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Notes -
Third Gulf War Negotiations Thread
As we approach the end of the 5 day pause(?) before the USA ramps up attacks again, reports are coming in that the Trump team has sent Iran a 15 point plan for peace. I don’t think the full text has been credibly made public at this time, as should be expected, but from what I’ve gathered the points can be reduced from redundant and detail points, Iran gives:
— Iran stops funding proxies abroad, especially Hamas and Hezbollah
— Iran pinky promises to never get a nuclear weapon, surrenders nuclear material, agrees to various future restrictions/inspections
— Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz
In exchange Iran gets:
— Full sanctions relief, including removal of the snapback provisions that removed sanctions would go back on Iran immediately if Iran violated the agreement
— American assistance with their civilian nuclear program.
Iran, after denying that negotiations were happening at all, has come back with the following demands:
— Bombing of Iran ends, assassination of Iranian officials ends, guarantees that it won’t start again
— Reparations
— Recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz
— They won’t negotiate with Steve and Jared, only with JD Vance
Trump has delayed bombing Iranian civilian infrastructure for this week, while Iran has let some ships through the strait as a gesture of good faith, or as Trump put it a “very expensive present.”
Now none of this is being reported clearly, and this all might be bullshit, and maybe one or both sides is engaging in distractionism.
But I’m filled with a deep sense of disquiet and defeat. The Iranian regime is rebuilt, reinforced, made more powerful. The Iranian regime is given new credibility, where before my diasporic friends could claim that with a push the rotten structure would collapse, now they know it will not. Iran gets effective, if not formal, sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran gets sanctions relief. Iran gives up more or less nothing, just some fissionable material that is easily enough replaced and a few proxies that have already been degraded. I don’t really credit the promises Iran is making here for much, especially if the snapback provision is removed.
Giving Iran anything after they close the Strait is tantamount to recognizing their sovereignty over it, de facto if not legally. Simply by asking for it, and then making a deal, Iran is going to be perceived as getting sovereignty over the strait. The USA, by accepting Iran's "gift" of letting ships through the strait, is already acknowledging that Iran has control of the strait! And this would be disastrous.
The flip side is that there’s little guarantee that the US would keep its promises in the future, but that doesn’t feel very good to me either. I’m not sure where I see the off-ramp at this point that isn’t a full invasion of Iran.
Another view is that given the conditions, this isn't really the Iran war, it's the Lebanon war and the Iran war is a sideshow and a distraction. The casualties are higher in Lebanon, there are troops on the ground in Lebanon, Israel is considering expanding its territory into Lebanon, occupation will inevitably result in settlements which will not be removed, etc. Perhaps the purpose of the Iran war never had anything to do with Iran herself, which is why the goals against Iran never seemed achievable, but were instead more local to protecting the Israeli homefront against Hezbollah. The USA distracts Iran and forces it to accept Hezbollah's defeat.
I suppose at least we’ll get good pistachios and saffron now? I’d love to see sanctions relief on a personal level, and I think sanctions are a wildly ineffective method of international relations, but on a geopolitical level this seems like the US admitting defeat.
I was told repeatedly by the US government, Israeli government, and many users on this board that Hezbollah was destroyed. I wonder who is destroying the dozens of Merkava tanks every night which I can watch on telegram.
The Iranian military is destroyed or nearly destroyed with no leadership and yet I can watch between a couple to dozens of Iranian missiles fall on Israel on telegram every night Israel claims they've intercepted nearly all of them with attached pictures of booster stages. And I can watch much more falling on American bases and more in Kuwait, Iraq, the UAE, and elsewhere every single night telegram.
/edit: The fog of war is thick and it makes it very difficult to carry on a dialogue about this topic because my beliefs about reality on the ground in this conflict and the beliefs of most on this board do not overlap much which makes most dialogues turn into bickering about facts on the ground which I have little interest in engaging in. However, I do have some comments and predictions: /edit
At this point, the only goal of the Trump administration after starting this preposterously stupid war for Israel being conducted in a slapstick, idiotic, and dishonorable way (not to mention the political suicide of Trump's winning coalition), appears to be to extricate the US without looking stupid and weak in an obvious loss.
But I think that ship has sailed. The only way the US doesn't suffer a strategic defeat is a vast escalation which we are incapable of (I hope) so the real question is whether it's going to be a strategic or catastrophic defeat. If the US successfully militarily reopens the Straight of Hormuz (which will not happen), then Iran can simply demonstrably destroy all oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf and it won't matter the Straight is open because there is no oil to ship and they will do it because we've made this existential for them.
My prediction is the US will abandon most if not all American military bases in the Persian Gulf, Iran will have de facto sovereignty over the Straight of Hormuz and charge passage fees, and Iran will emerge stronger than ever.
Which wouldn't be much of a difference because that is fiat accompli right now. We have basically abandoned all 16+ bases and for almost a month soldiers and other staff are hiding in hotels amongst civilians in at least Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. CENTCOM has to beg Iraqi militias for a ceasefire so they can abandon the greenzone in Baghdad, which we then promptly violated because that's how we apparently roll. and the CENTCOM Navy HQ has been obliterated and is uninhabitable. Not a single American warship is in the Persian Gulf or within 500mi of Iranian territory. We're now taking off from bases over a thousand miles away (some of which are all the way in the UK or even the US) with webs of lillypad tanker circuits refueling aircraft because we cannot protect aircraft on the ground within 1000mi of Iran. Based on talks I've had with friends who joined and fought in GWOT and are still in, the morale in the US military, at least over there, is bad.
There is no credible reason to think negotiations are happening and Iran publicly stating their War demands is not properly described as "negotiations." Additionally, the Iranian's public demands also include the US leaving its military bases in the Persian Gulf as well as covering Lebanon and some more I forget at the moment. The Iranians have already rebuked Russia, Pakistan, and will soon (if I had to guess) rebuke Egypt offers of trying to come up with a starting point for negotiations. The 15 point peace plan is detached from reality and DOA. At this point, the US Government appears to be agreement incapable after having shredded its diplomatic credibility so now we have to rely on hard power.
Great job everyone! Apparently what Trump didn't like about the Iraq War was the years of planning and preparation.
Sure, all Americans will soon be getting slammed by large increases in the cost of living as oil spiking filters through the world economy (producer inflation is already near 2% in a single month), but at least some connected insiders are getting filthy rich frontloading huge futures buys 10 minutes before each big Trump administration announcement.
Meanwhile, one million of Shiite inhabitants of South Lebanon fled their homes. They will be never let back (and will have nowhere to return).
They were the "sea" in which Hezbollah was swimming, they were source of Hezbollah recruits and reinforcements. This is over, this is now Israeli land, ancient land of Asher and Naphtali tribes restored.
Hezbollah can for some time hide in the ruins, until they are bombed out and hunted down. That's all.
Past a certain point, sanctions are going to come down and then Israel is finished. A large country can withstand sanctions, small countries with fragile high tech economies cannot. The Germany 1939 gambit of securing more lebensraum and expelling ethnic enemies only works if you're a big country with a large army.
Sanctions from whom?
China does not GAF, they want to make money.
India GAF about Muslim lives even less.
Russia the same.
Muslim world? It already sanctions Israel or sanctioned in the recent past, Israel lived with it.
Europe? Maybe, if it goes fully Muslim or woke but this is not happening soon, and Europe is not so important as it used to be (and getting less important every day).
US? Again, it will require all boomer Evangelicals die off, and this will not happen soon either.
And who has more money, the Israelis or the Arabs? China's official stance is pro-Palestinian, being anti-Israeli fits with their whole BRICS thirdworldism ethos. Iran is a friend of China, Israel is on the other side.
The moment America stops shielding Israel, stops debanking and harassing anyone who goes against Israel, the whole structure comes crashing down both militarily and economically. Boomer evangelicals are dwindling in relevance.
Expelling another million people and creating another migration disaster is not going to make Israel any friends in Turkey or Europe and will only bring forward disaster. America routinely throws allies under the bus, so too will be the fate of the 'greatest ally'.
China also has good relations with, Israel and the Gulf Arabs, who are not really against Israel these days. They want to make money not pick sides in Middle Eastern disputes.
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Israel has invaded south lebanon many times, why will they stay this time?
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Out of curiosity, what soft of things do you think the government of Iran would be saying if things were not going well for them and that they were prepared to make politically painful changes?
Remember that- at least according to various pro-Iranian positions of the last month- part of the travesty/evil of this war is that the US and Israel attacked during negotiations in which good-faith Iran was supposed to be on the cusp of making major concessions. I personally do not believe this claim, but for the sake of argument let's take the pro-Iranian claims at their word, and then take into consideration the Iranian words of the time. What narrative line pushed with the same vigor and effort by the state apparatus would you have looked at at the time and gone 'yeah, in the next few days they're going to make geopolitical concessions they've spent decades refusing'?
Or go back about 3 months ago, at the end of the January protest crackdown. This is hopefully not terribly controversial, but a government that shoots tens of thousands of its own citizens in the streets is facing things that could politely be called 'serious issues.' Hopefully also not terribly controversial, but shooting tens of thousands of your own citizens does not actually fix the issues, but tends to make them worse. Protests are a symptom, not the cause, of protests. But during and immediately after the regime, what high-level state or clerical rhetoric would you as the observer see and think 'they recognize and are going to address the underlying problems?'
Or go back further, to an event of your choice. The Iranian Revolution has had the better part of a half century to make mistakes and back down under pressure, despite the wishes of its ruling elite. At the time before the backdown was indisputably public, what sort of rhetoric were you seeing to indicate cracks within the system?
The point here isn't a claim about the current state of the current conflict, but about the ability to use certain types or sources of information to make meaningful conclusions about the state of the world. Different states lie in different ways, both deliberately and as the natural form of dissembling. For the Americans, the metaphor of kabuki theater exists for the sort of going-through-the-motions that has no real impact on the final result. For the Europeans, there will (almost) never be a diplomatic meeting that does not make positive 'progress' or that is not 'productive.' Examples could continue. There is quite often a public default position, regardless of what goes on behind the scenes.
If you want to take Iranian public rhetoric as presumptively true, and make the possibility that it's just public dissembling false the caveat, I'm not going to stop you. In fact, I will thank you for remembering the caveat. But before you feel disquiet and defeat, it might be worth considering whether Iran might have a default public persona of defiant triumphalism, and consider how that compares or contrasts if the Iranian opponent is an actor with the media objectivity and positivity that surrounds Donald J. Trump, and consider how that might shape your perception... and the information that would be provided to you.
Where does my analysis rely on what Iran is saying? I'm concerned about what my country is saying. I'm not making any claims based on missile stocks or whatever, I'm looking at what Donald Trump is saying live every day. He's saying the war is won, but at first the war was won and the regime was going to collapse, then there was a period where the war was won and the Iranians would "unconditionally surrender." Then the Iranians were going to give up on the strait out of fear of bombing attacks on infrastructure. Now we've arrived at, the Iranians are going to open the strait of hormuz in exchange for all sanctions being dropped.
Next you'll tell me that Trump just says shit and it doesn't matter keep your eye on the prize kid, the marines are on their way and it's all the prelude to the invasion that will go perfectly and end the whole thing! And maybe, but that doesn't really make me feel very good either. Because I don't really like being part of a country where the government just says shit it doesn't mean.
That's your second mistake.
Oh, I hate it. But it's the hand that's been dealt. No good trying to behave as if the cards are different than what they are.
I'll disagree with this part. The implication seems to be that the Trump admin is uniquely bad in this way (are we forgetting Hillary Clinton's public and private positions?)
But I don't even think this is bad. Why in God's name would our politicians tell us what's actually going on in Iran, while it's happening? You know there's a war on right? One of the primary tools of both the military and the state department is deception, or at the very least strategic ambiguity. If Trump came out and told us his actual specific war aims, the biggest beneficiary would be Iran, who could adjust their own strategy to better defeat us. It's obviously in the best interest of our country to dissemble or outright lie about our goals.
I suspect the objection you would make is that 'the American people shouldn't be lied to'. Okay, why? We're a representative democracy, where we elect particular people to positions of power because we think they will be best suited to wield that power. We hold elections on a regular schedule, where we assess the individuals and their records, but during their tenure in that position (short of impeachment) they can act with impunity. This is by design!
So my question to you is: what exactly would you do differently if Trump was clear and open about his war aims? I would wager 99.9% of those complaining online a) have no potential way to influence events and b) are not really affected by these events either way, outside of gas prices. Of those who are actually involved, they almost certainly have a much clearer picture of what's going on and why. For the rest of us, this is just geopolitical theater, and we should not sacrifice strategic advantage so that you feel better about it.
If we were talking about tactics or even grander strategy this argument makes sense, but war aims? No, we're supposed to be consulted about the war aims. You can have congress agree and declare war based on confidential plans but our representatives get to see the plans and agree to them, not one man.
For whatever it's worth, and whatever else I may observe or opine on this or any other conflict in the future, I do fundamentally agree / sympathize / consider this a valid position on how it should be.
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I think this works well enough as a response from me, so thank you.
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No, it works fine. Ask China about the Tiananmen Square protests. (But don't ask anyone young because they've never heard of them)
You have been banned from league of legends.
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I have heard from many a Chinese that the two decades after 1989 were some of the most profound political, economic, and social reforms of CCP-Chinese history. That Xi reversed many of these trends does not exactly change that shooting the protestors demanding such changes (and more) did not fix the issues of the Cold War-era communist economic-political order.
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I’m going to level with you on my sense of this. I think Ukraine and Iran are both opening shots of a soon to be much much bigger war. The same characters are involved in all of them — USA and somewhat European powers, and Russia, China, and Iran. The goal is more or less to reduce capacity for the RCI bloc to project power. So far, you are correct that it’s a loss, but I don’t think it will stay that way. Keep in mind that most conflicts go on for years so knowing how it’s going in two weeks is impossible.
I do think the war is necessary in the sense that unless the world understands that when we threaten, we not only mean it, but will destroy things, and remove leaders, then it creates the idea in most states heads that we are paper tigers. We either prove that we can and will back up our will with force, or we end up having to fight more often because the rogue states are not afraid to challenge us or attack our Allie’s. If Trump has done one thing for American military, it’s that because he’s not afraid to use the military, people understand that it’s a real fighting force, and that if you mess with us, you’ll be hurt.
"You see, this war isn't a loss because it's a prelude to WW3 and thus a nuclear apocalypse, so stay tuned for the human race to lose collectively! If we all lose, no one does."
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Where is China involved in any of this? I can see where you draw an Iran-Russia alliance, and China lurks in the background, but they haven't done anything to help Iran or Russia, and to a first guess their purposes are best served by Iran losing quickly and Russia remaining isolated and weakened.
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Since the "axis of resistance" bloc does not seem to be in any way real (excepting Russian-North Korean friendship and brotherhood), this mission had been already accomplished.
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I don't think this is quite true, at least if we're talking about active, open conflicts and thinking in the domain of interstate conflicts. Civil wars tend to drag out much longer. Some example data here. In Table 1, all four types of termination criteria for interstate conflicts had a median duration of a year or less. I'd seen graphs somewhere in the past, but can't easily find them. All of the means are definitely higher than the medians, and I recall the distributions being pretty skewed.
Of course, if you're thinking in terms of geopolitical 'conflict' that is not active hostilities, that's much harder to measure.
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It is beginning to look like the previous US presidents who for the most part did not bomb Iran were not just bleeding heart pacifists but had sound strategic reasons not to bomb them, and that attacking Iran was a mistake.
There is no quickload button in chess or international politics. If you make a mistake, you will find yourself in a worse situation than before.
Some strategic blunders come from noble motivations. For example, a (debatable sized) part of the motivation for the US-Afghanistan war was that the Taliban are terrible and nobody should be forced to live under their regime.
With Trump, there is not even a pretense of noble motivations. He was pretty open that the Venezuelan adventure was simply about securing their oil for the US, otherwise he does not give a fuck about who is in charge over there. Iran was just a desperate gamble to win the mid-terms.
Does the Iranian regime deserve to win this conflict? Fuck no.
But the US most certainly deserves to lose. Unlike Iran, their population had the luxury to elect the one who calls the shots. They picked Donald Trump out of all people, who turned out not to be a good steward of the American hegemony.
Did this even happen? No one wants to spend the capex to rebuild Venezuelas bpd capacity.
Are the heavy crude Texan refineries now taking in Venezuelan oil?
One problem Venezuela was having is they couldn't even ship their own oil without imported naphtha, which they were getting shipped via the shadow fleet -- which the US was blocking and seizing. So while they can't rebuild their domestic capacity quickly, now that they can get naphtha without restriction, at least one bottleneck is gone.
Yes. Note that a bunch of heavy crude refining capacity came on line in Mexico earlier this year, which was hurting the US refineries.
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Do you still think that, now that political prisoners are being let go and foreign companies are starting to move back into Venezuela? Do you think that Venezuelans are better off now that the US is sitting on Delcy Rodriguez? Or not
The operation may have good consequences beyond oil whether or not Trump's sole motivation was oil.
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Rodriguez just made the erstwhile chief of the revolutionary secret police and notorious user of torture against regime enemies one of her top people and defense minister a few days ago.
Yeah it's complicated but if your appraisal is just "securing their oil" it's not clear you've thought about this seriously / outside the 24-second news cycle
Is the capex in the room with us right now?
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American oil companies are private, yes.
Oil company executives are political prisoners.
Foreign investment in oil infrastructure.
The opposition loves oil companies.
Oil companies are enemies of the state.
EDIT: A big difference between Venezuela and Iran is that capitalist “exploitation” of Venezuela’s resources will improve the lives of the people living there, but continuous US/Israeli air strikes and CIA/Mossad-backed civil unrest will not.
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Hear ye!
More effort than this, please.
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If that's the goal then they've already failed because Iran is demanding that Lebanon be included in any peace deal and there's little reason to think the IRGC hardliners calling the shots right now will give up such a powerful tool in their arsenal.
On the flipside, it's almost inconceivable to imagine Netanyahu agreeing to a deal with Iran that actually leaves him in a worse position vis-a-vis Hezbollah than before the war even under immense pressure. The most optimistic outcome seems to be that Trump cuts a deal with Iran like the one he cut with the Houthis after Rough Rider that leaves them free to fight Israel alone as long as they don't shoot at the US Navy. More likely he continues to get dragged into the quicksand by promises of "small escalation for quick win!"
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So JD Vance is thé go between for the world’s top bad faith negotiators?
The actual conditions don’t mean anything; eventually there will be a cease fire where Iran opens the straights and cuts off a single one of its many foreign proxies in exchange for sanctions relief. But there’s a complicated dance of bad faith negotiations to preserve fiqh.
“Apparently” they didn’t want Kushner and Witkoff because they were involved in the earlier “bad faith” negotiations and asked for Vance instead.
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A couple of thoughts
Assuming they are even honest, the negotiating points seem to far apart to mean anything. Like, the US is not paying reparations to Iran, Iran is not going to become a de facto US protectorate, etc... Iran is also clearly concerned about bad faith negotiations. All in all, it seems like we're nowhere close to progress on this front.
This conflict seems to break a certain kind of person's brain, including a lot of people inside the Trump administration. They look at the raw power differential between the US and Iran, the difference in scale of destruction meted out on either end, and are simply baffled by the idea that Iran could still be in the fight or even in an advantageous position. It has a whiff of "that's not blood in my mouth, it's victory wine." What this fails to grasp is the difference in what this war means for the belligerents. The IRI has far more to lose and gain than the US does, far greater ability to make its populace accept suffering/losses, and an asymmetric need for force (simply put: the US needs way more force to achieve its goals than Iran does, and is operating much further away from its military base). Might-makes-right thinking habitually overestimates the efficacy of raw power and underestimates the importance of intangibles like morale and wanting it more.
A number of people have observed that it now seems the goal of this war for the US is to re-open the strait of Hormuz, which was already open before the war. (Realistically, the goal is to extricate itself without looking stupid/weak, but that ship has probably already sailed). It's still conceivable that the US is going to try some kind of special operation to seize Iranian uranium, but I'm going to hazard to guess that US military really doesn't want to do that. I am still left with the impression that the administration really thought they were going to pull a repeat of Venezuela (we also have some indication that Netanyahu thought kicking in the door would bring the whole rotting edifice down) and all the people saying "trust the plan" are huffing pure, unfiltered copium.
I have to wonder about the wider long-term impact of this conflict. There's going to be a lot of uninvolved countries suffering the economic consequences of the strait being closed, and I predict they're mostly going to blame the US for that. When you're global hegemon, they let you do it, but I can't help but suspect that the current administration is blindly drawing down US soft power without even realizing it.
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Yes, this war has not gone well for America, but that was hardly unexpected, there’s a reason no previous American president was dumb enough to do this, including HW and Jr. Disarming Hezbollah is equally flawed, Shias in Lebanon are loyal to it and will reform and rebuild it in whatever guise, whatever the case, and the country is too divided by sectarianism to stop them. I hesitate to say it’s over for Israel, it’s faced poor odds before, but the future certainly isn’t bright for it.
Hezbollah's continued resilience has never ceased to amaze me. I can't even imagine how Israel will look in a century. Israel's mounting domestic challenges hasn't left it in a good place when thinking about the future. Netanyahu's military exemption for religious Jews is going to catch up with the lopsided demographics in virtue of the fact that secular Jews aren't making up the difference in defense in the country. It's left me scratching my head a bit though, since the overwhelming consensus of Israel at the moment supports the war effort against Iran. My understanding was that among the Ultra Orthodox, even in Israel, they were very much against the secular state. I imagine they somehow got co-opted by state politics. Either I'm wrong in some way I don't understand or something else happened somewhere along the way that I haven't been informed of.
It's a fun thought experiment. On the plus side (for them), they are the only developed country with above-replacement fertility, they have tons of very high IQ people, rapidly growing GDP per capita, low (and shrinking) national debt, a strong national-religious identity and an extremely competent military. I can easily see an expansionist Israel annexing Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon and populating them with settlers.
On the other hand, their soon to be largest religious group reject military service, non-religious education and (to some extent) paid work, they are alienating the world with their treatment of the Palestinians, they are an extremely hot country in a heating world and their growing population is limited to a small sliver of land, even if they do annex territory from their neighbours.
The question is whether they can cream off enough of the Haredim to stop them turning the country into a giant yeshiva.
Cries in western civilization.
I don't want to live there, and I don't particularly love what they're up to. But man I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous.
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The Ultra-Orthodox are remarkably simple. They want to maximize the observance and study of Torah. Right now, they assess (correctly) that the State of Israel is capable of defending itself without Ultra-Orthodox soldiers. This means that Torah study and observance is maximized by staying in yeshiva and learning Torah all day. If the Ultra-Orthodox became such a large fraction of Israel’s population that the state needed them to serve in the IDF, then they would enlist/relent to conscription, because getting driven out of the Land of Israel is bad for Torah observance and study.
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America has destroyed Iran's military and leadership and experienced a scant dozen casualties. In what sense has this war gone poorly?
Oh IDK, stumbling into a quagmire scenario with a country that can strangle the global economy with barely any effort applied, while needing to either concede on unfavorable terms or invade and dedicate enormous resources to secure shipping across a rugged and populated coast where any one random attack that slips through on the previous traffic of hundreds of ships per day is a major failure. Effectively devoting enormous financial and military resources to return something back to what was already the status quo before starting the war.
All for the strategic purpose of… making sure that all countries never trust in the validity of a deal or agreement with the US again.
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Has it achieved any goals? At what cost?
I'd also score "we never really thought about what our goals are" as not achieving goals. Right now, the main goal seems to be an open Hormuz and stable markets... Which we had before the war started.
The war has definitely depleted Iranian munitions stockpiles (even if we assume that US efforts to strike those stockpiles were 0% effective, which they were not, and all of that depletion is from launching them at all and sundry.)
The US said that (besides self-defense) preventing Iran from projecting power and completing a nuclear weapon were its primary objectives on March 2.
Destroying their navy and missile inventory is a means of preventing Iran from projecting power.
Without inside knowledge of how effective US strikes are, what Iran's stockpiles look like, etc. I cannot tell exactly how effective this has been, but it definitely seems like Iran's ability to project power has been negatively impacted.
This is very true. But what do we do in 5 years when they.... make more?
There's a reason we are bombing their industrial defense production. And, from what I can tell, there's good reasons at this point to think that Israel will just keep bombing those production facilities, particularly if Iran does not agree to an arms control agreement.
But let's assume that "mowing the lawn" doesn't happen. Wanna see me do some really sloppy analysis?
Iran first started producing ballistic missiles in the mid-late 1980s, so completely destroying their production entirely sets them back by 35 years of infrastructure and production. However, that's a naive estimate, because part of what's difficult about ballistic missiles is accumulating the knowledge to build them. I think we can assume that the US and probably more especially Israeli are attacking that accumulated knowledge, but it's more difficult to do that than it is to blow up a bunch of static buildings.
One estimate I found guessed that Iran could build 300 ballistic missiles and an eye-watering 10,000 Shaheds per month in peacetime.
This works out, in a very, very simplistic evaluative way, of Iran having the capability to build the facilities to produce about, let's say, 10 ballistic missiles per month every year, building up from 0 in 1990 to 300/month today.
It's a bit harder to evaluate the Shahed, but let's just say that they started the program in 2016, since there is at least some evidence of it being used in 2019 (they may have acquired blueprints for a similar design around 2004 but I like 2016 since it gives us a nice round ten years). That suggests it takes a mere 1 year to build out the capability to produce 1000 Shaheds per month.
So if we assume for the sake of easy math that Iran has to rebuild their ballistic missile program entirely from scratch and progressively ramps up manufacturing, we find that their ballistic missile production ramps up like so:
720 sounds like a lot, but the US will have built 3000 Patriots in that time at 2026 production levels plus the excess Patriots manufactured as the US ramps up from 600 produced to 2000 produced per year between 2026 and 2033. It's unclear to me what the Israeli production rates are, but 200 annually of Stunner and Arrow-3 doesn't seem insane. So in 5 years it seems plausible that the Israeli or even a fraction of US interceptor capability will be able to handle the bulk of the Iranian ballistic missile threat.
Shahed numbers will be considerably higher, however, since our estimate is that they are 100 times as easy to produce. So in five years, we can expect 72,000 Shaheds, right around the 80,000 my source gives as an estimate of Iran's stockpiles at the start of this conflict. But, BAE is producing 25,000 APKWS guidance kits per year, and last year a new Iron Dome facility opened in Arkansas that is supposed to be able to produce 2,000 Iron Dome rockets per year. That works out to around 125,000 APKWS and 10,000 Iron Dome rockets to intercept the 72,000 Shaheds.
NOW, I don't think there's really any reason to think that the US will divert every single one of their APKWS to Israel, but there are a lot of cheap anti-drone systems coming online now, like the Martlet (which is expected, I think, to be sold to countries in the Gulf, although perhaps not Israel) and Iron Beam, and this doesn't take into account other defenses (like conventional air-to-air missiles or even the 30mm on Apaches). So it doesn't seem impossible that even against Shaheds, in 5 years there will be a lot of cheap defenses proliferated in the region.
Obviously, this is a VERY CRUDE TOY MODEL that is likely significantly off from what we will see in real life. It doesn't take into account cost, either, and from what I understand Iran in particular is under some financial strain at the moment, although they also are building relatively cheap offensive weapons. But the fun thing is that you can plug in whatever numbers you want (e.g. 500 baseline ballistic missiles and 2000 baseline Shaheds in stockpiles, or a residual production capability, or larger production numbers for the US+Israel to represent increasing Patriot and APKWS production, etc.) and see how the math works out.
While I don't think this is "realistic," I do think it suggests that Iran in 5 years will probably be less capable than they were at the start of this fight as regards ballistic missile stockpiles. Meanwhile we can anticipate advancements both technologically and in production from anti-missile systems over in the next 5 years. So there's actually at least some reason to think that the balance of power in the region will shift if Iran's production capabilities are significantly reduced.
I probably should have said 10 years given how hard Iran's ass is getting kicked.
They could speed things up given that Russia is now the premier Shaheed manufacturer. And Russia is no slouch on missile production either. I doubt China would sell them much offensive stuff.
Your analysis is largely sound, western production should have a nice edge on Iran in the near term, ideally. But yeah, only a fraction of it goes to ME. Everyone and their sister wants patriots/Interceptors right now.
I actually think your comment on the attack/defense power ratio is the most important point. No idea how that will go, but I think Iran's power in 10 years (assuming the current situation ends with a status quo except Iran's military-industrial complex is much flatter) is actually entirely out of their hands.
Either, 1) it remains much easier and cheaper to chuck drones at stuff than it is to blow them up, and Iran will inevitably regain an edge due to this dynamic
Or 2) it becomes quite cheap and easy to blow up cheap drones/missiles and then the only way to deliver warheads to foreheads is stealth cruise missiles or hypersonic ballistic missiles and then Iran is just fucked because they simply don't have the economy to do this and "mowing the lawn" becomes laughably easy as the "stealth cruise missile" supply chain is 100 to 1000x easier to break than a cottage industry making shaheeds in distributed basements.
I tend to agree with what you've said here. I will offer two notes: firstly, from what I can tell, Russia has historically been extremely leery of giving Iran anything that could actually hurt Israel). I am not sure, however, if this would rule out bulk Shaheds. Also, there is no reason Israel can't just build their own Shaheds. The US does it. So it's possible (if unlikely) that in 2036 the Gulf region is just "everyone has 500,000 Shaheds" which would be sort of funny in a dark way, I suppose.
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Lol. Dude. Anyone that's actively launching missiles in a war is effectively "depleting their stockpiles." That's not much of an accomplishment when you consider Iran still hasn't even begun launching it's most advanced ammunition, has the largest repository of missiles in the Middle East, and what it 'has' launched has inflicted a great deal of damage already, so it's not as if they used up their stockpile putting on a fruitless light show for everybody else.
Indeed, and as I said, the US depleting its own stockpiles is a big risk case in this war.
I'd be interested in how you can be certain of that, and which specific models you believe they are holding back.
Yes, I agree with this. But because Israel and the United States pulled the trigger, they have the first mover advantage, which means that most likely this arsenal was less effective than it otherwise would have been.
The Qassem Basir, for one.
Interesting, and thanks for the link, it was a good read.
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Okay. But "we got the Iranians to attack our allies with missiles" is not much of an achievement, or at least, it doesn't indicate on its own that the war is going particularly well.
You neglected eleven days ago to specify what kind of situation would make you say that the five week special operation is going poorly. Care to update that or do you feel that the war is basically already a success since our allies got bombed?
I think you have me confused with Shakes. I'm gonna have to get a real pfp or something!
You know, when you put it like that, you would sort of think the hostile-to-Israel types around here would favor the war more, wouldn't you...
Anyway: I think the operation so far has made progress in its goals: Iranian regional influence has been blunted. However, so far, I have not seen any evidence that the US has yet maximally degraded the Iranian strike complex. Today's CENTCOM briefing assessed that over 2/3rds of Iran's military production capabilities have been destroyed, for instance, so it seems clear that even US public-facing assessments are that Iran's capabilities are degraded but not destroyed. It seems possible to me that the US could reach something much closer to a systematic destruction of their capabilities the course of additional weeks or perhaps even days, although I think the Iranians are adopting a reasonably savvy defensive posture. As I said, without nonpublic information it is difficult to evaluate.
Sarker, Shrike, and Shakes sounds like a Victorian pharmaceuticals company to me. Or maybe a legal one.
I miss names like this. Now they'd be called "Gloob" or something equally nonsense.
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Our names are Sarker, Shrike, and Shakes,
We're experts in reasons and takes,
In opinions and argumention,
prognostication,
In effortposts, politeness, and make no mistakes.
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Okay, you got me, especially since Shakes wrote the grandparent comment.
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Wait, Sarker, Shrike, and Shakes are three different people?
All I can say for certain is that we are three different Motte accounts!
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By the literal definition of "they probably have fewer munitions than before the war" then obviously they're degraded, but that isn't a meaningful measure in any sense.
A better measure might be a few days ago, when Israel hit their gas field and they responded by issuing evacuation orders for multiple equivalent targets in neighboring countries and overcoming AD to hit all of them within hours. Personally, I'd call that a clear demonstration of "power projection" and until they are no longer able to reliably launch large, AD penetrating countervalue volleys any claim of victory on the basis of having degraded said capabilities is clearly hollow.
I tend to agree. But it's difficult to verify the current levels of Iranian munitions: smaller salvo sizes might indicate munitions destruction or merely conservation; larger salvo sizes might indicate healthy munitions levels or a use-it-or-lose it mentality.
So the war might end with the US claiming to have exhausted Iranian munitions stockpiles, when in reality the Iranians have thousands of missiles left. On the flipside, the war might end with the Iranians claiming to have barely felt it, when in fact the their final salvo in the war was their last gasp.
It's possible that the war will end in a way that makes it easy to determine the winner, but it also seems plausible to me that the war will end with both sides claiming victory and the real measure of that victory will be measured in subsequent behavior over years or decades.
Very much this, and it's the decision-making process of the the subsequent decades in particular that will... not vindicate, but provide context for whose expectations may have been better grounded.
There are two general parts of state-level decision making in geopolitics: you need the resources to do it, and the sort of political leadership to choose those resources. I am far from convinced that the Iranian system will be better positioned for either in the future, even if the desires to toll the straights of Hormuz becomes the post-war status quo.
For state resources, many things are not just a matter of money, but time and capital. The US and Israel claim to have gone after a lot of military industry, and that is neither cheap or quick to replace, nor are the outputs. The nature of losing years to decades of naval or missile investments is that they may take years to decades of reinvestment to rebuild. Until you build another Navy, I doubt even the most hardline Ayatollah will, say, send a blue water task force to escort Iranian oil tankers to China in a US-china war and dare the US to start another war to stop it, with all the implications that has (or could have had in the middle east).
But political leadership matters to. The Iranian political-economic system was already strained enough that there was a 'moderate' faction of pragmatists who were willing to disagree with IRGC-aligned hardliners not in goals, but in the need for reforms to get there. This war seems to have let the IRGC step in and leave the reformists out, and over the longer term states that don't reform can still be aggressive and dangerous, but become less capable over time. There is also a point to be made about the difference between animosity and the belief of personal distance from risk. Ayatollah Khamenei and most of the Iranian high-level leadership had over 30 years of lived experience of well-justified belief that they could wage asymmetric and not-so-asymmetric warfare against the US and Israel and that they wouldn't be retaliated against. Khamenei 2.0 and his core advisors may hate the US and Israel even more than his father, but somehow I doubt they will hold that sort of belief.
None of this is an argument for or defense of the American attack on Iran, but it seems clear to me that this is a war to try and shape the trajectory of the region, and there's more to the future of the region and relative Iranian or US power than the straits of hormuz or if the Iranian theocracy stands.
I realize you're just jawboning and not advocating for this position, but this would have to make the "Trump 8d Backgammon" hall of fame for copium right? "The war that we launched to bring down the hardline theocratic Iranian regime succeeded, because it empowered the hardline theocratic elements, which will lead to their downfall some years down the road!"
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Wars are not a tally of losses on either side. The US inflicted incredibly lopsided casualties in Afghanistan and Vietnam and still failed, because confusing tactical brilliance for strategic success is a perennial failure of American military thinking.
Also, the US hasn't destroyed the Iranian military.
We sank the vast majority of Iran’s navy, which is itself a strategic goal. It is in fact one of the strategic goals outlined by Trump in his speech when the war began
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A perennial failure of all military thinking, mind you. Sad as it is, we are not uniquely unable to see the forest for the trees.
It's certainly not unique to the United States, e.g. there's a good argument that Prussia and its successors had the same basic problem, though there it was more that Prussia overestimated the ability of tactical prowess to paper over fundamental material disadvantages. Thus getting into deep shit and having to be bailed out. The same could be levied against Japan during WW2. The distinction I would draw is that these people generally had straightforward strategic goals, but their egos were writing checks their armies couldn't cash.
By contrast, I think where the US stands out is the combination of conventional dominance and confused, facile, or overly ambitious strategic thinking. America, like Prussia, keeps convincing itself it's going to get a quick decisive war. But Prussia's problem was biting off more than it could chew, while America's problem is that we have no idea what we're doing. And I don't mean that in the sense of 'incompetent'. I mean it in the sense that we think we're doing one thing when we're actually doing another.
I'd call this a human problem. Breaking shit is fun and easy, thats why kids do it. That's why I still like throwing rocks off tall heights even though I now have grey hairs.
Building durable good systems is incredibly hard and challenging and much much less fun. That's why software engineers get paid so much.
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Iran has effective control of the strait of Hormuz and the regime stands, with a new generation of leadership. The nuclear program is exactly where it was before. If the war ends at this point it's a clear US loss.
We bombed it.
And after bombing it in June 2025 it was destroyed for many years and no further action was needed until the mid/late 2030s. Right? Right????
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We bombed it earlier, it made no difference. We can keep bombing the entrances to their facilities, but they can keep digging them out. So either we have to keep bombing forever (which means the war didn't end), or they're going to be able to restart the nuclear program where they left off. We actually have to take the nuclear material and take or destroy the centrifuges before we've actually set them back.
So in your opinion is the concept of a "bunker buster" just a lie?
In the stated opinion of the United States government, they're more of a suggestion, or advertising fluff.
The USA bombed Iran's nuclear capability six months ago, and the government has said repeatedly that it did not achieve its goals of setting back the Iranian nuclear program.
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The Iranians had bunkers deep enough to defeat the USs largest bunker busters.
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I think it would be great for mankind if Iran winds up controlling the strait, as this would constitute a powerful deterrence against future powers that plot unjustified wars without regard for humanitarian consequences. If this deterrence is permanently inked into history, then it could save millions of lives in the future when leaders read about the aggression of America and Israel against the underdog Iran. This would be good for Americans in America, because we will not be top dog forever; in a century or two we may find ourselves in Iran’s place with a more powerful China attempting to oppress us and conquer us. Giving Iran the strait would be a great reparative act for a country that does not deserve the families of its scientists blown up and its economy placed under crippling sanctions just because their civilization makes Israelis and Zionists uncomfortable and envious.
Ultimately there is nothing more important than justice and securing peace, at least not if you’re a member of the Christian West called to be peacemakers. If this reduces our power and prosperity, then that’s an adequate sacrifice for twenty years of mistakes we refuse to learn from. So perhaps we can learn from this one and boot the warmongers out of power. Obviously, we did not learn anything from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and Palestine. So maybe those who worship power will learn something from a decline in American power, and maybe Israelis will learn something from relentless missile strikes on their cities. I’m doubtful, but it’s possible.
They would just build pipelines. It’s one reason why in the past pipeline politics are complicated. But now that Syria is western friendly it’s believed pipelines become easier.
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Is there anything in particular about modern Iran toward which Israelis/Zionists are envious? I'm not trying to make a point here; I ask out of genuine curiosity. There is much in the very long history of Persian culture to be proud of. I ask because I hear things like this from time to time from very, very anti-Velayat-e Faqih Iranian exiles but there's never any follow up. Modern Isreal seems to have little to envy modern Iran about, with the giga-caveat that much of this is Isreal's doing I suppose. Perhaps its that Isreal is driven to harm Iran out of theoretical envy at what Iran might have become in a counterfactual recent history where there is no Isreal to have prevented their greatness?
In the proxy conflict for control of the Middle East, a conflict which Iran did not start, Iran has held on to influence in the region despite Israel dragging the hegemonic world superpower into the conflict. And despite Israel’s great tactics against Hezbollah, they still appear able to launch powerful attacks.
That is not an answer to the question he asked.
There might be many things to envy about Persian civilisation, which certainly has a storied and impressive history, but Hezbollah's resilience seems more like a strategic observation. You posited that Israelis are envious of Persian or Iranian civilisation.
I would consider their military competency a byproduct of their civilization, if not just a part of their civilization. I mean, without their military all Sparta had was pithy quotes.
The Israelis at present seem to have proven dramatically more militarily competent than the Iranians, though. What reason is there to think that the Israelis envy Iranian military skill? Or for that matter Iranian civilisation in general, for which I do not consider military competence a general proxy for anyway.
(I grant that military competence and civilisational worthiness, however defined, probably correlate positively. However, I would be willing to point to plenty examples of enviable civilisations that underperformed militarily - my respect for China as one of the world's great civilisations persists despite the Century of Humiliation.)
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Just objectively, I actually think that America continues to be the single best-positioned country to dominate the future. We don't expect this outcome, because we think we are Rome 2.0 and our best past was behind us and we are an empire and that empire will crumble tragically at some point and we're just kicking the can down the road, but...that might not happen. The US and its successor states might actually be top dog ~forever.
I don't really put it past China to still be a contender in 100 years but right now the future does not look bright for them, or any of our competitors.
But while you are worried about the practical consequences if someone else is in charge, I am actually worried about the morally corrosive consequences of being top dog forever. Either way, I think we directionally share concerns about the consequences of US success.
But I don't actually think "Iran controlling the strait" would establish a powerful deterrence against future powers that plot unjustified wars without regard for humanitarian consequences. Either the Sunni Arabian powers will reroute all of their stuff through the Red Sea, rendering Iranian control of the Strait a nothingburger (thus minimizing the didactic value of Iran controlling the strait) or the Sunni Arabian powers will kick off a massive war to wrest control of the strait from Iran. If the US is not involved, this war is likely to be an extremely ghastly slog (just like the Iran-Iraq War) and short of the US intervention you oppose, it is unlikely the US could prevent this, as Iran cutting off Sunni Arabian oil exports is almost certainly a nonstarter for those powers, and they can buy arms from Russia and China if the US cuts them off. (China and particularly Russia would likely prefer to ally with an Israeli-Saudi coalition against the Iranians rather than the other way around; my understanding is that the Russians perceive the Iranians under their current leadership as erratic.)
If they succeed in forcing the opening of the strait, the US will likely receive partial credit for their victory given that the Arabians will likely start the war in easy mode (no Iranian navy left to speak of, for instance), which will justify US intervention. If they do not succeed in opening the strait, leading to a loss of the region's oil production (it's unlikely that the Saudis will be content to let Iran export its oil during a prolonged conflict) it will strengthen the United States over the long term as we will control a much larger percentage of the world's oil than we did pre-conflict.
In either case, it seems to me that the results are much more likely to be bloody and horrific than if the US compels Iran to seek terms in the near future.
You will object to my model inasmuch as it renders a US loss impossible. I disagree: it is actually possible to have a situation where most outcomes of a situation lead to a victory (e.g. if merely destabilizing the region is likely to lead to a success in either direction). However, I do think there are "loss conditions" for the US here. I think it is unlikely, but the war is not over, and Iran could still possibly inflict military losses on the US so severe that the US has to retreat unilaterally. And the US may have already lost from a broader strategic perspective (expended munitions).
In my opinion, "securing justice and [a lasting] peace" is exactly the sort of maximalist thinking that drove, and drives, the neocons. Unless the fundamental problems of the region - intractable problems like the Sunni-Shia divide, and the competing national interests of different states - are resolved, all peace is likely to be to some degree temporary. There is a way to remove these sources of conflict, but it is fundamentally both horrific and unjust. Barring that, until Christ rules the earth, the other options are either settle for peace of a greater or lesser duration or for things like "nation-building" and "counter-terrorism operations" which are often of indefinite or extremely lengthy duration.
Mind you, I think that seeking honorable peace of a decent duration is a good and admirable goal. But I am fundamentally skeptical of the idea that "the US not being involved will bring about peace." There are specific areas where US action has arguably made things worse, or where US action has directly led to military conflict. But it does not follow that the US withdrawing from everything will create greater peace. It may increase peace for the United States - and that is not itself a bad thing! But it is not a magic button for world peace (and may be quite the opposite). Prolonged peace is not the default or expected state of humankind, and unless a single power becomes world hegemon, it is unlikely.
As a guy who would like to get out of the sandbox and who is concerned about the consequences of attempting US global hegemony, my personal hope is that Iran absolutely destroying all of our regional bases will make acceding to Iran's demands that we leave the region an easy "yes," that Iranian self-government will be restored, and that in the aftermath of that restoration the various parties in the region will be able to reach an amicable peace.
Who is “we”, exactly?
I don’t think there’s a ton of overlap between the circles who most criticize American hegemony and the ones which compare everything to Roman history.
Sorry, I could have been more specific. I meant Americans, particularly educated ones.
Maybe you are correct. I definitely think there's a certain strain (maybe moreso on the right?) of people who at least opportunistically pattern-match contemporary issues, e.g. declining birthrates and the GWOT, with the decline of the Roman Empire.
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This is just way too credulous man, the line that "if you kill your enemies they win" was only ever supposed to be a meme.
Like, what are we talking about? You want your enemies to have power over you? Do you think this makes you stronger?
When in human history did great powers losing wars deter future great powers?
If you think American aggression against Iran is unjustified you have absorbed far too much third world propaganda. Do you think it would be good if Iran got nuclear weapons too?
We should lose the war with Iran (making America weaker) so that in one hundred years if America is weaker we will be stronger? Why not just win our wars now so that America is stronger?
That future won't come to pass if Iranian oil isn't supplying China's economic base.
Those scientists are building Iran nuclear weapons so that Iran can project its power across the Middle East, and ultimately the world, in direct hostility to your interests. I think even the actual pacifists and Amish and Quakers et al. are not this credulous about the virtues of peace.
If you are Christian the most important thing in the world is getting right with God. Justice and peace are secondary to that ultimate goal. The Christian tradition in fact contains a lot of debate about the subject of war and just wars, which doesn't disappear just because you believe in pacifism. A very foolish form of pacifism where your enemies who hate you and in fact want to destroy Christendom would acquire power over energy and nuclear weapons if your vision won out.
Finally, to complete the set, it must be pointed out that America and Israel are winning. The comeuppance you are imagining is not coming.
Look I find it annoying to write these posts where each claim is rebutted on its own line and I imagine people find them annoying to read too. But there are some serious howlers in here that merit breaking down because they produce a very disordered line of thought. You seem to be saying, in effect, that America and Israel are losing (delusional, frankly), but that this loss is good (delusional again) because it will protect America when America is weak (which will only happen if America loses). America will be protected in our lose by our virtue in losing?
Frankly it's easier for me to understand this theory as the product of a meme parasite that's serving some sort of emotional function than as the product of anything rational. But I don't think is consistent on its own terms or with what is actually happening in the world. Iran is not an innocent poor benighted country -- they played power politics and lost. Had they won there would not be some flourishing of the human dialogue but they would work to directly attack your values because they see themselves as your enemy. Instead of that America wins, which is actually good for liberty, freedom, justice, peace, and ultimately the value of Western Civilization taken as a whole. Which is after all why we're all here in the first place.
Israel and the US have long tried to kick that can down the road (sometimes brilliantly bloodless like with Stuxnet, more often through bombing and murder), but don't tell me that killing their supreme leader was about preventing them from gaining nukes.
I would prefer if Iran did not get nukes, but even if Trump's plan (add scare quotes to taste) prevented this, it is entirely possible that the price for it is too high. For one thing, even with nukes Iran is not a threat to North America any more than North Korea is.
Of course, if past bombings gave good reasons why Iran would want nuclear deterrence, the present war gives them excellent reasons.
Sure, perhaps their plan is to mutually annihilate Iran and Israel the minute they have enough nukes, but with Nethanyahu in charge I simply find myself not caring much. If the religious crazies really want to murder each other, that is not sufficient reason to drag civilized countries into it preemptively.
Ok what was it about then?
Look you don't have to like Trump or agree with him in all cases but to imagine he doesn't have a plan for anything he wants to do is basically to deny any theory of mind for Donald Trump. I think it's TDS by another name. It's not even entirely up to Trump, obviously the American and Israeli militaries had plans and backup plans upon backup plans wargamed out for decades. When people say things like this I suppose that they live too much in the 24-second news cycle and don't have much of a frame of reference beyond that.
Of course, and if Iran has good reason to pursue nuclear deterrence, the justification for bombing is excellent.
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I don’t worship power, maybe because of my portion of old American heritage. Most of us have worshipped God, and this means understanding certain acts as beneath us. When George Washington was accused by the French of allowing the assassination of a negotiating party, it was a severe mark of disgrace that haunted him for the rest of his life and stained his reputation across Europe. This is my culture, and I think any foreign value system that worships power is a fundamentally anti-American influence that must be excised, just as much as any dangerous entanglement in foreign nations must be excised. I don’t know if you’re familiar with American culture so I will quote to you something from our first President and Founding Father:
Real patriots — in the eyes of the Founding Fathers — don’t start unjust and unnecessary wars for a random foreign tribe 6000 miles away. This is just not what we do. That’s why none of the American security apparatus supported this war. That’s why Israel had to put pressure on Trump to start the war. That’s why the #1 authority on terrorism in the American security state, Joe Kent, resigned to speak to Americans on the dangerous and subversive influence of Israel on American soil. Allowing Iran to become a little stronger is a great punishment and deterrence against the foreign tribe bringing us to war, but even more importantly, it is something that future powers will read about when deciding whether to commit acts of aggression.
I don’t know if you’re trolling when you ask whether history informs the decision of modern nations to go to war. That’s the basic curricula at any war college. I also don’t know if you’re trolling when you say Iran was building nuclear weapons, because that’s not the assessment of American intelligence, which means you trust Israel more than America, which seems slightly treasonous to me and very strange. But perhaps you’re not an American, I don’t know. But if you’re not an American, why are you pretending to speak for our nation?
No, in this religion justice and peace are getting right with God; they are one and the same thing; we will be judged by how we treat strangers and neighbors and others. There is a long history of Christian Just War philosophy, and it all concurs that our act of war against Iran was unjustified. And the Just God may punish those who support it; He will certainly punish those who promote “no mercy” and “no quarter”.
Wait, since when were you a Christian? This is new.
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You don't worship power so you just sit in the corner and let it happen? Watching? Melodramatically?
Well, although I understand this as a threat against my interests -- I can't take it very credibly since you don't believe in using power.
Hypothetically, would you support allying with Iran and bombing Israel is it advanced American power and interests? If what you want is American power, then a destroyed Israel means that many tech and defense jobs come back to America. We can also poach high IQ Israeli AI developers. Or if the math shows that the best way to maximize American power is to arm both Iran and Israel to bomb each other to the abyss, so that we can poach their highest IQ talent, would you support this? (This may entail allowing Iran to turn Tel Aviv into Gaza). This is a very serious consideration for a person who loves the notion of maximizing power, as future wars will be decided by drones and AI; we can exploit Iran’s smart drone tech and Israel’s smart STEM talent by pitting them against each other.
This is a net-zero vision of strength where anyone else’s successes are a threat. This kind of model historically doesn’t work and is in fact antithetical to American success post-WWII. We remain powerful by maintaining a global system of wealth and strength in which other powers pay us the ultimate tribute of imitating us.
It’s in our interests to work with Israel because they support American power. It’s in our interests to work against Iran because they oppose American power.
Trump is already pursuing American power in the Middle East by recommitting it to a new vision of prosperity. The Abraham Accords are a far cry from Saudi Arabia funding its own proxy militias to counter Iran. (Remember that under Obama we actually funded the off-shoots of Al Qaeda out of esoteric imagined interests. — Another one of dozens of genuine Obama scandals that received no coverage or consideration until Trump was attacked for moves reversing it.)
The next step is getting Iran on board. This can be done either through regime change, or by simply overawing the current regime to the point that it cuts its losses and joins us. This would be in Iran’s interests too — as Osama Bin Laden once said, something something strong horse etc etc.
Let me get this straight. We are talking about a regime in the Middle East that has circumvented the entire American intelligence establishment to push our president to start a war. They used a senator who was trained with Mossad talking points, a religiously-radical loyalist stepson, and advisors who were hand-picked by their own Middle Eastern lobbyists. Because of our support for this Middle Eastern regime, passage through the Suez Canal has fallen to a fraction of what it once was, and now the Strait of Hormuz is closed. We have harmed the global economy while our allies in Europe and Asia are baffled at our decision-making. This Middle Eastern regime employed Jeffrey Epstein to mass-rape Americans to secure blackmail on important figures including former President Bill Clinton and current President Donald Trump. They sell our secrets to our greatest global adversary, China. They disrupt America’s ability to negotiate with Iran, and sought to destroy our important alliance with Qatar (a true friend who has pledged to invest 1 trillion dollars in America) by violating all semblance of international norms and launching an attack on a negotiating team. Meanwhile, important American technology and military jobs are siphoned off to this middle eastern nation state while they enjoy free college and medical care.
It seems clear to me that American power is being curtailed by this regime, and that — per your power-loving guiding philosophy — America is essentially obliged to enact regime change therein. If the United States Military reigns white phosphorus down on Haifa today and cluster munitions down on Tel Aviv tomorrow, then within a few weeks we would have secured free transit along the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, opened up trade opportunities with Iran (a country 9x bigger than Israel), gained more allies across the Middle East, loosened a perfidious influence on our Body Politic, and returned essential defense work back to Americans.
I can’t conceive why you are not advocating for the USM to strike Israel, unless perhaps you do not really want America to be more powerful against her enemies, but instead favor Israel for some other reason.
Israel is a democracy
Conspiracy
Conspiracy
Conspiracy
Conspiracy
Not even good conspiracies, totally unsubstantiated and debunked. If you think Israel has blackmail material of Donald Trump raping then I think you’ve lost the plot
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It's sad that my only hope is that the Secretary of War is too stupid to understand what he's saying when he says that the intention is to fight this war with no quarter allowed or asked for, and is merely repeating something he thought sounded badass in an Alestorm song.
I don't know. I kind of think that you should ant the guy that's in charge of the actual fighting to buy in to the whole Conan The Barbarian meme about "what is best in life?" unironically.
I also think that if I were President Truman in the spring of '45 I would want to keep Morgenthau and his plan on hand, in part because the whole "Good Cop, Bad Cop" cliche is a cliche for a reason. That reason is that it works.
I do know. Assuming for a second that this does end with ground forces coming to grips with the enemy, a declaration of "no quarter, no mercy" is both profoundly stupid and profoundly evil.
Stupid, because we'd like Iranian footsoldiers to surrender. A process made more difficult when we're handing them ready made, authentic propaganda in which the American government declares that they will be summarily shot if they surrender and no prisoners will be taken. Stupid, because setting that standard makes turnabout fair play when a Marine is captured, and I don't want captured American troops torture-murdered. I'd like to see PoW conditions on both sides closer to the Western front than the Eastern front.
Evil, because it's obviously evil to murder a surrendered enemy soldier on the spot. It serves no purpose beyond the gratification of base human desires. This is a betrayal of American tradition dating back at least to the Lieber Code in the Civil War:
But then you say
Which makes me wonder if you understand what a declaration of "no quarter" means exactly, and are using it just to say "we should be meaner."
"no quarter" means that if someone is trying to run away you should shoot them in the back. What it means is that anyone on the field who isn't a friendly or who hasn't already been killed or taken prisoner is not only a legitimate target but a mission objective.
What he's saying is that we aren't trying to hold territory, we're trying to send a message, that message being that if you try to fuck with us you die and your nation gets set back a generation per @MaiqTheTrue's post above.
I asked DeepSeek. I think "common understanding of a term" is a pretty good use case for LLMs at the moment. You are flatly incorrect.
The phrase comes from the practice of "giving quarter," which refers to a victor sparing the life of a captured enemy and holding them as a prisoner of war. To declare "no quarter" is to announce that surrender will not be accepted; the enemy is to be fought to the death.
Key aspects:
· Legal status: Granting no quarter is considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions (specifically Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Convention and Article 40 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions), as it violates the principle that captured combatants are entitled to humane treatment. · Historical usage: In earlier naval warfare, a "no quarter" flag (such as a solid red flag or the Jolly Roger) signaled that the crew would fight without accepting surrender.
Though it does say
Even leaving aside the moral concerns, it's a grave sin to kill a man trying to surrender, it also is the opposite of the theory that you kick the door in and the whole rotten edifice falls apart, because you're telling the Iranian troops in advance that surrender (unconditional or not) is pointless, they're going to be killed either way. It also pretty much entitles the enemy against whom you have declared No Quarter to kill your men if they are captured (see eg the Battle of the Crater).
It's something that looks tough on a BJJ rash guard but is a definitional war crime.
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I think there's an Honor Harrington bit where the difference between "No Mercy" and "No Quarter" is demonstrated... by not killing the survivors in lifepods.
Speaking of Honor Harrington, no quarter, and songs...
It always baffled me that they chose the wrong "no" for the song.
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The Founding Fathers themselves (Jefferson! Madison!) lived long enough to send the nascent US Navy and Marine Corps to attack distant nations (also Muslim) a mere 4500 miles away. Twice.
We fought those wars because they were illegally seizing our vessels and then enslaving our sailors. That is a perfect case of just war, and we behaved in a perfectly moral fashion. We requested a treaty, compensation, and the return of captured sailors. We did not assassinate the ruler of Algeria and his family while they were sleeping, or set the entire city ablaze. We secured our interests with little bloodshed. The wars were just (!), necesssary (!), in furtherance of our commerce (!) and directly impacted American citizens and property (!).
And Iran was (supposedly) seizing tankers illegally within just the last few months (although so was the US near Venezuela, with at least paper legal authority on incorrectly-flagged vessels). Admittedly, those probably weren't US-flagged and if this were (hypothetical) a response to that it'd probably still be overzealous.
No, but several European powers (the British and the Dutch) collectively bombarded Algiers in 1816 before the treaty ending the Second Barbary War was finalized. A bit later the French invaded, forcing the Dey to abdicate in 1830.
Paper legal authority is, aside from guns, the only legal authority that matters on the high seas. You’ll notice everyone from the Indians to the French to the Swedes have started following course.
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Iran seized a couple oil tankers (not owned or flagged by America) which were on their way to America in response to the US seizing the Suez Rajan. So, not at all incomparable.
The bombartment of Algiers occurred after diplomacy failed to make progress to end the practice of enslaving Europeans, and after the execution of 200 European sailors. And even then, the request for surrender reads —
This is another case of just and necessary war, and even though Algiers was massacring and enslaving Europeans, the British commander did not see it fit to target innocent inhabitants of a city.
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Iran has declared war on the west without declaring war on the west since I’ve been alive.
They’ve killed maimed and disrupted as much as they could.
Legitimizing them is embarrassing.
This whole Trump 2.0 is an embarrassment (and I voted for him!).
I was against the war, but now that we’re in it, stopping without a new regime is wild, and bombing should restart as soon as a dollar of Iranian funds go to terrorism of the west.
The US will not not be a world super power in 200 years.
This. Remember 9/11, London, Madrid.
Oh, my mistake. Turns out that most of the terror attacks on western countries are actually Sunni attacks, not Shi'ite.
I do not like the Iranian regime, but if their 1985 bombings in Paris qualify as "continuous state of war", then we might as well claim that Saudi Arabia pursues a relentless war of extermination against the West given 9/11 etc.
They monetarily pay terrorist organizations.
I do concur that all of Islam is actually bad for the west.
They pay Hamas, which is very much pure evil, along with Hezbollah and the Houtis.
However, the original claim was that
If Hamas has the priority of waging war against the West in general, they are doing a piss-poor job of it. And we know that they can conduct complex operations when the goal is to kill Jews. It is reasonable to conclude that their mission is to destroy Israel, not the broader West.
Al-Qaida had some modest success killing Westerners, and a tremendous success is goading the US into costly wars which ended in defeat.
If Iran was funding a Shi'ite equivalent, then there would be some substance to the claim that they have 'declared war without declaring war' against the West. But simply calling the US the Great Satan is not declaring war against the West.
This is what I tried to point out with my original comment which was criticized by @Shakes. I concede that there are non-terrorist avenues which might be called war in hyperbole. However, it is not feasible for me to iterate through all the woes of Western society and point out that Iran did not craft COVID, it did not cause the Ukraine war, it did had little if anything to do with the opioid and obesity crisis, is below the US, China and Russia in per-capita CO2 emissions, does not cause modern Western dating dynamics, had no hand in crafting the later seasons of GoT and so on.
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So does the US, so does Israel. Can we stop with the pearl clutching, please?
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Come on, you can't introduce non-sequitur's to OP's point and use them as disproof of his point. "Iran has been at war with the West." "What about all these other incidents that weren't Iran's fault?" Come on, how is that logically connected at all.
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Has Iran funded a lot of terrorism in the west? I was under the impression they were one of the smaller players in that arena.
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I think this is disingenuous. There's room for legitimate disagreement over whether the US should be starting wars in defense of Israel, but calling Iran's funding of Hamas "making Israel uncomfortable" is rather understating the situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
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I agree, it’s disingenuous when people suggest Israel started the conflict with Iran. A core objective of the Islamic revolution is the destruction of the “Zionist entity”, not partially but wholly and absolutely, a raison d’etre of the modern Iranian state is Israel’s destruction, even at colossal political and economic cost (as we’ve seen). Since the neutering of Iraq in 2003 and Saddam’s replacement with a quasi democratic largely Shia government, no foreign power or group realistically wants to annex major parts of Iranian territory (other than perhaps the Kurds, but nobody else including Turkey would want that, and it won’t happen).
Israel’s hostility to Iran isn’t ethnic or national or irredentist or religious, like the hostility to the Palestinians. Iran is far away and Israel doesn’t claim any of it. It’s solely downstream from the Islamic revolution.
Just to add to @coffee_enjoyer's comment, it's disingenuous to suggest that Israel actually starting both wars does not constitute Israel starting the war with Iran. You simply have the ground truth that both wars started with Israel launching surprise attacks on Iran.
It's more disingenuous to suggest coarse propaganda slogans constitutes a start of a war. And by that standard, you would also have to consider the Jewish religion itself, which is an esoteric war-cry against its enemies including Iran. Jews to this day publicly celebrate Purim, the mass slaughter of Persian civilians on the basis of a "pre-emptive strike" dubiously similar to the narrative Israel is using to justify its own surprise attacks and aggressive war on Iran. Passover is publicly celebrated, which is the celebration of a mass slaughter of the first born sons of the Gentiles in Egypt. Israeli society has identified its war on Iran as a holy war on Aamalek, and that's not a new association.
The Jewish Synagogue, although slightly more esoteric than "Death to Israel", is a much more profound and esoteric war-cry than Iran's slogans, and a more indispensable raison d’etre for the entire religion itself which is why we have Israel in the first place causing so much war in the region. The religion is a war cry.
Quite awhile back, you argued that none of Israel's enemies in the region could defeat it even without US help. I countered that they wouldn't need to militarily defeat Israel, they would just need to cause enough insecurity and instability to threaten the colonial project. Not only has that proven more true than ever, but I think this war given the enormous investment by the US military shows that Israel could not have fought Iran without US help. And in fact a Iran/Hezbolahh/Houthis scenario against Israel with US neutrality very well may have resulted in the actual military defeat of Israel.
And that's the real reason for this war, going back to the "New Strategy for Securing the Realm." There was a balance of power between Iran and Israel, which is good for the US but bad highly threatening for Israel. Israel is starting this war to disrupt the balance of power, so they are hegemonic in the region.
To say Israel didn't start the wars is disingenuous in every respect.
This war and Israel itself would not exist without its religion. The Jewish religion has brought that region to this exact point, it is a religious hostility.
I would say it would be disingenuous if one were to ignore (1) Iran's threats to wipe Israel off the map; (2) it's incessant proxy attacks against Israel; and (3) it's decision to enrich Uranium in deep underground bunkers.
I think that @2rafa asked a key question: If the 1979 revolution had not taken place in Iran, would Israel and Iran be fighting each other right now? It seems pretty clear that the answer is "no." And if the answer is "no," what changed?
Here's another question to ask: What was the very first significant act of military hostility by Israel towards Iran since 1947?
That is not at all a clear answer given that Israel has been hostile to relatively secular regimes like Nasser, Hussein, Gaddafi, and Assad. Why would the Shah in this counterfactual not be included in that list of Israel's enemies? If it were like Syria, Israel would leverage fundamentalist elements in Iran to destabilize the regime and undermine the Shah like it did in Syria.
Because Israel is a threat to Iran. Israel has spent decades overtly planning for a war with Iran and petitioning the United States to attack Iran. Keep in mind Israel supported Iran during the Iran-Iraq war to provide a counterweight to Iraq. Then they take out Iraq by subverting the US foreign policy apparatus and overtly agitate for US to wage war on Iran. They take out Gaddafi (who was actually attempting to cooperate with demands placed on him), Assad, and by all accounts Iran is the crowned jewel of this policy strategy. Do you stop to think maybe that Iranian rhetoric is downstream from Israel's openly admitted foreign policy objectives and actions in pursuing highly destructive regime change throughout the region?
Rallying the country against Israel is fundamentally necessary for the survival of the regime because of Israel's own political strategy.
Syria's new leader was affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS! So why is his ascension over Assad considered such a huge win by Israel and US if this is ultimately about combatting religious extremism in favor of secular leadership? Doesn't that blow the entire "it was the Islamic Revolution's fault" theory out of the water? Israel WANTS an ISIS affiliate to lead Syria instead of Assad. How does this reality correspond to your impression here when it perfectly fits mine?
Edit: It's actually funnier the more you think about. Syria had Israel leveraging radical Islamist groups against the relatively secular Assad regime. Iran had Israel leveraging relatively secular monarchists against the Islamist regime. The only common denominator is Israel's objective to destabilize and destroy its rivals, it's not about fighting Islamism.
Well do you agree that before 1979, Israel and Iran were not hostile to each other? If so, what changed in 1979?
In that case, it should be pretty easy to answer my question:
What was the very first significant act of military hostility by Israel towards Iran since 1947?
When did this overt planning and petitioning start? What month and year?
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I will try to find my old comment, so you might be right, but I think what I said is that Israel’s destruction would not be inevitable in that event, or another statement that was maybe at least a little more cautious than what you imply. I’ve been pretty negative about Israel’s long-term prospects here for a while.
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This is a response to a generic argument but not the specific one. Iran and Israel were not historic enemies. Historically, Jews were sometime treated poorly in Persia and sometimes well, but that was true in many places. Israel doesn’t have any territorial claims on Iran. Even the most fantastical, maximalist Zionist claims disavowed even by most religious zionists end in Western Iraq, nowhere near Iran, and would require conquering other nations to reach. Israel and Iran had a coldly neutral or allied relationship for most of the Cold War.
It is disingenuous to pretend that what changed was not the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought to power in Iran a theocratic government let by a clerical leadership that considered the destruction of Israel its central and absolute foreign policy goal (not the only goal, of course, it also sought to export the revolution to Iraq and Sunni states, but the central goal, yes). This government was not threatened by Israel, which has neither the population nor any economic or political reason, independently, to rule over an Iran that is not hostile toward it. Iranians have no ethnic and scant religious relations (other than those they imagine themselves) with the Palestinians, Sunni Arabs who have themselves fought wars against them for centuries (millennia, Iran being Muslim because the Gulf Arab conquerors destroyed the Persian Sassanids, of course) and today - Hamas fighters fighting against Assad in Syria for example.
The sole reason for Israeli hostility toward Iran for the last 45 years has been the revolutionary mission of the Islamic Republic, which seeks to destroy it. Or ask yourself a simple question - if the Islamic Revolution had never occurred, do you think Israel would care to fight a war against Iran?
So the Jews create their colony in the middle of the Muslim world on the basis of superstitious, cult nonsense, and now Muslim religious hostility is cited as the justification for Israel launching these surprise attacks on its neighbors and conquering their territory and displacing the Muslims and destabilizing the region and most likely world economy. The raison d'etre for Israel is far more religious in nature than the Islamic regime in Iran.
The regimes of Assad and Saddam Hussein were not marked by rote Islamic fanaticism towards Israel, yet they were targeted by Israel for the exact same reasons I suggested. In Sryia the new regime is more Islamic than the Assad, accomplished with the support of Israel. A colonial project does not survive given a balance of power with enemies who are surrounding you. It results in colonists leaving. The US colonial project did not thrive on the basis of a balance of power with the Indians, nor the Spanish colonial project.
To answer your question, it would depend on the political objectives of the Shah. The threat of Pan-Arabism is actually what Israel has been trying to nip in the bud for all these years, preventing the political alliance of actually more secular leaders like Assad, Hussein, Nasser, and since the fall of Iraq Iran is the greatest threat of providing a basis for greater political unity and cooperation among Arabs. That is the 100x greater threat to Israel than Islamic fundamentalism- Israel's policy does not reduce to Muslim hostility, it's about making Israel the regional hegemon to secure its colonial project.
Iran is hostile to pan-Arabism, its people aren’t Arabs, and a pan-Arabist state that incorporated Assad, Hussein and Nasser’s states would become (regardless of who was in charge of Iran) a huge threat to Iran militarily and civilizationally. Israel didn’t bring war to a region that was beset with countless sectarian and ethnic divides long before it was founded.
Not necessarily a state but an Alliance, Iraqi militias are cooperating with Iran and inflicting huge damage on US assets in Iraq for example.
The point was that secular cooperation among Arabs (with Persians potentially at the helm) is what actually keeps Israeli planners up at night, sectarian fundamentalist slogans are what they point to as a pretext and they actually benefit from it and exploit it. Israel is not pursuing the policy it is because of "Death to Israel" chants, it's doing so for the reasons laid out in the Clean Break Memo, which directly plans on using sectarian fundamentalism to destabilize hostile and relatively secular regimes like Syria to prevent that type of cooperation.
In the counterfactual with the Shah, it would depend on whether he were more of an Assad figure or King of Jordan figure. But it doesn't reduce to the Islamic Revolution.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_for_Securing_the_Realm
…written almost 20 years after the Islamic Revolution, and 12 years after Hezbollah officially joined an alliance with Iran, receiving funding toward its mission of destroying Israel, which had been enshrined as a central goal of the Islamic Revolution from nearly the beginning. Israel didn’t start the hostility with revolutionary Iran.
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Whatever the Chinese decide is or isn’t in their interest in a century’s time, I have absolutely no doubt that it will not be determined by the comparative empathy level of American foreign policy in the early 21st century.
There’s ample evidence that the Chinese consult history to a greater degree in their foreign policy deliberations. In 2126, in the First AI War, when China considers how to strike our techies (being the invaluable engine to the American war machine), they may decide on a strategy of targetting them in their sleep along with their wives and children and neighbors, because this is the exact strategy that America signed off on against the Persians. The Chinese would simply be following America’s rendition of customary international law and applying it against its very authors. Consider Kissinger:
I don’t know if our conduct comes from a certainty that we will always be on top (despite demographic-dysgenic catastrophe), or a hardness of heart for our own descendants, or just a general disregard for longterm thinking, but the acts committed today are written down as the standards applied against us tomorrow. And this is a decent stand-in thought for those who have dehumanized Iranians or otherwise can’t empathize with anyone outside their fold. If the Iranians are “third worldists”, then at least imagine your own great grandchildren preferring not to be destroyed by China in their sleep in the next century.
USA will always be on top, because of two huge oceans that are unmovable at least on human scales. The only real danger is Brasil getting their shit together. But when it comes to odds - Brasil getting powerful is up there with the new Ayatollah becoming catholic.
And when it comes to them hitting west techies first - this scene is the biggest perversion inflicted on source material ever. But is illustrating about various defenses to that approach. https://youtube.com/watch?v=B203twyaMfM&t=34
Oceans historically were, and in many ways still are, bridges, not barriers. When the Royal Navy pwned the US Navy, you were our bitch, to the point where we could casually loot and burn Washington DC as a side quest while fighting the Napoleonic Wars. The oceans give the US the option (just as the English Channel gave the UK the same option) of neglecting you land forces and being a pure sea power - as long as the US rules (or at least contests) the waves, you are indeed safe from invasion (as we were and probably still are).
The nature of late C20/early C21 air and sea power makes the oceans a barrier to attack even if the US wasn't a major naval power - sea power is carrier-based air power and land-based aircraft have a massive advantage over carrier-based aircraft with equivalent men and materiel. This means that the late C20/early C21 USA was impregnable because the USAF could defend the coasts against the navy of a somewhat superior adversary. (This is the "The Falklands War wasn't supposed to be winnable for the British" argument - the RN overperformed and the Argentinian Air Force underperformed). But that tech stack is obsolete, as Russia learned en route to the bottom of the Black Sea and the US is currently learning the hard way in the Gulf. Will the same logic apply in a world where sea power consists of drone carriers escorted by laser cruisers? I don't know.
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I think you're not wrong that different takes on foreign policy are informed differently by history, but I don't think that is necessarily a better take. If it were, Putin's "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" might have landed differently. How is citing the history of the Kievan Rus working out for him?
I do think it's important to consider the long-term impacts of normalizing certain types of uses of force, though.
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Wow, another Middle East war where the Israeli interests were real but the American interests were illusory.
Do you think America does not have an interest in curtailing Iran?
No.
What interest do you believe the US has from curtailing Iran?
Do you think post war Iran won't sell oil to China? Even if that did happen (which would immediately start a trade war, and we'd be back to "no more rare earth for you") , why wouldn't China just buy oil from someone else? Oil is quite fungible.
Furthermore, what is the subsidy exactly? Unless you're referring to the US Navy securing sea lanes worldwide, in which case
this has clearly been massively accretive to the USA
the entire rest of the world is being subsidized too, so why single out China?
China acquires energy at below-market prices from rogue states sanctioned by the American-lead world order. Russia, Venezuela, Iran. If these countries normalize relations with that order and sell at market prices China will pay more than it did previously.
China paying marginally more for oil (as it rapidly electrifies) is a very shitty win considering the cost
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This seems one of the worst covered parts of a war that is generally poorly covered. Lebanon is currently in constitutional crisis. The government ordered the disarming of Hezbollah and the lebanese army refused to carry out the order. As a result Israel is invading to stop the rockets. It's not complicated, and I'm surprised that Hezbollah wasn't weak enough + the lebanese tired of being dragged into war with Israel to put Hezbollah down but here we are.
Israel is attempting to create agreements with the Sunni/Christians against the Shia but it's unclear if that will work. My guess is they kill a bunch of civilians, nonsense like plans to take territory (any evidence of this?) crops up and lots of horrible images and Lebanon rallies around the flag plus international pressure causes Israel to leave with nothing gained. Their best and perhaps only chance was to convince the lebanese military to take out Hezbollah on their own, and they were either too weak or too cowardly to do it. Supposedly the French are still attempting to negotiate a deal like this but I give it poor odds. Polymarket odds of Hezbollah disarming peaked at 59% at the beginning of the war and are now down to 30%.
The Israelis have announced plans for a buffer zone:
The occupation, and inevitable settlement, is conjecture at this point.
East Jerusalem has much more religious significance than most of Southern Lebanon. Arguably even Syria has more. All Israel has ever wanted in Southern Lebanon is some kind of Maronite ethnostate, but the reality is that Lebanese Christian elites are low tfr, far too comfortable and all have foreign passports and so don’t care to fight and die for their homeland really. This was the reality in the civil war and is the problem today. The Shias are poor and have nowhere to go.
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They've done the buffer zone thing at least twice before and never made a settlement. I don't think this time will be different -- no settlement but also no victory or much gained.
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There are still US Marines and parts of the 82nd Airborne headed to the Middle East. So yeah, I'd say distraction.
The peace the US is supposedly offering is basically similar to that which was supposedly offered before the war. The most important part of that, IMO, is that Iran actually surrenders the nuclear material (and likely the centrifuges and such); that's very hard to fake and sets their nuclear program way back. Iran clearly isn't interested in that deal, so I think the US is offering it knowing they won't take it. There certainly exists the danger that Iran could make an offer that the US would feel bound to accept, but "Iran keeps the strait" is obviously unacceptable, so that's not going to happen right away.
There's also the possibility that the US makes a deal, stops bombing, and it turns out there is some Iranian domestic opposition force which takes that as a signal to start a revolution. But I doubt it; the Iranians are too domesticated through 47 years of culling.
Iran allowing some vessels through the strait now doesn't change anything; Iranian oil remains a double-edged sword, both helping the regime and reducing their leverage to stop the US by squeezing energy markets.
These ships were non-Iranian oil.
The windfall to the Iranian from the de-sanctioning of oil on the water last week is an estimated windfall to Iran of in the neighborhood of as much as $14bn.
Allowing the Iranians to meter who gets through and who doesn't would be a disaster for the world.
I've heard of non-Iranian carriers getting through (e.g. with natural gas) but not tankers. Either way, though, that's even better. Allowing Iran to meter who gets through until the Marines arrive is strictly better (for the US) than the strait being entirely closed until the Marines arive.
What do you expect ten thousand Marines, just a fraction of whom are actually fighters, to achieve? The Strait is enormous, just trying to secure the Strait itself would require occupying more territory than Vietnam. You might take an island or two but what will those Marines do on said island other than be sitting ducks for Iranian artillery?
Best case scenario, Iran's ground forces are weaker than expected, you take an island with minimal casualties and now Iran can no longer extort passing ships or export oil. Okay, great, Iran, no longer restrained by the desire to protect their own rackets, chooses to flood the Gulf with sea mines while hitting every refinery and oil field between Baku and Cairo. Perhaps the Iranian regime falls many years down the line as a result of the collapse in oil revenue but the Trump regime falls even sooner and is remembered by future generations as a kind of Jimmy Carter on steroids. You could achieve the same result with airstrikes on Kharg and Qeshm without the need to endanger a bunch of Marines for no clear benefit.
Worst case scenario, Iran did their homework with the Russians and as soon as they land it's a humiliating endless parade of Marines getting obliterated by FPV drones.
No, I expect the US to continue to allow Iran to export oil.
...Okay, so then Iran decides to keep the Strait open, but exploits the apparent unconditional protection for their oil exports by obliterating all of their competition, allowing them to make extreme profits with the apparent sanction of the Marines.
Now what?
Uh, they don't obliterate all their competition. If they try, their exports get seized. If you're assuming a hypercompetent Iran and a US which will do nothing you're in a dream world.
I'm not assuming a "hypercompetent" Iran, I'm assuming that Iran is willing to sacrifice its oil exports in pursuit of delivering unto Trump a biblical midterm asswhooping such that no future American President considers messing with Iran under pain of a fate worse than Jimmy Carter. It isn't even an "assumption" since this is exactly how they've responded to threats to their exports in the past, both against Saddam decades ago and against the Israeli strike on their gas fields a few days ago.
On the contrary, you seem to be operating in a "dream world" in which Iran wouldn't endanger their oil exports even to achieve victory against the most powerful empire in human history. I'm pretty sure the assumption in Tehran was that their tankers would be seized by Day 3 and they'd have to survive on their northern trade routes.
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My modal guess is that Trump’s negotiations rhetoric is market manipulation to buy time. He’s hoping that a surprisingly easy ground victory on one or more gulf islands will either buy political will for a larger operation or convince the regime to surrender.
Of course, that is contingent on the ground operation going well.
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My suspicion is that the other Gulf states with interests in shipping through the Strait, which don't currently consider themselves part of the conflict, won't be satisfied with a long-term resolution that involves Iran setting up a toll booth controlling traffic. While they might not have the armed forces to directly threaten Iran on land, they can certainly block Iranian shipping at least as well as Iran can threaten theirs, in ways that the US Navy might choose not to for political reasons. Think "aerially mining all of Iran's ports" after the US has conveniently removed all anti-air assets.
But I also am pretty sure that any not-dumb parties involved already have considered these prospects.
There's literally no universe in which Iran is allowed to charge tolls for the straights.
I can't believe anyone is even talking about that with a straight face. They might as well tell the USA they want a world monopoly on unicorns as well.
The reason that is in their "peace plan" is so they can drop that clause during negotiations so they seem "reasonable" and "comprising".
The USA has similar maximalist demands currently that will obviously be dropped in the final deal.
Or, in both cases, because they don't really want a negotiated peace.
Also an option! Although I assume Iran really really wants a deal, as they are getting the absolute shit beaten out of them.
I think they're reading Western press and think they can win this outright.
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We completely destroyed the base of their military and they can no longer project power throughout the Middle East. They cannot even fully block traffic in the straits.
If America’s reported demands are true it’s a very good deal. Iran ceases all aspirations to project military power in the Middle East, and in exchange normal economic relations and development can resume. This is basically getting Iran to abide by the Abraham Accords and would set the Middle East up for a generation of peace.
Iran has not really closed the straits. Despite what’s been reported some vessels have never stopped making the crossing. Risks are higher and costs have adjusted but Iran has failed to actually project its will.
America destroyed Iran’s military capabilities to the point we are now willing to reintegrate them into the normal affairs of the Middle East. In exchange we suffered a scant dozen casualties.
Look I understand that many people are blackpilled or have been consuming a lot of different views about the war. But America totally decimated Iran. Every power in the world with more information than Twitter jockeys understands what happened. Iran had no meaningful way of retaliating. America has total air superiority. America has total space superiority. America has total naval superiority. Over the span of a few years we have shown that we can e.g.: blow up the secret pagers of every commander across a wide and dispersed military network; drop bombs that tunnel into the sides of mountains; turn off the electrical grids; track missiles from space and intercept them before they leave the launch site; decapitate the leadership of an entire country, over and over and over again whenever we want.
Everybody in the world saw it. Despite what propaganda claims nobody is really in denial about what happened. America is stronger than ever before.
The combination of what Trump has done in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba will be studied for generations. It will inaugurate a new playbook of how to use American military power. When our war aims aren’t to spend a trillion dollars on NGOs while telling soldiers they cant shoot anybody, we can basically do whatever we want.
Now, what do we actually want? Despite a lot of commentary American aims are fairly modest. Contrary to the isolationists we do have an interest in the Middle East. Contrary to the imperialists and neocons we don’t need total regime change in Iran to achieve our aims. (The phrase “regime change” is a little misleading because by killing Iran’s leadership we already effected regime change: it might simply be an Ayatollah willing to make a deal with America instead of the Shah or a new democratic movement.)
What America wants is a stable global order made up of partners willing to trade and do business in peace. What America wants is for the oil and money to flow. What America wants is for everyone to prosper. That’s the basis of American prosperity.
So as Iran wakes up to the new reality and cuts a deal I will say without a scintilla of irony or doubt: Mission Accomplished!
The Twitterverse is full of denial of these basic facts or doom and gloom clowning on Trump himself. (Trump is right, by the way, when he declares the war both essentially over and that it will last a while yet. We destroyed Iran’s military and it’s through our good grace that we didn’t also bomb them back to the Stone Age. The discrepancy is caused by the lag in time for the mullahs to process what happened, and start negotiating.)
The alternative view, that Trump had no plan whatsoever, that Israel dog-walked the Americans, that Iran bravely resisted and stood up to the American bully, that everyone in the world is laughing at America, that the Straits will never be reopened without conceding an Iranian victory, etc. etc. etc. — the alternative view is not only ridiculous given everything that has already happened but will look even more ridiculous as time passes.
Maybe it will take some time to sink in. It took a few decades for all the Japanese holdouts to accept what had happened after we dropped the bomb.
I’m also sure though that we’ll keep having this argument forever, because that’s in the nature of history.
Couldn't the same be said of the US military situation in Afghanistan across 20 years (modulo the lack of AFG Navy)? All of that can be true, as it's been before (Iraq too), yet the US military can still be in a position where it can't realize its objectives. Fielded Armies, Navies and Air Forces? US quickly wins hands down every time. Terrorists, militias, splinter groups? It takes a lot longer and at an unacceptable level of blood and treasure.
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I don't think America can take credit for that... if you mean "America and its allies" as "we", then yes, absolutely.
Yes, Mossad's HUMINT and infiltration/clandestine operations ability is just insane.
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If I understand what you're implying that's not true. In the early days of the war several carriers risked it, and a few were hit for their trouble. Since Iran claimed to have closed the strait, only ships given permission by Iran have made the trip (since at least the last week). Iran has been fairly generous with its "permission" so that has resulted in some decent traffic -- but at least at the moment Iran has been projecting their will on the strait.
It should be noted that traffic through the strait is a small fraction of its pre-war throughput even with recent 'upticks.' Whether or not Iran can properly close the strait, shippers clearly think the risk is high enough that they're not willing to risk it.
"Shippers" meaning the London insurance cartel.
I don't think the counterfactual of a more distributed insurance market (or no insurers) changes things. Any way you imagine slicing it, someone is on the financial hook for these ships.
In a non-cartel market, the insurers can't refuse to insure in order to pressure the US to restore the situation where they were getting war risk premiums when there was no war risk.
Yes but they also still don't insure any ships sailing through the straights as the insurance math simply doesn't work. There's no premium you can charge to offset this risk.
So says the cartel.
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...according to Iran. Conveniently, Iran has graciously extended its permission to every ship that has tried the crossing and succeeded. On the ground there are many ships that have made the crossing, such as some Greek oil tankers. Everything is down from where it was a month ago but the strait is not entirely closed because Iran's capacity to project its will is no longer there. It can harass ships and increase the risk, and that only temporarily.
The major question is not whether America will guarantee the straits but how they will do it. Right now it seems likeliest that they will negotiate a deal with Iran's remaining leadership simultaneous with an international fleet as a show of force. But if we wanted to we could always go back to bombing Iran into the stone age etc.
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I'm assuming by "carriers" you mean bulk and/or oil, not aircraft carriers?
For reasons that never occurred to me to question until this moment, we refer ships carrying oil as "tankers" and ships carrying gas (lng) as "carriers". Oil has gotten the spotlight in the war but I think LNG has been equally as important. The US exports quite a bit of LNG but it's all on the east coast. Africa exports on its west coast. If you want LNG and you're east of Africa, without the strait Australia is about your only option.
But yeah, to your point, not aircraft carriers.
I was actually looking at ONI's analysis of Iran's Navy from 2017 today, and I believe it said the percentage of the world's LNG that passes through the Strait is higher than oil. So yes, definitely important... the US and Europe are probably fortunate it's after the cold weather.
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