Israel vs Iran kicks off 6-12-25 (CST)

[MikeGER]

As far as i know, there wasn't any proof that Iran was making a bomb (Top US intelligence).

For civil use in power plants you need between 3.7% and 5% enrichment of U235
for nuclear medicine I heard up to 20%? is needed for a science reactor to generate useful nucleoids

The only need to go higher is for a nuke! And they had already 60%
and the closer its get to 90% the faster is the enrichment process

A good deal for Iran (the people not the regime)  would have been, ...and still is!
They get their Fule Rods ready for use in power plants from France (like Germany got in the past) and the medicine stuff also as priority flight in from Paris, flight time is 5h35min that should be short enuf for immediate usage in a hospital

[Redwolf]

Iran just attacked US bases on the Arab peninsula.

[JasonPratt]

Missiles were aimed at bases in Qatar, supposedly no casualties and almost all shot down.

Ceasefire agreed to by Iran and Israel soon afterward, to go into effect 6 hours later (so not long from this post), for 12 hours. If nothing else happens for another 12 hours, Trump thinks the war will be over. Hope so, but we'll see.

Anguille, the fatwa is an important point, that's true, but I'm not totally sure how the legalities of that work: can an imam reverse a fatwa, and if so at any time on his own authority or does he need votes from a convocation of his subordinates? My admittedly fuzzy understanding is that fatwas are only as permanent as the teacher/leader decides to keep them. Did it stop the rhetoric? I don't think so?

When the rhetoric has been bragging (let's call it) and pumping up the volume for so long, how safe is it to consider only rhetoric that they'd never put into practice? They dang well have put other rhetoric into practice, once they get an opportunity, and they plan for making those opportunities. 60 to 90% enrichment is making those opportunities.

I grant the shaky international legal status of the pre-emptive strike. Under the circumstances there could never be an immanent threat until it's too late to keep the genie in the bottle, however -- losing track of too-enriched material was regarded as the immanent threat. Once the package is in play, it's too late to stop the making of the package. I suppose the Ayatollah could be sniped after the damage is done (like the fictional Ryan Doctrine from The Sum of All Fears).

I grant the risk of destabilizing the region -- although considering Iran had made itself the enemy of all surrounding governments (even among their own branch of Islam), I don't know how destabilizing that will be. Rushing to fill a vacuum maybe. The argument for the strike was that the region and the world was going to be destabilized anyway, so go now to destabilize less than more. But those are admittedly based somewhat on imponderables. We'll see, but I've gotten the impression (perhaps wrongly) that a lot of local cheering was going on for the undermining of the current Iranian regime. It's entirely possible that Pakistan (of all places) nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, was meant to be satire!

The degree to which the JCPOA was working needs more study and detail. We left in 2018 on the ground that it wasn't working. What does that mean in context? That Iran was still working on ballistic missiles, thousands of them and their launchers, among other things necessary to get nuclear weapons up and running (not only the fissible material). The thousands of missiles and launch platforms turned out to be very true. So did continuing to arm and goad militant terror attacks in the region, which was the other reason for the US withdrawing from the JCPOA: so we could put sanctions in effect to try to get Iran to stop those things. The rest of the JCPOA kept working with Iran, and the EU made provisions to get around US sanctions.

Early in 2020 Iran said they would no longer abide by the limitations, but would let the monitoring group know when the limitations were exceeded, which certainly sometimes they did. The Biden administration wanted to join back in with the JCPOA a year later (one of Biden's first Presidential moves), but for various reasons (including Iran saying they'd ignore limitations going forward) we never did as far as I can tell. Though if we did, it didn't help.

Iran did sometimes slow down enrichment to 60% (verified by the watch group IAEA), but that's still heading toward weapons-grade, and sometimes the IAEA would catch them with geared up centrifuges explained away as "human error". (Opps, they accidentally rigged more highly complex equipment to speed up enrichment to 60% and beyond again! Everyone's done that sometimes.)

In other words, Iran continued to willfully deteriorate the situation through Biden's term. Despite being positioned as international law, including at/by the UN, the JCPOA was always more a set of guidelines than actual rules. None of the remaining crew (the P5+1 + EU, minus US) did anything about it. The moment Iran said they'd just ignore limitations going forward, that set the clock counting down, although occasionally they promised to slow down the clock temporarily for various favors like freeing up Iraqi payments to Iran -- a good chunk of which went toward more nuclear enrichment, more ballistic missiles, more missile launchers and support equipment, etc.

Anyway, Iran vows to continue to endeavor to persevere even if it takes years to get back to 60%+ enrichment again; so we'll get to lick this calf again and maybe next time the administration will wait and see if Iran can be trusted with weapons grade material despite their rhetoric otherwise.

[JasonPratt]

And then OF COURSE they shot things at each other before time was up. One sad little ballistic missile from Iran (apparently only one? though I've heard it was a swarm??), intercepted, and a final strike package from Israel, apparently the biggest one yet or thereabouts.

Trump's salty take about that has been made famous already. Iran's somewhat double-talk about not agreeing to a ceasefire (basically declaring Trump was lying about it for political points), and also that Israel had already broken the ceasefire which Iran supposedly hadn't agreed to, is par for the course by now I guess.

For a much more bearish doomy analysis, allow me to post some rants by a friend of mine, David Haggith (a fellow Christian conservative on most things), who REALLY doesn't like Trump or trust him even slightly. I realize he's leaping off the horse on the other side, but I also acknowledge he has real concerns and some valid points on the what-the-hell-o-meter. I haven't tried to mimic the actual formatting, sorry.

Please feel free to skip upon the first eye glaze. 

Did Trumpian lies hit a new climax, or are the ceasefire contradictions just the fog of war. Iran said this morning there is no ceasefire, never was a ceasefire. They even claimed Trump was lying to try to force a ceasefire into play, and to prove its point Iran lobbed some more missiles into Israel.

So, the story started off this morning, anyway, as Bill Bonner provided the following synopsis of what sounded like a fake-news ceasefire:

The big news came this morning. Huffington Post:

"Donald Trump has announced a ceasefire between Israel [and] Iran is "now in effect" after days of intense bombardments.

"It comes after the US waded into the regional conflict, siding with Israel by launching strikes on Iran's three nuclear facilities on Saturday.

"The US president wrote on Truth Social at 6:08 BST... 'THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!'"

But wait...

Minutes later... was this fake news? The Tehran Times:

Iran has not agreed to a ceasefire. Trump is lying again

"The president appears to be making up a new lie to force the Iranian government into accepting a ceasefire, believing that the move could pit the Iranian people against the officials and create domestic dissent."

How much of this war is real? How much is fake?

As if to prove its case that Trump's announcement was totally fake, Iran did the following:

Iranian missile barrage strikes Israel after deadline Trump announced for ceasefire passes

...an Iranian missile barrage struck Israel after a first deadline for the proposal.

The Iranian barrages sent Israelis hurrying into bomb shelters as the sun rose, killing at least four people and injuring eight others.

This article, however, says the opposite—that Iran did acknowledge the ceasefire and Israel did not:

Israel has yet to acknowledge Trump's proposal, which gives Israel more time to potentially strike back though Iran on its state television announced an overall ceasefire had begun at 7:30 a.m. local time.

And strike back Israel did, using its period of refusal to announce the ceasefire to seize the moment with a massive barrage of its own, according to Donald Trump, who fired back some intense words at Israel.

"A complete and total ceasefire" the president had announced yesterday "Complete and total, except only one side agreed to it ... or maybe neither side agreed ... or, at least, it is not so total as not to be stretched to its limits for a little extra firing time:

Israel did not immediately acknowledge any ceasefire, but there were no reports of Israeli strikes in Iran after 4 a.m. in Tehran. Heavy Israeli strikes continued in Iranian cities until shortly before that time. Israel in other conflicts has stepped up its strikes just before ceasefires took effect.

"As of now, there is NO 'agreement' on any ceasefire or cessation of military operations," Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a post on X. "However, provided that the Israeli regime stops its illegal aggression against the Iranian people no later than 4 am Tehran time, we have no intention to continue our response afterwards...."

The White House has maintained that the Saturday bombing helped get the Israelis to agree to the ceasefire and that the Qatari government helped to broker the deal.

It's unclear what role Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's leader, played in the talks. He said earlier on social media that he would not surrender.

The tenuous and almost unbelievable nature of Trump's ceasefire, is why I wrote yesterday,

In my view, it seems more likely that the worst is not behind us, but that Trump's hyuge, bold move may put the worst ahead of us....

I would point out ... back when Iran said it was going to retaliate against some of Israel's former missile attacks, the counter-attack took more than a day to finally show up. Iran could be using Trump's own tactics to buy time—the tactics where Trump talked about the need for Iran to negotiate and said he was giving it two weeks to do so, even as the Pentagon was carefully putting the finishing touches on a plan that would torch Iran's nuke plants in just a couple of days. They could be trying to get us to lower our guard a little and aiming for a serious surprise....

For a few more days anyway, I'm still looking and listening for the Trojan horse to roll up to the gate.

Trump appeared to have gotten that surprise this morning, and he was "not happy" with any of it:

Trump Goes Absolutely Berserk on Iran and Israel as Ceasefire Deal Crumbles: 'They Don't Know What the F*ck They're Doing'

Or maybe they did know what they were doing. Maybe they never agreed to anything. Or maybe they are school kids going back to the brawl after being pulled off of each other.

Speaking to reporters before takeoff, the president said that both Israel and Iran had breached the terms of the truce and made clear he was "not pleased" with Israel's promise to launch retaliatory airstrikes after agreeing to the deal.

The president's rage flamed on as he exploded in expletive fury, claiming the ceasefire was broken by both sides.

Now, this is somewhat the nature of ceasefires. They are particularly fragile at the start, but the size of Israel's attack as soon as the ceasefire was announced by the president certainly doesn't seem like they were attempting to honor a ceasefire.

The comments come as the Israeli military vowed to carry out "intense" retaliatory strikes on Tehran following ballistic missile attacks from Iran that struck Beersheba on Tuesday morning, killing at least four civilians. In response, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered a "forceful" counteroffensive, targeting what he described as "the heart of Tehran...."

Tehran denied any role in the attacks. Iranian state media claimed that "reports published about missile launches from Iran toward the occupied territories after imposing a ceasefire on the Zionist regime are denied," accusing Israel of fabricating the provocation.

Trump claimed that he became "firm and direct" in a call with Netanyahu after the breakdown of the ceasefire.

Accomplishments not as clear as Trump "Truthed"
Israel – which started the war – has officially accepted the deal, and Iran's state television announced it around three hours before it was due to take effect.

While the President claimed three key nuclear sites had been 'obliterated', the Pentagon later said the extent of the damage was unclear as full assessments had not been completed.

Israeli Leader of the Opposition Yair Lapid told the UK Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee it would 'take some time' to learn what happened, adding: 'I don't know if we'll ever know for sure.'

... affirming my obvious observation yesterday about Trump's claim of "total" mission success:

I doubt we can actually know how badly damaged the facilities deep under ground are at this point because the wreckage through the blast hole would likely be impenetrable.

That was my penetrating glance into the obvious about Trump's brash claim:

President Donald Trump has proclaimed that the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities was an unmitigated success.

"The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it," he wrote in a social media post Monday.

The actual truth is in the title to that article. It has to be just on the basis of how difficult it is to ascertain what happened many meters below the ground:

"U.S. scrambles to determine impact of strikes on Iran's nuclear sites"

...defense officials and nuclear experts are still trying to determine whether the strikes achieved their stated strategic goal of eliminating Iran's nuclear program.

"Final battle damage will take some time, but initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction," Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a Sunday morning Pentagon briefing.

Under Defense Department guidelines, it could take days or even weeks for the U.S. military to complete a formal battle damage assessment, or BDA, primarily by using overhead surveillance to collect information from the sites of the blasts. But experts caution there are limits to what information can be gathered.

Hearing directly from Iranians discussing the damage, either through human intelligence gathered by sources in Tehran's government or electronic interception of those conversations, would be among the best ways to assess the effects, although they are also among the most difficult methods.

"In lieu of highly vetted source intelligence, there is no real way to conduct any thorough" BDA, said Wes Bryant, who served as a targeter in Air Force Special Operations....

But "at this time, no one — including the IAEA — is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage" at Fordow, Grossi said. The agency won't know, he added, until its inspectors still in Iran are able to return to the facility....

"Why am I not impressed?" Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear and nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, wrote in a lengthy post on X. The enriched uranium "was largely stored in underground tunnels. ... Despite extensive Israeli and US attacks [on] the facility, there does not seem to have been any effort to destroy these tunnels or the material that was in them...."

"The point is they have material that they have made at other facilities," Lewis said in an interview. "We don't know what became of that."

Lewis and others suggested that the United States was aware of the limitations of a military attack on the widespread Iranian nuclear program and was more interested in showing Tehran that Washington was prepared to use force to stop it.

"It is a loss for the Iranians," Lewis said of the destruction at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz, "but it is not anything like the scale of the attack you would mount if the goal was really to eliminate the program.

"This problem has delayed them, and undoubtedly there must be things that have been destroyed that they now have to reconstitute," he said, but the rebuilding could probably be done in no more than a year....

The bombs dropped on the Fordow site burrowed through the mountainside and exploded on a delayed timer, collapsing dirt and rock that conceal the full extent of the damage.

So, the president, as usual, talks bigger and more brashly than the truth really allows, attempting to fashion reality with his mouth. There are facts, and then there is Trump's "alternate facts" as Trump's former Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway once called them. Here is what sounds more likely factual than "total destruction:"

"If Iran were to further enrich that material — which would not take very long, a month, or two, or three, depending on how many centrifuges they have left available to them — that'd be enough for about 10 weapons," Lewis said. "So, if everything goes badly, if Iran has retained as much capability as I worry they might, you could see Iran with an arsenal of something like 10 weapons inside a year."

"To be clear, you fear that Iran still today maintains the capability to create up to 10 nuclear weapons within a year?" Abrams asked.

"I don't fear it, I know it," Lewis said. "It's just a fact."

The professor went on to explain that Iran has "at least" one enrichment facility the U.S. did not hit in Saturday's attack, along with an underground production line to produce more centrifuges. In light of that, Lewis questioned the wisdom of the U.S. strike.

-and-

Donald Trump declared this weekend that his bunker-busting bombs 'obliterated' Iran's nuclear facilities and erased the Islamic Republic's chances of building a bomb.

But despite his triumphant bluster, Iran still likely boasts significant stockpiles of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and could well have other facilities lying in wait to reach purity levels required to fashion nuclear warheads....

Grossi said the stockpile seen by IAEA inspectors was stored in special casks small enough to fit in the trunks of about 10 cars. He also said he believed the material had been moved.

Satellite images published by US defence contractor Maxar Technologies showed 16 trucks leaving Iran's Fordow nuclear facility on June 19, three days before Operation Midnight Hammer.

Further images reveal a flurry of activity prior to the trucks' departure involving bulldozers and security convoys that were likely reinforcing and sealing Fordow's entrances and evacuating sensitive documents.

Now, no one outside of Iran knows exactly where its HEU stockpile is located, and Tehran's options are endless.

'We are, at best, in a pause, shaped by calculation, not capitulation,' he said.

'To view Iran's recent actions as a final move or a sign of weakness fundamentally misunderstands how this regime operates. Iran's leadership sees its survival and regional influence as existential, and it has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to absorb losses, act through proxies, and play the long game.

'The quiet that follows an exchange of missiles should not be mistaken for peace. It is often the eye of the storm.' (Guney Yildiz, visiting fellow at the London School of Economics' European Institute, speaking to Metro)

I've abridged Dave's article by about half. (I'm honestly surprised this fit the character-post limit!) He usually posts economic news and analysis.

[JasonPratt]

More from Dave today about the missing uranium. A shorter article but publicly available so I'll post a link and move along.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailydoom/p/a-hard-to-digest-whale-of-a-tale?r=2p08wd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Despite trending toward hawkish optimism about this action myself, I do try to attend to critiques of it, due to the whole situation being a vomitous massy mess.

[Crossroads]

Perun's weekly vlog is about the Israeli air campaign against Iran.

As always, he does a good job describing the background and how the past events led to the success of the mission. Also, good points about the audacity of the drone strikes inside Iran, similar to Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb.