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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....
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.
'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 onnn 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.
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