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What does the anti-war side in the US want in the Iran conflict? I'm woefully ignorant on this point of view, so I'm wondering if I can get some steelmans here.
The special military operation has not necessarily turned in the US's favor. And I understand why a majority of people were against getting into this absolute mess in the first place. But now that this mess has happened, it doesn't seem so easy to just pack up and go home. Assuming that the US passed a war powers vote, or otherwise just decided just to drop everything and go home, what next? It's a total capitulation, and to me it seems braindead obvious that Iran isn't going to stop harassing and extorting nearby shipping. I mean, what have they got to lose, meanwhile the more they extort the more money they get. So it seems like the only way that the shipment of oil can return to a normal state is if Iran is backed into a corner and is forced to stop what they are doing.
So I don't really understand the point of view of the anti-war side, such as the Democrat establishment
If their vote actually succeeded wouldn't this be pretty much the worst possible outcome? Iran commits piracy and extortion and the rest of the word twiddles their thumbs and just lets Iran do it? I can see a few hypotheses, but none of them seem to be a principled anti-war stance:
I'm sure I'm missing something here. What are the strongest ideas that make the anti-war side's case in terms of what should be done about the situation?
The US can pack up and go home if they offer Iran genuine compensation. We can take off sanctions, pay back the damage we caused, give them loans, open up our markets to their saffron and other products, allow a certain number of scholarships for their students… there are hundreds of creative solutions we can devise that will convince them to open up the strait. The problem is, per Joe Kent, the Israelis needs to be “reigned in”. Right now, America can’t actually be trusted, because of the free reign that Israel has over Trump. So the compensation we provide has to involve genuine “costly signals” of our good faith. So the deal could include reducing the extent of our relationship with Israel, signing a real treaty with Iran, etc. Is any of this likely under Trump? No, I don’t think it’s likely at all, because of his pride. But getting the strait opened isn’t some Herculean task.
They are obtaining compensation and deterrence against a country that wants to destroy their civilization, kill all of their leaders, kill all their negotiators, kill all of their scientists, and thinks it’s okay to kill 100 students and then pretend it was Iran that did it. They are in a fight against a force that represents, like, a Disney villian rendition of pure evil as personified by Trump. At this point he is like the personification of greed, corruption, and the shadowy underworld (Epstein). And most of the world sees this, which is why they aren’t helping America but actually doing what they can to obstruct their efforts (closing down airspace etc)
Or we could nuke them. It is cheaper. I much prefer Iran to have 2 choices - submission or destruction and let them choose. Closing of the strait means Iran has to be broken to a state where they are incapable and not unwilling to do that.
Would you say the Russians were foolish to not start nuking the Ukrainians after they failed to achieve total victory in the first month?
Russia's stated goal is to conquer Ukraine, and nuking them would kind of be a detriment to that. The US is no worse off if the entire Iran is a uninhabitable radioactive wasteland and 100 million iranians are dead. But it's certainly troublesome for Russia if all the Ukrainians are dead.
Well, Putin could have nuked Kiev and announced that he would continue to nuke one city every 24 hours until unconditional surrender. The destruction might not have been so different from a few years of conventional warfare. He did not do so because otherwise every one of his neighbors would have started nuclear programs asap, and because it seems entirely possible that the Ukrainian army would have been willing to fight him in the ruins of their cities.
Likewise, for the US, the Iran problem would be over. Instead they would have the problem that every other country in the world (excepting Israel, perhaps) would consider them genocidal maniacs on a scale dwarfing Hitler, Stalin and Mao together. Every non-nuclear country would either try to get nukes or enter defensive alliances with saner countries.
It wouldn’t necessarily need to be that bloody. There are plenty of ways to use nuclear weapons on Iran or Ukraine that would be highly effective and cause minimal civilian casualties.
There are a quite a few nuclear powers, and quite a few have been fighting conventional wars which were very frustrating for them.
If Putin could have won Ukraine in his original timeframe by launching a few small tactical nukes, or Nethanyahu could have installed the Shah by dropping a few tactical warheads on the IRGC, or if the Soviets could have won Afghanistan in a similar way, it seems strange why nobody did so.
I view tactical nukes as similar to chemical and biological weapons. If they were 'I win' buttons, similar to what gunpowder became in Europe, their use would be widespread. Instead, they are long on horror but short on effectiveness.
There is some overlap between the smallest nukes and the largest conventional bombs, and the MOAB and friends are very much niche. If a few tens of kilotons TNT would have changed the Iran war, the US air force could have just delivered that using conventional explosives.
The other thing is that on the scale of hand grenades to city-glassers, chemical vs nuclear energy storage is the Schelling fence. Normalizing the use of tactical nukes will also normalize the use of larger nukes.
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