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We killed the core of Iranian leadership in an afternoon and their only viable response is to attack unrelated countries and merchant fleets. What do you mean humiliation! Maybe on twitter where geopolitics is about what makes people feel good but in the real world there is not a single major leader who is not terrified of America's military. Humiliation? America downgraded Iran from a regional power to a backwater without a meaningful military in an afternoon, all they have left are guys with guns pointed at their own citizens.
We have won so overwhelmingly that we are reduced to calling this a failure because Iran was able to get a hit in at all. Yeah, that's what war is!
Please note that if the Iranian regime cannot even prove their leader is alive, either because we killed him or because we will kill him, then the Iranian government has collapsed. Collapsed! Claiming otherwise is like declaring war in the Pacific with Japan a failure because rogue holdouts continued fighting for years. We also had to drop two nukes so maybe the first one was a failure?
Who is really in charge of Iran? Nobody knows! That's not a government! Who collects taxes, who negotiates with foreign powers, who runs the judiciary? Maybe the Iranians can dig giant tunnels and live in underground cities like the mole people, although the US could actually bomb them there too.
This is a government that has literally over a decade of practice in collecting taxes, performing policing, and running a judiciary against essentially a partially very hostile civilian population. They are really good at it. The idea that the police or judiciary are going to collapse is nonsensical. This really only ever happens when e.g. police are displaced by another powerful force - either literal revolutionaries (in which case taking over tax and police duties in particular is very visible and obvious), gangs (like Haiti, or some villages or neighborhoods in Mexico maybe), or foreign powers (literal invasions, UN forces, etc). There basically are zero exceptions.
The modern era actually makes revolution significantly harder, not easier, because we have so many bureaucratic tools to administer (or, worst case, defer) typical state functions. In theory, total breakdowns can still happen if a country is widely illiterate with extensive fraud, bribery, local power structures, and poorly maintained central identification regimes (e.g. Afghanistan), but Iran is not even remotely like that. IIRC, their literacy rate is actually very high.
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If you think the countries that Iran has attacked are unrelated to the conflict I don't believe you have a terribly useful understanding of the situation in the region - that's the kind of analysis that you get from talk shows. In reality, people understand that nations with US military bases that are being used to actively launch attacks are in no way unrelated to the conflict. Similarly, if you believe that their closing of the Strait and attacks on merchant ships are wild flailing as opposed to an extremely well documented and widely understood strategy of attacking the global economy then I just don't think you're providing any kind of serious analysis.
Cyprus?
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Bombing an apartment in Bahrain is not proportional to bombing an American military base in Bahrain. Of course that doesn’t even address my point which is that Iran has little ability to harm Americans.
The Iranians have extremely good intelligence from Bahrain due to the high Shia population, and there were credible reports that American soldiers were being quartered in those apartments and hotels.
I actually agree with you on this, which is one of the reasons why starting this conflict was an incredibly stupid idea. The problem, of course, is that Iran's strategy is to destroy the global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz and depriving the world of fuel, a strategy which won't harm them terribly much due to their continued ability to sell oil to China and the fact that American sanctions kept them cut off from the global economy anyway, which means that the real test of their military effectiveness is simply "How much oil left the strait of Hormuz from non-Iranian sources since the conflict began?" Much like how the Viet Cong would have handily lost a fight with the American military if they all lined up in a field and marched to death, the Iranians understand that their conventional military disadvantage forces them to fight back with alternative means.
If Iran has the ability to "destroy the global economy" whenever they want then this conflict was coming sooner or later because the rest of the world actually can't afford to cede that power to a rogue state. It's actually the most rational war in the world.
No no no you're not understanding how war works. War is not America plays pretend. If there's an oil pipeline somewhere that allows Iran to hold out forever -- America will bomb it! Iran can't stop us. America will simply destroy Iran. The only reason America hasn't done that already is our charity. We want Iran to be able to pick up the pieces after they surrender and the war is over. But if the Iranians are delusional or fanatical enough to hold out we will simply end their capacity to function like a modern state. If the only two alternatives are "Iran wrecks the Global Economy" or "The Global Economy wrecks Iran," which do we think Donald Trump is picking?
Almost everyone has the ability to destroy the global economy. If you think that's the criteria required, you're saying that we have to go invade and destroy Israel, China, Russia, the US, etc. Iran is just the only state that has been sanctioned and removed from the global economy to the point that it won't actually have nasty consequences for them - the actual rational response is to not sanction them into oblivion so they have some skin in the game.
America has not bombed that oil pipeline nor have they seized Iranian tankers - they can't afford to deprive the world of even more oil supplies.
Why isn't the Strait of Hormuz open? I thought America was done playing pretend, so why haven't they won yet? Hegseth is on TV talking about no quarter, no mercy and no more pesky rules against bombing schoolchildren, and yet Iran still controls the Strait.
Those aren't the only two alternatives - though admittedly "The US empire's decline accelerates as they're forced out of the Middle East" isn't an option Trump is willing to pick either.
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By your logic it seems Trump is picking 'Islamize all your allies through mass refugee crises'. Which is the result of pretending that after the war ends, everyone just goes back home. America is doing a lot worse than pretend.
Any putative Iranian refugees have to pass through many safe countries before reaching Europe. If European countries want to destroy themselves we really can’t stop them.
You could stop bombing them where they live, for starters. That would stop them.
I was recently working with a Palestinian who had walked from Turkey to Austria, applied to refugee status, got rejected by all except one country and voila, now there is a family of 8 living in my town. Why did he spend 2 years away from his family, walking across Europe? He showed me pictures of his old house, and then again when it was just a pile of rubble on the ground. Then how the conditions in the camp in Turkey were shit. It was no place for raising a family. So he sought a better life.
What is the option for Europe here? Kill them all? Let them starve on the border? Create a humanitarian crisis in Jordan and Turkey? The situation is completely ridiculous. If Iran doesn't withstand this, we will be seeing a refugee crisis that will dwarf everything else.
Hell, no matter what, in less than 100 years we can expect a sizeable enough muslim majority in Britain to take relevant political control.
Honestly, I can't take your rhetoric seriously. If Europe wants to destroy themselves? The cold hard American realist can apparently just scoff. As if a Muslim majority country with fully functional nuclear submarines that can launch strikes anywhere in the world is a neutral development.
Complaining about your own weakness as you blame America what else do you want me to say? You don’t have the heart to kick them out, you don’t have the heart to keep the from coming in, you don’t have the heart to build your own military and stop America from getting involved. (Which we do on your behalf now that we produce all our own oil.)
Look I say this with love for Europe but it’s actually not all America’s fault here. However much blame you want to give us you are a continent of sovereign peoples, some of this is actually your fault
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What happens when you do all that and it turns out you still don't get what you want (and possibly cause a humanitarian crisis to boot)? Energy price stability is the only reason the US cares about the sandy dump in the first place, and now that shit is literally on fire. I can't help but feel like the pro-Trump position sees this as some ape-brained dominance display and are confused and angry because people keep asking about things like 'consequences' and 'strategic objectives.'
The risk of humiliation is that the US tries to impose its will by force and backs down once it realizes that's going to take real effort that it doesn't have the will for. Blowing a bunch of stuff up and leaving is not victory. Neither is a situation in which the US destroys quality of life for ordinary Iranians but the same IRI regime holds power.
Why is that not a victory? Who says it's not? You? A situation in which the United States can destroy Iran's government and military at will, and Iran can't respond, is a total victory.
This is so obviously true you can only reframe that as "some ape-brained dominance display". Ok, so Trump and Hegseth are baboons who can't formulate or even imagine goals so you don't have to try to understand it, got it. What about Israel? What about Saudi Arabia? Those are two countries that wanted to start this war, are they irrational too? Did Benjamin Netanyahu and MBS have no sense of "things like 'consequences' and 'strategic objectives'"? Maybe everyone in the Middle East is incompetent? Incapable of first-order thinking? Maybe they should read The Motte?
I got downvoted the last time I said this in a different discussion so I want to elaborate: I consider this form of thinking to be a form of TDS. It reduces a complex geopolitical situation into a farce that only makes sense if Trump is the only actor in the world. It's Shakespearean! Trump speaks, anything that doesn't happen on stage while Trump gives his soliloquy to the camera doesn't happen at all. I don't need to consider anything else. Based on media rumors in the fog of war, I've determined that the war is a failure. I don't actually have to understand what American goals are because Trump is irrational, so he must not have had any. I don't even have to consider anybody else's motivations, because they don't meaningfully exist.
In reality we're on week two of an extremely complex operation in which Iran's leadership was decapitated -- they have a cardboard cutout for a Supreme Leader. The best Iran can do in response is mine the Straits of Hormuz and bomb random Gulf targets. Maybe that's a higher cost than America is willing to bear, maybe nobody thought that far ahead, but it doesn't seem likely!
Because you didn't actually get what you wanted. Of course, it's hard to say here because the Trump administration can not articulate what it wants.
I have tried to understand it. You act as if the only reason you could conclude Trump doesn't know what he's doing is because you're not paying attention.
The problem is that they seemingly can't articulate what we're trying to do and contradict themselves like twice a day. Let me ask you this: why should I extend any of these people the benefit of the doubt? Have they displayed some record of competence that suggests I should and wait and see what strategic genius unfolds? Spoilers: no, they haven't. These are the people who decided we needed to threaten a close ally to gain access to territory we already have access to. We are fortunate that they can at least lean on the immense operational competence of the US military, but that cannot cover for a strategic deficit.
No, all the evidence available to me suggests that they expected the Iranian government to be cowed by the initial attacks and don't have a follow up plan beyond "keep bombing until they give up" (a strategy with a terrible track record). Maybe this was done at the instigation of Israel/KSA, but "Trump got suckered into doing something stupid in Iran at the behest of self-interested 'allies'" is a point in favor of the "Trump doesn't know what he's doing" argument. He is at least in good company there, since that describes a lot of US involvement in Iran since the end of WW2. For Israel, we have both clear national strategic interests and the personal interests of the leadership, but Israeli leadership wants to do a lot of things and the US doesn't have to indulge them.
And there's the thing: you don't even have to be a weapons-grade dumbass to wind up in this situation. Military actions not producing the desired results and forcing planners to clumsily improvise has happened to smarter people than Trump.
I wouldn't dismiss the possibility, though I think it's more likely that the lack of quality institutions highlights the prevalence of incompetence more.
I think there's good evidence that a broad effort to strengthen America's hand relative to China is succeeding, rather slowly. I would count this as strategic competence at play. The counter-Trump view is that this is despite his efforts, not because of it.
I also think it's likely that the Trump administration is screwing with reporters on purpose ("lying") which is going to make things look very chaotic to external observers and provides little to no insight as to whether or not the administration actually knows what it is doing. (The counter-Trump view here, I think, would be "jokes on you, I'm only pretending to be retarded" is not very convincing.)
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Yeah there’s your problem you just need to listen to Donald Trump more:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/read-trumps-full-statement-on-iran-attack
Adding other materials (November’s National Security Statement, Abraham Accords, Trump’s speech to the UN etc.) it’s like this: Trump has negotiated a new security framework for the Middle East on which all powers agree. Relationships with Israel have been normalized. Hamas and Hezbollah have been destroyed. The only threat to a lasting peace in the Middle East is Iran. So their capacity to threaten the Middle East is being destroyed.
I don’t know what else to tell you, this is all stuff said out loud in treaties and speeches and I think everyone chooses to pretend Trump just isn’t worth listening to. Maybe when he said we were going to destroy Iran’s missile industry he was just being extra figurative.
I’m choosing to interpret this as a reference to Diego Garcia, which is a pretty apt lesson in why European powers are not reliable partners. Or maybe you meant Trump threatening Spain after they refused to let us use our bases there to stage attacks in Iran? It’s hard to tell, there are so many examples that make my argument for me.
By the way how did we end up with incompetent institutions when apparently we used to be lead by people smarter than Trump?
Except (Sen. Chris Murphy, D-CT):
You are right that Hegseth agrees with Trump:
So, missiles and missile production, fairly straightforward and measurable. Naval "destruction", less. Other miscellaneous infrastructure, obviously not a goal. Deny nuclear weapons? See briefing. It IS, don't get me wrong, a goal, but the only method is: 'hope Iran gives up and negotiates at some point'. That's it. That's the whole strategy. That's kind of a shit strategy, unless we're going to go all WW2 Japan and drop nukes on civilian centers, or some other type of total war shit. (And as mentioned upthread, mutually assured oil production destruction is an option but an insanely bad one)
In other words, there IS a strategic plan but the ACTUAL (tactical) plans we have don't match the grand strategy. At all. IMO, that's enough to fairly claim that there isn't a [real/authentic] plan (functionally speaking).
The most likely reason Senator Murphy can report all this without disclosing classified info is he's just making it up.
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Chris Murphy is not a neutral observer, he’s a senator on the anti-Trump team who stands to benefit politically if the story is “Trump has no plan”.
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iirc Big Yud had an essay on this, called something like "Am I Smarter Than The Bank Of Japan?"
From chapter 1 of Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck, "Inadequacy and Modesty":
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The BoJ isn't staffed by populist outsiders who actively tout their lack of qualifications. If it was, the answer very well might be 'yes'.
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I think your concerns are valid. Where I think things might be different is that the supply of will power is more than likely coming from Israel. Their motivations are existential, which makes them more impervious to Western political pressure and humanitarian considerations. If Israel continues to see another version of the same Iranian leadership, their lobby will probably continue to push hard for military action and the US will feel the nudge to play a sustained role in lopping off the snake's head until Israel is satisfied.
This could incidentally work in the Iranian people's favor if the Kurds and any other rebel force are supported for a long enough period of time to become formidable enough to sway the Iranian military. Recent history suggests this probably won't happen though. We're more likely to leave rebels empty-handed once Iran is reduced to only being a threat to its own people rather than the region.
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