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Iran declares Strait of Hormuz completely open to commercial ships during Israel- Lebanon ceasefire, but US naval blockade stays in place
Still no significant movement on the maritime trackers. Ships are still grouped at the anchorages on both sides of the Strait. But Trump says Iran is working with the US to remove them. If Trump offers sanctions reliefs and ends the US blockade (which I doubt) in exchange for giving up their nuclear program and ceasing support for proxies against Israel, maybe this war could end quickly and we can return to pre-war status quo by the end of the year.
This is as close to a win-win situation as we can get. For Israel, there's a weaker defeated Iran in the region without means to develop nuclear weapons quickly, and for Iran, they get to survive and have access to sustenance funds. Trump can also claim some victory points for his base.
All of this is of course assuming Trump is being truthful and wants to end the war that he started. There's so much we don't understand or know behind the scenes.
I gotta say, Im really fucking disappointed in Trump for this. Alienating his base and attacking his own supporters, and then starting a insane war for what seems like no particularly good reason. And to top it all off, the blockade? Why? Seriously?
Its one thing to not like the Iranian government. Fine. But going all out and attacking them in the way he has been doing is really goofy, and is making many on the right utterly regret their vote, and making blue tribe go "I told you so".
The only thing I can hope for is that the public has a short memory and that this all comes under control during midterms. But chances are looking quite slim that that happens....
The blockade is the first good idea that Trump has had the entire war. It accomplishes the same strategic objective as capturing Kharg Island, can be maintained indefinitely, and is low-risk. Makes you wonder what the hell they were thinking for the first six weeks.
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."
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Comments like this confuse me.
It's not like Trump is some unknown man in a smoky room, he talks all the time. His administration has stated the reasons why. You can believe them or not but they are out there. You can even go beyond the public statements and make some inferences.
If you don't know what the stated reasons are.....try and address that first? It's not hard.
Furthermore it's pretty much impossible to know if the stated reasons are true/accurate or not without access to classified intelligence.
It's entirely possible that 100/100 presidents would have done this. It's entirely possible that 1/100 would have done this.
Anything is possible.
It is possible that aliens have landed in Greenland and any US president would therefore invade in 2026.
It is possible that an oracle has told Trump that America is doomed unless a majority of voters end up believing he is crazy.
It is possible that the Moon has turned into cheese since the last time we checked on it.
For a good Bayesian, anything is possible, but not everything is plausible. We have data how previous US administrations have dealt with Iran, and as you point out, we have Trump's public statements. Perhaps talking about regime change was a 3d chess move and he knew very well that killing the Ayatollah would not destabilize the regime, but had other reasons to do so.
Nor should we fetishize classified intelligence. Classified intelligence rarely changes the big strategic picture. Someone making an effort to follow a war from publicly available sources will generally get the gist of what is going on. Sure, once a century she might be completely blindsided by the US nuking Hiroshima, but most of the time the ministers and generals will have an information advantage of just a few weeks. Intelligence seems more useful in a tactical frame "we can kill the Ayatollah on that date" than on an strategic scale. If the US had military intelligence so great that they could avoid blunders, GWB would have invaded neither Iraq or Afghanistan.
Furthermore, your hypothetical big intelligence revelation would have to be something which involves Iran (so the Iranians likely know) and also known to the US (otherwise they could not have acted on it). It seems unlikely that it would be in the interest of neither party to tell the world about it. As a counterexample, when NATO intelligence had reason to believe that Putin would attack Ukraine, they made their concerns public.
Personally, I think that Trump's behavior can be adequately explained by his personality traits. We all remember the tweets how he predicted that Obama would attack Iran to boost his popularity. Of course, Obama did no such thing, but this is adequately explained by Obama in 2015 having at least 20 IQ points on Trump in 2026 (plus a staff of technocrats instead of brown-nosers) and thus knowing that would turn into a fiasco.
This ignores (at least in the case of Afghanistan) the necessity of invasion.
Which is likely what happened here. To me it seems likely if not obvious that some of the governmental claims are correct in a way that makes invasion necessary and appropriate.
Many people disagree. That's fine.
What bothers me is the posters who don't seem to have any idea what the claims and circumstances are, either out of genuine ignorance or for need of rhetorical flourish. This is the first time in years I've felt mainstream media reporting is more reliable and informative than this forum and it's gross.
From the perspective of US internal politics, one might argue that there was indeed a necessity. The voters were howling for blood after 9/11, and any leader who would not have given them some war would likely not have survived politically. But even then, the 20 years of occupation while trying to build a nation was clearly a wasted effort.
Spending untold billions to get a terrorist who really annoyed you is something which some people might think is worth establishing as a precedent, but I would hardly call it necessary. Other countries had to suffer evil men who committed mass murder against their population enjoy their freedom, and yet they survived.
For Saddam, the case was even more flimsy. Sure, he was an evil piece of shit, but so are a lot of strongmen in the region. Presumably, he had learned his lesson about attacking US allies after the first Gulf war. He certainly did not cook chemical weapons, as W claimed. His removal directly lead to the surge of daesh, which likely was much worse for human rights than Saddam.
Bin Laden's attempts to harm Americans overseas were "annoying". His attempt to harm America on 9/11 and get its attention was simply "successful". He made it clear that he had no intention of just being another annoying nemesis nestled in the Outer Rim.
Something can be necessary and not an existential matter. Nations that have the wherewithal and are expected to respond to aggression globally can only be so circumspect.
Packing up and leaving other inconvenient battles may have been what emboldened Bin Laden in the first place.
My take is a different one. 3k people killed in 9/11 is bad, sure, but his real success was to drag the US into a war in Afghanistan. Not only did the Taliban kill another 3k US and allied troops during 'Enduring Freedom', they spent more than 150 billion dollars on it. (I consider W's Iraq trip an unrelated misadventure.)
Unless my math is wrong, that comes to 50 million dollars per 9/11 victim. This is simply not cost-effective when the marginal price of a QALY in US healthcare is on the order of 100k$.
Nor was Bin Laden a comic book super-villain who was much better at hurting the US than the next in line was. Nor are jihadists motivated by fear of retaliation, Bin Laden himself was (I think) a minor Saudi noble who could have happily lived without having to work a single day in his life, but instead spent it hiding in caves doing Jihad. I very much assume that if he had known that he would eventually get gunned down by US special forces, he would not have done anything different.
At the risk of sounding callous, this was totally survivable.
If all Osama Bin Laden had to show for his actions is a displaced (temporarily or otherwise) Taliban and a bullet in his face it wouldn't have gone down as badly. It might even have been accepted as the cost of having an empire.
The damage domestically was due to the neocons deciding to overdraw on the opportunity he gave them in Iraq by lying.
I'd take this seriously if it was a response to a hurricane. Given human adversaries who can respond to your math I think it's not a good idea to tell shoplifters so long as they stay under $X they're good.
It might be more expensive and "pointless" in a sensible world but you're just going to have to ruin some lives here.
They may, however, be motivated by weakness. Osama saw the US pull out of Somalia in one of its fits of humanitarianism over a relatively small human cost. This is not the sort of message you want to send to a person like that and the organization he leads.
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'I can't understand the reason for -position X-' is a bit of a peeve of mine when used as a rhetorical tool as opposed to confession of ignorance. If someone wants to understand, by all means, and if an explainer can't be clear that issue is on them. But when people who do understand and simply don't agree with underlying premise use it with the connotations of 'and if I don't understand it it's not reasonable,' it's just a form of consensus building via a implied reasonable person standard that smuggles in the person's standards in lieu of actually engaging other positions.
It's particularly recognizable when someone repeats the premise on the same topic. There's only so many times people can profess to having never heard a respectable counterargument until it's clear the lack of respect is on their end, not the interlocuters.
In all honesty I'm not sure if this criticism is being aimed at me or pro-Iran posters who are confusing me.
If it's aimed at me - it does seem that seem people are formally anti-intervention (which makes sense) or anti-jew (which makes no sense to me but it is hate and hate doesn't always make sense), some of the other posters I cannot establish a theory of mind for, like the people who are mad at the US for being authoritarian and want to support Iran in response (or move to China as a hegemon).
Neither. It's just a pet peeve I've wanted to express for some time now, but rarely had a chance to express without it being unprompted or an implicit accusation of bad faith (which this was not meant to be against you).
If someone wants to be pro-Iranian, that's a completely different thing. And the Trump administration did itself no favors for not presenting its own case to the public for a 'why,' which I am on records as believing is a perfectly valid/legitimate expectation to ahve. As I said before, if the explainer does a bad job explaining their position, the problem is on the presenter, not the recipient of a bad presentation. I'll also maintain that 'understand' and 'agree' are different issues- you can understand / reasonably characterize someone's position without agreeing or conceding to it. Both confusion and opposition to the war are perfectly reasonable, even if there are unreasonable reasons smuggled in / not being challenged.
The particular rhetorical flourish you describe, which I eventually attribute to bad faith if it goes on after reasonable explanations, just brings out a waspish part of me. After a point, I'm less inclined to go along with faux incredulity which frames the bad faith individual as the one to set the standard of reasonableness, and instead counter it with faux credulity of their claim. If they want to claim inability to understand what's been given to them, ask what how they intend to overcome their self-professed limitations.
Which is not in line with the ethos of this forum, but it is the inclination, and thus the pet peeve.
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The blockade is cutting off an extremely important source of revenue and may be causing cracks within the Iranian government, with the foreign minister saying Iran's blockade is lifted and the IRGC issuing a contradictory statement a few hours later.
Whenever the Trump administration pulls stunts like this, it's often claimed to be incompetence of the worst sort, but in keeping with my general tendency to try to analyze actors as rational, let me steelman their actions: it seems possible to me that Iran is doing a good-cop bad-cop routine and/or decided to close the strait again once they realized the US intended to maintain the blockade.
Nevertheless the possibility that Iran's different factions are making different calls could indicate that the government is fracturing internally, which on balance is likely good news for the US (if that is what is happening). Either the IRGC purges the moderates, which would generate a more hardline Iran (bad news for the US) but would likely also weaken the IRGC's legitimacy and narrow the power base of the Iranian government (good news for the US) or the IRGC gets purged by moderates (great news for basically everyone) or Iran continues to issue contradictory statements and shoot at friendly (or at least neutral) shipping, which will begin to turn previously neutral third parties against Iran and make them look like the mad dogs the US government is portraying them as.
Obviously there are certain downsides to the blockade, and it's not over until it's over. But on balance I am much happier with the blockade than I am the proposed "bridge and power plant day," for humanitarian reasons if for nothing else.
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As someone who thinks the war is unwise and that the Trump administration seems incapable of competently executing its policies, the blockade makes sense. When Iran closes the Strait, it still lets it own oil out and thus has a strong financial lifeline. The US needs to prevent in order to create leverage, especially because a peace in which Iran tolls the Strait is clearly a massive loss for the US. Even if one cedes, or believes, as I do, that the war was a bad mistake by Trump, the blockade was the only move left.
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