We’re going to be at war with Iran in about 24 hours now. Aren’t we?
Trump said so far the the U.S. will not be providing support to Israel for the airstrikes, so for now, they're on their own.
And you believe that?
So when Iran retaliates (as they will) do you think the US is just going to sit on its hands and let Iranian missiles and drones fly towards Israel? Or are they going to do like the last time during the Biden Administration when Iran sent air strikes to Israel and organize a sea/air/land missile defense of Israel?
And then if it doesn’t stop at that and Iranian attacks continue. What then? Israel is on their own? You believe that?
This, of course, is also going to completely kill any possibility of a nuclear deal with Iran. They are now predictably going to go full bore on finishing up development of nuclear weapons. Which they can easily do out of the reach of conventional air strikes. Buried in underground bunkers in the middle of Tehran, for example. Iran has far more money and technical/scientific capacity than say North Korea.
0 x
A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
JohnH wrote: ↑Fri Jun 13, 2025 12:57 am
This kind of aggressive nonsense also leads to increased cooperation between states like Iran and North Korea. It's all around a very bad thing.
North Korea had a GDP of about $23 billion in 2023. Iran had a GDP of $406 billion in 2023 which is 18-times larger. And they have a vastly more developed technology and science sector. Also close ties to Russia. Iran also has large and growing Uranium reserves with more uranium ore deposits being discovered. They also have mature missile technologies that are currently being used in Ukraine where they have provided the Russians with hundreds of them. And they are being used elsewhere in the Middle East like Yemen. The notion that they lack the capacity to develop nuclear warheads today in 2025 is laughable. If Pakistan could do it in 1980, I think Iran can do it 45 years later in 2025. It would also be shocking to me that they weren’t able to hide and protect their existing technology from conventional Israeli strikes. They know how to build bunkers and bury technologies deep underground. Iran is one of the bigger mining countries in the world for a wide variety of minerals from with over 6,000 active mines and thousands of inactive ones. They know how to dig holes deep into the ground and already have plenty of them.
Israel launched this strike right in the middle of the newly started nuclear weapons talks with the US. I expect those are now over.
0 x
A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
Ken wrote: ↑Fri Jun 13, 2025 2:00 am
Israel launched this strike right in the middle of the newly started nuclear weapons talks with the US. I expect those are now over.
This strike is probably an indication that those talks weren't all that satisfactory to the US. If they were, the US would hardly have allowed this to happen.
Seems like the attack was years in the making. Israel deployed drones from INSIDE Iran, and destroyed air defense and ballistic missile sites so it could operate freely in Iranian airspace.
I've heard it said in recent months that Iran is at a very weak point with its longtime proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen being on their heels. A writer for NYT takes this view.
For four decades, Iran poured billions of dollars, weapons and military minds into a grand defense project: building up a network of anti-Israel militias in the Middle East known as the “Axis of Resistance” that would join Iran if a war with Israel broke out.
The stunning series of Israeli strikes on Iran on Friday underscored just how degraded that axis has become over the past year, with few expecting those armed groups to meaningfully respond to the Israeli aggression, experts say.
In the clearest sign of that weakened stance, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, seen as Iran’s most powerful proxy, condemned the Israeli attack in a statement but stopped short of vowing any military action in response — a notable omission from a group that has long served as the central pillar of the axis.
“The axis hasn’t been fully destroyed, but it has been significantly diminished beyond the point of return,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “It has been transformed into an axis of sitting ducks waiting for the next Israeli strikes rather than taking initiative and pushing Israel into the defense, as was the case just a few years ago.”
Iran fostered the web of armed groups — including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen and militias in Iraq — to enable them to carry out attacks on Israel and to provide Iran with valuable allies in the region that could serve as a deterrent against Israeli attacks on Iran itself.
After the deadly Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s devastating invasion of Gaza, many of those groups carried out their own strikes against Israel. But in the year and a half since, Israel launched audacious attacks on those militias in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, and the response from the Axis has grown increasingly muted.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah is battered after its 14-month war with Israel that wiped out the group’s top brass, destroyed large chunks of its arsenal and left the country with a multibillion-dollar bill for reconstruction.
Its stinging defeat also spurred political momentum against the group, undoing its once iron grip on Lebanon’s politics, after many Lebanese blamed Hezbollah for dragging the country into one of its deadliest and most destructive wars.
