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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   779 thread views

Transnational Thursday for June 12, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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US has started removing non-essential people from the Middle East. People assume that this means an attack by Iran is imminent. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-embassy-iraq-preparing-ordered-evacuation-due-heightened-security-risks-2025-06-11/

The expected series of events would be:

  • Iran is very insistent on making nuclear weapons.
  • US and Israel cannot allow this
  • Israel attacks Iran
  • Iran attacks Israel and US bases in the region directly.

The only thing I can say right now is that Israel is much better at special military operations than Russia. Their rockets have actually killed several high-ranking Iranian officers and scientists on the first attempt.

IT’S HAPPENING

—inb4 source

Source

The US should have dealt with Iran decades ago. Iraq was harmless

"Should have" to what end?

The whole point of the Iraq war from the PoV of the "realist" faction in the Bush Jr White House (I would guess particularly Cheyney and Rumsfeld) was to set up a US client state on Iran's border, ideally one that (unlike Saudi Arabia) was not funding Al-Quaeda. The project failed because the only Iraqi faction that was willing to collaborate with the American invaders was Badr/SCIRI, which was also the pro-Iranian faction.

There was a long period (roughly from 9-11 to the defeat of ISIS by Russian and Iranian forces in 2017) where a rapprochement between the US and Iran would have been possible, based on the shared enemy in Salafi Jihadism (including Al-Quaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS), if both sides had been run by actual foreign policy realists.

The US should have dealt with Iran decades ago.

How, though?

Iran is mountaineous and has a large population, so a traditional war would have been protracted instead of something like the Irak war where the army surrendered effectively immediately.

Boeing just doesn't seem to be able to catch a break.

There is a tragic crash in India with one of their 787-8. And it is nightmarish - full plane, full of fuel, just after take off crashes in residential area. There seems to be survivors which is miracle in itself.

An Air India passenger plane bound for London Gatwick crashed shortly after taking off in Ahmedabad on Thursday, leaving at least 204 people dead.

The flight was carrying 242 passengers and crew when it was involved in what the airline has called a "tragic accident" in the city in western India.

Ahmedabad's police chief told the BBC that 204 bodies had been recovered, while 41 people were being treated for injuries.

He earlier told news agencies there appeared to be no survivors from the crash, and that some local people would also have died given where the plane came down.

Details are still emerging from the scene. Here is what we know so far.

As always for plane crashes pprune is the source for latest news, speculations, bickering, wild theories

https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-crash-near-ahmedabad-7.html

There's some videos here and here (cw: deadly plane crash).

Too grainy to completely exclude takeoff misconfiguration (esp on a sleek design like the 787), but at least no obvious structural failure, and I'd be surprised if takeoff misconfiguration could get that high in those weather conditions with that passenger load. NTSB's going to do some tests for fuel contamination, pilot error, maintenance faults, so on, but at the risk of speculating too early a lot of what I'm seeing points to either dual mechanical failure of the engines or electrical failure of the whole aircraft, especially the reported RAT deployment is real. Given everything else a lot of people are predisposed to think software or major design failure, but it's hard to think of a software bug or hardware flaw that would hide for over a decade and then hit both engines simultaneously. Maybe flying into a flock of birds a la Sully, but without the river and miracle?

It hit the best med school in the state during the crash. I suppose that's one way to deal with elite over-production.

That is a fucking GTA mission. We are living in a simulation

Scary and sad stuff.

Didn't know people could survive being inside massive fireballs though.

People sometimes survive absolutely unbelievable stuff because bodies just happened be in just the right way. And sometimes they die because their body has a mild shock in a very unlucky way.

The universe is capricious.

There's a lot of surprising survivals in takeoff and landing crashes: Northwest 255 is a pretty (in)famous takeoff misconfiguration that managed to kill more people than were on the flight and had one survivor.

It's early so things are still confusing, but there are reports that he was in 11A. That's right by the emergency exit. He opened it and jumped out before the crash.

I don't buy it. He'd have to time the jump perfectly and then there's still a lot of "how did you avoid debris / fuel / landing on something hard"

Somebody has to be the one in a million. Guy might just have gotten extremely lucky.

Movie main character stuff.

Didn't know people could survive being inside massive fireballs though.

Human bodies are amazing in pulling miracles of survival.

Exactly. With enough of air travel and air travel accidents, it's not extremely surprising that surprising coincidences happen now and then. In 1970s a Serbian stewardess reportedly survived after aircraft exploded midair. ("Air safety investigators attributed Vulović's survival to her being trapped by a food trolley in the DC-9's fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground.")

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