BANNED USER: antagonism, personal attacks
>Unban in 1d 12h 26m
VIM
No bio...
User ID: 3609
Banned by: @Amadan
VIM
11d ago
The answer to the questions in your final paragraph, as I see the current state of US policy is that Iran is going to be systematically excluded from middle-eastern affairs. This wouldn't have been my personal policy preference, but I see why they're doing what they're doing. The Sunni are the vast majority, they control most of the countries, they have most of the oil, etc. The combination of Israel, Egypt and Iran as balancing various parts of teh arab world is over for now.
I think what Trump is doing is trying to crush the "Shia Crescent", partly because the two ends of that crescent got themselves into fights they couldn't win. Whatever the outcome of the current air campaign/Hormuz crisis, I doubt Iran is going to be in any shape to be secretly funding and arming other people for a decade or so.
In the current conflict the Sunni countries (excluding the UAE) pretty much just sat there and took it as Iran obliterated their air defenses, military bases and essential infrastructure with missiles and drones. Whether this is because they fear Iran itself or because they fear their own people rising up if they get too cozy with Israel, either way their oil output has cratered and Trump's blockade currently aims to drive Iran to the state that Iran has already driven every other Gulf nation to (except Oman).
If anything it looks like it's the US that's going to be systematically excluded from Middle Eastern affairs as Gulf countries discover that cutting a deal with Iran is the only way to get oil to market without getting struck by Shaheds. In the long run the Aya-toll-ah could generate more revenue for Iran than oil exports ever did.
Meanwhile, various ethnic and religious minorities which have been broadly Shia-aligned/sympathetic (Yazidi, Kurds, Druze, etc.) have been systematically mass murdered, driven out or politically marginalized across the middle east. ISIS did a lot of this, AQ a fair bit etc. The result has been to drastically weaken the various groups that Iran could hypothetically use as agents against Sunni powers. The middle east is being arabized and sunnized.
None of those groups were "Shia-aligned"; those are American-aligned groups, and their slaughter is a demonstration of the impotence and short-sightedness of American imperial policy. Yet more proof of Kissinger's old adage that to be America's enemy is dangerous but to be America's friend is fatal.
If Iran were to make a comeback in Syria it would be through funding pissed off (mostly) Sunni Syrians in the territory that Israel occupied after the fall of Assad to create a kind of Hamas-Hezbollah hybrid. If anything, fighting the US directly creates more opportunities for this sort of cross sect collaboration; the Houthis started working with Al-Shabaab and AQAP after they achieved "street cred" fighting the US Navy during Prosperity Guardian and Rough Rider.
VIM
17d ago
The air campaign against Serbia was largely ineffective. Milosevic didn't fold because he was getting bombed, he folded because the Russians cut him loose.
VIM
17d ago
What are the strongest ideas that make the anti-war side's case in terms of what should be done about the situation?
The geopolitical realist position held by Mearsheimer and Pape is that Trump set America down the path to defeat the moment he chose to start a war with Iran. There is no "positive outcome" available, just bad and worse outcomes. Cutting a deal with Iran or leaving them in control of the strait is bad, fighting an inconclusive war for months if not years that leaves all of the Middle East.
LBJ refused to accept a small embarrassment in Vietnam and in escalating he turned it into generational disaster. Had he taken the L at the beginning America would have been immeasurably better off.
VIM
17d ago
If it's obviously true then do you agree that Trump leaving right now would be a good move, since Iran is already beaten?
VIM
17d ago
Would you say the Russians were foolish to not start nuking the Ukrainians after they failed to achieve total victory in the first month?
VIM
26d ago
The fact that the current plan is to fight to return to the status quo ante suggests that the plan has gone wrong
Does Iran know that? They inaugurated a cardboard cutout as supreme leader the other week btw
So America is getting humiliated by a cardboard cutout?
VIM
26d ago
I cannot help but notice that you aren't very good at logic if you think blowing up a bunch of Marines on foreign soil is in any way comparable to blowing up American civilians in an NYC skyscraper.
If Reagan thought Hezbollah just wanted to indiscriminately kill Americans then why did he withdraw from Lebanon and how did said withdrawal succeed in ending Hezbollah attacks on Americans? It's almost like your argument makes no sense whatsoever except in some sort of counterjihadi fever dream
VIM
27d ago
"Our airstrikes have achieved total success! The enemy supplies of chariots, crossbows, even their stores of black powder have been totally obliterated! Unfortunately we still need to figure out a solution to the ballistic missiles and suicide drones but if you exclude all of the weapons the enemy is actually using to attack us then we've destroyed their military"
VIM
27d ago
In increasing order of importance,
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Because hitting power plants discredits Iranian internal opposition and makes Pahlavi look like an archtraitor
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Because of legal issues and the risk of future prosecutions for war crimes, some proportion of the military might refuse the orders, possibly a significant enough proportion to make carrying out said orders untenable
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Because Iran is a big country with a decentralized power grid whereas the Gulf countries and Israel are tiny countries with highly centralized grids (and much greater dependence on desalination), the anti-Iran coalition doesn't have escalation dominance in a "War of the Power Plants"
VIM
27d ago
Past precedent suggests that unilateral disarmament ends in your regime winding up like that of Gaddafi, not Saudi Arabia.
VIM
27d ago
But it's not only that, and you are putting forth a strawman. I'm sure the men who drove a truck bomb into Beirut and killed two hundred Americans knew exactly what 'Death to America' meant: killing Americans.
No, they didn't just kill two hundred random Americans, they very specifically killed two hundred Marines who were associated with the Israeli invaders of their country. Then when Reagan responded by withdrawing from Lebanon they ceased further attacks rather than pressing the advantage to start targeting defenseless tourists
Kind of proves the point of the fellow you're replying to: "Death to America" is shorthand for "Death to the American government", which is shorthand for "Death to the American Empire", which is shorthand for "Death to the American Empire in countries with Shia populations that are occupied against their will". If it just meant "kill Americans!" then they'd go for tourists rather than Marines and they'd do it all the time rather than almost exclusively against armed troops in Shia countries.
VIM
28d ago
Indeed, though rather than applying to the US or Iranian governments it more aptly applies to the Occupiers of the Government who chose this war vs the Occupied tax cattle expected to pay the price for it.
VIM
28d ago
As far as I can tell the "negotiations" were just an excuse to avoid having to carry out "Power & Bridge Day"
The current cunning plan is to blockade the blockade and prevent Iranian or Iranian-approved ships from leaving. One might give this plan more credit if a month prior the same admin hadn't given Iranian oil sanctions relief under the pretense of reducing the pressure on oil markets. To flip-flop now guarantees the worst of both worlds: Iran still made billions from selling into the oil price spike and now the market is going to be hammered going straight from "peace in sight!" to "Strait even more closed than before!"
At least some oil bulls will get to eat lobster
VIM
1mo ago
Israelis have the bomb.
6 million is a lot more than 750k, especially when almost every single person has significant military experience.
So did South Africa.
Who's gonna do it?
The US after the 2028 or 2032 election at the hands of an AOC, Mamdani, or Fuentes-like figure.
Imagine that instead of American carriers providing protection to Israel they instead imposed a Gaza-style blockade. Imagine that instead of paying Israel's neighbors to play nice they were instead paid to keep their borders closed. Imagine if the cargo planes full of munitions went to Israel's enemies instead. Imagine if, instead of providing veto protection from the UN, the US were a hostile force, imposing international sanctions and embargoes. Now imagine that an exception is made for outbound flights from Ben Gurion airport, so that Israeli Jews always have a golden bridge to escape across.
How long do you imagine Israel would last under such conditions? My guess is about a month.
VIM
1mo ago
Every nation on earth that isn't resettling terrorist groups inside their country is an "apartheid state" by this measure.
Last I checked the Native Americans were given full citizenship nearly a century ago despite also constituting an "armed and hostile people who live beyond its borders within its borders". This arrangement where land is kept in a permanent state of occupation because it would be demographically inconvenient to annex it formally is entirely unique to Israel; I'm sure the Mestizo regimes of South America would have created "Indioland" and "Negroland" to shove all of their inconvenient minorities into as well if they thought that was a real option.
VIM
1mo ago
But in most places, definitely including here on the Motte, you can map with nearly 100% consistency someone who is "critical of Israel" or "anti-Zionist" to "really hates Jews." It's true out in the public amongst the "Free Palestine" demonstrators, it's true here among the posters who suddenly have deep humanitarian concern for Palestinians and Iranians. Do they have similar concerns for, say, Ukrainians and Russians? Or the participants and victims in any other conflict anywhere else in the world? Of course not.
I'm an isolationist and my problem with Zionist Jews is that whenever a principled non-interventionist like Ron Paul comes along he inevitably finds himself baselessly slandered as an antisemite by human detritus like Ben Shapiro. A binary choice between the bloodthirsty warmongers and so-called "antisemites" is the easiest choice in the world by such a standard.
VIM
1mo ago
Sure, "Gazrael" would be the wealthy and thriving area
What, like the Warsaw Ghetto?
VIM
1mo ago
At this point, "Israel is an apartheid state" is exactly the tell I was talking about because it requires imposing criteria that aren't used anywhere else in the world. You can look at Arabs who actually are living in Israel and see that they are not apartheided.
Actually, the South Africans, literally the prototypical example of "apartheid", had a plan pretty similar to that of Israel where they would cram all of the inconvenient blacks into tiny plots of land called "Bantustans" that gave South Africa all of the cool benefits of sovereignty without all the lame obligations that come along with it like "citizenship" or "human rights".
For some reason, though, nobody fell for this trick when the South Africans tried it. I wonder why that is?
You can argue it *should" be, but there's the tiny problem that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians want that. What the Israelis would like is for the Palestinians to flourish in their own state that won't dedicate itself to destroying Israel. That's not on the table. What the Palestinians want is largely why we are where we are.
On the contrary, this is what the former head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group notable for being even more hardline than Hamas, had to say:
We have lived together in peace for centuries. And if Netanyahu were to ask if we can live together in one state, I would say to him: "If we have exactly the same rights as Jews to come to all of Palestine. If Khaled Meshaal and Ramadan Shalah can come whenever they want, and visit Haifa, and buy a home in Herzliyah if they want, then we can have a new language, and dialogue is possible.
So even the most hardcore terrorists have said that they'd be perfectly willing to accept a "South Africa" solution and that they actually wouldn't mind officially considering Gaza to be a part of a unified Israel-Palestine. The Israelis are the reason such a solution isn't on the table, not the Palestinians.
VIM
1mo ago
If America wished it would be absolutely trivial to make Israel a country in which nobody would ever want to live.
VIM
1mo ago
First, there's this idea that Israel is the primary/principle cause of all instability in the region, and that if we suddenly removed all the Jews and gave back the land to the Palestinians, we would have peace.
They aren't the cause of all instability but they certainly are the primary anchor that keeps American politicians dedicated to expend seemingly endless blood and treasure on pointless wars in the Middle East.
VIM
1mo ago
I'm not assuming a "hypercompetent" Iran, I'm assuming that Iran is willing to sacrifice its oil exports in pursuit of delivering unto Trump a biblical midterm asswhooping such that no future American President considers messing with Iran under pain of a fate worse than Jimmy Carter. It isn't even an "assumption" since this is exactly how they've responded to threats to their exports in the past, both against Saddam decades ago and against the Israeli strike on their gas fields a few days ago.
On the contrary, you seem to be operating in a "dream world" in which Iran wouldn't endanger their oil exports even to achieve victory against the most powerful empire in human history. I'm pretty sure the assumption in Tehran was that their tankers would be seized by Day 3 and they'd have to survive on their northern trade routes.
I like how you completely glaze over the definitive evidence for the '53 coup, which is what actually matters here.
No, he posted the evidence right below. Are you blind?
You're the one Gish Galloping by demanding infinite evidence and then refusing to budge an inch when said evidence is provided.
You need to prove that Iran did it, to start. But once again, he did answer it:
Again, do you have faulty vision? Do you suffer from severe brain damage? Is your IQ below the level of legal retardation? Are you suffering from severe inbreeding? Are you just trolling?
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