Modelling Iran as a monolith seems to lead to errors more than it simplifies analysis. It's absolutely possible that nine parts of their mosaic [1] didn't want to open a new front and one went YOLO.
Of course, they targeted civilians in all of the above countries.
And if you include attacks on ships, the list goes all the way from China to Paraguay and has dozens of entries. Essentially all civilian as well, meaning their attacks against actual military ships were a minority of their attacks.
Of those, perhaps Israel and maybe Qatar can be considered defensive actions. And perhaps the attack on Greece was accidental (really aiming for a US ship in the Mediterranean)
If you made a full list of everything Iran has the physical ability to hit and compared to the list they did hit, the only missing countries would be Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Armenia.
I must say, it also seems to me unlikely in the extreme the French immigrant community, or anywhere in Europe, would significantly be on Iran's side. First, they're largely economic migrants, suffering due to Iran's actions. Second, they're largely from countries Iran attacked. Third, they're Sunni, not exactly Iran's traditional allies. Fourth: they're not making any money of Iran.
So ... maybe it's just me but I don't think rhetoric is the problem here.
The regime started a proxy war against Israel decades ago, financing Hisbollah and eventually also Hamas, both with the official goal of destroying Israel.
Before the regime came into power, Iran had good relations to Israel.
So no, there's nothing 'defensive' when it comes to Iran's actions.
I haven't dug into it deeply, but I was under the impression that most of the Iranian targets were US bases and US-owned oil fields/energy infrastructure, with relatively few domestic civilian interests harmed. Am I mistaken?
I doubt the public in any country cares much about Iran's blockade, given that the US has "counter-blockaded" and claimed ownership and control of the stait. Iran was attacked first, then sneak attacked during negotiations, and has maintained a coherent and consistent policy during negotiations. Common people are sympathetic and view them as the underdog.
> Third, they're Sunni, not exactly Iran's traditional allies.
Muslims are far less divided than Western policy-makers imagine IMO, most have solidarity WRT Palestine and broader Middle Eastern geopolitics regardless of sectarian affiliation. Iran has been mostly successful in tying their struggle to the issue of Israel/Palestine, especially with the recently-interested younger people in western countries who have less reflexive reaction against Iran.
So, in essence, the US used the civilians as human shields.
It is no different than what America and the USSR were doing during the cold war just on a smaller scale. Playing cold war games is tricky though because its easy to over extend or let your proxies drag you into a conflicts you don't want. This is what happened to Iran and thus the cold war turned hot.
It is not. Ask the Kurds or the Baloch. Unfortunately, neither has a homeland backed by military force. The world would be much better if they did. If you think the Palestinians are the only ones in a bad situation, you're missing most of the field.
The Iranian theocratic regime regularly hosts conferences of "Jews" who come to deny the holocaust and to say that Israel is an illegitimate country. If the remaining Jews in Iran beg to differ, they will be routinely executed.
Israel's bombing of an adjacent building which accidentally damaged one of the remaining synagogues in Iran was likely without thought, but if someone in Tel Aviv actually did think about it they probably signed off on it as a favor to the remaining Iranian Jews, to establish that they weren't helping Israel.
Would you want to be a Jew in Iran? I think it would be about the same as being Sioux in South Dakota in the 1890s.
How ironic to be bombed by the reservation you forced people onto, and to lose air superiority to it, so you can't even prevent those Iranian Jews from flying laps over Tehran. How sweetly ironic that you spent 47 years obsessing over hating the people you forced onto that reservation, wishing to destroy them, instead of improving your own country and your own people with all of that western oil money.
Maybe building an entire dictatorship on a "minute of hate", or having a national holiday devoted to calling for the murder of another ethnic group who you already expelled, is not actually a viable social or economic strategy.
Meanwhile, members of the Iranian dictatorship are free to live in Paris and send their daughters to college anywhere they want. Perhaps a few of them should flee, while the option is available.
The Jews who fled to Israel don't have anywhere else to flee, they are the ones living on the "Indian Reservation". So maybe if the Iranian government is so interested in removing the "colonialists" of Israel, it should offer back in exchange all of the property it stole from the Jews who lived there before 1979.
It does make sense if you think about it for longer than 5s - it's about U.S. allies putting pressure on the U.S. to end the war. This whole propaganda about Iran being irrational is so dumb it's embarrassing.
The US is threatening to wipe out Iran's civilization, the EU is very tepid about the whole thing at best. Really sad to see, but not surprising. There's zero consistency or principle involved.
Traditionally that has been how countries tend to respond to military attacks on their soil. Iran's only saving grace seems to be that they're too ineffectual to pose any actual, serious threat to countries like France.
This also seems to have happened at US bases[3].
It's rather likely their attempt to show that they can 'reach' further than conventional means would suggest.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/28/uk-france-germ...
2 - https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/temperature...
3 - https://www.food-safety.com/articles/11974-refrigerator-malf...
It's also why the US is highly reluctant to return to high-tempo combat.
I think that is only a win if you have an extremely american centric perspective of this conflict.
So they did that. Then what? Do you really think that is going to translate into anything significant on the battle field? It might have some marginal benefits but it probably won't matter in the big picture for Iran.
They're weaker than the countries attacking them. So causing inconvenience so that pressure will be put on the US to end the war by countries the US might listen to.
Is that strategy going to work? Not sure. But does it have a chance of working? Maybe.
I'm just saying it isn't going to win them the war. The president broadly controls what the us military does. He doesn't need congress or the senate.
You seem to be mixing up "wanting to win" with "actually winning". Of course Iran wants to win this conflict, but that doesn't mean they are actually winning.
> They're weaker than the countries attacking them.
Yes, getting into conflicts from a position of weakness is generally a bad plan. Succesful countries plan for this sort of thing well before the conflict starts which results in the conflict not happening in the first place.
Iran had strategies in place for this, but they ended up backfiring.
>Is that strategy going to work? Not sure. But does it have a chance of working? Maybe.
Imposing costs on your opponent is a tried and true strategy that almost certainly could work. However Iran actually has to impose real costs instead of just propaganda wins. It seems like they were doing this best earlier in the war and now have run out of steam.
The price of oil, US midterm results, Gulf countries scrambling, that certainly doesn't look like they haven't imposed real costs.
> Yes, getting into conflicts from a position of weakness is generally a bad plan. Succesful countries plan for this sort of thing well before the conflict starts which results in the conflict not happening in the first place.
If by 'getting into conflicts' you mean 'getting invaded by the US and Israel' then sure. That just seems to be saying 'don't get invaded, sucker' which, while sound advice doesn't actually work out if someone's intent on invading you.
The Iranians are not trying to 'win' as such, but rather impose enough cost on the attackers that continuing the war no longer makes sense for them.
The truth is, you're not seemingly saying much of anything besides 'Iran bad'.
Israel and USA have been intent on invading Iran for decades. But they didn't. Then suddenly they did. That didn't just happen randomly. Iran took a bunch of foreign policy risks that backfired spectacularly making them vulnerable to invasion. If they made different decisions, or if they just got luckier, they wouldn't have been in a vulnerable position and this wouldn't have happened.
In many ways, the art of war starts long before the battles start. The things Iran could have done differently to affect the outcome of this war would probably have to have been done back then. It is a bit too late for them now.
> The Iranians are not trying to 'win' as such, but rather impose enough cost on the attackers that continuing the war no longer makes sense for them.
Yes, that is how all wars where the sides aren't evenly matched work.
But all they have to show for it is slightly higher prices at the pump, and its unclear they will even be able to maintain that going forward. It isn't looking good for them.
> The truth is, you're not seemingly saying much of anything besides 'Iran bad'.
I'm just saying they are losing and don't seem to have good prospects going forward. If by bad, you mean in the sense of their strategic position - then yes, iran's strategic position is very bad.
There is a war between the US/Israel and Iran, but there has not been an invasion. Attacks from a distance are not invasions. Contrast with the Russia-Ukraine war, where there actually has been an invasion.
If that's really the theory behind attacking France, then the Iranian regime is completely unmoored from reality. The last time the US listened to France was never.
Not to mention one of the limiting factors for america in this war is public opinion. I'm sure they would love some way to sell it to the american public.
Discrimination is a fallacious argument, if this is indeed an Iranian action, since Iran has been the target of a great number of indiscriminate attacks from the NATO bloc, including cyber attacks on its own food systems, also.
>Iran's strategy
I'm curious how you learn of Iran's strategy?
Going all, two wrongs make a right, misses the point. We aren't debating who is right but if iran's actions are likely to lead to them winning.
Indiscriminately - I suppose you mean "not attacking only military targets" - well I don't mean it from ethical stance, but rather the nature of tit for tat warfare, which is what this is.
>winning
Yeah, lost me there.
I don't. I think it is extremely clear in context that that is not what was meant
I mean, i also do think they are doing that too, and it seems like most experts agree that their use of cluster munitions over populated counts as indiscriminate in the sense of international law, but that is not the sense of indiscriminate that was being used in the comments above.