Last night, Israel went to war with Iran — launching a bombing raid targeting Iran’s senior military leadership and top nuclear scientists. The strikes were a tactical triumph for Israel: The heads of both Iran’s entire military and its Revolutionary Guards were killed in the opening hours, and Iranian air defenses took a massive hit. Israel suffered few, if any, losses and suffered no immediate major retaliation.

But on Friday afternoon, Iran launched a barrage of missiles across Israel that overwhelmed Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. While the full scope of the counterattack is not yet clear, it underscores that in this war — as in any other — there’s far too much we don’t know in the early days to be confident about predicting how things end.

Israeli officials are saying the strikes will continue for days, if not weeks — essentially a commitment to open-ended regional war for the foreseeable future. It’s nearly impossible, at this stage, to truly understand what’s happening.

“We know from history the full impact of Israel’s attack on Iran will take years to unfold. It could prevent an Iranian bomb or ensure one. It could destabilize the [Iranian] regime or entrench it,” writes Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

There are, I think, at least three key questions that will play a major role in determining the outcome of this conflict. They are:

All of these are, at this point, unanswerable. But trying to assess what we do know can help clarify what to look for when trying to figure out the implications of the past day’s events.

What is Israel’s objective?

For several decades, Israel has described Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat to its survival.

It was never fully clear if Iran was committed to getting a nuclear weapon or merely wanted the capability to acquire one quickly if it felt threatened. But the steps — like building centrifuges that could produce highly enriched uranium — are identical up until the very last minute, when it’s arguably too late to stop by force. From the Israeli point of view, a theocratic regime that sponsors terrorist groups that kill Israelis — like Hamas and Hezbollah — simply could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. For this reason, Israel has been threatening airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear program for several decades.

Last night, Israel made good on that threat. Israeli officials have described the attacks as prompted by an “imminent” threat of Iranian nuclear development, with one such official telling the BBC that it could have built bombs “within days.” Israel’s position is that........

© Vox