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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   23396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Iran is isolated. Iran's missile attacks on UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc.. have shown to those countries that Iran must never have nuclear weapons or missile capabilities. Iran's only constraints were lack of ability, not willingness.

I don't follow your logic here. Iran has long had the ability to launch such missile attacks on these countries. The constraint wasn't lack of ability but lack of motivation.

My logic is that Iran's attacks were seemingly random. They were angry. They wanted to hurt someone. They couldn't hurt Israel or the United States, their enemies, so they instead hurt whatever soft targets they could hit with their missiles.

I've asked ChatGPT to make a full list. Other than Israel, they've also attacked Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, and Jordan. They've also attacked shipping from many neutral countries, including India and China, hilariously attacking one Indian vessel who tried to pay the Iranian "toll" but paid crypto scammers instead. (At least according to rumor).

The only reason they didn't attack countries further afield is that their missiles don't go that far.

They also have borders to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Turkey, yet they did not attack them. So your theory that they were simply lashing out at whatever targets they could reach has some more explaining to do.

Here is another theory: they were specifically targeting gulf monarchies, which they widely see as allied to the US, possibly because they have US bases on their soil.

Your list was: Bahrain (3), Kuwait (5), Oman (4), Qatar (2), Saudi Arabia (4), UAE (2), Iraq (2), Jordan (2). I have put the number of US bases (per WP) in parenthesis.

They hit basically every country ME allied to the US except for Djibouti and Turkey. I think they probably considered Djibouti to not be relevant, and wanted to avoid dragging the rest of NATO into the conflict through attacking Turkey.

But their attacks clearly followed a method. If you can not harm the US directly, harm their regional allies who give shelter and support to your enemies. This seems entirely rational. Qatar just bought influence in the US to the tune of one presidential airplane, why would you not incentivize them to spend that influence to deescalate?

Attacking neutral ships gives their flag countries a cause for war against Iran, but it was also entirely rational. Closing the Strait is the one thing Iran can do to squeeze the balls of the world economy, so irrespective of it being a violation of international laws, they were going to do it once Trump started bombing. The US would have done the same in Iran's place.

Iran did in fact attack Turkey, they just did not do so successfully.

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