Can anyone explain why Iran is doing this?
Israel killed an Iranian general.
A few days ago Israel bombed an Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria.
Bombing an embassy is generally consider an act of war.
This is the Iranian response.
The proximate cause is an attack Israel launched against the Iranian embassy in Syria, resulting in the death of an Iranian general. The ultimate causes (why Israel launched that attack and why that Iranian general was where he was) are very complicated. I don’t pretend to understand it all, an O think it’s the subject for another thread.
I have the same question, and I think it’s very pertinent to this thread. All I know about the background is that Israel attacked the Iranian embassy in Damascus. This fact in isolation without further explanation makes it seem like Israel started this with an unprovoked attack. I’m sure this is not the case but I have no idea what the background is.
It has to do with religious hatred. Although exactly why they have that hatred makes no sense to me, so I can’t explain it.
ETA. It’s my understanding it has something to do with the Iranian revolution. But that just goes back to what seems to me to be non-sensical religious hatred, because again IMHO Iran was a much better country before the Ayatollahs, so the only reason to have supported them would be due to religious fundamentalism.
Ah, OK - Iran has long been backing people like Hamas and Hezbollah which, aside from that attack by Hamas on Israelis a couple months ago, both of those groups have been taking pot-shots at Israel for years. With a recent uptick of frequency in the past couple months.
Really, you can take this sort of animosity of one group towards another in the area back thousands of years. How far back do you want to go?
And each step back reverses the direction the finger is pointing. It’s maddening.
And it works the same way forward in time.
Did Israel admit to this ?
I’m not sure… they weren’t saying anything at first. They weren’t denying the accusation. Not sure who else would be a likely candidate to be the guilty party.
Honestly, I can’t keep up with all the crazy shit going on in the world these days, and certainly not do so and keep my sanity.
This is in dispute. Some news reports say embassy, while others say it was a consultate annex building. But an Iranian general died. It seems reasonable to suppose the Israeli government did this, as is stated in my link.
Re the thread question, did the attack targets also include U.S. military bases in Iraq, Jordan, and/or Syria?
Also, do the drones fly straight? If not, is there uncertainty concerning the ultimate target when they have been shot down?
Here’s what Israel had to say about it:
So in other words: “We’re not saying it was us, and we’re not saying it wasn’t us, but it was a military target, they deserved it, and if they keep screwing around, there’s more where that came from.”
As to the OP question, “Why is Iran launching this attack on Israel?”, there seems to me to be two answers: the Obvious one, in retaliation for the death of their General, but more interesting are the other potential reasons, such as:
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A way to demonstrate their support of Hamas and win bonus points with the Arab “street”, which for religious (Sunni/Shi’ite) reasons is not always a fan of Iran.
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The Iranians may feel this is a low-risk gambit, being that Israel is not in position, either militarily, economically or politically (IMHO) to risk what would amount to a ‘2-front war’, albeit this front would be mostly in the air.
As for the USA, while I suspect there will be raids on Iranian assets, any major commitment is unlikely by the US at this time, partly due to resources tied up in Ukraine/Europe and partly with the 2024 political activity in the US. They might be wrong about that, and I expect some sort of US strike, and we’ll see if that’s an end to it…or not.
- Or it could be a rash decision by men in Iran to do something to bloody the nose of the USA/Israel without due thought of the consequences…but politics has been around that part of the world for millennia and playing this game is nothing new.
Just some thoughts off the top of my head (which is bald so make of that what you will). The next 24-48 hours could be…interesting–as in “Interesting Times”
Press on.
Iran launched its attack against Israel on Oct 7th, through the use of Hamas, an Iranian proxy.
When their catspaw showed that they can’t get the job done, they decided to get personally involved, like an 80s movie villain shoving aside his henchmen and saying “fine, I’ll do it myself”.
I’m sure the attack was a lot more effective in the Supreme Leader’s mind, but the addled imagination of a religious fanatic bears little resemblance to reality.
Well, I never thought Israel didnt do it, but afaik it has not been 100% confirmed.
Also, distracting from their internal issues is probably high up on the list of motivations (that was a big motivator for Oct 7 as well, undoubtedly)
My understanding is that Iran has been fighting a proxy war against Israel. The Hamas attack occurred minimally with their blessing and possibly at their bequest. That is their ideal circumstance: they get to attack Israel without getting their own noses bloodied.
Israel has messaged that they cannot hide behind their proxies completely.
My understanding further is that each wants to message how tough they are without getting into a full out war. The question is how tough they each can be that messages their fearlessness to all interested players without forcing escalation that gets out of control.
The fear is that it is a very dangerous game and one miscalculation by either side can spiral bigger and bigger very quickly.
Iran is probably expecting that Israel won’t retaliate against targets in Iran proper. In order to do so they’d have to fly over Jordanian, Syrian (Israel most likely doesn’t care about this part), and Iraqi airspace. Are they willing to do so in order to attack Iran directly? I have no idea, but that seems like it will be the big question over the next few days.
Here’s my attempt to add a bit of context for the Israeli attack last week on the Iranian general near the Iranian embassy:
On Israel’s northern border are two failed states-Syria and Lebanon.
Syria disintegrated in a civil war several years ago. (Remember when a million Syrian refugees walked across Europe looking for asylum in Germany?.) Since then, the Syrian government , supported by Russia, has kept control over about one third of its territory, and terrorist groups like ISIS control the rest of Syria. Iran has proudly stepped into the chaos, to support the terrorists and use their territory to ship large amounts of missiles to Lebanon, where they are fired at Israel. Israel has routinely bombed the arms shipments , hitting airplanes from Iran as they land in Syria, and bombing weapons storage facilities. Iranian soldiers have been killed. The Israeli attack last week near the embassy was just another of these “routine” attacks, though this time the soldier who was killed was a high ranking general.
The other failed state on Israel’s border is Lebanon, which has fought several civil wars in recent decades, and is split in two parts. The southern part of the country, adjacent to Israel, is completely controlled by Hizballah (Arabic for “the party of Allah”) . Hizballah is a fanatic Shiite muslim terrorist group, openly backed by Iran. They have built a massive army with a quarter million missiles aimed at Israel, and a huge infrastructure of underground army bases, including tunnels under the border into Israeli territory. Their source of weapons and missiles is Iran. For the past six months, Hizballah has done massive damage to Israel. They have fired missiles and drones at Israeli cities along the border, causing a hundred thousand Israeli citizens to abandon their homes, becoming refugees in their own country.
Like in Syria, Israel has frequently bombed Iranian weapons being delivered to Hizballah, and Iranian soldiers have been killed.
For the past half century, since the Ayatollahs took control of Iran, Iran has been declaring their intention to wipe Israel off the map.
They now have nukes.
Your post is a reasonable if concise summary of recent events going back to 1979 but there is an entire history of Iranian resentment going back to the 19th Century of British (and later American) shit-fuckery, and the (largely justified) view that Israel is a proxy for US and British interests in the Middle East. Iran has sought to be the dominant regional power (and in opposition to the Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and is now seeing the opportunity to take advantage of Israel becoming a pariah state, which was probably part of their (and certainly Hamas) intent of the 7 October attacks and the predictably over the top Israeli response, but this is now spiraling into a potentially much larger conflict.
I don’t know if Iran has nuclear weapons yet, but ever since the US pulled out of the Iran nuclear framework (essentially removing all teeth to sanctions) they have been stockpiling just-barely-below-weapon grade enriched uranium and establishing newer and more modern centrifuges that will allow them to easily enrich up to weaponizable HEU. Iran has intermediate class ballistic and cruise missile delivery systems, and purportedly has a maneuverable hypersonic weapon of domestic design (developed with Russian expertise, so probably not just a mockup).
I’ve seen some Evangelical ‘news feeds’ celebrating this as heralding the Apocalypse because, you know, Evangelicals are nutbags, but there are very real security concerns here and little in the way of restraint in the region. Even a limited nuclear exchange would have dire consequences quite aside from the immediate mass casualties.
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