2rafa
21hr ago
But why don’t you ascribe any agency to Trump, here? You consider it necessary that one must have manipulated the other into war.
2rafa
1d ago
From the recent Merz photo call:
The first question Trump's asked about the Middle East is if Israel forced his hand. "No, I might have forced their hand," he responds.
Referring to Iran, Trump says: "We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion they were going to attack first."
"I didn't want that to happen," the US president says. "So, if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand."
2rafa
1d ago
It’s certainly a very convenient defense going into midterms. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense though. From an Israeli perspective this is all 6-9 months too late. The IRGC is too deeply embedded to overthrow with a decapitation strike on the civilian/clerical leadership and the biggest protests in 30 years were quickly and mercilessly crushed a few months ago. Nuclear sites and stockpiles are dispersed and deep underground and it would take a nuclear strike or boots on the ground to have any chance of destroying them now.
The timing and other (eg WaPost) reporting suggests that MBS / the Saudis gave their go-ahead last week, which would be a major turnaround from the last two years of rapprochement with Iran on their part.
Possibly something to do with the negotiations; it was very interesting that even Oman and Qatar were hit by Iran.
2rafa
1d ago
I don’t think in the end that there will be war with China. The Chinese are more rational than the Iranians or Cubans, and the Taiwanese are not as hostile to unification as many imagine. “The plan” for Taiwan (gradual rapprochement under the KMT or successors) is still viable. The US did not nuke the Soviet Bloc in the Cold War. Iran and Cuba are actually more internationalist than China, much moreso, they both even had Leninist ideas about exporting global revolution.
"How do we fight China" is the question on the mind of American planners, and the answer is "we don't, not really".
We don’t. You semi-dispute that answer but I think you discount it as a full possibility. At the least it is far from certain. Ideologically the zeal is not there. China is a rival in grand terms but not in local ones. China lacks even America’s ideological mission. If the Taiwanese accept peaceful reunification in a moment of crisis for America, what happens? A broken, fractured American government sends an expeditionary force to Taiwan? That is ridiculous.
The Middle East is the grand arena for Anglo civilization, as it has been for centuries, arguably for a millennium; the English were after all among the most zealous crusaders. Taiwan doesn’t have an influential diaspora preaching war (Jensen Huang would rather a peaceful, quick reunification so that he can resume frontier GPU sales to China), it doesn’t have a hundred million Americans who believe its fate portends the eschaton.
The heart of American warmongering simply isn’t in conflict with China. Nobody really cares about the Chinese. The racial insults are about as bland and unprovocative as “cracker”. They are not some terrifying martial enemy. You can read Islamic propaganda about a global caliphate. A Chinafied America just looks like America with longer working hours and less visible homelessness. What is scary there? Social credit? We have it at home. Even being responsible for the pandemic didn’t move the needle, not really.
The only reason to fight China is out of boredom.
2rafa
2d ago
It’s hard to picture exactly what a failed state in Iran looks like. Certainly it doesn’t look like Libya, Iraq or Syria.
Why? Firstly, the specific dynamics of Sunni sectarianism that drove conflict in Syria and Iraq don’t exist. Iraq is not ethnically homogenous but it is mostly Shia. Secondly, the longstanding, centuries old tribal dynamics of postwar / civil war Libya also don’t apply.
There are ‘factions’ in Iran. There are the Azeris. There are the Kurds (although more assimilated and pacified, even compared to their neighbors). There is a small Sunni minority. There are some Afghan refugees, although many have been returned recently. It has been a relatively contiguous polity for a very long time, unlike much of the Levant.
What does “failed state” Iran look like? Kurdish and Azeri militias fighting each other in the ruins of Tehran? Bourgeois university professors squaring off against remnants of the IRGC? It all seems pretty unlikely.
2rafa
2d ago
Bombing is a strategy, the objective is what’s relevant. Is the objective here bad? Yes, that’s why I opposed this action. But that doesn’t make the strategy impossible.
2rafa
2d ago
It really feels like the usual parade of cope and trope about China that has been circulating in the public discourse ever since it bootstrapped its way up from worse than sub-Saharan poverty to a world power in 45 years
Or, alternatively:
After a brief, less-than-century-long catastrophe largely of its own making, China - historically one of the oldest, most developed, highest IQ, most populous, most civilized places in the entire world - recovered to its natural position in the hierarchy of nations, much in the same way that Czechia becoming prosperous again 30 years after communism ended should not surprise us in the slightest.
China being rich and prosperous is its default state for most of the last 3000 years.
2rafa
2d ago
You can dynamically align the interests of the local elite with yourself. The US and UK did this with large parts of the Middle East (not least the Gulf) already, and quite successfully.
Don’t kid yourself that these people are ideological zealots. Every few years there’s a scandal in Iran because senior IR regime figures are caught on vacation, wives unveiled, chilling in some vacation destination. The son of the ayatollah is a westernized property developer. There are a lot of people even at the top whose devotion to the revolutionary crusade is limited at best. The reason they didn’t concede wasn’t ideological zealotry but the knowledge that if the whole regime was overthrown, which is possible in a kind of Gorbachev-cascade, they’d have nowhere to hide from the people angry about 50 years of domestic repression.
That said, this will go badly because the most zealous anti-government protestors were killed months ago.
Of course it’s still possible but the attacking force need to go back to premodern offensive tactics like killing or relocating entire villages to prevent the existence of any civilian population that could give succor to guerilla fighters. This makes it nonviable in our civilized age.
But it’s also why Trump’s tactics are smarter than anything in the War on Terror. In Venezuela and Iran, he leaves open the door to regime change but doesn’t seek it - he just wants to kill enough leaders that the next guy is willing to deal. He doesn’t have the humanitarian aims that the neocons did where on some level they did imagine that Afghanistan could become a Western democracy.
2rafa
2d ago
The US carved out a state in Korea despite the endless onslaught of millions of Chinese bodies in a zerg rush and the risk that the Soviets would send millions more. That’s very impressive. There was no need at the time to fight further and harder to get a few more map inches up the Korean Peninsula, which was broadly seen as just another offshoot of communist China.
Houthi air defenses were, to be fair, constantly being replenished by Iran. The Houthis are also a tribe who spent decades hiding out in the caves and mountains of Yemen, and still have forces concentrated there. The Iranians have a conventional military built along standard lines with standard bases, supply chains, etc.
In addition, there were ways of defeating the houthis but they involve a return to the brutal counterinsurgency tactics of the mid-20th century that are still considered, for now, too inhumane.
2rafa
2d ago
Israel already sells its technology to third-party powers that can easily export it onward to Iran (and already have trading relationships with Iran), this isn’t really a gotcha, there’s no defense against that happening.
According to the Washington Post it was also a sudden burst of last-minute Saudi support:
“Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack, despite his public support for a diplomatic solution, the four people said.”
After the strikes last year, attacks on proxies, the mass protests, the calculation by Iran’s enemies (principally Saudi Arabia and Israel) seems to have been that this is as weak as they’ll ever be, so might as well attack now. Unfortunately, that they’re as weak as they’ll ever be doesn’t mean they’re weak enough to be overthrown.
2rafa
3d ago
It actually seems impressive how many Iranian missiles the Gulf states have seemingly shot down. A few casualties here and there, but nothing crazy yet.
2rafa
3d ago
Most Lebanese expats in America are Christian Maronite elites, many of them even left before the civil war blew everything up. Places that received more Muslim immigrants - especially Australia where about 40% of the Australian Lebanese population are hardline Sunni Muslims - have problems with them.
2rafa
4d ago
I don’t think that this has turned into a happening that big yet. Maybe if the regime falls or looks like it, or they actually fully close the strait, but not yet.
2rafa
4d ago
Trump abruptly cancels press conference scheduled for shortly (ie this US morning). First possibility that comes to mind, given the reported strikes on the ayatollah’s compound, is that they aimed for the supreme leader and either didn’t get him or aren’t sure yet, such that a triumphant morning announcement has been delayed or cancelled.
2rafa
4d ago
I honestly think that if Trump had been fast on the trigger and started targeted bombing IRGC field offices, police stations, local army bases during the height of the last protests it might have been enough. As you say, hard to know for sure but there were at least hundreds of thousands protesting in Tehran which is close to the level where a motivated force can overwhelm non-hardened government sites. But today? There were some renewed student protests this week, but nothing on the level that could topple even a weakened government.
2rafa
4d ago
For the Iranian government to fall, there would have to be mass protests today (or maybe tomorrow) coinciding with more strikes. I don’t know, that feels unlikely.
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
—-
More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
There was just as much reciprocal persecution of Jews in Arab and Persian lands, in fact 18th century Western European Jewish travelers to Jewish communities in Persia lamented the extreme persecution of the local Jewish community, which was worse than anything in Europe at the time. A specific animus against ‘European Christians’ seems unfounded.
The difference is that outright expulsion was rarer in the Middle East because those were already relatively confessionally diverse societies with various random leftover minority groups, both ethnic and religious, from Assyrian Christians to Samaritans to Zoroastrians to Alawites to Eastern Catholics etc etc. The ruling elite might viciously oppress minority groups but these societies didn’t (until the late 19th century) generally consider the possibility of outright ethnic cleansing. It is unclear to me that being expelled is actually worse than being extremely cruelly oppressed by the way.
By contrast, European Christian societies were more exclusive, regularly fighting wars of religion that were explicitly designed to cleanse territories of other flavors of Christianity until comparatively recently, and Jews were often caught up in that fervor. Ethnically and linguistically they were often still very much diverse, but religiously they were more exclusive, and they fought more internal wars, which again have a habit of leading to ethnic cleansing regardless. In addition, and this is again rarely noted even though it’s obvious, the “110 countries” are mostly European because a large swathe of Mitteleuropa consisted of hundreds of tiny micro states for centuries, whereas the Middle East was mostly divided (at the macro level at least) into much larger polities like the grand caliphates and later Ottoman Empire.
If the US had taken out Saddam, picked another senior Baathist and told them to be a little nicer to the Shiites, and kept the Baathist army mostly in place, that could indeed have happened.
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