russia localized production long time ago and made some upgrades to drones. ukraine did bomb this week factory that makes jam resistant antenna arrays and another one that makes assembly of drones
Hopefully Iran does a little retaliation and then goes back to their covert proxy war rather than it escalating to open warfare. I honestly don't even know if either Iran or Israel could sustain open warfare given the distances involved without dragging in other forces to help. I would rather those forces not be ours.
At a minimum the US will veto any vote at the UNSC declaring Israel's action illegal. There are no laws or institutions that the US won't subvert to back Israel. Also, Trump already tweeted that he's sending Israel more bombs and UK admitted that it "helped" the attack. Israel got buy in from the west, no matter how much Rubio at State pretends it has nothing to do with us.
Please explain how allowing Iran to get nukes is in way or form helpful to the state of the world?
History will view this operation as a great success - and exactly what the west should be doing, a precision operation to take out advanced military capabilities of authoritarian regimes.
Imagine a world where Russia & North Korea had no nukes.
Yes, Israel has done lots of terrible things (but so have it's neighbors), but this one is pretty awesome.
Nuclear weapons have done more for world peace than any other invention in history. Countries with a nuclear option are effectively uninvadable, and that pushes conflicts away from the grueling total wars of the Napoleonic and World Wars, and into constrained, limited proxy wars. Want Israel to stop committing atrocities? Nothing better for it than nuclear armed neighbors. Want to keep Israel from ceasing to exist? That's why they've got the bomb.
Supporting Israel in preventing Iran from getting nuclear capabilities is destablizing, not the opposite.
The more countries with nuclear weapons, and the more unstable or extremist they are, the greater the likelihood of an eventual detonation, even if accidental. 40 years ago, everyone understood this and agreed nuclear proliferation was bad, the US and USSR committed to reducing their stockpiles, and Reagan himself expressed a desire for complete nuclear disarmament, in part because of the near-catastrophe of the Abel Archer incident--a catastrophe only narrowly avoided despite the US and USSR both being stable superpowers led by rational actors. Anyone encouraging nuclear proliferation for every tin-pot dictatorship or gay-lynching theocracy to make the world safer is insane.
> effectively uninvadable
Yet Israel was invaded during the Yom Kippur War when it had nuclear weapons, the UK was invaded by Argentina during the Falklands War, Russia was invaded briefly by Ukraine (Kursk). And Israel arguably just demonstrated that developing a survivable nuclear deterrent probably isn't as easy as many thought. (Ukraine, to a lesser extent, also with Spiderweb.)
> Supporting Israel in preventing Iran from getting nuclear capabilities is destablizing, not the opposite.
On the contrary, it sends a strong "fuck around and find out" message to any country pursuing nuclear weapons. And if Israel is capable of this kind of decapitating strike against a country's nuclear program, imagine what the US (or China) could pull off.
In these situations I like to point out that Pakistan also has nukes, Muslim terrorists, and skirmishes with another ally of ours (India) and there's no political campaign to crush them over it.
A lot of this is just a consequence of repeated exposure to foreign propaganda. It's not reasonable policy.
The fact of nukes is that they are both a get out of international jail free card and security against existential threat.
Previous decade arms control understood this, and understood something very valuable needed to be offered to keep countries from pursuing them.
Current nuclear arms control is failing (Iran, North Korea) because the international community is pretending they aren't worth pursuing at almost any cost.
If a country wants to pursue a foreign policy antagonistic or counter to the US, they'd be insane not to develop nuclear weapons.
Perhaps we shouldn’t leave it to states that own their own nuclear bombs, in defiance with international treaties (like the non-proliferation treaty) to dictate who can and cannot have nuclear bombs, and how to deal with countries that shouldn’t.
Imagine a world where the USA and Israel had no nukes.
There are much better methods to prevent Iran from getting nukes. Methods which have been shown to be effective. And in my opinion, the world really needs to denuclearize Israel (as well as any other nuclear armed nations).
What are you talking about? What methods were effective at denuclearizing Iran? They continued to pursue nuclear arms even during the Obama treaty.
Iran has been at war with Israel for the last 10 years, the fact that Israel held back until now, is 100% bec of the methods that proved totally ineffective.
> There are much better methods to prevent Iran from getting nukes.
And what if those methods don't work?
Obviously I would prefer all this to be resolved in a diplomatic way a decade ago, but in some cases military action will be the only way beyond a certain point.
There was a deal which exchanged UN monitored nuclear inspection with lifting of sanctions. It worked kind of well until Trump pulled out in this first term.
Similar deals can be reached today. For example Europe can promise to sanction Israel for their nuclear program in return for international monitors.
This is a testable hypotheses. We can look at arms buildup in history. I predict that you are wrong. Conventional arms buildup tends to correlate with war. The more war there is, the more countries built up their arsenals.
Further, I predict that there is a negative correlation with international treaties, and bilateral agreements and arms buildup. That is, the more nations cooperate, the more they negotiate and agree on stuff, the fewer arms they pursue and keep.
I don‘t feel like doing the research to gather evidence for my hypothesis, but mine at least doesn’t fail the sniff test. Feel free to prove me wrong with data.
That is not my hypothesis. My hypothesis is about weapons buildup in relation to a) war, and b) treaties and agreements. And it is about trends and likelihoods, not absolutes. To restate my hypothesis. More of (a) = more weapons. More of (b) = fewer weapons.
Sure we can look at Israel, a nation which has a part of tons of international treaties and agreements (albeit fewer then most other nations) and yet is one of the most antagonistic militarized nations in history. So we know there are exception. North Korea might be an example of a country that passes the sniff test of my second hypothesis. Outside of the most international treaties and agreements and also extremely militarized.
But on the other hand, according to my first hypothesis, Israel does pass as an example that contributes to the passing of the sniff test. Israel is probably the country that has seen the most wars and conflicts since World War 2 (maybe USA and Russia/Soviet Union have seen more; I don‘t know), and in accordance to my hypothesis, it is also one of the most militarized nation in the world currently (including one of very few nuclear armed nations).
EDIT: I was just reading an interview with Jim Walsh—a US based nuclear weapons expert, and he seems to agree with me and disagree with you:
> “I think there’s strong scholarly evidence – and certainly, if you look at the politics of the moment – to believe that in this attack, Israel will get the exact opposite of what it wanted, which is Iran is going to decide to go for the bomb.”
We know that experts are fairly bad at predictions.
Plus we have the latest report from the UN that Iran has been breaching their nuclear agreements.
Iran most likely won't be able to redevelop a nuclear program if the current one is destroyed (and Israel could easily destroy it again when/if they restart)
Iran’s behavior is exactly in line with my hypothesis. They a) were involved in regional conflicts against Israel (including having bombs dropped on them from Israel), and b) had their treaties broken by the USA.
Dropping the treaties and invading Iran does seem to correlate with weapons buildup.
Stay out of what? The Trump admin’s foreign policy is to allow Netanyahu to operate autonomously. The same they offer ICE.
In terms of American foreign policy interest it’s basically making us more vulnerable.
In so many words, Netanyahu might get us all killed. Trump will not decry anything Netanyahu does, so it’s 4 years of war and you better believe it. Putin also has no incentive to give Trump a peace deal. Provide enough war zone cover and Taiwan will just happen, all of a sudden. Negotiate all three peace deals, please, I’d love to see it.
Trump is out of his element here, he’ll be leaving a world at war. When you a let a pot of boiling water keep boiling on the lowest heat, you may not see all the boiling bubbles, but I assure you it’s boiling. It’s a boiling world, and without certain advents like AI, we’d literally have no positive news (think that through for a second). Without the miracle of AI, all we’d have is the most depressing world situation you could imagine.
> The Trump admin’s foreign policy is to allow Netanyahu to operate autonomously. The same they offer ICE.
to be honest, by now, it feels like the opposite, Netanyahu is allowing Trump admin to operate autonomously when it comes to internal affairs, for foreign policy Netanyahu is dictating the US foreign policy.
Go check Twitter, for some reason 90% of congress members immediately started praying for Israel after Israel's attack, as if they were handed over the message
On the other, based on the comments I have been reading here for the past couple years, you are supposed to embellish or flat out lie to support your point.
It says a lot about the discussion here that the above negative comments about the proxy nature of Israel/The USA and war are upvoted while this comment about...proxies and war is downvoted. Shows a lack a seriousness/depth of thought but instead it's all just talking points and point scoring.
The diplomatic attempts on the US' behalf have been absolutely bewildering towards Iran. At first they refuse to negotiate, so the US lets them draw their own lines besides nuclear weapons. So Iran draws non-WMD "red line" clauses, and America ignores those immediately. Weeks of negotiating later, no signs of good-faith discussion from the US lead to the hammer coming down because there was "no other way" to solve it.
If it wasn't so goddamn confusing, it would almost appear deliberate. Between this and the US suing Yemen for peace, it's looking like a good decade to strongarm America's soft power.
It gets worse -- the person leading the negotiations with the US was one of the targets:
> Ali Shamkhani has been severely injured in a strike targeting his house and hospitalized. Mr. Shamkhani is currently spearheading nuclear talks committee appointed by supreme leader and is former secretary of National Security Council
It’s because American foreign policy is not dictating the future of this, it’s Israel’s project and they are directing things. America has never had any success negotiating anything in the Middle East. We take what’s given to us.
America's foreign policy forged the first Iran deal. Clearly there was intent to try the same approach a second time, clearly it didn't work.
> America has never had any success negotiating anything in the Middle East.
Trump hasn't, let's be clear. But given his posturing towards the Gaza conflict it really shouldn't surprise you that his credit with Arabs is rock bottom.
We just got strange alerts on our phones here in Israel (3:00am local time), reading:
"""
Emergency alert: Extreme
Home Front Command instructions must be followed.
Due to the preparation for a significant threat, the Home Front Command's instructions, which are currently being distributed throughout the media, must be immediately followed.
Since 2002 Israeli court ruled individual conscientious objection is an exemption. There are lots of news stories of it being denied, but that is because collective action is considered protest and thus illegal.
The Israeli High Court of Justice ruled in 2002 that refusal to serve was legal on the grounds of unqualified pacifism, but "selective refusal" which accepted some duties and not others was illegal.
It also looks like it's not entirely simple to get the exemption, and if you don't do it correctly you could be jailed:
Ethics are utterly irrelevant in geopolitical affairs. When nation states face existential threats they'll do whatever it takes to survive. They might invent some ethical justification after the fact for public consumption.
And I don't mean this as a particular criticism of Israel. Most other countries do the same sort of thing when necessary.
That's only because we're throwing away the hard fought prize humanity earned at the cost of two world wars and millions of lives: the system of international laws and the UN.
Nah. The UN is a cute little debating society but it never had any meaningful capacity to enforce international treaties on it's own. Relations between sovereign states have always been fundamentally anarchic, and always will be.
The current system might be bad, but some sort of world government run by the UN would be far worse.
On the contrary, the US has become England: A state of the art cutting edge industrial society and empire turned into a smug entitlement driven immoral turd that is far beyond useless for everyone outside and most inside of it. This will inevitably trigger a global effort to disconnect and help foster the downfall. It will be expensive for everyone involved.
Also wise to remember, there are now so many quiet parts you can't say out loud that pretty much everyone who knows anything no longer participates in online conversation.
We don't make things in the West anymore so our dialog has no constructive purpose. You don't care what I think, say or who I am but those with nefarious intend are the ones paying close attention to everyone.
The destructive people are outperforming the rest of us and it can only end in one way. It has always ended the same way.
> the US has become England: A state of the art cutting edge industrial society and empire turned into a smug entitlement driven immoral turd that is far beyond useless for everyone outside and most inside of it.
Oh don't worry, Trump and his cronies are working hard to make the US not cutting edge at anything anymore.
"Iran general says Tehran aims to wipe Israel off the ‘global political map’", that's consistent with other leaders and the regime ideology since the very start
“We warn them [Zionists] that if a new war breaks out, it will result in their termination,”
and there are no shortage of such quotes, and even concrete plans (for example by using Hamas and Hezbollah), one attempt of which we have witnessed in 2023
> active preparations that turn that intention into a positive danger
>a situation in which the risk of defeat will be greatly increased if the fight is delayed
We know independently that Iran has been enriching massive amounts of uranium to degrees of purity only suitable for nuclear weapons.
See last announcement by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
According to Israel there have been other advancements in the nuclear program which might lead them to a nuclear bomb
1. Arming and organizing proxies to attack Israel for years is much more than just intention to do injury, it is actual. Those proxies continue attack on Israel (the latest missile launch at Israel was this week). How many missiles does a country have to eat before clause 1 if fulfilled? Any country besides Israel that number would be 1. In additional Iran does not recognise Israel's right to exist as a country and explicitly calls for Israel's destruction.
> There are no indications that Iran intends to use nuclear weapons against Israel.
The Iranian government are rather extreme theocrats, but they aren’t a suicide cult. They know that a nuclear first strike against Israel would result in massive nuclear retaliation aimed at annihilating Iran as a modern nation-state. They aren’t going to do that.
I think their primary reason for pursuing nuclear weapons is as a deterrent against conventional invasion, forcible “regime change” like what the US did to Saddam Hussein - much as Iran welcomed the removal of one of their national archenemies - given Iraq is majority Shi’a, a democratic Iraq is generally more friendly to Iran, although not all Iraqi Shi’a are pro-Iranian (e.g. Ayatollah Sistani, who is very influential, dislikes how Iran has politicised the religion) - but it raised the risk the Americans might try the same thing on them.
Edit: In case people don't understand why this is the kind of comment we'd call out: I've said a few times in different ways that Hacker News should be a place where we can discuss difficult topics. There are few more difficult topics than armed conflict between nations. It's pointless to have a discussion that mostly consists of people with entrenched oppsing views hurling insults at each other. If somebody is wrong, refute them with opposing evidence. Otherwise the only thing we'll achieve is to drive away anyone who is interested in actually learning anything new about the topic, in which case we're much better off not having the discussion at all.
When a person writes something that is obviously nonsensical it should be called out as such. This is especially so when the topic is about ongoing acts of war.
If it's an important topic, which it is, it's all the more important to convey the substance of your point, without the abusive barbs. Dropping the swipe "Please don’t act as if you don’t know that you are peddling nonsense" would have made all the difference. We can't know what people "know" when they write things on a discussion board.
In general I agree. But not in this case. In the “polite” approach what happens is that obviously bad assertions are made and one politely engages but the starting point is such that you are engaged in an attempt to just get to a reasonable place. It’s sort like how combatting a lie is much more effort than spreading one.
My comment above was not for the person who made. I don’t engage with such people. It was for the people who stumbled upon it. I want them to know that there are people who think the comment is ridiculously bad.
There's no "not in the case" on HN, though. People can figure out the quality of a comment themselves, perhaps helped along by a comment that disputes what the first comment says. But the idea you're doing everyone some service by trashing the place is misplaced, it's just not how things work.
The U.S. shot down a civilian Iranian airplane and killed around 200 people. The commander of the ship that did this later got promoted. This does not mean the U.S. wants to use nuclear weapons against Iran. Your points are not valid.
He did not get promoted later. I was wrong. But he wasn’t fired, relieved of command or put in jail. He later received an award for his naval service. But all of this irrelevant to the point I made.
When a Soviet fighter pilot shot down a Korean jetliner the U.S. reaction to that was quite a bit different than our reaction to the Vincennes shooting down the Iranian jetliner.
You can only pretend Houthis are making ballistic missiles in their caves and arent directly supplied and fed targeting data by Iran to sink ships crossing red sea for so long.
Which of the three points are you suggesting “Iran supplies arms to the houthis in Yemen” satisfies in the above criteria to justify the preemptive attack in Tehran?
It seems like it doesn't justify a preemptive attack, but rather a counter attack. Israel is responding to missile attacks from Yemen by attacking the manufacturers in Iran
If Russia had the capability to do so without facing an extreme counter attack you better believe they'd blow the shit out of weapon manufacturers.
The problem for Russia is that such an attack would bring in all of NATO which they likely can't defend against. And either way would result in massive damage to nearly everything in Russia.
OTOH, Israel can attack Iran and as shown in the past[1], Iran will roll over and only send a weak-ass slow drone attack as a response.
I wasn't asking about capabilities. I asked the user if he believed Russia has the right to attack EU countries providing weapons to Ukraine, possibly causing civilian deaths, just as he thinks Israel had the right to do so in regards to Iran.
I think this is lost on many people. There's no authority overseeing sovereign nations, no real law or consequence to law-breaking even if there was one. There's only allies, treaties, pacts between nations, military might, and the consequences of aggression that keep the peace. Russia would be bombing all the supply lines of weapons flowing into Ukraine if the consequences weren't so high. There's certainly no law that is preventing them from doing so, only the consequences of their actions.
This question is difficult to answer because it's unclear what you mean by "right" in this context. The moral high ground? Russia doesn't have that now, nor has it ever had it throughout its history of military expansionism.
Why is Israel in Gaza? Oh yeh, because Hamas invaded Israel on Oct 7 2023 and killed 1,200 people. To put that death toll in perspective, it would be like a Mexican Cartel invading the US and killing 41,000 people. For China it would be 174,000 people.
Then 100x those figures and you find the proportion that Israel killed in Gaza versus its population, significantly women and children, for perspective.
Why is that relevant? Israel is justified in killing as many people as they need to to ensure their security. The number of dead seems irrelevant to me, you need to convince that the people killed died needlessly. I just really dont get this argument I guess. Every war between a technological power and a non technological power will have lopsided casualty numbers.
When a people are oppressed and suppressed enough they fight back. People fight back using methods that are available to them. Palestinians have been systematically oppressed by Israel. Gaza is basically a giant prison. The people there have no navy, tanks, helicopters, or air force. They did inflict some damage. The response has been so disproportionate that it is rightfully viewed as immoral. Palestinians deserve peace and pursuit of happiness too. So do Israelis. One side has that much greater than the other and one side has been denying the other side those things for decades.
I agree with all of this. So what do you think the Israelis should do? Ive been against the war from october 8th saying Israel should focus on border control instead but I can see why the Israelis wouldnt be happy with that solution. Tel Aviv has been pretty continuously bombarded for the last 2 decades by Hamas, hard to say they just have to live with that.
Israelis have a right to live peacefully. Unfortunately they are not peaceful toward Palestinians. They continually encroach and annex Palestinian land in the West Bank oppress Palestinians. Palestinians fight back but it’s a hopeless cause for them.
From my understanding Israel tried to make peace by exchanging land for peace treaties. Only the Egyptians took them up on that. I think Israel is done seeking a moral solution and are now slowly annexing all of the West Bank and now Gaza. Palestinians should be given land somewhere and/or forced to emigrate. They’ve clung to what was once theirs but the reality is they are never getting it back.
But Israel is being immoral and their treatment of Palestinians is deplorable.
Hitler said "lebensraum" was for 'security' too. It did not in fact make Germany more secure, and the same will ultimately prove true for Israel's very transparent attempts to use the Oct 7 ghetto uprising as a pretext to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
It was a gamble, if Japan hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor it certainly seems possible Germany would have taken most of Europe and had enough juice left over that their Russian incursions wouldn't have been fatal.
And why did they do that? It's like gang warfare, never ending. It started long before Hamas and we've all lost track of why so finger pointing only makes it worse.
Because in 2023 Saudi Arabia, one of Iran’s most powerful enemies in the region, was expressing willingness to normalize relations with Israel. So Iran orchestrated attacks via its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, in order to torpedo the normalization process. (People forget that Hamas wasn’t the only one attacking Israel in October 2023—beginning October 8th Hezbollah began firing rockets and artillery into northern Israel, forcing over 90,000 Israelis to flee for safety.)
The difference is I'm correct and you are not. Hamas decided to attack a music festival of teenagers and young adults who want a free Palestine. They spent over a year planning this operation all to kill a bunch of Israeli's who didn't exactly disagree with their cause.
If Hamas hadn't attacked, Bibi might already be in prison. You know, I'm not convinced Hamas wants peace any more than Bibi does.
This is the kind of thinking that keeps this insanity going on forever.
You're demonstrating my point: we've lost track of "who started it" and it doesn't even matter now. It's too easy for each side to claim it's the other side's fault. They both have legitimate reasons to so it's easy to get support for those claims, too.
But I would argue that correct vs incorrect is entirely irrelevant. Nothing you or I can say can justify their actions.
because usa forced elections to palestine assembly in 2006 despite objections of israel and pa government (which was afraid that hamas that will win).
when hamas won, usa was horrified by outcome and "sponsored" PA security forces to get rid of hamas in gaza, but hamas prevailed and killed everybody who were against (throwing from buildings, dragging behind bikes) it or tortured them into submission
It is quite clear that ever since Yassar Arafat walked away from a deal with Israel during Clinton’s Presidency Israel has deliberately made Gaza and most of the West Bank a giant prison. Over the last 50 years far more Palestinians have been killed by Israel than Israelis killed by Palestinians. Palestinians have no navy, air force, tanks, or helicopters. The power differential between the two sides is vastly in Israel’s favor.
Israel has had plenty of votes since then to elect another Prime Minister who would push for peace.
Why is this considered a success of one assassin instead of a failure of a broad democratic electorate to push for peaceful resolution?
In fact, the protests against Netenyahu and young people refusing to serve the IDF shows that Israel was trying to push for peace internally.
Then Hamas decided to attack a music festival of teenagers and young adults who want a free palestine. They spent over a year planning this operation all to kill a bunch of Israeli's who didn't exactly disagree with their cause.
If Hamas hadn't attacked, Bibi might already be in prison. You know, I'm not convinced Hamas wants peace any more than Bibi does.
multiple rounds of negotiations happened after rabin death. camp david in 2000 for example which resulted in second intifada. taba. etc. negotiations continued till 2013 or so.
even Netanyahu, which was elected after Rabin death signed follow up agreements to Oslo as result of which Israel handed over Hebron and additional areas in west bank to PA.
It wasn't failure of "broad democratic electorate to push for peaceful resolution" but violence of second intifada and non-compliance of PA with oslo accords from very beginning: http://israelvisit.co.il/BehindTheNews/WhitePaper.htm
I’m not claiming it was a good deal. I’m claiming that since he walked away from the deal Israel has decided that it will slowly consume all of the West Bank and make living there and in Gaza a hell for Palestinians. It’s a slow genocide. Though now in Gaza it’s been sped up.
A less militant government would have simply been rolled by the rabid dog that is the Israeli state sooner. The eliminationist ethnocentrism from both officials and citizenry has been consistent and not at all hidden.
Israel is in Gaza because they have funded and supported Hamas, in the hope they would use those funds to invade them, giving them pretext for a genocide.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” - Benjamin Netanyahu [1]
It's an unverified quote which Netanyahu denied saying. In any case, Israel never funded Hamas as many claim; they allowed aid from Qatar which is pretty different.
I'll add that Israel allowed aid from Qatar after pressure from west and headlines in mass media that hundreds of thousands are going to starve in gaza if israel won't allow money from qatar.
the underlaying issues was that after PA tried to depose Hamas in Gaza and failed, it stopped paying salaries to everybody so Gaza was broke
The protests haven't stopped, they've been intensifying since the start of the war, especially so in the last few months. (They were larger before the war, but that's because the war itself made it much harder to protest for various reasons.)
In any case, while this government isn't popular and wouldn't be reelected according to most polls, this move against Iran is probably popular.
Well, um, you see, Hamas video'd themselves brutally murdering about 1200 people, including about 380 young adults at a rave, including pretty significant amounts of sexual violence and parading corpses or near dead people around Palestine.
They took around 250 people hostage.
Hundreds of thousands of Israeli people were refusing to serve in the IDF because of Palestinian oppression on October 6th. After the attacks, IDF had more volunteers than they could equip.
Actually innocent people do avoid trials. As sometime trials lead even to death sentences of innocent people.
Prosecutor manipulated icc rules and at time of filing was already known that evidence that he shows is wrong and icc still issued warrants. Why would anyone submit to such organization volunteerly ?
And as known now, he rushed warrants and cancelled scheduled arrival to Israel to see facts on the ground in order to protect himself from sexual harassment allegations
It's common in settler colonial societies, particularly during the period when they are still clearing land of indigenous people for settlement by the dominant group.
US/Israel hegemony is causing massive instability and chaos.
Its driving countries to pursue nuclear weapons as its the only way to ensure you're not at the whims of authoritarian and fundamentalist regimes.
I can see an fundamentalist US president at some point and Israel is certainly not become any more secular or moderate, and their democracy is sliding down the toilet bowl.
I don’t know if there are any “good guys” left. Maybe there are some countries too small and remote to matter on the international scale, like Iceland and New Zealand.
I would include Brazil in the list. And other south American countries. We are quite peaceful with the exception of some drugs war. But when the US is too busy, that problem goes away.
You do understand that an Iranian can hate the regime in their country and at the same time, have zero love or respect for Israel and its government's (at least currently) insane tendencies and bullying tactics.
I say that as someone who previously always defended Israel's responses to its neighbors and the country's better aspects. I'm hard pressed to do the same after months of that raving imbecile Netanyahu's grotesque policy of annihilation in Gaza. I just don't know how to call it anything else. Even if he has a legitimate mandate to destroy Hamas (no flower-power, peace-loving band of idealists themselves by the way) starving children to death through blockades has absolutely no justification.
Yeah I can understand that, but I'm pretty sure the hatred of the Iranian regime far supersedes the feelings towards Israel.
Just put yourself in their shoes - you've been exiled from your country, family and friends, would you not cheer on anyone attacking the regime that caused that? I think that's just expected human psyche.
Just like if, lets say, North Korea suddenly attacked Russia, I'm pretty sure Ukrainians would cheer for that.
>Just put yourself in their shoes - you've been exiled from your country, family and friends, would you not cheer on anyone attacking the regime that caused that?
Yes, you would likely cheer anything that tumbles the regime that caused your miseries. What you likely wouldn't cheer however, are missile and other attacks by an external power against places where civilians are killed. Regardless of how much you hate your country's regime, seeing bombs explode in the country's urban areas will likely make you think of some possible family member of yours being a victim of those bombs. This viscerally goes beyond hatred for your regime.
>Just like if, lets say, North Korea suddenly attacked Russia, I'm pretty sure Ukrainians would cheer for that.
What? This comparison is completely off base. If North Korea attacked Russia, Ukrainians could definitely cheer, but Russians, even those who hate Putin, probably wouldn't. Our debate above has nothing to do with citizens of a third, enemy country's feelings about the regime that has invaded them being attacked by someone.
And you can confirm they don't privately support Israel either through social media.
There's a lot of hopium among Zionists that they have widespread support, but really, they're as hated worldwide as the Nazis were. Japan in particular dropped from massively pro-Israel to massively anti-Israel. And this was from a poll last year. It's only gone more anti-israel since then.
I would implore you to understand how social media influences people.
• And you can confirm they don't privately support Israel either through social media.
• I would implore you to understand how social media influences people.
That seems like a contradiction, but I think this thread has run its course. Nobody needs to read us debating which of us is the more media-literate and level-headed.
That doesn't make any sense in this context. The failed, theocratic pariah state that is Iran, was the result, in part, of 'Western destabilization'. It will be more like an 'undo' when the Iranian people finally overthrow the regime.
If the Iranian people overthrow the regime I agree; that’s not what you are saying though. You are suggesting that Israel should overthrow the regime. You must understand from the last 20+ years of history that this would not be productive.
You are suggesting that Israel should overthrow the regime.
My conception of how Iranians would overthrow their government doesn't involve Israeli soldiers invading Iran, or a full-fledged war. My hope is, given the precarious state that Iran already is in, that an expensive and embarrassing failure - such as the destruction of its nuclear facilities - might be the final straw.
I agree that a regime change could turn out to be a disaster, but if Pahlavi is as prepared for the event as he claims, then it could be fantastic.
TOP SECRET//SCI//NOFORN//SOCCENT-32 POTENTIAL TARGET SITES (TS//TKI/RSEN//REL TO USA, FVEY)
Facility Name Type Latitude Longitude
Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) Nuclear Facility 32,580744 51,827081
Natanz Nuclear Complex Facility Nuclear Facility 33,724229 51,726114
Parchin Ammunition Plant Nuclear Facility 35,527676 51,765176
Khorramshahr Military Base Military Base 30,4580556 48,1889111
IR-40 Nuclear Facility Nuclear Facility 34,37331 49,240749
Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) Nuclear Facility 35,738431 51,388253
TOP SECRET//SCI//NOFORN//SOCCENT-J2
[edit 2] More relevant to HN. the Dolphin-class submarines are launching missiles as predicted, the US also thought they would be part of the 'cyber-war', which they define as "electronic jamming to distort and disable radar signals, rendering air-defense systems ineffective." Intel people are such tools, jamming and spoofing is 'cyber-war' and a 'cyber strike'.... I guess they are more right, it's not like you are hacking during a war, that was months ago which is intel. But it's language used for funding purposes.
[edit 3] I will say the "agents will carry out sabotage operations inside Iran" Who'd be nuts enough to do that? The US would have to have that wrong
It's fascinating that you continue to post on this account, frequently, despite the fact your posts are automatically dead and have been for some time.
Searching for “Israel” and “downvotes” and “flagged” in the HN search shows a steady stream of people complaining for years about an apparent coordinated campaign to silence criticism on this website. It’s frankly a ridiculous stain on a website that otherwise has a lot of interesting discussions.
Searching that for almost anything will give you the same results - someone is invariably unhappy at the perceived treatment of one topic or another.
There have been a bunch of massive threads on the Israel/Gaza conflict over the last year and a half and the bulk of the comments in those have been critical of Israel.
Generic trope and meta comments get regularly flagged because they are generic tropes or meta comments, not because they have something to do with Israel.
A possibility of an imminent strike on Iran was discussed in the Israeli press for the last few days. There have been several signs that it might happen, including the US removing people from its embassies in the region, etc.
Hopefully they took out some of the infrastructure Iran uses to support Russia's drone warfare against Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
russia localized production long time ago and made some upgrades to drones. ukraine did bomb this week factory that makes jam resistant antenna arrays and another one that makes assembly of drones
I hope the US manages to stays out of this one.
Hopefully Iran does a little retaliation and then goes back to their covert proxy war rather than it escalating to open warfare. I honestly don't even know if either Iran or Israel could sustain open warfare given the distances involved without dragging in other forces to help. I would rather those forces not be ours.
At a minimum the US will veto any vote at the UNSC declaring Israel's action illegal. There are no laws or institutions that the US won't subvert to back Israel. Also, Trump already tweeted that he's sending Israel more bombs and UK admitted that it "helped" the attack. Israel got buy in from the west, no matter how much Rubio at State pretends it has nothing to do with us.
Please explain how allowing Iran to get nukes is in way or form helpful to the state of the world?
History will view this operation as a great success - and exactly what the west should be doing, a precision operation to take out advanced military capabilities of authoritarian regimes.
Imagine a world where Russia & North Korea had no nukes.
Yes, Israel has done lots of terrible things (but so have it's neighbors), but this one is pretty awesome.
Nuclear weapons have done more for world peace than any other invention in history. Countries with a nuclear option are effectively uninvadable, and that pushes conflicts away from the grueling total wars of the Napoleonic and World Wars, and into constrained, limited proxy wars. Want Israel to stop committing atrocities? Nothing better for it than nuclear armed neighbors. Want to keep Israel from ceasing to exist? That's why they've got the bomb.
Supporting Israel in preventing Iran from getting nuclear capabilities is destablizing, not the opposite.
The more countries with nuclear weapons, and the more unstable or extremist they are, the greater the likelihood of an eventual detonation, even if accidental. 40 years ago, everyone understood this and agreed nuclear proliferation was bad, the US and USSR committed to reducing their stockpiles, and Reagan himself expressed a desire for complete nuclear disarmament, in part because of the near-catastrophe of the Abel Archer incident--a catastrophe only narrowly avoided despite the US and USSR both being stable superpowers led by rational actors. Anyone encouraging nuclear proliferation for every tin-pot dictatorship or gay-lynching theocracy to make the world safer is insane.
> effectively uninvadable
Yet Israel was invaded during the Yom Kippur War when it had nuclear weapons, the UK was invaded by Argentina during the Falklands War, Russia was invaded briefly by Ukraine (Kursk). And Israel arguably just demonstrated that developing a survivable nuclear deterrent probably isn't as easy as many thought. (Ukraine, to a lesser extent, also with Spiderweb.)
> Supporting Israel in preventing Iran from getting nuclear capabilities is destablizing, not the opposite.
On the contrary, it sends a strong "fuck around and find out" message to any country pursuing nuclear weapons. And if Israel is capable of this kind of decapitating strike against a country's nuclear program, imagine what the US (or China) could pull off.
In these situations I like to point out that Pakistan also has nukes, Muslim terrorists, and skirmishes with another ally of ours (India) and there's no political campaign to crush them over it.
A lot of this is just a consequence of repeated exposure to foreign propaganda. It's not reasonable policy.
The fact of nukes is that they are both a get out of international jail free card and security against existential threat.
Previous decade arms control understood this, and understood something very valuable needed to be offered to keep countries from pursuing them.
Current nuclear arms control is failing (Iran, North Korea) because the international community is pretending they aren't worth pursuing at almost any cost.
If a country wants to pursue a foreign policy antagonistic or counter to the US, they'd be insane not to develop nuclear weapons.
Right because if Russia and China didn’t have nuclear weapons they’d be in a war or gearing up for one…hmmm
Perhaps we shouldn’t leave it to states that own their own nuclear bombs, in defiance with international treaties (like the non-proliferation treaty) to dictate who can and cannot have nuclear bombs, and how to deal with countries that shouldn’t.
Imagine a world where the USA and Israel had no nukes.
There are much better methods to prevent Iran from getting nukes. Methods which have been shown to be effective. And in my opinion, the world really needs to denuclearize Israel (as well as any other nuclear armed nations).
> Imagine a world where the USA and Israel had no nukes.
The US and Russia were committed to working towards that world, at least back in the 80s.
What are you talking about? What methods were effective at denuclearizing Iran? They continued to pursue nuclear arms even during the Obama treaty.
Iran has been at war with Israel for the last 10 years, the fact that Israel held back until now, is 100% bec of the methods that proved totally ineffective.
> There are much better methods to prevent Iran from getting nukes.
And what if those methods don't work?
Obviously I would prefer all this to be resolved in a diplomatic way a decade ago, but in some cases military action will be the only way beyond a certain point.
There was a deal which exchanged UN monitored nuclear inspection with lifting of sanctions. It worked kind of well until Trump pulled out in this first term.
Similar deals can be reached today. For example Europe can promise to sanction Israel for their nuclear program in return for international monitors.
And then you just end up with an Iran with more powerful conventional weapons, so not exactly a major win either.
This is a testable hypotheses. We can look at arms buildup in history. I predict that you are wrong. Conventional arms buildup tends to correlate with war. The more war there is, the more countries built up their arsenals.
Further, I predict that there is a negative correlation with international treaties, and bilateral agreements and arms buildup. That is, the more nations cooperate, the more they negotiate and agree on stuff, the fewer arms they pursue and keep.
I don‘t feel like doing the research to gather evidence for my hypothesis, but mine at least doesn’t fail the sniff test. Feel free to prove me wrong with data.
History is full of nations and leaders that decided to go on conquest because of ego and hunger for power - that's your data.
You know what correlates the most with peace and lack of arms races? Having a single superpower who everyone is afraid of.
Deterrence is the reason why bad actors have kept relatively quiet, not diplomacy.
That is not my hypothesis. My hypothesis is about weapons buildup in relation to a) war, and b) treaties and agreements. And it is about trends and likelihoods, not absolutes. To restate my hypothesis. More of (a) = more weapons. More of (b) = fewer weapons.
Sure we can look at Israel, a nation which has a part of tons of international treaties and agreements (albeit fewer then most other nations) and yet is one of the most antagonistic militarized nations in history. So we know there are exception. North Korea might be an example of a country that passes the sniff test of my second hypothesis. Outside of the most international treaties and agreements and also extremely militarized.
But on the other hand, according to my first hypothesis, Israel does pass as an example that contributes to the passing of the sniff test. Israel is probably the country that has seen the most wars and conflicts since World War 2 (maybe USA and Russia/Soviet Union have seen more; I don‘t know), and in accordance to my hypothesis, it is also one of the most militarized nation in the world currently (including one of very few nuclear armed nations).
EDIT: I was just reading an interview with Jim Walsh—a US based nuclear weapons expert, and he seems to agree with me and disagree with you:
> “I think there’s strong scholarly evidence – and certainly, if you look at the politics of the moment – to believe that in this attack, Israel will get the exact opposite of what it wanted, which is Iran is going to decide to go for the bomb.”
https://aje.io/auoxkc?update=3773054
also: https://www.wuft.org/2025-06-13/what-israels-escalation-in-i...
We know that experts are fairly bad at predictions.
Plus we have the latest report from the UN that Iran has been breaching their nuclear agreements.
Iran most likely won't be able to redevelop a nuclear program if the current one is destroyed (and Israel could easily destroy it again when/if they restart)
Iran’s behavior is exactly in line with my hypothesis. They a) were involved in regional conflicts against Israel (including having bombs dropped on them from Israel), and b) had their treaties broken by the USA.
Dropping the treaties and invading Iran does seem to correlate with weapons buildup.
But the weapons have already been built, so at this point its either you act first or just hope.
And hope isn't much of a strategy.
Obviously there is a huge risk here that if Israel fails then Iran will without a doubt push for a bomb.
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Stay out of what? The Trump admin’s foreign policy is to allow Netanyahu to operate autonomously. The same they offer ICE.
In terms of American foreign policy interest it’s basically making us more vulnerable.
In so many words, Netanyahu might get us all killed. Trump will not decry anything Netanyahu does, so it’s 4 years of war and you better believe it. Putin also has no incentive to give Trump a peace deal. Provide enough war zone cover and Taiwan will just happen, all of a sudden. Negotiate all three peace deals, please, I’d love to see it.
Trump is out of his element here, he’ll be leaving a world at war. When you a let a pot of boiling water keep boiling on the lowest heat, you may not see all the boiling bubbles, but I assure you it’s boiling. It’s a boiling world, and without certain advents like AI, we’d literally have no positive news (think that through for a second). Without the miracle of AI, all we’d have is the most depressing world situation you could imagine.
I don't know. I find AI to be generally pretty depressing too.
> The Trump admin’s foreign policy is to allow Netanyahu to operate autonomously. The same they offer ICE.
to be honest, by now, it feels like the opposite, Netanyahu is allowing Trump admin to operate autonomously when it comes to internal affairs, for foreign policy Netanyahu is dictating the US foreign policy.
Go check Twitter, for some reason 90% of congress members immediately started praying for Israel after Israel's attack, as if they were handed over the message
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> The Trump admin’s foreign policy is to allow Netanyahu to operate autonomously.
Just say it the way it is because it's clear. US policy is run from Tel Aviv. Trump chickens out with Putin, China, and now Netanyahu....
No US war, No US war, No US war. Seems pretty consistent so far.
Hopefully Iran stops their stupid proxy wars. Stops supplying Russia with drones and rockets. Stops executing thousands of people every year.
Not to nitpick, but Iran doesn't execute "thousands" of people every year. They execute between 500 and 1000 a year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Iran
On one hand you are right.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/27/iran-execution-spree-con...
On the other, based on the comments I have been reading here for the past couple years, you are supposed to embellish or flat out lie to support your point.
It says a lot about the discussion here that the above negative comments about the proxy nature of Israel/The USA and war are upvoted while this comment about...proxies and war is downvoted. Shows a lack a seriousness/depth of thought but instead it's all just talking points and point scoring.
The diplomatic attempts on the US' behalf have been absolutely bewildering towards Iran. At first they refuse to negotiate, so the US lets them draw their own lines besides nuclear weapons. So Iran draws non-WMD "red line" clauses, and America ignores those immediately. Weeks of negotiating later, no signs of good-faith discussion from the US lead to the hammer coming down because there was "no other way" to solve it.
If it wasn't so goddamn confusing, it would almost appear deliberate. Between this and the US suing Yemen for peace, it's looking like a good decade to strongarm America's soft power.
It gets worse -- the person leading the negotiations with the US was one of the targets:
> Ali Shamkhani has been severely injured in a strike targeting his house and hospitalized. Mr. Shamkhani is currently spearheading nuclear talks committee appointed by supreme leader and is former secretary of National Security Council
https://x.com/farnazfassihi/status/1933360333118111907
>So Iran draws non-WMD "red line" clauses, and America ignores those immediately.
How so? What non-WMD red line clauses do you mean?
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It’s because American foreign policy is not dictating the future of this, it’s Israel’s project and they are directing things. America has never had any success negotiating anything in the Middle East. We take what’s given to us.
America's foreign policy forged the first Iran deal. Clearly there was intent to try the same approach a second time, clearly it didn't work.
> America has never had any success negotiating anything in the Middle East.
Trump hasn't, let's be clear. But given his posturing towards the Gaza conflict it really shouldn't surprise you that his credit with Arabs is rock bottom.
We just got strange alerts on our phones here in Israel (3:00am local time), reading:
"""
Emergency alert: Extreme
Home Front Command instructions must be followed.
Due to the preparation for a significant threat, the Home Front Command's instructions, which are currently being distributed throughout the media, must be immediately followed.
"""
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> Citizens have the option to do Sherut Leumi instead of IDF
I'm not sure if that's true. I looked it up and it seems that males need a Ptor (exemption) from the Army.
But they may be likely to choose IDF anyway due to the culture, so your point probably stills stands.
>Ptor (exemption) from the Army.
Since 2002 Israeli court ruled individual conscientious objection is an exemption. There are lots of news stories of it being denied, but that is because collective action is considered protest and thus illegal.
Interesting, thanks.
From wikipedia:
The Israeli High Court of Justice ruled in 2002 that refusal to serve was legal on the grounds of unqualified pacifism, but "selective refusal" which accepted some duties and not others was illegal.
It also looks like it's not entirely simple to get the exemption, and if you don't do it correctly you could be jailed:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/27/who-are-the-israel...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/war/just/preemptive.shtml#:~:te...
> One ethical expert (Michael Walzer) has put forward some conditions that he thinks must be satisfied to justify a pre-emptive strike:
>an obvious intention to do injury
>active preparations that turn that intention into a positive danger
>a situation in which the risk of defeat will be greatly increased if the fight is delayed
Is there evidence of these three important points to justify this attack as “preemptive”?
Ethics are utterly irrelevant in geopolitical affairs. When nation states face existential threats they'll do whatever it takes to survive. They might invent some ethical justification after the fact for public consumption.
And I don't mean this as a particular criticism of Israel. Most other countries do the same sort of thing when necessary.
That's only because we're throwing away the hard fought prize humanity earned at the cost of two world wars and millions of lives: the system of international laws and the UN.
Nah. The UN is a cute little debating society but it never had any meaningful capacity to enforce international treaties on it's own. Relations between sovereign states have always been fundamentally anarchic, and always will be.
The current system might be bad, but some sort of world government run by the UN would be far worse.
On the contrary, the US has become England: A state of the art cutting edge industrial society and empire turned into a smug entitlement driven immoral turd that is far beyond useless for everyone outside and most inside of it. This will inevitably trigger a global effort to disconnect and help foster the downfall. It will be expensive for everyone involved.
Also wise to remember, there are now so many quiet parts you can't say out loud that pretty much everyone who knows anything no longer participates in online conversation.
We don't make things in the West anymore so our dialog has no constructive purpose. You don't care what I think, say or who I am but those with nefarious intend are the ones paying close attention to everyone.
The destructive people are outperforming the rest of us and it can only end in one way. It has always ended the same way.
I'm not sure the UN provides a real alternative to that though.
> the US has become England: A state of the art cutting edge industrial society and empire turned into a smug entitlement driven immoral turd that is far beyond useless for everyone outside and most inside of it.
Oh don't worry, Trump and his cronies are working hard to make the US not cutting edge at anything anymore.
Is Israel facing an existential threat or Netanyahu?
They are the same thing.
> An obvious intention to do injury
https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-general-says-tehran-aims-...
"Iran general says Tehran aims to wipe Israel off the ‘global political map’", that's consistent with other leaders and the regime ideology since the very start
“We warn them [Zionists] that if a new war breaks out, it will result in their termination,”
and there are no shortage of such quotes, and even concrete plans (for example by using Hamas and Hezbollah), one attempt of which we have witnessed in 2023
https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/hamas-strategy-to-destr...
> active preparations that turn that intention into a positive danger
>a situation in which the risk of defeat will be greatly increased if the fight is delayed
We know independently that Iran has been enriching massive amounts of uranium to degrees of purity only suitable for nuclear weapons. See last announcement by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
According to Israel there have been other advancements in the nuclear program which might lead them to a nuclear bomb
1. Arming and organizing proxies to attack Israel for years is much more than just intention to do injury, it is actual. Those proxies continue attack on Israel (the latest missile launch at Israel was this week). How many missiles does a country have to eat before clause 1 if fulfilled? Any country besides Israel that number would be 1. In additional Iran does not recognise Israel's right to exist as a country and explicitly calls for Israel's destruction.
2. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-857003
3. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-857003
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> There are no indications that Iran intends to use nuclear weapons against Israel.
The Iranian government are rather extreme theocrats, but they aren’t a suicide cult. They know that a nuclear first strike against Israel would result in massive nuclear retaliation aimed at annihilating Iran as a modern nation-state. They aren’t going to do that.
I think their primary reason for pursuing nuclear weapons is as a deterrent against conventional invasion, forcible “regime change” like what the US did to Saddam Hussein - much as Iran welcomed the removal of one of their national archenemies - given Iraq is majority Shi’a, a democratic Iraq is generally more friendly to Iran, although not all Iraqi Shi’a are pro-Iranian (e.g. Ayatollah Sistani, who is very influential, dislikes how Iran has politicised the religion) - but it raised the risk the Americans might try the same thing on them.
> I think their primary reason for pursuing nuclear weapons is as a deterrent against conventional invasion
Israel just showed how effective that deterrent is.
Yes.
> Please don’t act as if you don’t know that you are peddling nonsense.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: In case people don't understand why this is the kind of comment we'd call out: I've said a few times in different ways that Hacker News should be a place where we can discuss difficult topics. There are few more difficult topics than armed conflict between nations. It's pointless to have a discussion that mostly consists of people with entrenched oppsing views hurling insults at each other. If somebody is wrong, refute them with opposing evidence. Otherwise the only thing we'll achieve is to drive away anyone who is interested in actually learning anything new about the topic, in which case we're much better off not having the discussion at all.
When a person writes something that is obviously nonsensical it should be called out as such. This is especially so when the topic is about ongoing acts of war.
If it's an important topic, which it is, it's all the more important to convey the substance of your point, without the abusive barbs. Dropping the swipe "Please don’t act as if you don’t know that you are peddling nonsense" would have made all the difference. We can't know what people "know" when they write things on a discussion board.
I disagree. The logic used was so bad that the most reasonable conclusion is that it was deliberately so. This is my opinion. I could be wrong.
You can be wrong / right and you can be polite / rude
those two are unrelated. Being right and rude (or worse) is not great for a discussion, especially on a topic like this one.
In general I agree. But not in this case. In the “polite” approach what happens is that obviously bad assertions are made and one politely engages but the starting point is such that you are engaged in an attempt to just get to a reasonable place. It’s sort like how combatting a lie is much more effort than spreading one.
My comment above was not for the person who made. I don’t engage with such people. It was for the people who stumbled upon it. I want them to know that there are people who think the comment is ridiculously bad.
There's no "not in the case" on HN, though. People can figure out the quality of a comment themselves, perhaps helped along by a comment that disputes what the first comment says. But the idea you're doing everyone some service by trashing the place is misplaced, it's just not how things work.
I disagree.
You don’t have to agree, you just can’t comment like that on HN.
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It's not like Iran did this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2024_Iranian_strikes_aga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2024_Iranian_strikes_o...
The U.S. shot down a civilian Iranian airplane and killed around 200 people. The commander of the ship that did this later got promoted. This does not mean the U.S. wants to use nuclear weapons against Iran. Your points are not valid.
Can you give source on him getting a promotion?
He did not get promoted later. I was wrong. But he wasn’t fired, relieved of command or put in jail. He later received an award for his naval service. But all of this irrelevant to the point I made.
When a Soviet fighter pilot shot down a Korean jetliner the U.S. reaction to that was quite a bit different than our reaction to the Vincennes shooting down the Iranian jetliner.
You can only pretend Houthis are making ballistic missiles in their caves and arent directly supplied and fed targeting data by Iran to sink ships crossing red sea for so long.
you forget that in mass media not reported that every (other) day for past couple of months there are ballistic missiles launched towards Israel
Are you referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Iran%E2%80%93Israel_con... ? Or can you provide more information about Iran attacking Israel everyday in 2025?
(Not to say that a few months means this conflict has ended, genuinely curious what the media I’ve seen has under/mis/not-reported)
Houthis attack Israel with ballistic missiles which are supplied to them by Iran for this purpose.
In past couple of months it happens almost every (other) day. Sometime a couple times a day.
The only time it was on news when Israel failed to intercept missile and it fell in vicinity of Ben Gurion airport.
Which of the three points are you suggesting “Iran supplies arms to the houthis in Yemen” satisfies in the above criteria to justify the preemptive attack in Tehran?
It seems like it doesn't justify a preemptive attack, but rather a counter attack. Israel is responding to missile attacks from Yemen by attacking the manufacturers in Iran
Would you think the same if, for example, Russia started attacking manufacturers in the EU that supply weapons to Ukraine?
If Russia had the capability to do so without facing an extreme counter attack you better believe they'd blow the shit out of weapon manufacturers.
The problem for Russia is that such an attack would bring in all of NATO which they likely can't defend against. And either way would result in massive damage to nearly everything in Russia.
OTOH, Israel can attack Iran and as shown in the past[1], Iran will roll over and only send a weak-ass slow drone attack as a response.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2024_Iranian_strikes_o...
I wasn't asking about capabilities. I asked the user if he believed Russia has the right to attack EU countries providing weapons to Ukraine, possibly causing civilian deaths, just as he thinks Israel had the right to do so in regards to Iran.
There is no “right” in geo politics. Might has made right throughout history.
I think this is lost on many people. There's no authority overseeing sovereign nations, no real law or consequence to law-breaking even if there was one. There's only allies, treaties, pacts between nations, military might, and the consequences of aggression that keep the peace. Russia would be bombing all the supply lines of weapons flowing into Ukraine if the consequences weren't so high. There's certainly no law that is preventing them from doing so, only the consequences of their actions.
This question is difficult to answer because it's unclear what you mean by "right" in this context. The moral high ground? Russia doesn't have that now, nor has it ever had it throughout its history of military expansionism.
Well, by "right" I meant the same thing the user I was replying to said Israel had when attacking Iran.
Reality is that any sovereign country has the right to do whatever they want.
Russia HAS attacked and sabotaged arms storage facilities in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_... is one such example.
And those missile attacks were in response to Israel's unrelenting and brutal genocide in Gaza, so the 'preemptive' term is still nonsense.
Why is Israel in Gaza? Oh yeh, because Hamas invaded Israel on Oct 7 2023 and killed 1,200 people. To put that death toll in perspective, it would be like a Mexican Cartel invading the US and killing 41,000 people. For China it would be 174,000 people.
Then 100x those figures and you find the proportion that Israel killed in Gaza versus its population, significantly women and children, for perspective.
Why is that relevant? Israel is justified in killing as many people as they need to to ensure their security. The number of dead seems irrelevant to me, you need to convince that the people killed died needlessly. I just really dont get this argument I guess. Every war between a technological power and a non technological power will have lopsided casualty numbers.
When a people are oppressed and suppressed enough they fight back. People fight back using methods that are available to them. Palestinians have been systematically oppressed by Israel. Gaza is basically a giant prison. The people there have no navy, tanks, helicopters, or air force. They did inflict some damage. The response has been so disproportionate that it is rightfully viewed as immoral. Palestinians deserve peace and pursuit of happiness too. So do Israelis. One side has that much greater than the other and one side has been denying the other side those things for decades.
I agree with all of this. So what do you think the Israelis should do? Ive been against the war from october 8th saying Israel should focus on border control instead but I can see why the Israelis wouldnt be happy with that solution. Tel Aviv has been pretty continuously bombarded for the last 2 decades by Hamas, hard to say they just have to live with that.
Israelis have a right to live peacefully. Unfortunately they are not peaceful toward Palestinians. They continually encroach and annex Palestinian land in the West Bank oppress Palestinians. Palestinians fight back but it’s a hopeless cause for them.
From my understanding Israel tried to make peace by exchanging land for peace treaties. Only the Egyptians took them up on that. I think Israel is done seeking a moral solution and are now slowly annexing all of the West Bank and now Gaza. Palestinians should be given land somewhere and/or forced to emigrate. They’ve clung to what was once theirs but the reality is they are never getting it back.
But Israel is being immoral and their treatment of Palestinians is deplorable.
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Hitler said "lebensraum" was for 'security' too. It did not in fact make Germany more secure, and the same will ultimately prove true for Israel's very transparent attempts to use the Oct 7 ghetto uprising as a pretext to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
> It did not in fact make Germany more secure
Yes, focus on this part, not the lopsided casualty count. Much more convincing argument.
I find the crimes against humanity more persuasive than concerns for the security of an irredeemable ethnostate but you do you.
It was a gamble, if Japan hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor it certainly seems possible Germany would have taken most of Europe and had enough juice left over that their Russian incursions wouldn't have been fatal.
> because Hamas invaded Israel
And why did they do that? It's like gang warfare, never ending. It started long before Hamas and we've all lost track of why so finger pointing only makes it worse.
> And why did they do that?
Because in 2023 Saudi Arabia, one of Iran’s most powerful enemies in the region, was expressing willingness to normalize relations with Israel. So Iran orchestrated attacks via its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, in order to torpedo the normalization process. (People forget that Hamas wasn’t the only one attacking Israel in October 2023—beginning October 8th Hezbollah began firing rockets and artillery into northern Israel, forcing over 90,000 Israelis to flee for safety.)
Because Hamas loves killing Jews.
And Jews love killing children. See how easy that is?
The difference is I'm correct and you are not. Hamas decided to attack a music festival of teenagers and young adults who want a free Palestine. They spent over a year planning this operation all to kill a bunch of Israeli's who didn't exactly disagree with their cause.
If Hamas hadn't attacked, Bibi might already be in prison. You know, I'm not convinced Hamas wants peace any more than Bibi does.
> The difference is I'm correct and you are not.
This is the kind of thinking that keeps this insanity going on forever.
You're demonstrating my point: we've lost track of "who started it" and it doesn't even matter now. It's too easy for each side to claim it's the other side's fault. They both have legitimate reasons to so it's easy to get support for those claims, too.
But I would argue that correct vs incorrect is entirely irrelevant. Nothing you or I can say can justify their actions.
You obviously haven't read the Hamas charter in which Hamas says their goal is the destruction of Israel.
And why, pray tell, was Hamas the only organization wielding some semblance of power in Gaza in 2023?
because usa forced elections to palestine assembly in 2006 despite objections of israel and pa government (which was afraid that hamas that will win).
when hamas won, usa was horrified by outcome and "sponsored" PA security forces to get rid of hamas in gaza, but hamas prevailed and killed everybody who were against (throwing from buildings, dragging behind bikes) it or tortured them into submission
Because Hamas gleefully kills anyone who opposes them.
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It is quite clear that ever since Yassar Arafat walked away from a deal with Israel during Clinton’s Presidency Israel has deliberately made Gaza and most of the West Bank a giant prison. Over the last 50 years far more Palestinians have been killed by Israel than Israelis killed by Palestinians. Palestinians have no navy, air force, tanks, or helicopters. The power differential between the two sides is vastly in Israel’s favor.
Arafat walked away because the ‘peace’ plan didn’t produce a viable state – West Bank was divided up in smaller enclaves
An Israeli they killed then own Prime Minister because he was willing to make peace
In my assessment, the assasination of Rabin is one the most successful assassinations in history, in terms of achieving the objectives of the assasin.
Why?
Israel has had plenty of votes since then to elect another Prime Minister who would push for peace.
Why is this considered a success of one assassin instead of a failure of a broad democratic electorate to push for peaceful resolution?
In fact, the protests against Netenyahu and young people refusing to serve the IDF shows that Israel was trying to push for peace internally.
Then Hamas decided to attack a music festival of teenagers and young adults who want a free palestine. They spent over a year planning this operation all to kill a bunch of Israeli's who didn't exactly disagree with their cause.
If Hamas hadn't attacked, Bibi might already be in prison. You know, I'm not convinced Hamas wants peace any more than Bibi does.
multiple rounds of negotiations happened after rabin death. camp david in 2000 for example which resulted in second intifada. taba. etc. negotiations continued till 2013 or so.
even Netanyahu, which was elected after Rabin death signed follow up agreements to Oslo as result of which Israel handed over Hebron and additional areas in west bank to PA.
It wasn't failure of "broad democratic electorate to push for peaceful resolution" but violence of second intifada and non-compliance of PA with oslo accords from very beginning: http://israelvisit.co.il/BehindTheNews/WhitePaper.htm
Yup, but consider how much death and injury that action has caused
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-actual-proposal-...
I’m not claiming it was a good deal. I’m claiming that since he walked away from the deal Israel has decided that it will slowly consume all of the West Bank and make living there and in Gaza a hell for Palestinians. It’s a slow genocide. Though now in Gaza it’s been sped up.
'Put it in perspective'
https://visualizingpalestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/...
Put in in perspective https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rocket_Attacks_fired_at...
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If you will have a closer look, rocket attacks started to climb up after Israel left Gaza.
There was expression during the disengagement process from Gaza: Palestinians can build either Singapore or Somali. It's their choice to make.
They made choice in 2006 when they elected hamas. You can see on graph how Hamas elected to use resources
A less militant government would have simply been rolled by the rabid dog that is the Israeli state sooner. The eliminationist ethnocentrism from both officials and citizenry has been consistent and not at all hidden.
Rolled like The West Bank? Hamas's stated goal is to destroy Israel. You pro-Palestinian types are always so hypocritical.
Israel is in Gaza because they have funded and supported Hamas, in the hope they would use those funds to invade them, giving them pretext for a genocide.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” - Benjamin Netanyahu [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjam...
It's an unverified quote which Netanyahu denied saying. In any case, Israel never funded Hamas as many claim; they allowed aid from Qatar which is pretty different.
I'll add that Israel allowed aid from Qatar after pressure from west and headlines in mass media that hundreds of thousands are going to starve in gaza if israel won't allow money from qatar.
the underlaying issues was that after PA tried to depose Hamas in Gaza and failed, it stopped paying salaries to everybody so Gaza was broke
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And yet Israel itself calls it a preemptive attack.
Arms supply to the terrorist groups and states(russia) is enough to justify limited hit against Iran.
Netanyahu's only way to preserve power is to start a mass conflict.
Fascism requires a state of permanent warfare; thereby dooming itself.
What happened to all those protests we were seeing against him? He’s an actual war criminal now but the protests stopped. What can we infer here?
The protests haven't stopped, they've been intensifying since the start of the war, especially so in the last few months. (They were larger before the war, but that's because the war itself made it much harder to protest for various reasons.)
In any case, while this government isn't popular and wouldn't be reelected according to most polls, this move against Iran is probably popular.
Well, um, you see, Hamas video'd themselves brutally murdering about 1200 people, including about 380 young adults at a rave, including pretty significant amounts of sexual violence and parading corpses or near dead people around Palestine.
They took around 250 people hostage.
Hundreds of thousands of Israeli people were refusing to serve in the IDF because of Palestinian oppression on October 6th. After the attacks, IDF had more volunteers than they could equip.
he is not war criminal. he is been accused of some crimes but it's unknown on what basis as indictment is confidential.
and protests are happening on daily basis
> he is been accused of some crimes
Normally, innocent people don't avoid trial and sanction the courts that accuse them.
Actually innocent people do avoid trials. As sometime trials lead even to death sentences of innocent people.
Prosecutor manipulated icc rules and at time of filing was already known that evidence that he shows is wrong and icc still issued warrants. Why would anyone submit to such organization volunteerly ?
And as known now, he rushed warrants and cancelled scheduled arrival to Israel to see facts on the ground in order to protect himself from sexual harassment allegations
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It's common in settler colonial societies, particularly during the period when they are still clearing land of indigenous people for settlement by the dominant group.
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Nothing good has come out of Israel’s nuclear program, either. But the era of nuclear disarmament is long over.
Regardless, the world is gonna be a better place with a non nuclear Iran.
US/Israel hegemony is causing massive instability and chaos.
Its driving countries to pursue nuclear weapons as its the only way to ensure you're not at the whims of authoritarian and fundamentalist regimes.
I can see an fundamentalist US president at some point and Israel is certainly not become any more secular or moderate, and their democracy is sliding down the toilet bowl.
> the world is gonna be a better place with a non nuclear Iran
Some of it will, some of it won't.
That's a very Zionist centered viewpoint. And at this point the Zionist viewpoint has very little public support.
The popular viewpoint is the world is going to be a better place with a nuclear Iran.
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I don’t know if there are any “good guys” left. Maybe there are some countries too small and remote to matter on the international scale, like Iceland and New Zealand.
> I don’t know if there are any “good guys” left.
I would include Brazil in the list. And other south American countries. We are quite peaceful with the exception of some drugs war. But when the US is too busy, that problem goes away.
Half of Iran would disagree with that, and it's the younger, more liberal half.
Not after Israel conducts this attack.
No one in Iran supports Israel, young or old.
That's a pretty strong claim given the amount of Iranians in exile who hate the Iranian regime. Have any data to back that up?
You do understand that an Iranian can hate the regime in their country and at the same time, have zero love or respect for Israel and its government's (at least currently) insane tendencies and bullying tactics.
I say that as someone who previously always defended Israel's responses to its neighbors and the country's better aspects. I'm hard pressed to do the same after months of that raving imbecile Netanyahu's grotesque policy of annihilation in Gaza. I just don't know how to call it anything else. Even if he has a legitimate mandate to destroy Hamas (no flower-power, peace-loving band of idealists themselves by the way) starving children to death through blockades has absolutely no justification.
Yeah I can understand that, but I'm pretty sure the hatred of the Iranian regime far supersedes the feelings towards Israel.
Just put yourself in their shoes - you've been exiled from your country, family and friends, would you not cheer on anyone attacking the regime that caused that? I think that's just expected human psyche.
Just like if, lets say, North Korea suddenly attacked Russia, I'm pretty sure Ukrainians would cheer for that.
>Just put yourself in their shoes - you've been exiled from your country, family and friends, would you not cheer on anyone attacking the regime that caused that?
Yes, you would likely cheer anything that tumbles the regime that caused your miseries. What you likely wouldn't cheer however, are missile and other attacks by an external power against places where civilians are killed. Regardless of how much you hate your country's regime, seeing bombs explode in the country's urban areas will likely make you think of some possible family member of yours being a victim of those bombs. This viscerally goes beyond hatred for your regime.
>Just like if, lets say, North Korea suddenly attacked Russia, I'm pretty sure Ukrainians would cheer for that.
What? This comparison is completely off base. If North Korea attacked Russia, Ukrainians could definitely cheer, but Russians, even those who hate Putin, probably wouldn't. Our debate above has nothing to do with citizens of a third, enemy country's feelings about the regime that has invaded them being attacked by someone.
All US Americans I've met living in Rio absolutely hates the current US regime.
The attacks just occurred a few hours ago.
But otherwise you can follow all sorts of Iranian ticktokers and they’ll give you the rundown.
The only Iranians that support Israel are exiled Pahlavists, like the ones around LA. No one inside Iran supports Israel.
Well, no one in Iran publicly supports Israel, obviously.
And you can confirm they don't privately support Israel either through social media.
There's a lot of hopium among Zionists that they have widespread support, but really, they're as hated worldwide as the Nazis were. Japan in particular dropped from massively pro-Israel to massively anti-Israel. And this was from a poll last year. It's only gone more anti-israel since then.
I would implore you to understand how social media influences people.
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Iranians value tolerance. The country has a unique history involving persians, jews and other groups.
https://tehrantimes.com/news/484990/Cultural-diversity-relig...
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the only reason Iran wants nuclear weapons is because Israel has them.
I hope we wind up with the best case, which would be the collapse of the regime followed by the return of Reza Pahlavi.
I'd rather not consider the worst case, because I imagine it's global in scope.
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That doesn't make any sense in this context. The failed, theocratic pariah state that is Iran, was the result, in part, of 'Western destabilization'. It will be more like an 'undo' when the Iranian people finally overthrow the regime.
If the Iranian people overthrow the regime I agree; that’s not what you are saying though. You are suggesting that Israel should overthrow the regime. You must understand from the last 20+ years of history that this would not be productive.
I agree that a regime change could turn out to be a disaster, but if Pahlavi is as prepared for the event as he claims, then it could be fantastic.
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Success is relative. So long it's better than now I'm happy with it.
The targets the US predicted are
Lets see how good they were[edit] Direct links -
UCF - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=32_34_50_N_... Natanz - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=33_43_27_N_... Parchin - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=35_31_39_N_... Khorramshahr - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=30_27_29_N_... IR-40 - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=34_22_23_N_... TRR - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=35_44_18_N_...
[edit 2] More relevant to HN. the Dolphin-class submarines are launching missiles as predicted, the US also thought they would be part of the 'cyber-war', which they define as "electronic jamming to distort and disable radar signals, rendering air-defense systems ineffective." Intel people are such tools, jamming and spoofing is 'cyber-war' and a 'cyber strike'.... I guess they are more right, it's not like you are hacking during a war, that was months ago which is intel. But it's language used for funding purposes.
[edit 3] I will say the "agents will carry out sabotage operations inside Iran" Who'd be nuts enough to do that? The US would have to have that wrong
Where are you getting this stuff from:
> TOP SECRET//SCI//NOFORN//SOCCENT-32 POTENTIAL TARGET SITES (TS//TKI/RSEN//REL TO USA, FVEY)
A leak? Which one?
Unless one knows the provenance, there is the risk it is fabricated
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It's fascinating that you continue to post on this account, frequently, despite the fact your posts are automatically dead and have been for some time.
Do you provide this as a journal for yourself?
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Testing your theory: Israel is a pariah state.
Searching for “Israel” and “downvotes” and “flagged” in the HN search shows a steady stream of people complaining for years about an apparent coordinated campaign to silence criticism on this website. It’s frankly a ridiculous stain on a website that otherwise has a lot of interesting discussions.
Searching that for almost anything will give you the same results - someone is invariably unhappy at the perceived treatment of one topic or another.
There have been a bunch of massive threads on the Israel/Gaza conflict over the last year and a half and the bulk of the comments in those have been critical of Israel.
Generic trope and meta comments get regularly flagged because they are generic tropes or meta comments, not because they have something to do with Israel.
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A possibility of an imminent strike on Iran was discussed in the Israeli press for the last few days. There have been several signs that it might happen, including the US removing people from its embassies in the region, etc.
Amazing how did this evade my news feed...
It's been in the news for several days.
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It's one person and it's unanimously downvoted.
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Preemptive strikes are a boon for his suddenly ailing health.
which polls? there are no elections in the near future.
Yesterday he barely won a vote to dissolve the government in the Knesset which politically hurt him
he won it with 9 votes which is a large margin and it actually made him stronger, because next time such a vote can be held is 6 months from now
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Just like the Gazan people?
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It's as if the purpose of these preemptive strikes is to create a pretext for the real goal: the declaration of a state of emergency.
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I really can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
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