.
You forgot to mention a small detail, the US did that only after they started a war. The US is known for its perfidy at this point, so any deals they propose aren't exactly trustworthy, and the US couldn't even contain israel after the latest MoU which made it void.
If only the prior P5+1 / Iran JCPOA deal of 2015 that constrained HEU and was backed up by multi country inspectors and tamper resistant / revealing on site instrumentation hadn't been thrown out the window by some fool.
Why on earth would anyone trust a country that reneged on a hard fought deal and followed that up by bombing during negotiations to restore what was lost.
Maybe because signing a new deal is better for your country and your people?
Like what's the worst case scenario that happens to iran if they just signed a new deal? How would it have been any worse than the current situation?
The deal doesn't even require a high level of trust - worst case they just go back to the previous situation. Making a deal only has an upside, even without trust.
Just like employment at will - and yet having a job is better than no job in most cases.
Yes of course but you are forgetting Iran needs to arm itself to the teeth before the new deal, so that when American does dealy things during the deal they are repelled. Just like the last few times America did a "peace deal" with Iran and then started dropping bomb deals upon them.
What is a deal? I think its a matter of definition. America is in the 9th or 10th day of continually dropping bomb deals unprovoked after setting a peace deal. Under that definition of deal, I think Iran should drop some good deals on some American naval vessels until America stops this stupid war.
I am of course not certain why Iran's armament is of any concern to America. It might be of concern to another country of course, which loves to make America fight its wars.
There's zero foundation for trust to uphold an international agreement even between US and its closest allies. Iran has no basis to believe any agreement will be legitimate or upheld.
The previous agreement ended with the US killing the Ayatollah and other senior leaders, promoting regime change, and demanding unconditional surrender. Venezuela capitulated to the US and is now under US control. If Iran's leadership's goal is to survive and to maintain control of their country, they're likely to continue hostilities until they re-establish a deterrent. Worked for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
If you believe the US military, Iran has already lost the majority of its capital-intensive armaments and its nuclear program and its senior leadership. This means there are fewer strategic holdings now at risk. Iran knows it can't be effectively invaded. The regime loses control in two scenarios: (1) internal regime change; (2) diplomatic capitulation to US demands. Waiting out at least US mid-terms while continuing to threaten the strait and neighbor's infrastructure is quite possibly Iran's best decision tree path from the point of view of the regime.
The current POTUS tore up the last nuclear deal with iran in 2018 for domestic political payoff. I can't take protestations about 'we've been trying to negotiate!' seriously when they come from the same people that created nearly a decade of strategic uncertainty (preceded by years of trash talk) and whose negotiation style oscillates between brutal violence and self-pitying wheedling.
I don't want to be partisan, but the incumbent POTUS is the epitome of dishonesty and the political polarization in US domestic politics is so extreme that even US allies are talking about a generational loss of trust. It would be irrational for a historical antagonist like Iran to bank on negotiating a new agreement with a country that refuses to bind itself by any international norms; it seems to me that it would be far more rational for Iran to breakout in pursuit of a nuke, and having once performed a successful test, reap the benefits of strategic stability that have gradually accrued to North Korea despite its ongoing pariah status. That is to say, once they have a nuke and other countries can no longer casually attack them, more of their economy can be redirected away from acquiring a strategic deterrent and into more normal kinds of economic development.
Not only has the US proven itself to be incredibly untrustworthy -both recently and in the past-, the protracted war in Ukraine demonstrates what happens when you give up your nukes and a member of the "nuke-havers" club decides that they want your territory. We're at the point where any country that has a militant nuclear-weapons-equipped neighbor and has both the ability to develop nuclear weapons and the state power to keep control of them would be stupid not to build them.
It's a shame that several of the countries that are supposed to be "the adults in the room" have decided to abandon the various gentlemen's agreements that made nuclear-weapons nonproliferation agreements sensible.
And it started bombing twice during those negotiations. They started war after Iran made concessions. And bombed during first negotiations.
The US idea of peace was regular bombing - I have heard people from defemse sector even use the "lawn moving" term publically. I dont understand an expectation that foreign country should be ok with that.
Plus, Trump dont do good faith deals, he promisses and breaks deals next day.
> we have 90M intelligent people and can resolve our own issues
This seems counterfactual, unless you called the regime for which you state you «have no love for» "satisfactory" or its length "insignificant".
> we have 90M intelligent people
This is also a pretty unbelievable claim - were it so, I and many others would move to Iran immediately. Can we say you are not being literally factual?
I don't care about Iran's leadership and think this shouldn't be the US's war to fight. Also, we aren't even trying to replace their government, we're just attacking per Israel's wishes. There must be a lot of Americans who agree.
Israel's leader is wanted by the international court for genocide. And lets not forget how Iran's current government took power? US installed a dictator in Iran because UK was angry that Iran nationalized the UK owned oil fields. This led to a coup, which resulted in the current Iranian government.
There's no good guys. Why is the US even there?
Edit: downvoted to -3. Did i say anything that was untrue? Or do people not like the truth?
Huh? I'm just pointing out that their supposed timeline of events missed a rather notable one.
Also, yes, your insight that not all revolutions are equal is correct. The US "revolution" (really more of a war for independence) was a net positive. The Iranian Revolution (which truly was a revolution) was a net negative.
Yes. We had no good justification for war against the crown circa the American revolutionary war. The crown spent a lot of money defending us vs the French in the French and Indian war and were totally justified in levying the extremely low taxes that they did on the colonists.
The funny thing is that the prosecutor for the ICC (Khan) who issued charges against Netanyahu was just removed today over sexual assault allegations, which had previously not been reported because the Muslim victim was worried that the charges against Netanyahu would be dropped. Khan literally messaged her “Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants”. Palestine has been such an effective political tool for the Muslim oligarchs and patriarchy. So anyway… more bad guys.
> US installed a dictator in Iran because UK was angry that Iran nationalized the UK owned oil fields.
> Did i say anything that was untrue? Or do people not like the truth?
It is widely assumed, but not factually correct, that the US was responsible.
On August 15th 1953 the CIA staged a coup to overthrow the government, but it failed. By the next day the State Department was actively trying to enter into diplomatic talks.
Three days later a group of clerics headed by Ayatollah Borujerdi took advantage of the situation and stirred up unrest that was ultimately responsible for the Shah taking power. They had been concerned about Mossadeq embracing secular liberalism and a referendum that dissolved the Majlis (parliament/congress). MI-6 had offered them support, but they rejected it.
> On 19 August 1953, Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état that strengthened the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. It was instigated by the United Kingdom (MI6), under the name Operation Boot[5][6][7][8] and the United States (CIA), under the name TP-AJAX Project[9] or Operation Ajax. A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mosaddegh nationalized the country's oil industry
That was the understanding until the CIA released a bunch of documents in 2017 which revealed that it was such an abysmal failure that they almost called off the entire thing.
The attempted coup brought out a lot of pro Mossadeq protestors. It wasn't until the 19th when clerics organized anti Mossadeq protestors that it took hold.
Might be worth flagging to Wikipedia editors for a review.
Even if we take these claims at face value, think about how this looks from the Iranian side:
- Failed coup attempt threatens government
- 'Ooops sorry just pranking you lol'
- Distracted government challenged by internal actor
- Power vacuum followed by monarchy
I'm sorry, this is like disclaiming responsibility for shooting at you on the grounds that most of my bullets missed and the one that hit just winged you. It's not my fault that your grumpy neighbor exploited the situation to attack you and then a third actor exploited the situation to seize all your assets!
Why do we think it's our job to intervene in other countries like this?
And if we wanted to help another country, working with the international community should be the only approach we take.
We've spent many decades overthrowing countries to what end? Even our vassals like Israel have universal healthcare while we're all in debt because of healthcare. It's not working and needs to stop.
In this case, the US was pretty involved in destabilizing the country. If the us and the uk hadn't intervened in 50s, Iran would have made a successful transition from monarchy to democracy. I guess we can discuss if the US owes anything to anyone, but a case for the us correcting earlier mistakes can definitely be made.
Og course there's so much more to the story.. but the fact is that the monarchy was effectively overthrown and shah had given up power and fled the country. In this particular instance it's very simple.. the us and the uk was bad
just bc the shah fled the country doesn't mean the us and uk were bad or even the root cause. same kind of simple-minded ignorance that led to Mossadegh's rise in the first place.
I can't assume that Iran would've successfully transitioned to democracy, or that it's even what should happen there. All those Arabian Gulf countries are monarchies.
It comes down to the simple reality that "I am because we are" and as such any time a human being is oppressed we are all oppressed.
One could make the argument the people who live in liberal democracies have an obligation to help those who unfortunately do not and who are still forced to live under autocratic oppression.
There were periods in history where most people lived under the thumb of some sort of autocrat of one form or another be they monarchs or religious leaders. Most people had very few human rights and had little opportunity for self-determination. Through the hard work of revolutionaries around the world many of those autocrats were deposed and others seeing the writing on the wall offered power to the people more willingly.
Think of it like a jailbreak where the jailer is oppressive and everyone in the jail is innocent. On your wait out should help open the cells of as many people as you can if only out of your own self interest because a larger mob escaping gives each individual a better chance to escape due to strength in numbers but also because it's just the right thing to do.
It's sort of the same thing here, Our ancestors (or even some of us) got out from under the thumb of an autocrat jailer but there are still others in that jail. If we don't help them who will? What would you want someone else to do if you were in their situation? To walk by an unjustly imprisoned person's jail cell and not free them when it is trivial to do so makes you the jailer.
Now that's the theory. In practice, I agree with much of what you're saying -- reality is a far trickier place than we'd like and the details make doing the right thing difficult if not impossible. And that doesn't cover the reality that western democracies are imperfect themselves and that many of their citizens are still subject to repression by their own autocratic leaning leaders, and so that we can't always do the right thing, but we should at least aspire to.
If you overthrow one autocrat and the society is not ready to self-govern, you'll just have another one taking his place. The best you can do is to fund some kind of democratic opposition on the ground and in exile, hoping to grow a political class mature enough that they will take over after autocrat loses power one way or another.
Trump is not Che Guevara. The US doesn't send troops at great personal danger to themselves to help oppressed revolutionaries. They back fascist dictatorships and launch drone strikes. They murdered 120 children on day one in Iran. Buying the party line here is absurd.
> Why do we think it's our job to intervene in other countries like this?
If Iran wasn't supporting terror organizations around the world and didn't help russia I would agree. Their country, they can kill as much of their own people as they please.
Well, maybe start fixing problems at home before spending tens of billions not fixing things anywhere else? we can't even change ourselves for the better, an adjudicated rapist, alleged pedophile rules us, and we're going to reform other countries? what grounds do we have to be casting stones ? "they're killing protestors!" I hear many westerns say, while ignoring the americans we're jailing for 30 years, calling terrorists for protesting the extrajudicial killings ICE are doing.
we have millions without healthcare, above subsistence employment, food security. Why are americans worried about "changing" iran?? Let's look in the mirror, folks.
Either treat it as not our problem, or if we're going to get involved, have a strategy to change the government. Yes it has been done in Iran at least once from the outside, maybe twice.
The alternative is what the last five American presidents have done: containment. There's a reason Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton and Bush didn't start the war that Trump did. This is why.
As mentioned, if you want to talk nuance bring the nuance to your comment. Don't try to fake it with "Even Bush and Biden" to make yourself feel smart on HN. You aren't, that shit's dangerous because it excuses further malfesance. Bush and Biden left a functioning gulf, Trump didn't. That difference is important even if you want to talk nuance.
Not OP, but I don't understand how you claim that Bush and Biden have nothing to do with the mess in the middle-east? Didn't Bush start the Iraq war, which removed political stability and introduced social and political chaos there? Didn't subsequent US Presidents after 9/11, including Biden, prolong the National Emergency to fight "terrorists" (look it up - while The Democratic party fear mongers that Trump will proclaim a National Emergency, the National Emergency declared after 9/11 is still in force! Every US President since 9/11, whether Democrat or Republican has extended it so that they can abuse the extraordinary powers it gives the US President).
Exactly. General opposition to the war on terror and the US in general has blinded you to obvious analysis that things were basically OK seven months ago and they're shit now, and there's a reason for that that isn't anything to do with US hegemony or whatever.
If you want to oppose imperialist scum, this makes sense. If you want the global economy to not be shit, it doesn't.
Trump could EASILY increase US support to Ukraine. He could have even done what France was flirting with, which was deploying boots on the ground in defensive positions as a "red line". Bringing up Ukraine/Russia is not in good faith. You know this, you know that democrats have called for aggressively arming Ukraine and never wanted this dumb Iran war.
Trump isn't "strong" until he actually calls Putin's bluff on nuclear weapons. You're not gonna do it Putin, and I'm fully willing for me and everyone I know to die in WW3/nuclear holocaust just to make sure Putin goes to hell a bit faster.
Ground troops have to invade Iran. Trump can't do that now because of upcoming midterm elections. After the elections, if there is no other way then Trump has to send ground troops in.
Forget Iraq, forget Afghanistan... because This Time It's Different
and of course ground troops _have_ to invade Iraq, Saddam has WMD's. And it will finally bring stability to the region. And they _have_ to invade Afghanistan, there is no way to take out bin Laden otherwise. And it will finally bring stability to the region. Casualties will be minimal because the oppressed natives will welcome us as liberators and our overwhelming military superiority will ensure our troops suffer no casualties.
There are no good choices here. It is either ground invasion and restore Ahmadinejad to power, or accept defeat and accept whatever "protection fee" Iran wants to charge ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
How are these equivalent? Yes, if you've started a pointless unjust war that you can't win, the right thing to do is say mea culpa, accept whatever fees the other party charges and fuck off forever. Not try your best to start WWIII just because, hell, we already killed 3000 civilians, might as well try to beat our high score from Iraq, right?
I believe IDF accepts foreign volunteers if they are Jewish. I could be wrong. If you are a jew, you can join now. You don't have to wait for the USA to send troops.
The alternative is it just destroy all their oil infrastructure and wait for the regime to collapse from lack of funds. But Trump doesn't want to do that (or let Israel do it) because he dreams of taking all that oil for himself and his buddies like in Venezuela.
If you do that, the oil, gas, and desalination infrastructure of the Gulf states will go down together with Iran. And besides that, why do you want to fight Iran to begin with?
This gets downvoted and ignored in every thread I see, not just on this website. But how is this not obviously the answer? We know Russia and China are funneling money to Iran so it would be a double win to drain their coffers too.
Morality aside, I just don’t see how this has been ignored. I know there is a large push for peace by many of the leaders of Iran and it turns out decentralized power can be a double-edged sword. Still, they can’t hold out forever.
No-one in their right mind wants to support IRGC. But, to see an egotistic, deranged, clown and the entire circus getting slapped in the face, is very satisfying to watch.
Yes true, but also anyone in Iran no matter what part your from wants the US gone in the region. The US is seen as responsible for allowing slavery in many golf states. It's also responsible for unfair businesses. And seen as a mafia state that steals resources.
And what happened before then? Iran had a secular prime minister, Mossadegh, but the UK and US supported, among others, conservative clerics to overthrow that elected government to put in a dictatorship.
Then in the 1970s the CIA provided SAVAK with the names of secular left opposition to arrest and execute.
So spare me talk about foreigners supporting religious fanatics, the western establishment did so for decades.
I for one don't want my tax dollars used to bomb schools in Iran.
I doubt you'll find many people here who are in alignment with a bigoted and criminal regime such as Iran's and its military.
What may be misinterpreted as sympathy for them is sympathy for the suffering Iranians, and antipathy for the criminal and bigoted US foreign policy especially in the Middle East. This did not start with Trump's recent idiotic game; Iran's only democratically elected president so far was toppled in 1953 by the CIA at the request of Churchill, because they felt Iran's oil does not belong to the Iranian people but to British Petroleum.
This is absolutely 100% true, which is why deliberately destroying all the pre-existing structural deterrents to their bad behavior was such a disaster.
Iran did bad things, but not as much as they could. Now they're doing more bad things and we can't stop them.
Instead this is a conflict where all sides are garbage. It's a conflict where we hope that everyone loses.
On the one side you have a terrorism-sponsoring theocracy that wants to force stone-age beliefs on its people, while exporting mayhem elsewhere. On the other you have Iran. (ba-dum-tss!)
Seriously, though, everyone involved with this conflict are bad actors. The US has bombed some 8 countries so far this year, threatened literal allies such that they got blood supplies ready for an invasion, is busy looting Venezuela like a busted pirate shithole -- basically Somalia -- is starving Cuba, is terroristically blowing up random boats by titling them "narco-terrorists", and is headed by a criminal rapist PoS that is rapidly turning the country into an idiocracy while their military is headed by a ChatGPT spouting imbecile. Israel is a war-criming pariah that pushed their luck a little too far and it turns out you can only bank on "but the holocaust" for so long while you're a rogue hermit nation that has vile behaviours and habits.
It's only in context that Iran, far down in the depths of garbage nations, somehow comes out looking like the better party in the conflict.
I totally agree with most of what you’ve said. The only part I disagree with is the whitewashing of what the IRGC has done across the region for years. Dismissing or minimizing its actions/impact simply because we also oppose other bad actors is, imo, a critical mistake.
Only then will you have the moral altitude to "go after theirs".
Not until WE have prosecuted OUR war criminals, will we have the precedent to prosecute any other nations' war criminals [1].
So, get on with it, citizen. Hold your government accountable. The people always get the governments they deserve.
[1] - No, "the West" is not morally capable of going after Putin, Netanyahu, etc. Not until we start prosecuting our own war criminals with real, effective results.
It's interesting that Cuba, Iran, and even Venezuela all took as part of their identity some sort of adversarial position with the United States (although Venezuela was post-Chavez). The US is currently treating them, to some degree at their word at this point.
Whereas you could look at a place like Vietnam that fought its war and moved on, Trump's focus is largely dealing with actors that never did. I suspect the Saudi's won't be the only Nuclear deal signed. So much of this is just the cold war extended, but with North Korea and Iran trying to work their way past non-proliferation. The natural response would also be to arm South Korea and possibly Japan. All of which would have been the West's natural response to non-proliferation being violated.
I get the perception, but much of this is decades in the making and almost everyone involved including the US should have sued for peace years ago. Actual peace. Not, "we're not firing rockets but Israel can't exist."
"You honestly seem more obsessed with Trump than the history here"
Indeed, why would I focus on the guy who started this very war under discussion and multiple other wars over the past year, has openly threatened nuclear attacks, and controls the largest military in world history. The guy who continually posts the US flag over sovereign, notably non-US countries. Must just be TDS, right? I mean, guy hasn't nuked a city yet so what's the big deal right?
What a bizarre statement. And the truth is that the US has been terroristic for decades, assassinating and murdering with impunity, stomping on sovereignty endlessly, with zero intentional law or moral justification on its side. Trump is kind of the ultimate outcome of that sort of behaviour, only he's too stupid to do the normal justification games. It's Americanism in its raw, most grotesque form.
"You completely lose me when you pin proliferation on the US."
The world had a general detente and a rules-based international order, and the only thing that has changed is the position of the US. Now Poland wants nukes. Japan wants nukes. I will not be remotely surprised if Germany, Japan, South Korea or any other nation one day pops up as a new nuclear power. I mean, Canada sure as shit should secretly get nukes, for obvious reasons.
If North Korea sold warheads to Iran, honestly, who would blame them? It's actually comically funny that while attacking Iran for their purported nuclear program, Trump is simultaneously offering a nuclear program to 9/11 Saudi Arabia.
"Even if I were to entertain the Wonderland of the US invading Canada or Greenland"
Wonderland? A number of high ranking US representatives have openly stated such desires. The country is such a lawless immoral idiocracy now that absolutely nothing is off the table.
1) Estimated $100M annually. 2) consistently 3) not sure, sources claim most of the income comes from international charity help intercepted 4) I don't know, I am just following HN guidelines and try to extract the meaning from a comment otherwise bound to be down voted.
The Iranian regime killed in a matter of days approximately the same amount of civilians as the IDF killed in Gaza over the course of their entire operation.
That’s just the tally from this year, they are also responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths across Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Ukraine.
How do you actually know that? Do you fully believe the media and media-adjacent NGO reports of these numbers? You need to understand the level of manipulation going on here. Are you aware that Mossad and Mossad/CIA backed armed revolutionary groups were involved in the protesting, likely with orders to engage in violent resistance. I'm not doubting many were killed, but the "30k+" numbers are clearly garbage. I don't have a side here btw -- I don't like the IRGC one bit. But we have been hearing about "Babies being killed in incubators" since 1990s, one should understand one's own government.
.. as opposed to the tens of millions the Western 5-eyes nations are responsible for, since 2003 .. and the 36 million refugees from our wars .. and the hundreds of thousands murdered in Gaza during the worlds latest preposterous genocide ..
I think the moral altitude you are looking for doesn't exist.
We've banned this account because (1) it has been using the site primarily for ideological/political battle, something we don't allow here*, and (2) it has been posting extreme flamebait, something we also don't allow here**.
How many Gazans are left in Gaza? How many Jews were left in Ukraine? Hell, how many Ukrainians remained? About 15% of the Ukrainian population was slaughtered, and the Nazis failed in their war aims. The Israelis succeeded, there is no force stopping them except their domestic politics.
Even if you for a second ignore the blatant nazi apologism and focus on the core claim of cruelty, the Nazis committed every one of those atrocities you’ve named, on a scale multiple orders of magnitude greater.
Sorry, Iran has a "responsibility" to defend itself.
And America's decision to slaughter Iranian schoolchildren was completely optional. It happened only because Israel convinced Trump that there was an easy win available.
Americans should be grateful that Iran has shown great restraint in their response.
The IRGC is a morally abhorrent organization. You'll never hear me argue otherwise. They victimize not only their neighbors, but also their own populace.
Also, the US bombing of the Iranian school was not a "grave mistake", it was the predictable result of reckless and incompetent leadership.
Other AI partners had stated that fully automated target selection without a human in the loop could be catastrophic -- and instead of adding a human in the loop to review the targets, US military leadership switched to Grok, whose leader had no such qualms.
The predictable result: hundreds of dead innocent children, and Americans like you who simply do not care at all.
No responsibility, no accountability, nothing at all... just some racist assholes arguing it's fine to bomb schools because the IRGC is awful (and because you love Israel).
By any definition of the word? Weird how "any" means israeli sources only. Everyone else agrees on it being a genocide. The israeli government is so brazen about it that it is funny to see your comment in 2026 it seems straight out of 2023
The UN defines genocide, in part, as "deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part."
This accurately describes Israel's multi-faceted genocide against the Palestinian people.
It is a genocide. It is mass murder. It involves direct violence, starvation, destruction of economic possibility, and it is morally abhorrent.
> your solution is the slaughtering of millions of Jews
The destruction of Israel does not mean the murder of Jews. A government can be replaced without killing everyone in the country. History is full of examples of this. Genocides are considerably _less_ common.
> "This accurately describes Israel's multi-faceted genocide against the Palestinian people."
Where is the part in genocide when the supposed "genociders" are allowing 4000 calories of food a day into the people they supposedly want to destroy, as well as providing things like polio vaccines? And where the number of civilians killed by one of the most lethal militaries resulted in deaths at a 1:1 civilian to combatant ratio, a number completely unheard of in modern warfare?
> "The destruction of Israel does not mean the murder of Jews. A government can be replaced without killing everyone in the country"
Are you being serious now? And when the Jews say they like their democratically elected government, what exactly will happen when an outside force attempts to "destroy" it?
> The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. Sahih Muslim 2922
When they're surrounded on every side by people who devote their lives to Hadith such as these, I can't blame them. Their enemies set up bases under hospitals, schools. Their wives and children are human shields. I think they're doing pretty well with the situation they've been handed. The situation is more complex than "They're firing on civilian populations", because their enemy fights in civilian clothing, and hides in civilian crowds. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place and are doing what they can to survive.
Palestinians are mostly Sunni Muslims, sometimes devout, but very few of them are zealot Salafi types. The vast majority of them are just ordinary people trying to live their lives in a world that’s cruelly stacked against them.
What’s radicalised them is not their religion but being driven from their homes and genocided - that would radicalise anyone. In fact given what’s been done to them, if anything the level of radicalisation in the Palestinian population is remarkably low
There's a pretty clear back and forth between Israel committing warcrimes, and Israels enemies commiting warcrimes back. While I can't say that it's unexpected for Israel to commit genocide, I can absolutely blame them, and certainly blame Netanyahu for their constantly escalatory strategies.
All I asked was for people to be more critical and thoughtful. The whole situation is terrible, and as far as I can see, our confusion has led all of these bad actors to benefit including IRGC and Israel.
Trying to attribute blame on anyone but its current Occupiers who are bombing them daily during a "ceasefire" is purposefully presenting a false narrative to hide who are responsible for systematically preventing and destroying aid, bulldozing homes, destroyed water wells, and deliberately targeting and starving children [1]
There are way more important things in life than Karma, preventing Zionists from actively trying to hide and whitewash Israel's genocides is one of them.
AMZN could have for example bought a "Gepard" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard) - easily shoots down cruise missiles and drones. Just a couple millions would have saved billions.
One> An executive has to care about a cost center, then proceeds to invest in prevention instead of looking like a hero after, instead of putting off a fire an getting a promotion or bonus. Which is nigh impossible.
Two> Our tech overlords try to push for our cyberpunk present to at least look kinda cool. Which they also refuse todo.
Radars and bases along the path of travel from Iran to Israel have been progressively degraded. Various interceptor types also have low stockpiles at present. I'm absolutely not an expert keeping well-informed, but my understanding is that Jordan's recent losses mean much of the path is now relatively clear of air defenses, and Israel would have to mount most/all defenses from their own territory for the first time. But Israel is at-present not engaging in the war, preferring to let US do the work, as a minister recently stated. Regardless, it may be attacked, depending on IDF actions in Lebanon.
Iran also isn't hitting Israel because they know Israel will go after Tehran and the regime more directly. They were the ones to target the Basij police, industrial and steel plants, government buildings etc. America is mostly constraining itself to bombing the coast and military assets, with a focus on the strait.
That plus most of Iran's attacks on Israel didn't do anything and likely still won't. Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
> Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
Also, Israel will not abandon (or be abandoned) by the US, but the others might want to cut their losses if supporting the US becomes costlier than being neutral.
The game being played is extremely interesting, with high stakes and no margin for error. Too bad people die.
Both Kuwait and Bahrain did airstrikes in Iran today with intelligence and air support from UAE. The gulf states being low risk targets will likely be a short term thing for Iran in the long run as well. https://x.com/WSJ/status/2080693251682795705
The US will not be able to sustain a military presence in the Middle East for much longer. Dedollarisation is happening and when it hits a tipping point, they won’t be able to sustain their current debt financing and interest on treasury bonds will rise sharply to compensate for that.
Won’t be pretty, as no empire has ever fallen peacefully.
Iran has recently demonstrated the ability to execute accurate strikes in Jordan. If it can do so in Jordan, it can do so in Israel once Israeli air defences are similarly degraded. Doubly so because many missiles meant for Israel were intercepted by Jordan.
Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.
This assumes Iran is maintaining consistent stockpiles and still has the capability of large attacks, including their fancier missiles which can avoid SAM systems. It's been well reported the number of drones/missiles Iran fired has consistently decreased. Israel and the US destroyed most of their missile factories so Iran is going to be conservative with how they use them.
At the peak Iran fired 650 missiles at Israel and only killed 28 people, mostly from hitting a single residential building. These days Iran is only firing small salvos into gulf states and only 20-30 drones at a time. I'd be surprised if they could pull off 2025 numbers when they fired a hundred at Israel.
> It's been well reported the number of drones/missiles Iran fired has consistently decreased.
One way of interpreting that statistic is that they are running out of munitions. Another way is to consider that stockpiles are not running low, but the initial response was a collection of high-burn, uncoordinated, decentralized tactical actions after an attempted decapitation-strike disrupted top-down C&C. Now that the fog of war has cleared, and communication has been restored, a more strategic regime is now in effect.
Iran has been getting consistent impacts on US bases in Jordan essentially every day for the past few weeks, and they are well defended.
At the end of the day Iran has more missiles than the US has interceptors. So when you get to the point when you're talking about running out, they just don't need to launch big salvos anymore.
Yes this is essentially what I was thinking. And there have been repeated estimates about Iranian stockpiles that have proven completely wrong. I think they have been able to manufacture throughout the war.
The political party I am a member off wanted a total arms embargo on Israël including anti air defense. (It didn't go anywhere ofcourse. But that a mainstream party is fed up with Israël is quite revolutionary).
Although what has changed is that Israël is no longer getting guns for free they need to pay for it same as everyone else. Progress!
The north of israel also wasn't evacuated for the recent Iran campaign. That was in 2024 and they didn't evacuate for the recent ground invasion they did in Southern Lebanon.
You seem to be woefully uninformed on this subject. Far northern Israel was evacuated in 2023 and has long since moved on to reconstruction. No significant damage in the area was directly from Iran, it was all from Hezbollah (their proxy militia in Lebanon).
The Israelis are the only ones that can, and want, to strike back. Besides no one weeps for missiles falling on Israeli cities, so that doesn’t serve the Iranians at all. Lots of much softer targets for Iranian missiles which can’t do anything to Iran.
Forgive the uninformed question, but doesn't Saudi Arabia also have significant armed forces? Given that Iran has closed the Straights of Hormuz and attacked several other Arab states, and has conducted strikes in Saudia Arabia itself, wouldn't that give Saudia Arabia a solid reason to strike back?
Iran has threatened to attack Saudi oil infrastructure if the Saudis join the Israel-American war on Iran. The Iran War Is Destroying Something More Valuable Than Oil - https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-refinery-crisis-saudi-aramc... As it has become clear that the US missile defence shield over Saudi Arabia is inadequate (as the US can't provide enough interceptors), the Saudis have decided to be cautious.
Many former army personnel have told me that the militaries of Oman (British-trained and equipped) and UAE (Australian and British-trained, US-equipped) are better in terms of capability and valor than most European countries, including even Germany's. Where they do face issues is in equipment stockpiles and sustaining conflict, which is what we've seen.
The Saudi main army is pretty incompetent, but the Royal Guard is extremely effective. They are separately trained by the West and maintain comms separate from the main army. And now they've teamed up with Pakistan, which has one of the best air forces in the region.
Qatar recently opened up a route for citizenship to foreign veterans who serve in their armed forces. That guarantees them a steady supply of soldiers from the region should the need arise.
The most vulnerable are Bahrain and Kuwait, but both of them have had help with security actions from their more competent neighbors.
From what I have read, their armed forces aren’t very motivated. There are stories about pilot trainings where the pilots were a bunch of rich guys that got into their jet, took off with full afterburner, did some fun loops and landed after using up their fuel.
Saudi has the advantage that they have the US doing the dirty work for them. No need to do much themselves.
Saudi Arabia has carried out airstrikes in Iran - but geography is a good reason not to want to escalate hostilities, despite the generational animus between the countries.
That is similar to pointing to someone on the street and claiming they want to commit suicide because you see no indication that they want to live. Unless there is strong evidence we can safely assume people don't want to be nuked. "I see no indication" is not the standard. The Iranians didn't start this, they don't seem to want to continue it and it is obvious that their planning will involve basic considerations like not doing things that will get them nuked.
Although hitting the AWS data centre in Tel Aviv seems like it would be a great tit-for-tat strike to really annoy the US and Israelis without threatening them in a way that will provoke a nuclear response or doing real damage to civilians. So I don't see why they'd purposefully hold back on that.
Things like the Knesset, attempts to knock out the entire military leadership simultaneously, maybe some sort of attack designed to wipe out a significant % of Israelis although I don't know what that would look like (maybe some sort of hit to take out food distribution or water).
Attacks trying to topple the Israeli state, in essence. Knocking out profitable capital is quite unlikely to do it.
I don't think any of that would provoke a nuclear response. As long as the Iranians stay away from NBC attacks, the Israelis aren't going to nuke them.
I don't know what you classify as existential. But unfortunately it is drop-dead easy to make a fission bomb and even easier to make (multiple) dirty bombs. Iran has the pieces to do these things many times over. Hell, by now they could have deployed dirty bombs abroad in multiple locations and we'd never know.
The only reason the USA doesn't flatten Iran with nukes is that the USA fears Russia will view it as an "all bets are off!" action and will do the same to Ukraine et al. Which is probably true right now.
lol no. Iran hasn't yet been able to enrich uranium to the necessary purity to make a bomb. Yes, making a bomb is easy once you have the materials. Getting the materials is very difficult. If by "dirty bombs" you mean a conventional bomb with radioisotopes mixed in... well, the use of that kind of weapon would probably get Iran invaded, but since it's not a very practical weapon it wouldn't affect the strategic situation.
Nuking Iran was never in the cards. We could have done that in 1979 and any time since. Ukraine has nothing to do with it. The red lines that would provoke a nuclear response from the US are pretty well known -- the US foreign policy establishment hashed out this stuff 75 years ago. Iran could get nuked by the US if it used NBC weapons against the US or our allies. No amount of bad behavior with conventional weapons is going to do it.
People in charge of nuclear armed countries are worried about the end of the so-called "nuclear taboo" which has kept countries from using nukes for 80 years, and they're not going to break it over a third rate power like Iran unless that third rate power actually acquires nukes and makes a credible threat to use them. We didn't use them in Korea or Vietnam. We didn't use them in Afghanistan. We haven't nuked North Korea. All more serious situations than the one in which we find ourselves today.
When somebody finally does break that taboo the world will be a much, much more dangerous place for everyone and planners in places like Washington, Moscow, and Beijing know it. Once a nuclear weapon is used, especially by a country with a large arsenal, every country that could have nukes but doesn't is going to have nukes.
Here's a good video on the topic concentrating on the possible Russian use of nukes in Ukraine:
laughing_man says "Yes, making a bomb is easy once you have the materials. Getting the materials is very difficult."
Well, apparently they've had (lots of) the raw material for years. And they have training: all those Iranian science majors at universities during/after the Shah was deposed are candidates. They've had 40 years to study, play and worship. As a friend says, Pakistan got the bomb and if they can do it, anyone can!
Marie Curie purified plutonium all by herself before the turn of the century (albeit in minuscule amounts at high personal cost), so I have little confidence in your assessment.
laughing_man says "...use of that kind of weapon would probably get Iran invaded"
That's the situation they're in. Furthermore many of them are "holy warriors" for whom death is a reward. 72 virgins waitihg for each martyr - I can almost smell the testosterone from here.[Note to countermeasures people: possibly use smell to "sniff them out" of their caves and hidey-holes?? Farhad's flatulence brings him down, bwahahaahaaaaah!8-))]
laughing_man says [dirty bomb] "not a very practical weapon".
Unfortunately I believe this is just wrongheaded. When I was a kid I read Flash Gordon cartoons. There was an episode with "cobalt bombs" to wipe out a civilization permanently. One of the few times that I was freaked out as a kid. Nuclear war didn't scare me at all, but cobalt bombs and extermination - sheeeeeeit!8-(
Seems the Russians read the same comic strip and took it to heart:
who's to say Iranians are any different (albeit hornier - though granted it really is a lot colder in Russia than in Paradise!).
laughing_man says: "When somebody finally does break that taboo the world will be a much, much more dangerous place for everyone and planners in places like Washington, Moscow, and Beijing know it. Once a nuclear weapon is used, especially by a country with a large arsenal, every country that could have nukes but doesn't is going to have nukes.?"
No shit, Sherlock! You're waking up. "Nuclear deterrence" is dead IMO (The July/August 2026 issue of "Foreign Affairs" magazine discusses this). [I hope there's no rush, I haven't yet bought a plane ticket. Goddammit! Probably end up rowing again!8-((].
> Well, apparently they've had (lots of) the raw material for years.
"raw material" != "material".
While I assume they could've purified enough of the former into the latter by this point if they wanted to, it is a much much harder thing to do than to say.
> Marie Curie purified plutonium all by herself before the turn of the century (albeit in minuscule amounts at high personal cost), so I have little confidence in your assessment.
No, what she discovered was *polonium*, not *plutonium*.
She named polonium that in support of the nationhood of Poland (which was at the time was partitioned between three countries), despite discovering it she never actually isolated it because polonium has a half life of 138 days which makes it a really really small fraction of the total material.
Polonium was first isolated in 1902 by Willy Marckwald who managed a whole 3 milligrams and even then it took another three years for people to realise what he'd isolated was the same thing Marie Curie had found. It took 15 tons of pitchblende to get those 3mg.
*Plutonium* on the other hand was first discovered in 1934. Plutonium (and uranium) is the stuff that makes fission bombs. It takes tens of kilograms of uranium or plutonium per bomb.
Purification of chemical elements (both polonium and plutonium) is much, much easier than separating the isotopes of uranium; and you need to purify ("enrich") uranium to a specific isotope to manufacture more than trivial quantities of plutonium. (And, indeed, polonium).
> Unfortunately I believe this is just wrongheaded. When I was a kid I read Flash Gordon cartoons. There was an episode with "cobalt bombs" to wipe out a civilization permanently. One of the few times that I was freaked out as a kid. Nuclear war didn't scare me at all, but cobalt bombs and extermination - sheeeeeeit!8-(
You're taking a comic book plot device as evidence?
Also, cobalt bombs != dirty bombs:
A cobalt bomb is a bomb powered by a nuclear explosion, that has enhanced fallout.
A dirty bomb is a normal, non-nuclear, explosive, that has some radioisotopes attached to it.
The former easily wipes out a city; the latter messes up a building.
Thanks for the history corrections and clarifications. Now I'll never forget that Mme. curie isolated polonium (another nearly-useless factoid). History is important but not as important as science. Still you're looking more and more like Frank Drebin: "Nothing to see here, folks, move along!"
ben_w: "You're taking a comic book plot device as evidence?"
I was telling a story about my early life! Get a grip! It was a lead-in to a)the Soviet doomsday device which may have been real and may still be around and b)to my early fright at the nasty side-effects of nuclear weapons.
ben_wL "The former easily wipes out a city; the latter messes up a building."
Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc. Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.
> Thanks for the history corrections and clarifications. Now I'll never forget that Mme. curie isolated polonium (another nearly-useless factoid). History is important but not as important as science. Still you're looking more and more like Frank Drebin: "Nothing to see here, folks, move along!"
Sarcasm noted, but you were mixing up something that wasn't isolated by Curie because it was too hard to do so, with something that was only found in the year she died.
> Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
If you gathered all the nasty decay products from Chernobyl and put them into convenient balls to strap to an explosive for the purpose of messing up someone else's country, you'd immediately have a problem of *the balls would cause the explosives you put them next to, to catch on fire, because of the heat output of their own radioactive decay*. Even in the spread-out form of the real life incident, robots stopped working when they got too close to large concentrations, the radiation fried circuits.
You are scared of something that is not only not plausible, it's something such that if they could do it at a scale big enough to hurt you, they'd have better things to do, e.g. hitting the US warships counter-blockading Hormuz.
> Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc.
Spare you the most important point?
> Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.
You say "lots" like it's a point, but it isn't: "lots" is far too vague.
Chernobyl had nearly 3000 times as much uranium in it as a fission bomb, to a different enrichment level, but how much enrichment matters during a criticality incident which transmutes elements into the nasty radioisotopes that you don't want to be around is complicated for fallout calculations. Nobody, including SpaceX, has a missile that is big enough to carry that all in one go.
At the time of the accident in the reactor of the fourth power-generating unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, the core contained 1659 fuel assemblies. Each assembly contained 114.7 kg of uranium, and therefore the reactor contained a total of 114.7 x 1659 = 190,287.3 kg of uranium. If the amount of fuel is calculated according to the uranium dioxide, i.e. in the form in which the fuel was loaded into the fuel elements, then its mass in each fuel element was 3.6 kg. A fuel assembly consists of 36 fuel elements, and therefore the reactor contained 3.6 x 36 x 1659 = 215,006.4 kg of uranium dioxide. The investigations performed in the destroyed buildings showed that the nuclear fuel after the accident is found in three main modifications: in the form of uranium dioxide tablets, in the form in which it was loaded into the reactor; in a dispersed form as dust and aerosol; and in a remelted state, in the form of a lavalike fuel-containing mass. This paper discusses the amount of nuclear fuel in the lavalike mass at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
This scale difference is also (one of the reasons) why even having a nuclear reactor as a "civilian program" is suspect. Makes it relatively easy to hide a weapons program.
Much, much more effective to use the reactor to transmute yourself some plutonium, than a dirty bomb. Apart from anything else, half the plutonium won't vanish in 30 years (caesium-137) / 28.9 years (strontium-90) / 8 days (iodine-131) like the main Chernobyl fallout is doing.
OK, so you seem the proper nerd to ask something I've been wondering for a long, long time: the world has tons of nuclear weapons. Each consists of at least one fission component and an optional thermonuclear component. Let's concentrate on the fission part.
Q. Would it be possible to economically move the fission component into a standardized nuclear reactor that could then generate electrical power?
IOW is there a "swords to plowshares" solution to the disposal of fission weapons or, once you've made one, are you stuck with a device that can only be used to blow things up?
Reason I ask is, I see Russia et al sitting on all these weapons which cost a great deal, are no doubt costly to maintain and of little or no benefit to anyone (well, other than as a threat). [I mean, it's almost like owning a fleet of BMWs but even less useful! ] If we could build a "reactor framework" into which we could move a single warhead's fuel and that fuel could generate electrical power until sufficiently diminished to be of little/no use as a weapon, then that would IMO be a very good thing. Countries like Russia who had a closet of nukes but no money could sell the nuclear fuel off and benefit, buyers could get electrical power cheaper(?), and the world would be better off. Everybody wins.
Or is making a nuclear weapon effectively an economic one-way street (i.e., you're stuck paying for it forever?
No, Ukraine is not the (sole) reason. USA has been in multiple wars since 1945, and never used the bomb again. They know the value of the nuclear tabu, and are not interested in breaking it, independently of the situation in Ukraine. They also have enough conventional weapons to level Iran with those, so they dont need to use nukes.
In addition I would hope that even in the morally bankrupt state USA is in today, murdering 92 million people would cause some political problems (but this might be naive of me).
> In addition I would hope that even in the morally bankrupt state USA is in today, murdering 92 million people would cause some political problems (but this might be naive of me).
Doesn’t matter. This question turns entirely on what Israel’s leadership thinks. If they’re faced with an existential threat, nukes are likely on the table.
> The only reason the USA doesn't flatten Iran with nukes is that the USA fears Russia will view it as an "all bets are off!" action and will do the same to Ukraine et al. Which is probably true right now.
That is not the only reason the United States doesn’t flatten Iran with nukes. It’s not even a consideration. How are you even arriving at such a conclusion?
It's theater for the Iranian regime. They expect almost all of the missiles will get taken down by the iron dome and US interdiction, but they still need to launch them to save face at home and not let attacks go unrequited lest they look weak.
Iran doesn't actually want to hit Israel hard, or at least doesn't want to do it right now. If they did, they wouldn't rattle their sabers so hard before each giant volley toward Israel, giving the Israelis ample time to prepare for a strike.
That's likely theater. if real rockets / drones were fired, there would be 100x more people dead. There is almost certainly some "understanding" with all parties involved.
A more likely reason for the lack of widespread death in Israel is the Iranians don't have the capability to cause it. The Israelis have air raid shelters, plus early warning radars that give them time to get to those shelters. And they have anti-missile systems to take out the most dangerous incoming ordinance.
Bizarre in the sense of mostly performative tit for tat strikes instead of some kind of serious strategy to win and to win for good. And in the case of Iran, the strikes are telegraphed in advance in almost comedic fashion. “OK, we’re starting operation True Promise n. We’re launching missiles. We’re about to do it, guys. OK is everyone ready? For the missiles? These are the targets, but next time it could be more serious, OK?”
This does not resemble what I would imagine a fight for civilization survival to look like. I’m talking about the stakes being you win or you, your family, and every man, woman and infant you know is going to be killed or starved in concentration camps.
If you're launching ballistics in a conflict where a local-theatre adversary has nukes, you might actually want to telegraph just what you're lobbing, when, and where, to avoid a Petrov-gone-wrong scenario.
"We're only hitting Gulf neighbour US-adjacent targets" is less threatening than "we're aiming directly at Israel".
For those unfamiliar with Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, you can thank him for being able to read this comment today.
Israel has densely populated urban neighborhoods that would be completely wiped out in a conventional attack. Tehran would be destroyed with nukes but so would every major Israeli city. The scale of country size is immense. If Israel thought that nuclear weapons were a viable option, they would use them already. That’s the reason for the tit for tat. They both have capacity to attacks that would devastate each other countries. Smotrich would rather the US take the brunt of attack and losses their ME bases.
It is really comedic! When the US sent over that bunker-buster bomber run, I noticed this for sure! The US and Iran's leadership basically choreographed this over X, and the misdirection, with one bomber's transponder flying in the opposite direction, was nearly adorable!
And the later "retaliation" against local bases by Iran was in the same, choreographed public fashion. At this point it seems to be a very respectful gentleman's conflict. It's very unlike some of the wars we've got entangled in, for sure. It seems like both sides sort of acknowledge that if we don't play fair, if it's not choreographed, if we don't stick to the rules, we really possess the power for world-ending, horrific conflict.
I'm skeptical as well. This guy who ran underage pageants and modeling agencies, who bragged about unimpeded access to locker rooms, dressing rooms and, um, other private areas, and whose name appears in the Epstein files more often than Harry Potter appears in the Harry Potter books, sounds legit to me.
Israel is not an ethno state. About 21% of citizens are Arab. They vote, sit in the Knesset, have served on the Supreme Court, and hold full formal civil rights.
There are also other factually wrong things in your comment, but let's leave it at that.
Cash payments, rental subsidies, mortgage discounts, free healthcare, free tuition, tax credits, tax exemptions, job placement, immediate citizenship, etc. All if you're of a certain ethnicity.
Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to
their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision making and surveillance and analysis capacities. [99] In October 2023, when the Israeli internal military cloud overloaded, [100] Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. [101] Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, [102] under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. [103] In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies. [104]
It's amazing how these people don't seem to get that the very fact it's an occupation makes basically everything Israel does there illegitimate.
If someone enters my house uninvited, I don't care what they have to say to justify themselves because they don't have a right to be there in the first place.
Also, Israel designates tents dual use.
Designating an AWS location very likely used for targeting assistance during this war on Iran is a very different thing.
You mean that massive "Hamas headquarters" that the IDF promised us was under Al Shifa hospital? The one they made renders of with dozens of rooms, but after attacking the hospital all we got was footage of single small hospital-tiled room, that Israelis themselves admitted they built?
> Who, if anyone, is Iran allowed to retaliate against?
The answer here is surrender and disarmament. It's the only outcome that seems compatible with the reintegration of Iran into the world economy, normalization of diplomatic relationships with neighboring countries, and path to development/prosperity for its people.
Iran will never surrender because US/Israel proved themselves unequivocally to be brutal savages that will torture, rape and kill you if you surrender. There is literally no point in surrendering to a barbarian horde.
There's so many people here who have clearly lost their ability to think clearly any time Israel is involved. I'm sure it's just coincidence though and nothing else is going on.
And what does Iran get in return for America butchering 160 innocent kids, or assassinating their leader? Or does "fairness" only flow in one direction?
Compare to Iranians: Affected by the aftermath of the American coup of Mosaddegh (ultimately leading to IRGC's existence), providing weapons to Iraq for the Iran-Iraq War (200K deaths), etc. + decades of stupid policy trying to take their oil in the name of "regional security" (for "our" oil).
~250 alone on one day in 1983. 300-400 total from their terrorist networks. Thousands of casualties (wounded and killed) in Iraq that are directly attributed to Iran.
I do so wish everyone espousing 1:1 casualty ratios as necessary & fair, and that anything else is immoral, would take stock of where they live and specifically how those countries avoided falling to the axis powers in WW2…
And, courage of their convictions, if their own people are so inherently evil for making “the other bastard die for his” they should be renouncing citizenship, yielding their ill-gotten wealth, and self-immolating for their nations eternal shame.
Categorical reasoning as applied to war does not yield a tit for tat, its category versus category. All of column B to preserve any column A. “Not worth the bones of a single British Grenadier”.
installing a brutal puppet dictator to torture and murder civilians counts as what exactly?
and protecting them from being tried criminally after theyve been deposed?
the US continues to blow up civilian infrastructure, and those WMDs that sadam was supposed to have were american made, for the purposes of using on iranian civilians.
The US didn’t install the shah to torture and murder civilians. It was shahs choice to do so.
To blow up civilian target is a choice.
I know nuance is unpopular nowadays but I do see a difference between bad decisions with unintended consequences and bad decisions with intended terrible results.
At some point, as an American, we must accept the consequences for being warmongers. If we want less harm, we should stop causing it all around the world for no objective gain (prove me wrong, I see no gains, only trillions of dollars incinerated and countless lives lost). But the US keeps lobbing stones expecting no consequences for doing so. Something about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
“Just one more conflict bro” as the kids would say.
> They can mind their own business, but they chose not to.
Neither the US nor Iran can do that. Iran and the US are in very different positions:
The US is the status quo power; they and their allies dominate the Mideast and Persian Gulf, and are hostile to Iran for geopolitical (control of region), economic (oil), and religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons. There is a long history demonstrating that - Iran would be crazy to trust otherwise. If Iran does nothing, US and allies would control all of the Mideast (including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq) and Iran would be helpless to protect itself or exercise its own will on any matter, legitimate or not, and risk getting overthrown and replaced with a US/allied proxy. That happened in the 1950s, and the proxy, the Shah and their heir, brutally ruled Iran until 1979 when the current were part of the Shah's overthrow and took power. Part of their raison d'être is to make sure US and allies never control Iran again. Iran cannot survive by 'minding their own business'.
Iran is the revisionist power; they would like to change the power structure so they are the dominant power, or at least they need to establish independence from the status quo power. They are a much lesser threat to the US than the US is to them, for obvious reasons: Iran doesn't have aircraft carriers and bases off the US coast, complete air superiority in US skies, isn't bombing the US, didn't kill the president, and lacks the power to impose crippling economic sanctions. But they are still a threat with ambitions that the US can't ignore.
The status quo power sets the rules and wants peace on their terms - with them still in power - so of course any challenger is violating the rules and appears to be an enemy of peace without being aware of the dynamic.
> Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe
The US also carries out ops, including those that kill civilians, all over the globe (e.g., bombing speedboats in international waters), as do others. Some US ops are covert but with leadership of the international power structure and the power to act sometimes with impunity (e.g., removing Venezuala's government), they don't have always do it covertly. Iran can't fly bombers everywhere on Earth; they only have covert or insurgent operators for many purposes.
I don't understand what it means to say that the US is hostile to Iran because of "religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons". Are you saying that the US backs one of the two major Islamic branches?
I was a little imprecise, sorry. One reason that the predominantly Sunni countries, such as Saudi Arabia, have conflict with Iran is because Iran is predominantly Shiite and the center of the Shiite world (as I understand it; I don't know a lot about it). For other reasons mentioned, the US is allied with many of the predominantly Sunni countries in the Persian Gulf; I doubt the US has any direct interest in Shiite or Sunni.
You can say the same, neither Iran nor the US is the good guy. It’s about as sane as the Star Trek episode where deaths are mandated by simulation outcome. It is what it is until political turnover provides an opportunity, but not a guarantee, of change.
My children will avoid any form of participation in US military operations, and I legally avoid paying as much US federal tax as possible ("how many of my tax dollars have contributed to killing innocent people?"), so I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic beyond as a scholar of history and predicting the future. Old men sending young innocent people to die is a tale as old as time, and I expect it to continue long after I’m gone (regardless of nations, boundaries, etc, which are also fluid over time), so the best one can do is manage your personal risk accordingly. We must assume it to be a constant of some sort until change occurs where that assumption would change. If tail risk catches you (“wrong place at the wrong time” through no fault of your own), c'est la vie.
Iran gets to learn "you break it, you buy it," with their own money. The remaining government officials still running their mouths on X and elsewhere should also be grateful they are still alive.
So far the Iranian response has been very strategic and calculated. So much so, that the majority of the west especially the Trump administration is not even capable of understanding their strategy.
I don't think it serves a strategic purpose to bomb Mar a Lago at this stage in the game.
BAH53 (Manama): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492345589
BAH54 (Zallaq): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1359931661 BAH55 (Hamala): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/956069872 If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492281507 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492953902). Based on the permanency of those air/missile defence batteries it doesn't look like the government of Bahrain are expecting things to get safer for data centre hosting in Bahrain any time soon.reply