The US-Iran War Has Begun

[Cristiano]

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Cristiano]

Iran continues to attack its neighbors:

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

View attachment 953

Padded with power here they come
international loan sharks backed by the guns
of market hungry military profiteers
whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
with the blood of the poor

Bruce Cockburn - Call It Democracy (1986)

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Cristiano]

This is long but interesting.

The United Arab Emirates is the most leveraged country on earth and almost nobody understands why.

Eighty eight percent of its population are foreign nationals. Ten point four million people who hold passports that say India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, Egypt, Britain, somewhere else. They are not citizens. They are residents. They chose to be there because the risk-adjusted return on their lives was positive. Better jobs. No income tax. Safety. The entire economic model of the UAE is a value proposition, and that value proposition has a denominator called security that just went to zero.

Emirates, the world’s largest international airline, has suspended all flights indefinitely. Etihad suspended until Monday. Singapore Airlines cancelled its Dubai service through March 7. United Airlines through March 4. More than eighteen hundred flights were cancelled on Saturday alone, another fourteen hundred on Sunday. Dubai International Airport, which handled over a hundred and twenty seven million passengers last year, is dark. A CNN verified video from inside the terminal shows a passenger in a blood-spattered shirt being told to go home. The UAE Ministry of Education has moved all schools to distance learning through Wednesday. Sharjah Airport is shut. Abu Dhabi Airport took a direct hit that killed a Pakistani national and wounded seven.

The UAE confirmed its air defenses intercepted one hundred and thirty seven ballistic missiles and two hundred and nine drones. Fourteen drones were not intercepted. Their debris fell on residential neighborhoods, hotel facades, port facilities, and according to multiple reports, a shopping center in Sharjah.

Here is what matters. When France gets bombed, the French stay because it is France. When Ukraine gets bombed, Ukrainians stay because it is Ukraine. When the UAE gets bombed, the ten million people who make up eighty eight percent of its population have a decision to make. And that decision has a very short fuse.

A country where nearly nine in ten residents can leave is not a nation in the traditional sense. It is a special economic zone with a flag. The moment the value proposition inverts, the population does not resist. It withdraws. This is not a war of attrition. It is a bank run on a country.

The deposits are human. There is no deposit insurance. And the withdrawal window just opened.

Schools are closed. Airports are closed. Flights are cancelled through next week. The residents of the world’s most ambitious urban experiment are sitting in underground parking garages because Dubai has no bomb shelters.

Nobody models a bank run until it starts.

 

[Free]

Woman killed, dozens injured as Iranian missile strikes Tel Aviv residential block

Victim is first person killed in Israel in renewed fighting with Iran, as first responders take 27 to hospital, including infant, after heavy damage to two apartment buildings

www.timesofisrael.com

A woman was killed and dozens more were injured by an Iranian missile that struck a Tel Aviv residential block late Saturday night, in the first deadly barrage to rock Israel during its renewed fighting with Iran.

The victim, a foreign caregiver in her 40s, was found in critical condition after a ballistic missile struck next to an apartment building in the coastal city, causing heavy damage to the structure and its environs.

Paramedics pronounced the woman dead while rushing her to the hospital.

Twenty-seven others were injured, including two in moderate condition and 25 who sustained light injuries in the attack. They were taken to three different hospitals in the area by Magen David Adom and United Hatzalah paramedics.

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Well heck. I didn't think anything could chill my elation about the death of a thoroughly irredeemable dictator like Khamenei, but it turns out the fact it was done by another self-described dictator who openly aspires to be just as bad really does throw a wet blanket on it.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Yes, Republicans Against Trump, the fake white people in Iran attacked the permitted to be white people of France. Lessers aren’t allowed to do that.

Still abuser logic all the way down.

 

[Cristiano]

 

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[Cristiano]

 

[Sid]

[sarcastic] Pfew, it was not a Trump tower... [/sarcastic]