I didn’t say that Israel is not on the offensive right now - it is. My point is that if the Iron Dome system is indeed compromised, that’s going to put pressure on Israel to stay on the offensive rather than to back down.

Let’s hope they keep this up and force Israel to back the fuck off.

I don’t see the same connection here that you do. A failure of Israel’s defensive weapons would require them to go on the offensive. The status quo from before the October 7 attacks was tolerable to Israel because they could shoot down incoming threats but if they no longer can, they must neutralize the ability of their enemies to launch those threats.

I don’t think it’s something dogs are physiologically capable of doing, and even if it were, I think it’s unlikely that dogs would be trained to do it on command.

The claims about dogs seem quite implausible and call into questions the reliability of the rest of the the article, but I’m not sure how Israel actually plans to go from that to reaching the rather high threshold for providing libel in the USA.

I’m rather more libertarian than most but I don’t think the free market, as generally envisioned, implies the freedom to send money to countries that your country is currently at war with.

I wouldn’t want to be one of the dudes in the speedboat though…

There’s very little chance that the USA will accept the plan - among other things, that would mean paying reparations to Iran.

Reporters and networks are prohibited from publishing the precise location of Iranian missile impacts, or even filming or photographing the extent of the damage in a way that could give away the location — restrictions designed, in the words of the army’s chief censor Col. Netanel Kula, “to prevent assistance to the enemy during wartime.”

The restrictions sound completely reasonable. This reminds me of how we would laugh when Russian soldiers uploaded detailed depictions of the damage done by Ukrainian attacks, because they were being so foolish.

I worry that a major ground invasion is the least bad option available to the USA now, and the Trump administration is not capable of carrying it out.

Well if he’s not quite alive, then he can’t be assassinated.

But for the moment if there is one country in this war that is rudderless, it is not Iran.

Ouch.

Well, the actual NYT article has the headline

U.S. Tomahawk Hit Naval Base Beside Iranian School, Video Shows

The school appears to be part of the same compound as the naval base. Presumably someone or something thought it was part of that base.

I admit that the articles I’ve read are not entirely clear about the order in which things happened, but my understanding is that the Israelis were trying to sneak in and dig up the grave without being noticed, they were noticed and attacked, and they called in air support. They were clearly prepared to fight, but their mission would not have involved any fighting had it gone according to plan.

who didn’t have anything to do with it

Those people attacked them. The interesting thing is how outmatched the attackers were despite outnumbering a group that wasn’t there with the intent of fighting.

It does no good to fight if you have no realistic way to win. They didn’t have the resources to challenge Israel before the war with Iran started and now they’re in an even worse position. They have two roles - as an irregular branch of Iran’s military and as a power within Lebanon, and they’ve chosen to prioritize the former and fight a losing battle at the expense of the latter (and at the expense of Lebanese people with no particular sympathy for Iran who don’t want to be involved in this).

It would have been wiser for Hezbollah to sit this one out.

https://polymarket.com/event/iran-leader-end-of-2026

Currently they’re giving him a 43% chance of still being the leader of Iran by the end of the year. So I suppose his chance of surviving at all is a little higher than that…

Germany gave up anti-US ideology after being bombed to rubble, and Japan gave up anti-US ideology shortly after being nuked. The Middle East is different culturally, but what you’re proposing is clearly not a human universal.

Consider Syria. Ahmed al-Sharaa was a jihadist but then decided that he liked being alive and in power more than he hated the US and Israel.

I think it’s plausible that they’ve concluded that the Assembly of Experts, a group selected for loyalty to Khamenei, is not going to radically depart from his ideology.

Israel is not going to take over its neighbors. It’s already struggling to rule over the three million Arabs in the West Bank and it’s stretched thin occupying just part of Gaza (less than 140 square miles).

I’m not happy with Trump’s approach to international relations, but there’s a difference between the sort of “pause nuclear program” negotiating that Iran had been doing and the sort that would ideally come out of this war, which would be “give up anti-US/anti-Israel ideology, give up ambitions of regional hegemony, and in return normalize political and economic relations” like the new Syrian government.

Well, the war would be won by disrupting the transfer of power to those who would carry on Khamenei’s policies, and this appears to be a solid step in that direction. I suppose you don’t want the USA and Israel to succeed, but why are you surprised that they would brag about achieving their own goals?

Also, I think someone coming to power who is willing to negotiate (rather than waiting to be air-struck and replaced) is more likely than the collapse of central authority.