I was betting on it being russia.
As a grey-zone war tactic, i feel like it doesnt super make a lot of sense for iran. France isn't super involved, so its more likely to draw them in then make them think the costs of supporting USA is unacceptable.
On the other hand, not much of Iran's strategy has made much long term sense and more has felt like desperation from a gov that is out of options and wants to go down swinging, so i suppose this fits with that.
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.
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.
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 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'.
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 am not saying it is, just interesting to analyze who it would have been if it was. Does it benefit Iran to attack France? I guess? Maybe just a target of opportunity. US freezers are just too damn locked down(!). Or does it benefit someone else to make it look like Iran did it, kind of a thing...
Well you were betting it was Russia, and I kinda expected that as well. But then, yeah, probably Russia would want to boast that they did it as a threat or show of force not make it look like their semi-allies (Iranians) did it.
It makes complete sense.
France headlines Operation Aspides, the Euro navy in Gulf of Aden vs Houthis. They are very involved, directly blunting Iran + Houthi trying to impose cost on west via control / attack on commercial shipping. Hence they get targeted, it's just Iran establishing mutual deterrence, you fuck around in our backyard, we fuck around in your infra and extract economic costs. Meanwhile their infra is basically gone, the amount of damage Iran can inflict vs receive via grayzone at this point is asymmetrical.
Russia going, nudge nudge shame about those freezers, maybe if you stopped giving aid to ukraine those freezeers will stop breaking, is a strategy that maybe could work with little downside because what is france going to do? double sanction russia?
But for iran, there is not a lot of room for france to move to be more pro iran that isnt high cost, but lots of low cost ways to be more anti iran, so it seems like a bad strat.
BBC France accuses Iran of supermarket fridge hacking (7 points, 2 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50428440
gouv.fr French CERT and Foreign Ministry Now Attributing Fridge Attacks to Iran (2 points, 2 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50428719
CNN France blames Iran for 'unprecedented' supermarket fridge cyberattack (7 points, 1 hour ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429252
As is updating your vulns.
They have also proven with the rocket attempt on Diego Garcia to be able to hit 3800km away, which would put every European capital except Madrid, Dublin and Lissabon in range of Iran's rockets (and maybe nukes). And it's not technically confirmed that's their maximum range. Even London is (just barely) in range.
https://www.euronews.com/2026/11/04/iranian-mp-tells-euronew...
(of course emphasizing the usual, namely that anything that happens is Europe's fault, without specifying, of course, what they mean by that. Even on the base issue it's not clear: obviously US uses European bases to supply it's middle eastern ones. Is that a "rocketable" offence? Plus: if Europe makes things difficult for the US, does anyone seriously believe that lowers the risk of an attack?)
Europe is once again under constant threat of rocket and nuke attacks. The "end of history" has been canceled.
This will get a lot worse before it gets better.
Suppose it wasn't a false flag operation. Why would Iran threaten the EU when the EU was skeptical about the war early this year and suffers from it due to lack of Qatari LNG?
The logical step would be to do diplomatic outreach to the EU.
Now the EU has a casus belli (more like supporting the war rather than participating). It all sounds like the EU is selling the war to its population, but maybe Iran is really that stupid.
Iran could be seeing that this approach, rather than more blatant attacks, is a useful way to create problems for the US's allies with a lower risk of elevating those US allies to direct enemies. The intention would be to get the US allies to put pressure on the US (in particular) to back out of the US/Israel war on Iran.
At a certain point, it stops being "hybrid warfare" and starts being "obnoxious prank".
Russia's deployed (small amounts of) WMDs offensively and has blown up/set fire to some military infrastructure on NATO soil. I'd call these things "hybrid warfare".
Making a grocery store file a claim with their insurance for unrefrigerated food is more along the lines of "dick move".
You've traced the very substance and nature of our ridiculously circuitous plan to get the EU to attack Iran. Can we get your thoughts on the Zapruder film while you're here? Maybe you can bring some fresh perspective to that.
I hope there will be a full exposé of the actual evidence. "Trust the authorities, bro" just doesn't cut it any more.
tl;dr - about more than election hacking, the possibility that the US military is behind various hacks and influence operations by faking being Russia/Iran/NK
>This included "the use of Farsi and IP addresses traced back to devices located in Iran"
I guess they were caught then. I heard of software that can hide or change these things called "IP addresses", but I guess using it is way too hard for organizations with plenty of resources :
The US and Israel have deeply penetrated Iran's network. I would not be surprised they are proxying through there to paint a picture that Iran is attacking them as well... to try to stem the tide of Israel's falling public support across the globe.
The accusation here is that the US is doing the bad things while pretending to be other APTs. As an American, I would not be surprised in the slightest if this turned out to be true, very double agent-esce and inline with the hubris, especially under this administration.
Israel/Palestine is not their battle anyways; just ignore it and move on! Make peace with Israel, stop supporting Hamas/Hezbollah and just focus on your own problems. What does Iran have to gain from fighting with Israel? It can't be that they hate all Jews, when Iran is one of the few Muslim countries with any Jews left [1].
Just drop it guys, and learn to live in peace. There's a lot more to this world than continuously fighting with each other.
/rant
As for the Jews in Iran, there used to be 150,000 Jews in Iran before the revolution today there are ~9,000. Furthermore IRGC are very much the ideological inheritors of the type of folks who did the Allahdad (God's Justice) Massacre in Mashhad in 1839.
Iran trying to gain favor with the Sunni Arab world is somewhere in the same ballpark as Russia trying to gain favor with ethnic Ukrainians.
All of this seems to so insane to me. This region has lots of wealth (dino juice just coming out of the ground), and they're frittering it all away on buying more and more weapons and destroying each other.