Fordow meets the B-2
I was wrong again. I couldn't be more pleased to say it.
For the past few days, Judith Levy has been sleeping on my couch. She came to visit me in Paris on her way back from the UK and wound up stranded by the war. She’s since been waiting for El Al to organize a repatriation flight for her and the thousands of other stranded Israelis in France. They’ve promised to get her back, but they haven’t said when. It could be today. It could be tomorrow. It could be next week. It could be years from now.
For the past few days, I’ve been listening to the alerts on her cellphone warning her to rush to the shelter. She’s been texting non-stop to her three kids, two of whom have also been stranded overseas.
Paris, meanwhile, has been suffering an epic heat wave. My apartment is too small for guests to be comfortable here under the best of circumstances, but in a heat wave, it’s ridiculous. It’s on the top floor of the building—a five-story walkup—and directly under a zinc roof. There’s no air conditioning. No apartment in Paris has air conditioning. (Well, some do, now—but not old ones, like mine.) I have one of those cooling portable fans that’s advertised as an “air conditioner,” but against heat like this, it’s about as effective as Iranian air defenses. My cats have retreated under the bed for shade, too hot to even to scamper, no less frolic.
We’ve been shvitzing miserably, kvetching about the heat, checking the news every ten seconds, wondering if Judith is going to be trapped here all summer, wondering if bombs will land on Judith’s apartment in Israel, talking about the comparative virtues of different kinds of bomb shelters, and debating whether Trump was going to chicken out.
It’s so hot the train tracks are buckling and the gargoyles are melting off the cathedrals. French authorities are frantically warning everyone to drink a lot of water and check on their parents. They’re still spooked by the memory of that heat wave in which all the elderly died because everyone was on vacation and forgot to call them. As the Yale Environment School earnestly explains, “Many of the victims lived alone, in top‑floor garrets or attic apartments, where the heat built up beneath zinc roofs and literally cooked people as if they were in an oven.” (My father’s just fine. His apartment is on the second floor. It overlooks the Seine, and it gets a lovely breeze in the summer. It’s Judith and me who are in the top-floor garret, being “literally cooked.”)
It’s far too hot to clean, so we’ve just been leaving dishes in the sink. Used cat litter is piling up in the Litter Genie. (You have to go to the basement of the building to take out the garbage, which means coming back up seven flights of stairs. I did clean the litter boxes, I’m proud to report—let no one say I lack hospitality!— but when I contemplated taking the heavy bags to the basement, then crawling back up all those stairs, I lost my will to live.)
I have a guest bed in my attic—which is cozy and romantic in the winter—but it’s so hot and airless up there that even the houseflies won’t fly up to die. So we’ve taken turns sleeping on the couch, meaning you wake up feeling as if someone’s spent the night smashing every one of your vertebrae with a hammer, like a xylophone. My apartment smells of stress, sweat, and cat.
On Thursday, we learned that Israel’s Chief Rabbi had pronounced this emergency insufficient to justify scheduling repatriation flights on Shabbat, meaning there would be no flights at all until today. The whole flight schedule would thus be pushed back by two days. Judith muttered imprecations under her breath. “Okay, let them stay here,” Judith exploded, meaning the Orthodox. “Get me home.”
Vladislav then texted to say, “Hey, plans changed, I’m in Paris! Do you mind if I crash with you?” (Trust me, Vlad: You didn’t want to. I’m sure you’ve been much more comfortable on the street. Maybe you even get a little breeze at night under that bridge over the Seine? It can’t possibly smell worse than this place.)
Judith is desperate to get home. You might think she’d be glad not to be in Israel right now, but that’s not how it works. She feels terrible for being away.
Usually, being trapped in Paris is no hardship duty. But it’s high season, so even the crummiest air-conditioned hotel starts at 300 euros a night (and for that, you’re not guaranteed air conditioning, or even a flush toilet). She’d either have to book and pay for several days in advance, or take the risk that she’ll have to go to another hotel the very next day. It makes no sense for her to dump thousands of euros on a hotel when she might get the email from El Al five minutes later.
So the past few days have involved a lot of logistics talk. Someone she knows has a friend who’s been ferrying stranded Israelis on a yacht from Cyprus. (It’s not great sailing, apparently. Lots of vomiting involved.) That would mean fighting her way through a hundred thousand frantic, irritable, and equally stranded fellow Israelis at Larnaca airport. We looked at photos of the crowds at Larnaca. If you know Israelis, you know why she decided it would be better to perish of heat prostration in Paris, where at least no one is shouting at her. Can you drop a MOP on Fordow from a C-130? Someone she knows thought that might be possible. You definitely can’t just borrow a B-2. It’s not like a rental car. How many ballistic missiles could Iran have left? They’ve got to be running out of them soon, right? Maybe she could stay at the airport hotel? It’s cheap, and then she’d be right there if ever she receives the blessed email from El Al. That’s a promising possibility. Is it possible they’ve given the Houthis a dirty bomb?
Apparently, it’s a breezy 75 degrees in her neighborhood in Israel, and her apartment has air conditioning. Yes, you might be pulverized by a ballistic missile, but at least you’ll die feeling fresh.
In any case, I woke up this morning after only a few hours of fitful sleep, drenched in sweat. I looked over to assess whether she was still sleeping and whether I’d disturb her if I got up to go to the bathroom. She was still wearing her eye mask, so I decided I’d just lie there until she woke up. Then she pulled down the mask. She said, “Did you see?”
Uh-oh. Did one of the cats barf again? “See what?”
“He did it.” She had a Cheshire Cat grin. It took me a second. “He bombed the hell out of Fordow.”
“Oh, my God!”
She began laughing with relief. “Six MOPs. Natanz and Esfahan, too. SLBMs.”
“Oh, my God.”
“There’s no Fordow anymore.”
The cats picked up on the mood and began scampering about the bedroom, despite the heat.
“Is it okay if I ignore you and spend the morning reading the news?”
She was already glued to it. She didn’t lift her eyes from her phone. “Of course!”
We’re searching Twitter to see if we can find satellite images. She’s on the phone with the Israeli embassy. The airspace is completely closed at least until tomorrow. Over the speakerphone, I’m hearing a rapid volley of Hebrew that I don’t understand, followed by her interlocutor’s words, in English: “It’s pretty messed up right now.”
But Fordow is gone. (We think.)
Good thing I didn’t send yesterday’s newsletter, I’m thinking, not for the first time this week. I’d confidently predicted Trump would TACO.
If you’d like to join the ME201 group to discuss this, we’re meeting at 4:30 pm Paris time, today. Judith may join us, too—depending on logistics. If not, I’ll get her on a podcast soon.
I wrote to Shay Khateri asking if he might join us to offer an Iranian perspective. “I’m thoroughly drunk right now,” he replied. “And by then, I’ll be too hung over.”
“L’chaim!” I wrote.
“L’chofesh!” he replied.
A selection of commentary
Here are a few things Shay wrote, presumably before he cracked open the champagne:
Will the Islamic Republic use Muharram to whip up fervor? Rather than accepting responsibility for the disaster he has wrought, Khamenei will equate himself to the greatest Shi’ite martyr:
Without external pressure anymore, and wounded, the Islamic Republic will use the occasion to prove that it is still in charge. Relying on its foot soldiers’ mourning enthusiasm, it will unleash them on the people to brutally enforce order and arrest people who showed sympathy for Israel. Its propaganda apparatus will focus on suffering and survival, linking the war to the survival of Shi’ism after Muharram. Rather than having to accept responsibility for the disaster he has wrought, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will equate himself to Husayn, the greatest Shi’ite martyr.
Timing matters not just in terms of strikes and tactics, but also culture. Iranians may pour out to protest the regime once the war is over. To give them the best chance, the United States and Israel should end the war after the peak of the mourning period on July 6 and before Arba’in on August 14, when zealotry will peak again.
He also warned: “Don’t underestimate the Islamic Republic’s retaliation. All defenseless, civilian airliners are in peril.”
Also: A nuclear deal was never in the cards:
… Khamenei has a base of support between 10 and 20 percent. To stay in power, he needs to remain legitimate among that base. Undoubtedly, this setback harms his image and legitimacy. He will do his best to put a nice spin on it. Nonetheless, the message will be: “They can break our air defenses, but not our resolve.” The regime will argue that what matters is that the system survived, and the nuclear program is not dismantled, despite "American and Zionist propaganda.” I cannot predict whether it will work with certainty, but my guess is that it will not. Determination can get you only so far, as Adolf Hitler learned the hard way.
There was no spin on giving up on his nuclear program willingly. Keep in mind: This is a zealous, religious regime carrying the will of God. In religion, compromising the will of God is a sin. How would his supporters react if he compromised on the will of God to the Great Satan?
Khamenei wanted to avoid a deal more than he wanted to avoid a bomb, and he got his wish.
Elsewhere
The United States bombed Iran. What comes next? Only one outcome is certain: Hypocrisy in the region and around the world will reach galactic levels as nations wring their hands and silently pray that the B-2s carrying the bunker-buster bombs did their job.
A demo, here in Paris, in support of Iran. They’re chanting, “Macron, close the Mullahs’ Embassy!”
Sohrab Ahmari argues that the optimistic path I sketched out the other day is a very narrow shot:
… Here, then, is a recipe for a civil war—in all its ethnic, sectarian, and ideological dimensions—that would radiate instability into Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and elsewhere: all places where the United States has serious interests, troops or personnel, or both. An outbreak of ethno-sectarian conflict, then, would put pressure on Washington to intervene. For Europe, the civil-war scenario would almost certainly mean a massive migrant wave, potentially dwarfing the 2015-2016 exodus from Syria.
Accompanying this is the problem of regime remnants. The hawks insist that only a tiny minority of Iranians support the regime; everyone else, in their telling, is a mini-skirt-wearing, rave-attending spiritual denizen of LA or Miami, who just happens to be living in Islamic Iran.
What nonsense. There is no way to accurately poll Iranian society. But we do know that the Islamic Republic enjoys a core of support among a not-insignificant share of the population, either as a result of ideological commitment or the material benefits they and their family members have drawn through membership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or the basij paramilitia. Otherwise, no amount of repression would have kept the regime in power for nearly half a century.
Careless readers who quickly adopted his article as their argument for “staying out of it” seem to have missed this key sentence: “But whether or not [my emphasis] Washington joins the fight, it will inevitably be drawn into the vexing aftermath.” In other words, this will happen whether or not we take out Fordow.
My conclusion—which was perhaps not what he meant me to conclude—was that this makes it all the more urgent to take it out now. If Iran fractures, “Who is going to secure said [nuclear] program against the Islamists?” he asks rhetorically. “That’s right—the United States.”
Well, if yesterday’s bombing run did the job, that’s one less thing we have to worry about.
Israel killed Mohammed Said Izadi, the Quds Force bigwig who funded and armed Hamas ahead of October 7. (He knew about the plan.)
This account of life in Tehran right now is skillfully achieved:
… The streets were quiet. Maybe because of the long lines at gas stations, fewer people were using their personal cars. Across the city, banners have gone up with slogans like “Harsh revenge” and “The blood of the martyrs will not go unanswered.” The government is trying to steer people toward vengeance. The atmosphere in the city hovers somewhere between mourning and violence. But behind all this propaganda, people are simply exhausted.
A political analyst on a Persian-language TV channel based in London said: “The Iranian people are tired. You can’t rally a nation to war when they’re this psychologically worn out. They don’t want war—they want a way out.”
The city’s cafés are still open. Life goes on with a kind of stubbornness that resembles pain. There’s a café near my house that I often go to in the evenings. Sometimes I think people go to cafés just to reassure themselves that everything hasn’t completely collapsed yet. Conversations are intense.
I see Mani—a sociology student with thick hair and a trimmed beard. His words are laced with irony: “We thought they were spending all the money on drones, missiles, and air defense, but now it turns out the Iranian sky is full of holes—like Swiss cheese. The most high-ranking security officials couldn’t protect themselves. How can I not be worried about the safety of my own family? Just think how miserable we must be—to feel a kind of joy that another country has attacked us. That’s how much injustice we’ve endured. If our leaders had any real compassion for the people or for this ancient land, we wouldn’t feel this way.”
Another adds: “All the cities have become unsafe. We don’t know where to go.”
… At the corner grocery store, the elderly shopkeeper stares at a muted television in the corner. On screen: fire and smoke, a map of Iran, blinking red dots. His name is Rahmat—a man who used to greet every customer with warmth. But now, his voice is quiet, his tone subdued. “May God have mercy,” he says. “I lived through the Iran-Iraq war … back then too, everyone thought it would be over in a week.”
He’s one of the first people I’ve seen lately who looks truly afraid. His generation knew war firsthand: mortars, sirens, food rations—those memories live in their bones.
The shops are still stocked, but people are starting to wonder if they should begin storing rice, bottled water, canned food — just in case. From the loudspeaker of the neighborhood mosque, revolutionary chants and old war anthems blare on loop. The sounds are familiar — pulling the city back into the 1980s, to the days when Ahangaran’s trembling yet defiant voice sent young men to the frontlines.
It’s as if the city is lost in a fog of the past.
But something feels different now. …
More from Shay
Like Shay, I’ve been appalled by the excruciatingly low quality of American public discourse about Iran (and the Middle East, generally). So many people who obviously know nothing about this have been brightly spouting off nonsense on television and podcasts. Why aren’t they embarrassed? Wasn’t there a time when we collectively believed it was undesirable to sound excruciatingly ignorant?
It seems that, on the whole, many people are extremely ill-informed and, to be blunt, stupid about the war.
I recently saw an American tabloid news broadcast in which the hosts fretted for a half-hour about possibly being nuked by Iran. I don’t mean in the future; I mean that they clearly thought Iran already had nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them via ICBMs. They appeared utterly unaware of the fact that the entire point of this war is to prevent precisely that.
Obviously, not all Americans are this ignorant, but the general idiocy does seem extremely prevalent, which makes the task of dealing with what we must lamentably call the real world all the more difficult.
Also of note:
The moronic obscenity of siding with Iran, by Andrew Fox:
A sickness is permeating parts of the Western commentariat. We are witnessing a moral and intellectual collapse masquerading as solidarity. I refer to the increasing number of voices, online and at protests, who claim to support the Palestinians but in doing so end up aligning themselves with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Opposing Israeli policy in Gaza does not and cannot morally justify cheering on one of the most brutal, tyrannical regimes on the planet. Somehow, that is precisely what we are seeing.
People are waving Iranian flags at protests, echoing regime propaganda, and even expressing hope that Iran “finishes what Hamas started.” This isn’t anti-Zionism. It’s not even a legitimate expression of anger at Israel’s conduct in Gaza. It is something far darker: we are witnessing an inversion of moral clarity so warped that it makes Orwellian doublethink seem quaint.
Let us remind ourselves what Iran is.
This is a regime that executes women for refusing to wear the hijab, jails journalists, dissidents, and academics for daring to think freely, tortures teenagers, publicly hangs gay men, and funds terrorist proxies across the Middle East, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen. Remember, these are all groups that target civilians with gleeful indifference. It armed, trained, and directed Hamas in the slaughter of Israeli civilians on 7th October, one of the most grotesque terrorist atrocities in modern history.
What level of disinformation and what depths of self-delusion does it take for people in London, New York, or Berlin to look at Iran, at this theocratic dictatorship that murders its own citizens for dancing, and say: “Yes, this is who we stand with?”
The answer lies in the poisonous well of social media. Platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram are overflowing with viral falsehoods. Take hospitals, for example. The myth that Israel has destroyed every hospital in Gaza stands in stark contrast to the reality that it facilitated the establishment of 11 field hospitals within the Strip to replace medical infrastructure damaged due to Hamas’s military use of them. The falsehood that Israel deliberately targeted the Al-Ahli hospital early in the war is contradicted by every subsequent independent analysis, including those from US and European sources, which confirmed it was a misfired Palestinian rocket.
It doesn’t matter because the lie travels faster. In today’s tribal, binary world, where every issue is framed as oppressor vs oppressed, if you dislike Israel, then Iran must be good. That is the grotesque equation: people will believe anything if it flatters their ideological priors.
When you see influencers, activists, and even academics cheering Iran’s strikes against Israel, when you hear them describing Iran’s military escalation as “resistance,” understand what they are truly saying: that their animosity towards Israel, and perhaps the West more broadly, is so overwhelming that it eclipses any concern for truth, liberty, or justice.
They would rather support the men who beat women to death in the street than stand with a flawed but functioning democracy.
That is the abyss.
Israel is not perfect; no country is. Criticize its conduct, debate its policies, demand accountability, if that is your position; but do not delude yourself into thinking this justifies embracing a regime that murders poets and funds death squads.
Supporting Iran in this conflict does not equate to supporting the Palestinian people. You do not have to support Israel, but supporting Iran amounts to backing the jackboot over a free press, favouring the hangman’s noose over the ballot box, and siding with a regime that has transformed an ancient, proud nation into a prison.
It is a terrifying moral inversion that reflects the degradation of our societal capacity to distinguish right from wrong, and it is happening in plain sight.
Well said.
A few more analyses you might find useful:
Iranian and Iranian-backed attacks against Americans (1979-present)
The ISW’s evening report from yesterday—before the US strikes—is useful.
Finally, here’s the problem with the “thermal kettle” produced by zinc roofs in Paris. My building has none of the insulation they show here:
With that, I’ll return to shvitzing and trying to work up the energy to climb up and down fourteen flights of stairs with a hundred pounds of used cat litter on my back.
I’ll post an update later today if there are urgent developments.
See you at 4:30 Paris time.
I hope you will leave the used cat litter in the basement, and climb back up without it.
Your heat misadventures are why I no longer visit my family in Kansas during the summer.
Currently, it's 18 degrees in Estonia, with the White Nights, and it's the St. John's holiday (Jaanipaev), which means that everyone has headed to the countryside. Tallinn is empty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaanip%C3%A4ev
Would love to take part in your video session today, but I'll be grilling fish. But it's been a great week. I hope this heralds a new era in the Middle East.