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Bulletins and News Discussion from April 8th to April 14th, 2024 - First Iran-Israel War Megathread

Iran has struck Israel.

The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Country of the Week is the United Kingdom! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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2K comments

  • good god, already seeing "well, shucks. we were THIS close to Holding Netanyahu Accountable and now Iran has done this and made people support him again" takes. there's eating from the trashcan of ideology and then there's going out to your nearest landfill and diving headfirst into it

  • There's this fascinating contradiction that we've seen now in both Ukraine and Israel where they're simultaneously asserting that everything is good because their air defense systems intercepted everything, Iran/Russia is seething and coping because of it, etc etc; but also that this was a massive and brutal escalation and Iran/Russia must be punished for all the harm they've done to us. I can't personally say I care that much about whatever narratives that Israel produces to cope with their losses, and the last six months show well how Israel even more so than Ukraine is putting all their cards into propaganda in the hopes that it'll affect things in the real world somehow, as if saying that your military bases aren't being BTFO will un-explode them.

    Last night really was a paradigm shift, which was easy for me to forget in the videos of drones and missiles smacking into Israeli installations. Israel's sense of invulnerability shattered on October 7th, and their operations and propaganda inside the Gaza Strip since then has been one big attempt to not just attempt the impossible task of destroying Hamas, but to rebuild that sense of strength in their society. When Hezbollah and Yemen joined in, it was two further blows to them. But one thing that Israel could tell itself while rocking back and forth in the fetal position was that there was still one last shield it possessed, one way in which it was still strong - it knew that Iran would never attack them directly. They simply would not dare. It would be too massive of a hurdle to jump, too dangerous for Iran to strike them, a nuclear-armed power. They would only ever act through resistance groups, they thought. And that has been more-or-less true for many decades now.

    Until last night. The Rubicon has been crossed. There's now little left for Israel's sense of protection. Weeks where decades happen.

  • https://twitter.com/fadiquran/status/1779426300760850642

    "On Iran’s strike:

    At Stanford, I attended a masterclass on military strategy led by a person with decades of experience, including serving at the highest levels in the military and government.

    One lesson he thought that I always remember was this:

    He asked us:

    “Say the US decided to attack Iraq with a new stealth jet it hadn’t used before that evaded all radars? The attack was a success. Was it strategic?”

    Many in the class raised their hands to say “yes, it achieved its goal”. But the professor said: “It may not have been”.

    Why?

    “Because now your adversaries know your capabilities and it’s a matter of time before they find ways around them. If this attack could be done with conventional weapons, it’s better to keep your top weapons until you need them. Using them creates a disadvantage.”

    My analysis is that the scale of Iran’s attack, the diversity of locations it targeted, and weapons it used, forced Israel to uncover the majority of anti-missile technologies the US and it have across the region.

    The Iranians did not use any weapons Israel didn’t know it had, it just used a lot of them. But the Iranians likely now have almost a full map of what Israel’s missile defence system looks like, as well as where in Jordan and the Gulf the US has installations. It also knows how long it takes to prepare them, how Israeli society responds…etc

    This is a huge strategic cost to Israel, while Arab regimes now are being blasted by their peoples, particularly the Jordanian monarchy, for not doing anything to protect Gazans but then going all out to protect Israel.

    Crucially, Iran can now reverse engineer all the intel gathered from this attack to make a much more deadly one credible. While the US and Israel will have to re-design away from their current model which has been compromised. Its success in stopping this choreographed attack is thus still very costly.

    Moreover, with the threat of a regional war that neither the US nor the Arab regimes want feeling nearer, it’s likely their pressure on Israel to back down will increase, making a ceasefire more feasible.

    Anyone assuming this is just theatrics is missing the context of how militaries assess strategy versus tactics. Theatre is an important factor, but gathering intelligence of the “enemy’s” posture is more valuable, especially if one believes they’re in a long war of attrition.

    Netanyahu and the Israel government prefer a quick hot and urgent war where they can pull in America. The Iranians prefer a longer war of attrition that bleeds Israel of its deterrence capabilities and makes it an ally for Arabs and the US that’s too costly to have.

    Lastly, if you are a person who hates war, if you want peace, the best and only way to get there in the region is to support the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and dignity.

    There is no sustainable peace possible as long as Palestinians live under an oppressive system of apartheid."

  • US trade representative says China's economy is a system “that we’ve articulated as being not market-based, as being fundamentally nurtured differently, against which a market-based system like ours is going to have trouble competing against and surviving”.

    Full article

  • Israel grouping together injuries and "people treated for anxiety" is just so funny. Not a serious country.

    Also, I guess if after the smoke clears Israel is seriously listing cases of anxiety, the damage wasn't that bad and Iran's response was pretty calculated. Switching my brain to nothing ever happens mode until the morning.

  • Western media is running zionist propaganda and making its viewers dumber by refusing to assign blame for the attack on the Iranian consulate. They're all "Iran attacked 'Israel' who they accuse of being responsible for attacking the consulate". Everything to make the Iranians look aggressive and unreasonable.

    Who else would have attacked the consulate? Fucking Bolivia?

    And of course they're humanising the Zionists and making their feelings relatable to viewers "Danish-'Israeli' in 'Tel Aviv': I haven't slept for 48 hours" reads the current headline on one news website, complete with a picture of a sad-lookibg white woman. The poor little settler went to get her Lebensraum and be the master race and now the subhumans are disturbing her sleep. The fucking tragedy.

    Meanwhile when brown people gets murdered by the thousands all we get are statistics and even these statistics are being smeared as probably being unreliable by the "Hamas-controlled health authorities" bullshit.

    I hate western journalists so much it's unbelievable.

  • Amongst the mixture of dread and anticipation of tonight's events grumpy comedy man Dave Anthony's tweet got a laugh out me with a tweet directed at the libs on his timeline:

    As i see the mushroom cloud over Los Angeles. "If Trump was president there would be two mushroom clouds."

  • When the Zionists carpet bombs civilians by the tens of thousands the so-called civilized west does jack shit except giving a half-hearted performance of asking the Zionists nicely to perhaps not be as murderous the next time.

    When Iran retaliates for an illegal and unprovoked terrorist attack by the zionist entity against a diplomatic mission the west sends planes and missiles and hangar ships to defend the zionists.

    No wonder the rest of the world hates the west.

  • https://thecradle.co/articles-id/24357

    According to Yemeni sources, behind closed doors the US has offered Ansarallah everything they could possibly ask for if they drop the embargo and stop supporting Gaza/attacking Israel.

    “The sources further reveal that the Americans pledged to immediately release withheld Yemeni public sector salaries from the National Saudi Bank, lift the country’s siege entirely, reopen Sanaa Airport, ease restrictions on the port of Hodeidah, and facilitate a comprehensive prisoner exchange agreement with all involved parties.” They also offered to recognize Ansarallah as the legitimate government of Yemen and to remove Ansarallah from the US terrorist list.

    That’s how much the Biden government wants this genocide to happen, they’re willing to give up all of their imperialist ambitions and investments of the last decade against Yemen. They could have done all of the things above at any time, but they don’t, they hold it back as leverage. This is how US does its foreign policy, they sanction nations and hold their economies hostage and then make them bargain and haggle back to neutrality by giving up all of their sovereignty.

    They do the same shit with Iran, sanctioning them into the ground so that Obama and the EU can do an “Iran deal” where Iran gives up a bunch of concessions in exchange for the US to end its sanctions. Basically, the US never has to give up anything they just hold everyone at gunpoint as their leverage

  • Congratulations to Elon Musk, because of his Twitter meltdown, China's BYD Auto has won and is now firmly established in the Brazilian market. Meanwhile, Tesla will enter the Brazilian market, Elon Musk will probably be banned from entering Brazilian territory and Twitter will also be banned and, if we're really lucky, the FBI will give him a good scare by raiding his house.

    It also makes Lula da Silva and the Brazilian Supreme Court more popular. There's nothing better to unite people than an idiot American bad-mouthing a country he doesn't understand or speak the language of. Now, Congress and/or the Supreme Court could easily pass a law establishing more regulations for the Internet, since the majority of the population would support it.

  • Just as shocking as watching China go from war torn backwater to industrial hub of the planet in the last 70 years is watching the UK go from the globe spanning empire to... whatever the fuck it is today. Didn't those guys used to be a major world power at some point? What happened to them?

  • "The Israelis entered this war under the childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and no one was going to bomb them"

    • Iranian Bomber Harris, probably

  • I'd like to thank the Islamic Republic of Iran for bestowing me with such confidence today that multiple ladies were coming up to me telling me I looked cool as hell tonight. All praises to Allah, he works in mysterious ways

  • holy shit lmao, the Zionists released images like this as proof that their airbase is fine:

    extremely obvious that they quickly dug a hole in a ground and they're so stupid that they forgot to not include the mound of material that they unearthed. I guess this is indirect proof that the airbase truly has been fucked or they'd release something of substance instead

  • China: Global Times newspaper: Iran responded with strategic intelligence, with missiles and drones, successfully destroying major military targets in “Israel.”

  • NHS just announced the cancellation of all trans healthcare appointments for under 18s and it's putting over 18s "under review". Given the context I expect this to be a build up to trying to cancel all trans healthcare.

    https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/nhs-englands-response-to-the-final-report-of-the-independent-review-of-gender-identity-services-for-children-and-young-people/

    1. NHS England has already announced that it is bringing forward its review of the adult service specifications, and we have written to the Chief Executives of the organisations that host the GDCs to inform them that this will be undertaken in the context of a broader, systemic review of the operation and delivery of the GDCs. NHS England will provide more detail very soon, but we envisage it will be informed by the deployment of external quality improvement experts into the services. In view of your advice about the need for caution in the initiation of medical interventions for young people under 18 years of age, our letter instructs the adult gender clinics to implement a pause on offering first appointments to young people below their 18th birthday.This letter also makes clear that NHS England expects full cooperation from the GDCs in the delivery of the data linkage study, on which we have corresponded separately.
2049 comments