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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8737 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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US can end the Iran War in 36 hours if we wanted to. We choose not to because of stupid liberal war ethics. And that’s without using nukes. A few key hits on infrastructure and Iran surrenders.

That strikes me as wishful thinking. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan surrendered, they had to be taken, and each of them took more than 36 hours, as would Iran, due to their geography and population, if nothing else.

I am specifically saying “Not if you do war crimes”. We clearly can’t do regime change etc with just air strikes on military targets. But we do have the ability to bomb basically anything in the country. We can nearly completely cut power/water in Iran.

The regime will shoot protestors to maintain power. If we credibly threatened civilian infrastructure and it became topple the regime or die I think we could succeed.

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.

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

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