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Fireworks In Qatar
Iran wasted some missiles it couldn't spare on Monday taking pointless pot shots at the Al Udeid Air
Many locals and residents of Qatar go to Al Udeid Desert for camping/entertainment. My 18yr old brother in law (who was visiting Doha for a few days with friends), says one of the missiles hit the ground close to where they stood.
Why anyone would go to Al Udeid Desert during such times is beyond me. He’s very young and very stupid (the two are highly correlated, at least in his case). Thankfully, he’s ok.
It’s kind of fascinating to me. I’m an entrepreneur, so you could say that I’m ‘aspirationally greedy.’ But I look at these ads and pictures of these ‘swank’ Middle East cities, and for the life of me I just can’t understand why someone wants a multi-million dollar condo in Doha or Abu Dhabi. My Lambo getting crushed in the driveway by an Iranian missile fragment seems like the least of the issues I’d worry about.
I suppose at this point Khamenei’s only play is to retain domestic power. I imagine the pathetic telegraphed show of force meets those needs for an Internet blacked-out populace.
The sad thing about all of this is there are many Iranian Americans who were forced to flee that regime who can’t visit their families. It would seem that trend will continue, thanks to the peace.
I am surprised they targeted that specific base. I would have bet money it would have been our bases in Iraq.
It really is something to see how impotent Iran is at this point. The regime is hanging on by a thread.
If (and that’s a massive if) regime change happens without the chaos that followed in Iraq, I’d have to give the architects of that change their due and clap as they unfurl the Mission: Accomplished banner, but to channel the ghost of Donald Rumsfeld, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns that have yet to play out. Some (many?) unfortunate folks will still end up dead or maimed because the powers that be view their lives as inconsequential in the reality TV version of Risk.
It might be nice if we still had Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty fully funded and operating in order to communicate with, inform, and perhaps even “advise” the people of Iran.
Maybe the US should bring back the tactics of old, drop leaflets offering free Starlink (Musk owes us, great patriot that he is) connectivity for all Iranians. Maybe the pen has a place alongside the sword.
H-Man, the Iranians seem to have the patience of Job. They know the game is over, time to rebuild to fight for another day and what about that caravan of 16 wheelers at Fordow that disappeared in a day. Nobody seems to have an answer on that enriched uranium other than to acknowledge that it is gone. Bloomberg put out a great timeline. See https://www.bloomberg.com/explainers/us-iran-relations-a-timeline-of-their-complex-history?srnd=homepage-americas.
Fascinating that we gave them a nuclear reactor with enriched uranium. See the timeline
1957
The US signed an agreement to support Iran’s use of nuclear energy for civilian purposes as part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program. A decade later, the Americans provided Iran with a 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor along with the enriched uranium needed to fuel it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the White House in 1954.Photographer: PhotoQuest/Getty Images
We also shot down one their passenger jets,
1988
A US naval cruiser, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian passenger jet over the Strait of Hormuz on July 3, killing all 290 people on board. The US said that the plane was mistaken for a fighter jet and its investigation of the incident called the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, which was traveling from Bandar Abbas in southern Iran to Dubai, a “tragic and regrettable accident.”