And so it begins (via Elena Moore and Megan Pratz at NPR):
The U.S. military has joined with Israel to launch military strikes against Iran, a dramatic escalation in the years-long effort by both nations to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
"We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan," President Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday...
Saturday's attack marks the first act of direct military involvement by the U.S. in the rapidly escalating conflict between Iran and Israel.
It included a strike on the heavily-fortified Fordo nuclear site, according to Trump, which is located roughly 300 feet under a mountain about 100 miles south of Tehran. It's a move that Israel has been lobbying the U.S. to carry out, given that only the U.S. has the kind of powerful "bunker buster" bomb capable of reaching the site. Known as the GBU-57 MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator), the bomb can only be transported by one specific U.S. warplane, the B-2 stealth bomber, due to its immense 30,000 pound weight...
The U.S. carried out the strike despite years of promises by Trump to keep the country from entangling itself in another Middle East conflict. Yet Trump has also said it is paramount that Iran never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.
Trump initially sought to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran — one to replace the Obama-era agreement that he abandoned, despite Iran's apparent compliance, in 2018. But in the days after Israel's initial strikes on Iran earlier this month, he grew increasingly vocal in his opposition to Iran and the possibility it could attack U.S. assets in the region...
Israel considers Iran an existential threat and says its attacks this month have been necessary to keep Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The attacks have strictly targeted military and nuclear facilities, according to Israel, but the Iranian government says they are already responsible for the deaths of more than 200 civilians.
Iran has responded with a barrage of missile and drone strikes aimed at Israel. The Israeli military says it has intercepted many of those projectiles, but not all. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says dozens have been killed, and hundreds more wounded.
Iran has long defended its nuclear program as peaceful, but Netanyahu has argued it poses a risk not just for his nation, but for the U.S. as well...
For its part, the U.S. intelligence community has said it believes Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard relayed that guidance as recently as March during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee...
Gabbard has since backtracked her statements to the Senate, siding with trump's - and Netanyahu's - allegations.
No one can determine for now where all of this will lead. Iran's leadership will be pressed to respond in an escalating manner, which would drag America even further into the mud pit with escalations of our own.
So far, Iran's public response was to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokehold in the Persian Gulf. It would cut off 20 percent of the oil getting shipped across the globe, triggering spikes in oil prices and worsening inflation woes everywhere especially in the U.S. How they would implement that - using whatever naval forces they have to attack tankers, most likely - would surely sparking a shooting battle and arguably escalate matters even further. There's still the possibility Iran would strike at any of the U.S. military bases across the Middle East, which would definitely escalate things to likely ground invasion.
All of this happening without anyone openly declaring war, even though everyone involved knows full well that this is a war and nobody in this wants to be the one to step back and calm things down.
It's not a war that a majority of Americans want: All of the current polling is opposed to trump leading us into another Middle East debacle. We've been burned out by the mistakes and destruction of the post-9/11 Global War on Terror that sucked us into Iraqi and Afghani quagmires, neither of which ended cleanly (and with a sorrowful return of Afghanistan to a brutal Taliban rule). And yet, the neocons at Fox Not-News and throughout the Republican ranks are salivating at another chance to inflict "Regime Change" on an Iranian population that's already suffered too much from American involvement in their history.
All this threatens is another quagmire full of occupation, torture, terror strikes by local resistance, and years of misery for all involved.
Gods help us all. I keep saying this, and I keep getting proven right: None of this is going to end well.
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