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.

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

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.

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”?

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.

"""

Netanyahu's only way to preserve power is to start a mass conflict.

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.

The targets the US predicted are

  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] 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

Wish it didn't come to this, but at this point I can only hope the strikes are successful - nothing good can come out of another fanatic regime with nukes.