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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26056 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Jury finds defendants guilty of terrorism-related charges in attack on Prairieland ICE detention center

Eight defendants were convicted of rioting, providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and use and carry of an explosive — the explosive being fireworks. Daniel Sanchez Estrada was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record. He and Maricela Rueda were also convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents.

Description of the event from Wikipedia:

On July 4, eleven people[1][21] gathered near the Prairieland Detention Center at 10:37 pm,[22] several dressed in black "military-style"[23] or black bloc clothing with their faces covered.[1][21] A suspect was seen removing a wagon filled with fireworks from a vehicle and pushing it towards the detention center.[20] Law enforcement officials allege that the participants conducted a "diversion" to draw ICE officers out into the open; fireworks were set off, the group split up into several smaller groups, and a participant spray-painted vehicles and a guard structure with slogans including "Ice pig" and "traitor".[2] One small group remained near the facility entrance, apparently keeping watch.[21] The ICE officers called 911 to report the incident to local law enforcement.[23][22]

Only one person (Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist) in the group fired shots, nonfatally hitting an officer. The defense argued that the other members of the group intended only to peacefully protest and not to bait out officers for Song. This, of course, brings us back to the classic, airplane-on-a-treadmill style "Does Antifa exist" debate.

https://www.keranews.org/criminal-justice/2026-03-13/prairieland-detention-center-ice-antifa-shooting-terrorism-trial-verdict-texas

The jury heard several perspectives about the night of the shooting and the events surrounding it: a recap of Morris’ interviews with law enforcement after her arrest and direct testimony from cooperating defendants Sharp, Sikes, Kent, Thomas and Baumann.

All told law enforcement and the government that they didn't expect violence the night of July 4 — just a noise demonstration with fireworks. Morris told investigators she suspected Song used others present at Prairieland as a distraction so he could pull off his "fantasy" and run away.

The cooperating defendants' answers varied on whether a "North Texas antifa cell" existed. Some testified the people in their circles never seriously referred to themselves as members of antifa. Others named specific defendants they considered "antifa." Defense attorneys later sparred with Kyle Shideler, the prosecution's controversial antifa expert, over his testimony that the defendants' actions aligned closely with prosecutors called a handbook on antifa beliefs authored by Mark Bray. The prosecution wrapped up its case during closing arguments by describing Song as a "ringleader" who worked with his politically-aligned inner circle to coordinate an ambush at Prairieland, escape and hide any physical or digital evidence.

All these articles are light on evidence, so let's go to the DOJ press release.

Evidence at trial revealed that most of the Antifa Cell involved in the Prairieland attack looked to Benjamin Song as a leader. Song acquired firearms that he distributed to co-defendants and recruited members at gun ranges and combat sessions he conducted, as well as from various ideologically aligned groups. For example, defendants Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, and Savanna Batten were part of a group that created and distributed insurrectionary materials called “zines,” according to trial evidence.

Witnesses testified that an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song can be heard on police bodycam video yelling, “get to the rifles!” and then he opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover. Police arrested most of the Antifa Cell shortly after the attack, many near the scene. Benjamin Song escaped and remained at large with the help of others until his capture on July 15, 2025.

Trial evidence demonstrated that collectively, the Antifa Cell acquired over 50 firearms in the Fort Worth/Dallas area prior to July 4. During trial, the government introduced numerous chats of the members, who used an encrypted messaging app to coordinate with each other that had auto-delete functions, permanently deleting some Antifa Cell members’ communications. They also used monikers in group chats to hide their identities, and some of the planning chats included only trusted participants. The chats introduced at trial revealed that members in this limited group conducted reconnaissance and discussed what to bring to the riot, including firearms, medical kits, and fireworks:

"rifles might make the situation more hot if this is the case either way" (Rueda)

"I think you'd be surprised. Cops are not trained or equipped for more than one rifle so it tends to make them back off" (Song)

From the texts released, it doesn't seem like there's firm evidence that they knew what Song was planning. Of course, many of the messages were deleted, so it's hardly exonerating.

Fireworks are gunpowder, so yeah, explosives.

And count me in as one of those rolling their eyes about "so we all turned up dressed in black at the same time at the same place and acted in a co-ordinated manner but it was all pure coincidence!"

So like, I understand that these people and their lawyers are just trying to find a way to stay out of prison, but it's still absolutely stunning to me that anybody can say with a straight face that a bunch of folks who all showed up at the same place at the same time wearing the same thing carrying loaded rifles and explosives, who then all participated in throwing those explosives at a bunch of police officers, were actually a bunch of totally unrelated individuals with completely independent and totally legal motives after one of them shot a police officer. Like yeah, I get it, you want to put up the best legal defense you can and you can't exactly admit that you were knowingly organizing terrorism, but who are they actually expecting to buy that?

Never underestimate 'There can't be any "members" of Antifa. It's just an idea, not an organization, bro.'

I get a distinct 'something is off' feeling every time I hear someone say that. I don't know why exactly but I'd like a name for it. Like when you hear something you know is wrong but also know that if you tried to explain why you'd be getting nowhere.

Never underestimate 'There can't be any "members" of Antifa. It's just an idea, not an organization, bro.'

The top comment in /r/law on reddit: https://archive.is/FNOnK

Because it looks like the person using it is creating a fig leaf of an argument so an allied group will never be held responsible.

It's an attempt at bullshit. It isn't really about truth but is just an attempt to convince (or, more likely, just deflect and waste time long enough to dissipate actionable outrage) so what's the point in trying to get into a factual debate about it?

The person has revealed themselves to be a partisan.

As a side note, that's one of the things I find really annoying about these Leftist activist types. For example, suppose they block a highway and get arrested and prosecuted for it. I would have a tiny bit of respect for them if they would own up to what they did, take their licks, and accept their sentence of 100 hours of community service or whatever. But instead, their MO is to spin, lie, etc., do whatever they can to avoid punishment for their wrongdoing.

What does your tiny bit of respect matter to them compared to not being punished by the laws they believe are unjust?

What does your tiny bit of respect matter to them compared to not being punished by the laws they believe are unjust?

That's an interesting question and I think it touches on one of the core parts of the issue I was raising. So there are laws against blocking traffic; disrupting gatherings; arson; destroying people's property; etc. Do Leftists believe that these laws are unjust? I tend to doubt it. If someone destroyed their property; disrupted their gatherings; etc., they would freak out and demand that the offenders be punished. So what's really going on is that they simply believe they have carte blanche to break the law because in their self-serving judgment they are "punching nazis" or "fighting fascism" or whatever.

A point that MattyY makes is that acts of civil disobedience work because they play on existing faultlines and sympathies. Which is why stopping traffic for Gaza does nothing. It's just a cargo cult licensing their Main Character Syndrome.

That is why they should care, insofar as they care about their cause at all and it's not an excuse to impose their will: you don't need to earn omw_68's specific respect, but you probably need to earn it from some segment of society if you want to make sweeping changes to very big systems or policies.

A point that MattyY makes is that acts of civil disobedience work because they play on existing faultlines and sympathies. Which is why stopping traffic for Gaza does nothing. It's just a cargo cult licensing their Main Character Syndrome.

I basically agree with this, although I would quibble with your use of the phrase "civil disobedience." To me, "civil disobedience" means that you (1) openly and notoriously disobey a rule which you genuinely believe is unjust; and (2) accept the consequences of breaking that rule as a way of making your point. (So for example, a black person intentionally sitting in the "whites only" section of a bus station.) Nobody who blocks traffic for Gaza is seriously claiming that the rules against blocking traffic are unjust. Moreover, instead of owning up to what they are doing, these people (typically) lie, cheat, and play games in order to avoid legal consequences.

I think that when you block traffic for Gaza (or some other cause), it's more akin to terrorism than civil disobedience. To be sure you are generally not killing or maiming people (although you might be if you end up impeding an ambulance) but you are still inconveniencing people and interfering with their legal rights, albeit in a minor way.

In another discussion, I called this "terrorism-lite"

But in any event, as mentioned above, I basically agree with you. For terrorism (or terrorism-lite) to be effective, there needs to be a minimum amount of sympathy in mainstream institutions such as the news media, college administrations, and so on. With Gaza, at least in the United States, there is some degree of sympathy, but there is also a lot of organized pro-Israel sentiment. So it's difficult to accomplish anything with terrorism-lite.

Wrongdoing? What wrongdoing. They did no wrong. And besides, punishment would harm their enjoyment of those social acitivities. Taking punishment isn't part of the plan; punishment for socially just acitivities would be injustice, after all! If it can be avoided, then that is justice. And what do they care about your opinion, anyways? You're probably a fascist anyways, or at least a violently-silent bystander who refuses to take the correct side.

They're engaging in a socially accepted and promoted social activity (just not accepted by the wrong people whose opinions are wrong) with a thin veneer of sanctity-within-the-civil-religion, why ever from their own perspective would they want to take punishment for it?

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - George Orwell

Just like the "youth club" one town over isn't an antifa cell, it just so happens to be staffed and frequented by people who organize questionably-legal political activities together while wearing antifa regalia, quoting antifa slogans and distributing antifa media.

It's a good thing we can just close our lying eyes and decide to stop seeing.

"Antifa activists" is a parallel to "Environmental activists". You can't be a member of "Environmental" either, because it's just an idea, not an organization.

Nobody cares about that fine distinction for environmentalism, like when Sea Shepherd ships ram whalers or when Last Generation Canada members throw paint on museum pieces. Outsiders recognize that the disparate groups (and non-affiliated individuals) all share a common goal and philosophy, and treat them as a coherent entity. This is as it should be.

Antifa is the leftiest of the left wing, so its adherents use tactics like "[not] Fucking Tell[ing] Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand". 1984 may have overreached a bit when it said if you can't name something you can't think about it (hence the Party making Newspeak), but it sure does make it harder to legislate against something if you can't establish a definition first.

Nobody cares about that fine distinction for environmentalism, like when Sea Shepherd ships ram whalers or when Last Generation Canada members throw paint on museum pieces. Outsiders recognize that the disparate groups (and non-affiliated individuals) all share a common goal and philosophy, and treat them as a coherent entity. This is as it should be.

Why is it "as it should be" to look at environmentalists using low resolution? Surely there is a significant difference between a scientist studying climate change models who calls for using less fossil fuels, on the one hand, and Ted Kaczynski on the other. And plenty of people make the distinction, indeed it is unusual not to.

Notice that you yourself picked two particularly militant examples of environmentalists.

Even if you mean "nobody cares about that fine distinction for militant environmentalists", that is not true. Most people make a distinction between people who throw paint on museum pieces and Ted Kaczynski, and recognize that not only do their actions have different moral qualities, but they can also in no way be said to be part of the same organization. Indeed, since Kaczynski acted alone, his actions cannot be characterized as being the actions of any environmentalist association whatsoever.

To look at people who share common (or somewhat common) goals and philosophies as belonging to a coherent entity is the type of low resolution thinking that perhaps makes sense in the face of an existential threat, when there is no time to try to use higher resolution and to do so would decrease one's emotional willingness to fight, but even in that kind of a situation it would be just an expedient, not something that is good in itself.

Why is it "as it should be" to look at environmentalists using low resolution? Surely there is a significant difference between a scientist studying climate change models who calls for using less fossil fuels, on the one hand, and Ted Kaczynski on the other. And plenty of people make the distinction, indeed it is unusual not to.

When moderates (of whatever topic) benefit from the actions of extremists, I start to suspect that they are only moderates out of practicality and convenience. If one person in a crowd starts throwing molotovs, then peaceful law-abiding people should either kick them out, or leave. If they close ranks instead, then I suspect the only reason they aren't committing arson themselves is practicality and convenience.

Outsiders using low-resolution judgment means that movements have an incentive to clean up their act. A high-resolution one would let them reap the benefits and face none of the consequences.

Notice that you yourself picked two particularly militant examples of environmentalists.

You have to choose controversial examples, otherwise it's rhetorically useless. Would you have learned anything about my opinion if I said "Both used oil recycling advocates and anti-CFC advocates are 'environmentalist'"?

Indeed, since Kaczynski acted alone, his actions cannot be characterized as being the actions of any environmentalist association whatsoever.

I called out non-affiliated individuals above. Why do you think formal organization matters at all? Leaving aside his environmentalist bona fides, he was certainly part of a movement. Does your (presumably negative) perception of his actions just poof into irrelevance when he died? Would it have mattered if he founded and passed on a shell corporation to promote his work, making an "association" of 0-1 people?

Outsiders using low-resolution judgment means that movements have an incentive to clean up their act. A high-resolution one would let them reap the benefits and face none of the consequences.

In other words, you can't complain about being called a communist unless you have enemies to the left.

Pretty much.

I tried looking for that comic with someone politely asking for a wallet while backed by a crazy guy with a gun (who he disavows, of course), but I couldn't find it. At least he had the good grace to say the right things, even if he didn't take any concrete actions.

A bit late to the party, but it was a Chainsawsuit comic, originally done in response to GamerGate.

I question your characterisation of Kaczynski as an environmentalist. I don't recall him mentioning climate change or acid rain even once in his manifesto. He was opposed to modernity primarily for what he saw as its deleterious effects on the human psyche, not for its impact on the environment.

Even if you mean "nobody cares about that fine distinction for militant environmentalists", that is not true. ... but they can also in no way be said to be part of the same organization

Unless you specifically mean Ted Kaczynski, and not violent eco-activists generally, this is complete nonsense, and of course people think they're a part of the same movement.

The reason Kaczynski doesn't fit is that he was following a different set of ideas than environmentalism, not because he was violent.

Even the militancy is hardly relevant. Few people bother drawing distinctions between violent and not violent Nazis, or violent and non-violent Jihadis.

Jihadis and Nazis, whether non-violent or violent, are pursuing evil aims. At least some environmentalists are pursuing good aims.

Bringing humanity to the light of Allah, doesn't sound evil in and of itself to me, and even a good leftist will find lots to agree with even in the OG Nazi party platform. So I don't see a reason to allow this kind of picking and choosing for one, but not the other.

I don't think this is the same kind of "picking and choosing". Sure, not all the aims of jihadis and Nazis are evil, but all jihadis and Nazis pursue at least some evil aims - whereas many (most?) environmentalists have wholly good aims. Thus any given jihadi or Nazi, even if they're non-violent, has some amount of evil intent, while the same is not true of a given non-violent environmentalist.

(And anyway, insofar as "bringing humanity to the light of Allah" is ultimately a euphemism for "enslaving humanity to the tyrannical will of a supernatural being" I would consider that an evil aim in itself, even before the specific of shariah law are taken into account.)

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The same people who say that, also say that "white supremacy" or "nazis" are a real threat to society, despite "white supremacy" also being "just an idea, not an organization," and also literally zero of the people they accuse of being "nazis" self-identify as such.

The term for this is "being disingenuous," aka "pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible"

I mean, it isn't an organization the same way, say, the NAACP is, where there are local chapters and a national office and membership lists and a full-time staff. It's more like the Crips, where various local crews of a dozen guys will wear the colors but aren't beholden to any larger organization. This is assuming that people still identify as antifa and it isn't just an insult political opponents lob at people they don't like who presumably engage in certain practices.

Indeed, these people didn't identify as Antifa- IIRC, they identified as members of the john brown gun club, one of several groups that people refer to when they say 'antifa'.

Splitters!

'There can't be any "members" of Antifa. It's just an idea, not an organization, bro.'

"Corruption" is just an idea too; that doesn't stop us from punishing those who advance its cause.

The difference is that corruption refers to a specific set of practices, many if which are illegal and most of which violate ethics rules. Antifa is a theoretical set of political opinions that can result in illegal activity, but the activit isn't antifa in and of itself, and holding certain opinions isn't illegal.

corruption refers to a specific set of practices, many if which are illegal and most of which violate ethics rules

No, corruption is the idea that your personal goals are so important that you're willing to break the law to accomplish them. Antifa, therefore, is simply corruption by another name.

and holding certain opinions isn't illegal

It isn't illegal to be a member of the Mafia either, but they're never punished for that; they're punished for the evil, corrupt actions that naturally arise from that idea taken to its logical conclusion.

No, corruption is the idea that your personal goals are so important that you're willing to break the law to accomplish them.

I think this is an overly expansive definition.

No, corruption is the idea that your personal goals are so important that you're willing to break the law to accomplish them.

I'd say "betray your responsibilities", not "break the law". Not all corruption is illegal and not all premeditated crimes are corrupt.

Give a fig leaf so a sympathetic juror can do some jury nullification?

Not just he jury. Usually they operate in areas where the prosecutor and judges are friendly.

If something like this happened in Portland only the shooter would have been charged and they would have found an excuse to let him plead down.

Not just he jury. Usually they operate in areas where the prosecutor and judges are friendly.

I agree. I do think their biggest mistake was trying this in Texas.

In this case, though, the charges were federal, so local judges and prosecution are less of a factor.

I suppose one of the major mistakes these people made, in terms of getting away with their crimes, was committing them in Texas where a jury of their peers will consist entirely of Texans.

There are shitlibs, resistancelibs, and blue tribe tribalist tards in Texas. Probably very few in Johnson county, but immigration jails aren't built in downtown Dallas.

The first mistake was committing the crimes in the first place. The second mistake was using electronic communications to discuss their crimes. Committing them in a jurisdiction where the jury might not be as sympathetic as it could be is pretty far down the list.

The first mistake was committing the crimes in the first place

Seems to me that apart from shooting the cop, they weren't committing any crimes that haven't successfully been committed all over the country for years by their fellow travelers. Seems that shooting a cop is the threshold for getting the book thrown at you, and as long as you don't do that you can just keep doing low level terrorism forever.

Zoomer criminals just leave the damn phone at home challenge [IMPOSSIBLE!!!].

Leaving your phone at home can also be presented as evidence of intent to commit a crime, especially if your usual pattern is to carry it with you everywhere. This has been successfully presented as circumstantial evidence by prosecutors at trial in various cases.

I think the argument is intended to be that since you carry your phone everywhere and the phone was at home, you must have been too.

If the intent is to use the phone as an alibi based on location data, the issue is that modern phones track a lot more than just rough location. Eg. unlock/lock events, movement, checking notifications, etc. For a habitual phone user, a gap of a few hours with absolutely no activity in the middle of the day looks pretty odd. Especially when a digital forensics expert could compare it to the pattern of life for the last six months or something.

And if they get any indication that the suspect left their house (eg. vehicle GPS, red light camera, neighbor's Ring camera) now they are caught lying, plus leaving the phone at home looks like preparation for an illegal act.

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@urquan

Yeah, the unstated premise there was "assuming you don't get caught". If you get busted in flagrante delicto then I can see how that would make things worse. But if you even hoped to get away with it, not having the tracking device in your pocket with a time-stamped trail is a good idea.

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All these articles are light on evidence, so let's go to the DOJ press release.

Or the RECAP docket.

It's incredible to me the sheer fucking amount of paperwork required just to put somebody away for committing a crime that everybody knows they did. Of course, it helps having pro-bono activist lawyers from the NLG with unlimited resources to spam the court with procedural issues, but god damn. It actually disheartens me to see how difficult or even impossible it would be for the legal system alone to actually make any sort of dent in the extremist left.

Indeed. Every time I read even a probable cause affidavit I'm both impressed by how clear they are--they're good writing--but also disheartened at how expensive they must be. This is a limited resource!

Not trying to argue that they're PhD level documents or anything, but I'm surprised that every salty ragged looking detective has to be able to write one at that level.

Not trying to argue that they're PhD level documents or anything, but I'm surprised that every salty ragged looking detective has to be able to write one at that level.

They're just Mad Libs. There's standard things they write that work in court, that they have been trained to write. So all they have to do is fill in the details. Of course, this also means they may or may not have any relation to reality. Same goes for police testimony.

I got a culture war hot take for ya'll in the dying hours of this thread while I marinate infront of a screen on account of I fell off a fucking ladder and rolled my ankle like a QUA-SAUN'T:

Qualification before I even start: obviously its bad if anyone is killed, and I would prefer if none of this happened, or if it did happen it stayed as geographically isolated as possible, but given that it hasn't:

I am not fan of Iran or it's ruling class, but if I had to pick between them and the gulf states, I'd pick them every time. The gulf states are full of degenerate lazy assholes, run by people who are dumb as shit outside their little lanes, ruling over people who are parasitic insects on the global economy, and I don't give a shit what happens to them or anyone who chooses to live there. It is the worst place I have ever been payed to go, I would rather go back to bucharest and get chased down a half finished bridge by stray dogs then spend another hour in Dubai, and anyone who likes it has no taste; a crime worse than being a bastard.

What the fuck is even the point of these places? At least Switzerland and Singapore have some class as they wash your blood money; I just don't want to hear another dude talk about how nice his place in dubai is. Bitch, Dubai is rich person Mcdonalds, be a real man and get you a place in Macau and another in Monaco and a third in Sun Valley.

It's interesting because getting wealthy from oil happened at the same time as "wahhabism" was spreading. Although apparently there's some dispute if that is actually the correct term.

In the 70s the idea was running spreading that any music other than singing over drums was un-Islamic. Similarly there were strict views about women's clothing. So even though the Ottomans certainly had music and women's fashion there was domestic pressure against promoting it. Cat Stevens famously converted to Islam in 1977 and felt he had to give up his music career.

Also gulf donors took over funding far left groups in the West after the Soviet Union fell, and they managed to make Palestine one of the premiere causes on all campuses. That's actually a pretty incredible achievement of foreign policy.

The worst crime of the Gulf Arabs is their gullibility. They invested in those vanity projects (The Line being its ultimate symbol), basically redistributing the oil windfall back to the West. This is deserving of much mockery.

But on the merits, they've exceeded every standard I could expect from them. They maintain stable, rich nations. They are trying. They are buying world class AI experts hoping to get some high value-add economy going, building datacenters, constructing attractive (not to you yeah, I get it) cities on worthless patches of the desert, despite negligible culture of sophisticated urban life. Their royalty has some real assabiyah and is concerned about its legitimacy among the native masses – more so than the elites of the West. This time they are doing it without the cheat code of Persians carrying their intellectual jobs. I respect all people who struggle against the odds. It would be quite sad if they failed.

I agree and also respect the Arabs for what they are trying to do. I view places like Dubai, similar to places like Las Vegas or phoenix, as a testament to the idea that you can really just decide to make someplace nice. Even with unlimited amounts of money that kind of infrastructure takes functional governance. It’s sad that in this age I don’t think the us could do as well. For instance do any communities in California besides San Diego have any kind of desalination capacity?

I don't know that desalination capacity is really the best measure of competence. California doesn't desalinate because, most of the time, there's enough water in the mountains that can be impounded that it doesn't make sense to desalinate. Consider that California supports large-scale agriculture that the UAE doesn't have anywhere near the capacity for. Urban water use is a drop in the bucket compared to that. Desalination is energy-intensive, and brine disposal is a real problem, so it's only done when there aren't any better options.

I claim that given the state of Californian infrastructure they couldn't do it even if they wanted to.

The barriers are all legal and paper based, which are actually more real than gross physicality it turns out.

See also: Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable from SSC. It's getting to the point that geology is more mutable than society.

Half jokingly California is a third world country with a 100,000 outer space alien enclave.

That's not true.

We've got at least half a million outer space aliens in the enclave.

Yeah, I'm also really not into that dubai style, but I've now heard from multiple people (some I know in person, some just online) who worked with arabs that they've been impressed with how they at least try to think in a genuine long-term perspective on how to keep their society running in a way that isn't just a complete capitulation to the west. Not that I'd expect that to work well long-term, anyway. For an example, the demographer & pronatalist Lyman Stone has commented on the foresight of the UAE to explore possibilities to keep up the birth rate before even dipping below replacement rate. Most other countries dipped below replacement half a century ago, told themselves it's just delay and will surely fix itself, noticed after ca 20 years lol no it doesn't, then told themselves that surely infinite immigration will surely fix it, and now, well, the results speak for themselves.

Iran is an oil state that completely ruined itself through religious revolution and now regularly mass murders its population whenever they vet the balls to protest every couple years and exports terrorism throughout the region. Are the gulf states retarded? I guess so. Would any sane person prefer to live in Iran over them? No.

That is true. It is also true that the people of Iran are more productive than the sum of the entire population of the other gulf states, who need to import third worlders to do their physical labor and europeans/americans to do their intellectual labor; which populations are prohibited from entering into their society.

If that isn't the essence of degenerate decadence, I don't know what is.

Broadly agreed. Iran atleast capable of putting together a solid situation whilst essentially everything South of there has nil chance outside of occasional massive petrochemical windfalls that they will inevitably squander in the longrun.

Dumb analogy: is the Arab Gulf basically the Avatar of the world? A bajillion dollars and zero cultural impact (at least in the West).

I'd say their cultural achievement runs the other way. There one of the best maintained non western cultures.

As an Egyptian, completely wrong. The vast majority of Arab culture, i.e music, movies, films and intellectual writings, are produced in Egypt or Lebanon. Gulf arabs merely consume.

Also, while outwardly they might seem non western, the elites are just as westernized as every cosmopolitan rootless elite out there. They drink, smoke weed, fuck prostitues, buy German cars. There's nothing unique about them.

No cultural impact he said sipping his alcohol and coffee with sugar while sitting on a sofa and wearing a cotton shirt posting on a machine that works on algorithms made with algebra.

Those are products of yeast, north africans, Persians, Persians, Peruvians, and Persians again! Three out of six of those are IRANIAN, hence my bias.

algorithms made with algebra

These are named after Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi who was, well, Persian and who in his youth was likely Zoroastrian. Though kudos for Arabs who after conquering Persia allowed such a talent to flourish.

I hope you aren't claiming that the Arabs were the first to discover fermentation.

alcohol

I don't know if that's what he meant, but the etymology of the word alcohol is Arabic.

Naturally, but I don't know what that proves.

Yes. Loan words exist. Including from Arab sources within the past few centuries.

Not clear why they are being credited with cotton and sugar. Ancient Egyptians and Indians had cotton and traded it to ancient Romans. The middle East being between Europe and East Asia means they were the middle part of larger trading networks. So Indian numerals and far East trade such as sugar cane went through them. But I don't give them credit for being in the way of Chinese and Indian traders. Adopting Indian numerals was a good call on their part.

Alcohol is worldwide, and wasn't cotton well known in Egypt back before it was really "Arab"? And sugar is... either cane-origin or beet-origin, neither of which is indigenous to the Gulf.

The word "alcohol" is from the Arabic, though the Arabic word had nothing to do with the intoxicating sprit. As is the word cotton (English lost the characteristic "al", which still exists in Spanish "algodon") -- here, Arabs brought it to Europe but didn't originate it. Cane sugar also came to Europe through the Arabs, but originally from India.

Ah. So the cultural impact is just the linguistics, rather than anything about the concepts themselves.

Except for coffee.

What did they produce in the last few hundred years that isn't the various forms of Dubai Chocolate (stinky vs not)?

Mostly the logistics of spice trading as attested by the Portuguese, and the large scale development of desalination technology.

Eh? I think being a traveling merchant or a trade hub doesn't count by my standards.

I'm sure they've helped with the cost-reduction scaling curve and overall adoption and implementation of desalination, but they did not invent it, and as far as I'm aware they do not directly export it or have independent cutting-edge R&D that isn't just hiring a Western firm. I could well be wrong here, please correct me if I'm missing something.

Are we giving all the civilizational accomplishments of the Chinese to the Mongolians since they had whatever tenure as colonial overlords?

I'll take this bait.

Because there is a bastard here. And it's the one that laughs at industry.

You sit in some People's Republic of Museums and you spit on the few who dare to do instead of waiting to die. Because they do with so little class.

Has Howard Roark no taste? Why does he insist of making gawdy metal things, why doesn't he just lay there and die? Is Hank Rearden not a dangerous fool making monuments to his vanity instead of giving his all for boomers and children like good Jim Taggart?

A few poor bedouins lucked on some, not much, but some, oil. And those poor bedouins were sly enough to turn this not into an endless war, not into a brutal theocracy, but into one of the most successful cities in the world.

And people like you, who feel small in the presence of achievement, will instinctively need to lower it. The search of greatness must simply be a sign of one's vanity. Poor Yankee doodle so classless he thinks the feather in his cap is macaroni.

But it's not low. Greatness is great. Bending a desert full of essentially nothing into a paradise is nigh miraculous and demonstrates clear ability that commands respect to the wise, or at least, the sane.

In the end if it does get destroyed, the world will be worse for all the people this city has welcomed and one of the few places in the world that rewards skill with opportunity will be lost, hastening our spiral towards world spanning destruction and mayhem in exchange.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship death.

Sorry, missed this at the time, but I liked reading it so here: a late response in kind in honor of intresting prose.

You sit in some People's Republic of Museums and you spit on the few who dare to do instead of waiting to die. Because they do with so little class.

They ain't doing shit, what they have is the consent of the people who actually do shit to pretend to own the land the go juice comes out of; as opposed to Iran who owns their go juice land by their own blood and effort.

Has Howard Roark no taste? Why does he insist of making gawdy metal things, why doesn't he just lay there and die? Is Hank Rearden not a dangerous fool making monuments to his vanity instead of giving his all for boomers and children like good Jim Taggart?

Much like those jagoff fantasies of a shitty writer and welfare leach, the Gulf state imagine themselves captains of industry when they are pathetic ticks living and dying by the consent of their betters; the great historical cultures of the world that walk their goat paths and deign to not instantly obliterate them.

A few poor bedouins lucked on some, not much, but some, oil. And those poor bedouins were sly enough to turn this not into an endless war, not into a brutal theocracy, but into one of the most successful cities in the world.

And people like you, who feel small in the presence of achievement, will instinctively need to lower it. The search of greatness must simply be a sign of one's vanity. Poor Yankee doodle so classless he thinks the feather in his cap is macaroni.

But it's not low. Greatness is great. Bending a desert full of essentially nothing into a paradise is nigh miraculous and demonstrates clear ability that commands respect to the wise, or at least, the sane.

They took their great gift and turned it into ashes and CO2; they received their inheritance of 5 talents and built a glittering babylon on sand, the great whore of the world who accepts all abominations. Where is their world bestriding colossus? Who builds their great monuments, forges their weapons, who is it even who constructed the substrate of their society? It's not called the Petro Riyal or Dihram.

In the end if it does get destroyed, the world will be worse for all the people this city has welcomed and one of the few places in the world that rewards skill with opportunity will be lost, hastening our spiral towards world spanning destruction and mayhem in exchange.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship death.

Unless it changes, when it gets destroyed the world will continue turning, having gained nothing and lost nothing. The great river of crude and trade and lucer will lurch and slosh until it finds it's new level, and collect into new tributaries and oxbows and lakes, and the opportunity to rise will have been squandered on libidinal ephemera.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship mediocrity and pretend it is virtue.

Having been there: They deserve credit for choosing a dude and not biting the hand that feed, we can give them that. Other peoples have managed less with more. That said:

The degeneracy comes from the fact that they took that enormous amount of money that comes out of the ground, and who exploits it? They have third world poors do their physical labor, they have professional class westoids do their intellectual labor (me!), they import all their artists and cultural production from those who have the mercenary souls needed to take it (me again!), and they half heartedly manage when they can be bothered, until a western technocrat jingles some keys at them loudly enough that they stop eg. plowing a trillion dollars into impossible megaprojects wouldn't even make sense in the post scarcity future.

If tomorrow all the oil in the world vanished, after the dust settled Russia would still be Russia, the USA would still be the USA, Iran would still be Iran, Venezuela would still be Venezuela, Canada would still be Canada, and the gulf arab states in question would be populated entirely by tribal nomads and ghosts.

This discourse is all too common and may be true of much of the GCC but you targeted Dubai specifically, which essentially exists on the premise of diversification because they knew the oil would run out. The rulers we're literally spelling out that exact scenario as something that needed to be avoided.

What then is one to make of a place whose economy is now a mere 1% petrochemicals? Does that falsify your judgement or validate it?

I suppose one could make arguments around the strategic necessities of Abu Dhabi and of the ostensible tensions created by oil. But were there no oil there would also not be funding or motivation for this war.

Dubai has already had several huge pullbacks when the oil money was disrupted. The 1% number is inaccurate since it's pulling in oil money from across the region and still heavily subsidized by the Emirates who have larger amounts of oil.

As somebody who's seen the Dubai government investment process first-hand a lot of their future proofing efforts are more elaborate scams from the connected to absorb resources than productive endeavors

As someone who's seen many investment processes from the inside, that's essentially all of them and not really a good yardstick.

It's scams all the way down. Competence is really measured in how much you can wrangle the scammers into having to produce actual value.

But Dubai is pretty infamously known for being created by slave labor. You claim the rulers bent the dessert into a successful city, but neglect to mention who actually did the manual labor. Slaves. Slaves create the buildings, slaves maintain the infrastructure. Without slavery, the city collapses. That is not a successful city. Successful cities are good places to live for a large majority of their inhabitants. Mistreatment of foreign workers, trapping them with debt, and stealing their passports so they can't leave is all pretty well documented at this point. The city is a hellhole if you are not a tourist or rich.

I see that the city is an impressive feat from the perspective of human ingenuity and mastery over nature. But the leaders deserve no praise. Anyone so explicitly utilizing modern day slavery for an achievement that is impressive but obviously totally unnecessary is a pathetic loser.

By all means, dare to dream and attempt what others believe to be impossible. But if your construction project that mainly exists to show off how great you are, requires trampling on tens of thousands of human lives, then it is time to let go of it, and do something else.

That's entirely fair.

But is the claim that it's all built on the back of slaves substantively true?

The largest estimates for this phenomenon by NGOs top out at around 100k people, about the same absolute numbers as the UK (though much more concerning proportionally). A big issue that ought be stamped out for sure, but hardly a systemic necessity to run the place.

My estimation is that it's one of those real social problems they have, as any society does, and that they're trying to address it. Not that it's some kind of ostensible social choice, like their political system.

Iran's issues in contrast seem much more like deliberate choices of its ruling class.

While I broadly agree with this point I heavily disagree with their choice of architecture. Why must everyone make the same souless glass and concrete blocks everywhere? If you're making all this money at least do something more interesting with it than making a bigger glass tower than anyone else. The artificial islands are working in the right direction imho.

People focus on the Burj because it's iconic, but there's a pretty wide diversity of architectural styles in that city, from this to this.

War brings out the worst in people. Especially on message boards where no one is actually in danger of dying. But we sure have opinions about who deserves to die and who doesn't.

Dial it down.

To hell with opinions. I'm making an argument. I shall like to see it answered. As is after all the point of this forum.

In response to the few things in there that might have been an argument I'd say that:

  1. Bending a desert full of essentially nothing into a paradise is NOT nigh miraculous if you do it by throwing money at it, unless you think that just having oil money is miraculous. It's better than just using the money to go to war, but that's an extremely low bar to meet.

  2. There's a difference between demanding that some specific person not waste their money (I agree that it's their money and they can do what they want) and noticing that everyone is wasting their money and making unfavorable inferences about the society from that.

I don't think you have any understanding of the logistics involved in something like this if you think one can just throw money around and end up with Dubai.

Most of the GCC got more oil money to play with and don't get anything like it. Despite some actively trying. Why is this?

Have you been to the region? There's an abundance of Dubais and microDubais built to resemble each other through Oil brute forcing

I lived in the region for some years doing business. I don't think that's an accurate characterization.

People like to copy models that work, and the financial ar hitecture of the region is very much grown around the oil business, not least because all modern industry flows from petrochemicals.

But the UAE is not Oman is not Saudi is not Qatar. There are significant differences, which is why some projects succeed and others fail. If there were none, Saudis would just be blowing past the whole gulf out of sheer scale.

Exactly. Good for the emerging world peoples and tax-avoidant who've been able to take advantage of the Gulf States, but the whole thing is borne on essentially a massive oil lottery win and all the neighboring states sans oil are absolute messes. Being able to just buy luxury space communism for a tiny population (which isn't going to necessarily last and has already crumbled before) for 50-100 years is pretty piss poor in the terms of broader civilizational accomplishment.

Would you make the same argument about the industrial revolution? And if not, why not?

Industrial Revolution is a series of processes that is widely copied and not a random windfall.

Exactly. Good for the emerging world peoples and tax-avoidant who've been able to take advantage of the Gulf States, but the whole thing is borne on essentially a massive oil lottery win and all the neighboring states sans oil are absolute messes.

Except Jordan.

Is Jordan a Gulf state? I figured they're more Levant.

... which, granted, a lot of the Levant is a hot mess, but for different reasons unrelated to oil or lack thereof.

No, Jordan isn't a Gulf state; it's a neighboring state, however.

Hear hear.

They trade oil for a high standard of living, and Dubai banks the oil money locally.

Now, to be clear, Iran is in some ways morally superior to these countries- at least the locals do actual work instead of abusing indentured servants, for example, and the gulf states don't have stellar human rights records either. But let's not sugarcoat the Iranian regime; they're fucking retards whose sine qua non is being enemies of America, who have seemingly failed at both their good governance and their religious goals. The same cannot be said for the gulf states.

Literally, the gulf states are the bull case for monarchy. You know what most Arabs do when they discover an ocean of oil? Have a civil war and let the winner squander the money on terrorism, with no benefit to the people. Saudi citizens might be lazy fucks, but they don't do that. Saudi Arabia is a developed country with a high standard of living, that's managed to avoid sanctions. Same for Qatar, Kuwait, etc. Iran hasn't had a civil war recently, but you know what they spend their oil money on? 'Cause it ain't good governance. They're out of running water in the capital. That's very unlikely in Riyadh despite supplying water to it being a harder problem. The Gulf Monarchies are basically achieving both their human and religious goals, even if they don't get all their foreign policy goals and have poor human rights records. Yes, they cheated by using oil money, but this is not a foolproof loophole- just ask Nigeria, Venezuela, Libya, Iraq, etc. Does the median petrostate benefit the people at all? I guess Russia's oil money enables a military machine that provides economic stimulus.

For avoiding the petrostate trap, hats off to the gulf Arabs. This is actually a hard problem and they solved it.

The Gulf Arabs are absolutely in the petrostate trap. They don't make things, they just function as a shady tax haven and cheap-energy zone for certain industries. They have ambitions in AI, not in making AI models but buying GPUs made by industrious countries, hosting AI models made by clever companies, exploiting their cheap energy.

The Gulf buys US weapons, they buy Chinese weapons, they buy (or attempt to buy) US protection. Who makes the actual oil equipment and drills? Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Samsung... The Saudis have some Chinese made ballistic missiles waiting for Pakistani nuclear bombs they think they paid for.

Iran makes their own oil equipment. Iran's MAPNA Group makes gas power plants at world standards. They are trying to export technology, not just oil. Their oil industry has problems, as you would expect given sanctions. But it is their oil industry and not imported oil industry.

Iran makes things, they build their own missiles, drones and weapons. They develop their own strategies to take advantage of their enemies' weaknesses. Their proxies do a good job.

The UAE's proxies in Sudan haven't covered themselves in glory and they're merely fighting Sudan, not exactly a tough opponent. The Saudi army has all this fancy US gear. And how do they perform against the Houthis? They got wrecked by the Houthis.

Iran is far superior to the Gulf Monarchies in governance. They may be an enemy of the US but they are not stupid. There's a huge power gap between Iran and Turkey and Pakistan at the top end of the Islamic world, then there are the Gulf monarchies and below them assorted Arab riff-raff. The Gulf states don't know how to fight or do anything correctly. Their manifest impotence in this war is obvious, America has to do all the fighting for them.

The gulf states turned their oil money into everything they want, without needing to kill tens of thousands of their own people from time to time. They have high human development, high incomes, and did that without needing to abandon their way of life/traditional culture.

Not bad for petrostates with average IQ in the 70's- the most comparable countries are shitholes in sub saharan Africa. Has Nigeria transmuted its oil money into anything good?

Iran produces better tech than the gulf Arabs, I'm willing to believe that- but unlike the gulf Arabs it doesn't keep the water on in its own capital city. Iran's government ignores huge chunks of its responsibilities.

When the oil runs out, the Gulf States will wither into nothing. Already it rather looks like they're withering away since they're so shit at fighting, even with all the fancy weapons they purchased. The crass prostitutes and grifters seem to be moving out of Dubai.

I dispute that the Gulf is highly developed. All their development is done by other people. It's just development that happens to be located in the Gulf and whose fruits happen to accrue to Arabs since imperialism went out of fashion at a very fortunate time for these people. It's not true development and comes without the underlying productivity and industriousness one expects of a real developed country.

Nigeria is a 'it never even began' country, irrelevant. They make the Arabs look like a bastion of civilization.

If the water was really off in Tehran, wouldn't the people be dying of thirst? The water situation there is bad. But droughts do make it difficult to get water. In Australia we also had problems with water during the Millennium drought requiring rationing. It didn't get quite as bad as Iran but it was pretty bad.

Their land mostly sucks. There is a reason the Arab states never developed much in terms of civilization. It’s because most of its desert and not useful to develop agriculture and then more. Sort of like Alaska in some ways.

Just to distinguish, the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates are canonically the breadbaskets of the ancient world and are largely Arab.

The Arab States in the Gulf, not so much.

The Fertile Crescent used to be a lot more green back in the times of the Sumerians, there's a cycle of roughly 25,000 years in which the Sahara and that region as a whole transitions from being a lush green fertile land to becoming a desert and back. Plus those people who built those civilisations weren't really Arab, either culturally (which really arose with Islam) or to a large extent genetically.

Also the irrigation literally salted the earth over centuries.

Are they? Egyptians are pretty separate to Arabs especially the vintage that made Egypt a big deal initially. That's like saying the Byzantines were Turks.

There is a reason the Arab states never developed much in terms of civilization

This is a truly bizarre take without more elaboration.

Think I’m suppose to specify the oil countries which are mostly desert that can’t support a lot of population without outside resources paid for with oil money.

To be clear Iran cuts down on Chinas oil exporting allies which actually makes it fairly important for policing China and protecting all of the west Asian allies.

To be clear this is capeshit. China does not depend on Iranian oil (it just exploits the sanctions-driven discount) and in fact keeps getting Iranian oil even now. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan depend enormously on the oil from the Strait of Hormuz and unlike China have NO domestic fossil fuel production; this all can turn out tragic for them. Accordingly Chinese indexes are stable and other East Asians are in shit. And removing THAAD launchers from Korea to reinforce the Middle East underscores how little attention has been given to the Chinese angle in this conflict.

Trying to frame this obviously Israeli war as part of some 4D chess strategy to "police" China is cope. Israel is not at war with China, therefore neither is the US. Indeed, Trump is even calling on PLAN to assist in reopening the Strait.

There's an alternate history where America winds up allied to the Iranian Shia coalition instead of the Turkish/Saudi/Egyptian Sunni one. I'm not sure that world is any more peaceful, but the Shia generally are less trouble than the far more numerous and expansionist Sunni.

I have a lot of respect for the Iranian people and their ability to organize. I have a lot of respect for Persian culture and their long and fractious history. There's a reason it's so unstable, and it is largely the result of tribal loyalties and clan-based societies. In this respect, the Iranians are no different from the Arabs.

Aesthetically is an entirely different story.

Brother the folks running Iran are not better. They also live off oil revenue and are degenerate.

The worse thing about Iran is that they rule over a populace with decent innate potential (well, subtracting anyone with means and will to leave).

Brother the folks running Iran are not better. They also live off oil revenue and are degenerate.

Yeah but they've had periods where they've managed to genuinely better themselves and hold actual jobs and whatnot.

What the fuck is even the point of these places?

Osama Bin Laden answered your question thusly:

(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;

(i) These governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic Shariah, using violence and lies to do so.

(ii) These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and subdual.

(iii) These governments steal our Ummah's wealth and sell them to you at a paltry price.

(iv) These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.

(v) The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step to free the Ummah, to make the Shariah the supreme law and to regain Palestine. And our fight against these governments is not separate from out fight against you.

(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.

(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.

You may have a different view of the moral valence of these facts, but they form a pretty useful model.

Dubai is cringe all the way. Simple comparison between Qatar airlines and Emirates shows everything wrong with the dubai mindset.

Lol, Qatar is just Dubai Jr. Same "build a fuckload of gaudy skyscrapers in the middle of the fucking desert despite miles of empty space everywhere while relying on a population made up of 90%+ imported labor to do all of the dirty day to day actual work."

And Qatar Airlines is just Emirates with a better marking team. They fly the same planes to the same destinations with the same customers (ie- economy is full of subcontintals on transit flights, biz class is full of rich arabs or western biz people). The whole experience from glitzy airport lounge that somehow manages to be less comfy than the average Scandinavian bus stop to the glitzy permium cabin pods that are underneath the outer cosmetic shell the same parts made by the same suppliers to the glitzy menu with gold-leafed cappacinos and "premium" wines is interchangeable with most airlines these days.

Except Qatar is quite light on glitz. Emirates are all glitz and flash. I have flown both and spend quite a lot of time in the lounges. Qatar color scheme is more subdued - calming purple instead of gold everywhere. Even the music is better. The personal are quite good at giving you whiskey and cashew and getting the fuck out until you land. They don't pester you every five minutes with "do you need anything sir?" They don't wake you up about seatbelts while you are sleeping. They let you sleep almost to the touchdown. The first class lounge is also better if you care about comfort - quieter, calming.

Emirates are built on the idea that the luxury must be displayed and consumed, qatar - that it needn't be.

As in, Dubai/emirates has superficial style and no substance? Does Qatar have substance?

No substance, but Doha doesn't try to suffocate you with opulence. It is built on slave labor and not a good place - not sure how to tell it - a month in Dubai - and you will be tired, a month in Doha - you will be rested.

Have you seen much of the middle east? Would you recommend any of it to people who want to sample parts of the whole world?

Right now - I would say that I wouldn't recommend anything of the middle east. But the best places I have been there are Erbil and Muscat. Dubai is Sin City - anything goes if you have money. Didn't like it that much. There is no reason to go to Saudi Arabia unless you are muslim. Doha is ok, but kinda boring.

Seconding Erbil, once things have calmed down. Also get out to the countryside while you're there, many historical sites.

Before going to the middle east, finish out europe/asia/ go to Romania/Bulgaria and do the ancient painted monastery loop from cluj to brasov/ go to plovdiv and veliko tarnovo to see some OLD christian sites.

If you've been everywhere else: Trust your heart. I still need to get to poland, cambodia and most of china before I think of doing middle eastern tourist shit.

China's good though the recent development wave means a lot of the bigger cities are kinda samey.

I have been highly recommended to visit Chongqing by multiple people. I'm also interested in travelling around Yunnan province and experiencing life away from the big cities. One day...

I went to Chongqing at the start of February and I've been to approximately 15 or so cities in China. It's a cool shock to see the whole urban geography, but the day to day experience in Chongqing is pretty typical for nice, new developed Chinese cities. There's not a ton of unique flavor there honestly but it is abundantly pleasant.

Chengdu and Yunnan more unique vibes arguably.

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Tangentially, is Bucharest really so bad as to be your go to "place only really better than that other place I really hate?" No experience traveling in that area, but was considering visiting someday.

No, bucharest is great if you aren't so tiktok pilled you can't deal with old stuff that isn't perfectly aesthetic; beautiful churches/arcades/opera house, totally insane palatial monument to being a dumbass you can visit, the people are nice as heck (to me, but my vibes are immaculate in person. I save all the poison for the internet.)

It just happens to be the place where; after dark; I had one beer over my tolerance; and then was chased by stray dogs up an unfinished road bridge. It's the funniest thing that has happened to me while traveling to relate in text form. Unless you get drunk and do dumb shit late at night you'll be fine.

You can add that they are literal slavers who fund ethnic cleansing terrorists in Sudan and betray fellow Muslims by allying with imperial outsiders and extract much of the region's natural endowment of wealth through resource and geography rents while spending it on sybaritic pleasures, and yeah, they basically exist to cater to the globalist rich who don't think they're cool or suave enough for any other tax haven with greater personality and style to it and would prefer to construct their personal images around chintzy opulence and unreproductive sex with Russia prostitutes, or at least that's the view of the place I receive.

has no taste; a crime worse than being a bastard

Absolutely based.

I have a soft spot for Saudi Arabia, but Dubai can go and do one.

I have a soft spot for Saudi Arabia

That's bait.

Saudi Arabia has a few insane vanity projects and a poor human rights record, but it manages to accomplish both its religious and human development goals. That's a hard problem to solve.

No, I genuinely like Salman bin Saud and think of all the gulf nations Saudi Arabia is the most on the "righteous path": not being too fundamentalist but also not going full hedonist like some of the other countries. Plus the fact that they control Mecca and Medina helps too.

He does seem to be drinking the Techbro Abundance Kool Aid a bit too hard and I'm skeptical he's going to be successful longterm. I do agree with you that I'd rather 'Arabs spend a lot of money trying to actually build productive things even if too ambitious' to the 'Whores' or 'Wahabbism' alternate routes on the tech tree, though.

What the fuck is even the point of these places?

According to international consensus, as codified by the United Nations (1 2):

  • Every people has the right to self-determination (free determination of political status and free pursuit of economic, social, and cultural development).

  • The purpose of a country is to fulfill its people's right of self-determination.

  • More developed countries do not have the right to decide that a particular people is not sufficiently civilized to deserve the right of self-determination, or has failed to properly pursue economic, social, or cultural development.

Every people has the right to self-determination (free determination of political status and free pursuit of economic, social, and cultural development).

If anyone truly believed this, surely they'd conclude that the South should have been allowed to peacefully secede from the Union. I'm sure someone is going to pipe in with "but slavery", but wars of aggression to change economic and social models is directly against the third point (and if it weren't, we can talk about fascist Italy ending slavery in Ethiopia, or the British ending widow-burning in India).

I see roughly what the authors were intending to codify, but I don't think it can be done even-handedly, and in practice it's going to end up being a lot of "who, whom?" and unwritten assumptions about what counts as a "people" that privilege certain parties. Not even always unreasonably: we couldn't practically take every sovereign citizen at face value. And for the record, I think Southern secession was a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, and slavery abhorrent.

If anyone truly believed this, surely they'd conclude that the South should have been allowed to peacefully secede from the Union. I'm sure someone is going to pipe in with "but slavery", but wars of aggression to change economic and social models is directly against the third point (and if it weren't, we can talk about fascist Italy ending slavery in Ethiopia, or the British ending widow-burning in India).

I've been toying with the thought that nothing Israel is doing in Gaza is more "genocide" by any definition than what the North did to the South. And, for the record as you say, I toothink Southern secession was a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, and slavery abhorrent.

I'm not subject to rule by the UN, so I say fuck these places in particular. They can send a blue helmet to stand outside my house and shake their head disapprovingly if they feel like it.

The best thing that Trump is doing is destroying those international travesties. If we are lucky by the end of his term we may get to the point where "rule based order" is so damaged that even eager democrat president may be unable to salvage it.

Padme: And then we build a new rule-based order that actually functions as such rather than just being a marketing label, right?

Sure, nothing wrong with "might makes right" world order ... as you are 100% certain that you have the might, that you really wield the biggest club.

I am convinced that the modern "rules-based order" is actually might-makes-right order, it's just that at the time the rules were established in 1945, "might" was on the side of Western Liberalism and generally wrote them down in its favor. It's quite evident in practice that the rules are never applied to the major powers evenhandedly: in fact, they quite explicitly gave themselves vetos at the UN for most such issues!.

But the principles of rules-based order do sound good on paper, if that means anything. I like the idea, but I don't think they're enforceable without a higher power enforcing them. And Team America: World Police is a poor simulacrum of such a thing.

To the extent that America's foreign policy was subject to democratic influence, I think it did lean towards a rules-based order to a greater extent than any other empires or hegemons have historically done. Vietnam as the crowning example - taking a geopolitical loss in order to stand by popular principles and appease the masses. The problem is that the people only take an active interest in foreign affairs from time to time, and quite a lot can be done clandestinely through the CIA or whatever. This gives the state department a lot of room in pursuing an agenda that's might-makes-right under the hood while preserving an outward appearance of civility.

But the very need to disguise their actions imposes some limitations, so even that can be considered a win for creating a more idealistic world.

Exactly. The world may not be black and white, but there are paler and darker græys. The post-1945 liberal order has moved us closer to the Star Trek future, while the belief that "The U. S. isn't perfectly virtuous, therefore all possible international orders are equally lex silvæ." moves us closer to Warhammer 40k.

I hope I don't need to explain why the former is preferable to the latter.

I think the "rules-based order" after the Cold War has basically been nothing but Team America: World Police; before that it was that plus some wrangling with the Soviets about how to keep the cold war from turning too hot.

The alternative is "might makes right when used against us, but when used to our benefit we are suckers who could use our might but give in instead". I don't think that's better. I can't think of a time when the US benefitted from the international order keeping anyone from using "might makes right" against us.

"Self-determination" is a concept that really could use some expounding here, since we are talking about absolute monarchies. Who sets the boundaries of the "self" here? You seem to think that Arabs under a dictatorship of Arabs are satisfactorily self-determining. If you are a Hindu Shudra in a Brahmin dictatorship, are you enjoying self-determination? What about a hypothetical Wakanda project of US census "black"s, where Ethiopians in the vein of Timnit Gebru rule over Haitians?

Unfortunately, the ICJ has not seen fit to issue an authoritative ruling on this issue. However, the opinions of Kosovo and Serbia on the topic may be of interest.

Kosovo:

While the exact contours of any right of self-determination have not been articulated by this Court, the authorities noted above may be read as identifying two key components that permit the exercise of the right: the existence of a "people"; and the demonstrated inability of that people to be protected within a particular State, given prior abuses and oppression by that State's government. The people of Kosovo are distinct, being a group of which 90 percent are Kosovo Albanians, who speak the Albanian language, and who mostly share a Muslim religious identity. The Security Council itself has referred to the "people of Kosovo". Further, the prior infliction of massive human rights abuses and crimes against humanity by the Serbian authorities upon the people of Kosovo, are well-known and well-documented, as demonstrated by the February 2009 ICTY Judgment in Milutinović et al., and have been condemned by the General Assembly, the Security Council, and many other international bodies. The continued denial by Serbia of representative government to Kosovo was recently demonstrated by the failure of Serbia to invite Kosovo-Albanian representatives to the drafting of the 2006 Constitution of Serbia, nor to give them a chance to express themselves upon it (only Kosovo Serbs were allowed to participate in the referendum). In these circumstances there can be no doubt that the people of Kosovo were entitled to the right of self-determination.

Serbia:

Kosovo was neither a mandated/trust territory nor an overseas European colonial territory in the UN sense, nor was it registered or recognised or ever even submitted for acceptance as a non-self-governing territory with the United Nations, nor did any international or regional body ever recognise it as such, nor was it subject to foreign occupation as determined or evidenced by relevant international organisations. Kosovo formed an integral part of the FRY (State Union of Serbia and Montenegro). It remains an integral part of Serbia, and as such the population of that territory were, and remain, part of the "people" of Serbia. Those persons forming part of a minority within the territory of Serbia, including Kosovo, are entitled to the protection of minority rights as laid down in Articles 14 and 75–81 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia 2006.

Kosovo, as a part of an internationally recognised independent State, is not a self-determination unit as that term has been understood in international law and practice. Consistent international recognition of the territorial integrity of the FRY (and thus of its continuator, the Republic of Serbia) by definition precludes acceptance of the right of self-determination as inhering in the inhabitants of the province of Kosovo.

Who decided who is "nation" deserving of self determination?

In practice, your ability to find great power generous uncle who supports your cause diplomatically/militarily decides the issue.

There is no supreme commission of linguistic experts that examines dialects spoken in Trashcanistan/Carbombistan border zone and scientifically chooses where the true border should be.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/more-marines-heading-to-middle-east-as-u-s-continues-relentless-strikes-on-iran

Around 2,500 U.S. Marines are heading for the Middle East, along with a Navy amphibious warship. Their mission is not yet clear, but it signals a marked increase in U.S. forces in the region.

To my knowledge, US ground forces have not been meaningfully involved in the Iran conflict. It appears that this might be changing.

What strategic objectives would 2,500 marines be able to achieve in the context of this conflict? Are the islands in the strait important enough to capture but far enough from the Iranian mainland to actually hold? I'll admit that I am no expert in this. At the moment all I can do is hope none of my relatives get deployed and hope for the best.

So US is coming for real.

Can they win despite all? According to our former mottizen @KulakRevolt, yes.

See CatGirl Plan for Epic Furry Victory.

If I can nitpick, CG overestimates the need for draft - Russian experience shows that big country can recruit rather large forces voluntarily just for cash.

Why drafting people when you can rev up printing press once more and promise millions in cash for signing up. Lots of disadvantaged Americans would take the offer as eagerly as Russians from rural areas.

Realistically, if there is any plan, it will will involve Azerbaijan moving from the north. The Azeri army was built up in the last 30 years by NATO and Israel exactly for this purpose, it was never about holy rocks of Artsakh/Karabakh.

KulakRevolt has a long history of outlandish failed geopolitical predictions and should be read more as entertainment than as prophecy.

My personal favorite being a strong prediction that Egypt would invade Israel after Oct 6th in support of Hamas

Yeah his predictions are real 'alternate timeline' stuff. Deliberately or not, his predictions are things he would like to see (or more cynically, things his followers want to see and will spike engagement).

I remember his flameout post here seemed designed to be as polarising and ostentatious as possible.

CG overestimates the need for draft

Most Americans, including those in the 18-35 age range, cannot join the Army because they're too fat and/or they smoke weed or take other illegal drugs and/or they've declared bankruptcy and/or they've been found guilty of a crime and/or they're not smart enough and/or they have a medical condition.

The uniformed services raise and lower their standards slightly in order to make recruitment goals, but most people still can't join the military when they're at their lowest. And the DoD has been on record for decades that the worst thing that could happen to the organization would be to suffer under Vietnam-era style draft again. It makes for far worse combat units.

If the military services were forced by the politicians to accept people via a draft, I suspect they'd create units specifically to sequester those people so they'd never get in the way of the professional force.

I think Kulak severely overestimates the offensive capabilities of the Iranians. They can't bring millions of human wave tactics against the US Army. Any attempt to mass such forces and they'll be flattened in short order by the US Airforce. Also given the fragility of the Iranian regime I question their ability to give millions of unvetted conscripts guns. If going against the Americans means certain death and going against the Mullahs means that airforce fights for you... well I expect any mass conscription to end it short order. And speaking of conscription the Gulf states lack the population base for his proposed cannon fodder, they have a tiny population of citizens and those citizens are fat and happy they aren't going to go die in the Iranian mountains for Israel nor will their monarchs send them to.

We don't need a draft anyway though because America could conquer the two provinces he mentions with just the national guard. He whole analysis assumes they Iranians will be able to fling millions of men at the US which they won't because of America's overwhelming airpower.

Bribes won't work in a prosperous capitalist economy, you can't just pump money into the demand for young workers without driving the price up prohibitively.

If pure manpower is a concern for the USA, the best route would obviously be the Roman one: we've got millions of able bodied men dying to become American citizens at the border.

The problem for the American military is that the all volunteer army is what makes the army so damn effective. Once you start impressing low human capital into the army, you lose effectiveness in a hurry.

without driving the price up prohibitively.

Why would that be a limiting factor? If the economic-political situation gets so screwed up we're considering a draft or mass service-for-citizenship scheme, it would be entirely feasible for the government to redirect american economic productivity from old-age healthcare to military power. It wouldn't exactly be very popular, but nothing about this is anyway.

Because we have 4% unemployment, so every soldier payed to go overseas vacates a job in America, which will then need to increase wages to attract workers, which will then lead to increased bribes to attract soldiers. I suppose in the short term one can outrun the wheel of inflation, but not in the long term.

Disadvantaged Americans aren't as desperate as disadvantaged Russians, nor are they fit for military service. You could force the probation roster into the Army without too much fuss from other people, probably, but the US army wouldn't be exactly thrilled to have them.

We basically give every citizen free health care, food stamps, and section 8 free housing. The middle class is squeezed but all the people you could bribe to get drafted are already getting paid.

You would need to gut the free stuff program to get people to take money to enter the military.

Well, the poorest of the poor don't tend to join the army very often- the working class and middle classes dominate enlistment. These people might be on CHIP or something but they're not getting huge welfare assistance, nor do they need it. The military is attractive out of economic necessity to the recently shotgun married and that's about it, and they're also mostly already in the army.

Kulak clearly says that the US will fuck it up somehow, that the actual plan will be way more shambolic and half-cocked and sure to fail.

I agree. Also, Azerbaijan is probably weak to drones/missiles. They don't want to lose their oil do they? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to profit off the price spike than potentially get wrecked?

Kushner is shaping Trump’s behavior as you would a child or a dog. “Command the Marines over, that will scare Iran into capitulation. What, they didn’t capitulate? They don’t respect you at all! Get the marines on the boat, that will make them surrender. It didn’t work? Then we have to launch one tiny landing, otherwise America appears weak. You know Kharg Island doesn’t even count as Iran...”

This smells like cope.

Trump has been a public figure for over three decades and over the course of those three decades he has remarkably consistent. I think that you are just salty that your team is not on top.

search “go to war”, second result https://www.c-span.org/program/campaign-2024/former-president-trump-campaigns-with-tucker-carlson-in-glendale-arizona/651374

I was referring to spectacle of AWLs trying to paint Trump as some sort of senescent meat-puppet after having spent 4 years running interference for president autopen.

Trump's been talking about Iran for decades and if you thought this administration was going to sit quietly by and let Iranian regime and their proxies take potshots at our allies and ignore clearly stated red-lines without a response, After all the drama with DOGE, After all the drama with ICE, After snatching Maduro, you have not been paying attention.

Trump in 1988:

I'd be harsh on Iran. They've been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I'd go in and take it. Iran can't even beat Iraq, yet they push the United States around. It'd be good for the world to take them on.

1988 Iran is not 2026 Iran. Drones + their ballistic program.

Yes, obviously.

Mu.

Can you account for the Donald having the idea of whacking Kharg Island 40 years Before Kushner? Or was I taking you too literally?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis

It’s definitely a parallel to the current conflict, it’s just the drones and missiles make it no longer rational to take Kharg. It’s no longer the rational thing to do, so someone is telling him to do it. Even John Bolton (!) is skeptical of how prepared we are.

My pessimistic prediction is: small landing; American soldiers die by drones; American news reports rumors that Iran will release the drone videos (they would not because they’re not that retarded); together this propaganda promotes further action by Trump + public; somewhere along there is an Israeli false flag in America; greater ground troops; many Americans die and trillions wasted because of Israeli by 2030

2500 is about the size of crew, pilots, and troops for either an LHA or LHD. Per USNI'S Fleet Tracker there's currently one near Japan, and one in the Caribbean. Would provide a bit of added firepower (F-35s, Harriers, Ospreys, etc., plus more anti-sub capabilities), and the threat of some shore/harbor activities.

Edit: word is that it's the TRIPOLI & strike group. So in addition to the TRIPOLI, that's one Tico and one Burke coming from the area of Japan.

No, don't ask about why ship sizes don't seem to match up with what you'd think based on their "Frigate vs. Destroyer vs. Cruiser" classification.

No, don't ask about why ship sizes don't seem to match up with what you'd think based on their "Frigate vs. Destroyer vs. Cruiser" classification.

Isn't classification about what they do and not how big they are. Same as with tanks - which could lead to heavy tank sometimes being lighter than medium ones.

I think there's also a habit in some places to classify larger ships that would generally be termed "destroyer" due to their anti-air and/or anti-submarine capabilities as "frigates" because that sounds less scary.

At the risk of dramatic oversimplification, I think in modern parlance (at least in the west) there's been a tendency to use "frigate, destroyer" and perhaps "cruiser" to mean "small, medium, and large" because the trend is for ~all ships to have at least limited multirole capabilities. Unless someone was calling something a "frigate" to be politically correct, I cannot think of any ships in the recent past labeled frigates that were designed to be larger than the contemporary destroyers in their own fleet, and likewise the cruisers have always been larger than contemporary destroyers.

I think there's also a habit in some places to classify larger ships that would generally be termed "destroyer" due to their anti-air and/or anti-submarine capabilities as "frigates" because that sounds less scary.

Japan goes even further - they call their aircraft carriers destroyers!

EDIT: Though apparently they've been upgraded to cruisers.

That's because of something something "defensive weapons only" in their constitution, right?

The Russians also designated their carriers "aircraft carrying cruisers" due to the Montreux Convention, which is pretty funny, although in fairness the Soviets put substantial anti-ship armament on said ships.

Unless someone was calling something a "frigate" to be politically correct, I cannot think of any ships in the recent past labeled frigates that were designed to be larger than the contemporary destroyers in their own fleet, and likewise the cruisers have always been larger than contemporary destroyers.

Although sometimes a "destroyer will be larger than the current "cruisers" (but not any cruisers in production, granted, since there are none atm, and CG(X) would have been larger than the Zumwalts). A lot of it is political, as you said -- people have different reactions to different ship "classes" (see also: the Trump-class "Battleship" which, granted, is designed to be f-off huge).

the Trump-class "Battleship"

It is big, but isn't this thing a bit light on the firepower?

I've seen a lot of discussion about that, with various ideas tossed around, but this is all just aimless speculation so far.

Some people say they just made it big to appeal to Trump's ego, with no real thought behind it. In that line of thinking, the extra tonnage is just a mistake.

Some people say, it's a work in progress. The extra size can easily be filled up with more missiles like the old "arsenal ship" concepts with 500 missiles.

Some people say, it's a political maneuver to get Congress to fund what they really want, which is a future Cruiser/Destroyer. So just take that armament, but away the excess tons, and call it a destroyer/cruiser.

Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship. It's proposed with three untested weapons systems (high energy lasers, railgun, and hypersonic missiles), and maybe nukes, so they might as well wait a bit to see how those shake up before committing to any one big weapon system. Some extra tonnage also helps a bit with survivability, which makes it a bit more of a real "battleship."

Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship.

My understanding that an issue we are currently hitting with the Burke class is that we basically kept throwing new systems on there (we also increased the size of the ship over time, the first ships in the class didn't even have a helicopter hangar) until we basically tapped out the potential.

Yeah, it makes sense. Reading Bean's blog, i got the sense that the reason the Burke class was so successful was that they designed it with enough space to handle decades of future upgrades, but that's really tapped out now.

I think a lot of people were claiming it had fewer VLS per tonnage than anticipated, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some degree of "right-sizing" before it's executed.

If the Navy can get a railgun to really work the firepower will be terrifying.

Nuclear-powered warships with banks of railguns is my personal dream.

The Navy hasn't returned my calls in a very long time.

Yeah I am disappointed that they don't seem interested in putting reactors in. I guess there are good reasons, with the new propulsion methods, not to do that, but it makes sense to me to have a class of nuclear-powered cruiser escorts designed to accompany carriers. And if railguns and/or lasers Become Real, it would be simple enough to reload their munitions at sea.

(You can reload VLS cells at sea anyway, it's just painful, but a larger ship would probably be able to do that regardless if you wanted it to.)

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Zumwalt

Man I always complete forget that the Zumwalt exists. Pretty fair to compare them to the Tico, I think, so that is at least a halfway good counterexample and probably a decent illustration of @Lizzardspawn's point.

Although it kinda seems like we should class them as a monitor, given their intended function.

Man I always complete forget that the Zumwalt exists

Yeah, it's a stealth ship, that's how it works.

Lockheed Martin be like "okay but how do we market...what kind of countermeasure was it again?"

"Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, seriously, what the hell is it?"

It's like they started out with a submarine then forgot what they were doing half-way through.

More comments

It might be useful to have marines around if intelligence identifies a coastal town being used as a hub for minelaying/drone strikes. You want those assets in the area if you try forcing the strait open and then discover you need to do an amphibious landing.

Trump just announced they destroyed all military targets on Kharg Island, so, presumably they'll conquer that?

Kharg Island, I have learned through situation monitoring, is the way Iran processes 90% or so if its oil for export.

I have no idea how sane this is. Maybe it'll be fine?

Sounds like more bad news for oil prices.

At worst we are seeing a slow but emerging strategy of just running Iran into the ground like with Syria and all the rest. Where sub par targets get selected due to a lack of better options. The decision makers have to make decisions, after all.

Iran deserves it way more than Syria did. They are one power I would not mind being run into the ground. If Europe decides to let all their retaliatory terrorists in, that's their fault.

This sounds like genocidal lunacy. What on earth did the average Iranian or Syrian do to deserve any of this? What should Europe do in the face of a giant refugee crisis? Create a humanitarian disaster in Jordan and Turkey? Let them starve at the border? Shoot them if they do anything else?

Maybe I'm being to hasty and my instinctive revulsion to your point of view is just a matter of ignorance on my part. Why do you say such things?

What on earth did the average Iranian or Syrian do to deserve any of this?

The average nobody did anything. I don't know of any nation ever where, from top to bottom, every single person was wicked. You can say they voted for it, they tacitly supported it, whatever. Germany, Japan, the Serbs, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, none of these countries were filled with vile people who "deserved" carpet bombing, starvation, embargoes, displacement, whatever. It's the nature of nations that when they get involved on the world stage, war is often the only way to get what you want.

The question is what you want, and how badly.

People roll out the World War 2 examples because they're pretty cut and dry, and the closest example in a western, developed sense we have to the present. "We want you to stop invading and conquering others, and our roughly evenly matched forces will make a push all the way into your country to make you stop." Superpowers with precision munitions (remember this part) did not exist. A global economy, such as we have now, did not exist. Cheap travel and the resultant mass migration did not exist!

Oh, and live broadcasting of the war didn't exist either.

But to the point, people will defend those wars as just - and I agree with them - despite the fact that the civilian tolls are so staggering they don't even register even with an aid. The lasting debate of civilian casualties from that war, the nuclear bombings of Japan, often dies in its throat when many of the people who consider it an atrocity don't even know that the firebombing of Tokyo produced around as many casualties as a nuclear bombing in a single night (I would much rather die to a nuclear blast than an incendiary firestorm, for what it's worth). This is to say nothing of the bombing campaigns across Germany, which were specifically designed - given the failure of precision bombing promised by the Norden bombsight and massive air casualties the Allies endured as a result - to reduce a city to being ineffective. They didn't want to kill civilians. Okay, maybe Harris did after the Battle of Britain. But generally, the purpose was not to inflict needless and horrifying casualties. It was all they could do to prosecute the war until the Germans and Japanese capitulated. Note that in Germany's case the bombing alone did not do this and it took massive ground movements to do so all the way into Berlin itself, but the bombing made those ground advances easier.

Did those civilians deserve it? It's a rhetorical question, because of course they didn't. But it's just irrelevant once you are the citizen of a nation that another nation has determined it has just cause to prosecute war against you. No amount of justification of geopolitics will make it okay to the people who die in the crossfire. They suffer and die and all their dreams are lost for something impossibly bigger than they are, that they could have not possibly changed on an individual level.

This is the reason I brought up superpowers with precision munitions, global economies, cheap travel, and the media. Because by Vietnam we lost the stomach for the same type of campaign pretty much overnight. I will find the source, but there has been a lot of talk about how North Vietnam was desperate by the early 70s. Bombings of Hanoi were driving their nation, not the guerillas, but the nation, into disaster. Had the US bombed them as mercilessly as Japan or Germany, they likely would have caused the nation of North Vietnam to fail. Whether that's enough to have killed communism in Vietnam is up to debate, and I'd say it's unlikely, but it would have prevented the immediate rolling of the conventional NVA over South Vietnam after the US withdrawal. But at this point, the war was broadcast, and things like napalm girl and the Saigon Execution photos made people see how awful geopolitics is on a micro level. Weapons were becoming actually precise, and people were asking if such things were necessary. I'd say they're only necessary if you want to actually defeat the nation you're fighting.

This is not, by the way, a defense of the Vietnam war or that it was a good idea from the outset. But once you're in the fight, and you have the objective to defeat one nation and preserve another, there's a cost. The US, via politics and bad strategy (read up on William Westmoreland if you're interested) did not do what needed to be done, so all that happened was South Vietnam fell anyway and the US took a huge hit to its credibility on the world stage.

This debate persists to now, and is even more pointed. Everything is livestreamed, and weapons are so precise that we now expect zero civilian casualties, and anything more is a massive scandal. To the point that Obama is considered a maniac because he killed an estimate of 116 civilians with drone strikes. Tell that to the average American from 1945 and they'd call him a genius on no other level.

This is, again, not a justification for untargeted mass bombardment. This is also not a defense of bad intel, or misusing precision weapons in a way that kills innocent bystanders. Again, even down to one person, what difference does the geopolitical or military targeting situation make? They're dead. They've lost everything for nothing. But I ask what a nation is supposed to do if it has determined that another nation is an enemy, and diplomacy has failed, and it has determined that it must proceed militarily to, put coldly, get what what it wants. If the idea that a civilian death is a tragedy that invalidates the righteousness of the cause, then in a sense I am happy that the average person who thinks these things is so far removed from the idea of war being an existential threat. Certainly it is not for someone living in the US or most of Europe at this point in time (the situation is different for Israel, regardless of your position; it's a fact that they have enemies within and without that are in striking distance and I suspect it's a large reason that the population wasn't clamoring for the war to slow down after October 7th). I don't mean this as a jab, either; it's a miracle we live in the world we do. But at the end of the day, going to war is going to kill a fair bit of people who have nothing to do with it in any meaningful way, because you won't achieve your objectives otherwise.

Make your accusations of Israeli excesses and I'm going to agree. Denounce bad US intel for strikes, or a bad overall strategy, and I'm game there. But this is an argument that is rolled up in more practical criticisms of wars in general and I don't find it compelling, horrible as it may sound. At the outset we know a war is going to kill innocents. But if there's an objective that can only be achieved militarily - and given the constant abuse of diplomatic agreements and funding of militias throughout the Middle East, I'm going to say there's a fair argument for Iran - that's the price.

As to your other questions, I don't have an answer. It's up to Europe to decide what its border and refugee policies are, though if I lived there I'd definitely be in "turn them back no matter what" mode no matter what. I also don't find the idea of Iran splitting into a bunch of ISIS-style warlords very plausible. It's a country that is much more united in religious and racial demographics. You aren't going to have Sunni paramilitary groups gobble up the country, nor are you going to have massive racial violence (and if you did, the Persians would just win). Syria was the last gasp of Ba'ath/pan-arab/secular dictatorship against the tribal infighting and Wahhabism that is inherent to Arab nations. I don't see them collapsing the same way.

Again, it all falls onto whether Iran is a valid target, and if it's worth the squeeze. The comment you're replying to does, and I'd be pretty happy to see the regime fall too. Civilian casualties (let me edit this and say civilian casualties on any sort of normal scale) just aren't a reason not to do it. Call it cold, but geopolitics is fuckin' cold.

The US, via politics and bad strategy (read up on William Westmoreland if you're interested)

That wikipedia article was an interesting read, thanks. The most fascinating thing to me is how he jumped around in rank. He went from O2 -> O4, O6 -> O3, O4->O7->O5->O8. I can't fathom a military career like that these days.

Military promotions used to be absolutely insane, especially in World War 2 with rapid replacements and battlefield commissions. Vietnam was less, to my knowledge, but chosen ones like Westmoreland still existed. For the life of me I can't understand why he was a chosen one, though.

I saw some really good talks about Westmoreland. The one that really opened my eyes is here.

It says (temporary) under a lot of those. Temporary because he was demoted later on, or temporary by initial intention?

After all the temporary ranks he goes back to the "normal" rank. These read like wartime field promotions to me where they need someone to fill the spot and he's the only one available. I just never heard of anyone getting demoted after those. Going from colonel to captain, or general to major is mind blowing.

We have established two important things that we agree on:

  • Civilian casualties bad, but will happen in war.

  • We need a good reason to go to war, partly because civilian casualties bad.

The two points of contention were:

  • Why do the Iranians and Syrians deserve civilian casualties.

  • What will be the result of Europe turning the refugees away.

Neither of these were answered.

What I'm looking for is a distinction between the good and the bad. Why, for instance, was Oct. 7 bad? Or 9/11? If genocide is a militarily winning strategy, was the holocaust bad?

You might want to stop me here and mention that these questions don't need to have moral answers. Things happen. The causal chain of events that drives us towards our next disaster is too vast and complex for such simple terms. And I'm perfectly willing to recognize the salience of that position. But until that is done consistently, is there any reason for me to do so? Because the mainstream line has been that all of the above were bad, Iran also bad and that America is morally good. It is especially when America is doing morally bad that geopolitical realism is trudged out, claiming that, in reality, America needs to do bad to ultimately do good!

But even then. If we set morals aside, this Iran incursion can hardly be considered a positive move on the geopolitical side of things. If worst come to wear and there is a big refugee crisis, everyone knows Europe wont say no. They will let them in. Nations that are in a very precarious position demographically. Economies facing all manner of crises. This is practically every single modern ally the US has. How can this be justified?

Why do the Iranians and Syrians deserve civilian casualties.

I touched on it a bit for Iran, but in short:

  1. Funded/armed/directed Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militias (a very large part of why Iraq is dangerous), and the Houthis, as in basically every major destabilizing group except ISIS/Syrian variants.
  2. Killed US servicemembers with those Shia militias even when we were not militarily involved in Iran
  3. Nominally aligned with China and Russia, receiving arms from them and lining their pockets (I think this is A Bad Thing because I do not like China and Russia as adversaries)
  4. Fucked around with nuclear capabilities while making "death to America" an official slogan
  5. Is a brutally repressive regime. Not a good enough reason on its own, but usually a given in these situations and also a reason that the civilian casualties caused by military action may be offset by a regime change. This is more likely true for Iran than Syria.

Points 1, 3, and 5 also applied to Syria, and back to geopolitics I like for there to be less nations that are economically and militarily aligned and supported by Russia and China. I am explicitly for American dominance on the world stage because that means I am more likely to keep enjoying the benefits of a giant and very defensible united land mass that is far from war in all its forms.

What will be the result of Europe turning the refugees away.

Presupposes a tide of refugees which I am not inclined to think will happen (I touched on this in my first comment). I'd also mention that even if it did happen, overall Iranians are a good bit more westernized, less Wahhabist (that's a Sunni thing!), less tribal, and less teen-rapey than the current stock in Europe (to oversimplify, Syrian in the mainland, Pakistani in the UK), so a few refugees from there are more likely to integrate unless they do the whole "we'll just import young and pissed off men" thing again. Even then, I doubt they're nearly as bad as what we see now.

Persians are not Arabs, and will proudly tell you so, and that's for the better.

Funded/armed/directed Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militias (a very large part of why Iraq is dangerous), and the Houthis, as in basically every major destabilizing group except ISIS/Syrian variants.

Killed US servicemembers with those Shia militias even when we were not militarily involved in Iran

To be clear you only oppose this on the grounds that this is harmful to US interest in the region, which you support based on personal prosperity, not that these attacks were unjustified or unrelated to US provocation that might have caused them.

To that extent I'm having a hard time aligning myself with your position from a geopolitical point of view. Iran, and tell me if our history does not match up here, wanted the same thing you want for yourself. Peace and prosperity. To that end they wanted control over their natural resources. Resources that the US and UK were making use of. This leads to a very clear incursion into Iran by these nations. Which ties into reason 3, 4 and 5. What else is a nation to do when foreign entities so clearly disrupt their process of self determination?

I get it, 'aw shucks, sucks to suck, now give us the oil' but given the cost, past failures and losses, and how far the US has moved forward, and how quickly and drastically technology has bettered our standard of living, can any of this be rationally justified anymore? It feels like a giant sunk cost fallacy. Where a list of old grievances gets trudged out to justify an evergoing tit for tat that is of no tangible benefit to American or Iran.

Presupposes a tide of refugees which I am not inclined to think will happen

I don't think it will happen either. Which is why I said it would be a worst case scenario. But even then, we are comparing potential cost and benefit. The cost being overloading Europe with refugees. And there is no contingency or plan. Americas allies in Europe will be weighted down even more. Further carrying the indirect cost of American incursions in the middle east. I ask, how can this be rationally justified? I get that personal prosperity is important, but at some point the calculus stops adding up. I have a genuinely hard time believing that you believe that America is having its interest served by risking their already weak allies and their precarious position for whatever it is you think is being gained by this campaign into Iran.

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If genocide is a militarily winning strategy, was the holocaust bad?

Are you comparing the holocaust to "deaths caused by military bombing/heavy weapons"?

I'm comparing things generally considered to be bad by Americans with the morally neutral geopolitical framework supplied by LazyLongposter. Which I think he is using to selectively justify Americans doing things we all known are morally bad.

As he stated, the US could have won the war in Vietnam had they just intentionally bombed the civilians harder. But because doing such things is too awful in the eyes of the public, the US stopped. Using that morally neutral standard, what is the problem with the holocaust? Killing your enemy is a winning strategy. Is it better to starve to death in camp than it is to be burned alive in a firestorm that was intentionally created by dropping incendiary bombs on wooden residential areas?

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Sub par targets? Kharg Island is one of the most important targets in any Iranian scenario because it’s where all the oil gets processed. Please stop thinking in hour-long news cycles and imagine what an Iranian operation would look like if it was planned to take five weeks and we were only halfway into it.

imagine what an Iranian operation would look like if it was planned to take five weeks and we were only halfway into it.

I like this game we're playing where there's definitely a plan that's been clearly communicated, if you ignore half of what POTUS says, a third of what the SecState says, and two thirds of what the SecWar says.

Why do you think that press releases are a reflection of the true plan? I'd argue the opposite - that the Trump admin uses deliberate strategic ambiguity in their public statements. To quote 2016 candidate Trump: "I don't want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is."

Why do you think that press releases are a reflection of the true plan?

Because that's been the expectation of every American president in wartime basically forever. That the president and his administration would clearly communicate the causes of the war, the motivations behind the actions of the war, the aims of the war. To do otherwise is morally unacceptable to me.

To accept that Trump has a plan but is lying to us about it repeatedly is to accept the status of subject rather than citizen, to be a slave rather than a man. "L'etat? C'est lui!" You seem to draw some line that Trump is lying to the press, he isn't lying to the press, he's lying to us.

I'm not anti-Trump or against regime change in Iran in principle, but I'm not going to "trust the plan." That's un-American.

Congress has the power to declare war (a point I agree on), but do the people? Should we hold a referendum before we attack our enemies?

I consider this perspective naive to the reality of military conflict. Apparently a big reason we struck when we did is because we had accurate intelligence that multiple Iranian leaders were in one place, and we had to act quickly to take advantage of the opportunity. There's a reason the executive is in charge of this - because it requires decisive action.

I'm sorry, but the expectation that the military explain its goals to you during the conflict is inane. Not just military goals, but diplomatic ones too, are closely held secrets. Why? Because we are in conflict with an adversary and denying them information is the obviously correct thing to do. Trump is refreshing in this aspect.

Too many of our Presidents are afraid to take action because of their fear of poll numbers. Talk to me in a few months when we actually know the results.

What comment are you replying to exactly? It sure ain't mine. Either that or you're truly arguing for a system of periodic slavery. Nowhere did I ask that the president share targeting information or war plans, just

clearly communicate the causes of the war, the motivations behind the actions of the war, the aims of the war.

That's not a big lift, if you have clear justifications for the war.

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Congress has the power to declare war (a point I agree on), but do the people? Should we hold a referendum before we attack our enemies?

This is exactly what "democracy" meant, when it was meant seriously.

Current breaking news arrive that Athens and Sparta are at war again. The men of the city gather at the agora, debate the recent habbening, and vote whether the city joins with Athens against Sparta or the other way around.

Democracy requires informed citizenry with skin in the game, which was the case in these times. Everyone knew basic geography and political situation, everyone roughly knew where is Athens, where is Sparta and where is their city, and how strong they are. Everyone knew from direct experience how war looks like, and what will happen to you and your loved ones if you pick the wrong side.

Now, pollsters asking populace "Should we bomb Iraq, Iran, both or neither?" is akin asking five years old "When you grow up, do you want to be astronaut, accountant or garbage truck driver?"

Two more weeks, trust the plan? Short term pain, long term gain? It feels like I'm tuned in to the news cycle alright.

The US bombs or captures Kharg Island, halting 90% of Iran's oil processing and then what? The Iranians throw in the towel? Strike a peace with the US and Israel and we can all go home to for peace and prosperity? Genuinely, maybe that can happen. One can hope. But it sounds silly.

Or will it be another slow grinding down of conditions for human life in Iran, just like in Syria? Or will we repeat Iraq? How many women and children did those sanctions under Albright kill? Half a million? We're not even counting the invasions yet. How many refugees did Syria net the world?

I'll reserve me some pessimism, if based on nothing other than the cavalier attitude people can have toward human life and the future of their own allies.

This has been going around on Twitter so forgive the link to the slop account:

https://x.com/sethjlevy/status/2032516317866029535?s=46

Contrary to a lot of discussion here Trump has been aware of Kharg Island for 40 years (it would be hard not to be, it’s one of the central points in any war game over Iran)

You are welcome to still be skeptical or pessimistic or believe whatever you want… but clearly details about what to do with Iran are not news either to Trump or to the people running the military.

Given that the number floated recently by Trump was “five weeks” I’m willing to wait that long at least before proclaiming that Kharg Island constitutes some kind of spiraling out of control when — it was probably always going to be targeted. Because it has to be, because it’s one of the most important chokepoints on the map.

And like it or not there actually is a capital-P “Plan” that the 24-second news cycle isn’t really capable of judging.

Trump has known about Kharg Island for 40 years so therefor I should not be skeptical or pessimistic about the still undetermined goal of a plan that would be drawn together by the same institutions that brought us Iraq one and two, Afghanistan, Lybia and Syria.

I'm willing to wait five weeks and be proven wrong. As I said before, worst case scenario they are throwing shit at a wall hoping that it sticks. That doesn't change the underlying contention here. Which is that there is no stated goal with regards to this invasion. So how would one be able to judge the strategic salience of any action?

I think you mean the same institutions that brought us Venezuela. Iraq and Afghanistan began over two decades ago, which is a complete replacement cycle for the US military. Literally thousands of people have no other job than to analyze those conflicts and figure out what went wrong and how to do better.

No, it's the same institutions that brought us Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Made obvious by how vague and obscure everything about this conflict is. Which is one of the problems highlighted in the Afghanistan Papers, but was also intuitively obvious regarding Iraq. Why invade Iraq? Because of 9/11. Except they had nothing to do with 9/11. Well, the WMD's! Except there were none and Saddam had already accepted investigators to confirm they had gotten rid of all of those. Well, the oil! Saddam was already providing regional stability and selling it internationally. I could go on.

The US was using the exact same tactic back then as they are now, except the Venezuelans allow themselves to be bought, whilst the Taliban did not. Iranian officials seem to not be accepting any bribes at a broad scale. So what alternatives do US strategists possess?

We are still waiting on the results of this conflict, but as it stands I see no reason to believe there is anything different going on. A thousand people can analyze a hammer, that won't make it any better at screwing. All we've seen so far is the hammer. I'm still waiting to see the screwdriver.

Given that the number floated recently by Trump was “five weeks” I’m willing to wait that long at least before proclaiming that Kharg Island constitutes some kind of spiraling out of control when — it was probably always going to be targeted. Because it has to be, because it’s one of the most important chokepoints on the map.

It's a chokepoint for oil I guess, but I haven't seen anyone claim that it's a chokepoint for e.g. maritime traffic.

Let's say another three weeks go by. What kind of situation will make you say that you were wrong about everything going according to some reasonable plan? What are the strategic objectives that are supposed to be accomplished in the next three weeks, the failure of which will indicate that things are going off the rails?

I'd imagine if the plan was always to seize islands in the Gulf that you wouldn't wait two weeks after the beginning of your air campaign to start transferring Marines in from out of theater.

Conversely, we have a lot of reason to think the current administration thinks in terms of short news cycles and poasting.

Trump has been aware of Kharg Island for 40 years:

https://x.com/sethjlevy/status/2032516317866029535?s=46

Again and politely: I think this is a form of TDS. Every reasonable expectation of how a war works is thrown out the window because Donald Trump is in charge. How long is it supposed to take to invade Kharg Island? Did they wait to destroy Iranian air capabilities first? Were they waiting on other intelligence? Did the Americans already have war plans for this contingency? The Israelis? The Saudis?

Well, since Donald Trump is the one in charge all these questions disappear. We know from our vaunted backseat driver theoreticians’ armchairs that the invasion of Kharg Island was unexpected, or should have happened sooner, or later, or has unimaginable consequences, or can’t possibly be a good idea. Or whatever. I heard the war plans were drawn up in crayon and Trump had to have explained to him what “oil” is. Hegseth is so evil he made the plans worse, but he was also too drunk to make them effective. If only we had General Milley back he would have saved everything

So our argument in favor of sane war planning is that it incorporates an idea our 80 year old president first fixated on 40 years ago, when he had no military experience or advice. Gotcha.

If you’re not aware of the obvious importance of Kharg Island and the fact it would trivially be in any war plan with Iran you are actually displaying a disqualifying level of ignorance here. I don’t even mean this as a personal attack: you clearly do not know the first thing about which you speak.

Acquiring the site where Iran processes 90% of its oil is just a weird fixation of Trump’s? I don’t know how to parse this except as another form of TDS.

That fact that Trump is and has been aware of Kharg Island demonstrates that he does know what he’s talking about, that US military plans were not made up in the 24-second news cycle, and that the hyper-cynical take pursued by ultra-skeptics is more based in emotion than anything else. You’re wrong, the US military does have a war plan and denying that is a conspiracy on par with denying the landing on the moon.

Why risk ground forces' lives by taking them earlier?

Because they're not significantly at risk and they're actually ready to go.

Aren't they at greater risk at the beginning when Iran's ejaculation capabilities were not yet degraded and they could reasonably overload whatever temporary AA the marines were able to build at the island?

I think you misunderstand me. If the plan was to have the Marines seize Kharg Island, you probably wouldn't send them in right away. But you'd have them staged nearby; you wouldn't wait two weeks then move them in from the Pacific.

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Iran's ejaculation capabilities

wat

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Do you have a conception of what the original US plan might have been; and how it might have changed due to events thus far? Just curious.

That's something that's bothering me about this entire enterprise. I'm not the most plugged-in person when it comes to geopolitical events, but I like to think I can read and understand the news, at least.

As it stands, I don't know quite why we're there, or what we want to accomplish, or how we plan to do it, or what our win condition is.

It makes me long for the days of desert storm, when that was all clearly laid out before lead started flying.

I think this piece from Ross Douthat is the most likely explanation. Trump is a bully, and while he's obviously no military expert, he has an uncanny sense for knowing when someone is weak. Iran was weaker than they'd been in a long time, so he seized the chance.

Why?

Look what Iran is doing - shutting down the global economy, launching missiles at and deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure and the economy (oil, travel, etc etc) of its neighbors. They've always been interested in doing this in all likelihood, but didn't think they could get away with it. They also had their civilian terror networks temporarily defanged.

What happens if they get the bomb? What happens if they rebuild the missile capacity and expand the drone capacity?

What if two years from now they wanted to close Hormuz and were a nuclear state? We'd have to just accept it or much riskier things.

The U.S. and Israel absolutely have classified timelines on missile production, they may have timelines on the nuclear stuff.

Iran can't be allowed to do what it wants to do, because it would do this. We know this, we can see now exactly why that is.

It just happened Trump was sitting in the chair instead of a cowardly president who might end up just waiting and praying.

Why now, specifically?

Trump made his threats and it was clear something was going to happen eventually, it appears to have gone off a bit half cocked but I imagine that's because the Iranians foolishly put enough of the government in one room together.

Why don't people understand this?

The government has been very explicit with stated public war aims and reasons, and has a number of private elements that are easily guessable. The media has landed on a meme to criticize this conflict as "they weren't clear" so people think it isn't clear when it is.

The government has been very explicit with stated public war aims and reasons, and has a number of private elements that are easily guessable.

Which time were they extremely clear?

Was it when Rubio said we didn't really want to do this but we had to because the Israelis were doing it either way? Was it when Trump said their nuclear program was completely eliminated a few months ago? Was it when Hegseth said there would be no ground troops involved? Was it when Trump said that the whole thing was pretty much wrapped up last week?

what Iran is doing - shutting down the global economy

Iran can’t be blamed for defending themselves from an unjust attack by Israel. I would hope Americans would do the same if they were in Iran’s place; if they wouldn’t, I think they lack courage and a moral compass. If Israel decided to start targeting the homes of every American service member, and our only hope was to shut it down, then that’s what America should do. This is the proper response to an Israeli attempt at your national annihilation, something they have a track record of doing in the past 80 years.

launching missiles at and deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure

Israel does this

They've always been interested in doing this in all likelihood

This applies to Israel

What happens if they get the bomb

Israel has the bomb. Every accusation is an admission when it comes to Israel. The Israelis, with a straight face, will tell you we should “help the Iranian people have their voices heard” while they keep three million Palestinians under a military occupation and prevent them from voting and moving freely in violation of international law.

Can you point out the inciting incident of which Israel was the aggressor - and thereby justifies the characterization of a 'unjust attack', rather than a series of mutually aggressive tensions and accumulated causus belli between Iran and Israel that have flamed into war? Has Israel ever made 'justified' attacks? Can you name a single one, or is this another case of selective demands of rigor?

Or is everything Israel does illegal by definition, and we're playing wordcel games?

Iran can’t be blamed for defending themselves from an unjust attack by Israel.

Iran has been waging proxy war against Israel for 44 years via Hezbollah, Hamas and their other paramilitaries. it has a literal doomsday clock counting down the days until Israel's destruction. If the regime didn't want a war with Israel, they've been going about it a funny way.

And it's not as if Israel is a threat to Iran. They're seperated by two countries and hundreds of miles. If Iran wanted peaceful relations with Israel, all they would need to do is stop funding Hezbollah and Hamas and stop threatening to nuke Israel.

There is a lot to criticise Israel about regarding Gaza and the West Bank, but Iran's conflict with Israel is one of Iran's making.

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I appreciate your response but I won't be engaging with you on this. I've personally found the anti-Israel/anti-Jewish posters to be too laser focused on that end of the conflict to the point where it makes the conclusions questionable and discussion unrewarding.

My apologies if I have you pegged incorrectly on the Jewish front.

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A shattered Iran in civil war would have to be terrible for sea traffic right? I mean there's always going to be one faction shooting at tankers.

And the gulf countries have enough money to have couple of airplanes and many drones patrolling 24/7

It remains to be seen whether the IRGC are actually capable of guerilla warfare. Iran isn’t Yemen or Afghanistan or even Iraq. Iran fell below replacement level tfr 25 years ago. Iran is more developed and educated than those nations. It lacks the strong tribal loyalty upon which the Taliban and Houthis rely. IRGC officers are used to creature comforts, not living in caves.

It is still a very high risk, of course, but it’s not guaranteed that a collapse leads to a Houthi style Shia Islamist insurgency.

I can't understand what the point is of seizing Kharg island. The US could just bomb it to leave it unusable for as long as they want? Or just steal the tankers at sea? It's not like it would be hard to blow up some oil storage terminals.

Landing troops there would just make them a juicy target and difficult to resupply. Iran can launch all kinds of things from inland at them.

No one wants to start tit for tat bombings of oil infrastructure. We're in the interesting situation of both bombing the hell out of them and letting them export more oil than usual. Seizing their oil infrastructure and holding it hostage could be valid in a way just blowing it up is not.

There's already been a good deal of bombing of oil infrastructure. Take a breath of fresh air in Tehran, you can smell it. Haifa too. Oil infrastructure in Oman got bombed.

Much easier and safer to just counter-blockade from afar I think.

Israel did that and we allegedly told them to chill.

If you size it there is a possibility that you will give it back. I suspect that if they just destroyed it Iran would retaliate by destroying gulf oil infrastructure, which the us certainly does not want…

Maximally cynically: brave dead Marines coming to grips with the enemy will produce a greater rally round the flag effect than high oil prices and the occasional air accident. The scenario where we bomb Iran and kill 14 copies of Muhammad Al Unpronounceable while Iran blows up oil tankers will produce few of the political benefits of a war; the scenario where Iranians are killing American soldiers will have some purchase with the public.

Controlling the island gives you leverage in negotiations. You want your oil refineries back? Then play ball. Or in the best case scenario you can hand it over to a new friendly regime.

And yeah, Iran can launch all kinds of things, if they’re fine up blowing up their own refineries in the process.

I don't think the Iranians have any intention of 'playing ball.' They're very angry. The guy in charge just had his father, wife, kids get blown up by US/Israel. I don't think he gives a damn, he is out for blood.

The people who might've been doing the 'friendly regime' are eating bombs and perhaps changing their political stance. Why would some random person in Tehran think more positively about Israel or America after getting their apartment blown up or coated in a thick layer of toxic petrochemicals from all the oil fires?

I really don't see the benefit here, karg is just their oil export terminal. All of kargs oil has to go through the strait, which iran has closed anyway. They've already determined they can last without oil exports from karg. Karg is useless without the ability to export oil from there and iran already isn't. This logic has real "we're taking kursk as a bargining chip in negotiations" energy. How did that work out?

They are still sending their own oil out of the Strait. Mainly to China.

No they aren't, they're sending it out their port just outside the strait at chabahar.

No, the Jask port does not have sufficient capacity. They are still also loading at Kharg Island.

Yes, I know that port doesn't have capacity for all of irans oil. No, that doesn't mean they're sending it through the strait, it's just not getting out. You can look up transits of the strait, theres barely anything going through and mostly not oil tankers.

The benefit is leverage in peace negotiations, and if there is peace the strait won’t be closed anymore. The Karg island facilities are extremely valuable to Iran in peacetime, which makes them worth taking in times of war.

Alternatively, the conflict never really ends and it's gitmo east.

Alternatively, the conflict never really ends and it's gitmo east.

Yeah, I think Trump likes the idea of territorial expansion. Is it feasible to build a naval base there? And if so, does that reduce the need of the United States to locate facilities in places like Bahrain?

For a while during the Ukraine conflict, Ukraine was still getting royalties on Russian pipelines running through Ukrainian territory.

Imagine a goof-ass future where the United States occupies Iran's export terminals and charges Iran royalties to export oil, while the Gulf states pay bribes to Iran to keep Hormuz open. Everyone hates each other but can't afford a war anymore. Trump gets a nobel peace prize, but whines that it should be called the Donald Strait.

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Iran has not "closed" the strait in normal terms. They have apparently not mined it, despite some claims that they would. Thet can still get their own oil through. What they're doing is taking shots, with drones, at other ships which transit it.

So it's not closed but they'll attack anything that goes through it? Sounds closed to me.

It's probably the case that in a military conflict shipping could pass through it. What won't go through is ordinary commercial shipping, because it isn't worth it. It's the difference between "Iran can get almost every single ship passing through" and "I'm not risking my oil tanker for no real reason."

So it's for all intents and purposes closed to shipping?

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They'll attack anything not theirs going through it. (That they can see, anyway, and I'm not convinced that applies to much more than "ships broadcasting their location") That's a rather big difference.

Again, just look at the chart I posted, not even their own ships are going through. Unless you think iran only exported 1 tanker a day of oil?

Yes, per international blockade rules (unless applied to the Germans in WWI), it's "closed" (although the blockade rules may have changed, I recall Russia/Ukraine being a bit odd compared to what I remember, but that may have just been dumb takes on the internet). Now, it could be more effectively closed, by mines, in the same way building a giant sea wall, having 52 Reaper drones permanently hovering, or having 18 Iowa-classes moored stem-to-stern across it would more effectively close it, but it's still "closed" without that.

It seems like a bargaining chip. Taking it away from Iran and offering to give it back gives them more of a positive motivation to end the war than just bombing it.

Also, getting them to fixate on whacking Marines on Kharg would redirect their munitions away from more high-value targets.

Finally, it would allow them to test some of the tactics the Marines have been pivoting towards which focus on the need for the Marines to be able to operate within hostile missile range.

Escalate to deescalate perhaps?


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