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I would be shocked if this results in boots in the ground. Like with Soleimani, seems like gamble that stops with the air strikes (plus whatever Israel is up to).
People exclaiming loudly about how dangerous this is while also campaigning for increasing escalation in Ukraine against an actual nuclear adversary are not serious people.
I'm highly against more foreign intervention but this seems fine to me. A nuclear Iran seems to be very bad in very obvious ways.
I've long been interested in how people, when talking about Ukraine, use generic terms with little meaning like "increasing escalation" to make comparisons of things that obviously aren't comparable - in this case, the direct use of the American bomber fleet, which obviously hasn't been happening in Ukraine and does not seem like something that is happening.
American weapons guided with American intelligence have hit Russian targets. I fail to see how different that is to bombers dropping bombs.
Whose bombers?
Tbh the distinction between forces attacking and just supplying other forces that attack is somewhat lost on me, but a cursory reading of cold war era conflicts (Vietnam, Afghanistan etc) clearly indicates states consider it to be very different.
Kinda has to be, if every single country involved in manufacturing any bullet used to fire at your troops is now at war with you, things would escalate very rapidly.
All the more so in the current age of globalized industry.
That said, yeah, if your country is selling fully manufactured high end weaponry to another country with the basic knowledge that its going to be used in an extant conflict, you're clearly tapdancing on a somewhat blurry line.
Selling gasoline to a belligerent country is at least plausibly deniable, since it has civilian uses.
There's an obvious difference between tapdancing on a blurry line and flagrantly, obviously and unambiguously running hundreds of meters on the other side of the line, which is what sending the bombers would be doing.
Yeah, sending the bombers, training the pilots, providing support services and maintenance and okaying their use, but denying any role in the outcome because "well WE didn't fly the planes" is patently silly.
If there are two guys having a shootout and you go over to one of them, hand him a gun, hand him the bullets, help him load the magazine, give him a few tips on marksmanship, and point out where the other guy is hiding, the other guy could pretty rightfully consider you an enemy combatant at that point.
But I dunno how many layers of obsfuscation are required before it becomes a wash.
"We sold the bombers and training to this other country, who then lent them to the belligerent country, and it just so happened that this other country has access to our satellite network to help with targeting, but we didn't tell 'em to do anything with that" is probably the furthest you can get without being obviously culpable.
And that's only because the intermediary country does have the option to just not do the thing you're hoping they do.
It is a gentleman's agreement left over from the cold war, to allow nuclear-armed states to fight each other without actually fighting each other. In exchange, both parties can avert the specter of nuclear war. The United States did not declare war on the USSR when Soviet pilots were training the North Vietnamese, and in at least one confirmed instance actively fired upon US pilots, nor when Soviet "advisors" were the ones actually manning and running the North Vietnamese SAM sites, and the Soviets did not declare war on the US after we returned the favor in Afghanistan. The Chinese and the Soviets did not immediately leap to arms against each other during the Sino-Vietnamese War.
It applies even in cases where both parties are not nuclear powers, or only one is a nuclear power and the other is not, and it allows both parties to avert the specter of true total war, which would be so destructive as to not be worth it. Because it creates deniability. Note I did not say plausible deniability, the United States was not fooled for a second by the Chinese People's Volunteer Army in Korea, but the United States did not want to invade China and China did not want the United States to feel as though it had to invade China. A Chinese army, flying the Chinese flag, shooting Americans flying the American flag means war. There is no two ways about it. But a Chinese army flying the Korean flag, or no flag, shooting Americans flying the American flag means that the Chinese can intervene and the United States does not have to declare war. Oh the US could have declared war if the decision-makers really truly wanted to, but the Chinese gave them an opportunity to not declare war, and they took it.
It's not about how silly it is, nor how obvious the culpability is. It is about providing an out. Even if it is a very silly out, even if it is a very obviously artificial out, it is an out. Thus do Moscow and DC remain something other than glowing puddles of radioactive soup.
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