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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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So do you think this is why Israel bombed the consulate? Every reply so far seems to be concentrating on Iran as the aggressor, with nothing about "but their consulate was bombed".

Suppose an American consulate were bombed by anybody, what would you expect the US response to be?

Suppose an American consulate were bombed by anybody, what would you expect the US response to be?

Let's imagine that Iran didn't just bomb a US embassy, but stormed it and took diplomats/civilians hostage. What would happen?

There's precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis

The US response would probably be to tighten economic sanctions on Iran, but to avoid military escalation. As the Ukraine war shows, the US is very wary of escalating conflicts, even with second-tier powers like Russia or Iran.

It was a consulate in name only. It was a QF operational base used to conduct operations against Israel.

The Iranian MFA didn’t lose a bunch of passport stampers here.

“Why did Israel just blow up an Iranian MFA building without provocation” is not the correct framing here.

I suspect the US response to be blaming the free speech rights of an American that was orthogonal to the consulate attack

I don’t follow.

I was making a joke about Benghazi.

Benghazi.

The administration's initial reaction, IIRC, was to claim the attacks were incited by an inflammatory video some American posted on the internet.

I'm pretty sure he's referring to the narrative blaming the 2012 Benghazi attack on "filmmaker" Nakoula Basseley Nakoula's YouTube video "Innocence of Muslims."

Huh. Learn something every day.

Israel probably bombed the consulate in retaliation for what Iran's proxies did to Israel. International relations is not governed by rules treating agents symmetrically.

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