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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   22612 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Saddam Hussein fired chemical weapons directly into Iranian cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people yet the Iranians kept fighting for years in the hope that they could seize some territory in compensation.

It seems pretty doubtful that blowing up some civilian infrastructure would achieve much of anything

Grok say this never happened. And from what I know about the US military they tend to find chemical weapons as not effective but I’m no expert.

And from what I know about the US military they tend to find chemical weapons as not effective but I’m no expert.

My point wasn't that chemical weapons are effective, it's that Saddam was willing to cross all moral red lines against the Iranians and it didn't work. Where is the evidence that your strategy works?

Grok say this never happened

Perhaps you should think and research with your own brain instead of replacing it with a machine

Dude. You 100% used a machine to research whatever you said occurred in Iran. You used either Wikipedia, Google, or maybe some podcast bro. AI can just scan more data points than google.

You didn’t go to Iran and interview villagers and do soil samples.

FWIW chemical weapons have never been effective in war. History is filled with stories of high civilian casualties and destroying civilian infrastructure led to victory. Roman salted the earth. Mongols slaughtered entire towns who fought to well so other towns would just agree to be slaves. America carpet bombed Europe and nuked Japan. Sherman marched thru Georgia.

Dude. You 100% used a machine to research whatever you said occurred in Iran. You used either Wikipedia, Google, or maybe some podcast bro. AI can just scan more data points than google.

Fact check: false.

I knew that Saddam used chemical weapons against the Iranians and that his war killed hundreds of thousands of people from prior knowledge, not Wikipedia or Google. I'll grant that I double checked after you claimed it "never happened" but unlike you I don't use a machine to replace my brain :)

History is filled with stories of high civilian casualties and destroying civilian infrastructure led to victory.

It's also filled with stories of high civilian casualties leading to defeat, as Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and ISIS can attest. Not to mention that in nearly all of the examples you give the military victory came first and the civilian casualties came later which confuses cause and effect. Where is your evidence that this sort of strategy will produce results instead of just running up the kill count while failing to produce surrender?

“Prior knowledge”

Are you claiming you are a victim of Iraqi Chemical attacks and have first hand knowledge?

Wherever your prior knowledge came from….it came from a machine.

Have you ever heard of books? University classes? Conversations with people from wide ranging backgrounds?

Are you a real human being or are you some sort of AI chatbot that has never experienced the real world? I suppose if you literally only exist on the internet it would make sense to conclude that all knowledge comes from machines.

I get you. If your buddy tells you something at a pub (he probably saw on Twitter) it’s more true than something found on the internet.

A lifetime of knowledge, reading & education vs "DURR GROK DID DIS HABBEN!?!"

I'd recommend you learn what "books" are and what a "university" is before trying to engage in discussion of complex topics in the future. I'm afraid Grok can't save you

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Wikipedia indicates a few tens of thousands of civilian injuries from Iraqi chemical weapons, some Iranian and some Kurdish in an Iraqi city recently captured by Iran.

Just to be clear you quoted sources that indicated “0” recorded instances of Iranian civilian deaths.

(1) My intent was to point out that both you and VIM were making overbroad claims. Iraq did "fire chemical weapons directly into an Iranian town" (not a city), though those weapons did not "kill hundreds of thousands of people".

(2) The second linked article indicates 100 Iranian civilian deaths.

to be clear, those were intended as separate statements, as in "Saddam used chemical weapons on Iranian civilians and he killed hundreds of thousands", not "Saddam's chemical weapons killed hundreds of thousands"

If I meant "Saddam killed hundreds of thousands specifically with chemical weapons" then I wouldn't have separated the statements with an "and" but I suppose I was too imprecise. My bad

Not some civilian infra, it would need to be nearly all of it. Full shutdown of roads, industry, oil, etc. Any building that makes other things. If production is mixed into residential then the residential has to be hit too to hit the production.

This would of course be a genocide but if nobody can move an inch without being cluster bombed with artillery surely Iran would collapse if only to starvation and looting. The strait would probably be open in this case.

Trump hesitates because he fears the inevitable war crimes tribunal this would cause from democrats. He is not confident republicans can hold the executive for the remainder of his lifespan, or that some other republican president would throw him under the bus in an act of bipartisan goodwill.

The US doesn't have the sortie rate to do this. US aircraft already fired off the bulk of their standoff arsenal and achieved nothing of great significance.

The necessary munitions do not exist, nor do safe airbases to launch such a demanding operation.

Iran is much less vulnerable than the Gulf Arabs in a war of food and water, their retaliation would smash US regional allies and severely hurt Israel, who is also desal dependent.

There is no path to victory for America here.

Ah, well if that's the case then Trump and the US are truely done for unless ground troops are mobilized. There's no way the IRGC will settle for anything less than full nuclearization and financial reparations for the damage they suffered otherwise.

The strait would probably be open in this case.

Why? Has everybody forgotten that partisan / guerrilla warfare exists?

Partisans can exist only within a living civilian population. Guerrillas can't exist for very long without civilian support.

There are plenty of examples of guerrillas fighting for decades without much or any real civilian support.

The latin and african guerrillas finance themselves without civilian support through the drug trade. I doubt Shia guerrillas representing the last bastion of Iranian revolutionary struggle would debase themselves to that level, unless they wanted to lose significant legitimacy in the islamic world.

Sure they can. You can stockpile supplies that will last you months, or even years, very easily.

Decentralized cells of IRGC units could certainly survive and threaten the strait. I believe most could be convinced to surrender by remaining IRGC leadership if Tehran and other major cities are flattened by fuel-air bombs, cluster munitions, or whatever the modern equivalent is. Perhaps Trump also shares your doubts about a civilian infra-bombing escalation. To me though, it might be his only way out of the mess.

I want to clarify that I was totally against starting any military conflict with Iran to begin with. However, now that direct hostilities have started, we have to decisively finish any conflict with countries whose official slogan is "Death to America", or we will be leaving yet another problem for future generations to clean up.

I want to clarify that I was totally against starting any military conflict with Iran to begin with. However, now that direct hostilities have started, we have to decisively finish any conflict with countries whose official slogan is "Death to America"

…if your problem is with the slogan, then why oppose starting the conflict? Their slogan didn't change, though I suppose they now chant it with more sincerity.

Timing is everything in war, politics, and more. Just because you have an intractable enemy, it doesn't mean you should cast other priorities aside to immediately eliminate them. Trump started the war because he was convinced by Netanyahu that it was an excellent time to defeat Iran. Clearly, it wasn't.

Trump, the US, and possibly the entire oil-importing world now suffer the consequences of a poorly timed decapitation strike aimed at the IRGC. While Iran should have been dealt with eventually, the US could have waited for a more opportune moment, like a contested transition of leadership for example. It's clear that the US had already waited for a long time, but the status quo was tolerable and there was no immediate threat to US interests from Iran.

The country who benefited the most from this war's timing was Israel, who could use the US as a beat stick against Iran while they still had bipartisan pro-Israel support in US congress. Israel's support among younger republicans and the democrat base is fading, so this war is perfect for them while they can still count on the US military to soften up Iran.

we have to decisively finish any conflict

You could easily do that. Just withdraw unilaterally. Of course that would require the US to stop being a client state of Israel.

Well, the US is a client state to Israel, which is why unilateral withdrawal is impossible. Hence Trump's dilemma with Iran and the strait, and the likely need for bombing warcrimes to obliterate Iran to get himself out of a losing war.

What happens if Trump commits bombing warcrimes, they're ineffective and Iran returns the favor against the Gulf? Iran is a huge country that would take quite a bit of effort to actually depopulate whereas the Gulf is entirely reliant on a handful of desalination plants. Such an exchange could easily wind up going worse for America's allies than Iran. At that point what do you do, nuke Tehran to reestablish deterrence?

It seems like the reason the US is in this mess is because it keeps doubling down, losing, and winding up in an even more humiliating position than before.

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