Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
Even for that we would prefer more than just someone rushing to be the first to post the news.
Total nuclear war? Sure, post your good-byes while you can.
Last!
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
Only if you make distinctions without a difference, which would merely be a skill issue.
Dean
Flairless
10d ago
They can have multiple reasons to want it. Among which is the IRGC's reputation for being corrupt incredibly closely intertwined at all levels of the politically-managed economy, such that each potential new revenue flow is also money for people who like having money and regional patronage networks.
Dean
Flairless
10d ago
Why are those the only three explanations you could come up with?
You insert two or three conditional cluses per explanation. You could increase your explanations merely by modifying those.
Dean
Flairless
10d ago
In all honesty I'm not sure if this criticism is being aimed at me or pro-Iran posters who are confusing me.
Neither. It's just a pet peeve I've wanted to express for some time now, but rarely had a chance to express without it being unprompted or an implicit accusation of bad faith (which this was not meant to be against you).
If someone wants to be pro-Iranian, that's a completely different thing. And the Trump administration did itself no favors for not presenting its own case to the public for a 'why,' which I am on records as believing is a perfectly valid/legitimate expectation to ahve. As I said before, if the explainer does a bad job explaining their position, the problem is on the presenter, not the recipient of a bad presentation. I'll also maintain that 'understand' and 'agree' are different issues- you can understand / reasonably characterize someone's position without agreeing or conceding to it. Both confusion and opposition to the war are perfectly reasonable, even if there are unreasonable reasons smuggled in / not being challenged.
The particular rhetorical flourish you describe, which I eventually attribute to bad faith if it goes on after reasonable explanations, just brings out a waspish part of me. After a point, I'm less inclined to go along with faux incredulity which frames the bad faith individual as the one to set the standard of reasonableness, and instead counter it with faux credulity of their claim. If they want to claim inability to understand what's been given to them, ask what how they intend to overcome their self-professed limitations.
Which is not in line with the ethos of this forum, but it is the inclination, and thus the pet peeve.
What bothers me is the posters who don't seem to have any idea what the claims and circumstances are, either out of genuine ignorance or for need of rhetorical flourish. This is the first time in years I've felt mainstream media reporting is more reliable and informative than this forum and it's gross.
'I can't understand the reason for -position X-' is a bit of a peeve of mine when used as a rhetorical tool as opposed to confession of ignorance. If someone wants to understand, by all means, and if an explainer can't be clear that issue is on them. But when people who do understand and simply don't agree with underlying premise use it with the connotations of 'and if I don't understand it it's not reasonable,' it's just a form of consensus building via a implied reasonable person standard that smuggles in the person's standards in lieu of actually engaging other positions.
It's particularly recognizable when someone repeats the premise on the same topic. There's only so many times people can profess to having never heard a respectable counterargument until it's clear the lack of respect is on their end, not the interlocuters.
Dean
Flairless
11d ago
Their claimed conditions for peace before the ceasefire, for some. Reparations from the US, reparations from the Arab countries, the end of sanctions, and right to toll the strait of hormuz were all demands rather indicative of a state that sees money streams as a significant aspect of what they want.
Seems that Iran has closed the strait again, because the US blocked their ships.
'Again' implies that they had stopped closing the strait to regional traffic.
Aside from some high-visibility propoganda passages, the open commercial data of, say, Iraqi trade does not show any such unblocking.
To be honest, seems fair. A blockade is an act of war. A ceasefire where one side blocks economic activity while the other does not seems unbalanced.
Why NaN, I wasn't expecting a defense of the Trump's blockade from you of all people. Normally I'd have expected a pithy 'but Trump said the strait was open!' to deny the Iranian role in blocking the economic activity they weren't letting pass.
'Wasted' here only makes sense from a strategic perspective of 'we shouldn't be striking Iranian targets to begin with' - in other words, your reasoning is circular. The war is bad because we're wasting munitions, and the munitions are wasted because the war is bad.
It does have the echo of the totally-not-pro-Russians of yesteryear who were very adamant that the west was giving too much aid to Ukraine, and very evasive about what an 'appropriate' amount of aid was.
Dean
Flairless
13d ago
What, are you suggesting that Iran, leader of the axis of resistance that routinely hides military assets in restricted sites, might... lie for propaganda purposes?
Or exaggerate a real but smaller number of casualties? Or obfuscate if there was a valid military objective moved inside the school during the pre-war dispersals? Or benignly omit any past history or context of the infrastructure that might lead non-psychopaths to believe something nefarious?
Surely not. If you can't believe the government that months prior was killing thousands to over ten thousand citizens in the streets, who can you trust?
Dean
Flairless
20d ago
A Democratic media organ presenting a highly inflammatory allegation with salacious details without source and treating it as credible despite no one else seemingly able to verify?
Say it ain't so.
Dean
Flairless
21d ago
In my view, this is conflating regime leadership with regime type, which is what I'd consider 'regime change' to generally refer to.
This is understandable in more personalist systems, such as dictatorships built around specific individuals with minimal backbench of successors. In these cases, so much of the regime is tied to the individual that removing the individual removes a key driver of many of the distinct policies of the regime. An example here is Russia, where while whoever follows Putin is likely to be someone at least tolerable to Putin's security state, there's no institutional driver compelling them to follow Putin's desire to be a Great Man of History.
Iran has many issues, but that is not / was not one of them. Iran had a large backbench of clerics with government or military experience, just as it hard large cadres of Revolutionary old guard who could fill in if the old guard died suddenly or gradually. In turn, the system has spent a lot more time and effort trying to ensure that potential successors will be of a type. The clerical government's vetting and veto process is what has made even 'moderate' and often sidelied official opposition amount to 'I agree with your goals but think this is a bad way to pursue it,' while the IRGC is its own self-selecting force with get-along-to-get-along patronage networks.
With the IRGC's own influence now (and predictably) shaping the supreme leader succession, that is and was predictable grounds for expecting a change of leadership leading to a change of personalities, not a change in regime type.
This aligns with my thoughts in a general sense, with different caveats and less finality. Information sphere wise, easy Iranian victory. Underlying structural power factors, though... the war doesn't have to be a US 'win' to have bad effects on Iran.
My biggest caveat is that I personally don't think regime change or even a uprising was actually an early war goal of the Americans or Israelis. I think it was a sort of hoped-for outcome that served as a public justification that they wanted to encourage, and would absolutely have taken credit for if there was any sort of anti-regime movement, but I suspect it mostly was about putting people (particularly the Iranians) in a state of mind to, well, believe that regime change was actually the intention of what was basically a month-long (air) raid.
Which is a forest I think a lot (most) of the wartime discussion missed for the trees of individual leadership strikes. Almost everyone in the region had a general sense of what the US and Israelis had in theater, which was a lot of airpower and precious few maneuver formations. And yet, discussion for so long went from Kurdish invasions to Kharg island to what have you. Some people may believe the Iranians deterred and forced each invasion attempt to fail... or, possibly, there wasn't an invasion attempt at all. At which point it's not quite axiomatic to claim victory in repelling the invaders, but that's mostly because sometimes raiders won't leave on their own accord.
As far as a type of military operation go, though, raids are used to kill people or destroy things, and possibly bring something back. It doesn't seem like there was any raid of the nuclear sites to bring back uranium, but there was absolutely a lot of IRGC (and not-so-IRGC) military-industrial-economic infrastructure hit. Just how much and how severely remains to be see, but the growth curve has definitely been set back a bit, so to speak. Almost as impactfully, the most significant people killed were generally a leadership generation that had a lifetime of lived experience that waging proxy war could stay below the level of major combat operations, or at least stay largely safe themselves (at least until about a year or two prior). Their successors (probably) won't have that same mindset, even as they will have the reduced MIE-base to work with.
I think one of the more interesting potential long-term changes / harms to Iran will be what the impacts of the leadership succession will be. The previous Ayatollah had a lot of regional legitimacy with Shia because he was a cleric first, a ruler second. In so much that the IRGC took the reigns to run the country during the conflict and has become even stronger within Iran, the war has converted Iran from a theocracy with a praetorian guards to a praetorian guard with a theocracy. There are a number of longer-term implications of that, from religious legitimacy to rationalization of the security state and the increasing resilience of a state-within-the-state that is less bound to the clerics. It may take years to decades, but I suspect the revolutionary Islam cred will degrade compared to what it would have been, particularly if the IRGC-dominated Iran gets equated to with corruption and desires for wealth... which the current list of demands centering around money aren't exactly working against.
Dean
Flairless
29d ago
While I agree that there's definitely criticisms to be made of the war even from a neocon perspective, this does read like TDS. The war on Iran is easily justifiable from a Neocon perspective(we invaded Iraq over less), and there is an international coalition- it happens to be middle eastern countries rather than European ones, but it's there.
I suspect part of the issue is a paradigm difference between the sort of people who view wars as discrete, self-contained periods of violence, and those who view the current conflict as just the latest campaign of a longer war that neither started or expected to end (hence why the war is basically an extended air raid). I don't think 'neocon' implies one way or the other, but I firmly suspect Kagan is among the former and the current war leaders are among the later.
It's a paradigm difference that matters because a Kagan-style neocon might have a binary view of war based on the expected ability to decisively win, but otherwise see themselves at peace otherwise. It struggles when put into a context where decisive victory is not possible (and thus would prefer peace), but also is also denied peace (because the enemy gets to vote and can engage in sustained asymmetric warfare).
This is why military science discussions over the last few decades have shifted away from war as a binary to the conceptualization of conflict continuums of degrees of intensity/lethality that can be moved between more easily. But that evolution in the literature was after Kagan established his professional persona, and there's no indication he's tried or wanted to update his own models, especially when TDS-posting gives him steady employment and prestigious placings.
Dean
Flairless
29d ago
In the mainstream (TV etc) "discourse", that US is a reliable ally and a positive force in the world used to be near axiomatic, not anymore.
I suppose if we ignore not just Trump I, but also Bush II, Reagan, Nixon, and of course Eisenhower over the whole Suez Crisis.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but praise for the US was never axiomatic even from Europe, let alone other places.
Dean
Flairless
29d ago
Thank you. I'll not hold it against someone to not know about a particular media personality's long-established personality, but it was confusing seeing the equivalent someone pointing at the The Guardian and positing it as evidence that even Britain was lost. Kagan has ever been part of the Trump coalition. A person who for a decade has campaigned for the Democrats against the current Republican, writing for a generally Democratic media outlet, continuing to do so is about as surprising as water being wet.
Heck, it's not even good TDS-Kagan stuff, and it's filled with the sort of shallow geopolitical, historical, or strategic analysis that's either unserious or seriously phoning it in. There are a lot of reasons why various people in the US support the Israeli, but we have the Cold War records and deliberations of why the US started supporting Israel when it did, and 'a sense of moral responsibility after the Holocaust' is not a particularly competent summation of them... or why the US support started after a period, rather than consistent. Again, we have records from the leader deliberations at the time. Or the bit about 'Israelis should question the US's dedication to this fight' in the short but also longer term. This not only treats as an error the rather obvious limiting factor in the air campaign that the Israelis clearly helped and advocated for the US to do- the factor being that raids are by their nature shorter in duration and have more limited goals- but also ignores the elephant donkey in the room of the changing Democratic Party establishment's, shall we say, anti-commitment to Israeli support. Which would be providing the perspective for the Israelis in any now-or-later consideration. And going by his last paragraph, you'd think Kagan thinks the US never faced shifting basing basing or overflight permission shifts or adhoc coalition making in the past... as opposed to it being the standard practice (and difficulty) depending on the state and their interests at the time.
As far as rigor goes, it's slop. Comfortable slop, depending on one's taste, but it is very much served to satiate (or instigate) an emotional state rather than going for analytic or even historical accuracy. Which has been par for course for Kagan in the Trump era, so eh.
When you make an appeal to reasonable deference due to a lack of systemic overreach, it is no longer 'regardless' if the systemic overreach is at what you dismiss as the margins. Your outgroup is by its nature at the margins of your consideration.
'I do not mind constitutional rights being revoked for my outgroup' is not a defense.
Why only two? Why are you unable to come up with other choices of how to perceive and proceed?
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