> This has been Iran's strategy

Modelling Iran as a monolith seems to lead to errors more than it simplifies analysis. It's absolutely possible that nine parts of their mosaic command structure didn't want to open a new front and one went YOLO.

France is pushing for a two state solution in Israel. So it was dumb to attack it to begin with. I don't know what they are trying to accomplish. Legitimize the recent US and Israeli attacks against Iran? The Iranian leadership probably doesn't want peace in Israel because if that ever happens, they cannot further instrumentalize the Palestinians and Lebanese muslims against Israel.

> Them attacking France isn't any less rational than attacking, say, Qtar, or blockading non-US ships bound for non-US countries transiting the straight of Hormuz

It does make sense if you think about it for longer than 5s - it's about U.S. allies putting pressure on the U.S. to end the war. This whole propaganda about Iran being irrational is so dumb it's embarrassing.

The US is threatening to wipe out Iran's civilization, the EU is very tepid about the whole thing at best. Really sad to see, but not surprising. There's zero consistency or principle involved.

>lash out indiscriminately

Discrimination is a fallacious argument, if this is indeed an Iranian action, since Iran has been the target of a great number of indiscriminate attacks from the NATO bloc, including cyber attacks on its own food systems, also.

>Iran's strategy

I'm curious how you learn of Iran's strategy?

This would be a terrible false flag. I know people like conspiracy theories, but nothing about this suggests false flag.

i mostly meant from a motive perspective.

Russia going, nudge nudge shame about those freezers, maybe if you stopped giving aid to ukraine those freezeers will stop breaking, is a strategy that maybe could work with little downside because what is france going to do? double sanction russia?

But for iran, there is not a lot of room for france to move to be more pro iran that isnt high cost, but lots of low cost ways to be more anti iran, so it seems like a bad strat.

Let’s not go down the liberty rhetoric. They could claim on their end they are all about self determination against colonialist practices (and with Russia excepted the others have a historical excuse to claim this.) It is obviously a broad power play, we are all wise to want our part to be on the winning side for rational reasons, but moralising a punch fest is not adding anything more than illusions. After all, our western governments are abundantly adopting the authoritarian aspects of population control from these countries, maybe that’s our next problem maybe it’s our current one.

Too many people fall on the confusion between justifications, explanations, and excuses. In particular, it can be hard to find what moves something from one to the other of those terms for a lot of people. It often blurs between perspectives, agreed enemies, agreed allies, and inclusion or omission of extra details.

They can't gain credibility with the Sunni world; Sunni Arabs are pretty close to their mortal enemies --- not in some dumb religious way, but in a modern geopolitical sense --- and that conflict is far more salient than Israel/Iran.

Iran trying to gain favor with the Sunni Arab world is somewhere in the same ballpark as Russia trying to gain favor with ethnic Ukrainians.

But Iran are Shia! They don't seek Sunni approval; they've been at each other's throats since the beginning!

All of this seems to so insane to me. This region has lots of wealth (dino juice just coming out of the ground), and they're frittering it all away on buying more and more weapons and destroying each other.

The existence of a Jewish state in the region also undermines the theological basis of an Islamic republic.

> Russia has demonstrated that they can conduct so-called "hybrid warfare" as long as it doesn't lead to serious injury or death and the response will be meager

At a certain point, it stops being "hybrid warfare" and starts being "obnoxious prank".

Russia's deployed (small amounts of) WMDs offensively and has blown up/set fire to some military infrastructure on NATO soil. I'd call these things "hybrid warfare".

Making a grocery store file a claim with their insurance for unrefrigerated food is more along the lines of "dick move".

Yeah, that's what we do to draw people into wars: we set their supermarket freezers to defrost and make the stocking crew stay half-a-shift longer. Then we vote the guy who dragged our own country into the war into lame duck status.

You've traced the very substance and nature of our ridiculously circuitous plan to get the EU to attack Iran. Can we get your thoughts on the Zapruder film while you're here? Maybe you can bring some fresh perspective to that.

NK just pulled off the biggest crypto robbery ever. But its not all about hacking, influence operations are significant too. Ask Jensen.

The accusation here is that the US is doing the bad things while pretending to be other APTs. As an American, I would not be surprised in the slightest if this turned out to be true, very double agent-esce and inline with the hubris, especially under this administration.