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Iran launches dozens of drones toward Israel
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- By Chris Lau, Sophie Tanno, <a href="/profiles/tori-powell">Tori B. Powell</a>, <a href="/profiles/emma-tucker">Emma Tucker</a>, <a href="/profiles/kaanita-iyer">Kaanita Iyer</a>, <a href="/profiles/paul-leblanc">Paul LeBlanc</a> and <a href="/profiles/adrienne-vogt">Adrienne Vogt</a>, CNN
- Published
- Apr 13 2024
- Word count
- 226 words
This says dozens, but I am seeing a few reports of the drone count being all the way up to 400. May just be the largest drone strike in history if true.
Interestingly they seem to be avoiding the Tel Aviv bubble, which they probably hope will limit Israeli retaliation (which I do not doubt will happen to some extent) to avoid Tehran.
Except for work being cancelled for some people, the center isn't really feeling anything yet. I expected to wake up to my shift with an alarm.
Ninja edit, Israel is claiming to have shot down 100 ballistic missiles up to this point. I suspect opsec is keeping a lot of things under wraps but I severely doubt that the region will stay quiet after this.
Ninja edit 2, more like 200 total projectiles (drones and missiles) with the vast majority being shot down outside of Israeli territory. So far only one impact reported. Remains to be seen where this goes.
I'd expect Israel to level Iran's drone factories. They'll be encouraged to do that by the US/EU, because it hurts Russia critically in the Ukraine war when their only flow of decent drone hardware dries up. What Iran does after that we'll just have to see. I'm sure Iran isn't happy with the hit rate they got out of that epic salvo - it was a total joke it went so poorly. If they hit back again, it's going to get hot over there, but at this point they don't even look like a threat. Hard times when your epic flex leaves you flat on your face looking like an idiot.
I just watch Biden's aid posse. If they bug out of Gaza (which they are prepared to do at a moment's notice in a matter of hours) then that means US intelligence has decided to nope out of the area because they expect it to get worse. So far they haven't moved, and seeing pilots from four different countries all combine air forces in that region to shoot all of this stuff out of the sky is at least one single good sign in this mess.
Still developing, but quite an escalation. Is it the beginning of a hot war between major powers in the Middle East?
As of right now what's known is:
So at the very least seems like there will be a "skirmish" of them using long range weaponry on each other until everyone feels they've shown off enough.
Obviously, depending on how bad the damage is from the attacks is going to be the major decider. If a couple of empty factories blow up and less than 10 people die, Israel probably isn't doing much. If they hit a major civilian centers (note they have said they're only targeting military targets so this is unlikely) and we have 500+ casualties, then yeah it's going to be a full blown war in no time.
It's really anyone's guess at this point though. There's not a lot anyone can do until we know how much damage is done.
Edit-
Still hard to tell what's accurate, but it seems like
nothing was hit in Israel (?)at least one missile hit a military base with minimal damage, but they are still absolutely planning on a serious response. Hopefully that's more talk than not but we'll see.Interesting that they are escalating, but they say they don't want to escalate.
That's what Hezbollah implicitly does sometimes too. In fact, they just did:
Lebanon’s Hezbollah fires ‘dozens of rockets’ at Israeli positions
I read somewhere that attacking Israel plays well with their base, but they don't actually want to start a wider war. So they try to attack without triggering a war, for political reasons.
But it might also be about normalizing attacks on Israel. (Did you even hear about the Hezbollah attack?) They're probably trying to do that too.
It seems like a very risky game. Obviously, Israel is not going to be happy about normalizing attacks on Israel. They believe in deterrence, often with overwhelming counterattacks.
This gets into the weird world of politics which is often just like the dumbest game of "im not touching you" ever.
Israel hit an Iran embassy (and why is it's own mess).
Iran can't just "oh well" because even if the leaders WANTED to do that, they would probably be replaced with someone who felt otherwise.
Iran, almost certainly, does not actually want a full out war with Israel for a whole slew of reasons. Even ignoring US involvement, it's far from certain how well that goes for Iran. It would be devastating for both sides for sure, and that's the last thing Iran wants/needs right now, especially if they lose/appear to be losing.
So what we get is a serious, but maybe not too serious, attack with an instant "If you leave it at this we can all forget this happened" thing.
But the simple truth is, even if no one is killed, they just launched drones and I believe missiles at another nation, so now israel is right back in the exact same position. How do you "respond" without just saying "nah your attempt to kill our populace is fine".
I mean, if Iran doesn't increase civilian casualties by a significant number, only hits military targets....Israel would be wise to say harsh words that end with 'something we'll show mercy' and start de-escalating matters (ideally across the board).
If Iran really wanted to stir the pot they had a lot of options.
Israel’s foreign policy has traditionally been overwhelming force as a deterrence. It’s not really in their interest for Iran sending warheads to be seen as a “normal” occurrence. I think it’s very possible we see tit for tat escalation.
This is also a great excuse for them to once again blow up Irans nuclear program and I suspect they’re going to taste that opportunity given Irans position on what they’ll do with nukes
This is me putting my conspiracy theorist's hat on. But are we really sure Iran doesn't already have nukes? Their chief rival is Israel. Israel has, for decades, maintained a policy of ambiguity, refusing to admit the existence of their nuclear arsenal. At the same time, Iran has been reportedly right on the brink of developing nuclear weapons for what...20 years at this point? Trump withdrew the US from the Iranian deal in 2017. And at the time, Iran was reported to be just months away from the bomb. Them already having a decent number of nuclear weapons doesn't seem that absurd an idea.
The one thing that would really make me suspect this is that Israel and Iran really are acting very similar to how other nuclear powers operate when in conflict. They've doubled down on the proxy war, and they've been running a low-level cloak and dagger spy v. spy conflict with each other for years. The present Israel/Iran relationship reminds me a lot of the Cold War US/Soviet relationship. If you can't declare outright war against each other, you have to use covert and indirect action to advance your aims.
And part of this is being very careful about how you respond to slights and actions against you. Iran has supported Hamas and Hezbollah, so Israel killed one of their leading generals. In response, Iran launched a drone attack against Israel. However, they've done so in a way that seems geared to give Israel an easy off ramp. Yes, they made a big spectacular attack...hundreds of drones! They initiated an attack that they can play up in their media, something to show their people that slights against their country won't go unanswered. But at the same time, they hardly launched everything they could against Israel. They didn't order Hezbollah to unleash their rocket arsenal. They mostly sent a bunch of cheap, slow, low-yield drones that could be easily shot down. Israel has apparently shot down 99% of the drones and missiles Iran launched. What we saw represents only a tiny fraction of Iran's capabilities. Despite the spectacular nature of an attack with hundreds of drones, it was actually a pretty modest demonstration of their capabilities. And the damage to Israel was minimal. Those drones cost something like $20k a piece, so 500 of them would represent a cost of $10 million. That's about the cost of five tomahawk cruise missiles.
It reminds me of the lengths the Soviet Union went to during the Korean War to give the US a path to avoid escalation. Soviet Pilots fought the US over the skies of Korea. However, they always made sure to provide a fig-leaf of plausible deniability. They flew in planes with North Korean or Chinese markings. Some were given fake Chinese passports. Others were officially not even active duty Soviet soldiers, but just volunteers who just showed up in China offering to help. There absolutely was an organized campaign to pit Soviet pilots against American ones, but this provided a small degree of deniability. And the American government certainly wasn't fooled by it. They knew these were actually Soviet pilots. But they never called the Soviet Union out on it or used it as an excuse to escalate. If the Soviet Union had directly sent in Soviet planes to openly attack US troops and aircraft, that would have been a direct declaration of war. But by doing it indirectly, the Soviets could help their allies while also giving the US an easy path to avoid escalating the situation into an all-out nuclear war. The Soviets pulled their pilot shenanigans not to fool the US, but to give the Americans an easy excuse to not start a nuclear war.
This whole situation feels very similar. The two sides are engaging in tit-for-tat retaliatory attacks, but they're deliberately designed to be relatively minor. Maybe this means that they really just don't want to fight a conventional war. But it really makes me wonder if perhaps Iran is already a nuclear power, but it has just chosen to maintain the same strategic ambiguity that Israel does. They would even have a similar motivation to do it. Israel has avoided admitting having the bomb because that would have given the Arab states a clear justification for pursuing one of their own. Iran might deny having the bomb to prevent Saudi Arabia from having a clear excuse for building one.
I don't really have any firm evidence of this of course, it's all just speculation. But this whole situation makes me wonder if Iran already has the bomb, their rival powers already knows it, and they're all walking around on tip toes to prevent things from going nuclear.
It really isn't. Israel bombed an embassy. They explicitly aimed at territory marked as Iranian soil, and while they claimed they were aiming at Irani generals, that literally doesn't matter. If they weren't trying to escalate, then they failed spectacularly! There's no way that Iran could not retaliate to the unprovoked (as in, not specifically provoked) bombing of their embassy.
A point of clarification, Israel’s attack was on a consular office next door to an embassy, not the embassy itself.
Still a reckless provocation, of course.
I mean, it's not like Iran hasn't done the same thing and worse against Israel through its proxies. The most well known attack directly on an embassy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Buenos_Aires_Israeli_embassy_bombing
Usually, if you have nukes, you want to be very loud about that fact. The main utility of a nuclear arsenal is as a deterrent.
Israel has a good reason to be ambiguous about its nuclear situation, which is that an open admission that it has nuclear capabilities could trigger other states to acquire/develop their own nukes. Also, while Israel isn't a signatory to the NPT, it still isn't a good look for the US to be supporting a non-big-five state that has nukes.
If Iran had nukes it would be extremely hard to keep that a secret. Nuclear testing is extremely easy to detect and essentially impossible to hide.
They might want to keep it a secret if they had it, but I doubt every world power capable of detecting it(which is a bunch) would want to.
Is it necessary, though? Let's say Iran got their hands on the schematics for a nuclear bomb from Russia or China. If they built it to spec, wouldn't they have a functioning nuclear weapon without doing a single test?
Technically, yes. But there's a reason in IT we say a backup is not a backup unless tested.
That, and a nuclear capability that you've never tested isn't a very credible deterrence.
Israel is pretty damn alone in that regard - they're the only nuclear power I can think of that has not done any testing according to public records, though there are 2 events that were possibly(probably?) Israeli nuclear tests. They're also the only country that is suspected of having nukes but doesn't actually admit to them. That for example NK has conducted tests is well known. It's a very unmistakable way of saying "would everybody please stop messing with me!", and that in itself is probably seen as a decent reason to test the thing.
While it's true it's trying to avoid escalation, it could also be seen as salami slicing tactics, pursuing goals gradually while avoiding escalation. Israel's West Bank settlements might be seen as a form of that.
Drawing a hard line (for example, forming an alliance, as with NATO) is a way of countering that.
With the Korea War example, it was a bit clearer what could be gained from such tactics, though. What can Iran do gradually?
Don’t seem that’s going to be the case given Israel’s statements so far
Didn't say it was likely, just that it would be wise to avoid full-blown WWIII, which between this and Russia/Ukraine is not looking too great.
I mean I’m still conflicted on how serious this attack was.
Iran did telegraph it, but hundreds of drones and dozens of ballistic missiles is not “for show”. Just from an economics and logistics perspective the attack and defense probably cost more than most countries make in a year.
There’s all sorts of back channel communication and what not but it’s hard to look at what happened and just say to you citizens “see it’s fine. We stopped them “
I agree, its hard to read as a distant observer with no insider knowledge. But then, if you're putting on a show, bigger and more extravagant with minimal actual damage is kinda the ideal....especially if your citizens are furious. Additionally, it also kind of signals "we're prepared to throw this at you somewhat casually". What if the failure rate is because this was essentially 'cleaning out the factory waste' rather than 'our best possible gear'?
If it was a true 'display of force,' a single drone taking out 5 buildings would be much more effective of a 'this is what we're capable of' though.
I think right now Israel wants to, at least on the international stage, talk up the damage and their willingness to respond. This gives Iran the opportunity to declare "victory" without actually having achieved anything. So I expect Israel to act very concerned and serious. Lots of "we can't give any details because of OpSec", "we're weighing our options", "Iran's attack on military and civilian targets was oh so bad", and once Iran has declared victory, they just don't do anything.
Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I'm reading the whole "Israel will coordinate its actions with its allies" as a silent admission of "yeah, the US doesn't want an escalation and we don't either, so if this was the entire retaliatory strike, we can leave it at this." but I admit that's possibly more fortune-telling than news-reading.
I'm huffing hopium that they only launch drones and don't go for a full coordinated missile strike with their allies on civilian targets...
If they just hit the West Bank that's one thing, but it's quite another if they launch cruise missiles at Tel Aviv...
If Israel chooses to escalate after this extremely-telegraphed almost non-response it could get ugly. There are some big things hanging in the balance:
Netanyahu holding these keys is pretty gross here, I'm skeptical of the ability for the US to apply sufficient pressure given the last year.
Netanyahu is motivated to escalate and worsen the security situation until after the US election. He knows if he can push things to have Trump win he will have “run out the clock” and the leash will fully be off.
I'm no American politics guru but certainly Netanyahu could use this to apply pressure to both sides? Maybe I'm being overly doomer but I feel we live in a world where the US presidential and downstream ballots are shaping up to be close and any wedge issue can potentially be a decider. With this much time on the clock, I'd want to apply general pressure in advance of the october election
The ironic part is that a segment of the US political left who side with Palestine will help Netanyahu with that.
Please elaborate
Trying to explain this fairly neutrally.
I believe the OP is saying that basically, there’s a segment of the American left that supports Palestine and hasn’t liked how President Biden has handled the conflict, and are committing to not voting for Biden as a result (and this will especially be the case if Biden does more in support of Israel).
Because of the two party system, by committing to not voting for Biden as a result of his seemingly pro-Israel stances, they’re indirectly supporting Trump, who is arguably even more pro-Israel.
So the part of the American left that is pro-Palestine deciding to not vote for Biden because of his pro-Israel stance will result in someone who is even more pro-Israel becoming president (which would benefit Netanyahu) - and is pretty textbook “irony”.
I totally hear that, thanks for the summary. The angle I think I disagree with is that politics is strictly binary. Yes, we live in a two-party system, so inevitably, the three options are left, right, or some flavor of abstaining, but there are still coalitions in both the left and the right. Simply, if Biden chooses to ignore one of these group, he should not count on their support.
The onus is on the candidate to earn our votes. If we just fall in line for the blue or red candidate, they have no incentive to cater to anyone but moderates on the fence, especially in an election year without a primary opponent. Withholding our vote is democracy in action. It gives Biden a reason to listen to us, to stop enabling the genocide in Gaza, to end the subsidies of this Israeli offensive.
That's all morally true, but in practice, not voting for the candidate closest to you politically does make the other candidate more likely to win.
Threatening not to vote for the candidate closest to you can be effective in exerting some pressure, but actually not voting or voting for someone else has only a negative effect on the current election.
Does the threat work if you aren't willing to follow through though?
Not that it matters much for my vote. I live in a solid-colored state, so I have the privilege of taking a moral position on the presidential vote.
The thing is, nobody knows whether or not you have followed through: your vote is private.
If you really want to employ this tactic, and live in a swing state, probably the best thing to do is to talk loudly about how you might not vote for your candidate and then secretly do it. You can even claim you didn't, since nobody knows.
Good point. Especially true for poll responses. The "no preference" movement in the last primary was a great way of doing that, but there is a long time between now and the election. Bolstering third party candidates could be a pathway to keeping up that pressure
Yes, I agree. I don’t think “following though” in this way does much of anything most of the time, and we better hope it doesn’t do anything in this case.
In general, this is overestimating your influence from voting. A vote is a drop in the bucket, something we do out of duty, because it matters in aggregate. But votes and surveys are opaque - you don’t know who voted in a particular way or why they did it. The message is “number went up” or “number went down” and then the pundits have to decide what it means. This is similar to journalists reading the tea leaves about why a stock price went up or down. They make something up that sounds reasonable, but nobody really knows.
Your direct input into this ouija board is minimal. You might have more influence over how the number is interpreted if you speak up than on the number itself?
As a way of supporting a cause, voting is the least you could do. If you want to send a message to someone, there are other ways, and why wait until the election to do it?
Of course this makes it pretty clear that the criticisms of pro-Palestine leftists claiming they won't vote for Biden due to his current policies are BS, since claiming you won't vote for him due to this behavior is exactly what you should be doing right now even if you ultimately don't think anything other than voting for him in the election is wise.
The issue I have with this idea is that our votes as individuals never mattered to begin with. We only matter in aggregate, and aggregate votes are measurable. If we all say we won't vote for
xunlessy, but come election dayxgets a lot of votes, it could be reasonably inferred that the earlier threat was an empty one, and nowxknows not to listen to you.In this case, I'd wager Biden is counting on exactly this happening. We've had Trump and the GOP generally held over our heads for years, used as a cudgel to try and force leftists to go along with the Democrats even if and when they don't do any good, or worse yet betray us. This is not a healthy relationship.
I won't pretend I know how to solve this. It's a goddamn mess. But I don't think it's as simple as making a threat you won't follow through on.
Biden’s agenda has been the most progressive of any President since Lyndon Johnson. This assertion that he’s just pussy footing around and not doing anything progressive really has zero connection to reality.
It makes it hard to take people online who talk about being “leftists” seriously when the idea of being “left” seems to be focused more on reflexive opposition to the whatever the Democrats happen to be doing as “not good enough” without any concrete policy agenda beyond just taking whatever has actually been put forward and saying “it should be more generous though.”
This is true, but it's also true because Biden has to have progressive policy if he hopes to retain progressive voters. We see the policy because of the pressure, not in spite of it. The same can be said for expectations/actions with Israel. If folks don't find meaningful ways to signal he'll lose support then we'll just see a continuation of the federal policy in the middle east that we have over the last 3 decades.
The pressure came from people inside his political coalition, not outside of it. Elizabeth Warren made the cabinet picks for financial regulation and consumer protection posts. Labor union leaders had a hand in deciding who was going to represent labor issues.
The model of politics where you’re like, boycotting products based on what you like or don’t like is not how policy agenda setting actually works. That’s trying to engage with politics as if it’s a consumer product/branding thing. I find it bizarre and ironic that people who call themselves “Leftists” are so thoroughly bought into the capitalist, individualist logic of a consumer products marketing campaign instead of the socialist logic of mass organizing and coalitional negotiation.
Right... And Warren is in his cabinet because she was able to develop a following with her progressive politics (i.e. people showing popular support). Medicare for All became a talking point because it found support under Bernie. Those are collective efforts, we just don't have a domestic system that allows for coalitional negotiation. A collective effort to write in "undecided" can have impact and I think that's why we're seeing a walking back of supportive US/Israeli policy. Not enough mind you, but a start.
It feels like you're pretty dismissive of grassroots attempts an influencing policy. I'd genuinely be interested to know what you think effective policy influence would be. If you could think of it specifically for this case all the better.
I don’t care how “progressive” Biden supposedly is if he’s enabling genocide. Which he is.
If you find it hard to take me seriously when I stand up for the principle that people should not be killed, so be it. I don’t need your approval.
There's certainly a balance of short-term vs long-term concerns here. If you want to affect the next election, then threatening to withhold support is effective, but it loses its effectiveness if the support never goes down despite the threats.
The other thing to consider is that, while our votes only matter on aggregate, we can only make decisions as individuals. When considering the prospect of who to vote for, when you're in the booth, what you have to weigh up is the impact of your one, single vote on both the outcome of the election and the subsequent statistics. My argument would be that the impact on the election is more important than the subsequent statistics, especially if you live in a swing state/marginal constituency. If you live in an area that will only vote one way, your impact on the election is so low that statistics take on greater meaning.
What leash has there been to this point? From what I've seen Biden hasn't done anything material to limit Netanyahu at all.
Seeing reports that Israel just conducted a strike on Iran. I believe the major outlets are confirming now so looks like we’ll have to see what happens next
People are saying not much damage but it's hard to tell, I did see videos of supposed anti-air putting up a fight near the strike sites - I'm not sure if Israel is directly missile striking or using fighter jets
The damage these strikes have done from both sides seem to be symbolic
Well the main issue here being that Israel supposedly wasn't going to strike, the US claimed they wouldn't support it, and Iran said, literally yesterday, that if Israel strikes at all they'll immediately respond with major force.
Clearly they haven't done that yet, as I think it'd be obvious with every satellite in orbit probably glaring at their bases right now, but it makes for once again a very touchy situation.