Meanwhile on the International front....

They can go back to doing it, but the U.S. can bring the pain, unlike a Saudi regime that secretly doesn't mind the Houthis causing oil prices to spike.

 

The biggest difference is that what the Houthis are doing now is making the cost of shipping and insurance go through the roof for everyone using the Suez. I think that was intended to increase pressure on the Israelis to come to some form of settlement so that the attacks would stop. Instead a coalition of the willing to slap the Houthis around to break that shit up is forming.

 

With this one weird trick.

 

Watch until the end.

 

Remnick

The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition

To be vigilant—to live without illusions about the ever-present threat of annihilation—was a primary value at No. 4 Haportzim Street, once the Jerusalem address of the Netanyahu family. This wariness had ancient roots. In the Passover Haggadah, the passage beginning “Vehi Sheamda” reminds everyone at the Seder table that in each generation an enemy “rises up to destroy” the Jewish people. “But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands,” the Haggadah continues. Benzion Netanyahu, the family patriarch and a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, was a secular man. For deliverance, he looked not to faith but to the renunciation of naïveté and the strength of arms. This creed became his middle son’s inheritance, the core of his self-conception as the uniquely unillusioned defender of the State of Israel.

That son, Benjamin Netanyahu, is now in his sixth term as Prime Minister. Not even the state’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, held power longer. But Netanyahu’s standing in the polls is dismal. Now seventy-four, he always campaigned on security, presenting himself as the one statesman and patriot who saw through the malign intentions of Israel’s enemies. Yet with the Hamas massacre of some twelve hundred people in southern Israel, on October 7th, he had presided over an unprecedented collapse of state security.

“Historically, Netanyahu will go down in history as the worst Jewish leader ever,” Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset who long ago left the Labor Party and joined the leftist Hadash Party, told me. The fury at Netanyahu among centrists and many conservatives is scarcely less intense. Galit Distel Atbaryan, a hard-line minister in Netanyahu’s government, resigned after October 7th; she later talked of her “burning anger” toward him. She was hesitant to attack Netanyahu during wartime, but, she told Israeli television, she herself had “sinned” for her own role in dividing Israeli society. When she woke on the morning of the seventh and heard the news of the catastrophic attack, her first thought was “You did this. You weakened the nation.” Now, she said, “the days of this government are numbered—that’s obvious.” Naftali Bennett, a former Prime Minister, told me that Israel was experiencing a self-defeating level of division. “In the past year,” he said, “Israel has been tearing itself apart and its immune system became weak. Our enemy saw that and attacked.”

 

Who had Iran vs. Pakistan on their World War III bingo card?

Pakistan carries out strikes on separatist targets in Iran | CNN

 

Hell, who had Sarajevo on their World War I bingo card?

 

widening gyre

Pakistan Retaliates With Strikes Inside Iran as Tensions Spill Over

Israel-Hamas War: U.S. Strikes Houthis Again as Tensions in Region Rise

‘Different rules’: special policies keep US supplying weapons to Israel despite alleged abuses

 

I think we need to separate the Iran/Pakistan thing from Palestine. Unless the region as a whole blows up they are two separate issues. The Islamic State terrorists who set off two bombs in Iran during the Solemani memorials are based in Pakistan, and that was who Iran hit. The Pakistanis went after terrorists based in Iran who had hit them in a tit for tat retaliation. Both are client states of China, who has already stepped in to try to keep this from expanding further. China does not want to be in the position of having an ally looking to China for help against another of China's allies.

 

What the Pakistanis did isn’t much different than what we’ve done in… well, Pakistan… for a couple decades, including when we nabbed bin Laden. No one said that would lead to WWIII. I wonder where the Pakistanis got the idea to do it?

 

Bombing a memorial service?

 

Iran supports the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestine Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Now Iran's in a shootout with Pakistan, ratcheting up tensions from Islamabad to Benghazi?

Not sure it's possible to separate it.