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Top Administration Officials Are Now Openly Admitting That America Is Israel's Bitch.
This wasn't clipped and quoted from a fringe groyper. This was posted by an official White House account.
I can't believe this shit. The United States has abdicated strategic initiative to Israel. The American armed forces in the Middle East have been reduced to reacting to and mitigating damage from Israel's operations in the theater. The straightforward interpretation of the above quote is that Israel started a war that killed American troops.
I was watching Tucker Carlson lay out this exact theory and thought, “well that’s an interesting idea. Too bad we’ll never know for sure.” And then the first thing I see when I tab over to Twitter is Marco Rubio making the exact same thought.
That's nonsense. That war started in 1970s. The official slogan of Iran is "Death to America" and you still don't believe there's a war? The fact that you are not getting action in a specific moment of time does not mean the war disappeared. As Israel itself learned very well on October 7, and US learned before it on September 11, and on many other occasions where Iran or Iran's proxies murdered Americans. You can choose when the war turns hot, or you can let the enemy choose it for you.
Yes, Israel has its own war with Iran, and it is not going to surrender because some miserable assholes in America hate the Jews. It is an independent state, with its own independent goals. It is a very close ally of the US, but still US has its own priorities and Israel has its own. US can afford waiting for Iran to build up (though it's not smart, but US is so powerful even built-up Iran is no existential threat for the US), Israel can not. So the US can use the opportunity Israel's actions provide, or can waste it. Trump smartly decided not to waste it. Describing taking this excellent opportunity to wage war (and, with luck, end this war with a resounding victory) efficiently and coordinating with US's strongest and most motivated ally as "mitigating damage from Israel" is either stupid, or strongly motivated by finding Israel's fault in any situation, no matter what happens. It is natural that Tucker Qatarlson is doing it, that's what he's being paid for, but for any person whose brain is not replaced by Qatar's money it is just stupid.
And describing American casualties as Israel's fault is completely insane. There are casualties in every war, and in US's war in Iran there had been many and will be more, until Iran's insane government, whose official slogan is "Death to America", is destroyed. Saying it's Israel's fault because Israel is US ally is just bizarre.
The tendency of some Iranians to hate America did not just appear out of nowhere in the 1970s. There was US support for the Shah. When it comes to overall tensions between Iran and the West, we could go further back to the 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran.
Who cares? They want to kill us have spent 50 years trying to kill us and now want to acquire nuclear weapons so we can never do anything about it. It wouldn't matter if they were totally justified, they're our enemy, they hate us. (Support for the Shah 50 years ago is anyways extremely thin gruel.)
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Nothing in history has ever appeared out of nowhere. There are always historical reasons. We can go to 1970s, or 1940s, or to Cain murdering Abel, if you want. All that does not change the fact that Iran, as a state, had always been in war with the US, and never considered US anything but the Great Satan. And they hadn't been quiet and theoretical about it - for them, the war is real, and violent, and if they are too weak to strike the US directly, they certainly are very willing to strike at the US by any means accessible to them. Iran (as the Islamic Republic) has always been aggressive and violent. So pretending there was no war and everything had been fine is just ignorant. The causes why there was a war is a separate business, but it does not change the fact of the existence of the war.
There were multiple Islamist terrorist attacks on US soil, none of them Iranian. Does not not look like they are very willing to stirke by any means.
They are willing to strike by means available and convenient to them. I don't think it makes sense to debate the meaning of the word "any" - the point is Iran is at war with the US, and this has been confirmed by many hostile actions, costing lives of many US citizens (as well as many other people). Is it "any" means or only "some" means that Iranians use to murder Americans, is immaterial for the question.
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9/11 was carried out by (mainly) Saudi nationals based from Afghanistan. The Beirut bombing would be a better example.
I remember reading about these guying learning to fly in USA. I do not remember reading anything about them visiting Afghanistan. Bin Laden did but he wasn't carrying the attack.
Still, @yunyun333's overall point stands: most of the Islamic terrorism which reaches outside the ME is in fact Sunni terrorism (though funded and committed by citizens of allied gulf states rather than Afghans) rather than Shiite terrorism.
Blaming Iran for 9/11 (which was at least implied) is as absurd as blaming Saddam.
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I'm not singling out Iran specifically here, I am talking about the mindset that "if there's no shooting/bombing right now, right this second, then there's no war". It doesn't work this way, and it had been proven over and over that you can't just ignore things like aggressive death cults because they aren't bothering you right now, because they will bother you later. When it's quiet for a while, people start thinking "oh, it's ok, it's not happening anymore" and they get complacent and relax - and then it starts happening again, because the underlying reason is still there. And yes, Iran is not the only reason, but it's a very major one.
There are such things as frozen conflicts, where the arms fall silent despite both sides maintaining competing claims.
Are you saying that it is right and proper to thaw any frozen conflicts, such as Cyprus, China, Kashmir, Korea?
Or take the Cold War. In a way, Iran was following the Cold War etiquette when it enabled Hamas to commit Oct 7 -- enabling local freedom fighters/terrorists to blow up your enemy was a pretty standard move both for the US and the USSR. (Though I will grant you that in the cold war, you normally had your terrorists slaughter civilians of some state which did not matter rather than your peer competitor.) Of course, they found that the cold war etiquette does not really apply to non-nuclear states.
Both the US and the USSR considered each other to epitomize everything what was wrong with the world, used terms such as 'Empire of Evil' etc. Would the world be better if the conflict had gone hot?
Often, the correct move when faced with a conflict which is not in a shooting stage is to not start shooting and hope the conflict goes away. Sometimes it does. Sometimes your enemy will turn it into a shooting war eventually, e.g. in Ukraine or Nagorno-Karabakh. But sometimes, it really works out, the world is a lot better for the USSR collapsing instead of nuking it out with the West.
Yes, of course, frozen conflicts exist. But Iran had been in no way "frozen" - it was actively seeking to establish long-range strike and nuclear capability. While at the same time engaging in a proxy war with the US.
You can't compare Iran with USSR though - US could not get into a hot war with USSR that it could have any hope of winning (at least if your definition of winning does not include nuclear wasteland). In fact, it can't even do this with Russia, which is much smaller and weaker than USSR. With Iran, there is a possibility of direct kinetic action that can be successful in removing the threat. But that window would be closed forever once Iran gets nukes and long-range strike capabilities. The latter he had already possessed, and reportedly was within months of the former. So the choice was a potentially short hot war now (I mean didn't have to be February 28, but sometime within 2024-2028), or 50-year-long cold war later. And given as US pretty much lost the capability to wage long cold wars anyway (the first Democratic president would immediately roll back any gains made by preceding Republican administrations), I don't think "it will eventually work out" was really a viable option. There are a lot of nations that hate America, and that's fine, as long as their hate is, as you noted, "frozen". But then there is Iran, who does not want to remain frozen. They want to arm themselves for the battle with Great Satan. That's the whole underpinning of their ideology - coexistence with Great Satan is not something that you intend to do long term, it's something that you do while you gather your forces for destroying it. Well, they got their final battle a bit sooner than they expected, hopefully it would be final enough.
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