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.

Everything ultimately comes down to whether some sort of uprising “on the ground” occurs.

Not necessarily - my guess is that the plan might be to keep killing leaders until someone willing to negotiate comes to power without a revolution.

The President is merely acting according to his nature - the ultimate explanation of why he is doing this is that the American public chose to trust the sort of man that he is. Challenging the fox’s motives after he has been voted back into the henhouse is a waste of words.

Well, there was that thing with Nord Stream. I’m not saying that Orban isn’t making this up but it isn’t totally implausible.

I don’t think it was strange for them to offer that shirt for sale, especially since they seem to have a print-on-demand system which does not involve any overhead for having an additional design. Offering the shirt is IMO less awkward that trying to pretend that Nazi Germany never existed.

The shirt itself:

I’m not sure why anyone would want one except to be an edgelord but there’s nothing obviously offensive on it.

Idealists are letting perfect be the enemy of the good but I don’t think that’s why Democrats underperformed. Neither Clinton nor Biden/Harris were idealists of this sort (despite some stuff Harris said but didn’t mean back in the 2020 primaries) and they didn’t lose elections because of a lack of support from the idealists. So IMO while the idealists aren’t helping, the very much non-idealistic institutions of the Democratic party which prioritize seniority within the party over electability are to blame.

Really? I wonder what model year will have cars available without it. I was thinking of buying a new car but I can wait.