Iran

In the tit for tat wars in the middle east, Israel struck at Iran yesterday, and today Iran is striking back at Israel. 

I came across this: "According to Hamas’s plan, after its attack on Israel, the remaining components of Iran’s axis of evil — Hamas in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the Shiite militias in Syria, Iraq and Iran — would join in a regional war with the ultimate goal of destroying the one and only Jewish state." (NY Times by Benny Gantz)

I've read that Russia and its allies just want to sew the seeds of disunity in countries that aren't ruled by strong men, ie functional western democracies. They don't have to win asymmetrical wars, they just cut into the unity of open democratic states, drain off some of their unity and power by sewing chaos. Iran agreed to join the battle once Hamas launched the missles. 

"Iran’s religious leadership is devoted to exporting its fundamentalist ideology, driven by the pursuit of hegemony and captivated by the thought of its opponents’ violent subjugation." (op cit).

Every justification for war is flawed, because the outcome is mass death. Sometimes you have to fight back even if you don't want war, it takes more time to neutralize waring nations and undercut motivations for war. In a way war is the best problem solving given a situation, and you'd have to back thing up to different antecedents to create peace. 

The waring narratives casts Iran as already planning something, but we honestly have to look at a nation and what they do. What are the circumstances that undercut and stop war, end ongoing wars.

You can see the waring building up (Current Affairs). The article in Current Affairs by Nathan J. Robinson goes into deeper context about the waring articles in the Times, and asks some questions those articles can't answer. It brings in international law, completely ignored in the waring articles. Everyone in the UN wants to relax the situation except Israel and the USA. This is not good. I fear we are heading towards something that will spiral out of control and have negative consequences for everyone.