No Stupid Questions

What's going on:

Israel and Iran:

• Israel has terrible relations with virtually every country in the world, and even worse relations with the countries nearby, one of those countries is Iran
• Iran is the only Shia Muslim country in the world (one where the majority of the population is Shia and the people in power are Shia)
• There are Shia minorities in many countries, and in some countries the Shia are a majority of the population, but don't have power (Iraq used to be like this, not sure how it is now)
• Iran supports armed Shia groups outside Iran (Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, etc.)
• Sometimes these Iran-backed Shia groups act a bit like governments, sometimes like terrorist groups, often a combination of both.
• Israel shares borders with many countries with Iran-backed militias, so is constantly dealing with low-level conflict with groups linked to (financed by) Iran
• Iran (quite reasonably) thinks that the only way it will be safe from attack is if it has nuclear weapons, so it has been trying to develop them for years
• Israel (quite reasonably) doesn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons, so has been trying to stop them for years, using spying, sabotage, and more recently, direct airstrikes
• Under Obama, a deal was reached where Iran agreed to stop work on nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief
• Trump violated the terms of this treaty (as he has violated many other treaties) mainly because Obama signed it, and Trump has personal hatred for anything having to do with Obama
• With no deal in place, Iran went back to working (at least more openly) on nuclear weapons

Trump, Racists, and Evangelicals:

• The war against so-called "DEI" has meant any non-white person in an elevated position in the US government and military has been demoted or fired, and an incompetent but politically loyal white person has replaced them
• DOGE meant eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse", but mostly they eliminated anything they didn't understand, which included soft power (like Voice of America broadcasts in Persian which were received by people in Iran), Iran analysts at the Pentagon, etc.
• Successfully kidnapping Maduro from Venezuela gave the Trump admin a false sense of confidence
• Israel has a powerful lobby in the US,
• Many evangelicals believe that we're in the biblical endtimes, and that the rapture will happen soon. They want the jews to go back to Israel so Jesus can come back and kill them, then they get to go to heaven. Jews being in control of biblical places is a key element of their theory, so they support Israel because they want the world to end.

Israel's latest attacks:

• Israel attacked Iran last year, and the US joined in, and they claimed this "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program
• Despite this, the message is always that Iran is days or weeks away from a nuclear weapon, so both things are true: the Israeli/US strikes against Iran were a massive success and Iran's program was obliterated, but Iran is still days or weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon
• The Trump admin was trying to negotiate a new treaty with Iran, but wasn't making much progress because the negotiators were unqualified idiots: a real estate developer (Steve Witkoff) and Trump's son in law (Jared Kushner)
• Israel saw another opportunity to take out targets in Iran recently, so they attacked, and the US felt the need to join in, despite being in the middle of negotiations

Hormuz

• Many countries in the middle east only have major ports inside the Persian Gulf, and no way to get goods in or out without passing by the Strait of Hormuz
• Getting into the gulf means getting past the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran can easily control, it's only 50km coast-to-coast in some places
• Iran, at best, has non-hostile relationships with the rest of the Persian Gulf countries, so it doesn't risk much by sinking any ship passing by in the Gulf

What's Next:

• Who knows
• The US went into the conflict without a goal
• Israel went into it with goals (destroy the ability for Iran to finance militias on Israel's border, force them to focus on issues back home), but achieving its goals might make things even worse for the US
• Iran is facing an existential threat, so it's unlikely to back down, and it's not really like the US can escalate without actually invading
• In any invasion, the US would be badly hurt, Iran has a population of almost 100 million, 660 thousand active military, and 350 thousand reserves
• Any invasion would also serve to have Iranians rally around their country
• Many Iranians (especially urban ones) hate the theocratic regime, but they've seen how after US "interventions" nearby countries have collapsed into chaos. Stability under a hated theocratic leader is much preferable to chaos, so they're unlikely to rise up
• There are groups inside Iran who might fight (the Kurds for example), but they've been repeatedly burned by the US, over and over, going back decades, so they're not going to take promises from the US seriously