Iran issues warning of ‘irreparable damage' if US joins conflict
Israel and Iran have exchanged strikes for a sixth day, with the Israeli military saying it has hit military targets in Tehran.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei insists his nation will never surrender and threatened America with 'irreparable damage' if it joins the war.
This morning, Iran's Revolutionary Guard released a statement saying Israelis must choose between a 'slow death' in a hellish life inside bunkers or to flee Israel.
It added the skies above Israel are open to Iran's missiles and drones.
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The Age
10 minutes ago
- The Age
US strike on Iran would bring peril at every turn
Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a defiant response to Trump's call for 'unconditional surrender', but Trump said there were indications that the Iranians wanted to talk. There were also reports of an official Iranian plane landing in Oman, where many of the negotiations with Steve Witkoff, the president's special envoy, had taken place before Israel's attack. If Trump is taking a pause, it may be because the list of things that could go wrong is long, and probably incomplete. There's the obvious: It's possible that a B-2 could get shot down, despite Israel's success in taking out so many of Iran's air defences. It's possible the calculations are wrong, and even America's biggest conventional bomb can't get down that deep. 'I've been there, it's half a mile underground,' Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said last week, as the Israeli operation began. But assuming that the operation itself is successful, the largest perils may lie in the aftermath, many experts say, just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are many lessons from that ugly era of misbegotten American foreign policy, but the most vital may be that it's the unknown unknowns that can come back to bite. Iran has vowed that if attacked by US forces, it would strike back, presumably against the US bases spread around the Middle East and the growing number of assets gathering in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. All are within missile range, assuming Iran has missiles and launchers left after the Israelis are done with their systematic targeting. Of course, that could start a cycle of escalation: If Americans are killed, or even injured, Trump will be under pressure to exact revenge. 'Subcontracting the Fordow job would put the United States in Iran's sights,' Daniel Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Israel, and Steven Simon, a veteran of the National Security Council, wrote in Foreign Affairs this week. 'Iran would almost certainly retaliate by killing American civilians. That, in turn, would compel the United States to reciprocate. 'Soon enough, the only targets left for Washington to hit would be the Iranian regime's leaders, and the United States would again go into the regime-change business – a business in which exceedingly few Americans want to be involved any longer.' The reaction could take other forms. Iran is skilled at terrorism, and reacted to the US-Israeli cyberattack on its nuclear program 15 years ago by building a fearsome cyber corps – not as stealthy as China's or as bold as Russia's, but capable of considerable damage. And it has plenty of short-range missiles left to attack oil tankers, making transit in the Persian Gulf too risky. The last thing the White House wants to do is air these risks in public. Democrats are calling for a congressional role, but they have no power to compel it. 'Given the potential for escalation, we must be brought into this decision,' Senator Adam Schiff of California, one of Trump's political rivals, said on CNN on Wednesday. 'Bombing Fordow would be an offensive activity.' And like most offensive activities, there are longer-term perils, beyond the cycle of attack and retaliation. Already the message of these past five days, as interpreted by Iranian leaders or others with nuclear skill, may well be that they should have raced for a bomb earlier, and more stealthily. That was what North Korea did, and it has now ended up with 60 or more nuclear weapons, despite years of American diplomacy and sabotage. It is a big enough arsenal to assure that its adversaries, South Korea and the US, would think twice about conducting the kind of operation that Israel executed against Iran. And history suggests that nuclear programs can be bombed, but not eliminated. 'Nuclear weapons can be stopped through force – the Syrian program is a good example,' said Gary Samore, who was the Obama administration's co-ordinator for weapons of mass destruction when the existence of the Fordow plant was made public. And in Iraq, after the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981, to keep Saddam Hussein from getting the fuel for a bomb, the Iraqis 'reacted by building a huge, secret program' that went undetected until after the Gulf War in 1991, Samore said. That was such an embarrassment to American intelligence agencies that more than a decade later they wildly overestimated his ability to do it again, contributing to the second failure – and leading the US into the Iraq War. But Samore added: 'I can't think of a case where air power alone was sufficient to end a program.' That is an important consideration for Trump. He must decide in the next few days whether Israel's attacks on Iran's Natanz enrichment facility, and its bombing of workshops where new centrifuges are made and laboratories where weapons research may have been taking place, are sufficient to set back the Iranian program. In short, he must decide whether it is worth the huge risk of direct US involvement for whatever gain would come from destroying Fordow with American pilots, American warplanes and American weapons. But he also doesn't want to be accused of missing the chance to set the Iranians back by years. 'If this war ends and this Fordow is left intact, then it wouldn't take long to get this going again,' said Samore, now a professor at Brandeis University. Trump has not weighed these questions in public, and it is always hard to know how he is assessing the evidence. He bristled the other day when a reporter noted to him that his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had testified in Congress just a few months ago that Iran had made no decision to produce a bomb. Loading Trump insisted that there wasn't much time left – though he cited no evidence to contradict his own intelligence chief. 'Don't forget, we haven't been fighting,' Trump said on Wednesday in the Oval Office. 'We add a certain amount of genius to everything, but we haven't been fighting at all. Israel's done a very good job today.' Then, muddying the waters anew, he turned to his signature phrase: 'But we'll see what happens.'
West Australian
14 minutes ago
- West Australian
Israel-Iran war: IDF strikes at least 20 military sites using fighter jets as conflict intensifies
The Israeli Defence Force has confirmed it struck more than 20 military targets in the heart of Iran using 60 fighter jets, as the growing conflict in the region enters its seventh day. In a post on X, the IDF said it hit key nuclear and missile sites across Tehran, including uranium enrichment and centrifuge sites, plus missile and air defence production facilities. The IDF also confirmed it targeted research and development sites for Iran's nuclear weapons project. 'These sites fuel Iran's weapons program and attacks on Israeli civilians,' the IDF wrote. 'The IDF will continue targeting threats to defend Israeli civilians.' In a separate statement, the IDF asserted that the sites struck were 'designated to allow the Iranian regime to expand the scale and pace of its uranium enrichment purpose of developing nuclear weapons.' According to the IDF, the strikes specifically targeted 'factories producing raw materials and components for missile assembly, as well as sites for the production of Iran's air defense systems'. The latest wave of attacks follows reports that Iran has downed its first Israeli aircraft since the conflict began, confirming the destruction of a Hermes 900 long-endurance tactical UAV over Isfahan Province earlier this week. Video released by Iranian state media appears to corroborate the claim, showing debris consistent with the unique structure and markings of the Israeli-manufactured drone. More to come...
The Age
25 minutes ago
- The Age
The view from isolation: Amid the relentless ill tidings, at least the faithless fairy wrens make sense
The United States, having given itself over to the absurdly erratic Donald Trump and his cabinet of lickspittles, was proving it could no longer be counted on for almost any major decision that lasted more than a blink. Loading Tariffs in Trump's hands had become a global pea-and-thimble trick. His promise to bring international peace was proving not worth an Israeli shekel, a Gazan child's life, a Ukrainian hryvnia, a Russian rouble or now, an Iranian rial. His latest effort, to demand via text on his Truth Social the ' unconditional surrender ' of Iran, came barely a nanosecond after indicating he wanted to stay out of the Israel-Iran mess. Oh, and who might have imagined, before it came to pass, a president deploying 4000 National Guard troops and 700 US Marines to quell what were relatively low-level protests by civilians against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brutes? Why, it was only a few months ago Trump himself had pardoned all those who had been indicted or found guilty of attacking the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Unsurprisingly, polling by the Australian foreign affairs think tank the Lowy Institute revealed this week that almost two-thirds of Australians now hold little to no trust in the United States to act responsibly in world affairs. The only surprise is that 36 per cent of Australians still hold some form of trust in the Trump outfit. Watching the fairy wrens bobbing around the lawn, I recalled my first trip overseas, a study tour to the US in the 1970s. I stayed with a series of hosts who proved unfailingly hospitable and generous. A couple of my American hosts tried to persuade me that the disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon wasn't really a bad person, and was the victim of a witch hunt. We cordially agreed to disagree, and I never once felt that expressing a view could get me into any sort of strife. Free speech seemed genuinely treasured, and the perspectives of those from across the oceans seemed welcome. It was, I reflected, so very long ago. What had happened to those mild Americans of half a century ago? Muttering something unkind about Trump these days could get you deported or worse, your university could lose its funding or your law firm could be locked out of government contracts. While I pondered the menace in these developments, Trump's defence secretary, the greasy-haired ex-Fox News host Pete Hegseth – who would barely appear out of place in the sales office of a backstreet used-car yard – was hectoring Australia over its defence expenditure. We may, of course, need to seriously review our defence capabilities, and it's nothing new for the US to press us on the military's share of GDP. Back in 2013, Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, called Australia's defence spending inadequate and accused Australia of wanting a free ride on the US. Armitage, however, was a serious man of vast experience. Is there any pressing reason we should listen to a fellow like Hegseth, who is so lacking in smarts that he was caught out sharing on a leaky chat group the details of a US strike on Yemen? Why, this defence secretary couldn't organise America's immense military machine to turn on a stupendously expensive birthday parade for Trump that was much more than a sad-sack march-past. As for Australia's spending, did Hegseth even send a receipt for our $500 million down payment this year on the $3 billion Australia has promised to prop up the US' submarine industry? Has an acronym ever sounded quite as ugly as AUKUS? Back home, what was supposed to be Australia's federal opposition – having been eviscerated at the recent election after its brains trust thought it was smart to assume a MAGA-lite approach – was meaninglessly splitting itself asunder before hurrying back to a shaky coupling of convenience. Even closer, what is supposed to be the Victorian Liberal Party was tearing itself to shreds. Again. The forces for and against offering bankruptcy relief to former leader John Pesutto, spurred by factional hatreds old and new, were still furiously facing off at the time of writing.
