Eighth day of strikes, and the war picked up a country it didn’t start with. Iran hit a US base in Jordan, killing two American soldiers, and this morning Jordan’s own military shot down three Iranian missiles over its territory, with a fourth landing in the desert. Jordan has spent decades as the quiet, load-bearing ally nobody names in headlines: intelligence sharing, refugee absorption, the border nobody wants to think about. Now it’s air-defending its own sky in a fight it never volunteered for. That’s usually how these things go once they start, though — wars don’t stay inside their original borders any better than fires stay inside their original buildings.

What’s changed more than the map is the target list. This started (I wrote about it here as the toll-booth episode) as a dispute over who gets to charge for safe passage through a shipping lane. A week later, the US is hitting an unfinished nuclear plant at Darkhoveyn, days after satellite photos confirmed damage at Bushehr, while Kuwait’s water and power plant has now been struck twice at the same address. Somewhere along the way, the war acquired a punch list, and it’s working through it in order.

Smaller, stranger item: the Tate brothers were arrested in the US after British prosecutors added 38 more charges, bringing the total to 59, and extradition proceedings begin now. Dual citizenship, it turns out, just means two governments eventually get their turn.

Sources read for this entry