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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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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.

Well, I was wrong about this.

Good rule of thumb for US military interventions: once all the toys are out of the toybox, they're going to get played with.

A message to people trying to negotiate with the US is that the longer you let the build-up continue, the more you're going to have to give up to call it off. The effort involved in assembling these many military assets in-theater makes its momentum hard to stop. The inertia is just too much.

This is a near historical universal- Rome didn't negotiate after their final siege assault was ready.

  • Rome didn't negotiate after their final siege assault was ready

Can you give some citations. My google fu failed me on that topic

In his war memoirs Julius Ceasar gives one of the Gallic cities a deadline of "you have until the ram has touched the wall", IE we are preparing to attack, and you have until the attack begins to negotiate terms. The idea being that trying to stall for time will only result in a worse terms (or no terms at all) compared to what was already on the table.

Edit: Credit to @TowardsPanna who beat me to it.

The traditional rule is you had until the siege engines were complete (which was enormously expensive and time consuming) to surrender with terms and avoid a sack (The army is allowed to do whatever they want, up to and including killing literally every person in the city they didn't enslave then burning it down on the way out.)

This was to encourage people to not force you to spend the money on the siege, you were incentivized to not break terms on a surrender because then nobody would trust you enough to surrender and many sieges ended with the besieging army half starved/half dead from various illneses.

Caesar described the principle of “murum aries attigit” in his commentary on the Gallic wars, which literally means the “The Ram Has Touched the Wall.” It referred to a Roman policy: surrender would be accepted before, but not after the battering ram touched an enemy’s city walls.

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