While I agree, and I find that Israel is on the wrong side of history, I'm not entirely into seeing this whole matter as black and white.
I have the opinion that modern world history is mostly shaped around each countries/population traumas that echo through society till today.
E.g. the biggest trauma of Ukrainians aren't even the events that are playing recently, but the Holodomor that happened 100 years ago. On the other hand the biggest trauma on Russian side is still the German invasion and war of annihilation happened during the second world war. As both sides see themselves as the victims and see the other side as the aggressor (or collaborator) and none has ever taken a step back to recognize their actions, they simply cannot communicate.
The biggest trauma of China is the century of humiliation where western powers and Japan went above and beyond any decency in their actions. Thus, Chinese society and leadership is all about never being dictated conditions and terms by foreign powers. They see themselves as victims of events that they don't want to see ever again.
The jewish Israeli population biggest trauma are centuries if not millenia of animosity, racism and violence coming from any side, last but definitely not least the Holocaust. Thus Israel is all about security at all costs, even if it means bending any sign of human decency. Again, they see themselves as victims and their actions will always go in that direction.
Sadly many parts of the world, many countries, many societies, are simply too scarred and unable to take a step back from the victim mentality and recognize their own actions.
Israelis are unable to recognize they are Goliath and not David from the longest time, they are unable and unwilling to say sorry, the last Israeli leader that tried, got assassinated by one of his own.
The arabic/muslim population in the area too see themselves as victims of the post world war 2 events, and they are as well unable to recognize how scarred and traumatized is Israeli society from centuries of events, including modern ones where they had to survive against hostile coalitions that aimed to annihilate them.
So, without a generation of leaders able to recognize and understand the role of history and those traumas and empathize with the other sides we're trapped in those loops of aggression.
People still believe October 7th attacks weren't intentionally allowed?
There is a lot of legitimate debate on this topic as the security failures are unusual and are still officially being discussed in Israel.
I see no "smoking gun" for this yet, but yeah, there are a lot of indicators, such as alarm calls by military observers being ignored beforehand, IDF units having been moved from the Gaza envelope to the West Bank before, etc.
Of course, Netanyahu could counter those rumors by establishing a state commission if inquiry, but instead he fights tooth and nail to prevent this from happening...
Also, the official explanation how October 7 could have happened honestly makes no sense to me. Somehow Hamas suddenly gained super powers on that day and could break through the "containment" that had been perfectly adequate before. And because of their mysterious newfound strength, it was also imperative to bomb Gaza to bits and impossible to go back to the security situation as it was before...
Well either utter incompetence of every part of military of israel, or planned to allow it to happen. They even removed most of the guards spread across the region, those who were left were often only with pistols from what I've heard. They were closely monitoring hamas training for exactly this just before it happened.
Sure, some incompetent russian fsb officer who got his place thanks to nepotism may miss that, but mosad, on border with one's mortal enemy? Give me a break, there is 0 logic and knowledge of the involved parties in such thinking.
But its expected, say soviet union went to great lengths to make state terror official and legal, justified and all by th books. Not sure for whom since all knew what chaotic terror was happening all the time and there was often no logic in who was next, but the face of the regime needed to have everything straight and square.
Anyway, those who actually care about the topic understand it well, its not some superbly hidden scheming bur rather facts in plain sight. The rest of folks simply don't care
I've listened to podcasts discussing the Israel military. One thing that people need to realize is that the IDF and it's leaders are skewed incredibly young. The mandatory service paired with the fact that people often don't stay in service means that they have 30 year old colonels and 35 year old generals.
They don't have the sort of career and institution knowledge like the US military has.
In Italy a famous jewish actor commenting a law that wants to make antisemitism illegal said it's a bit weird a former fascist minister gets to decide that he's antisemite.
> Working towards war with Iran has been bipartisan US policy for decades now
Obama signed the Iran nuclear deal in July 2015 [1].
Biden didn't put any policy focus on Iran, in part becase, with the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult to distill any policy focus from that Presidency following Covid. But he also didn't ratchet up pressure in any material way [2]. (And to be clear, I'm not saying that's good.)
Islamic lunatic ayatollahs, who've shown a willingness to massacre their own people, with nukes?
Can't imagine why that would be a bad thing ...
I don't much understand that about this thread. Yes Trump bad. Yes, US should not get into another war (although in here, arguably this may avoid war, and yes, that's been said before)
But when it comes to the ayatollahs at the business end of the missiles: defending them? I mean, I understand socialists brought them to power, but still: for these particular ayatollahs, having their insides spread over a few football fields ... can't happen to a more deserving bunch.
If Iran is unhappy with their government, they can deal with it. It is not a US problem in the slightest. Going to war with another country puts Americans at risk.
Congress hasn't publicly supported the attack. That is an extremely important step, and required for any operation lasting more than 30 days if I'm not mistaken, but it doesn't mean a majority of Congress hasn't already made clear they do support this.
Is there any credible foreign policy analyst anywhere in the world who argued Iran was recently negotiating in good faith? (JCPOA aside, which is, granted, a massive aside.)
Everything I've seen indicated Tehran was playing for time.
"In the world of strategic studies, there has been a return to ‘theories of [nuclear] victory’. Their proponents draw on the work of past scholars such as Henry Kissinger, who wondered in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy if extending the American deterrent to all of Europe at a time when the threat of total destruction hung over the US itself would actually work: ‘A reliance on all-out war as the chief deterrent saps our system of alliances in two ways: either our allies feel that any military effort on their part is unnecessary or they may be led to the conviction that peace is preferable to war even on terms almost akin to surrender ... As the implication of all-out war with modern weapons become better understood ... it is not reasonable to assume that the United Kingdom, and even more the United States, would be prepared to commit suicide in order to defend a particular area ... whatever its importance, to an enemy’.
One of the recommended solutions was to bring tactical nuclear weapons back into the dialectic of deterrence extended to allied territories, so as to give US decision makers a range of options between Armageddon and defeat without a war. Global deterrence was ‘restored’ by creating additional rungs on the ladder of escalation, which were supposed to enable a sub-apocalyptic deterrence dialogue — before one major adversary or the other felt its key interests were threatened and resorted to extreme measures. Many theorists in the 1970s took this logic further, in particular Colin Gray in a 1979 article, now back in fashion, titled ‘Nuclear Strategy: the case for a theory of victory’.
...
In 2018 Admiral Pierre Vandier, now chief of staff of the French navy, offered a precise definition of this shift to the new strategic era, which has begun with Russia’s invasion: ‘A number of indicators suggest that we are entering a new era, a Third Nuclear Age, following the first, defined by mutual deterrence between the two superpowers, and the second, which raised hopes of a total and definitive elimination of nuclear weapons after the cold war’" [1].
I think the chances we see a tactial nuclear exchange in our lifetimes has gone from distant to almost certain.
It is still unhinged, but because of nuclear weapons. Ukraine, and now Iran, showed the whole world what happens when you don’t have a nuclear deterrence.
I think the unhinged rhetoric is, in part, a necessary partner of the nukes. Because you need to not only have nukes but have your adversaries believe that you won't hesitate to use them. If North Korea had nukes, but the US didn't believe they would use them, then they'd be getting the Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc, etc, etc treatment.
It’s good for them. That’s the point they’re making. All this shows that for many countries nuclear proliferation is the way to guarantee their safety.
The fact that NK possess nuclear weapons strongly discourages external players from attacking it. It does not in any way change the tools NK has at its disposal domestically.
If you're trying to say that had NK not had nukes we would bomb it for 'humanitarian purposes' or 'on behalf of its people' then I have a couple of bridges for sale.
How does that factor in here right now? We haven't used or threatened to use nukes, and at least the public case made is in part that Iran is trying to get nukes and shouldn't.
I say "public case" specifically here, I don't buy that justification but it is still the one being used.
I recall someone (name escapes me at the moment) defining WW3 as ignition in 5 flashpoints between belligerent groupings:
- Eastern Africa esp. Sudan, which we all nearly universally ignore
- Israel Iran
- Russia and a neighbor which we know today is Ukraine
- Pakistan Afghanistan India
- China Taiwan Plus Plus
Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC: Contained conflagration, short targeted exchanges, probability of contamination low, material possibility of nuclear escalation. Case in point: North Korea developed nukes without being invaded, and now that they have nukes, other countries are watching and seeing that NK won't be invaded. What lesson do those other countries draw? And what of a world in which many potential belligerents hold nukes? Hiroshima weeps.
I'd like to add an important attribute here: The revolution will be live-streamed, more-or-less. And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons. I predict this fact will not distress many people, such is the state of humanity.
So to the 7 or so decades of stability we and our ancestors enjoyed, here's looking at you, going down me. But Brettonwoods serves the present the least of any time since its creation. Case in point, w.r.t. eastern Africa, the geopolitical bounds of those ~4 countries seems likely meld to a degree. If we are indeed heading into WW3, I expect the world map to be redrawn afterwards, and the only lessons learned is how to win better in future.
And if we are, while disgruntled old geriatrics go at each others throats via their youthful proxies, I greatly prefer the nukes rust in peace.
Reminds me of Blaise Pascal's quote: 'All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.' Aspiration, you gotta take care man, it just might kill ya.
> Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC
You're missing the commonalities, what defined world wars: the full might of industrial economies being dedicated to military campaigns.
World War II's theatres' were incoherent–the Axis interests in e.g. China and the Pacific had basically zero stragegic overlap with Europe and North Africa. (The only parties having to consider a unified theatre being the USSR and USA.) But the entire economic surplus of Europe, Asia and North America was basically dedicated to (or extracted towards) making things that were reasonably expected to be destroyed within the year.
First, I don't think this leads to WW3 although I would agree with you that there is a general global tendency towards escalation. Still, I think we can not call this WW3 and I am not 100% certain this is a build-up to WW3 either.
As for North Korea: I think the situation is not solely about North Korea itself but China. China is kind of acting as protective proxy here. I don't see North Korea as primary problem to the USA, but to South Korea and Japan. Both really should get nukes. Taiwan too, though mainland China would probably invade when it thinks Taiwan is about to have nukes; then again China already committed to invasion - this is the whole point of having a dictator like Xi in charge now.
The situation Russia is in is interesting, because even though they are stronger than Ukraine, Ukraine managed to stop or delay Russia, which is a huge feat, even with support. As Putin does not want to stop, and Trump is supporting him (agent Krasnov theory applies), I think this has escalation potential. Putin is killing civilians in Ukraine daily - I think he does that because he already committed to further escalation against all Europeans. So Europeans need a nuclear arsenal, but european politicians are totally lame - see Merz "we will never have nukes". Basically he wants to be abused by Putin here.
> So Europeans need a nuclear arsenal, but european politicians are totally lame
Are France's 240 submarines-launched thermonuclear ballistic missiles not adequate? Despite the need for security, nuclear proliferation is extremely bad. It seems ideal for France continue to maintain their nuclear weapons while the rest of Europe keeps their hands clean.
> And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons.
Maybe not in the details, but the general geopolitical "axes" (USA/the "West" vs China/Russia/BRICS/"Global South"/etc) have become increasingly obvious in the last years. And so far, most of the recent conflicts fit pretty neatly into that pattern.
Of course there are more things running in parallel, like the general shift to the right, Trump in the US, the specific situation with Israel/Palestine, the emergence of AI, etc.
But I don't see why any of this needs any other "grand secret cause" to explain the current conflicts.
The revolution will be notably public, but not live-streamed. It will come as a swift and decisive reaction to a shock-and-awe deployment that will de-stabilize the state apparatus of a big nation outside of the “west”. The movement will be initially localized but it will spread until a perimeter of containment is setup around developed nations. Much more will come after.
hmmm - but is it really "world war" 3 if it's a bunch of localized conflicts?
I'm a little disappointed that the internet and social media had little impact on universal disclosure about geopolitical matters. My sense is that governments updated their playbooks to both defend against them (e.g. minimize leaking) and leverage them (e.g. bury inconvenient information with propaganda). By comparison, I'm more hopeful about cellphones and bodycams generally reducing excessive police violence and discrimination (emphasis on "reduce").
prediction: the nuclear threat will look quaint compared with disposable million-drone swarms on land and in the air, targeting anything remotely interesting via onboard AI.
2 countries with the best war technologies on earth must work together to have a war with embargod-country-for-decades.
And those 2 counties are founder of Board of Peace.
My greater concern is the people of Iran. Especially since Iran has conscription so the people who end up dieing in a war didn't even consent to being made soldiers.
I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.
I have been reading on the topic of shunyata or emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and have been uncomfortably observing just how much of the artifacts we take to be real and substantial in the world are just "made up". They don't have an inherent reality of their own except what we attribute to them. And yet, made up stories can have very real consequences in terms human suffering.
It ought to be possible to cut through the layers of reifications and simply defuse much of the strife in the world. And yet, we continue to inflict misery on each other unnecessarily.
There is a theory (a bit "school of schizo" and totally unsubstantiated but kind of interesting) that the sense of urgency from Israel at the moment is because they really believe in the curse of the eighth decade.
In other words it is actually totally irrational and driven by belief in (and attempt to refute) a kind of prophecy.
No idea if that's true or not, but at this point, it wouldn't even surprise me
However, to be fair, Desert Storm hasn't resulted in regime change. The Coalition bombed the shit out of the Iraqi army, but never committed to the ground operation deep inside Iraq. And Saddam's regime survived until the next war.
That alone hints that it is very hard to bring a dictatorship down with just aerial attacks - the ground component is also essential. Something tells me it is going to be the same here.
Only a land operation or a total collapse of the government, with the armed police and military joining the opposition, can topple the Iranian regime.
> Nothing like a war to boost your popularity just before the elections
If he pulls off a regime change, even a Delcy-style swaparoo, he'll get it, and arguably not undeservedly. It will ultimately come down to Iran's capacity to inflict casualties on American forces.
As I recall Iran said quite openly, in response to the US troop buildup, that they would see an attack by Israel as an attack by the US, suggesting that they could target e.g. carriers instead of Israel if Israel attacked them.
> I'm not sure what's the logic behind that PR-wise
Part of it is the stated idea that Israel still has public support. That such an exchange, even if Israel launches the first strike, would get more support. This is probably misjudging the actual public support for Israel, which is much lower amongst the general public than amongst (esp. Republican) political circles.
The other part of it is that Trump has surrounded himself with card-carrying nazis, who have not at all been subtle about their desires to harm jews.
> but regardless, it didn't happen.
That Israel didn't launch the first strike and instead insisting on a joint strike (despite otherwise being constantly warmongering), suggests to me that it's the latter 'part' of the reason that had a lot of weight here.
I’m honestly perplexed. I had anticipated a scenario like “the US feared Iran was unstable and attacked to protect nuclear material”. It seems this would give them reasonable cover. I don’t see how Israel going along helps
While I think this (and Venezuela) are arguably the biggest missteps this administration is making, it's hardly a partisan point. The political establishment loves war more than perhaps anything else. In 2016 alone Obama bombed half a dozen different countries with more than 26,000 munitions for an average rate of three bombs dropped every hour, every day, for a year. [1] Nobel Peace Prize embodied.
I think the only way to get away from the warmongering is to go for a third party. But even they would likely be corrupted by the excessive influence of the military industrial complex. Eisenhower was not only right, but plainly prophetic.
Not defending that peace price but:
Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.
Trump this time around didn't inherit a major us deployment in a conflict area. No Iraq, no Afghanistan. Also, he's doing military strikes by himself, no Congress involved.
Syrian and Libia were both essentially civil wars with an oppressive regime with Syria using allegedly chemical weapons.
Your source is a very weird site. Countries Obama bombed 2026??? What does that even mean. Is it just a typo in the main heading and the title?
Large scale deployments shifted under Obama to widescale bombing campaigns. The site mentions its various sources such as this [1] which mentions that Obama also increased the number of drone strikes by an order of magnitude relative to his predecessor. To be clear I'm not picking on Obama, but saying solely that this isn't a partisan issue. "They" all love war.
And places being in a state of internal conflict, conflict which is itself often backed and fomented by US intelligence agencies and backed proxy forces, is hardly some reason to go bomb them. Even moreso when you look at results. See what Libya turned into, and what Syria is now turning into. It turns out that Al Qaeda in a suit is still Al Qaeda, to literally nobody's surprise if you're even vaguely familiar with our history of backing extremists and putting them in power, something which we have done repeatedly.
This war, if it escalates, is not going to be good for Iran, the people of Iran, or likely even the US. The only country that might come out a winner is Israel, but even that might not end up being the case, as Iran's retaliation will likely focus on them. To say nothing of longer term consequences.
> And places being in a state of internal conflict, conflict which is itself often backed and fomented by US intelligence agencies and backed proxy forces
Drone strikes picked up, obviously as that technology became more and more mature. They're cheaper to operate and don't put a pilot in harms way. So that's kinda expected?
Not only that but it should be noted what the stated aim is of these strikes and earlier Trump strikes on Iran: take out the nuclear threat.
That nuclear threat was contained under a plan backed by US, EU, Russia, China and Iran, in which Iran would not pursue nuclear expansion and let a team of international experts in to verify this on a continuous basis, in exchange for some sanction relief. A solution Trump threw in the trash, reinstating the sanctions, pressuring Iran to pursue nuclear again as one of its few levers of power it can pull on.
In other words he created the necessity for violence by throwing away a unique solution that the entire world got behind including US allies & enemies, throwing away goodwill and trust in future deals (why would Iran negotiate now if it's clear how Trump views deals, as things to be broken even irrationally?)
Those who claim this is an anti-war president have no clue, even in the context of a 'just war' argument it simply falls flat.
Regarding intervention in Venezuela, is that seen as a mistep in the US? In the rest of America it is considered as a win, except of course by Cuba (Cubans are the most, almost the only, affected)
Regarding politicians: Gustavo Petro was the most vocal protester; now that Trump told him in the White house to shut up, he is wagging his tail happily.
The operation in Venezuela could be characterised as an enormous success in the sense that it didn't seem to do anything and therefore was a big improvement on most times the US activates its military. But it was still a misstep in the sense that it keeps US aggression top of mind without achieving very much.
A war? Of course not. It’s a major combat operation. Only congress can declare wars. We haven’t had any in decades. They should call it the Dept. of Major Combat Operations.
It's not just the US, very few wars have been formally declared after WW2, because we all learned war is bad™, so we added more and more rules (both international and national) to make it harder to do it.
But the reasons wars existed didn't go away, so this just resulted in more and more people getting killed in "special military operations" or similar things. See e.g. "Why States No Longer Declare War"[0].
That article says that nowadays countries no longer declare war, because now there are a lot of international treaties that restrict what may be done during wars.
Not declaring war provides a workaround, allowing the states to do whatever they desire, without constraints, while avoiding being accused that they do not observe their obligations assumed internationally.
As soon a country agrees to enter a conflict on a side, which the original axes declare to be a war, it's at war. You can tell the media whatever you want of course.
The US didn’t declare war since WW2 because such a declaration would give the president disruptive powers (such as the power to seize factories).
In fact, after Vietnam war congress specifically created a law to restrict hostilities without congress approval to up to 60 days, which is what the current (and prior) administrations are acting on.
The occurrence of a war is a fact whether or not it is declared, and whether or not the actor waging war does so consistent with the legal requirements their nation's laws put on doing so.
Americans voted for no new wars, and especially no new wars in the sandbox, and they got a new war in the sandbox.
Americans really have to be among the most gullible people on the planet.
Not to mention that Trump is a paedophile, the open corruption, attempted coup etc... it's like that Hemingway quote. The decline of the USA has been gradual, and then very sudden.
I can't believe I have to say this on HN but no, the Iraq war was not started for Israel. Yes Netanyahu did testify before Congress but he was not testifying on behalf of Israel and the Israeli government quietly warned against invading Iraq.
I noticed that you somehow failed to mention 9/11, Colin Powell, George Bush or Osama Bin Laden, nor the fact that the Invasion has bipartisan support and was overwhelming popular with the American public.
Yes, thanks for confirming that the Iraq war was started because of Israel, and not oil. None of what you mentioned specifically discredits Israel as the primary cause of the Iraq war.
You guys really like revising history in realtime, huh? As if we didn’t live through that era ourselves. It was never a remote secret that Israel kept pushing the US to attack Iraq and had done so for years before 9/11, which Iraq had not part in anyhow.
I tried to access that URL but it's banned in my country (Romania) for being an "exploitative gambling website". It's the first time I've felt that my country has a sensible internet policy.
Due to distance planes need to take off many hours before the bombs drop.
You can get an edge here by moving your ass somewhere where you can see the planes take off, maybe a team with people at multiple locations - boats near the aircraft carrier, near military bases in Israel, ...
There's an Israeli newspaper from 1984 saying it's a month away. Definitely more than a month passed between '84 and '92.
Btw. They ARE not that far away from the bomb, after they enriched uranium as a consequence of Trump (in his first term) cancelling the Obama treaty.
But they ARE a theocracy and Ajatollah Chamenei released an order (fatwa) forbidding Iran from obtaining and using an a-bomb. The new religious leader might change the religious law tho. I mean the one that comes after Chamenei becomes a martyr.
Funny how, knowing just a little bit more, it all really looks like nonsense created for illiterate, just to take their attention off of Epstein Pedophile Scandal.
The concept of nuclear brinkmanship is part of accepted WMD doctrine. A country can maintain a fixed short interval away from weaponization for decades. It is widely accepted that Iran does have a military nuclear program; the amount of material enriched, the enrichment level achieved and the hardening of the involved facilities are an open testament to that (there are many other intelligence signals that we are not privy to).
I think you're missing the point: a constant justification for bombing Iran is that they are one month, one week, or a couple months from building a nuclear bomb.
If that was true, obviously they would have built one buy now. Being one year away from building would be non-urgency inducing.
The constant lying about timelines does not imply Iran does not enrich uranium, but, as you remember, after the last bombing the leaders of the USA and Israel said they had completely obliterated Iran's nuclear program. Except, apparently After six months they are one week away from a nuke again.
This seems to indicate the USA should be bombing Iran every few weeks, forever, just in case they get a bit faster next time.
Except, when we don't have any scandal or other crisis going on, then Iran does not seem to be getting a nuke quickly. I wonder why.
While I have no love for the Iranian regime I fear this will end up like the 'liberation' of Iraq: A massive power vacuum in an unstable Islamic regime.
What even is the plan here if the air assault fails? Boots on the ground? In Iran?
Iraq was attacking its neighbors every couple of years, Iran is not.
Iran has shown that it is remarkably sane actually, given the aggression shown towards it by Israel and the US and has made a lot of efforts to reach a deal.
Remember, it was the US that exited the JCPOA and now it wants Iran to give up all its misses so that they would be defenseless.
I have no love for theocracies, but I do think the Iranian system is a lot better than the likes of Saudi Arabia, which we're buddy buddy with.
Oh and I guess the founder of Syrian branch of AQ and deputy head of ISIS running Syria is better that what was before too, in your book?
Oh yes, and the fact that Israel is just sitting there occupying millions of Palestinians, attacking Syria, Lebanon etc. despite a 'ceasefire' has nothing to do with why these groups continue to exist, I am sure.
Iran's funding for these groups is a part of its 'defense in depth' strategy since it doesn't have the capability to project power otherwise. I am not saying that it is the right thing to do, but I am also not that surprised that backed into a corner, they're trying to build regional proxies. It's not like the US and Israel are not doing the same in and around Iran.
But I like how these statements, like yours, are always made with zero context and hope for an uninformed audience to upvote them.
> Iran's funding for these groups is a part of its 'defense in depth' strategy
That's the rationalisation. Not a justification. Defence in depth was Hitler's rationale for invading Russia, is Israel's strategy for pacifying neighbors, and is Russia's excuse for invading Ukraine.
Creating weak neighbors is checklist-item one for any classical aspiring land empire. It's also tremendously destabilising to its neighbourhood. (It's not a coincidence that China and Russia are bordered by (a) shitshows or (b) countries militarily posturing against them.)
Ah yes, give any discussion enough time and Hitler inevitably gets to be whoever your opponent is.
Unlike Hitler, unlike Israel and unlike the US, Iran has not proactively attacked.
Hitler had no reason to fear attack from Russia, Czechoslovakia or France. Iran has every reason to fear an attack from the US and Israel, look at what is happening right now ffs.
Western governments provide funding and shelter for extremist Iranian groups like People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran and various separatists movements inside the country, so please spare me this Hitler nonsense.
Iranian government massacres its own civilians whenever they dare to demand change. Iranians are also largely secular compared to citizens of most Arab states, and hate their government. They're also mostly Shia, which makes it hard for likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda to gain ground there, as Shias are enemies to Sunni extremists.
I believe there's a much better change of democracy / sane regime in Iran, than there ever was in Iraq and other Arab states.
Mossad was literally bragging that it is handing out weapons in Iran recently, but yes, Iran always 'attacks' for no reason and should not do anything no matter what happens right?
Same as the Gaza and Lebanon ceasefires where one side stops attacking and the other (Israel) keeps bombing?
That all being said, we are talking about different cultures. Iranians are on average more educated than Iraqis were/are, and the country is ethnically more homogeneous.
So I have hope that they'll find a way to organize when the current regime falls.
I know that, but what I don't get is with a society like that, how can a theocratic government last for so long? Maybe I'm being naive, but authoritarian governments tend to fall when an educated population is against them. Iran looks like a weird case to me in this respect in that the population seems to be against (and honestly, seems to be quite brave) and still the theocracy goes on and on.
Anyway, best of luck in this. Your people deserve better.
Yeah this is what lots of Western people don't get. The cultural / ideological gap between rulers and those being ruled appears much larger in Iran than in most other Muslim countries.
Many countries have hardcore conservative rulers AND population, but in Iran the problem is mostly just the rulers. With better government, Iran would have so much potential.
>What exactly do you imagine will replace the Iranian government that is worse?
A regime that only controls the capital, leaving the rest of the country in a power vacuum leading to internal conflicts and sectarian violence that will eventually spill over the borders into Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq etc...
One of the issues with Iraq was that Rumsfeld didn't want to acknowledge that it takes more personnel post-toppling (to rebuild infrastructure and institutions) than during invasion. It seems like the current government could be prone to make the same mistake.
I recommend anyone interested in this to read Cobra II. It's an excellent book.
what are you talking about? Iran is a sophisticated country with a parliament and elections, with a powerful civil society. It has 90 million inhabitants. They graduated more women in STEM disciplines than the USA. Yes, it's a theocracy, but it's more free than Saudi Arabia for instance.
Are the Americans going to bomb the Saudis next? or only if Israel ask for it?
Who say US is not regime? It is the world largest regime in the world, with bidders in every country to do their bidding, mass surveillance including their own country men. People blame only Russia, China, Iran etc when US have been doing the same for years.
The plan is a show of power. Trump will leave in 2 years, leaving much of the world in disarray because he had no plan whatsoever, and his staff is literally out of the movie Idiocracy. Nothing of lasting value will come out of the horrors that happened in the past 3 years, and in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.
> in 10 years we will look back into the present with disbelief.
You mean in 10 years, when the US is a stable and high-functioning democracy with independent media, a universally liked, charming, and polite president, supported by both the right and the left, who finally manage to overcome their minor differences? Is... is this the direction this is all heading?
> in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.
This is a very optimistic outlook, to the point of naivete, though I really hope you are right. In reality, neither Trump nor his cronies are acting like people who imagine they will be out of power anytime soon. In 10 years the world will likely still be dealing with the fallout of this administration, if not still dealing with the administration itself.
I don’t think it’s possible to change regime without boots on the ground which is not currently considered. So there will be no power vacuum, at most Iran military will be weaken. It’s not a big win for the US but would allow Trump to safe face after his demands were essentially rejected.
Your description of what happened in Iraq was exactly the point of why we invaded. Iraq and Iran were the two biggest threats to Israel, we got rid of Iraq and now we are removing the only other rival to Israel remaining in the Middle East.
After this, Israel, being the only nuclear power in the region and having massive funding from the American taxpayer, will dominate the entire region. This has always been the goal.
So replacing a fascist with western antagonism and constant threat on American allies, with a somewhat democratic, weak, and western aligned government?
The place has 90 million people, how do you even deal with this without throwing the whole place into chaos?
Besides, after this the collective west has no moral high-ground anymore, the global south will resent us more than ever. If other countries go to aggressive wars, our condemnation is worthless.
Trump is completely compromised and it was probably the powers that be who told them that this is how it is going to be.
> Besides, after this the collective west has no moral high-ground anymore
They never had any morals, all for their business gains look at Middle East, Africa and Asian countries where they were involved. Europe always looked other way when US does something and vise versa.
There is no such thing as the "global south" other than in the minds of westerners and westernised elites (and elites are getting less westernised). From a western viewpoint you can lump the rest of the world together, but it makes no sense from any other view point.
As for moral high ground. Compared to whom? China? Russia? Myanmar?
I really do not even want to understand the mental gymnastics which one has to undertake to justify the actions of the US and Israel in recent years.
Nor do I even know how to begin to grasp the enablement displayed by Europe as a whole. People constantly cite China’s “human rights abuses” (which seem to pale in comparison to all this) and rightly so, but continue to enable this blood thirsty and power hungry tag team to indulge in flagrant abuses of international law and general morality.
This is a sad day for level headed and empathetic humans across the globe. At which point do we accept that WW3 began quite a while ago? Because it sure as shit did.
Edit: fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion but it’s my truth.
To add to this: anyone who still does not see that Israel is by and far the most dangerous rogue state in the region is (at best) blinded by propaganda.
Iran has repeatedly demonstrated restraint and pragmatism throughout these aggressions on their sovereignty, starting with Israel’s strike on their consulate in Damascus.
There is a curious cognitive dissonance in which people think is somehow more morally correct to do human rights abuses abroad than at home. The US is doing both currently, though.
Very level headed and empathetic to go and claim that 50 countries just lost their right to criticize China because US and Israel are fighting Iran. Trolls having their priorities straight!
At this point, no country in the world will ever again 'make a deal' with the US, because while pretending to negotiate with you they try to ram a knife into your back.
It was pretty obvious that if the negotiations failed that the US would respond by attacking Iran. Iran didn't seem willing to give up their nuclear weapons program regardless of the quite predictable consequences.
I doubt the negotiations were in good faith, probably just a political 'see, we tried' gesture full of deal-breaker bad faith proposals. I think the plan all along has been to attack, probably for more than a year.
You don't go and rename a whole federal department to 'Department of War' when you don't intend to get into wars.
What's predictable is, if you don't have nuclear weapons, you get attacked. Ask Ukraine. If I were a small country (any country for that matter) the first order of business would be to build myself nuclear weapons now.
Ask Libya. They gave up their nuclear weapons program as a sign of good will.
The US then lied through their teeth to the security council about wanting to conduct a humanitarian operation and instead acted as the rebels' air force, helping them win and subsequently leaving the country in utter ruin.
1. The U.S. and Iran had already negotiated and signed a nuclear agreement between our countries but Trump reneged on the already-negotiated agreement.
2. Trump claimed that his previous attacks on Iran within the last year “completely and totally obliterated” their nuclear program, “obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before” - both direct Trump quotes. Trump was quite clear that Iran’s nuclear program had already been destroyed like nothing had ever been destroyed before.
> 1. The U.S. and Iran had already negotiated and signed a nuclear agreement between our countries but Trump reneged on the already-negotiated agreement.
Yeah, I agree that was probably a bad idea, doesn't make what I stated above any less true.
> 2. Trump claimed that his previous attacks on Iran within the last year “completely and totally obliterated” their nuclear program, “obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before” - both direct Trump quotes. Trump was quite clear that Iran’s nuclear program had already been destroyed like nothing had ever been destroyed before.
Yes...Trump lies all the time, that's nothing new.
Yes it does, it makes everything you said untrue. You stated Iran doesn't want to give up its nuclear programme, not true. Iran in fact already did agree to it, Trump then threw that in the trash.
Second, it shows the Nuclear threat wasn't the issue because he had a solution for it and threw it away. Then bombed Iran destroying it ostensibly, then continued bombing for regime change. So it's not obvious negotiations failed over nuclear which you stated, because it wasn't about nuclear.
Negotiations failed over dismantling Iranian power, mostly its ballistic weapons. i.e. give up weapons and make yourself defenseless to maintain peace. Like the Palestinians did with Israel, after which they're still being murdered daily, aid is still being blocked, and the west bank is increasingly being colonised. In other words an absurd ask from a sovereign country with multiple expansionist neighbours including one that bombed you and virtually all its neighbours last year.
"In the middle of negotiations" is arguably more and more used as a carte blanche to do whatever you want in the meantime. Prominent recent example being Putin pretending to be ready to negotiate for peace while bombing Ukraine.
The question is really whether negotiations were going on in good faith with the actual goal of realistic compromise.
It was Trump who cancelled to JCPOA. Also, sending Witkoff and Kushner as negotiators is already an obvious sign the US is dishonest about preventing conflicts through diplomacy, otherwise they would send experienced diplomats. It is really the US Epstein Class Deep State government to blame here.
They could have named the DOD the "Department Of Peace", instead they called it the "Department Of War", showing their true face and trajectory.
At this point it is really the people of the US to rise up and implement a Regime Change from within to change things for the better.
You all just keep lying endlessly, I think most people get it at this point. Iran was prepared to go further than the JCPOA, it was never enough because it was never about nuclear weapons.
I speak Persian (Farsi) and in state TV, every day, they said we won’t back down and won’t give up anything. Watch the supreme leader’s translated speech. Straight from the horse mouth! Who’s lying here?
Just to be clear I’m not pro war! I take Iranian regime as the first and foremost responsible party in this mess and then US! My people stuck in this disaster of a power struggle.
'productive talks and reasonable progress' is what diplomats almost always say in negotiations in order to maintain a reasonable atmosphere for possible further negotiations, this is not rocket science.
They also said the US demands are completely unreasonable, which you conveniently left out.
What do you even think the words diplomacy and negotiation even mean? Of course it included independent oversight to any extend the US wanted. There is nothing that Iran can do to satisfy the requirements for peace because the goal of the US is war, Iran has no interest in war that leads to their destruction. For fuck sake it didn't even include any sanction relief! Wake the fuck up!
The magnitude of human suffering this will bring, civil war, sectarian violence, it all leads to hundreds of millions of people dying, millions of people displaced. Nobody likes the Iranian regime, just like nobody liked Saddam, its not the point. These wars are barbaric, not in the interests of anybody but Israel and a select few American arms dealers and pedophiles that propagandize their way to barely conscious sheep in the west clapping along to the barbarism AGAIN.
The obnoxious sanctimonious behavior of telling random Iranians to “wake the fuck up” as if we have a saying in what either Iranian government or the US side does. Go pound sand.
Evidently I care more about the hundreds of thousands of Iranian people that will die in this war than you. All you do is repeat the talking points of the Trump administration. I've seen this all before, the Iraq war broke peoples brains in exactly the same way, nobody learned anything at all.
Oh these poor Iranians need saviors, they don’t know what’s good for them. We know better. They don’t learn.
Don’t you see any similarity between what you say and any colonial. And my brain is broken?
Let me put it in a way that’s easy to comprehend for you. War is bad and Iranian government is as much responsible for this war as the US. I don’t understand how this is so triggering for some.
edit.
> Evidently I care more about the hundreds of thousands of Iranian people that will die in this war than you.
Did you care equally when thousands of Iranians were massacred in the streets by the government or the “care” activates only when convenient?
That's not the point. The point is that the attacks on Iran are not about the nuclear weapons. Iran entered the JCPOA and complied with it, it had completely suspended any nuclear weapons program. But that didn't matter for Israel and their sycophants in US foreign policy, because for them the nuclear weapons program is at best only one part of the problem. Their real problem is that Iran is an independent state in the region that refuses to accept Israel's occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and parts of Lebanon, and that refuses to comply with US policies more broadly.
Overall the goal is not to stop Iran's nuclear program, though that is part of it. The goal would be to install a government in Iran that is friendly to Israel and the USA, or, failing that, to completely destroy their economy and defense such that they effectively can't act outside their own borders.
> The wall extends across the so-called Blue Line and has made “more than 4,000 square metres [43,055sq feet] of Lebanese territory inaccessible to the Lebanese people”
So you're saying Israel's occupation of Lebanon amounts to 4,000 square metres? About the area of an athletics track, I guess? (Not counting the bit inside the athletics track.)
How much land area, exactly, is another nation allowed to seize by force before it becomes unacceptable to you? It obviously is not that much given the tone of your message.
That's not the question I'm interested in. The question I'm interested in is whether it's correct to claim that Israel occupies "parts of Lebanon", particularly in the context in which the claim was made, next to the claim that it occupies Gaza and the West Bank.
The south. It's not a real occupation like the west bank, it's more of a 'raid and pillage' thing. No rape reported yet, so it isn't at all like the West Bank.
So they have medical grade uranium facility under a mountain? If that’s all they need, wouldn’t it be easier to just purchase it from a third party instead of investing billions of dollars hiding from Israel?
there are many reasons to do nuclear research beyond medicine, for batteries like the ones powering the voyager space craft, nuclear reactors come in a wide variety of configurations, and many of them actualy produce more radioactive elements that then need to be managed.
60% is nothing,80% is nothing, it needs to be 93%++, and LOTS of it to build a bomb, and given the number of bombs already arrayed around Iran, they would need 100's
and all the infrastructure to become a credible threat , for which they plainly dont have the money to afford.
The wildly unpopular leaders going after Iran need a scapegoat, or rather a continious supply of scapegoats, but have failed to recognise that the world is moving past them.
Somehow world will close eyes again ... Somehow we need to bring back moral standards that we all have deep in ourselves and screw this money world me all made together... I dont have answers or ideas how but this is just nonsense
US has been always playing god, cunning manipulations all over the world. Most of the Europe was silent until recently when Greenland under threat. US benefits from every war either oil, rare metals, trade, weapons, there is always an agenda even though they are not directly involved.
Or you can blame Israel and Zionists lobbying the governments and media that radicals will crawl out under everyone's beds. (PS: it started before Libya)
The US didn't start the Lybia thing, France (and particularly Sarkozy) did, and the US felt obligated to follow up. In Hillary leaked emails, you can read about it. The CIA basically saying 'the successor France want is X, let's try to put our choice as the leader of the next Lybia instead', and a week later, the french/DGSE candidate for Khadafi succession died.
Lybia was 100% a French war the US took over. Sarkozy's subordinates were extremely close to the Lybia regime that helped illegally finance his presidential election, at least according to French judges, so it was also also a very political war.
I think just forego the hypocrisy and have the Israeli's move the White House over there and put one of their own in it instead of pulling the strings.
> Pre-emptive violence; not even justified with a narrative of escalating threat.
This is basically Purim. Which is in a few days, what are the odds!
At some point Americans will realize ethnic Jewish groups exist and operate in their own interests in America, and that is at odds with American interests. Or maybe not - top private donor the IDF Larry Ellison (an American, supposedly) looks like he’s expanding his media empire even further with WB. Should go a long way in helping his personal friend Netanyahu’s 8th front.
Small coordinated groups always win out over fragmented larger ones.
Those who know their history also know that the current American administration is of a kind that usually ascends following the rules, but then never voluntarily leaves power.
So I don't think Israel has anything to fear there.
> the current American administration is of a kind that usually ascends following the rules, but then never voluntarily leaves power
Sounds like you might be making a very strong claim! Can you make it more precise? For example, "President Trump will not peaceably transfer power at the end of his current term". Is it something you'd be willing to put money on, for example on Polymarket?
Trump makes a lot of claims of unfair elections, declaring a state of emergency and is talking about a third term. Hard to really know for real what will happen but it is suspicious.
Neither the current administration nor Israel are particularly popular with the US public today, and those are correlated in that Israel has particularly lost support from Democrats and Independents in the US, suggesting that a change in power (legislative or executive, and especially both) in the US government could very easily spell much less favorable US policy toward Israel.
Normal people are starting to call themselves goyim and aren’t afraid to call themselves antisemites anymore. You can look at this from many angles (sitting here in Eastern Europe watching history repeat itself again in 4 years is a very discomforting feeling), but all of them are signs of Israel losing US citizenship support at an unprecedented velocity.
And this is why the Ellisons are quickly ramping up their media empire with the purchase of Paramount (which included CBS who is now ran by Bari Weiss), the freshly inked Warner Brothers deal, and their part ownership of US TikTok (of which Oracle hosts the data now).
>Normal people are starting to call themselves goyim and aren’t afraid to call themselves antisemites anymore.
Normal people distinguish between Israel and Jews and call themselves antizionists. It's Zionists who blur the distinction.
There are several countries throughout history where the citizens have been absolutely obsessed with their own race and considered the crusader state to be the sole representative of it. It never ended well.
And they’ve blurred it so much and thrown around the accusation so frequently and with so little hesitancy that many people are starting to simply not care anymore.
It was Trump or his immediate environmetn who asked Israeli to attack Iran first (better optics); Israel would have never done this without American approval.
Did Israel want this to happen though ? Yes. But so did the Americans. I guess the negotiations went badly.
More specifically, seems to be driven by Netanyahu's political accounting. Starting a potential major war going into mid-terms is pretty inconvenient for Trump who could be looking at impeachment over Epstein. But Netanyahu is facing trial and October-7 investigation commissions more imminently and can't wait that long. Netanyahu trumps Trump, evidently.
You are lying, they have been trying to avoid this war in any possible way. But Israel wanted this war before they lost the support of the USA population (that it's happening fast) or they have a less accommodating USA president.
I agree about Israel fast losing support among the general public here but the idea of a less accommodating executive or legislative branch in the US for Israel is unthinkable. Not unless the system is changed from the ground up in dramatic fashion. The two most relevant branches of government in this country are completely beholden to Israel and anybody denying it is a zionist shill.
I can't help but think that all this shit is because Netanyahu really wants to put off more court hearings on his lame ass corruption charges. I really can't wait for him and his cronies (in Israel, and the West) to be brought to justice.
Without having to wait for the history books to do their thing.
His court appearance are continuing as scheduled, twice a week, for the last year. except for some specific incidents where he had to leave of cancel due to running a state.
No matter what you think, there is no way for him to avoid these hearings
Great, for those minor charges of accepting what, something like 150k Eur in gifts. As opposed to life in prison for genocide, which he clearly and absolutely deserves.
Go ahead, defend one of the most despicable humans alive this very day. I can't imagine what's going on in your mind. Maybe a combination of Attent and koolaid?
While Netanyahu definitely deserves that, don't expect anything to change for the better in Israeli foreign policy if he gets deposed and tried. Israeli politicians have become radicalized to a level that is hard to imagine from a European or US perspective.
Even the leader of the "left wing" opposition has recently explicitly stated that Israel was gifted the entire region from the Euphrates to the Nile by God, so they would have a right to own the entire region, but that this must be balanced by security concerns and tactical realities. This happened in response to the US ambassador's explicit public remarks in the Tucker Carlson interview that also asserted Israel's God-given right to the entire region. Note that this region, from the Euphrates to the Nile, includes about half of Irak, parts of Syria, most of Lebanon, parts of Saudi Arabia, and of Egypt.
I was discussing this with a friend today. It just feels like there's no point to these actions.
Not in the sense of "I don't ideologically agree with our decision to do this," but in the sense of, "I do not see how this accomplishes any ideological or practical goal."
What are they trying for? Regime change in Iran? No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before. Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
A US president who vocally and repeatedly promised he would not start new conflicts keeps starting them, and there's not even a reason. It's infuriating. I have my partisan opinions, but that should not be a partisan statement! It's just disturbing!
The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state.
Iran has negotiated like no one will ever attack it, and that was a correct assumption for decades
However, due to Iran's overly aggressive use of questionably rational proxies, Hamas has dragged it into a regional conflict where it lost most of its proxies power.
After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state, so the only leverage they had left was ballistic missiles, which were also handled quite reasonably by Israeli air defense.
In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal that heavily restricts Iran's ability to enrich as well as ICBM, trigger with existing uranium stockpiles removed.
As Iran due to ideological reasons refused, and IMO had miscalculated this will be a win-win, as losing will quell the protests, the only thing really left is the metaphorical stick
Does Iran not have the same rights of self-defense and sovereignty as the US and Israel?
> The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state
The US and Israel are currently nuclear blackmail states. The rational move for Iran to prevent itself from being bullied is to have nukes like North Korea.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US
190 countries signed the non proliferation treaty for a very good reason, so no they don’t have the right to it in any sense of the word on the international stage.
Especially not when they’re mass murdering protestors and funding islamic extremism left and right
Okay so neither then does Israel yet here we are a country with illicit nuclear weapons that murdered scores of thousands of civilians has what standing to do what now?
They actually do. And I say it as a European and I think the Iranian regime is as bad as it gets, and won't shed a tear if they all get executed.
What recent months show us, is that it's a rough world - there are no friends. I'm rooting for European countries to accelerate their nuclear weapons programs. In an ideal world, of course I would be against. But the world is far from ideal. The current alternative is being dictated the rules by Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. Thanks, but no.
Next up, Hannibal Lector marches for change of regime in I-ran and better life for I-ranians. When asked if that's not a bit odd, he says, get back at me when my crimes are on a similar scale.
Why exactly do you suppose the US gets away with carrying out military attack or threatening to carry out military attack against a new country every couple of months?
The NPT did not exist at the time of the US developing nuclear weapons, and it explicitly allows US (and other pre-existing nuclear powers') weapons.
Israel, like India and Pakistan, simply never signed it, forgoing the international nuclear technology market as a consequence but also avoiding a treaty obligation not to develop them.
That was before the revolution. The revolutionary government still honored the deal, but that's been obviously a losing move for a while. The whole Middle East recognizes that, just look at how many countries Pakistan has sharing agreements with recently.
No such right exists, except in moral terms, but if you are going to invoke morals, the Iranian regime does not hold up well. So no, they do not.
Perhaps you will argue that the US or Israel or Pakistan or North Korea have conducted themselves in a way where they do not have that moral right either, but that is a different debate, and either way it is moot because they do have them.
> The rational move for Iran to prevent itself from being bullied is to have nukes like North Korea
North Korea invaded South Korea, stole a US Navy ship (the Pueblo, which they still proudly exhibit), dug large infiltration tunnels under the DMZ, kidnapped hundreds, or even thousands people from SK (and Japan, to a lesser extent), and have assassinated, or attempted to assassinate, multiple SK heads of state, and perpetrated acts of terror like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858
What did the US or SK do to them before their nuclear program that constituted "bullying?"
In many ways I think it would be better than the world controlled by the US axis.
Then again, I am not from the US nor Israel nor any muslim country. I just hope the countries I care about stay out of this Iran deal.
This would allow me to quietly hope that Iran somehow wins this in the long run. I have this tendency of supporting the aggressed party in uneven conflicts.
Are you saying that countries and people are the same?
And I’m not entirely sure what point are you trying to make, that terror countries like the houthis should have nuclear weapons, or that people in a country should not have equal rights.
Terrorists already have nuclear weapons. Of course no country having nukes is ideal, but in absence of that possibility everyone having them is better, unless your reasoning is "I hope my side has them and the other side doesn't."
>Iran has negotiated like no one will ever attack it, and that was a correct assumption for decades
Iran had a signed agreement, trump cancelled it. Israel literally killed Irans negotiators just a few months ago. What is this nuclear level ignorance.
This comment is so wrong. Trump's strikes won't "prevent" anything, it's domestic posturing to look tough. You cannot bomb your way into regime change.
> After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state
That's also wrong. Trump claimed Iran's enrichment capabilities were totally destroyed, but they weren't.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal
America already had a good deal. Trump got rid of it.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal that heavily restricts Iran's ability to enrich, and as Iran due to ideological reasons refused, and IMO miscalculated this will be a win-win, as losing will quell the protests, the only thing really left is the metaphorical stick
Didn't we have one of those a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it /s
Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
The contradiction is that they’re weak at this minute - militarily and economically and politically. But they won’t be this weak in the future.
- Military - their regional proxies destroyed, missile and drone stocks low, provably weak air defences.
- Economically - the currency is worthless, extreme inflation for seven years and hyper inflation for a few months, the economy is currently producing nothing due to unrest, they have a massive water shortage of their own making. They have no goods worth exporting. Their oil is sanctioned, meaning only China will buy from them and at a steep discount. And oil is extremely cheap at this minute.
- Politically - they have no friends willing to bail them out. Russia has no money to spare. China doesn’t care about anyone outside of China. North Korea is even poorer. All sections within Iranian society detest the mullahs running the government. They’re hanging on by killing tens of thousands of protestors.
Trump bets that Iran’s leaders are at their weakest since their war with Saddam ended in 1988. Meaning now is the best time to negotiate a deal where they hand over their fissile material and uranium enrichment equipment. In return they could get a heavy water reactor(s) that produces energy but no fissile material.
If he lets this opportunity slip Iran could fix all of their many problems in a year or three. Manufacture more missiles and drones. Build up their proxies once more. Maybe the price of oil recovers. Russia’s war ends and they aid Iran best they can. The economy recovers and the Iranian people stop trying to overthrow the government. Maybe a conflict starts elsewhere that draws America’s full attention.
Will Trump get that deal? Probably not. That fissile material is the only leverage the mullahs have. If they give it up they’ll be toppled like the other dictators who gave up their weapons programs - Gaddafi and Saddam.
> Didn't we have one of those a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it /s
Yes, although it had merit it was far worse than what can be signed now, especially the sunset clause was problematic
> Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
that's the nature of nuclear weapons, your conventional force can be abysmal (pretty much NK situation vs US) and yet you can create epic destruction
> And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
Yes, the thing here is the long term goal of signing a deal, whose main goal is removing the existing highly enriched uranium from Iran and restricting their ability to redevelop nuclear capabilities. Essentially this is the part where "Diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means" (to highly paraphrase), because the alternative to a deal is maintenance attacks such as these every two years
I dont see how it is fair from USA to demand others dont have nukes. Ukraine made mistake of trusting ISA and giving them away and now USA basically support Russia in their invasion.
Iran is a bad guy state ... but the "fair" atgunent hwre dont apply.
On Israel, is it possible that they feel their influence on US foreign policy is waning and they want to push over Iran before they can’t do it anymore, even if the propaganda in America hasn’t been sufficiently set up yet to provide cover? Where pushing Iran over is useful because having weak neighbors is good for their expansion?
Possibly wishful thinking, but that’s the only way I can make it make sense in my head.
You don’t unseat the Fraudster in Chief while at war. So starting a war is a slightly less conspicuous trick than outright preventing relevant elections from taking place.
Yes, when you ask the basic Clauzewitz question about "continuation of politics by other means": what are the war aims, and how is this action connected to them?
What are the strikes even against?
Do they seriously think that after Iran shot all the street revolutionaries, another group will come forward and collapse the government?
Are they treating Iran as Big Serbia? It's a very different situation!
> What are they trying for? Regime change in Iran?
Seems like it. I can't imagine what else they might try for.
I suppose USA might think some shock and awe will result in iran making concessions at the bargaining table, but that seems unrealistic to me.
> No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before.
That seems very debatable.
> Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
Well they did take action against israel (you could say they were indirectly responsible for oct 7). Now they are facing said existential threat.
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Ultimately though. Iran has been a major threat to both israeli and US interests, largely by funding proxy groups that take violent action against those interests. That's your motive for a war.
Iran is currently weak, facing multiple internal and eexternal crisises.
A war is happening because there is a limited window where iran is weak but the window potentially won't remain. That's the reason behind a lot of wars in history.
Probably a continuation of the 'mowing the lawn' strategy (as used against the Palestinians). Every now and again use massive military force to set back Iran's capabilities, time and effort they spend rebuilding is time and effort not spent causing problems elsewhere.
It accomplishes the goal of diverting attention away from the recent revelations of a pedophile ring among the elites having operated from a private island for decades, with current US president and serial rapist Trump being best friends with the ring leader.
It's bound to be incredibly successful at accomplishing that goal.
Similarly, wars against Iraq and Afghanistan were very successful in diverting attention away from 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers being from Saudi Arabia, and later on from the funding provided to one or more of the hijackers by Saudi officials. With a certain Ms. Maxwell being asked to join the investigatory committee on the event in question.
Yes, but there is also the other elephant in the room. Don’t underestimate Trump, he may not have read about Michael Parenti’s explanation of The Assassination of Julius Caesar: where he argues that Caesar was killed not as a tyrant threatening republican liberty, but as a popular reformer who challenged the Roman oligarchy's wealth and power and thirst for wars.
Maybe Parenti doesn't explicitly equate JFK's killing to Caesar’s, the similarity lies in both being elite-driven assassinations to preserve power: Caesar by Roman senators against reforms, akin to theories of JFK's killing over anti-war shifts and perceived threats to entrenched interests. Critics note Parenti's JFK work critiques official narratives as state cover-ups, mirroring his Caesar "people's history" inversion of "gentlemen historians."
Anyone raising their weapon against Israel in the last 20 years was armed, supplied, funded, trained and directed by Iran. There’s a special division called Quds in the IRGC responsible just for that. The list includes Hizbollah, Assad’s former regime in Syria, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthis, Hizbollah in Iraq and others.
Israel being an ethnic supremacist state for more than the last 20 years [0], on a determined mission to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population from their ancestral land [1], this comment unintentionally makes Iran sound like the good guys in this story. (I do not support any form of theocracy).
> makes Iran sound like the good guys in this story
Only for dc/marvel-shaped brains where there are evil guys who do bad things, and they're opposed by good guys who spread goodness.
> to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population from their ancestral land
Like after creation of Israel, Arabs motivated (often violently) Jews to leave their homelands and move to safe Israel, thus proving zionist ideas to be right. And then wonder what people support these zionist ideas now? Any ideas? :-)
So we agree that the first move in this conflict was a 20th century European nationalist group setting up a new state by force in the middle of an inhabited nation? With the blessing of the colonial power in charge.
Doesn't defend what happened to Jewish people in Egypt and Lebanon, but certainly puts some context around it.
As for the depopulation of Jews from Yemen and Iraq, that was Israeli policy and they managed it by themselves.
Yes, Israel was founded specifically to be a safe haven for Jews after 2/3 of them were murdered in Europe, and it passed this (somewhat ridiculous) law in 2018 because it knows full well that once Jews cease to be the majority in Israel, they'll cease to be, period.
You can view it as racist, you can hate it, you can want to see Israel destroyed in favor of yet another 100% Arab country, it really doesn't matter, because the fact is you're all hypocrites who only have the safety that you have because of genocides, brutal wars, land capture, regime toppling and forced conversions. That's the only thing we learned from the rest of the enlightened world. Kill, destroy, erase, force convert, and somehow be deemed a beacon of freedom and democracy.
In real life, Israel is more ethnically and religiously varied than all its surrounding countries, and non-Jews in Israel have rights that even I, as a Jew, don't have (such as freedom of religion). Jews are a minority in the Galilee, and there's no law for the Judaization of the Galilee.
Cultural Arabs and Ethnic Arabs are not the same thing.
Ethnic Arabs are from the Arabian peninsula. Islam's expansion started a slow process of Arabization whereby indigenous people in lands that ended up under the control of the Muslim caliphate/empire started speaking Arabic (mixed with their local dialects) and adopting aspects of Arabic culture, not dissimilar to the previous process of Romanization and Hellenization from the Greeks and Romans.
TL;DR People who today call themselves Palestinians are biological descendants of ancient Jews and other peoples local to the region of Palestine who eventually converted to Christianity and/or Islam, some remained Jewish, started speaking Arabic, and never left the land.
That's what genetic studies and history converge on, and what the early zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion also happened to believe in (Ben-Gurion wrote a thesis on this subject), until it became inconvenient for Zionism to continue to do so.
>Ben-Gurion, along with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (the second President of Israel), argued in a 1918 booklet (written in Yiddish) that the Arab peasants of Palestine were not descendants of the Arab conquests, but rather the "remnant of the ancient Hebrew agriculturalists".
If you'd rather modern science, then there are genetic studies out of Israeli universities leading weight to this hypothesis (they tend to not get much attention among modern zionists as you can imagine). It's also the general consensus among historians of the region, inside and outside Israel. It's not really a contested position amongst academic historians.
>I love how you turned the elimination of hundreds of religions and ethnic groups into some beautiful cultural influence.
It was not always a clean process, varied a lot by century and location, but on the whole did not involve ethnic cleansing or massacres of ethnicities. The percentages of Arabs you quote above are, again, people who started calling themselves Arabs after cultural shifts, and not, as you seem to believe, a result of mass migration of ethnic Arabs from the Arabian peninsula to replace the local populations.
I don't think we have much else to exchange in good faith on this topic, so I'll leave you here.
It would be highly impractical to go to war with all of them at once, but USA can still fix one country at time. Venezuella, Iran, hopefully Cuba next.
They were only aligned with us after we overthrew their democratic secular government in 1953, and installed an unpopular authoritarian monarchy as sole leader. The reason we overthrew their government is because they felt we were ripping them off in oil deals and wanted the right to audit and cancel those deals (and renationalize their oil fields) if we weren't playing fair. Then in 1979 that puppet government was overthrown in a "real" revolution, which gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran which, for some reason, always had a chip on its shoulder against the West.
The protests in Iran today are almost certainly being extensively backed by the CIA and other US organizations. Do not mistake a minority as necessarily representing much more than themselves. Of course they might (I certainly don't have any particular insight in the "real" Iran), but you could certainly see something similar happening in the US with extreme groups, left or right wing, becoming visibly active if they were able to find a strong backing/organizing power that made them believe that they could genuinely overthrow the government. The point being that the actions and claims of those groups would not necessarily represent the US at large.
Some people here might not be American or were too young to remember the lead up to the Iraq War, but it was transparently bullshit. Many people knew this. But if you dared say that, supporters would actively ruin your life. The Dixie Chicks were one of the most popular music acts in the US at the time, a country band that broke out of country and was getting huge appeal across the US. They dared to say they opposed the war. Their careers never returned.
Now with social media that isn't completely locked down, some voice of opposition can slip through and assure people that, yes, this is crazy. No, we don't need to blow the shit out of towns across the world. But these social media sites are all owned by government-aligned mega billionaires. They're rolling out AI that can comment and act very, very human and endorse everything the government does. They can auto-police opinions and spit out thousands of arguments and messages of harassment against them in seconds. Soon they'll be autoblocking any sense of disagreement.
It's at that point they can say that this is done to defend America. This is done to defend freedom. This desert country that's too screwed up to even manage its own internal affairs is somehow so dangerous that it's going to destroy the whole world with nukes it doesn't even have so we must destroy them all now. Dear leader always has your interests at heart. And you'll have no info to point to saying otherwise. Everyone who dares question it will be mocked, ridiculed, fired. Even if this administration fails, the tools are being built and laid out for the next, and I really don't know how humanity will overcome it. And I hate that I can't have optimism in this situation.
This discussion is one where it's worth looking at commenters' histories. Many have several pages where the bulk of their posts are defending Israel, saying war with Iran is necessary, and various related things. It's kind of spooky
While true for the Iraq war I don't think that holds as true anymore. Even a lot of MAGA recognise that getting into wars in the Middle East does nothing but cost the taxpayer billions/trillions of dollars for nothing to show.
That's because there's a glimpse of reason that still pokes through with influencers sometimes saying "you know, I think (thing) might not be good so I hope Trump doesn't do it." Then when trump does (thing), they always backpedal and say it's great. Pre-election inflation was a problem. Now prices are great. Epstein was a problem. Now they say nobody cares. War with Iran was bad. In 2 days influencers will all have a prepared message supporting it and in 3 days half the country will absolutely support it.
It's regime change this time. Trump published a message calling for all Iranian military forces to surrender and the Iranian people to take over the government.
Their endgame is genocide. They will be happy to only enslave the Iranian people too. Seriously, USA and its colony in Palestine are colonialist supremacists and they just want to extract all the resources and don't mind killing all the people of that land.
It's a nakedly imperial gambit, the Western ruling classes are attempting to deny Middle Eastern oil to Russia and China. Iran is their only capable opposition in the region, every other Gulf country is a bought-and-paid-for satrapy which just cosigned a genocide on its doorstep.
The US department of war said last month that it was "obliterated"
>No other military in the world could have executed an operation of such scale,
complexity, and consequence as Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER. Yet the Joint Force did so
flawlessly and obliterated Iran’s nuclear program.
The most likely and capable retaliation will be cyber/info wars.
Iran has sophisticated influence operations and will likely flood social media with disinformation designed to deepen political divisions and erode trust in institutions.
This advice serves even if you don’t believe the above. Be deeply skeptical of all viral content in the coming days and weeks, especially anything designed to change your opinions, or provoke outrage/fear. Verify before sharing. Expect deepfakes. Stick to primary sources when possible.
Trump also said that when he says things he means them, unlike Obama's red lines in Syria (his words). When he said that, it was pretty clear he couldn't back off of attacking Iran.
I assume it took so long because he's going for regime change, not just a few bombings. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, it took the US 5 months to launch a counter-invasion (mostly because of coalition building).
Sure seems that way. I don't really see how this military action is justified from a US perspective. Or even from an Israeli one. The most likely justification is that the leadership of the US and Israel are a little bit unhinged and want a war to distract from domestic issues.
Though I suppose you could say he's lying, it's staged etc. In the same way that the religious attribute every good thing to their god and every bad thing to their devil.
Netanjahu is old and wants to secure his 'legacy' by being credited for dismantling Iran, knowing Trump will back him both because he's been fed BS and because the Israelis have enough kompromat to sink him. There's no 'rational' justification for this attack, only madness and huge egos.
What kompromat would even affect Trump at this point? He's been proven to be deep in bed with a literal pedophilic cabal of elites, what on Earth else could they have on this guy that would affect anything?
If you're talking about Israel, why choose to move there then? Few Israelis have long-running roots in the country, it's mostly recent immigrants or their children.
This feels a lot like the people building a home next to an airport and then complaining about the noise.
Besides, are you sure "your house" wasn't stolen from someone? That's hardly uncommon in Israel.
Israel is 80 years old, I was born here and I’m 25 years old. The funny thing is my parents immigrated from Russia so you probably won’t want me there either (me too). Your argument is bad.
You don't need one, it is very easy to emigrate to many western countries as an Israeli passport holder. There's also a chance you qualify for one of the EU citizenship schemes for jewish descendants. You don't have to choose to live in an apartheid state.
At least if you only held a Russian passport you could plausibly claim that it's somewhat difficult to move anywhere nice.
> I live in a home that is younger than 80 years as most Israelis do
I guess that makes it better. Truly, a shining example of Israeli moral superiority.
I can easily find ownership records going back more than 500 years for the land I live on. Odds are it'd be trivial to go even further.
What about the land you live on? Who owned it 100 years ago and how'd it end up in your possession? How do you think those records would tend to look in Israel? What kind of stories do you think they would tell? Would it be a good look for Israeli people?
My grand grandparent had a factory and a mansion in Poland , which was stolen by the nazis. My family moved with 0 assets to Israel to rebuild themselves. Will you please pay me the sum lost with dividends so I can return to Poland?
The entire continent of North America changed hands in the last 250 years many European lands changed hands in the last 150 years, some Israeli lands changed hands in the last 80 years, why should only we open our records?
The Romani people. Perhaps even Jews, depending on attitudes towards Israel.
Probably other groups who are even less visible, so we don't know about the challenges they face. The 19th century push for nation states has marginalized and tried to erase many groups.
Do you disagree that there's a good chance that by choosing to live and pay taxes in Israel you're going to have a net negative effect on the future of the Palestinians over your lifetime?
Oh Drop down from your high horse, let’s ask you what have you done for example for the environment have you quit your job to join a cause to for the environment? Have you stopped buying things from china? Have you completely stopped consuming fast fashion?
I won’t leave my friends and family and rather fight for the values of this country from here
>Oh Drop down from your high horse, let’s ask you what have you done for example for the environment have you quit your job to join a cause to for the environment? Have you stopped buying things from china? Have you completely stopped consuming fast fashion?
I hope this particularly weak whataboutism helps you feel better about your indefensible moral position.
> fight for the values of this country from here
Apartheid being one of the core values worth fighting for, apparently.
I'm sure Hamas would say the same, it's just about how that peace is reached and how it looks like in the end. The typical Israeli vision of peace isn't any better than the typical Palestinian vision of peace.
I’m not a politician nor all the information is available to me on what can be done and what not
My moral compass says the following -
1. First of all securing our own democracy from all the internal authoritarian movements
2. Creating a situation were any Palestinian can live respectfully, feed their family and get education
From there state decision should be far more easier.
> 1. First of all securing our own democracy from all the internal authoritarian movements
perfectly reasonable ask. 3 years ago, I would have been perfectly fine if they demonstrated interest in that. Instead we have people like Ben gvir openly spout ethnosupremacist vitriol that would make hitler blush. Now my instagram is full of that man touring prisons where he brags about executing people who clearly show signs of torture. (and this is what they are COMFORTABLE SHOWING) between that and his approval ratings (60% of israelis want to relocate Palestinians somewhere else Its clear that the whole society is rotten from the top down.
Why? First of all, we tried to give citizenship to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, they refuse.
Second, are you suggesting to annex Gaza and th West Bank, and giving them citizenship? That means the come election, Hamas would be the biggest party in the Knesset, revoke all democratic rights, and create a sharia state. That will be the end of the only democracy in the Middle East.
Is this what every American tell themselves when they wake up in the morning? Or that what every Arab says to himself outside of Yemen, Saudi and Oman?
Yes every morning I wake up and think, why are my tax dollars going towards a parasitic entity who has taken complete control over our government to fight it's wars for them when we can barely afford basic necessities at home.
It was their country before you guys showed up with guns and kicked them out.
The only reason it still exists is because of a massive propaganda machine designed to misrepresent the whole situation to the American people who's tax dollars are bankrolling it.
Ah! We’re going with history. Awesome. This country was Jewish before Islam even existed, according to many, many, many archeological findings. So is your position is to exile all non Jews from Israel?
The majority of you are descendents of european converts cosplaying as middleasterners.
That said, I support jews who were there before 1950s and the ones who are actually willing to make peace with palestinans and live alongside without an apartheid ethnostate. They are welcome to live in Israel and I wish them peace.
The rest of you who are defending or taking part in this genocide should absolutely be exiled.
> Second, half of the Israeli Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arabic and Muslim countries.
And the solution to that was to create an apartheid state where you forced palestinians to live as second class citizens in their ancestral home?
Last I checked, there are plenty of jews in morocco and Iran. I've met a few.
> And thank you for having the 1950 cutoff, since my family came to Israel before that.
Glad that you found a loophole that lets you defend literal genocide while clinging to your land claim as if that was the part I had a major problem with. you certainly got me there.
Given a choice between saying you don't support the genocide of the palestinian people and being there before the 1950's, you chose the later. you do understand how that makes you look right? like I'm shocked at your lack of self awareness here.
You are perfectly welcome to be a racist piece of shit. its your right I guess. but don't turn around and act like you're the victim when everyone hates you.
> Plenty Moroccan Jews in Morocco - 300,000 in 1950, 2,250 in 2026.
> Iran - 150,000 in 1950, 15,000 in 2026.
Its definitely ethnic cleansing and it shouldn't have happened either. I wish we stood up to stop it back then. I didn't say anything about it back then because I wasn't alive back then to speak out against it. I'm alive now and THIS genocide that your people are committing is what I'm speaking out against because Im against genocide. I know there are other genocides going around in the world but this one is being funded with MY tax dollars.
Like people who live in Iran or did you live in Gaza? Average joes pay the price. Bibi, on the other hand, needs to keep any war going lest he some day goes to trial.
I’m willing to pay the price to achieve peace. I know I have defense and fortifications (and if your in Europe, you most likely have the same defenses) and can endure. Iran and Gaza have 0 defenses, and yet the chose to start a war.
I don’t know why anyone even bothers with this anymore. Literally every single word that comes out of his mouth is a lie. It’s actually staggering to think about. It’s like he is incapable of doing anything that right, correct, or true.
Are there any accurate sources on how many Iranian citizens the Iran regime has killed in the past couple of months? (some sources suggest tens of thousands, but I wonder if it could be a 'WMDs' situation [lie to get support for a war]).
Trump said in the State of the Union [0]:
> in just over the past couple of months with the protests they've killed at least 32000 protestors
And just moments ago Trump says 'tens of thousands' [1]
I don't get that argument at all. Americans felt that they were missing out on all the fun, so they decided to kill even more Iranians? Does anyone really believe that bombing cities saves lives?
This is exactly what was claimed in Iraq, and while I'm sure you can find some few idiots or optimists, it is completely false at the relevant level. There is no such thing, and has never been such a thing, as a country welcoming an invasion by another country, at least not in the last few hundred years since nation states developed, and since explosives became the major means of war.
This is especially false in Iran in relation to USA intervention, since both the democrats and the fundamentalists still remember how the USA & UK deposed their last democratic leaders and (re) installed the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, who both parts of Iranian society hate and remeber being oppressed by today.
The diaspora and the clans are cheering for sure, as well as a lot of people who lost their operations when the Taliban took Afghanistan back.
But the clans are way, way weaker than they were when they did their coup against Mosaddegh, so it will be extremely expensive for the US to keep control this time.
Why are we even talking about this? As if this is being done for the 'protestors'? Netanyahu didn't visit the White House 6 times in the last year to advocate for the welfare of the Iranian people. The "negotiations" over the last several weeks weren't over protestors - it was over the Nuclear program, ballistic program and proxy forces. It wasn't even about US interests. Iran offered mining, oil and other valuable rights. Trump wasn't buying. This is about Israel's national security interests and hegemonic ambitions. Protestors are just pawns in service of that.
If this turns into a full-scale war or a civil war breaks out, we are looking at 1 million Iranian deaths conservatively speaking. Just look at happened at every single foreign intervention in the region - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia. How does a million dead Iranians help them? How does it help the Americans, and the world if oil infrastructures or shipping lanes are targeted ? How does it help the region or Europe when millions of refugees flood out, and armouries are broken open and weapons and insurgents flood the region (like it did with Iraq and Libya)? It helps Israel greatly though, since they take out their arch nemesis, their conventional military and the nuclear program. And they think can shield themselves from the chaos they create around them.
Apparently you don't even have to give Americans the neocon foreign policy spin anymore, we generate it ourselves.
To wit, after Maduro was kidnapped and the exact same regime kept in place (minus selling oil to Cuba), and Trump openly said it was to control the oil, most of the reactions were pretending we live in a universe where the US does these things to spread democracy.
Its probably not the reason they are attacking (except in as much that it makes the iranian regime vulnerable). However i would say that yes, humanitarian intervention is one of the only non self-defense justifications for war that anyone has ever accepted in the post-ww2 era. (Edit: to clarify, im saying its the type of thing people build justifications for war around. Whether its a valid justification on this specific case is probably highly debatable. I think a reasonable argument could be made)
> However i would say that yes, humanitarian intervention is one of the only non self-defense justifications for war that anyone has ever accepted in the post-ww2 era
So when is the US intervening in Ukraine then? Russia is literally doing human safari with drones hunting down civilians in Kherson.
But this will undoubtedly increase the general level of adversarial feelings and justifications of violence worldwide for many decades to come. The seeds of the next ISIS were planted today
Can the US or Israel morally claim “humanitarian” intervention given what’s happening in parallel in Gaza? If Iran bombed Tel Aviv would you call it a humanitarian intervention? Is this a creative use of the term? When you make a “humanitarian” intervention to save some humans, while decimating others it sounds like you think the “others” are not/sub-humans.
we sure dodged a bullet in 2024 elections and elected the right people to stop all these senseless wars that were one of the cornerstones of the election campaign
Because polls before and after the election were crystal clear on this point.
Over 30% of Biden 2020 voters said arming genocide was going to affect their vote.
That's BIDEN VOTERS.
80% of Democrats wanted an arms embargo.
Arming Israel meant giving up millions of votes in swing states, in an election that was lost by extremely slim margins in those states.
And before you ask, it was also clear from polling that ending support to Israel would have cost nearly zero votes from her base.
And the reason the Harris campaign didn't know this is because they didn't want to know. Campaign staffers were instructed to mark anyone who raised Gaza as "no response". Attendees of the DNC conventions were literally plugging their ears and shielding their eyes from protests, or even laughing about them.
Trump won by less than 50% of the vote and there are many polls that show the Biden administration's genocide was massively demotivating to democratic voters.
Voters don't lose elections, campaigns do. Harris failed, and this kind of "turning around of the blame" thing that Dems try to do is one of the reasons why they don't win elections: they never learn.
Attacking Iran is bipartisan consensus unfortunately.
Schumer, for example, is an avowed Zionist and would love to attack Iran. Case in point: His leadership worked to delay Massey and Khanna's war powers resolution until after this attack so they could say "Well, I guess we're too late. Darn."
They absolutely matter. Except on pretty much every foreign policy issue. And also universal healthcare. Oh and also the minimum wage, which has remained the same throughout several supermajorities belonging to both parties since the 70s when it was last updated. Oh also if you think corporations and their leaders should be held accountable for gambling with investor money and destabilizing the economy, or are angainst corporate welfare, unfortunately there’s no one you can vote for. Oh and also if you’re against congresspeople investing while being party to insider information, and with the ability to potentially sway regulatory votes in any given company’s favor, or dole out corporate welfare, unfortunately the leadership of both major parties participate fairly blatantly in that. Oh also, if you think the federal government should demonstrate a modicum of fiscal responsibility and not leave future generations in unrecoverable debt? Unfortunately no options for you. Also, if you would prefer your president not be friendly with a convicted pedophile, unfortunately that’s not gonna happen, we’ve gotta have at least some pedo-friendly people in office on both sides.
Iran is not the middle east. In the actual middle east, there has been permanent war for >1500 years. And during all that time the middle east has started wars from Zimbabwe to Norway to Hong Kong.
On might think muslims would have learned something after the defeat of islam (as in the last coherent country/state structure) in 1919-1923 at the hands of muslims. Of course, islam as in the state, started a Naval war with the US, to defend the great institution of slavery ... and when they failed ... they started a second one.
And let's just not discuss whether some muslims (such as IS, but certainly not limited to them) are still trying to bring back slavery. Because we all know the answer.
The ICE killings, deportations of US citizens, and the general anti-US sentiments around the world show that lesser evil exists, and that not voting can have consequences.
It's a shame that it took all this for the Democrats to even begin the dialog about Israeli money in politics, and perhaps they may even realize that nobody wants to vote for pro-war neoliberals.
"Lesser evil exists?" What if the "lesser evil" is just the good cop in a barely concealed good cop/bad cop routine?
It's not a bold statements that many senior democrats are thrilled that Trump is attacking Iran. This time, he's doing something they would have liked to but couldn't get away with.
Yes, voting matters, but organizing matters more. Until there's people who don't (secretly or openly) cheer for policies driving the world towards a cliff, voting matters little.
And on no account should you listen to the paid political operatives suggesting that the Democratic party's previous last minute offer would have gone significantly better.
I'm quite sure I was being clear when I called Democrats "pro-war neoliberals". Still, voting Democrat would have saved all those lives taken by the Trump administration up until this point.
Some of those lives, maybe. Did voting for Biden over Trump first time around save lives? Could be. But it also allowed Trump to return, angrier and four more years into his mental decline, because it didn't do anything about the root of the problem, which is the fantastic bipartisan corruption in the US ruling class.
The Dem establishment, informed by consultants, loves to go after "gettable" Republicans. Their theory is "Any 'rational' left-leaning voter will have no choice but to vote Dem!" But what they never seem to consider is that moving to the right can indeed disgust some portion of the base who instead will refuse to turn out.
I did not miss that. That's exactly my point. Its two sides of the same coin on this issue; that's why Democrat voters stayed home. Doesn't change the fact that there would be a whole lot less heinous events in and outside the US if MAGA wasn't in power.
Ever since the ICE stuff I've been desperate to find a way to not pay my taxes - even if it means donating 2, 3x, hell 4x my tax bill to somewhere else. Obviously it's basically impossible to do this (especially if your income is all self employment income) outside of just spending every penny you earn on something that could be viably considered a business expense. So I'm wondering if I should just straight up stop working until I can relinquish my USA citizenship.
Spend down my savings and assets till I have almost nothing to exit tax, exit, and then start working again.
I don't want to fund the bombing of strangers I have no quarrel with.
If you're willing to go through all this trouble, why not just become politically active? Don't underestimate what a motivated individual can do. All these public figures (or institutions) swaying the country back and forth are only people too.
This is a laudable position, and I don't say this to discourage you or others from taking this action, but taxation does not effectively constrain US military spending, as long as the USD remains globally desirable and the US retains the ability to print more of them.
You're a good person and I feel similarly. We live under the Fourth Reich.
I do not think ceasing work is the right move, but definitely get involved politically and don't equivocate when you condemn our elected "representatives".
It might also soothe your soul to be in the company of like-minded individuals. A Quaker prayer is a sure place to find many.
I find the nuclear motivation an excuse. I mean, enrichment plants or not, if Iran wants a few nukes I am pretty sure that Russia would part with some enriched material and smuggle it pretty easily to Iran.
My theory is that Israel has dirt (Epstein files maybe) on Trump and holds him by the balls. The second idea is that this is an obfuscation campaign to have the public opinion forget about Epstein, the state of the real economy, the falling approval rates, or all of the above.
What makes you think Trump is not interested in this himself they just offered him hotels and land. Him getting blackmailed is I feel a lot of people that have voted for him are using as a coping mechanism.
The attack on Iran proves the point just like Russia attacking Ukraine if you want to protect your territories you need nuclear weapons. Canada, Greenland and countries in South America should also look to acquire nuclear weapons as once they are done with Iran you will be the next.
The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
opportunity cost-wise, iran could have poured all the money they did in nuclear enrichment instead into missiles, air defense, etc, and they would not be having as much problems as they do now.
nuclear enrichment is extraordinarily expensive and really not all that great of a deterrent when you have them. just look at fairly recent tussels between india, pakistan and china. Russia was invaded and didnt nuke ukraine.
> My advice for rulers … hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
Just need one flight from Pyongyang. Why suggest involving a major power given that you’ve just laid out the strategic need for nuclear weapons to deter interference from… major powers? Your post lacks coherency.
If nukes are so good why Israel isn't safe? Or in other words you overestimate how useful nukes are. On contrary for Iran them having nukes mean Israel have to guess if coming missiles contain nukes or not and whatever to strike back with their own nukes where as now they can freely sand missiles without escalation concerns.
Israel isn't safe? They are probably the most well defended country on the earth. A very capable domestic military and the full power of the US as an attack dog willing to do their bidding.
Nukes do not help against guerilla warfare: their destructive power is so big that they are really unreasonable attack weapon, and only a deterring factor instead.
They protect against being "policed" by big world countries.
Eg. if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons, Russia would not have been invading them (or are they "protecting" them, as promised when they took their nuclear arsenal for destruction?). If Iran or Iraq had nuclear weapons, they would not have been bombed by US.
Israeli nukes are the main reason we haven't had regime change in Tel Aviv at the hands of a Turkish/Egyptian/Saudi/Iranian coalition. Israeli nukes are why Iran has had to settle into a pattern of slow, distant, annoyance via proxy forces (which lack a capability for existentially challenging the IDF).
Anti-nuclear proliferation should now be treated as crime against humanity. Nuclear proliferation is only way to ensure world peace. Every single country should get nukes and capability to use them against each others. And be fully ready to do it.
I hope you and I never get the opportunity to learn how this would end. We’ve had nukes on Earth for less than 100 years, do you expect the next few thousand to go that well? Do you think in that time, nobody will ever roll a nat 1 on a wisdom check?
They have chosen the weekend not to disturb the stock markets. They may pull that off when they get inside support as the corruption of the regime has made it unpopular with business class and the middle class. Trump may achieve another 'Venezuela' short war.
I'm very skeptical that external attacks bring about a resurgence of domestic Iranian protest resulting in a tidy regime change. I think the downward lurch of BTC tells you how it's going to go, because Trump's mouth is writing checks others are going to have to cash and there's a lot of contradictions involved.
How is he guaranteeing immunity to members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard if they do nothing? Likewise, if he's telling the general Iranian public to simultaneously rise up and stay home, how does he plan to manage the hoped-for happy ending? In the event they succeed and topple the regime, are they just going to let bygones be bygones with the suddenly displaced IRGC while also giving Trump the keys to their treasury?
There wasn't a war between the Siam and Khmer, just some clashes plus their conflict is irrelevant to the rest of the world. I am not aware of crypto going down during that time? If I remember correctly it was close to ATH.
It kind of reveals Trump as a big liar. Not that this is a surprise, but even in his own self-image he can no longer try to shift the blame to others. Now he committed to war until regime change occurs.
Iran is a lesson to all: as soon as Israel or the US take a disliking to you you have to rush for nuclear weapons.
Iran has been the grown up in the room for well over a decade at this stage and it didn't matter one bit. You cannot appease Israel or the US because that don't want to be appeased, they want to bomb Iran into a lawless wasteland. They could have switched to a secular liberal democracy and it'd make no difference.
Don't know why you are being down voted. I mean Iran had a democracy that was toppled by the CIA when they tried to nationalise their resources in favour of a puppet dictator. If the US cared so much about human rights why not go invade Saudi Arabia.
I know someone whose clan was involved (still were when I last talked to him, before the US left Afghanistan). Of course the CIA/MI6 used local support, but they did have an impact on when, who and how. And on the power structure from 53 onwards.
Iran makes the drones that russia uses to attack Ukraine every day. Iran makes the rockets Houthis use to attack ships. Iran provides rockets andgunding to Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran is a terrorist state.
Currently an absolute shit load of C17s landing in Germany after leaving the PG region. I guess we know which country finally caved and let the US use them for whatever fresh conquest this is.
Germany is one of the most pro-Israel countries and known for using excessive police voilance against pro-Palestina protestors and strongly denies that there is a genocide going on in Gaza.
Ben Franklin was asked what kind of govt would the newly formed United States have. He was sadly right when he replied 'A republic, if you can keep it'
One of the (many) pretexts for the war, at least from Trump seems to be that Iran 'interfered' in US elections. From the Washington post
'President Donald Trump shared an article about Iran seeking to interfere in U.S. elections on his Truth Social account a couple of hours after U.S. strikes began in Iran early Saturday.
“Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” the post read, with a link to a piece from Just the News, a conservative website from which Trump frequently shares articles. Shortly after, the president posted another article from the site, albeit unrelated to Iran; it was about the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor Fani T. Willis.'
Does the US even have a functioning Congress left? Who will even believe such a preposterous lie? Even the most die hard MAGA supporter will find it hard to believe this fabrication.
It's like Trump doesn't feel the need to even maintain the fig leaf of a causus belli. He must truly feel that he is now the king of the United States to be so emboldened.
US president can be democrat or republican, republicans can control the Senate or the House, or the democrats can control the Senate or the House - regardless of who is in power, Israel's interests by US are always met. US can wreck havoc on close relations and ties with Europe, Canada, etc. - but relation to Israel never changes. You can oblivious to all this, but the truth is: Israel de facto controls the US.
Another mid east war entirely on Israel’s behalf, another war Americans will pay tax for, die for- just so Israel can keep grabbing few parcels of lands from Palestine.
There's no way you can defend the Iranian leadership. Toppling them is not shameful, just like ousting Saddam Hussein was IMO reasonable. The problem is what happens afterwards.
And you think the US, now currently sliding into authoritarianism itself, will install an enlightened democracy upon the Iranians?
This is WW3 in slow motion. The goal is to takeover Eurasia and contain the Russian-Chinese alliance by eating away at the edges and removing all unaligned or hostile energy sources.
Remember how much toppling Sadam Hussein, killing a million Iraqis, rounding up and torturing thousands of random Iraqi civilians, destroying most of the country's vital infrastructure, and selling their oilfields to American companies at bargain prices helped Iraqis? It's going to be the same for Iran. There's going to be massive suffering.
But at the end of 1 milion deaths (est.) Iraqi dollar was dollarized.
Saddam had been selling dollars for euros and talking about shifting his oil to other currencies for years. 2003 put an end to that - it was literally the first thing that was done by the provisional Govt. was to make sure all Iraqi oil was sold in dollars.
The Petrodollar was not in jeopardy anymore, and for the post-1971 system, that was essential. Same thing is now happening with Iran and Venezuela. The real goal is - China must not be allowed to have substantial sources of energy that are not priced in dollars.
Except not, the Iranian revolutionary system is very much designed around the desire to be able to rapidly replace people. The list of targets for a decapitation strike might just be way too long to be feasible.
It's the biggest military buildup since 2003. Kinda looks like they plan on overthrowing the regime. Which would be amazing for world peace considering Iran is building drones for Russia and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. But we'll see...
Yeah -- it only took a world war, massive global alliances, and tens of millions of deaths. Also, I’m not sure how political and military competence from about a century ago has any relevance to today.
> 30,000 in 2 days - half the 2-year death toll of Gaza ; With no artillery , air-strikes or heavy weapons, without million-man armies facing off in pitched battles, without health system collapsing with 100s of thousands of injuries in 48 hours, photos or satellite imagery of mass graves and bodies littering the streets
A lot of them were armed as well based on the death toll for security forces. Again where is the evidence for all this. The Iranian government published the names and details for the 3000-odd death-toll they claimed. The 30,000 number is from diaspora, citing 'anonymous health and government officials' - Who all seem to be linked to Pahlavi, Israel and US-backed sources all trying to manufacture a case for the war they are now waging. If the real number is > 10x then giving names should be very easy for CIA and Mossad.
All this is just a excuse, when this whole war is about Israel's national security interest and hegemonic ambitions. The "negotiations" were entirely over the Nuclear program, ballistic program and proxy forces - The protestors, human rights, democracy none of it were even mentioned. Netanyahu didn't visit the White House 6 times over the last year to advocate for the protestors.
I can vouch for people still there. I’m a Brit who married an Iranian who still has a large family in Iran. With the exception of one religious aunt who is married to a military man, all the Iranian family and friends we know have been hoping for intervention. We've had emotional messages from my wife’s cousin (a new mum) describing looking out of her apartment every night for the past month praying for planes overhead. Take that anecdata for what it’s worth.
1. Not everybody lives in the direct nearing of the bombing/conflict hotspot
2. They weren’t doing that great before anyway (because, you know, the islamic totalitarian theocratic dictatorship)
3. They haven’t been doing great at all lately (because, you know, protests and turmoil and the violent repression from the aforementioned islamic totalitarian theocratic dictatorship)
Agreed. I had an Iranian colleague also reach out who was ecstatic about this news. The hacker in me is curious to see how it all unfolds, as well as to see all the curious discussion that arises on this forum.
Remember when we bombed Iran at Fordow? It happened less than a year ago. Iran sent some perfunctory retaliation, and everyone forgot the whole affair. Same with this. Nothing ever happens.
What an utter betrayal of no war by DJT. This is the final straw. Era of Trump is dead, we are back to neoconservative era. I guess Adelsons are too hard to say no to.
Citizens United is an existential threat for USA. You cannot have Israeli-American dual citizens pouring $200 million dollars in elections. and that’s just her alone. This is simply not sustainable.
Exactly what part of my statement was dog whistling? Can you stop throwing around this serious accusation of antisemitism without any attempt to substantiate your claim?
Making a big deal out of Israelis—especially wealthy ones—having dual citizenship is a classic antisemitic tactic, used to sow the idea that they aren't "real Americans" or their primary loyalty is to another country.
Also: yes, Citizens United is a big problem. But phrasing your comment as if the primary problem with it is "Israeli-American dual citizens" pouring millions of dollars into politics is perpetuating the antisemitic ideas that a) all or most Jews are wealthy, and b) Jews are controlling our country/the world.
Whether or not you meant it as antisemitic, it played directly and very clearly into multiple antisemitic tropes that are frequently used to try to smear and harm Jewish people.
It’s still pretty unclear how in the US is planning to go. For example, manifold still rates the chance that Iran’s regime falls this year at 46%, which should be a given if the US put boots on the ground. https://manifold.markets/SaviorofPlant/will-irans-regime-fal...
This was doesn't benefit the US whatsoever. I am getting tired of our taxes going to another useless war, like the Iraq one, that only benefits a foreign entity, aka Israel.
Iran could have been contained and Obama was right on his approach. We don't know the details of the strikes, but I hope it doesn't go into a full blown war, but this will be another Iraq like disaster, and american people are getting tired of doing the bidding of Isreal, a country that is already mirred into doing a genocide. This war is already unpopular in pools. Iran's regime is terrible to its people, but this has the potential to be another disaster where countless of people could die.
It won't go to a full blown war. They will bomb some stuff and declare victory. Once they sailed two carrier battle groups over there an attack of some sort was a foregone conclusion.
>We don't know the details of the strikes, but I hope it doesn't go into a full blown war
Well, if the Chinese are smart, they will capitalize on this opportunity. They can prop up the Iranian regime with intelligence, weapons, and financial support the same way US & EU prop up Ukraine. The purpose would be to bleed US munitions stocks even faster than they already are, as well as increase attritional losses in platforms and personnel. China's stranglehold on rare earths and their export restrictions are making it more difficult for the US to restore its weapons stockpile. I'm sure China can crunch some numbers to identify the point of maximum weakness if the US is forced to sustain an anti-Iran air and naval campaign 30/60/90+ days. Then Xi can try to overlap that window of weakness with one of the two invasion windows against Taiwan (mostly due to weather in the Taiwan Strait). I don't think the PLA is dumb enough to try a full amphibious assault, but they could definitely initiate their blockade then.
I don’t believe China has any intention to support anyone by military means. Best case they will keep on trading and that’s it. Iran is alone. Maybe Turkey makes a crazy move to support seeing it sees itself as next in line if Iran falls. This is the biggest present to European powers, which I think will be hoping that it will keep US busy for rest of Trump’s presidency. They have the Ukraine excuse to distance themselves and let everyone get weaker while they arm themselves up. Internal political tensions in US will also give them leeway to more actively influence American politics and these will be even worse with a long war pitched against a scandal background. Then again, Trump may be a genius, get this done in a couple of months and leave everyone grasping for a new strategy.
If China didn't anticipate the US attacking Iran after Maduro was deposed and the resulting impacts on their oil supplies, then they are asleep at the wheel.
I might be convinced that the Administration was concerned about people being forced to live under Islamic rule if it was as eager for war with Saudi Arabia as it is with Iran.
(I wouldn't support it any more in that case, but I would be more inclined to believe that its motivation might actually have anything to do with "Islamic rule".)
No. There are dozens of countries with despotic regimes, including Israel. And I also have no interest in zionist or any religious ideals exported either. If this were justification we would also be bombing Israel, which has committed far worse crimes than Iran.
What a gift to the deeply unpopular Iranian regime. Nothing galvanizes support for whatever-you-have more than an external threat.
Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump.
The Iranian regime may fall, but it'll be like Iraq. We'll get something like ISIS out of it, or worse, and the place will be a complete basketcase of civil war for 25+ years. Or we'll be there for 25 years in another "forever war." Bravo.
The Iranian people overthrow their government and establish what they want?
My point is that an outside force coming in will help the current regime and/or the ideas behind it. Even if the current regime falls, democratic or pro-Western ideas in Iran will be seen as aligned with the invading force and rejected by many people who might otherwise be open to them.
Is there anyone who likes being invaded by a foreign power, ever?
>Do you have any better ideas or is it your position that evil dictators get to rule forever?
If president Trump doesn't declare martial law, start a civil war, military coup or change the constitution of the USA, he will stop ruling in 3 years. We can wait that long.
Things were starting to come undone naturally then we decided to 3rd party the whole thing
Do you think the people fighting ICE in the streets of Minneapolis would welcome a joint Chinese+North Korean decapitation strike on Washington and cruise missiles flying over Portland?
>“Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump”
I think this is a scenario Steven miller fantasizes about while playing with action figures but that’s the closest it gets to being real.
Sure derogatory terms for liberals, as you term the left, would support the armed forces if China invaded hawaii but expecting them to also support Trump is fantasy. Like supporting America and supporting Donald Trump are entirely different matters and usually divergent.
most liberals do not support the assassination of politicians. after the guy got killed, there was a massive search on social media where right wingers were looking for anyone who mocked him, and they got like a handful of people.
One of the main reasons Iraq is like Iraq is the Iranian meddling and their proxy organizations which operate in Iraq with impunity. The Iraqi government is entirely subservient to the Iranians.
As the recent wave of protests in Iran came after the 12 days where Iranian regime was dealt a massive blow, I think your analysis is wrong. Iranians consider this an opportunity. Also, the scale of violence unleashed on the Iranian public by the regime is staggering; it’s not about the regime being simply “unpopular”.
I’m a Brit, married to an Iranian who still has a large family in Iran. I’ve got to witness first hand quite the opposite to what you describe, at least with the British mainstream media. With the exception of one religious aunt who is married to a military man, OP’s comment reflects the feeling of all the Iranian family and friends we know. And FWIW, I can point to Iran on a map, and I am not Mossad.
I don't claim to have the answers, and don't necessarily disagree with you. But that's how the Iranians I know insider Iran feel. That there was pain ahead of them with or without intervention.
Iran is on the other side of the Persian Gulf from Dubai, where Iranian tourists flock to buy Disney, Apple and other embargoed products without restrictions.
Can any Iran simps explain why the regime couldn't just agree to zero enrichment and cease its weekly ritual of organized mobs chanting:
> DEATH TO AMERICA
in the streets like blood-thirsty lunatics, something for which there was no equivalent in the US even after 9/11 (mobs chanting "Death to Muslims/Islam"), let alone doing so with governmental encouragement as happens in Iran?
Do they not realize how many Americans aren't pro-Israel and aren't invested enough in the Middle East and its politics, proxy wars, and human rights abuses to want the US to support Israel in military action against Iran, except for their nuclear ambitions, and regularly professed eternal hatred for our country?
Last I checked, no one dared to attack them before they had nukes because of China's promise (made good in 1950) to use their military to defend the regime in Pyongyang, and the massive array of conventional artillery pointing at Seoul just across the DMZ, where 25% of South Korea's population resides. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192139
That they'll never, in some capacity, attempt use them against the country they weekly collectively chant death to?
EDIT: thanks, dang, for the
> posting too fast
cooldown, for all of my four posts.
> perhaps we could negotiate a peace deal in which israel and iran both agree to give up nuclear weapons and allow for IAEA inspections
I completely agree with you. Isreal has better relations with its neighbors than its ever had, has destroyed Iran's proxies, and given its obvious conventional military supremacy and lack of regional nuclear-armed foes and US-backing, its nuclear stockpile is just a destabilizing force in the region, and them voluntarily disbanding it would earn them a great deal of goodwill and a moral highground.
The current Iranian regime has destruction of Israel as one of their main goals. Not the other way around. I’m sure if Iran will have less threatening leadership Isreal will not bother them.
We don't have many details regarding the negotiations, but early reports suggest that Iran agreed to the "no high-enrichment" line. It was the proxy support and MRBM standoff weaponry that caused the talks to collapse (allegedly).
Trump launching bunker-busters on his midterm chances. Which depending on how bad it goes, potentially means impeachment and prison. Whatever it is the Israelis have on him, it must be good.
Works out great for Netanyahu though as is customary. He can be PM for a while longer and stave off his own impending trial and imprisonment. If this goes well for Israel, he might even get that pardon that Trump campaigned for tirelessly.
Not a chance. He hasn't even got the strength in his convictions to do that. Trump is just an opportunist, he'd go down like Jerry Lundegard at the end of Fargo.
Speaking of markets... Polymarket was trading yes on this happening at quite interesting odds, "yes" was trading at around 30¢ or better over the next few days just a few hours ago...
I was quite surprised to see it that low... and also to find it is inaccessible for trading if a US national. Just looking at the platform it seems predominantly US driven so I gather many people are willfully attempting to breach the ToS (and probably lie to the IRS) when using it...
Seems that they are behaving intelligently - pummeling the IRGC. If the IRGC fails the public will probably have a bit of small talk with the regime officials and functionaries while the regular army and police will probably look vague amused from the sides.
Regardless of how it ends, and it can go both ways, we're witnessing history here. This feels like a much bigger development than Russia-Ukraine. Iran is a major partner for Russia and China, mostly for military technology and oil. Hope it's not a start of WW3.
But russia-ukraine is also a much more contained war between 2 parties that will likely end in a stalemate.
The middle east is a much more tangled web of alliances and hatreds, i think the iranian regime falling would have much more harder to predict second order geopolitical effects.
I hope you're joking. This is such "Ukrainians are just Russians by a different name" logic. China, Belarus, and North Korea are deep in this conflict, so are all the European countries. There's no stalemate end to this war, only a temporary cease fire or the collapse of Russia.
Depends how you count “big”. Russia-Ukraine has had about 1 million deaths, and has completely changed how Europe thinks about security- it’s hardly a sideshow. Then again, not much territory has changed hands and there has been no regime change yet.
Not true, prior to 2022 February Russia controlled small parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, now they control them almost entirely, as well as good chunks of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts.
The casualty-to-death ratio in Ukraine is surprising for modern times, especially on the Russian side. Counting civilians, Ukrainians, Russians, I can see the death count being close to 1M. Partisan sources already put Russian combat losses at around 1.2M personnel. Ukrainian losses might be more than half what Russian losses are. The 1M deaths estimate doesn't seem outlandish.
No it's not. This is an air strike campaign, no boots on the ground. It'll end in two weeks. There is no chance China or Russia get involved, like last time, so "WW3" is completely non-credible.
The previous campaign lasted a whole 13 days and WW3 didn't start. I'm not sure why anybody thinks it'll be different now or why Russia or China would bother going to war for Iran. That makes zero sense.
> The previous campaign lasted a whole 13 days and WW3 didn't start. I'm not sure why anybody thinks it'll be different now or why Russia or China would bother going to war for Iran. That makes zero sense.
We did not move 1/3 of operational USAF capacity and 33% of our deployable Navy for limited strikes.
Okay, and where's the army? I'm not sure what you're expecting without boots to put on the ground. Are the pilots gonna be ejecting to go hunt Khamenei? This argument is meaningless. Again, none of this can lead to WW3 and none of this can turn into a protracted war as in Ukraine-Russia.
You can stop when you have no idea what you're talking about, you know.
You seem like a Trump voter who voted for no more wars doing damage control
Boots on the ground can happen at any time if Iran manages to either hit one of the thousands of US assets in the region or worse they resort to terrorism with a theatrical attack like 9/11 which ended up costing so many lives , money and freedoms ranging from TSA literally up your ass to the destruction of privacy online and offline…..and of course as we all know boots on the ground
The big difference with previous campaign is that now, the Iranian regime is facing existential threat. While the previous war was more a of a show for respective domestic publics, this one feels like there is no coming back.
Of course Russia or China won't go to war for Iran - nobody is saying that. They can get involved though, just as Europe is involved in Ukraine war.
That is not to say bombing doesn't have its uses in war. The bombing of the oilfields of Ploesti in Romania severely damaged the German war machine. But it took Russian boots on the ground in Berlin to effect a German surrender.
Being Serbian, the bombing campaign of 1999. was successful. It lead to the (temporary, 12-years long) regime change, and to the de-facto independence of Kosovo. It ended the war.
There might be boots on the ground eventually given Trump's speech.
>The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission
Iran is hitting back at US bases so it could be related to those risks, rather than a full invasion.
(Crazy idea, maybe the people shouldn’t be left in the dark about their government’s war plans by having a deliberate legislative body debate and vote on it)
It's a sinister statement, but despite everything the U.S. has moved to the region, they didn't move the stuff they would need to move for ground operations.
> And they will again appear weak and incapable, unable to help their allies
Iran and Russia have various partnership agreements, but are not allies. And Russia has already demonstrated that it doesn't support what are, on paper, close allies in the CSTO, so not defending a non-ally strategic partner really doesn't move the needle on their credibility.
China buys Iranian oil, if they’ll start to but oil from non-sanctioned countries it will push prices up. But the biggest reason for prices to go up is the risk that Iran will attack tankers in the strait of Hormuz or oil infrastructure on Arabian peninsula.
I don't think it's bigger than Russia-Ukraine - it's part of it. This is all about destabilising Iran's incumbent government, which is probably a good thing at the moment. It'll damage supply lines to Russia's Ukraine offensive, give the chance for Iranian citizens to rise up against Khamenei and the IRGC and break the command chain for their foreign proxy operations. Part of Dugan's work on geopolitics, which they seem to be following to the word (c'mon guys seriously?) suggests that Moscow and Tehran should be allied which they are behind the scenes.
As for the nuclear threat, literally Iran said it was going to destroy Israel to the point it had a massive countdown clock in Tehran until Israel blew it up, so meh. If I was on the receiving end of that threat I'd make it a policy to respond to it, escalation or not. I make no claims of the accuracy of the threats past IAEA being unable to verify they aren't enriching stuff.
Doubt it'll escalate into WW3. The only other powers involved are Russia, who are totally hands tied with Ukraine if they like it or not and China is only interested keeping what's left in its sphere of influence later through their outreach initiatives. I suspect most Middle Eastern countries will be quite happy about this conflict as they have persistent problems with Iran as well from the Houthis, Hezbollah and tens of other factions. They won't want to say anything though in case their own citizens turn on them.
The cringeworthy thing is how the US gov are communicating this and that does the operation a lot of damage. It's really quite terrible. Sounds like it was written by a bunch of 9 year olds after too many sugary drinks. Urgh.
> The cringeworthy thing is how the US gov are communicating this and that does the operation a lot of damage. It's really quite terrible. Sounds like it was written by a bunch of 9 year olds after too many sugary drinks. Urgh.
Thats because its not written for you and I. Its written for people who struggle to communicate at an adult level, which is a shockingly large portion of the US.
More like this is a small piece of the puzzle in Russian-Ukraine war. Iran plays quite a big role in supplying Russians. If Iran is taken out, power balance in that war may change too.
As big as this is, the Russia-Ukraine war pretty much marked the end of the post-WW2 era and redefined global relations between the powers. In that sense, this is yet another major shift within this new era. But also, the series of events that led to this point does connect to the Russia-Ukraine war, and maybe doesn't happen without it.
I don’t dispute that fact, but the Jews that have immigrated from there have grew up in the Soviet Union and in the Soviet education system, and therefore speak Russian
Additional context: the comment above me stated 2m people have emigrated from Russia to Israel it’s more correct to say that they have emigrated from the Soviet Union
I have to wonder how many are in governmental roles and realized they can steer the US into conflicts and ruining itself without any of those involved identifying as Russian. It's the cleanest backdoor for espionage that there ever was.
I still cannot understand what "Claud helping to conduct attacks" could possibly mean. Like, they asked an LLM to use tool calls to look up strategic info, maps, and military asset inventory and then write a plan for where to point the missiles? How is a text generator helpful here, whose job could it make meaningfully easier in the chain of command?
"Here is 10 petabytes of signals intelligences, you can run queries, give me the hierarchy of my enemy, the house address of anyone within 3 degrees of separation of their leadership or weapons industry, the next house address they're likely to be at if trying to flee my strikes, and the time they're all most likely to be there. Then schedule drone strikes on the houses."
I would not expect that prompt to work unless there's a fairly trivial query that can be crafted to give the right answer when run against the relevant datastore. If there is a query like that I would hope you have a guy on staff well-versed enough to know that and just run it himself.
Getting publicly kicked to the curb by the Trump admin mere hours before it starts another war is probably the best thing that could have happened to Anthropic. Not sure how well OpenAI's parachuting in is gonna look with hindsight. I have a feeling we won't have to wait that long to find out.
There are always unanticipated consequences in war. Argentina never thought in a million years that an attack on the practically undefended Falklands would result in the loss of the General Belgrano.
Even if you don't support US & IL standing in the frontlines against the terror regime, at least pray for the freedom of the people of Iran, 90m people held hostages by the regime. If you are pro-peace, do not be hypocrite, some wars are needed to defeat evil.
US needs to start thinking that you are not givinig someone freedom bt bombing them. You have soo much of your problems but your money printing machine is working and that is only reason that you can say that. Its not about 90m people its about your pockets...
"This survey found notable signs of the "rally-round-the-flag effect" that many observers were commenting on at that time, including very positive appraisals of some aspects of their government’s and military’s performance during the war."
Good on the US and Israel. The protesters risked their lives last month, partly because of the promise that help would arrive.
As long as the bombs land primarily on regime targets, this is the right thing to do.
I am cautiously hopeful. If there aren't widespread civilian casualties, and if enough of the Iranian army and police join the protesters, Iran will finally be free.
Oh bless, caring about civilians! How about the more than 16,000 children murdered and about 4000 child amputees. Yes, it's super reassuring that you care about civilians.
It's the Iranian people who will be the final judge of how much civilian death is acceptable.
If so many Iranian civilians die that this new revolution fails, then not only will regular Iranians continue to suffer, but all the deaths in the protests and these bombings will have been completely pointless.
If few enough Iranians are affected that they persist, then it may well be worth it.
I'm baffled at the lack of calls to boycott the Fifa world cup in US.
And at the double standards applied to Russians and Israelis in their wars of aggression.
I guess Israel can play the "October 7th" card at least which was an insane horror.
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