Quote:Deep intelligence penetration enabled Israel to kill Hassan Nasrallah

Benjamin Netanyahu was required to give permission to undertake the attack from New York, where the Israeli prime minister had given a bellicose speech at the UN general assembly. There was, presumably, felt to be little time to wait.

According to an unsubstantiated report in the French newspaper Le Parisien, the mole who informed the Israelis that Nasrallah was on his way to the bunker was Iranian. If true, it would be eye-catching, given that Iran is Hezbollah’s principal backer.

Video released by the Israel Defense Forces on Saturday of the jets “taking off for the strike from Hatzerim airbase” showed eight US-made F-15Is. One taking off is laden with multiple missiles, under the wings and at the rear. Experts said they appeared to be American-manufactured BLU-109 2,000lb bombs, of the class the Biden administration had decided to withhold from Israel in the summer amid concerns about their use in densely populated Gaza.

Justin Bronk, an aviation expert with the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) thinktank, said the Israeli air force would have probably used 2,000lb joint direct attack munition (JDAM) guided missiles fitted with penetrating fuses designed to explode after a building or the ground is struck. Israeli air force officers said that during the attack, named Operation New Order, about 100 munitions were used and that bombs were dropped “every two seconds”.

Quote:The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago. But our work is unfinished. The United States must sustain its fortitude across administrations to shake the revisionists’ assumptions. It must be prepared for the revisionist states to deepen cooperation with one another to try to make up the difference. It must maintain its commitments to and the trust of its friends. And it must continue to earn the American people’s confidence in the power, purpose, and value of disciplined American leadership in the world.

(10-02-2024, 08:22 PM)Schmoe Wrote: Anyone else see the video of the poor Palestinian bastard who had a missile land right on him?  Apparently that's the only person these missile strikes killed.  It's a good thing there weren't more casualties, but that makes this whole attack look like more posturing.

Quote:With US military support, Israel shifts Middle East power balance

Israeli military strikes are targeting Iran’s armed allies across a nearly 2,000-mile stretch of the Middle East and threatening Iran itself. The efforts raise the possibility of an end to two decades of Iranian ascendancy in the region, to which the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq inadvertently gave rise.

In Washington, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and Arab capitals, opponents and supporters of Israel's offensive are offering clashing ideas about what the U.S. should do next, as its ally racks up tactical successes against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen and presses its yearlong campaign to crush Hamas in Gaza.

Israel should get all the support it needs from the United States until Iran's government “follows other dictatorships of the past into the dustbin of history,” said Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at Washington's conservative-leaning Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — calls echoed by some Israeli political figures.

Going further, Yoel Guzansky, a former senior staffer at Israel’s National Security Council, called for the Biden administration to join Israel in direct attacks in Iran. That would send "the right message to the Iranians — ‘Don’t mess with us,’'' Guzansky said.

Quote:Ultimately, Israel “will be in a situation where it can only protect itself by perpetual war,” said Vali Nasr, who was an adviser to the Obama administration. Now a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, he has been one of the leading documenters of the rise of Iranian regional influence since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving limited weight to Biden administration calls for restraint, the United States and its partners in the Middle East are “at the mercy of how far Bibi Netanyahu will push it,” Nasr said, referring to the Israeli leader by his nickname.

“It's as if we hadn't learned the lessons, or the folly, of that experiment ... in Iraq in 2003 about reshaping the Middle East order,” said Randa Slim, a fellow at SAIS and researcher at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

Advocates of Israel’s campaign hope for the weakening of Iran and its armed proxies that attack the U.S., Israel and their partners, oppress civil society and increasingly are teaming up with Russia and other Western adversaries.