The purpose of the war is to destroy the Axis of Resistance, Iran, Hezbollah and its allies, the only force standing in the way of US/Israeli hegemony in the region.
That’s a purely ideological way of looking at the situation which IMO is not sufficient. As the article states, this war was not unprovoked either, regardless of whether the provocations warrant such a response. Iran is seeking its own hegemony. Now, this does not negate your point on the hegemonic approach of US in the region. I think this war can be viewed as a power struggle between a regional and global power that’s developing into a struggle dominance and survival.
Is anyone going to mention what these provocations are? I've yet to figure it out after 6-12 months. Pretty much everything going on seems to involve the Israelis aggressively expanding their borders or viciously attacking anyone who might oppose their expansion. I've lost count of the number of negotiators they've killed.
Trump has averaged something like 1 bombing run on Iranian leadership ever 2 years. Iranian provocations must be quite effective at making him see red.
> Is anyone going to mention what these provocations are?
Sure, it’s not hard to find. These started long before Trump. You should look beyond the last few months’ news cycles. Iranian government’s issues with Israel are of ideological nature (according to the regime) and their open support (financially and militarily) of a part of Palestinian resistance and Hezbollah. Iran has been active at Israel’s borders for years. Their heavy involvement (including sending troops) in Syria’s civil war is another one to name. All of these are the ones that Iran openly admits to. You can’t explain these away with Israel’s expansionist tendencies because that’s not been a threat to Iran. No serious analyst believes that Israel wants/can to expand into even Iraq, let alone Iran!
The hostilities towards US and vice versa are a whole different topic.
Now to be clear I’m not siding with Israel on this and not saying that caring for Palestinians is not right, just answering your question and naming a few examples. Now, it’s all happened during many decades and not sure if it matters anymore who started it because it’s become a total shit show that is very hard to reconcile.
You might find it surprising that during Iran-Iraq war, Israel was the only country in the region who helped Iran against Iraq (which had the backing of the Arab countries including Palestinians).
Would it be fair to characterise these provocations as all involving Iran providing resistance to Israel aggressively expanding their borders? Because these cases seem to have a tendency to Israel controlling more land at the end of the day. It looks like a pretty classic situation where an aggressive power builds up in a series of "defensive" expansions.
> Iranian government’s issues with Israel are of ideological nature
I think they're just good at threat assessment. There seem to be a lot of Iranians dying of Sudden Acute Missile Disease this month. Frankly I'm struggling to see what aspect of their actions aren't just common sense over the last decade, except for their charmingly simplicity in that they didn't make a break for a nuclear bomb when they first got within a year or two of being able to develop one. Israel and their supporters have done a very bad job of offering an explanation of why the repeated hits were justified or helpful.
Israel withdrew fully from Lebanon in 2000, and this was certified by the UN, yet Hezbollah kept attacking them anyway.
If Hezbollah offered Israel a choice between: peace with Hezbollah OR occupy land in Lebanon, I think Israel would rationally choose peace.
But Hezbollah has never offered this. Their stated goal is complete destruction of Israel.
So if the options are: Hezbollah shoots at you from right across the border OR you occupy a buffer zone and Hezbollah still shoots at you but from further away:
Isn't it perfectly rational to choose the buffer zone?
Israel just communited genocide in one place and displaced millions in two others.
It "ordered" wast places full of people to lead, destroyed bridges, created shoot at will area on other side and is getting ready to move settlers there.
Isreal is not defending itself. It is cleansing and expanding, feeling entitled to kill at will everyone not them.
> Would it be fair to characterise these provocations as all involving Iran providing resistance to Israel aggressively expanding its borders?
Considering the results of this war so far and the one before, as well as Iran's military strategy, it doesn't seem plausible to think Iran sees (or ever saw) Israel as a threat to its borders' integrity. This may be the basis for Iran's strategy in the region in some version of the future, but to extend it to what they've done in the past would be hindsight bias.
IMO, the regime is not as much worried about Israel as it is about the US. Just compare the number of missiles and drones they shot at Gulf countries vs Israel.
But consider that Israel, rightfully or not, can make similar claims, which actually conform to the Iranian regime's long-stated goal of "destruction of Israel".
> Frankly, I'm struggling to see what aspect of their actions isn’t just common sense over the last decade.
That’s because it didn’t all start in the last decade. As you get closer to “present” in this timeline, it looks more like a one-sided affair. This is similar to the view which sees the whole Israel-Palestine issue only from October 7th onwards.
> Israel and their supporters have done a very bad job of offering an explanation of why the repeated hits were justified or helpful.
True, I’m also not sure if this is going to turn out as they wish it did. Although the jury's still out, but as the article points out, it seems unlikely.
> IMO, the regime is not as much worried about Israel as it is about the US.
The Islamic Regime is not a normal rational actor, their opposition to Israel is driven primarily by their ideology.
> Just compare the number of missiles and drones they shot at Gulf countries vs Israel.
This is probably more just a matter of Iran having more short range weapons than long range weapons, Israel is a long range target that much of their weapons will be unable to reach.
>As the article states, this war was not unprovoked either
Using the same extraordinarily broad definition of "provocation" required here, can you name a single war in history that was unprovoked? And if not, haven't we just neutralized all meaning from the phrase "provoked war" with our overly broad definition of "provocation"?
What you see here is the limits of liberal discourse on war, it's always 'here are the reasons why the war is justified' now let me explain why i'm against the war. Then discourse devolves into 'what is war even'? Believe in something, anything, dear god.
It is to benefit Israel (so it can anex more territory in Lebanon), and it has no benefit to the US. The US had already a deal with Iran, which didn't threat its own interests directly. It is like leave a snake alone, but once you step into it, it will bite you.
This war is only to benefit Israel, and right now indirectly Russia (due to the rising prices). Basically, the US is the main loser/sucker in this war, and we are all poorer for doing it.
why would israel want to annex territory in Lebanon? Israel has fought in southern lebanon at least 2 times since I have been alive to fight hezbullah, they always go in, try to remove hezbullah and go back. From a geopolitical perspective what would israel gain by permanently annexing a this area?
these two issues are completely different. judea and samaria do not equal lebanon, ideologically or geopolitically whatsoever.
Israeli military launching incursions into lebanon to fight hezbullah and prevent them from launching rockets randomly into israel (these rockets killing many arabs as well), is not the same as the squabbles of a small minority of civilians in disputed territory within israel proper.
He writes that the region is not very important to the USA. It's not, but it is a strategically important area, not only in terms of its location, at the nexus of Asia, Africa and Europe, but also because of the oil there.
Now the US is not dependent on Middle Eastern Oil, but Japan, China and other countries are. So controlling the region will mean a lever of power over those regions.
At present, gasoline prices in China have risen by 11% since the war started. In the U.S., they have risen by 33%.
The U.S. is dependent on oil and the oil market is global. Even if the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, Americans still pay increased prices for pretty much everything as a result and the economy suffers. The only way around this would be a scheme in which domestic oil producers are forced to sell to American refiners at pre-war prices, similar to the "National Energy Program" that was tried in Canada during the '80's. (Spoiler: It didn't turn out well.)
Yes, the U.S. is less likely to see its pumps run dry and U.S. oil companies are going to be very happy with the increased prices. However, unless it goes the NEP route, U.S. companies are going to export more oil creating shorter supply at home. Americans will pay the same high prices everyone else will be paying. As we're seeing now, the U.S. might actually see even higher price increases than countries like China.
I don't interpret your statistic the same way you do and I don't think it backs your point. Some of the difference between that 11% and 33% you quote are due to the fact that gas is baseline cheaper in the US than China, and a mere denominator difference doesn't prove one more reliant than the other on gas when it goes up by a flat rate, which is how oil prices generally impact gas prices. Another factor you're failing to consider is the possibility that economic headwinds due to oil prices or any other factor really (you're trying to model an extremely complex system here and the war can affect these two economies in many other ways) impact Chinese demand for gas (driven by their mfg sector) more than American demand for gas (driven by broader factors) - maybe cargo price, currency, shift of demand from consumer to military, or who knows what are causing the things you see. I don't claim to have the answer, I am just saying your measure is totally insufficient to prove your point. You're correct that it's a global commodity that impacts everyone but most experts agree that it impacts east Asia more than the US.
American citizens have known since 1973 that their dependence on oil puts them at the mercy of every Middle East dictator. The governments have known this clearly since the 1940s - see the Barbarossa operation. The US had literal generations to reduce their oil dependency and yet chose to remain dependent. It has nothing to do with the current war.
The US succeeded in reducing their oil dependency and the country is now a net exporter. That doesn't solve the environmental concerns, nor hermetically seal the country from trends in global oil markets, but the US's energy independence agenda has definitely been successful on its own terms.
Unfortunately, it hasn't diminished the number of American foreign policy experts who think it's very important to fight lots of wars in the Middle East.
It seems to me that the current war in the middle east has more to do with ensuring those who chant Death To America do not develop nuclear weapons and to set back their ballistic missile program.
It's kind of a problem if you can't definitely say why a war of aggression is being fought, no? But if we do say that this war is being primarily fought to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, then it has to be considered an unmitigated failure. The current outlook is immeasurably worse than it was at the end of the Biden administration, and I'd charitably describe Biden as having done next to nothing to stop them.
I agree those are big problems! That's why I supported JCPOA. The US foreign policy blob wanted to bomb Iran instead, though, with very unclear explanations of how bombing Iran would cause a kind and non-belligerent government to take over. The more articulate members seem to take it as an article of faith that people react to American bombs by doing what the American government wants; the less articulate members have just been insulting journalists when they ask basic questions about whether there's a plan or what the goal is.
A treaty whose key articles would start expiring in.. late 2025. Which Iran had no motivation whatsoever to extend had it being kept (imagine this Iran but with 2-4 trillion dollars more, more than a few going to drones and missiles). You'd have this war but on way worse terms.
If Trump truly cared about nukes, he wouldn't have torn up the treaty in his first term. This war's about catering to Israel and distracting from the Epstein files.
The treaty that would have expired in January 2026 and left Iran with far more resources? Biden gave Iran $6 billion, a month later the Gazans infiltrated Israel with Iranian-funded weaponry.
The article states that it's not important for any reason other than oil and shipping:
"The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States."
China is the world's largest oil importer. Stats are hard, things get mislabeled due to sanctions, but somewhere between 15%-20% of China's oil is-or-was from Iran+Venezuela.
In my view, this partially explains the move in Iran, considering a 3-10 year strategic timeline.
It was never about nuclear weapons, Netanyahu has been saying Iran was one week away for over 30 years. Europe goes along as an excuse to support politically unpopular war to maintain US support for Ukraine.
No, he hasn't been saying that, despite what you may have read in a random reddit comment. In the 90s he was saying 3-5 years. In 2010 it was 1-2 years.
The first time any kind of claim measured in weeks was immediately before Rising Lion last year, and guess what, the IAEA agreed with him.
I think we can agree that being weeks away from having enough fissile material for a nuke is different from being weeks away from having a nuke. Unless you think you just get your fissile material and then pop it in the next day
What would you expect Europe to do? It’s not like they openly support this war. The Iranian diaspora supports it, there is the secularism element, but the US doesn’t care about the Iranian people anyway
The diaspora is happy about the regime being targeted. They will be much, much more ambivalent if the US starts targeting power infrastructure and innocent people in hospitals etc start dying en masse.
> Power infrastructure & hospitals are already being targeted and bombed
It's absolutely not. If they were being targeted, material fractions of them would be getting destroyed. Instead we're seeing one offs, which look more like fuckups or Israeli nonsense.
The diaspora somewhat supported it for a week. Then a desalination plant was hit, and I guarantee the support grew way, way weaker. Now we're 3 weeks in, and the only Iranian I keep contact with is extremely sad that the outcome is this bad. I won't tell him 'i told you so', because unlike people on HN who argue for the operation, he doesn't deserve it, but to the 'regime change' supporters: I told you so.
the nuclear weapons program has cost about 2T USD for Iran, and definitely makes certain arguments for intervention more acceptable, but it doesn't negate the other side of the equation. the cost of intervention is still enormous. (and since the enriched uranium is an obvious target it is obviously even more protected)
I'm sure this is true, and that there will always be a (likely disproportionately) loud group of complainers, many of whom will forget about their complaints. I haven't really publicly complained about Tahoe before, and I don't intend on whining about it again. But...
It's fine. I'm not going to rail about how it's unusable, or say that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes, or whatever. But it's enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to buy another Mac, if I have the option of using a desktop Linux system.
That's a pretty big caveat. But those curved window borders and the rounded widgets in e.g. the settings menu are kind of awful. Not unusable. But every time I open a terminal and I deal with the choice of either having obscene padding around my content or seeing a few pixels of my prompt's corners shaved off, I get just a little more irritated, and a little less likely to pick up my Macbook the next time I'm deciding which device to use.
Good UI for tools, physical or digitial, should reduce the friction between picking it up and using it for something, that's the problem at the core of design. With the small caveat that sometimes technically good but perhaps unethical design solves stupid business problems well, like deliberately making chairs uncomfortable to keep traffic moving through a busy cafe, or making anti-homeless benches, design should not dissuade you from using something you purchased to solve other problems; it's unprincipled.
I've always been "pro-change" for UIs, as opposed to the bunch of people in the "bring the old UI back" camp, but Tahoe looked like fecal matter from the moment it was introduced.
On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.
So I’ve enabled reduced transparency and all the other accessibility settings I can find to remove the terribleness.
The UI is now mono-coloured gray and looks like MacOS back in the days before OS X was a thing - but it’s still better than what Apple “envisioned” with Tahoe.
> looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned
It’s an operating system, not a dress to parade around on a catwalk. I don’t want it to be fashionable and change with the seasons, I want it to be usable and intuitive. And yes, it should look good (which Tahoe doesn’t) but to the extent that it makes usability better, never in detriment of it.
I got a Mac mini and was very positively surprised that it still ran the older version. I can use the size setting I'm comfortable with in the display menu. When I use Tahoe, I need to make the setting smaller to have a reasonable amount of apps open, but then it's uncomfortable to read.
That's actually a problem with Tahoe, it is not something new and bold, it's old-fashioned. Transparency already has come and gone as a UI fad, and it doesn't really make any big difference if you throw computationally expensive effects at it.
It's a very impressive phone and will likely be the case that Apple and Samsung dominate western phone sales. But you can get way better phones from China right now with these new silicon carbide batteries which is just a game changer.
I still think it has a lot of potential, and is the logical next storage system, because of its performance advantages over NAND flash. Because input costs can come down.
"here's one I prepared earlier" would be cute. I think other people's threads pointing out to scale globally it has to be something anyone can do, and right now Intel appear to have set the RAND conditions or whatever IPR they lock into this higher than other people want to pay.
It's all about trust at the end of the day. And given that it was exposed that Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google etc all collaborated with the US government to provide surveillance (PRISM) by Edward Snowden, how we can trust them ever again?
Today when cropping an image in Preview.app on Tahoe I ran into an issue where you can't use the bottom of the crop selection rectangle because the rounded corner of the window blocks it.
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