For the most part I agree that in the long term Israel has not been super helpful to US interests. The people running our society had their veiws of foriegn policy formed in the 70s and this is the result.

In general they only fight Hamas and Hezbollah, 2 groups that they created with their invasions. The only thing I can think of is their intelligence operations against Iran, but it’s not clear why they need to be the ones to do it.

For now, pretty much unfortunately. Once oil demand drops the ME will be less of a priority for the US, but then will have to contend with the Israel lobby which won’t go down easy.

You’re right that most Americans don’t care about this and, to the extent they do the pro-Israel group has more resources and have it as a higher political priority. On the other hand the pentagon and state dept definitely see it as a security issue. They see a highly militarized Israel as an asset as a detterent and an insurance policy if things pop off in the ME. This is the conventional wisdom, but it’s far from controversial if it’s the best policy given that Arab forces refuse to fight on the same side as the Israelis, and modern US war stategy calls for using local indigenous forces they prop up. Overall the US will never except not having a strong military presence in the ME (atleast until oil demand drops in the coming decades when renewables become very cheap) and Israel is one of the ways they achieve this.

Edit: for some reason I said far from controversial, but I meant it is controversial.

TBH don’t know which one would have been more embarressing for the Iranians. That the air defenses would have let an airstrike in Tehran or that they let the Israelis plant a bomb in a secured compound. Honestly I think this is worse for them.

Florida and North Carolina did not. I’m not sure if there were any others.

https://www.wral.com/story/biden-won-t-have-challengers-in-nc-2024-primary-election-state-democratic-party-decides/21202708/

https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/primaries-and-caucuses/results/florida/democratic-presidential-primary

Presumably the donations will start coming back in now that Biden is out.

People don’t know her tbh. She used to be kind of a poor public speaker, but seems to have solved that based on recent appearances. Not gonna lie she’s a bit strange if you’ve ever heard her speak, but I don’t think it’ll hurt her against Trump who is an all time weirdo in American politics. Importantly she’s young and fairly sharp and hasn’t been around long enough to have too many skeletons in her closet.

He dropped over 2 points to Trump since the debate and I doubt more public appearances from him were gonna help especially since he already committed to another debate. He’s outside the margin of error for winning any sunbelt state and losing everywhere in the rustbelt. It’s not impossible that he would have won but seems pretty improbable.

Honestly the biggest problem Biden had was that all his funding dried up after the debate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/us/politics/biden-fundraising.html

Regardless of who you think would win in a vacuum you gotta acknowledge this.

Seems like AP is getting some basic facts mixed up here?

Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel during a single incident in April in response to Israel’s alleged assassination of a pair of Iranian generals in Syria at the time.

Here’s the contemporary source https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/13/middleeast/iran-drones-attack-israel-intl-latam/index.html

Iran launched an unprecedented large-scale drone and missile attack at Israel on Saturday night, in retaliation for a suspected Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic complex in Syria

tbh, pretty disappointing from AP.

I genuinely do not care who owns the factory as long as it creates jobs.

Pretty clear breach of journalistic ethics, no?

Mr. Grimm pleaded guilty in exchange for an agreement that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty. But under Virginia law at the time, the crime was not eligible for capital punishment.

Where was this dude’s lawyer?

Ah OK, I can’t read apparently. I thought you meant the attacks from Iraqi militias have been going on longer than the current Israeli invasion. I agree with your original comment.

For these particular groups the article says the exact opposite.

But on Nov. 2 they claimed their first ever attack on Israel.

In general it is pretty rare for anyone to directly attack Israel other than groups they created through their various occupations, mainly Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.

Yep. And the subheading I really have a problem with.

Reading too much into the language seems, at this point, to be less of a danger than reading too little into it.

The implication being that it’s low stakes to make this accusation without solid evidence. In reality the whole justification from the West for the state of affairs between Israel and Palestine is that Arabs are a bunch of backwards savages, and this extends to the way the West has acted throughout the Middle East.

I don’t think you understand. There were two buildings, the embassy and the consulate. The embassy was not directly hit, the consulate was.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-04-01/syria-says-deadly-israeli-airstrike-destroyed-irans-consular-building-in-damascus

While Iran’s consular building was leveled in the attack, according to Syria’s state news agency, its main embassy building remained intact. Still, the Iranian ambassador’s residence was inside the consular building.

Also looks like the Vienna Convention defines diplomatic missions not the Geneva Convention. My bad.

It was a consulate which is also covered by the Geneva convention as all diplomatic missions are. There really isn’t a significant distinction here.

Not that it’s anything new, but it’s crazy that 2 ICBM-armed states have a massive border standoff.

https://apnews.com/article/iran-iraq-militant-bases-attack-05c7530d66fb05dd6f2868527003ba2d

AP article is a bit more detailed here. Looks like the militia is not affiliated with the Pakistani military which lowers the stakes of this fortunately.