UAE has been down for months, Bahrain is now offline, Saudi Arabia is still under construction.
The whole affair has been so bizarre.
I draw parallels between the development of whales and large-scale shipping:
- Both are comparatively recent developments. Giant whales are less than 5 million years old, large cargo ships (tankers, dry bulk, containers) at what are now considered ordinary scales are less than three decades old. (See: <https://logisticselearning.com/largest-container-ships/> especially graphic here: <https://logisticselearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/im...>.)
- Both require highly-efficient propulsion: mammalian metabolism, petroleum-fueled diesel engines, respectively.
- Both require widely-separated resource opportunities. For whales, seasonally-abundant food such as krill or fish; for cargo, large-scale production and consumption of goods separated by water.
- Both require comparative safety from predators. Large adult whales have virtually no natural predators (orcas being a notable exception), until human whaling grew in scale largely since the 1500s and accelerating greatly through the 19th and 20th centuries, during which whole populations where annihilated. Maritime shipping depends on a lack of piracy or hostile naval warfare, with tremendous losses to traffic being seen during the 1st and 2nd World Wars in both the Atlantic and Pacific.
(There's a similar pattern with air travel, in which flights virtually instantly divert far from active combat zones. The list of airliner shoot-down incidents is surprisingly large: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...>.)
Highly-centralised or choreographed logistics chains are also fragile and subject to disruption. During WWII, the Soviet Union was initially inclined to One Big Dump supply depots, possibly a hallmark of centralised planning. These proved attractive targets and quite harmful to ongoing operations, and over the course of the war much more decentralised patterns emerged, or so I dimly recall from long-ago reading. Decentralised operations are integral to much guerilla / asymmetric warfare by the inferior party.
BAH53 (Manama): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492345589
An adjoining substation to BAH53 had one of it's two main buildings damaged/destroyed about 2026-07-16 per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-data-center-power-substation-bahrain-jul-16th-2026-142024
Then about 2026-07-22 BAH53 itself was damaged/destroyed per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-amazon-web-services-bahrain-jul-22nd-2026-142112
Possibly the least defended of the three sites as there is no air/missile defence battery in between this site and Iran.
No media reports about this data centre being attacked previously. Possibly the safest of the three as there are at least two (probably three) air/missile defence batteries in between this site and Iran.
Apparently the Batelco DC.1 data centre adjoining (and apparently critical to) BAH55 was damaged/destroyed about 2026-04-01 per https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk28nj0lrjo _or_ the adjoining substation to these two facilities was damaged/destroyed -- news articles are hard to follow as to what exactly might have been damaged and the extent of damage caused.
Middle ground for defence with one or two (maybe three) air/missile defence batteries between this site and Iran, depending on where drones/missiles are launched from.
So, if the whole of me-south-1 (Bahrain) went down it means at least three buildings many kilometers apart must have been attacked.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio...
Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587
2. It’s expected and war, and while war is not good, I wonder about data backups and succession planning for this.
3. It makes sense they would’ve had a fire drill and reviewed since it’s a capital investment, 6 months of war, at the same time Bahrain is considered stable, so I really wonder about the conversation around this and if there was any disaster planning with this scenario in mind.
4. If there wasn’t, I’m sure there is now across all regions of AWS.
This month has been for me, a uptick in unique headlines that I wouldn’t have thought would happen.
From what I can tell, the issues are: Fonts are too small, secondary fonts have terrible contrast with their backgrounds, information is too dense/not enough white space, overuse of blinking/glowing status dots, overuse of bordered elements, and overuse of accented elements. I am surely forgetting some other issues.
I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
They are behind many atrocities in Iran and in the region including the situation in Gaza (partially). They also provided weaponry and support to Russia against Ukraine.
Winner: US military industrial complex + Israel
Losers: Everyone else
Amazon will already have quite a lot of hardware queued up for new datacenter builds and expansions, some of that will presumably be redirected to this project once folks stop chucking missiles around. They also pride themselves on the speed of new datacenter rollout - even if they have to bulldoze the site and start from scratch, I doubt it takes as long as a year.
I don't see them listed on https://mediabiasfactcheck.com either, which is usually a red flag for me. For example you can find other suspicious sources - like Iran International - on there https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/iran-international-bias-and-c...
Given these companies are selling the AI and cloud tech that's used by US and Israel in their invasions, wars, genocides, etc, it's no surprised that they would be deemed dual use.
The most unpopular war the US has ever known which has made every person in the world worse off financially, all for Israel's demands.
I really don't hate to say it but maybe that ethno state should be left to deal with their matters themselves.
There are also other factually wrong things in your comment, but let's leave it at that.
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The US started this. Amazon is an American company with many governmental and military contracts. Why would it not be a valid target?
How many Iranian hospitals, schools, bridges, data centers, etc have been destroyed?
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Although hitting the AWS data centre in Tel Aviv seems like it would be a great tit-for-tat strike to really annoy the US and Israelis without threatening them in a way that will provoke a nuclear response or doing real damage to civilians. So I don't see why they'd purposefully hold back on that.
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Israel also has a lot more options for retaliations against Iran then nukes.
Safe reminder both Israel and Iran, and arguably Iran more so, commit “war crimes”.
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This does not resemble what I would imagine a fight for civilization survival to look like. I’m talking about the stakes being you win or you, your family, and every man, woman and infant you know is going to be killed or starved in concentration camps.
(I realize it’s a stretch from what you’re suggesting but if you think about it, not really)
government contractors may be embedded in high stakes situations.
One> An executive has to care about a cost center, then proceeds to invest in prevention instead of looking like a hero after, instead of putting off a fire an getting a promotion or bonus. Which is nigh impossible.
Two> Our tech overlords try to push for our cyberpunk present to at least look kinda cool. Which they also refuse todo.
That plus most of Iran's attacks on Israel didn't do anything and likely still won't. Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
In Wildberries case (and Ozon's shortly), that centralization didn't require much peace at all - just a government that wasn't run by a fascist nutter who naively thought he could invade a neighbor without consequences.
Which is to say that all the military assets in Gulf countries, including this Amazon DC, are valid military targets.
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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/ukraine-hits-russias-larg...
His quandary: should he eat it anyway? Seems like the radiation should be minimal, after all. Or maybe wait until this next Wednesday when he has a stomach x-ray and eat a small slice just beforehand to confound his primary care physician (they are both great practical jokers!)?
I've seen data centers that were built to withstand an aircraft impact (they were located on a major airport flight path). I wonder if they'd rebuild these to that standard or something even stronger, given these attacks. It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
Here's a Google Maps link to BAH53 (Manama), it doesn't look like the hardened data centers I seen (e.g. sloped walls like a bunker): https://maps.app.goo.gl/6DjhQs753p6EHQUu6
This is just one of the popular ones, but there were also tens of posts about it with only 1-10 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641788
Here’s another popular one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632503
The reason it’s not really news this week is because both the Bahrain and the Dubai regions have been effectively non-operational for the last 4 months, so the IRGC saying they destroyed an already-destroyed region is less newsworthy.
Because individual HN users do the flagging and many are tired of the inevitable and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war that predictably erupts on any topic related to the Middle East.
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You comment presumes that either the posted article or the comments are doing in any informing. I contend that neither do, they are both simply writing prompts for partisans.
Your comment also presumes that the entire earth is not already saturated in Israel v Palestine content. You not getting your desired outcome is not evidence that people are uninformed.
Whether they are or are not, you are also sidestepping an even more important question - why must all internet sites cover all topics? There's nothing wrong with any site making clear what topics they want to focus on. HN and it's users have made it clear they prefer to focus on tech and there are literally 70 million other places you can go to fight over Israel & Palestine. If that's your thing, have at it, you don't need to do it here.
In fact, I would argue that both HN and Israel v Palestine fight sites would be better for it. If all sites are for all issues then all sites just devolve to the same slop. If sites can focus, they develop their own unique community. The attempt to invade such spaces and force them to have the discussions you want them to have is just colonialism by another name.
As for use it gets: plenty of use, mostly when someone needs to have their worlds close to that area (usually latency or legal reasons). There are a lot of smaller businesses that lost a lot (or maybe even everything) because their never thought they would need to create backups in a different region. Most of that wasn't really reported on but instead gets shared on various platforms like Reddit.
Or how good their HA/failover strategy must be.
Although losing one data centre from an availability zone seems like exactly the kind of issue AWS plan for and handle well, and does not take down the whole AZ. By contrast with "our BGP config got messed up".
Just talk to me, 10, 20 years ago, there was no true conversation around attacking datacnters.
Just think how much RAM and SSD's were lost. :(
LLMs in general are pretty terrible at spatial arrangement. You should see some of the architects' critiques of AI-generated floorplans that are on YouTube; the LLM generates a layout that is just nuts. I've found them largely useless at putting together UI mocks; Figma or Photoshop is still way easier to work with if you just want to cut up UI elements and rearrange them.
The status dots are a part of animations in general, which they overuse, especially things like transform/scale on hover and hover effects on many many elements.
I think it's not simply borders but contrasting-color borders often with box shadows.
Probably something to do with the training data and how it’s weighted. It’s the same how the writing is essentially full of overused phrases, the AI slop feel.
There's no good guys. Why is the US even there?
Edit: downvoted to -3. Did i say anything that was untrue? Or do people not like the truth?
Isn't it an oversimplification to say there are no good guys? O
> Did i say anything that was untrue? Or do people not like the truth?
It is widely assumed, but not factually correct, that the US was responsible.
On August 15th 1953 the CIA staged a coup to overthrow the government, but it failed. By the next day the State Department was actively trying to enter into diplomatic talks.
Three days later a group of clerics headed by Ayatollah Borujerdi took advantage of the situation and stirred up unrest that was ultimately responsible for the Shah taking power. They had been concerned about Mossadeq embracing secular liberalism and a referendum that dissolved the Majlis (parliament/congress). MI-6 had offered them support, but they rejected it.
I would highly recommend this book if you can get a copy: https://www.amazon.com/Iran-CIA-Fall-Mosaddeq-Revisited/dp/0...
I mean, you're passing over the violent revolution from socialists and Islamists.
And if we wanted to help another country, working with the international community should be the only approach we take.
We've spent many decades overthrowing countries to what end? Even our vassals like Israel have universal healthcare while we're all in debt because of healthcare. It's not working and needs to stop.
We don't need Americans to "save us", we have 90M intelligent people and can resolve our own issues. It would be great if the West started respecting the sovereignty of other nations.
I have a hard time sympathizing with the Pahlavi supporters cheering the bombing of our home.
What I’m saying is that supporting one of the biggest terrorist group in the world by the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a grave mistake. It legitimizes one of the biggest, if not the biggest, reasons behind the current situation in Iran and some other bad situations in the region.
If you are an Iranian, you know what IRGC has done and keep doing, how good they are at propaganda and how nothing is beyond them including killing (and worse) anyone anywhere in the name of their god.
But the IRGC is the only one defending my home right now. I also find it curious why you are not calling the US or Israel against this illegal aggression against our country?
What I’m saying is that we should not legitimize the IRGC. Trump is bad, the current Israeli government is very bad, and the IRGC is very bad.
On another note, the IRGC is defending itself, not us. They’ve killed exponentially more people in days than US or Israel has over in total. Again, all of these are bad.
-Thucydides' Melian Dialogue
Given how clownish the US is handling this war, I'm afraid you just have to get used to it.
When they're surrounded on every side by people who devote their lives to Hadith such as these, I can't blame them. Their enemies set up bases under hospitals, schools. Their wives and children are human shields. I think they're doing pretty well with the situation they've been handed. The situation is more complex than "They're firing on civilian populations", because their enemy fights in civilian clothing, and hides in civilian crowds. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place and are doing what they can to survive.
What’s radicalised them is not their religion but being driven from their homes and genocided - that would radicalise anyone. In fact given what’s been done to them, if anything the level of radicalisation in the Palestinian population is remarkably low
Then in the 1970s the CIA provided SAVAK with the names of secular left opposition to arrest and execute.
So spare me talk about foreigners supporting religious fanatics, the western establishment did so for decades.
I for one don't want my tax dollars used to bomb schools in Iran.
Hard to like anyone in this situation.
What may be misinterpreted as sympathy for them is sympathy for the suffering Iranians, and antipathy for the criminal and bigoted US foreign policy especially in the Middle East. This did not start with Trump's recent idiotic game; Iran's only democratically elected president so far was toppled in 1953 by the CIA at the request of Churchill, because they felt Iran's oil does not belong to the Iranian people but to British Petroleum.
Iran did bad things, but not as much as they could. Now they're doing more bad things and we can't stop them.
Instead this is a conflict where all sides are garbage. It's a conflict where we hope that everyone loses.
On the one side you have a terrorism-sponsoring theocracy that wants to force stone-age beliefs on its people, while exporting mayhem elsewhere. On the other you have Iran. (ba-dum-tss!)
Seriously, though, everyone involved with this conflict are bad actors. The US has bombed some 8 countries so far this year, threatened literal allies such that they got blood supplies ready for an invasion, is busy looting Venezuela like a busted pirate shithole -- basically Somalia -- is starving Cuba, is terroristically blowing up random boats by titling them "narco-terrorists", and is headed by a criminal rapist PoS that is rapidly turning the country into an idiocracy while their military is headed by a ChatGPT spouting imbecile. Israel is a war-criming pariah that pushed their luck a little too far and it turns out you can only bank on "but the holocaust" for so long while you're a rogue hermit nation that has vile behaviours and habits.
It's only in context that Iran, far down in the depths of garbage nations, somehow comes out looking like the better party in the conflict.
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Whereas you could look at a place like Vietnam that fought its war and moved on, Trump's focus is largely dealing with actors that never did. I suspect the Saudi's won't be the only Nuclear deal signed. So much of this is just the cold war extended, but with North Korea and Iran trying to work their way past non-proliferation. The natural response would also be to arm South Korea and possibly Japan. All of which would have been the West's natural response to non-proliferation being violated.
I get the perception, but much of this is decades in the making and almost everyone involved including the US should have sued for peace years ago. Actual peace. Not, "we're not firing rockets but Israel can't exist."
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And America's decision to slaughter Iranian schoolchildren was completely optional. It happened only because Israel convinced Trump that there was an easy win available.
Americans should be grateful that Iran has shown great restraint in their response.
Iran purposefully slaughters thousands of its own protestors. The US made a grave mistake and accidentally hit that school.
If you can't understand the difference, you're beyond help.
> then it is for the best if their country is destroyed entirely
Deep, deep thoughts, man.
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That’s just the tally from this year, they are also responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths across Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Ukraine.
I think the moral altitude you are looking for doesn't exist.
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What a grossly offensive and patently false thing to say[1].
Funny how history rhymes sometimes
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Israel is a settler-colonial state engaging in decades long genocide and apartheid. The real question one should ask oneself is: Why is America involved? It is purely to protect Israel because our politicians are bought by Israeli & defense money.
It doesn't matter to America if Iran is fanatical. It doesn't matter to America if Iran has nukes. It all comes down to Israeli lobbying and war games.
You need to wake up and understand that there is no morality in geopolitics, Iran has sided with China and Russia because it acts in it's self interest. Israel acted in it's self-interest (though I would argue it over-played it's hand). America should act in it's self-interest and retreat from Iran, even if that means the eventual collapse of the status-quo equilibrium in the mid-east and abandoning Israel.
They’re involved.
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The whole website seems to have issues, probably because of AWS issues in the middle-east. But archived pages are available:
- About: https://web.archive.org/web/20260719174647/https://houseofsa...
- Contact: https://web.archive.org/web/20260328195438/https://houseofsa...
CNBC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49004096
This one got more upvoted for some reason though.
Very, very interesting.
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If someone enters my house uninvited, I don't care what they have to say to justify themselves because they don't have a right to be there in the first place.
Also, Israel designates tents dual use.
Designating an AWS location very likely used for targeting assistance during this war on Iran is a very different thing.
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What do you think the end result of making regions unstable such as by unprovoked attacks on Iran is?
> you think
Well, maybe I am presuming too much there.
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Most recently the UN report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-...
Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision making and surveillance and analysis capacities. [99] In October 2023, when the Israeli internal military cloud overloaded, [100] Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. [101] Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, [102] under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. [103] In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies. [104]
Cash payments, rental subsidies, mortgage discounts, free healthcare, free tuition, tax credits, tax exemptions, job placement, immediate citizenship, etc. All if you're of a certain ethnicity.
Can Arab Jews make Aliyah?
The answer here is surrender and disarmament. It's the only outcome that seems compatible with the reintegration of Iran into the world economy, normalization of diplomatic relationships with neighboring countries, and path to development/prosperity for its people.
Definitely not the country that slaughters protestors by the thousands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iran_massacr...
There's so many people here who have clearly lost their ability to think clearly any time Israel is involved. I'm sure it's just coincidence though and nothing else is going on.
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Attacks trying to topple the Israeli state, in essence. Knocking out profitable capital is quite unlikely to do it.
Anything existential. (Tehran doesn’t currently have that capability.)
The only reason the USA doesn't flatten Iran with nukes is that the USA fears Russia will view it as an "all bets are off!" action and will do the same to Ukraine et al. Which is probably true right now.
Iran doesn't actually want to hit Israel hard, or at least doesn't want to do it right now. If they did, they wouldn't rattle their sabers so hard before each giant volley toward Israel, giving the Israelis ample time to prepare for a strike.
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"We're only hitting Gulf neighbour US-adjacent targets" is less threatening than "we're aiming directly at Israel".
(Though yes, Iran has struck Israel with > 200 missiles in a single attack: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2024_Iranian_strikes_o...>.)
Note that US attacks on Iran have been similarly loudly telegraphed in response. Though I suspect the rationale (if any) differs.
And the later "retaliation" against local bases by Iran was in the same, choreographed public fashion. At this point it seems to be a very respectful gentleman's conflict. It's very unlike some of the wars we've got entangled in, for sure. It seems like both sides sort of acknowledge that if we don't play fair, if it's not choreographed, if we don't stick to the rules, we really possess the power for world-ending, horrific conflict.
Also, Israel will not abandon (or be abandoned) by the US, but the others might want to cut their losses if supporting the US becomes costlier than being neutral.
The game being played is extremely interesting, with high stakes and no margin for error. Too bad people die.
I suspect that Iran knows that going after Dubai would upset a lot of American (and Sunni) billionaires.
...which I now return to...
Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.
At the peak Iran fired 650 missiles at Israel and only killed 28 people, mostly from hitting a single residential building. These days Iran is only firing small salvos into gulf states and only 20-30 drones at a time. I'd be surprised if they could pull off 2025 numbers when they fired a hundred at Israel.
One way of interpreting that statistic is that they are running out of munitions. Another way is to consider that stockpiles are not running low, but the initial response was a collection of high-burn, uncoordinated, decentralized tactical actions after an attempted decapitation-strike disrupted top-down C&C. Now that the fog of war has cleared, and communication has been restored, a more strategic regime is now in effect.
Although what has changed is that Israël is no longer getting guns for free they need to pay for it same as everyone else. Progress!
You may be confused with southern Lebanon, which is.
The Saudi main army is pretty incompetent, but the Royal Guard is extremely effective. They are separately trained by the West and maintain comms separate from the main army. And now they've teamed up with Pakistan, which has one of the best air forces in the region.
Qatar recently opened up a route for citizenship to foreign veterans who serve in their armed forces. That guarantees them a steady supply of soldiers from the region should the need arise.
The most vulnerable are Bahrain and Kuwait, but both of them have had help with security actions from their more competent neighbors.
Saudi has the advantage that they have the US doing the dirty work for them. No need to do much themselves.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/05/1084729579/russian-law-bans-j...
It’s the act of comment warring that is pointless. [X/Y] partisans are not intellectually curious about statements coming from a [Y/X] partisan. Nobody’s minds are going to change either way.
There presumably some third parties who could hypothetically be swayed, but from what I’ve seen they’re few and far between.
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I wonder if AWS even has the capacity to keep an entire region’s data elsewhere if they wanted to (I mean they could with their margins, but I doubt they do.)
Straight from Wikipedia
The attempted coup brought out a lot of pro Mossadeq protestors. It wasn't until the 19th when clerics organized anti Mossadeq protestors that it took hold.
Might be worth flagging to Wikipedia editors for a review.
- Failed coup attempt threatens government
- 'Ooops sorry just pranking you lol'
- Distracted government challenged by internal actor
- Power vacuum followed by monarchy
I'm sorry, this is like disclaiming responsibility for shooting at you on the grounds that most of my bullets missed and the one that hit just winged you. It's not my fault that your grumpy neighbor exploited the situation to attack you and then a third actor exploited the situation to seize all your assets!
Are you sure it isn’t the other way around?
One could make the argument the people who live in liberal democracies have an obligation to help those who unfortunately do not and who are still forced to live under autocratic oppression.
There were periods in history where most people lived under the thumb of some sort of autocrat of one form or another be they monarchs or religious leaders. Most people had very few human rights and had little opportunity for self-determination. Through the hard work of revolutionaries around the world many of those autocrats were deposed and others seeing the writing on the wall offered power to the people more willingly.
Think of it like a jailbreak where the jailer is oppressive and everyone in the jail is innocent. On your wait out should help open the cells of as many people as you can if only out of your own self interest because a larger mob escaping gives each individual a better chance to escape due to strength in numbers but also because it's just the right thing to do.
It's sort of the same thing here, Our ancestors (or even some of us) got out from under the thumb of an autocrat jailer but there are still others in that jail. If we don't help them who will? What would you want someone else to do if you were in their situation? To walk by an unjustly imprisoned person's jail cell and not free them when it is trivial to do so makes you the jailer.
Now that's the theory. In practice, I agree with much of what you're saying -- reality is a far trickier place than we'd like and the details make doing the right thing difficult if not impossible. And that doesn't cover the reality that western democracies are imperfect themselves and that many of their citizens are still subject to repression by their own autocratic leaning leaders, and so that we can't always do the right thing, but we should at least aspire to.
Well, maybe start fixing problems at home before spending tens of billions not fixing things anywhere else? we can't even change ourselves for the better, an adjudicated rapist, alleged pedophile rules us, and we're going to reform other countries? what grounds do we have to be casting stones ? "they're killing protestors!" I hear many westerns say, while ignoring the americans we're jailing for 30 years, calling terrorists for protesting the extrajudicial killings ICE are doing. we have millions without healthcare, above subsistence employment, food security. Why are americans worried about "changing" iran?? Let's look in the mirror, folks.
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Trump has done more pro israel actions than Biden
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and of course ground troops _have_ to invade Iraq, Saddam has WMD's. And it will finally bring stability to the region. And they _have_ to invade Afghanistan, there is no way to take out bin Laden otherwise. And it will finally bring stability to the region. Casualties will be minimal because the oppressed natives will welcome us as liberators and our overwhelming military superiority will ensure our troops suffer no casualties.
The one coherent rule of this administration is that "will become a disaster" is not a part of the decision making process.
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Why on earth would anyone trust a country that reneged on a hard fought deal and followed that up by bombing during negotiations to restore what was lost.
Like what's the worst case scenario that happens to iran if they just signed a new deal? How would it have been any worse than the current situation?
The deal doesn't even require a high level of trust - worst case they just go back to the previous situation. Making a deal only has an upside, even without trust.
Just like employment at will - and yet having a job is better than no job in most cases.
The current POTUS tore up the last nuclear deal with iran in 2018 for domestic political payoff. I can't take protestations about 'we've been trying to negotiate!' seriously when they come from the same people that created nearly a decade of strategic uncertainty (preceded by years of trash talk) and whose negotiation style oscillates between brutal violence and self-pitying wheedling.
I don't want to be partisan, but the incumbent POTUS is the epitome of dishonesty and the political polarization in US domestic politics is so extreme that even US allies are talking about a generational loss of trust. It would be irrational for a historical antagonist like Iran to bank on negotiating a new agreement with a country that refuses to bind itself by any international norms; it seems to me that it would be far more rational for Iran to breakout in pursuit of a nuke, and having once performed a successful test, reap the benefits of strategic stability that have gradually accrued to North Korea despite its ongoing pariah status. That is to say, once they have a nuke and other countries can no longer casually attack them, more of their economy can be redirected away from acquiring a strategic deterrent and into more normal kinds of economic development.
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They have been targeting journalists.
Also what about the children? Why they do keep targeting them.
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But, start with YOUR OWN FIRST.
Only then will you have the moral altitude to "go after theirs".
Not until WE have prosecuted OUR war criminals, will we have the precedent to prosecute any other nations' war criminals [1].
So, get on with it, citizen. Hold your government accountable. The people always get the governments they deserve.
[1] - No, "the West" is not morally capable of going after Putin, Netanyahu, etc. Not until we start prosecuting our own war criminals with real, effective results.
As for Vietnam, they're suffering from tariffs, why are you assuming they're also no negatively affected by the Trump admin?
Trump's domestic policies are an abject, colossal failure (hey remember the 10% credit cards and eliminating the deficit and the debt and fixing the goods trade deficit -- now at historic highs, btw -- and all those big DOGE and tariff rebates, and...), and just invading random nations has always been a go to when that happens. Traditionally it was easy public support, and after a whole campaign about being insular and not being the world's cop, suddenly it's guns blazing and let's boost military spending to $1.5T (while simultaneously stepping back from NATO). So Trump picked some targets that would minimize kickback. And are you saying that not being friends with the US is a green light to invade? I mean, you understand that by every principal of international law, the US is a criminal pirate empire, terroristically murdering in large numbers at will.
I guarantee that Trump has asked the US military for concrete plans on invading Canada, Greenland, and beyond. There is zero question about it, and it will all come out in the ashes that remain after this disastrous administration.
And sure, proliferation is going to go wild, not because the US bequeathed them (I mean...do people think the US holds the key to nuclear weapons? That it gives the green light?). The US has taught a lesson that everyone needs to get nukes, and most of them should be pointed at the US.
We are headed to an incredibly dangerous timeline. And eventually it is going to end up with some glassed American cities. But hey, at least the Trump crime syndicate got rich in the process!
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Between which parties, exactly..?
Also, the US bombing of the Iranian school was not a "grave mistake", it was the predictable result of reckless and incompetent leadership.
Other AI partners had stated that fully automated target selection without a human in the loop could be catastrophic -- and instead of adding a human in the loop to review the targets, US military leadership switched to Grok, whose leader had no such qualms.
The predictable result: hundreds of dead innocent children, and Americans like you who simply do not care at all.
No responsibility, no accountability, nothing at all... just some racist assholes arguing it's fine to bomb schools because the IRGC is awful (and because you love Israel).
This accurately describes Israel's multi-faceted genocide against the Palestinian people.
It is a genocide. It is mass murder. It involves direct violence, starvation, destruction of economic possibility, and it is morally abhorrent.
> your solution is the slaughtering of millions of Jews
The destruction of Israel does not mean the murder of Jews. A government can be replaced without killing everyone in the country. History is full of examples of this. Genocides are considerably _less_ common.
Starving them to death, crushing them under buildings, running them over with tanks, burying them alive, etc. Makes Babi Yar look not so bad.
I know that some IDF snipers are humane and kill Palestinian children with head-shots [1] but that is a small percentage of the killings.
You're right, Mexicans feel so strongly about the war in Iran in 2026 that they... flooded into the US in the 90s and 2000s?
Honestly, great point. You make a compelling argument that ICE's treatment of illegal immigrants is completely justified. As you correctly point out, no one should care what they say as their presence is illegal. Any action against them is therefore legitimate.
and protecting them from being tried criminally after theyve been deposed?
the US continues to blow up civilian infrastructure, and those WMDs that sadam was supposed to have were american made, for the purposes of using on iranian civilians.
To blow up civilian target is a choice.
I know nuance is unpopular nowadays but I do see a difference between bad decisions with unintended consequences and bad decisions with intended terrible results.
Like 100s (?) of Americans killed by Iran ever.
Compare to Iranians: Affected by the aftermath of the American coup of Mosaddegh (ultimately leading to IRGC's existence), providing weapons to Iraq for the Iran-Iraq War (200K deaths), etc. + decades of stupid policy trying to take their oil in the name of "regional security" (for "our" oil).
How would it work? Do you expect a 1:1 casualty list? 1:1 list of events? Should the US citizens allow for a coup on US soil carried out by the IRGC?
And, courage of their convictions, if their own people are so inherently evil for making “the other bastard die for his” they should be renouncing citizenship, yielding their ill-gotten wealth, and self-immolating for their nations eternal shame.
Categorical reasoning as applied to war does not yield a tit for tat, its category versus category. All of column B to preserve any column A. “Not worth the bones of a single British Grenadier”.
“Just one more conflict bro” as the kids would say.
Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe, so what’s happening now is expected.
Neither the US nor Iran can do that. Iran and the US are in very different positions:
The US is the status quo power; they and their allies dominate the Mideast and Persian Gulf, and are hostile to Iran for geopolitical (control of region), economic (oil), and religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons. There is a long history demonstrating that - Iran would be crazy to trust otherwise. If Iran does nothing, US and allies would control all of the Mideast (including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq) and Iran would be helpless to protect itself or exercise its own will on any matter, legitimate or not, and risk getting overthrown and replaced with a US/allied proxy. That happened in the 1950s, and the proxy, the Shah and their heir, brutally ruled Iran until 1979 when the current were part of the Shah's overthrow and took power. Part of their raison d'être is to make sure US and allies never control Iran again. Iran cannot survive by 'minding their own business'.
Iran is the revisionist power; they would like to change the power structure so they are the dominant power, or at least they need to establish independence from the status quo power. They are a much lesser threat to the US than the US is to them, for obvious reasons: Iran doesn't have aircraft carriers and bases off the US coast, complete air superiority in US skies, isn't bombing the US, didn't kill the president, and lacks the power to impose crippling economic sanctions. But they are still a threat with ambitions that the US can't ignore.
The status quo power sets the rules and wants peace on their terms - with them still in power - so of course any challenger is violating the rules and appears to be an enemy of peace without being aware of the dynamic.
> Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe
The US also carries out ops, including those that kill civilians, all over the globe (e.g., bombing speedboats in international waters), as do others. Some US ops are covert but with leadership of the international power structure and the power to act sometimes with impunity (e.g., removing Venezuala's government), they don't have always do it covertly. Iran can't fly bombers everywhere on Earth; they only have covert or insurgent operators for many purposes.
I don't think it serves a strategic purpose to bomb Mar a Lago at this stage in the game.
Nuking Iran was never in the cards. We could have done that in 1979 and any time since. Ukraine has nothing to do with it. The red lines that would provoke a nuclear response from the US are pretty well known -- the US foreign policy establishment hashed out this stuff 75 years ago. Iran could get nuked by the US if it used NBC weapons against the US or our allies. No amount of bad behavior with conventional weapons is going to do it.
People in charge of nuclear armed countries are worried about the end of the so-called "nuclear taboo" which has kept countries from using nukes for 80 years, and they're not going to break it over a third rate power like Iran unless that third rate power actually acquires nukes and makes a credible threat to use them. We didn't use them in Korea or Vietnam. We didn't use them in Afghanistan. We haven't nuked North Korea. All more serious situations than the one in which we find ourselves today.
When somebody finally does break that taboo the world will be a much, much more dangerous place for everyone and planners in places like Washington, Moscow, and Beijing know it. Once a nuclear weapon is used, especially by a country with a large arsenal, every country that could have nukes but doesn't is going to have nukes.
Here's a good video on the topic concentrating on the possible Russian use of nukes in Ukraine:
In addition I would hope that even in the morally bankrupt state USA is in today, murdering 92 million people would cause some political problems (but this might be naive of me).
That is not the only reason the United States doesn’t flatten Iran with nukes. It’s not even a consideration. How are you even arriving at such a conclusion?
They seem to be correct because Israel has not nuked Iran in responses.
Was in your reality also the complete iranian leadership killed without warning, while they were discissing negotiations with the other side?
At the end of the day Iran has more missiles than the US has interceptors. So when you get to the point when you're talking about running out, they just don't need to launch big salvos anymore.
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Uh,
> Is there space for nuanced discussion?
Apparently not?
Is it really just for a return to the pre-Trump status quo, only this time with the same deal not cosigned by Obama?
There's zero foundation for trust to uphold an international agreement even between US and its closest allies. Iran has no basis to believe any agreement will be legitimate or upheld.
Not only has the US proven itself to be incredibly untrustworthy -both recently and in the past-, the protracted war in Ukraine demonstrates what happens when you give up your nukes and a member of the "nuke-havers" club decides that they want your territory. We're at the point where any country that has a militant nuclear-weapons-equipped neighbor and has both the ability to develop nuclear weapons and the state power to keep control of them would be stupid not to build them.
It's a shame that several of the countries that are supposed to be "the adults in the room" have decided to abandon the various gentlemen's agreements that made nuclear-weapons nonproliferation agreements sensible.
Indeed, why would I focus on the guy who started this very war under discussion and multiple other wars over the past year, has openly threatened nuclear attacks, and controls the largest military in world history. The guy who continually posts the US flag over sovereign, notably non-US countries. Must just be TDS, right? I mean, guy hasn't nuked a city yet so what's the big deal right?
What a bizarre statement. And the truth is that the US has been terroristic for decades, assassinating and murdering with impunity, stomping on sovereignty endlessly, with zero intentional law or moral justification on its side. Trump is kind of the ultimate outcome of that sort of behaviour, only he's too stupid to do the normal justification games. It's Americanism in its raw, most grotesque form.
"You completely lose me when you pin proliferation on the US."
The world had a general detente and a rules-based international order, and the only thing that has changed is the position of the US. Now Poland wants nukes. Japan wants nukes. I will not be remotely surprised if Germany, Japan, South Korea or any other nation one day pops up as a new nuclear power. I mean, Canada sure as shit should secretly get nukes, for obvious reasons.
If North Korea sold warheads to Iran, honestly, who would blame them? It's actually comically funny that while attacking Iran for their purported nuclear program, Trump is simultaneously offering a nuclear program to 9/11 Saudi Arabia.
"Even if I were to entertain the Wonderland of the US invading Canada or Greenland"
Wonderland? A number of high ranking US representatives have openly stated such desires. The country is such a lawless immoral idiocracy now that absolutely nothing is off the table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/18/g-s1-134037/why-is-it-so-hard... (“… the U.S. has been acting like an empire without wanting to be an empire.”)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30908249
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-military-deaths-chang...
It might move the needle 15%.
If you want to oppose imperialist scum, this makes sense. If you want the global economy to not be shit, it doesn't.