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Eh, "unconditional surrender" did not come up in any of the overviews and AI summaries I looked up when making that post. Totally makes sense that he said it; demanding massive asks and threatening to walk away is the man's main tactic.
Compare it to the Iranians who have sworn to fight "until complete victory" while insisting that no negotiations have even been happening. This is what I mean when I referenced a fog of bluster, threats and maneuvering. What's going on in the minds of them men involved? What do they really want, what are they really willing to trade or sacrifice, what do they really think of the situation so far? I think I don't know, you don't know, Daes definitely doesn't know (or can't say if he did, isn't he posting from China these days?) and none of us have any plausible methods for rectifying that.
People can call that cowering in the fog of war. I think I'm dispaying some epistemic humility while acknowleding the basic surface-level consideration that there does seem to be a lot of fog.
Maybe. Their rate of fire did plummet something like 90% over the first few weeks. I am definitely open to the position that the Iranian decentralized method is overly difficult or impossible to completely stamp out with just air power. There's a lot of middle ground between "strong enough to shut the Strait", which seems not really true since we've been running ships through it, and "plucky enough to kick shipping insurance premiums into intolerable territory", which seems reasonably true.
There's a fair bit of room for criticism of the US here, but I do think this hUmIlIaTiNg LoSs line is just nakedly motivated reasoning.
And this is exactly what I'm taking a wait-and-see approach about.
Yes, let's compare. Indeed, to our knowledge, no direct negotiations with the US have been happening at virtually every moment where the US was claiming negotiations, and the MOU is both extremely similar to initial Iranian terms, dissimilar to Witkoff-Kushner terms which Iran had dismissed, and an admission of Iranian victory. They've performed so much better than you that you can't look at this. Wiki:
Pretty clear who's been full of bluster here and who achieved victory.
Uh-huh. From the inner spiritual China. The politruk does keep a tight watch over what I get to post on themotte. @aquota see, I really wouldn't have needed xitter to lose interest in dancing around the fact that some Patriots are going off their rockers and it's pretty funny.
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