Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli Government Photo.
Israel has launched a retaliatory strike against Iran in response to their attack this weekend. Reuters. The attack is a response to the massive missile and drone strike Iran launched last weekend that was mostly ineffective. Iranian media reported explosions in the Isfahan province, where many of Iran's nuclear facilities reside. Flights have also been rerouted in Iran in response to the explosions. Israel had said they were going to respond to Iran's attack on April 13th.
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My Comment:
There is not a whole lot of information about this and rumors are flying. The news media is about an hour behind the events and the events are rapidly changing. I am also hearing reports of attacks in Syria and Iraq as well, but western media has been silent about it. It's unclear if those are related to these attacks or not, but it would be a massive coincidence if it wasn't. As always, information could quickly get out of date.
Regardless of the details, this is not a welcome development. Israel had a perfect off-ramp with any conflict with Iran. Iran's strike against them was a total failure and did very little actual damage. There wasn't a need to retaliate because each side had saved face. Israel could claim victory because they shot down most of the attack and Iran could claim victory as well as they showed a strong response to Israel's attack on Iran's embassy.
But that didn't happen and now I am afraid we are going to see an actual war. It won't be a high intensity conflict like the Ukraine war, but I could see these tit-for-tat attacks continuing for a long time until one side either runs out of weapons or simply gets bored with the conflict. We also might see attacks on Israel from Iran's proxies, including Hezbollah.
Will the United States be drawn into the war? I am not sure. Biden made it clear that they did not support any attacks on Iran from Israel and Iran has refrained from attacking US forces in Iraq and Syria. Right now there doesn't seem to be much of a reason for Iran to attack us and our only involvement should be to defend Israel from further attacks.
I still have fears that America could indeed be drawn into the war. I don't think it would be in Iran's best interests to launch an attack on us, but Israel might have motivation to do so. If there is a major loss of life on Israel's side we would probably join the war. And that could leave us vulnerable from attacks from Iran. Both our troops in Iraq and Syria and our civilians are home could be under threat due to Iran's expertise in unconventional warfare.
I think that Joe Biden has a lot of blame for all of this. He has no influence in either Israel or Iran. He told Iran not to strike Israel and they did. And he told Israel to not strike Iran and they did. It's clear that neither side is listening to the senile dotard currently occupying the White House. If there is a peace deal to be made, it is going to have to come from some other country than the United States as long as Biden is in the White House. Perhaps Russia or China?
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