Multiple missiles have been launched at Iraq from Iran targeting American military facilities, according to a U.S. official. ...
A U.S. official confirms to ABC News that ballistic missiles have been fired from inside Iran at multiple U.S. military facilities inside Iraq on Wednesday morning, local time. The facilities include Erbil in northern Iraq and Al Asad Air Base in western Iraq, the official said.
I assume we will attack Iranian missile and air bases inside Iran plus select Revolutionary Guard bases.
Depending on how much of our retaliation is by non-stealth aircraft rather than missiles and stealth aircraft, we may go after air defense sites as well. Once the strike expands in scale the operation has to expand more to go after air defense and air bases to protect the strike assets going in.
Iran and Iraq launched missiles at each other's cities during the Iran-Iraq War. So this must be eerily familiar to Iraqis.
UPDATE: I hear the attack did no damage. Honestly a single fighter bomber could fire as many warheads. This seems token despite Iranian boasting, conceivably giving us the option to tighten sanctions as our response.
And did Iranian air defenses shoot down a Ukrainian 737 taking off when Iran launched their missiles? Odd coincidence.
Between the stampede deaths at Soleimani’s funeral and this incident, perhaps enough Iranians have died.
UPDATE: Of course, coincidences do happen. Like two small earthquakes in Iran on top of all else.
UPDATE: I was shocked that Iran's missile barrage was basically a pageant--aimed to miss apparently--rather than a retaliation. With no American casualties (and I'm not sure if there were any at all) and very few missiles, the need for American retaliation as I assumed evaporated.
The Iranians claimed to have inflicted death and destruction and called it a day. The mullah supporters will believe that.
Meanwhile regime opponents there will discover that the boasts are lies. And they'll wonder about whether Iran shot down that Ukrainian airliner in error.
And some will even wonder if the earthquakes were an American operation.
So Iran can say they struck back effectively and we can see they did not and change the struggle from open fighting to the economic sphere. America, rather than hitting back at Iran, decided to impose even more sanctions on Iran.
That is where our real war effort will continue. And don't doubt that Iran will resume terrorism when they feel they can get away with it.
Democrats should be ashamed for turning disagreement with Trump into virtual praise for and effectively a defense of that terror-sponsoring regime that seeks nukes and still screeches "Death to America!"
I'd say I was prescient a month ago about them and their inability to rally around the flag, but it was like predicting sunrise in the morning.
UPDATE: I wonder if we had eyes on Iranian skies when the Ukrainian airliner went down? Why isn't Iran releasing the black box recovered?
UPDATE: The 737 went down 4 hours after the Iranian missiles were launched.
And were the Iranians trying to kill our troops after all? That possibility was raised. If so, the Iranians suck. Although I hear they did not use their best missiles.
UPDATE: Strategypage has more.
UPDATE: Iran shot down that Ukrainian 737:
Pentagon and Iraqi officials claim that a Ukrainian Airlines flight that crashed after leaving Tehran Tuesday night was shot down by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile system, according to multiple reports.
It wasn't deliberate (not like Iran isn't above killing civilians deliberately).
Iran was foolish to turn on their air defenses. Did they really think their ramshackle system was up to detecting us? With our stealth the only indication Iran would have that we were attacking them would be things blowing up on the ground.
Instead, Iranian missile crews thought they were the cream of Persian military skills using the very best Russian-made radars, and my how easy it was to detect the American attacker!
UPDATE: I've heard it really isn't accurate to say that Iran is refusing to turn over the black box. Let's see what they do with it after they examine it.
As an aside, maybe the Iranians will have a little more sympathy for us and belief in the reality of our mistaken shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988 during a battle between America and Iran in the Gulf. And Ukraine can't say too much considering their S-200s accidentally shot down a Russian airliner in 2001 during a military exercise with the Russians.
UPDATE: And we tightened the sanctions:
The sanctions mean "we will cut off billions of dollars of support to the Iranian regime," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters at the White House.
The measures targeting Iran's steel industry and eight state officials came on top of massive sanctions already aimed at bringing the country's economy to its knees.
This is our main effort in the war Iran began four decades ago.
UPDATE: Iran admits they mistakenly shot down the Ukrainian plane:
Iran's Revolutionary Guard on Saturday acknowledged that it accidentally shot down the Ukrainian jetliner that crashed earlier this week, killing all 176 aboard, after the government had repeatedly denied Western accusations that it was responsible.
To be fair to the Iranian government--nutball that it is--the separate nearly state-within-a-state and even-more-fanatically-nutball Revolutionary Guards no doubt didn't tell the government that its forces did it.
But note that the Iranians mimic the language of some Democrats here who blamed America for the crisis that led to the Iranian shoot-down. Yet somehow we and our Iraqi allies managed to avoid shooting down any civilian planes over or near Iraq during the Iranian missile barrage on Iraqis bases (one in Anbar and one in the Kurdish region) where Americans were deployed.
