This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.
I am doing this post outside of the normal Friday order because it is an unusual topic and I want to keep making it clear that even as world events continue to happen – as they must – I do not want this blog to turn into a politics newsletter. I simply haven’t had the time to polish and condense these thoughts for other publication – the hard work of much writing is turning 3,500 words (or 7,500, as it turns out) of thoughts into 1,500 words of a think piece – but I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head. That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress.
And this war is dumb as hell.
I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.
Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples.
But that’s enough introduction. What I want to discuss here is first the extremely unwise gamble that the administration took and then the trap that it now finds itself in, from which there is no comfortable escape.
The Situation
We need to start by establishing some basic facts about Iran, as a country.
First, Iran is a large country. It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population.
More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.
In practice, given that Iran did not and never has posed an existential threat to the United States (Iran aspires to be the kind of nuclear threat North Korea is and can only vaguely dream of being the kind of conventional threat that Russia is), that meant that a ground invasion of Iran was functionally impossible. While the United States had the raw resources to do it, the political will simply wasn’t there and was unlikely to ever be there.
Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.
Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.
In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal.
That deal was not perfect, I must stress: it essentially gave Iran carte blanche to reinforce its network of proxies across the region, which was robustly bad for Israel and mildly bad for the United States, but since the alternative was – as we’ll see – global economic disruption and the prospect of a large-scale war which would always be far more expensive than the alternatives, it was perhaps the best deal that could have been had. For what it is worth, my own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing, which put us on the course for this outcome (as more than a few people pointed out at the time).
But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.
Which leads us to
The Gamble
The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.
The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.
In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.
But power in the Iranian regime isn’t wielded by the Supreme Leader alone either: the guardian council has power, the council of experts that select the Supreme Leader have power, the IRGC has power, the regular military has some power (but less than the IRGC), the elected government has some power (but less than the IRGC or the guardian council) and on and on. These sorts of governments can collapse, but not often. It certainly did not help that the United States had stood idle while the regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its opponents, before making the attempt, but I honestly do not think the attempt would have worked before.
The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.
As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.
The problem is that once the gamble was made, once the dice were cast, the Trump administration would be effectively giving up control over much of what followed.
And if administration statements are to be believed, that decision was made, without knowing it, in June of last year. Administration officials, most notably Marco Rubio, have claimed that the decision was made to attempt this regime change gamble in part because they were aware that Israel was about to launch a series of decapitation strikes and they assessed – correctly, I suspect – that the ‘blowback’ would hit American assets (and energy production) in the region even if the United States did nothing. Essentially, Iran would assume that the United States was ‘in’ on the attack.
That is notable because Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.
The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly over the last several weeks where things explode in Iran and there is initially confusion over if the United States or Israel bombed them. But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.
So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack. It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.
But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.
Which is the case here. Because…
The Trap
Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.
The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.
And the scale here is significant. 25% of the world’s oil (refined and crude), 20% of its liquid natural gas and around 20% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz which links the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Any of those figures would be enough for a major disruption to trigger huge economic ripples. And even worse there are only very limited, very insufficient alternative transport options. Some Saudi oil (about half) can move via pipeline to the Red Sea and some Emirati oil can move via pipeline to Fujairah outside of the Strait, but well over half of the oil and effectively all of the natural gas and fertilizer ingredients are trapped if ships cannot navigate the strait safely.
And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.
And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.
Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.
But the trap here is two sided: once the strait was effectively closed, the United States could not back off out of the war without suffering its own costs. Doing so, for one, would be an admission of defeat, politically damaging at home. Strategically, it would affirm Iran’s control over the strait, which would be a significantly worse outcome than not having done the war in the first place. And simply backing off might not fully return shipping flows: why should Iran care if the Gulf states can export their oil? An Iran that fully controls the strait, that had demonstrated it could exclude the United States might intentionally throttle everyone else’s oil – even just a bit – to get higher prices for its own or to exert leverage.
So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.
The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.
Under these conditions, both sides might seek a purely military solution: remove the ability of your opponent to do harm in order to create the space to declare victory and deescalate. Such solutions are elusive. Iran simply has no real way of meaningfully diminishing American offensive power: they cannot strike the airfields, sink the carriers or reliably shoot down the planes (they have, as of this writing, managed to damage just one aircraft).
For the United States, a purely military solution is notionally possible: you could invade. But as noted, Iran is very, very big and has a large population, so a full-scale invasion would be an enormous undertaking, larger than any US military operation since the Second World War. Needless to say, the political will for this does not exist. But a ‘targeted’ ground operation against Iran’s ability to interdict the strait is also hard to concieve. Since Iran could launch underwater drones or one-way aerial attack drones from anywhere along the northern shore the United States would have to occupy many thousands of square miles to prevent this and of course then the ground troops doing that occupying would simply become the target for drones, mortars, artillery, IEDs and so on instead.
One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.
Meanwhile escort operations in the strait itself are also deeply unpromising. For one, it would require many more ships, because the normal traffic through the strait is so large and because escorts would be required throughout the entire Gulf (unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the ‘zone’ of Houthi attacks was contained to only the southern part of the Red Sea). But the other problem is that Iran possesses modern anti-ship missiles (AShMs) in significant quantity and American escort ships (almost certainly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) would be vulnerable escorting slow tankers in the constrained waters of the strait.
It isn’t even hard to imagine what the attack would look like: essentially a larger, more complex version of the attack that sunk the Moskva, to account for the Arleigh Burke’s better air defense. Iran would pick their moment (probably not the first transit) and try to distract the Burke, perhaps with a volley of cheap Shahed-type drones against a natural gas tanker, before attempting to ambush the Burke with a volley of AShMs, probably from the opposite direction. The aim would be to create just enough confusion that one AShM slipped through, which is all it might take to leave a $2.2bn destroyer with three hundred American service members on board disabled and vulnerable in the strait. Throw in speed-boats, underwater drones, naval mines, fishing boats pretending to be threats and so on to maximize confusion and the odds that one of perhaps half a dozen AShMs slips through.
And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can. Which is why the navy is not eager to run escort.
But without escorts or an end to the conflict, shipping in the Gulf is not going to return to normal. Container ships are big and hard to sink but easy to damage. But while crude oil tankers are hard to set fire to, tankers carrying refined petroleum products are quite easy to set fire to, as we’ve seen, while tankers of liquid natural gas (LNG carriers) are essentially floating bombs.
The result is that right now it seems that the only ships moving through the strait are those Iran permits and they appear to have a checkpoint system, turning away ships they do not approve of. A military solution this problem is concievable, but extremely difficult to implement practically, requiring either a massive invasion of Iran’s coastline or an enormous sea escort operation. It seems more likely in both cases that the stoppage will continue until Iran decides it should stop. The good news on that front is that Iran benefits from the export of oil from the Gulf too, but the bad news is that while they are permitting some traffic, precisely because high energy prices are their only lever to make the United States and Israel stop killing them, they are unlikely to approve the transit of the kinds of numbers of ships which would allow energy markets to stabilize.
Just as a measure here, as I write this apparently over the last three days or so Iran has let some twenty ships through their checkpoint, charging fees apparently to do so. That may sound like a lot, but it is a quantity that, compared to the normal operation of the strait, is indistinguishable from zero. The Strait of Hormuz normally sees around 120 transits per day (including both directions). That scale should both explain why five or six ships a day paying Iran to transit is not going to really impact this equation – that’s still something like a 95% reduction in traffic (and all of the Iran-approved transits are outbound, I think) – but also why a solution like ‘just do escorts’ is so hard. Whatever navies attempted an escort solution would need to escort a hundred ships a day, with every ship being vulnerable at every moment from when it entered the Strait to when it docked for loading or offloading to its entire departure route. All along the entire Gulf coastline. All the time.
Likewise, even extremely punishing bombings of Iranian land-based facilities are unlikely to wholly remove their ability to throw enough threat into the Strait that traffic remains massively reduced. Sure some ship owners will pay Iran and others will take the risk, but if traffic remains down 90% or just 50% that is still a massive, global energy disruption. And we’ve seen with the campaign against the Houthis just how hard it is with airstrikes to compromise these capabilities: the United States spent more than a year hammering the Houthis and was never able to fully remove their attack capabilities. Cargo ships are too vulnerable and the weapons with which to attack them too cheap and too easy to hide.
There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, having demonstrated that no one can stop them from determining by force which ships pass and which ships cannot. That would, in fact, be a significant strategic victory for Iran and an enormous strategic defeat for the United States.
Peace Negotiations?
Which brings us to the question of strategic outcomes. As the above has made clear, I think the Trump administration erred spectacularly in starting this war. It appears as though, in part pressured by Israel, but mostly based on their own decisions (motivated, it sure seems, by the ease of the Venezuela regime-change) they decided to go ahead on the hopeful assumption the regime would collapse and as a result did not plan for the most likely outcome (large war, strait closure), despite this being the scenario that political leadership (Trump, Hegseth, Rubio) were warned was most likely.
The administration now appears to be trying to extricate itself from the problem has created, but as I write this, is currently still stuck in the ‘trap’ above. Now this is a fast moving topic, so by the time you actually read this the war well could have ended in a ceasefire (permanent or temporary) or intensified and expanded. Who knows! As I am writing the Trump administration claims that they are very near a negotiated ceasefire, while the Iranian regime claims they have rejected both of the United States’ interlocutors as unsuitable (‘backstabbing’ negotiators), while reporting suggests Israel may feel it in their interests to blow up any deal if the terms are too favorable to Iran.
That is a lot of uncertainty! But I think we can look at some outcomes here both in terms of what was militarily achieved, what the consequences of a ‘deal’ might be and what the consequences of not having a deal might be.
The Trump administration has offered a bewildering range of proposed objectives for this war, but I think it is fair to say the major strategic objectives have not been achieved. Initially, the stated objective was regime change or at least regime collapse; neither has occurred. The regime very much still survives and if the war ends soon it seems very plausible that the regime – able to say that it fought the United States and made the American president sue for peace – will emerge stronger, domestically (albeit with a lot of damage to fix and many political problems that are currently ‘on pause’ coming ‘un-paused’). The other core American strategic interest here is Iran’s nuclear program, the core of which is Iran’s supply of roughly 500kg of highly enriched uranium; no effort appears to have been made to recover or destroy this material and it remains in Iranian hands. Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.
When the United States did this in Kazakhstan, removing about 600kg (so roughly the same amount) it required the team to spend 12 hours a day every day for a month to remove it, using multiple heavy cargo planes. And that facility was neither defended, nor buried under rubble.
Subsequently, administration aims seem to have retreated mostly to ‘fixing the mess we made:’ getting Iran to stop shooting and getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened and the ships moving again. They do seem to be asking for quite a bit more at the peace table, but the record of countries winning big concessions at the peace table which they not only haven’t secured militarily but do not appear able to do so is pretty slim.
Now it is possible that Iran blinks and takes a deal sooner rather than later. But I don’t think it is likely. And the simple reason is that Iran probably feels like it needs to reestablish deterrence. This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.” And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.
Iran is thus going to very much want a deal that says ‘America blinked’ on the tin, which probably means at least some remaining nuclear program, a de facto Iranian veto on traffic in the strait and significant sanctions relief, along with formal paper promises of no more air strikes. That’s going to be a hard negotiating position to bridge, especially because Iran can ‘tough it out’ through quite a lot of bombing.
And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
Strategic Implications
So my conclusion here is that the United States has not yet achieved very much in this war on a strategic level. Oh, tactically, the United States has blown up an awful lot of stuff and done so with very minimal casualties of its own. But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.
None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.
So the true, strategic gains here for all of the tactical effectiveness displayed, are functionally nil. Well what did it cost?
Well, first and foremost, to date the lives of 13 American soldiers (290 more WIA), 24 Israelis (thousands more injured), at least a thousand civilian deaths across ‘neutral’ countries (Lebanon mostly, but deaths in Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc) and probably at least a thousand if not more Iranian civilians (plus Iranian military losses). The cost of operations for the United States is reportedly one to two billion dollars a day, which adds up pretty quickly to a decent chunk of change.
All of the military resources spent in this war are in turn not available for other, more important theaters, most obviously the Asia-Pacific (INDOPACOM), but of course equally a lot of these munitions could have been doing work in Ukraine as well. As wars tend to do, this one continues to suck in assets as it rumbles on, so the American commitment is growing, not shrinking. And on top of spent things like munitions and fuel, the strain on ships, air frames and service personnel is also a substantial cost: it turns out keeping a carrier almost constantly running from one self-inflicted crisis to the next for ten months is a bad idea.
You could argue these costs would be worthwhile it they resulted in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program – again, the key element here is the HEU, which has not been destroyed – or of the Iranian regime. But neither of those things have been achieved on the battlefield, so this is a long ledger of costs set against…no gains. Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
The next side of this are the economic consequences. Oil and natural gas have risen in price dramatically, but if you are just watching the commodity ticker on the Wall Street Journal, you may be missing some things. When folks talk about oil prices, they generally do so via either $/bbl (West Texas Intermediate – WTI – one-month front-month futures) or BRN00 (Brent Crude Oil Continuous Contracts). These are futures contracts, meaning the price being set is not for a barrel of oil right now but for a barrel of oil in the future; we can elide the sticky differences between these two price sets and just note that generally the figure you see is for delivery in more-or-less one month’s time. Those prices have risen dramatically (close to doubled), but may not reflect the full economic impact here: as the ‘air bubble’ created by the sudden stop of oil shipments expands, physical here-right-now prices for oil are much higher in many parts of the world and still rising.
Essentially, the futures markets are still hedging on the idea that this war might end and normal trade might resume pretty soon, a position encouraged by the current administration, which claims it has been negotiating with Iran (Iran denied the claim). The tricky thing here is that this is a war between two governments – the Trump administration and the Iranian regime – which both have a clear record of lying a lot. The Trump administration has, for instance, repeatedly claimed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia was imminent, and that war remains ongoing. The markets are thus forced to try and guess everyone’s actions and intentions from statements that are unreliable. Cards on the table, I think the markets are underestimating the likelihood that this conflict continues for some time. Notably, the United States is moving assets into theater – an MEU, elements of the 82 Airborne – which will take some time to arrive (two weeks for the MEU which is still about a week out as I write this) and set up for operations.
In either case, while I am not an expert on oil extraction or shipping, what I have seen folks who are experts on those things say is that the return of normal operations after this war will be very slow, often on the order of ‘every extra week of conflict adds a month to recovery’ (which was Sal Mercogliano’s rule of thumb in a recent video). If the war ends instantly, right now, ship owners will first have to determine that the strait is safe, then ships will have to arrive and begin loading to create space in storage to start up refineries to create space in storage to start up oil wells that have been ‘shut in,’ some of which may require quite a bit of doing to restart. Those ships in turn have to spend weeks sailing to the places that need these products, where some of the oil and LNG is likely to be used to refill stockpiles rather than immediately going out to consumers. For many products, refineries and production at the point of sale – fertilizer plants, for instance – will also need to be restarted. Factory restarts can be pretty involved tasks.
This recovery period doesn’t just get pushed out by 24 hours each day it gets longer as more production is forced to shut down or is damaged in the fighting. As I write this, futures markets for the WTI seem to be expecting oil prices to remain elevated (above $70 or so) well into 2028.
Meanwhile, disruption of fertilizer production, which relies heavily on natural gas products, has the potential to raise food prices globally. Higher global food prices – and food prices have already been elevated by the impact of the War in Ukraine – are pretty strongly associated with political instability in less developed countries. After all, a 25% increase in the price of food in a rich country is annoying – you have to eat more cheaper foods (buy more ramen, etc.). But in a poor country it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food and hungry, desperate people do hungry, desperate things. A spike in food prices was one of the core causes of the 2010 Arab Spring which led in turn to the Syrian Civil War, the refugee crisis of which significantly altered the political landscape of Europe.
I am not saying this will happen – the equally big spike in food prices from the Ukraine War has not touched off a wave of revolutions – but that it increases the likelihood of chaotic, dynamic, unsettled political events.
But it does seem very clear that this war has created a set of global economic headwinds which will have negative repercussions for many countries, including the United States. The war has not, as of yet, made Americans any safer – but it has made them poorer.
Then there are the political implications. I think most folks understand that this war was a misfire for the United States, but I suspect it may end up being a terrible misfire for Israel as well. Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic – is now openly discussed in both parties. More concerning is polling suggesting that not only is Israel underwater with the American public, but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history.
Again, predictions are hard, especially about the future, but it certainly seems like there is an open door to a future where this war is the final nail in the coffin of the American-Israeli security partnership, as it becomes impossible to sustain in the wake of curdling American public opinion. That would be a strategic catastrophe for Israel if it happened. On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s. But a future president might well cut off spare parts and maintainers for those F-35s, refuse to sell new ones, refuse to sell armaments for them, and otherwise make it very difficult for Israel to acquire superior weapons compared to its regional rivals.
Economic coercion is equally dangerous: Israel is a small, substantially trade dependent country and its largest trading partner is the United States, followed by the European Union. But this trade dependency is not symmetrical: the USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. Absent American diplomatic support then, the threat of economic sanctions is quite dire: Israel is meaningfully exposed and the sanctions would be very low cost for the ‘Status Quo Coalition’ (assuming the United States remains a member) to inflict under a future president.
A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory. As Thucydides might put it, an outcome like that would be an “example for the world to meditate upon.” That outcome is by no means guaranteed, but every day the war grinds on and becomes less popular in the United States, it becomes more likely.
But the United States is likewise going to bear diplomatic costs here. Right now the Gulf States have to shelter against Iranian attack but when the dust settles they – and many other countries – will remember that the United States unilaterally initiated by surprise a war of choice which set off severe global economic headwinds and uncertainty. Coming hot on the heels of the continuing drama around tariffs, the takeaway in many places may well be ‘Uncle Sam wants you to be poor,’ which is quite a damaging thing for diplomacy. And as President Trump was finding out when he called for help in the Strait of Hormuz and got told ‘no’ by all of our traditional allies, it is in fact no fun at all to be diplomatically isolated, no matter how powerful you are.
Of course the war, while quickly becoming an expensive, self-inflicted wound for the United States has also been disastrous for Iran. I said this at the top but I’ll say it again: the Iranian regime is odious. You will note also I have not called this war ‘unprovoked’ – the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades. That said, it is the Iranian people who will suffer the most from this war and they had no choice in the matter. They tried to reject this regime earlier this year and many were killed for it. But I think it is fair to say this war has been a tragedy for the Iranian people and a catastrophe for the Iranian regime.
And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?
And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.
In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.
Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer.
> Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important
Perhaps this should be not UNimportant?
It appears like that, either he corrected it or you read it too fast.
I can confirm anecdotally that the author corrected it after the fact
This looks like a typo: “Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important”.
Yes obviously a typo. But it’s consistently irritating that the first replies to Bret’s well-thought out posts are pedants pointing out typos rather than engaging with the substantive material. 10 points for proofreading, -50 for comprehension.
What, you expect *mitigated* pedantry?
Eh….given the name of the blog i am fine with it.
Is there some better way we should be reporting typos?
Engaging with the substantive material takes a lot longer than pointing out a typo. It is inevitable that such replies arrive later. And if a typo is confusing it can be positively helpful to point it out.
My friend. They are not nitpicking a minor grammatical error. They are drawing Deveraux’s attention to a typo which changes the entire tone of a very important statement. Pedantry it is not.
Plus posting any reply, even a spelling or grammar nitpick, is a way to get flagged for email notifications of new replies.
Also, “primal scream issued into the avoid” in the penultimate paragraph. There were a few others I saw but didn’t make particular note of.
Well said.
Reading this was a lot more insightful than the major media outlets. Thanks!
I would love to hear your thoughts on how this war will affect on-going Russo-Ukrainian war.
When you say that Iran was not a major strategic priority, are you aware of the statements made by Steve Witkoff, one of the US negotiators who was part of the talks with Iran just prior to the start of the war? It was pretty widely reported about three weeks ago; here’s one link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-steve-witkoff-iran-enriched-uranium-11-nuclear-bombs/. A couple of key quotes:
> Witkoff said that the uranium could have been enriched to the weapons-grade level of 90% within a week to 10 days.
> “Both the Iranian negotiators said to us, directly, with, you know, no shame, that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60% [enriched uranium], and they’re aware that that could make 11 nuclear bombs, and that was the beginning of their negotiating stance,” Witkoff told Fox News.
(Paragraphs starting with > are quotes from the CBS news article, except for my own addition in brackets; I can’t seem to get WordPress to do proper blockquote formatting, so old-style email quoting it is. Rest of this comment is my own words.)
If Witkoff is accurately reporting what the Iranian negotiators said, that changes the strategic picture for the US. Because if the US’s strategic goal had been to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and now Iran is a week and a half away from being able to create 11 nuclear warheads, then suddenly the strategic picture becomes urgent, and a half-planned effort now becomes better than a fully-planned effort next month.
The existential threat to Israel, of course, is obvious: if Iran had developed functioning nuclear weapons, some, perhaps all, of them would have been launched at Israel. But Iran also had the range to reach most of Europe: they launched two missiles at the American military base on the island of Diego Garcia. One failed mid-flight, but the other one was intercepted by countermissile fire, presumably because it looked like it could have reached its target. Diego Garcia is farther from Tehran (2,361 miles) than Berlin (2,200 miles). (Note, I have not personally verified those distances, but I have no reason to believe they’re in error). It would be unwise of any country within 2,000 miles of Iran to assume that they would be safe from a nuclear-armed Iran led by Khamenei.
In my opinion, if Mr. Witkoff was accurately reporting what the Iranian negotiators said to him, then Iran was a much more urgent strategic priority for America than you seem to believe it was. I suspect that it was when Trump saw the reports from his negotiators that he said, “That’s it, we’re pulling the trigger now, we can’t afford to wait.” And, of course, if Trump shared that info with Netanyahu (which I believe he did, or else Netanyahu had received similar strategic assessments from Israeli intelligence), then the reason for Israel to launch the attack right away was even more obvious. Even if your assessment is correct that the war would be a political misfire for Israel and they can gain at best a pyrrhic victory, when someone’s choices are a possible pyrrhic victory or likely nuclear annihilation, he’s going to choose the first option.
“if Iran had developed functioning nuclear weapons, some, perhaps all, of them would have been launched at Israel.”
Citation needed
Citation 110% needed.
The most likely scenario is that Iran would have used its nuclear weapons like every single other nuclear weapon-armed country has used them since Hiroshima: to prevent other nuclear-weapon-armed countries from pulling stunts like ‘surprise leadership decapitations’.
In fairness, no nuclear state I know of went as far as to install a public countdown clock to the date their major geopolitical opponent is meant to stop existing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Square_Countdown_Clock
On the flip side, the fact it was installed after the nuclear deal could very easily be seen as (primarily internal) signaling that handicapping one’s capacity to create a bomb did not mean any reduction in commitment to this core policy goal. And there’s in fact the risk of irradiating Palestine itself – particularly symbolically significant when it is installed in Palestine Square, on Quds Day (Quds is Arabic for Jerusalem.)
That’s the thing isn’t it. For all of the posturing, the actual evidence suggests that while Iran is pretty solidly committed to kicking the Israelis out of Palestine…they have behaved entirely rationally in relation to their nuclear capabilities.
I think that’s where the “US committed to this war in June 2025” bit comes in – at that point it was obvious to everyone in Iran that the only defence against another round of air attacks and so ad infinitum was their own nuclear deterrent – which is the big lesson of the second Trump administration; the US won’t defend its allies and will launch decapitation strikes on its enemies, so just in case, we better get a bomb.
As for Iran inevitably using its bomb as soon as it has one, Israel is also a nuclear power and unlike Iran, has meaningful defences – Iran would be in the same position as the Soviet Union vis-a-vis NATO in the 1950s, they would probably hurt their enemies quite badly, and certainly be annihilated in return. Of course, if you think Israel will kill you whatever you do, why not preemptively go down swinging?
To be fair, what we’re witnessing right now is a real-world test of the hypothesis that Iran might not actually need a nuclear deterrent because of its other, conventional sources of leverage: both the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which even at this early stage has already prompted the U.S. to lift sanctions on Iranian oil, and (more importantly) the ability to target desalination infrastructure in the more arid Gulf states, which is probably the main factor that’s been keeping the U.S. from following through on its threats to strike Iranian domestic energy infrastructure. Taking desalination capacity offline would practically erase the more populous Gulf cities from the map overnight, so it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to argue that Iran having the capacity to do this with conventional missiles and drones might actually be the functional equivalent of a limited-purpose nuclear deterrent.
Aside from the mood swings of the Trump administration (a.k.a. the “whichever random West Wing vizier, Fox News pundit, and/or social media AI slop happened to catch Trump’s attention within the past 5 minutes” administration), the most worrisome wild card here is whether the Israelis are rational enough actors to recognize or care about the possibility that its reckless hyper-bellicosity might end up forcing Iran into such desperate measures. After having spent decades growing accustomed to the U.S. insulating it from the consequences of its actions, Israel is in for a rude awakening sooner or later; presumably it’d be better for Israel if that rude awakening comes at the hands of a U.S. administration cracking down and forcing it to behave itself, like a fed-up parent disciplining an out-of-control toddler, rather than at the hands of its justifiably-angry neighbors if the U.S. ultimately throws up its hands in frustration and abandons the Israelis to their fate. (Israel is also heavily reliant on desalination, although its facilities are far enough away from Iran to stand a somewhat better chance at missile defense than the hopelessly-indefensible facilities directly across the Gulf.)
That reasoning only holds up if you assume that the situation “Iran possesses nuclear arms” instantly and with 100% certainty becomes “Iran uses nuclear arms on Israel”. Which is not proven, and in fact there’s very many indications that the opposite is true.
Firstly, Iran already possessed a variety of non-nuclear weapons capable of attacking Israel(or Europe), and did not fire them except in response to an Israeli attack.
Secondly, very many countries around the world possess nuclear weapons, all but one of which, the United States, have not used them to attack another country. In fact, there’s even a majority-Islam country (Pakistan) possessing nuclear weapons, which was involved in several wars and did not use their nuclear weapons.
Also, the US already once used the justification of “This dictatorial regime can never be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction” to invade another country, and achieved nothing except untold human suffering as Iraq collapsed into chaos. So I’d treat the US statements in that regard as a priory untrustworthy.
I think you make some points that are interesting, but this part doesn’t make any sense:
“In fact, there’s even a majority-Islam country (Pakistan) possessing nuclear weapons, which was involved in several wars and did not use their nuclear weapons.”
Pakistan, for all its problems and all the flaws of its governing structures, probably never had a political leadership quite as bad as the Mullahs.
That sentence is there because there’s people who argue that the reason Iran is different from other nuclear countries because of the Islamic concept of jihad. So it’s a pre-emptive counterargument.
That doesn’t help much if the argument is “Muslims who personally have a very strong commitment to Jihadist ideology would approach the use of nuclear weapons differently than most other people, including Muslims who don’t have such a strong personal commitment.”
Personally, I have a lot of strong disagreements with both the average Jesuit and the average “It’s God’s will that the Rapture should happen soon” Fundamentalist preacher, but I’d be a lot less worried about nuclear weapons in the hands of the former than the latter.
The biggest mullah of them all, the late Khamenei, had issued a fatwa against the development and use of nuclear weapons. Either the Iranians take their religious leaders seriously or they do not. The Iranian strategy up until now was to threaten nuclear breakout in exchange for sanctions relief, which culminated in the JCPOA and which Iran was reasonably happy with. I imagine that calculus may have changed.
“Either the Iranians take their religious leaders seriously or they do not.”
Apparently they did not, because after the fatwa there’s decades of development. While Khameinei was leader, which meant *he* didn’t mean it either.
I don’t think we can say anything with respect to that particular fatwa.
Charitably, there may be extra wordage not usually quoted that reconciles what people say about it, with what Iran did after it was proclaimed.
Or, maybe it was just political sloganeering, not intended seriously.
@Mark Oooor maybe they did take their Supreme Leader seriously and were telling the truth and only enriching uranium for purposes of civilian use.
If we’re going to list options, we should include that one.
Pakistan’s actions during the 1971 Bangladesh liberation struggle were probably worse than anything the Islamic Republic of Iran ever did, but I’ll grant that if your concern is about expansionism or religious messianism, the killings in Bangladesh were not motivated by *that*.
Pakistan declared in the last round of Israeli/US attacks that it would respond with nuclear weapons if Israel used them against Iran.
Iran has had the capacity to make nuclear weapons fro some time. Its leadership repeatedly declared it would not do so, on religious grounds. All the intelligence said it had not done so.
Witkoff is a reliable source???
Pakistan declared in the last round of Israeli/US attacks that it would respond with nuclear weapons if Israel used them against Iran.
I would bet that they’re bluffing and/or engaging in some bravado for domestic consumption, but who really knows. Hopefully we won’t find out. It might also depend on which party and/or politicians are in charge at the time.
> That reasoning only holds up if you assume that the situation “Iran possesses nuclear arms” instantly and with 100% certainty becomes “Iran uses nuclear arms on Israel”.
That has been the assumption of most of the analyses I’ve seen over the past two decades. It could be wrong, yes, but I personally think it’s correct.
However, what I believe about Iran’s intentions doesn’t matter at all to the analysis, really. What does matter, a LOT, is what Netanyahu believes about Iran’s intentions. And it’s clear that Netanyahu believed, and still believes, that a nuclear-armed Iran run by Khomeini would have been a threat to Israel’s existence.
“> That reasoning only holds up if you assume that the situation “Iran possesses nuclear arms” instantly and with 100% certainty becomes “Iran uses nuclear arms on Israel”.
That has been the assumption of most of the analyses I’ve seen over the past two decades. It could be wrong, yes, but I personally think it’s correct.”
Why do you think that a nuclear-armed Iran’s first move would be to invite its own destruction as a functioning state? Israel has nuclear weapons, it has the delivery systems to use them against Iran, and it would be extremely likely to use them to retaliate against Iran in the event of an Iranian nuclear attack.
In terms of pure, board game-like strategy, Iran technically does hold a very significant advantage of being ~82 times larger than Israel geographically. This means that a hypothetical scenario where both countries are subjected to exactly the same atomic bombing as 1945 Japan would be completely survivable for the Iranian state, but would leave little left of Israel. Depending on whether the side doing the launch sympathizes with Palestine or is some sort of an AI system purely aiming to maximize the damage, we would most likely see either a desperate attempt for the survivors to fight to exert control over the entire Jerusalem or a rump enclave centered on Haifa.*
In practice, of course, Israeli leaders can understand these dynamics the same as everyone else, and so…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_nuclear_weapons#Stockpile
* This dynamic is also why I consider the calls for Australia to develop nuclear weapons incredibly foolish, by the way. Even if we assume that invasion fleets, the only actual threat to our territorial integrity and/or self-governance, are logistically plausible, nuclear weapons would be of extremely limited utility vs. them, since fleets are already fairly dispersed and can disperse further (to the point that by the time of impact, a blast wave may be far enough away to not mean much for any ship intended to go through storms) and a single ship getting melted with a direct hit from a nuke is dramatic, but does not deliver a significant strategic benefit over just being sunk with a conventional warhead.
On the other hand, using them like every other nation’s deterrent – for “countervalue” strikes vs. the opponent’s cities – creates an escalation ladder where we are at an incredible disadvantage. Just 6 warheads all landing at a different state capital would devastate around half of the population. A dozen would effectively knock the country back 200 years, with the remaining population centers not looking much different from the colonial times. To China or even Indonesia, effectively the only countries which could be conceived of attempting an invasion of Australia, 6 or even 12 warheads would still leave ~90% of their population in place even if they all hit – and that’s before we get into China being infinitely better positioned to do missile defence with their manufacturing base. An Australian nuclear arsenal just would not seem to add enough value next to the downside of not only the reputational and economic costs of violating NPT (admittedly not very relevant if everyone were to start doing it) but the incredibly costly risks of other nuclear powers feeling forced to extend their targeting list to Australia in any MAD scenario.
I cannot stress more strongly how daft and, dare I say, bigoted this claim is. I’ve never read such a reputable analysis, and don’t actually believe any exist. You would have to believe some very strange things about the Iranian regime to reach such a conclusion, things that are just not supported by their past behavior.
Exactly. Especially by their past behaviour on a personal level.
Pretty much everyone in the higher echelons of the Iranian government right now was, let’s say, at least a teenager during the Iran-Iraq War. During that war, the Iranian government was aggressively recruiting teenagers and young men to clear minefields by charging across them. They were unarmed but were holding plastic keys, as a reminder that death as a martyr would grant them the keys to Paradise.
If you were an Iranian of that generation who earnestly wanted to give your life for your faith, you had plenty of chances.
The Iranian government now is therefore exclusively drawn from men who in the 1980s watched their contemporaries charging ecstatically into prepared defences covered by automatic weapons and artillery and thought “nope, not for me, thanks”, and I don’t think people get more suicidally devoted with age. The opposite if anything.
> ” They were unarmed but were holding plastic keys, as a reminder that death as a martyr would grant them the keys to Paradise.”
This story is widely repeated but no concrete (well, plastic) evidence for it has ever been provided. It’s pretty well accepted as likely a myth.
“This story is widely repeated but no concrete (well, plastic) evidence for it has ever been provided. It’s pretty well accepted as likely a myth.”
That is certainly the Iranian government position, yes. Eyewitnesses disagree.
Doesn’t affect my point anyway.
No, it really is the position of pretty much everyone, including US conservative commentators like RealClearPolitics: https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2013/05/03/iran_martyr_state_plastic_paradise_keys.html
> “Just one problem: There is virtually no photographic or video evidence that these keys ever existed. I contacted several trusted Iran experts and analysts, and while none were willing to outright reject the validity of the paradise keys story, none had ever seen one, nor could they say with certainty that they ever truly existed.”
“No, it really is the position of pretty much everyone, including US conservative commentators like RealClearPolitics”
Oh, good point, I hadn’t realised that both conservative American bloggers *and* the Iranian government said it wasn’t true.
“And it’s clear that Netanyahu believed, and still believes, that a nuclear-armed Iran run by Khomeini would have been a threat to Israel’s existence.”
It is clear to me that Netanyahu wanted to bomb Iran. It is not clear to me that he thinks the first act of nuclear Iran would be to nuke Israel, nor that he bombed Iran for that reason.
Those assertions might be true, but they have to be proven, and it is not easy to conclusively prove anything about the beliefs of a complete stranger in a foreign country on a different continent.
That reasoning only holds up if you assume that the situation “Iran possesses nuclear arms” instantly and with 100% certainty becomes “Iran uses nuclear arms on Israel”.
Iran’s whole ideological goal with respect to Palestine is to reclaim the territory for Muslims. Rendering it a radioactive wasteland, even for a couple decades, seems like it would completely obviate that goal.
Right – the flip side of “From the river to the sea” is that since all of it is Palestinian, none of it ought to be irradiated.
Though, if we suspend this ideological consideration for a moment, NUKEMAP suggests that an attack with the same 100kt warhead as the Trident ones would devastate Tel Aviv and surroundings without the blast radius quite reaching across the border into the Palestinian territories – while an “air burst” detonation would largely avoid nuclear contamination. A Fat Man-sized warhead (5X smaller) would have even lower spillover risks – but apparently leave rather important places like Bat Yam (population ~130k) practically untouched. Similar goes for a launch at Haifa.
In this morbid scenario where Iran apparently gives up on the major implication of its core policy goal, it would presumably focus on those two, with the hope the Palestinian/Israeli Arab population can handle the rest. A larger number of smaller warheads would presumably enable greater saturation with little increase in spillover – although it’s difficult to imagine anything landing near Jerusalem.
However, such thinking requires one to believe that Israel would not only avoid using its arsenal (generally believed to contain several hundred warheads) on Iran – but that with little left to lose, it wouldn’t deploy vs. the currently-recognized Palestinian territories also, rendering the exercise pointless even under its own monstrous logic. (Given that multiple Israelis and American Jews have explicitly opined that “the Samson Option” ought to be aimed at “taking down the world with them” and launch at, e.g. the European capitals (Rome and Moscow are just two of the cities that have been invoked by name), irradiating the Israeli perimeter ought to be seen as the minimum taking place in that scenario.)
P.S. By the same token, it is apparently possible to launch one or even several warheads into Gaza with a limited spillover into Israel proper – which is definitely not a situation I have considered before.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap
This was not the conclusion of the US intelligence community over the past twenty years. A declassified NIE from 2007- initial findings were leaked in 2007, then most of it was declassified in 2013- argued that Iran’s government of the time, led by famed Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was fully rational in its nuclear weapons program, responded to incentives, and no more likely to seek self-destruction than any other government in a MAD situation.
https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/books-monographs/cia-support-to-policymakers-the-2007-nie-on-irans-nuclear-intentions-and-capabilities/
I honestly haven’t really seen any serious analyst who thinks that?
Now don’t get me wrong, a nuclear-armed Iran would be *bad* for both the US and Israel (and I think, most of the rest of the world too) for many reasons, but not so much because “They will immediately nuke Israel” as that it would be a massive restriction on freedom of action, the *threat* of nuclear weapons would mean first of all that directly attacking Iran would now be much dicier, and secondly that even attacking Iran’s proxies would be a lot more fraught. It would give the iranian regime a whole lot more leverage in general, etc. etc
In fact, 16 years ago, Jeffrey Goldberg, the current editor of The Atlantic (and onetime guard at an IDF prison) had quoted Netanyahu himself remarking as such – alongside including many other revealing lines.
https://archive.md/PTtqW
P.S. It is also remarkable that pretty much the only thing the opening paragraph of this 2010 Goldberg’s piece is missing is the explicit mention of Hormuz.
Presumably, a nuclear Iran would be willing to use nukes against Israel to retaliate for a nuclear attack on Iran, and maybe to so some saber-rattling. An actual Iranian first strike on Israel would be as insane as … the current war.
Iran has been “about to have nuclear weapons” for an eternity now.
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions
Except intelligence assessed that they were not in fact building one, and there’s more to having a bomb than having uranium.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/jun/23/Tulsi-Gabbard-Iran-nuclear-weapon-Donald-Trump/
“Possessing SNM precursors” and “possessing deliverable nuclear arms” are not interchangeable statements. It may take a week and half to enrich the SNM to weapons grade levels, but then it will take additional time to actually prepare the material for use in a physics package. The enriched UF3 will have to be processed to extract the metal, which itself will then have to processed to whatever physical form will be required. This means an additional delay of a few days to a couple of weeks before the first core is available.
And that leads to the big questions… Does Iran have a (tested?*) design for a deliverable weapon (physics package, arming/fusing/firing system, and the bomb or warhead structure) that they have sufficient confidence in to manufacture and deploy? Have they produced the non nuclear components and are just awaiting the SNM?
Neither is impossible. A crude (by our standards) design can be developed and tested without SNM. And even a multi kiloton fizzle is a politically viable weapon. (Adding the margins to *ensure* it works paradoxically can increase the chance of a fizzle.) They don’t need a high yield weapon, even as low as 5-8 kilotons in an urban area will produce sufficient damage to be unacceptable.
The real question is how they intend to deliver it. Air drops are out of the question. And we have the demonstrated capability to intercept MRBMs and TBMs. There are various ways to potentially attempt to evade those interceptors (highly lofted trajectories or maneuvering warheads) but those are significant technical challenges in their own right… Not impossible, but we simply don’t know.
So far as I’m aware they don’t have a tested design, which adds some delay. Not sure how much, though.
As for delivery, airdrop is obviously out, but they can still hold the threat over Israel with an MRBM. Interception rates aren’t perfect and Israel currently willfully lets through missiles targeted at open ground. The threat of getting a single nuke through in a mass conventional decoy bombardment is still a reasonably potent one.
Making a nuclear device and making something you can feasibly deliver by MRBM are two very different problems, and the latter is a lot harder.
I am personally pretty dubious that Iran is as crazy as their propaganda implies. They seem to have been behaving as rational actors who are advancing their interests and don’t want to all die even if some of them are willing to be personally martyred. They’re also not too committed to nuclear weapons given that they were willing to sign the JCPOA.
I am much more inclined to believe they’d use nukes as a shield like literally everyone else with nukes, even North Korea. This would still be bad because they’d be emboldened to step up their proxy wars, but it’s not the same as nuking Israel (and probably although not certainly failing because of Israel’s missile defenses).
Yep… and even the logic of their propaganda rules out a first strike. Martyrdom is not suicide as an end in itself, it’s dying for a greater cause. The Islamic Republic clearly sees cause of expelling Israel from lands perceived to be rightfully Islamic as a compelling cause, but laying waste to the physical geography of Israel already undermines that cause, and inviting the devastation of what, to a Shia, is the only true bastion of the only true religion isn’t remotely near to an acceptable price.
Iran probably developed a viable warhead design sometime in the 2003-2012 timeframe, tested it (at Parchim) to the extent possible without actual nuclear explosions, and put it in a filing cabinet against future need. It is reasonable to assume that there are many copies hidden in many filing cabinets around the country, and not reasonable to assume that this knowledge can be destroyed by aerial bombardment.
Based on the performance of other nuclear powers with their earliest designs, there is a 75-80% probability of it developing full yield (probably 10-20 kilotons) on the first shot, and ~90% of it developing at least half a kiloton or so.
Iran’s policy for the past 20 years seems to have been to maintain the capability to develop a modest nuclear arsenal on short notice, but not to actually do so until absolutely necessary. It is more likely that we have convinced them it is absolutely necessary to develop a nuclear deterrent, than that we have eliminated their ability to build a modest nuclear arsenal on short notice. Maybe we’ve bought six months; we’ll see.
Well, 1/2 kiloton still spreads radioactive material a good distance around. Not as bad as a full yield, but not desirable either.
And 10-20 kilotons translates to ~100,000 dead in Tel Aviv, or Doha or Dubai or wherever, or most of the American servicemen at Diego Garcia. Then things get really ugly, for everyone.
“If Witkoff is accurately reporting what the Iranian negotiators said, that changes the strategic picture for the US.”
No, it doesn’t.
While you’re at it, “if Witkoff is accurately reporting” is a conditional highly likely to be answered in the negative. Witkoff is a real estate developer who conducted negotiations with Russia without taking his own translator, and badly misunderstood what he and Putin were talking about last year, leading to the pointless Alaska summit. In re: his talks with Iran, he has no experience with arms control negotiation, no experience with nuclear technology, and seems not have to taken anybody from the State Dept who could provide that expertise to the US team. There have been a bunch of reports for weeks that Witkoff simply didn’t understand the deals Iran was putting on the table.
Remember when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq post-2003 invasion?
IF the US administration would actually see a nuclear armed Iran as an existential threat to the States (and nothing you listed actually would count as an existential threat), then why this ill-concieved half-measure? Why not start by instituting a draft to get the manpower to actually achieve victory, or, if the administration insists on underestimating Iran, why not start with at least a considerable deployment of troops to the Middle East to prepare for a ground invasion?
If the threat were existential, the US would be able to muster the polical will to mount an actual contest instead of this wishy-washy waste of resources. I think the majority of the US electorate would decide on not wasting hundreds of thousands of their own children to keep just *another* regional power from getting nukes, though, so this would be a tough sell, but for a non-imagined existential threat, a great motivator like Trump should go all out, right?
Mr. Witkoff is a liar, but more importantly he is also not smart enough to understand what he’s talking about. The United States has many specialists capable of assessing the status of Iran’s nuclear program based on intelligence materials and information provided during the negotiations, and Mr. Witkoff brought with him and consulted with none of them. The assessment you’ve quoted is fantastical on its face and given the source there is no reason to give it any consideration.
I feel the required key assumption is false, if not knowingly so, and being provided by Mr. Witkoff as pretext that, were it true, would lead to your questions. I’m sure there is some desire for uranium enrichment and nucclear weapon development within the Iranian government, but I do not believe it a practical threat.
I think a key issue is, as Brett points out, that BOTH sides in this conflict are notorious liars. I don’t trust anything the US government says on the subject of Iran (look at the dissimulation campaign to justify the American-Iraq war).
There’s simply no reason to believe Witkoff is accurate in his claims.
The “if” in “if Witkoff is accurately reporting…” is bearing an amount of weight that would make Atlas wince. For my part, I do not for even a single second believe the narrative that Witkoff and co. are trying to push about Iran being only days or weeks from nuking us. I don’t like predicting, but I’ll go ahead and risk predicting that no credible proof the Iranians were about to nuke us, or anyone, or that they would have had a nuclear bomb/missile in two weeks if we hadn’t attacked them first, will ever emerge.
I don’t think that is even operationally and technically plausible, but even if it were plausible, I would not take Witkoff’s word on it because I do not think he is an honest person. His ever-growing series of unfulfilled pronouncements about the talks in Ukraine have not instilled me with much confidence in either his honesty, or his judgment and competence to interpret what he is told in diplomatic talks, or more likely both.
But in any case, it’s difficult to see how Witkoff’s statement of a few weeks ago could have made it urgent for the administration to functionally commit us to this war back last June, or could have caused the Trump administration to take major steps to try to lock in the war as far back as 2017, or for Trump to have called loudly and frequently for this war to happen starting more than forty years ago.
I think Trump and Co. just felt like Iran had already been knocked down and would be easy to knock out, and wishfully misjudged the sheer huge amount of blood, toil, sweat, and tears, and I can’t help but add treasure, that it can often take to span the distance between a large nation being down, as Iran surely was and now is more, and a large nation being out. Attempting a knockout while they were down was the motive in my view, not any intel of imminent WMDs.
“If Witkoff is accurately reporting what the Iranian negotiators said”
I think that the rank dishonesty of this administration (not to mention the Netanyahu administration), and the fact that it is no more trustworthy than the Iranians, is pretty well-established.
Other commenters have correctly questioned Witkoff’s accuracy and the assumption that the Iranians would immediately attack Israel rather than use their nukes as a deterrent, but suppose that he was completely right: wouldn’t you actually plan ahead for something you saw as a serious threat? They had a year to gather allies, stage troops and equipment, plan for how they’d evacuate Americans in the area, and protect key targets but they appear to have done little of that before the stock market panicked. If the goal was a desperate last-ditch effort to prevent another nuclear power, wouldn’t they have ground forces ready to secure the target of the operation before the enemy has time to regroup? (And if the response was that it’s not worth that many casualties, we’re well into the thousands already.)
All fair points, save for two problems.
First, Trump abrogating the nuclear deal is ultimately responsible for all of this anyway so this mess is wholly self inflicted even if Witkoff is telling the truth.
And second, why should we believe that Witkoff is telling the truth? It seems deeply silly for the Iranians to tell us they are weeks away from a nuclear weapon. Wouldnt it make much more sense for them to do everything they can to hide that they are close to a nuclear weapon and then spring the capability upon the world with a successful test? Moreover, Witkoff and the rest of the administration have a well established reputation for being loose with the truth.
Hi Bret, I would like to thank you for articulating all this.
I had a gnawing doubt that the move might not be good for Israel in the long run, but wasn’t sure how.
I really appreciate how you articulated the perils.
(Being in Germany right now, I do get the feeling that Germany would have to be dragged kicked and screaming into any sort of action against Israel (sanctions, any sort of military intervention against Israel would be absolutely unthinkable, especially given their nuclear deterrence).
I’d be interested in knowing what the public perception towards Israel is like in Germany at the moment.
For instance, I’m British, and if you took a look at our government you’d see a similar situation: an administration that appears to be pro-Israel to the point of political suicide. However, polling among the British population indicates fairly broad and rising anti-Israeli sentiment. Of course, the public leveraging that sentiment into a government that changes tack is far from a given, but it’s at least indicative of a potential sea change in political direction.
Is the situation similar in Germany? Or is it a case of ‘the German government is broadly doing what a majority of Germans think is right’?
Yep. Trump took Venezuela as his mental model for how Iran would work: decapitate the government and end up with a successor more willing to play ball with the USA. (Possibly but not necessarily by way of a popular revolution, in Iran’s case.) Absent that kind of regime change, the war only leads to worse scenarios. And here we are.
I’m not sure I agree that last year’s suprise attack locked us into war at a time of the Israeli government’s choosing, though. Say that Israel killed Khamenei and (with last year in mind) Iran inevitably retaliated with strikes on American bases and allies. An America that really *hadn’t* supported the decapitation of the regime could have responded by seriously punishing Israel as well as Iran, signalling that it hadn’t been involved and wanted deescalation. We’ve played the proportionate-but-deescalating retaliation game with the Islamic Republic before.
Shipping would have frozen temporarily in Hormuz as soon as the bombs flew, but if Iran thought that:
* the US was actually trying to stop Israel from continuing its agenda of violent regime destabilization;
* after some initial US counter-retaliation for Iran’s revenge strikes, the US wasn’t going to keep hammering at Iran; and
* a significant diplomatic worsening of Israel’s position had just become possible, after it tried to drag its military patron into an unwanted war,
I imagine it would have wanted to keep full closure of the strait on reserve as a threat.
Maybe that just shows my strategic naivete. But that’s the scenario I’d have tried to work toward if I were a US policymaker who wanted to make last year’s attacks but was reluctant to be dragged into subsequent military adventures by a junior partner. Some damage would have been inescapable, but there’d have been some chance of avoiding THIS much damage.
As it is, though, I think we’re at war right now because our government liked the odds of regime change, not because Israel in any meaningful way forced our hand.
This sounds like the sort of story that maybe could be sold, but to do so would require strong negotiating links. One of the things that I remember standing out to me from the 12 day war was how many negotiators were targeted.
You’d have to believe that the US regime would be willing and able to punish Israel in a manner credible to the Iranian regime in order for that deescalation route to hold. I think that is extremely unlikely if only due to domestic politics.
And be willing to do that *after* Iran has, presumably, attacked US bases. Which I don’t think it’s feasible even for a “normal” US government.
The only way they could have avoided this kind of thing would be if the US had intercepted and shot down the israeli attack.
What if Trump just needs to survive the midterms better than in 2018 and wanted a small victorious war to somehow boost his odds? After all, per Clausewitz (drink!) war is always political. 😉
I mean the article shows that US government is just strategically careless to start this war, alright, but what if there is more to the war’s real goals than cannot be seen through pure military (strategy/operations/tactics) optics? Those US guys just can’t be that stupid? Or can they?
Still, that June 22, 2025 US strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities made the US involvement with the next Israeli strike and thus 2026 Iran war inevitable is a strong case against that midterms scenario. But again, it can show Trump can plan bit ahead for his small victorious wars.
Still a dumb war, because its political impact is also likely to be catastrophic. You don’t win the midterms on “I blew up the ayatollah and his missile launchers’ if gas is $5 a gallon.
As a Californian, I always find these “$5/gallon for gas” apocalyptic scenarios mildly amusing. California might flip red if Trump gets gas down to only $5 (not really, we hate him here).
Yeah, as a resident of Hawaii, gas was $5.29 a gallon (at one of the cheaper places in town) earlier this week. I dread to think where it’s going.
And as a bonus, at the state level Hawaii gets roughly 40% of its electricity from burning oil*, a larger proportion (by a hefty margin) than any other state! Fun times ahead!
*Of which it has exactly zero.
I listened to a podcast (Conflicted with an American host and a Saudi British host who used to be a MI6 spy in Al Qaeda) and the Saudi guy was so optimistic about this going well for the US.
He made the point, not addressed here, that the US military did account for the closing of the strait. (Which makes sense, they’ve been wargaming war with Iran for decades) Iran’s plan A to block the strait was sinking some old ships in a critical channel and physically blocking it. The US sunk those ships on day 1. Plan B was small high speed boats carrying torpedoes and anti ship missiles. Iran built a few hundred of these. They all got blown up on days 2 and 3. Plan C was mining the strait and attacks with submarines. All of the mine layers and subs were also destroyed in the first few days.
So now, Iran has plan D, a “soft”‘ closure accomplished through the use of drones and missiles.
And it works.
But the destruction of A, B, C, suggests that the US military knew what they were doing.
The Saudi British host was also convinced that the US next step was to seize Kharg island (an island about a third the size of Manhattan at the north bend of the strait) and then fortify it. This island is where Iran loads almost all of its oil on tankers. Losing it would be a significant blow to the regime’s finances.
Now, while the saudi host talked about how easy it would be for the US to seize the island (and I believe it, one small island is much easier to get than a whole country) neither host explained why the Marines needed to do so are just now leaving the US. Presumably, if this was a well thought out plan, they should have been in place before February 28.
He also believed that this war was decided on October 11 2022. He said that even with a Harris presidency, this war would still have happened.
It was wild to here how optimistic the hosts were when describing this conflict.
They called it the first imperial war as Iran had threatened the current global “imperial” system of the US and this was that empire smacking back. (They didn’t mention Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan.
Problem for the Saudis and the UAE is that by running with the wolves they put at risk their own oil and gas infrastructure – mostly located well within Iranian drone and missile range. No oil for Iran is no oil for them. This may not deter them – the current Saudi leader is not exactly known for making good calls on policy.
The US might be content with a ritual victory. Israel wants a wrecked Iran (and Lebanon, Syria, Iraq …)
I feel like this conflates tactics and strategy.
I don’t think anyone has argued that the US military is not highly competent on a tactical/operational level. It would be very surprising if their plans hadn’t included measures to secure the strait. These kinds of decisions are made by professional military planners.
Those same military planners will have communicated to political leadership that, while they were confident they could prevent options A-C, option D would be impossible to fully contain
Political leadership then refuses to listen (and/or fails to appreciate the strategic significance of this fact). Thus you end up in this mess.
Same with Kharg Island. Sure tactically/operationally they can take it, probably have plans for doing so. But that’s further escalation, and how does it change the fundamental strategic picture?
Honestly those tacticool podcasts are nothing more than propaganda: just to remind that limited damage to the Ras Laffan site caused shortages that will take YEARS to recover and that totally shifted lthe andscape of LNG production and distribution.
Everybody involved in this mess is a liar and an incompetent.
Oh, I’m pretty sure that yes, the US Military knows what they’re doing. But they’re currently taking their orders from people who don’t. Yes, of course the US Military knew that Iran would close the Strait. But their bosses at the political level were convinced that Iran wouldn’t, and they didn’t listen to anyone who told them it would.
As for the US seizing Kharg Island and getting Iran into economic difficulties – yes, of course that’s the plan right now. But re-read our host’s comments on financial difficulties during war time. Besides, for the Iranian regime, it is a war *for its very survival*. Are you going to give up your own survival and agree to your destruction because you’re running into *financial difficulties*?
And, the new Supreme Leader of Iran is a guy from whose perspective Trump, the people who work for him, and the country they lead are the people who killed his father. Is he going to worry about financial difficulties? (“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. But I’m tight with money right now, so please tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”)
As for “He also believed that this war was decided on October 11 2022. He said that even with a Harris presidency, this war would still have happened.” (I assume you mistyped “2023”.) That’s just completely, incredibly, mind-bogglingly delusional. Unless the guy was simply lying, of course. The only people who might seriously believe that would be either 1) people who don’t know much about US politics at all (perhaps because their main specialty is Al Qaeda rather than the USA); 2) right-wingers who are too convinced that “everyone clearly agrees” with the “obvious rightness” of their own ideas, and 3) left-wingers whose judgment is too clouded by their low opinion of mainstream Democrats.
Also taking Kharg island would surely puta LOT of American troops well within drone, artillery, missile range. This would allow the Iranians to kill far more American troops than they are currently able to. While Iran can suffer the loss of their oil exports to an extent, it remains to be seen whether Trump can sustain heavy American casualties in an already unpopular war.
Agreed, and considering the current domestic sh*tstorm that is the Epstein files, it seems like a failure of Trump’s administration to sustain those heavy American casualties could well be fairly existential for him.
Really not smart, on practically any level.
I don’t think the forces being deployed right now could hold Kharg Island against a massed small boat attack supported by several hundred Shaheds. I’m also not convinced it will cause Iran to surrender, and frankly I don’t think it’s the best method of shutting down Iran’s oil exports. The US could set up a distant blockade outside the strait and intercept all the oil without exposing forces to Shahed bombardment. This has the advantage that we don’t risk damaging the infrastructure, which means we don’t put Iran into a sunk cost position where they can’t get their oil exports back even if the war ends.
Blockades only work if the blockaded party is willing to cooperate. All it will take is couple of suicidal tanker crews not cooperating – and now the US is responsible for massive ecological catastrophe.
There is no good end for the US.
That’s nonsensical; we don’t have to blow up the ships to stop & board them. Cargo ships are absolutely terrible for military purposes, and also, it is rather rare to have crews which are suicidal. And if they are, they can just dump the oil wherever. Also also, that doesn’t benefit Iran so they have little reason to try.
You’re absolutely right, we don’t *have* to blow up ships… But this Administration is not known for it’s subtlety, tact, and adherence to usual procedure.
And as our host often reminds us, “the other guy gets a vote” – we’re not the only party who could have their fingers on the “make big boom” button.
In Venezuela, they boarded by helicopter with a special forces team, which would do for an ordinary tanker crew. I think they’d repeat that.
There is the risk that the crew would blow an LNG tanker, which would kill the helicopter team, but there’s not a high proportion of suicide bombers in the population and it puts a lot fewer people at risk than seizing an island right off the coast. And there’d be an ecological catastrophe if the oil pipelines got burst in the fighting, which is a serious risk in a full-scale battle, so it’s not like the ships are unique in that regard.
I really don’t understand why not just Derek but also “guy” are immediately jumping to the incredibly extreme scenario of suicide bomber tanker crews – rather than what ought to be the logical deterrence of placing however many men with guns you can devote per tanker (and for a country of ~90 million trying to secure its livelihood, that “however” ought to mean “quite a lot”.) After all, ships in the Russian shadow fleet have already been spotted with guards aboard.
In particular, a helicopter raid is a lot less attractive if a number of men aboard happen to carry shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. These weapons used to be somewhat rare in the Middle East – Saddam’s entire million-man army had <10,000 in 1991, and they were of the highly inaccurate first generation. Things change a lot over 35 years, however: Iran had not only imported a number of Chinese copies of the late-Soviet Igla (capable enough to have downed a number of Western jets in e.g. Bosnia, let alone helicopters, and to have made close air support borderline suicidal for either side’s air force in Ukraine), but Iran itself had the capacity to build that weapon for 20 years now. If they could send those to Houthis, they can most definitely use them to protect their tankers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misagh-2
Now, in fairness, technology evolution goes both ways, and top-line military helicopters do carry extensive countermeasures against this kind of a missile – the U.S. military announced that ~1,500 machines were getting refitted with an updated suite. Still, there are only so many you can fit onto a machine that also has to loft people and cargo through the air. For reference, 1980s Soviet military manuals instructed that every one of its thousands of BMPs ought to have an Igla in its troop compartment just so that a handful of people riding inside could defend themselves from a low-flying air attack. During the initial Egyptian assault of the 1973 war, it is estimated that every third soldier was carrying either an RPG or even a Malyutka (the first Soviet wire-guided anti-tank missile – very flawed but nevertheless a lot closer in complexity to an Igla than an RPG.)
I am not even discussing the time-honoured WWII scenario of just placing a lot of autocannons aboard. However well anti-missile countermeasures work, it’s basically impossible to armour a helicopter against anything much larger than rifle caliber. The main obstacle to that would be the opposition from whichever flag the ship flies under, since unlike hand-held missile launchers, those would not be concealable. In cases where that’s not an obstacle, though, this could do a lot. As in, do you recall when that Comfort hospital ship got parked outside New York during the pandemic? (Only to immediately get an outbreak aboard – still, at least there wasn’t an attempt to ram it with a derailing train, like what happened with the other such ship, Mercy, near LA.) They were literally converted from 1970s supertankers, and so provide a decent proxy for Iran’s tankers.
Have you imagined one yet? Good, because they also happen to be of practically the same size (length, width, displacement) as the notorious Yamato – which ultimately carried 162 anti-aircraft autocannons (and 15 more heavy machine guns) when its made its doomed final raid. That didn’t save it because of no radar and because those Japanese autocannons were incredibly bad relative to literally every other WWII design (from slow traverse to vibration and having to replace magazines by hand) – but it does show just how much stuff Iran could conceivably place onto those tankers’ decks if it wanted to stop boardings above all else.
Admittedly, the more armed men you place onto a tanker, the more tempting it gets for the enemy to blow it up – and an administration which had already blown up unarmed fishing boats is very likely to a see deck with all those guns on it going up in flames as the ultimate snuff video. For Iran, though, that would be still a risk worth taking over just losing shipments of its oil – not to mention that the US would be getting the blame for the inevitable environmental consequences of such attacks.
TL;DR: Zero need to blow up your own tanker when at the absolute worst, you can bait your enemy into blowing it up at the cost of some really expendable weapon systems and some extra troops (relative to tanker’s crew) who otherwise might just get killed in an airstrike on the ground anyway.
“Blockades only work if the blockaded party is willing to cooperate.”
I am fairly sure the Nazi’s did not cooperate with the British blockade during WW2.
But who do those ships belong to?
I don’t think India and China are going to meekly accept the USA seizing their ships and stealing their oil.
Iran doesn’t have the small boats anymore. Missiles could hit it, but the us can make anything that floats sink within minutes.
As I commented elsewhere in this thread, not even the US military or the Trump Administration’s Press Secretary go as far as to say that – and Stimson Center analysts said that those boats very much exist the other day. Additionally, I strongly suggest you take a look at a video of some of those “non-existent” boats.
https://bsky.app/profile/noelreports.com/post/3mgsfzdnnls2b
Also, it’s not like the small boats have to be military. I’m sure there’s still a bunch of civilian craft about that could be loaded with troops. Not ideal landing craft, but on the other hand we’re not talking a lot of defenders.
Interestingly, Iran does not ship its oil to Kharg Island – there is an underwater pipeline running from its oilfields. This is conceivably of some military relevance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Stream
Now, the exact scenario above is impossible here because the pipeline is apparently too narrow (70cm diameter vs. 140cm). This would be less of a problem for drones, though. While flying FPVs through a ~25 km stretch of a pipe with no internal illumination (unless you strap lights to the drones themselves) will likely represent far too much risk of damaging the pipeline, a number of UGV (ground drones, usually wheeled or occasionally tracked) designs we have already seen on the frontlines to ferry supplies seem small enough.
In theory, this could help to resupply the defenders already entrenched on the island. It would also be possible to use the wheeled drone as a carrier from which an FPV would take off once it leaves the pipe. (The “$64,000-question” is whether even an inactive pipe could be sufficiently drained of oil residue on its walls and floor to make even “rover-sized” drone travel possible.)
“Iran’s plan A to block the strait was sinking some old ships in a critical channel and physically blocking it.”
This sounds improbable. Even a very large tanker won’t draw more than 20-25m. If you look at a chart, the Strait of Hormuz is over 100m deep in its most constrained part, the shipping channel around the north of the Musandam peninsula. For comparison, the entire southern North Sea is less than 50m deep and has many large wrecked ships in it, very few of which are dangers to shipping.
The Strait of Hormuz is also pretty wide and therefore blocking it up would take a lot of ships. Historically blockships have really only been used for very constrained sea areas like harbour entrances.
I think you should discard everything else that this podcast said.
Yes, I actually had to look up the part about “hundreds” of small boats, because I distinctly remembered seeing a news account republish Iranian video of just ONE underground concrete base stocked full of such boats, two weeks into the strikes. I GUESS one could insist that video was taken before the war if they really wanted to argue the point – except that even the U.S. itself is, as of now, claiming 140 Iranian vessels destroyed (not “hundreds”) and “92% large vessels” destroyed. If they actually achieved the wholesale destruction of small boats, this is the absolute last administration one would have expected NOT to brag about it.
As the case may be, even The Atlantic (whose editor Jeffrey Goldberg was notoriously an IDF prison guard in his youth, and whose owner, Laurene Powell Jobs, had been photographed in a swimsuit next to Ghislaine Maxwell) had published the following just the other day.
https://archive.is/xgEqW
AKA, their destruction was NOT achieved yet. (And let’s just say that Stimson Center, whose board members include retired US Admirals, is incomparably more reliable than a random podcast.)
Finally, the idea that ~2,500 U.S. Air Force fighters and 141 bombers (of which only ~970 and 60 are actually mission-capable at any given time according to Air and Space Forces Magazine) actually possess the capability to deliver enough explosives to stop Iran from manufacturing new boats seems borderline absurd and flies in the face of the basic facts about its size in this very post, as well as the strategic bombing post from a few years earlier.
Throw in ~300 Israeli fighters (which are bound to have the some restrictions on mission-capable rates as well), the Reaper drones that get shot down daily or the Navy/Marines’ planes (a reminder that out of the 12 US aircraft carriers, only four are deployable at any given time, and one of those just left to get repaired for upwards of a year after an an accident left it burning for 1.5 days straight), perhaps even the Gulf countries’ air forces – still does not change the basic premise much. Anyone who wants to argue this is enough air power to actually destroy Iranian military industry faster than it can repair the damage and/or start new factories better have some really good calculations on their side.
“Iran’s plan A to block the strait was sinking some old ships in a critical channel and physically blocking it.” I think we can safely dismiss this as a lie; at its widest point the Strait of Hormuz is 24 miles wide and about 300 feet deep
Why would they sink ships at its widest point?
They would sink them where there is a narrow bit of constrained deep water that lots of ships have to go through.
Matthew, see my comment – even the narrowest bit of constrained deep water in the strait is over a hundred metres deep and several miles wide.
And the other reason that blockships only work in harbours and so on is that the obvious way to clear them is to pack them full of explosives and blow them to pieces, except you can’t do that in a harbour because you’ll blow your harbour to pieces. Out at sea, though, go for it.
I think he meant the minimum width is 24 miles.
This would also be accurate (though some of that water is quite shallow) – the two shipping channels are not the full extent of the navigable water.
It’s quite disturbing to me that people are willing to say and accept this sort of thing. The idea of using blockships should not even be remotely plausible to anyone who knows how big the Strait is (roughly the same size as the English Channel) and how big a ship is.
It is important to have a basic awareness of the physical world!
@ajay:
“It is important to have a basic awareness of the physical world!”
But, but, but, but… Robert Bosch keeps telling me that the only reason why people oppose this war is that we do *not* have a basic awareness of the physical world! Surely, the only reason why anyone cares about silly details like the sizes of ships or bodies of water is that they’re deeply unserious people.
Indeed! I’ll also add that I find it incredible how many people appear to consider naval escorts through the Hormuz that work >90% of the time (the whole “even 1% risk is too much for insurance” talking point assumes you can actually eliminate the 99%) and/or naval landings on Kharg Island plausible, even speaking of them as a borderline done deal – while simultaneously considering a landing across the Taiwan Strait practically impossible.
As in, the length of the Strait of Hormuz is nearly the same as the width of the Taiwan Strait! And the total distance from the start of Hormuz to Kharg Island is about 4 times greater than Fujian-Taiwan distance! This is before you account for just how much easier it’s going to be to suppress anything on Taiwan (45X smaller than Iran) that’s capable of shooting at the PLA Navy ships relative to Iran. This is both due to geography (a number of Iranian anti-ship missiles have enough range as to conceivably hit targets in the Gulf while positioned deeply inland, so it’s not just the coastline that needs to be suppressed) and due to the sheer number of guided munitions the PRC would be able to deploy by now. (I saw an estimate of their HIMARS equivalents alone having the potential to hit targets on Taiwan with ~20,000 missiles over the first 24 hours.)
I know that the Taiwan landing is often compared to D-Day – but the reason the latter took ~24 hours to cross the channel on average is because the proper ships had to wait for the converted river barges – and the reason they had to use them was because the Nazi Germany had A LOT more troops in Normandy alone than the Taiwanese military currently has in total. Just a dozen of PLA Navy’s modern landing ships that are already in service and carry 800 troops each would deliver the equivalent of 7% of the entire active-duty ROCAF (yes, they would likely draft more once the invasion seemed imminent, but good luck managing everything that goes into a successful mobilization with no prior experience) ashore. Those modern ships would cross the median width of the Strait in 4 hours at top speed (perhaps 5 at a more conservative speed). This makes it very conceivable 2-3 waves could land ashore within the first 24 hours via those ships alone. (This via those ships alone – not counting some slower Cold War stuff and however many merchant ships might get converted for operation.)
https://theddaystory.com/discover/blog/how-long-did-it-take-to-cross-to-normandy-on-d-day/
Plus, those are the landing ships – the naval escorts are obviously faster than that! I suspect we would see the destroyers stay close, but some of their frigates, which could get to within ~10 km of the shore in 3 hours, would likely do that first in order to draw out any anti-ship weapons that have not been suppressed by their land missiles and aviation (manned and unmanned) yet.
In all, it just an incredible amount of people in the Anglosphere/the West seem to frankly have their heads in the sand regarding what it would take to protect Taiwan if the PRC became truly committed to this objective. Most seemingly have no idea regarding the aforementioned capacity which the PRC could already deploy towards a forceful “reunification” of Taiwan. Trying to imagine how much more it could do if this first attempt failed and it went on actual war footing (i.e. doubling its current defence budget (1.7%) as a fraction of the GDP and enlisted military as a fraction of the population would merely bring them in line with the US; countries like Israel show that it’s possible to spend 9% of the GDP on the military and still have the conveniences of a first-world country) becomes borderline Lovecraftian.
> But, but, but, but… Robert Bosch keeps telling me that the only reason why people oppose this war is that we do *not* have a basic awareness of the physical world!
That is, of course, not true. There is a reason that I wrote that Devereaux’ piece is very good. There are people who are opposed to this war for serious reasons.
That isn’t you or your chum Isator. You are both morally unserious and unlettered and have cast your lot in with the rapey-murder people.
Honestly, missiles and drones sound like Plan A. It’s effective and costs no resources if no ships attempt to pass. If the US military wasn’t prepared to stop Plan A for closing the strait, then they very likely knew they couldn’t keep the strait open.
Taking Kharg Island accomplishes nothing but stopping Iran from exporting oil at a time when the US is so desperate for Iran to export oil that they’re removing sanctions. Not to say they won’t do it anyway, but it’s strategically incoherent.
The Iranian government and armed forces are terrorists and troublemakers and should be aniilated. Nuclear bombs should be dropped on Iran and wipe it off the map.
Thing
The thing with capturing Karg Island is that the Iranians will immediately stop sending crude oil to the refineries on it. That damages Iran because it would kill that revenue stream, but it also damages the rest of the world because it reduces the suply even further — at the moment some of the Iranian refined product is getting out, and without it the prices we all face will go up even more, so worse power cuts in the Phillipines and worse fertiliser shortages in India, and so on.
I’d love our host to opine on my almost certainly naive view about what a hypothetical modern version of the Romans would do in this kind of situation:
To me, this looks like a situation that you cannot solve through military power alone, or even mostly, but an insane level of applied engineering could make a difference – dropping in an army of engineers and building alternative infrastructure to transiting the straits, feels like exactly the sort of crazy thing that the Romans would do.
And sure, maybe this would be a level behind Ceasar’s Rhine bridges, or the circumvallation of Alesia, or the Masada ramp, but the USA is an empire with capability far beyond Rome’s peak.
If the USA spent 1-2 billion a day on building infrastructure, instead of blowing infrastructure up, what could be achieved?
I am pretty sure that the Roman response would be to depopulate the region and import new inhabitants.
Interestingly, the Romans did have this problem – dealing with a hostile state in Persia – which they managed primarily through diplomacy for a long time, and then primarily through war for a long time.
Historians generally regard the diplomatic approach as more successful.
The gods seems to agree with the historians, given they struck an Emperor with lightning when he tried to wage war against Persia :þ
I think Roman capacity to build infrastructure into hostile territory was aided by the fact that the armies they needed to cross into that territory could effectively walk across one bridge, and their enemies did not possess the means to keep blowing up the bridge (and the vehicles that transport the construction materials) from several miles away.
The technological capabilities are higher across the board, and that greatly increases the logistical pressures even on the much stronger power.
Also, the Roman borders existed on the edge of the territory they were moving into to build bridges. They didn’t have to ship troops and materiel hundreds of miles from the home land.
I suspect the Romans would do things the hard way if they considered it a vital strategic interest and dispatch sufficient ground forces to secure the strait.
It would create a lot of targets for Iranian missiles.
There is already an east-west pipeline (‘petroline’) running from the persian gulf coast to the red sea. It has been the target of the Houthis in the past, but as far as I know, it’s currently open, despite the war with Iran. Apparently it was built in response to the Iran-Iraq ‘tanker’ war, but it rather illustrates the fact that engineering solutions can make sense in scenarios like this.
OTOH, the fact that its capacity has not been increased by enough to eliminate the importance of the straits in all the decades people have been worrying about Iran, suggests it is a hard enough engineering problem to evade solutions during this year.
It *could* suggest that if taken in isolation. But nothing exists in isolation. When one examines a map, one finds the Red Sea kinda sucks for tankers. In particular, the entrance is even more constrained than the Strait, and is already burdened with the not inconsiderable traffic through the Suez Canal. (And Yemen and the Houthis border that entrance and its approaches.) And one must also consider the enormous cost of establishing the requisite facilities for transferring the oil from the pipeline to tankers.
This screams that using the Red Sea is a desperation move, one that would be made if and only if using the Persian Gulf and the Straits was no longer tenable.
It is not easy to spend a billion a day on building modern infrastructure, which is not as amenable as preindustrial (or even early industrial) to being solved by throwing a lot of human labourers at it. The billion a day being spent on murder is possible because the murder bennies have been procured over time, from a literally continental network; the newspace is flooded with pieces on how those stores are being rapidly depleted, though how much of that is true and how much is ad copy for the manufacturers I wouldn’t presume to know.
Theoretically, building new pipelines to and ship berths on the Red Sea would cost far less than 30bn, perhaps less than 15bn, but I’d be surprised if it could be rushed to happen in less than 12 months, and more importantly ~the production itself is within the Iranian threat range~ and can’t be moved; Iran has so far mostly refrained from targetting production, except as a direct reprisal after an Israeli attack on the giant Pars gasfields, but it absolutely could do so. A better “going around the problem” solution might be to procure a lot of solar panels, offsetting gas demand for electricity generation, but that won’t make a dent on the need for oil products or fertilizer.
Of course, for a lot of people surrounding the US president personally, or his party in general, high oil and gas prices are hardly a problem. They could even be seen as a good thing, given that the US is the sole energy exporter among the big economic powers. China, the EU, India, and Japan all import oil and gas, much of it from the US. And a lot of poor brown and black people suffering might hardly be considered a bad thing for some of those leaders. (Coughmusksalutecough.)
@Thuin,
Canada and Russia are also energy exporters, depending on whether you include them among the big econmic powers.
A very big drone target
What is the possibility that, political power in the US – against Trump’s administration – will go for a presidency change? As someone outside of the US, having no clue about how it works, is it likely such political conflict within the US itself, will make the US stop the war.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem very likely for structural reasons, at the very least until the next election and I would consider it extremely unlikely even afterwards.
There’s only two lawful paths to removing a President; Impeachment and the 25th amendment. Impeachment requires a majority vote in the House of Representatives and a 2/3rds vote in the Senate. Both are currently majority-Republican, and the Senate uses a phased election system where only a third of the membership will be up for election, so I’m not actually sure it’s possible for Democrats to take a 2/3rds majority this year. Trump currently has a death-grip on party loyalty because he’s got a diehard base that votes in the primaries that decide who the Republican candidate in the general election is. This might collapse if the Republicans take too bad a loss in the election, but so far it’s holding
The 25th Amendment is actually harder; it requires a majority vote of the Cabinet (all appointed by Trump and committed to the war) to initiate, and if Trump disputes it requires a 2/3rds vote of both houses to permanently remove him from office. It’s really intended for when the President is in a coma or suffering from dementia so severe he doesn’t notice he’s been removed from office.
Technically, Trump can’t deploy the military for more than 60 days without authorization from Congress, but odds are good it’s forthcoming or he’s just going to cite inherent Article 2 powers and the Supreme Court will back him. The odds of a military coup or mass strike do not appear high.
As for a popular revolution, most of America still believes in elections and aren’t likely to rise up unless Trump overreaches by canceling them.
Absolutely zero chance.
Statistically speaking, Trump is more likely to be assassinated than to be forced to resign.
There’s not really a viable legal pathway to removing Trump, as others have mentioned. And I have serious doubts they will be able to mass anything akin to a coup or a regime change, without anything remotely resembling a strongman or organization to rally around.
“Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic” – when you consider that Israel has for quite a long time, presented itself as representing _ALL_ Jews, whether or they they wish it to, you realize that Israel has been driving this antisemitism. Or in other words, Israel is using Diaspora Jewish communities as “Human Shields” for its policies, which means it values those Jewish lives as less than it values those policies which reflect almost perfectly, the policies that antisemitic regines in europe used to expell the Sephardim (and Muslims) from Spain in 1492, and the Ashkenazim from England in 1290, etcetera.
Bigotry is ultimately the fault of the bigots, not their targets.
I accept the line of argument that points out that Israel, aside from all its other horrible acts, has also openly allied itself with right-wing antisemites around the world. But I don’t accept the line of argument that because Israel is bad, they’re to blame for bigoted haters hating Jews.
The Likud regime certainly is no stranger to peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories when when the targets of those conspiracy theories are, say, George Soros or Volodymyr Zelenzky.
This is above and beyond a conspiracy theory popular among Israeli hyper-nationalists, which blames the Holocaust on Palestinians.
Have Likud spread antisemitic conspiracy theories about Zelenskyy? Not defending them, just wondering, as I wasn’t aware of that.
I wonder if it’s something you have to be able to read Hebrew to understand/know about. So far, a cursory search had only revealed this Jerusalem Post article from mid-2022.
I think I might also share some quotes from that Atlantic piece by Jeffrey Goldberg I linked earlier in the thread (I started typing in “Jonah Goldberg”, but then recalled that was the Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning guy) that nowadays seem almost impossible to imagine.
And
“when you consider that Israel has for quite a long time, presented itself as representing _ALL_ Jews, whether or they they wish it to, you realize that Israel has been driving this antisemitism.”
If some insane African dictator – some Idi Amin type – was putting himself forth as “The Only True Representative Of The Black Race Worldwide”, and if you disagreed very strongly with him and his policies, I would still not regard going round punching random black people in London as an acceptable way for you to behave, and if you did this, I would blame you, not the Idi Amin type.
“the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades.” You know, the Hizbullah resistance came into existence because Israel’s government sent the IDF into Lebanon in 1982, and wouldn’t leave, while behaving abusively towards the locals in south Lebanon. In similar situations, the Allied Powers supported resistance movements in Third Reich Occupied Europe during the 1940s. Is it any wonder that Iran, without taking control of these “proxies”, either politically or otherwise, would supply fellow Shi’a resistance movements in their local region? Or are you claiming by extension, that the French, Czech, Polish, Danish, Dutch, Yugoslavian, etc, and even German, resistance movements during that period, were “terrorists”? And another thing, Hizbullah were fighting the IDF, a military armed force. I fail to see how guerrilla warfare against an occupying army constitutes “terrorism”, whereas an armed force using armed might against unarmed civilians, does constitute terrorism, state terrorism, and the IDF by the same standards we judge the Wehrmacht, was and is a terrorist organization, as indeed was the US armed forces in Iraq. Or are you arguing that West Asians aka Middle Easterners, aren’t human? Because that’s the end result of following that train of thought. (You might like to re-read the US Declaration of Independence. That’s where I get this train of thought, and needless to say, that’s probably where the judges in the Nuremberg Trials and the Tokyo trials got their train of thought, regarding armed forces used against civilians populations.)
You complain at length about people being called terrorists in a direct reply to a quote that does not, actually, contain the word “terrorism” or “terrorists”. You might want to pay attention to what the people you’re responding to are actually saying, instead of just mechanically reciting your lines from the standard script.
Actually, Bret Devereaux was using “proxies” as a synonym what groups that are also termed “terrorists” by the MainStream Media. And as I have pointed out, the Allied forces in the Second World War also used “proxies”, but they didn’t call them “terrorists”; they called them “Resistance” instead. And it is a matter of historical record that the IDF did occupy southern Lebanon; it is also a matter of historical record that the IDF was not exactly friendly towards Lebanese civilians; it is also a matter of historical record and human psychology that such behaviour towards civilians tends to create Resistance.
“This guy I don’t like said one thing that, if you squint a bit, sounds a bit like this other thing said by other people whom I also don’t like; therefore, they are clearly saying the same thing!”
Wow, impressive reasoning skills!
You’re reading too much into Bret’s one-word aside here. You can act provocatively even towards an aggressor. Or would you say that a kid that says to a schoolyard bully “I’m going to beat you up tomorrow” is not provoking that bully?
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong about your stance regarding Hezbollah and Israel – I am with you at least so far as that Israel is one of the biggest sources of regional instability in the last decade and should be acknowledged as such. But you’re overreacting and shouldn’t immediately accuse him of dehumanising the Lebanese.
The IDF went into Lebanon in 1978 to dig out the PLO, who had just killed dozens of Israelis in the Coastal Road Massacre. But perhaps some people wouldn’t regard the Coastal Road Massacre as terrorism, either, because after all it only killed Jews.
That last little aside is unbecoming, a truly loathsome bit of rhetoric.
Well, for that matter, I suspect you, bagel, would not regard the King David Hotel bombing as terrorism because it killed mostly British; ditto the massacres at Tantura, Deir Yassin, etc, because the people killed were only Arabs; ditto Kafr Qasim; etc, including the ones in Gaza during 1956, such as the Khan Yunis one on 2 November and the one in Rafah on 12 December, etc. At least one of the future Hamas founders Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi saw an uncle being murdered in Khan Yunis. You don’t have a leg to stand on.
Unfortunately it seems like the political reality of the United States is that ending any war in a way that can be seen as a “loss” is a political disaster, even if that war was started by a predecessor and is very unpopular. After Joe Biden got eviscerated for withdrawing from Afghanistan it seems very unlikely a future president (whether due to impeachment, death in office, or the next election) will want to take the political heat of being the “loser” in Iran.
The irony, of course, in Biden taking the blame for Afghanistan is that it was Trump who committed the U.S. to a withdrawal in 2021 and then, when he lost the November 2020 election, ordered the gutting of the American military presence there before Biden could take office.
(Sigh) No. Biden got eviscerated for completely, utterly, and thoroughly botching the withdrawal from Afghanistan, where all the plans for evacuation were based on assessments of the effectiveness of the Afghan army and government that were so massaged that they didn’t just visit a parlor, they hired their own masseuse.
I enjoyed the first part of this and will come back to it when I have time, but wanted to mention that near the top there appears to be an error. The text said that people in countries are not important, when I believe you meant that they are important. I think there was an inadvertently missing double negative.
Fixed
“Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important,” I think you meant “unimportant” here.
Fixed
Sarah Paine has this concept called a ‘pivotal error’. A pivotal error is one where there is no return to status quo ante and all options are now worse. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is an example she returns to – brilliant on an operational level, terrible on a strategic one. This regime seems committed to do as many pivotal errors as possible in as short a time period as possible. This is what happens when you have a country decide to put the incompetent nincompoops in charge of running the country.
You have to understand that the alternative was accountability for billionaires and treating minorities with basic human decency. Set against that horror, collapsing the entire global order and economy into ruin was the only sensible option.
Only if you believe entire groups in society to be out to you for never explained reasons.
“Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important”
Shouldn’t this be “unimportant”?
Fixed
SMH. Take it from this war college grad and retired flag officer… this will go down as the case study of how not to start a war. However tactically brilliant it has been due to the exceptional capabilities and training of the US military, you don’t go to war with a military, you go to war with all of national power, and the planning and execution has been both strategically and operationally inept. A war college seminar group could do better.
Cynically for war initiation the Trump administration would have been smarter to let Israel got it alone, and if the Iranian response inflicted US casualties they’d have had causus belli and the nation would have been howling for blood.
If they don’t back down, it’s about to get even more catastrophically stupid. If the Marines or 82d are inserted into Iranian territory, it will be extremely difficult to sustain them and they will take a pounding; nothing in the air and sea campaign is doing anything meaningful to attrit Iran’s substantial asymmetrical ground capabilities, on their home ground, with a population that supports resisting an invader. Even a limited objective like the seizure of Kharg island, which would be accomplished tactically (with significant risk) would be strategically and operationally stupid. Iran has de facto closed the Strait, but that’s immediately reversible as it doesn’t appear that they have yet mined it to enable their own continued shipping. Seize Kharg and there’s no reason for Iran to take the shipping equivalent of the nuclear option and release the sea mines and close the straight for real, for everyone.
And setting aside international legality — since there’s no one to enforce those laws — the important legal date for the US is 1 May. Congress has neither declared war nor authorized the use of force in Iran. The War Powers Act gives a president 62 days of carte blanche (48 hours to report, 60 days for Congress to act or wind down) before the ability to employ the military is lost legally. On 1 May, without Congressional action, every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine executing any order other than local self defense is now obeying patently illegal orders.
I fear for the Republic.
Well, the people currently running the show in the USA seem to hate the war colleges as bastions of wokeness.
> Iran has de facto closed the Strait, but that’s immediately reversible as it doesn’t appear that they have yet mined it to enable their own continued shipping. […] release the sea mines and close the straight for real, for everyone.
What does “release the sea mines” actually mean? Go out and put them in the water, or turn on mines that are already sitting there?
It seems pretty achievable to have remote control, at least up to “arm once, disarm once” (and probably even “bob up from the bottom on a cable once”). Which, come to think of it, would also mean that mining was reversible at least as long as you didn’t want to reserve the ability to do it again quickly. Do real mines not actually have that much controllability?
Most mines stay armed once set, which is why there’s been efforts to ban land mines and some sea routes are still closed due to WW2 mines. Even in countries that make efforts to clean up their minefields, that’s more a matter of tracking where they are and detonating them in place.
… but this isn’t World War II. In 1945, you *literally couldn’t* have built a mine that could be reliably remotely disarmed (or armed) by you, but not by the other side. The technology truly didn’t exist. It would even have been a bit tricky (possible, but not trivial) to build one you could remotely disarm *at all* without running wires to it.
Now, you have microprocessors, and you have cryptography that would have seemed like mathematically impossible voodoo in 1945. If you can get a signal to your mine, having it listen *only to you* is a fully solved problem.
As for delivering that signal, I would *think* a modern mine would have a variety of sensors, including hydrophones, and be doing meaningful signal processing just to figure out when to trigger, limited maybe by battery life. You can get a message to that mine. Receiving the communication is no harder than figuring out when to explode, actually probably easier, and can actually use the same hardware.
You can’t necessarily get a confirmation *back*, and might fail to reach a few units with damaged sensors, but I don’t see how you could fail to control the vast majority of them. And in fact the ones you couldn’t reach could probably detect that they were damaged and fail safe.
… at least unless I’m missing something really obvious. I suspect that if I am, it’s something “militarily obvious” rather than “technically obvious”.
Well, the militarily obvious problem is that you have created mines that can be deactivated by an enemy that knows the signal. The signal you have to broadcast to the entire minefield over the air/through the water. So there’s a vulnerability to replay attacks, and if you want to switch the code suddenly the logistics of it all get a lot more complicated.
Oh, the cryptography you could use to have an automatically rotating signal like the authenticators on your phone requires a shared secret, so if the enemy gets their hands on one mine they can get all your activation/deactivation codes forever.
Erm, OK, look, I don’t know anything about warfare, but I do know a fair amount about cryptography. There is no “the message”. Protection against replay attacks is very, very well understood, and there are standard countermeasures. There are no logistics involved in updating; keys and sequence numbers roll automatically.
You can also send messages that only affect specific mines or groups of mines, without disclosing which mines you’re addressing.
This is exactly the stuff I meant you couldn’t do in 1945, but it’s all standard now. A lot of garage door openers get this right nowadays.
If you want protection on easy mode, it’s nice to have the mines know the date and time… which does not take a lot of battery power. If the mines *don’t* know the date and time, then the one-way communication *may* mean that a *few* units are vulnerable to replays of messages they didn’t initially hear.
That isn’t going to be that easy to exploit practically; if the other side wants to put a mine into an actually incorrect state, they need that mine to miss at least two messages, and then they have to replay the older one, and be able to get their replay to the mine in spite of whatever made them miss the original messages. That’s all without knowing which, if any, mines they’re actually affecting. That’s an awful lot of luck to chain together, and again it only applies if the mines have no clocks.
If people aren’t doing this, there has to be a better reason than replay attacks.
The logistically tricky part would be securing the keys while still retaining the necessary access to them. You don’t want to expose the control capability to capture, which means you probably can’t, for example, give every little boat in your navy the ability to manipulate every mine in the vicinity at will. But for this particular application, you can still get a lot of value while locking the key in a vault in your innermost stronghold, which seems pretty simple logistically.
You’re right that TOTP tokens use a shared secret.
You are not right that it’s impossible, or even slightly tricky, to do confidentiality, authentication, and replay protection *without* a shared secret. Avoiding shared secrets is what public-key cryptography is about. RSA was published in 1977.
I mean, obviously you don’t put anything in any one mine that can be used to control any other mine. Once again, that’s standard stuff that any vaguely competent cryptographic application developer understands.
After you do the trivial part and make sure that no other mine contains information that can *control* other mines, you have a slightly trickier problem in arranging that it can’t even *read* messages that aren’t addressed to other mines, or tell which mines those messages affect. That’s a bit less standard… but still solved.
It’s true that garage door openers don’t use any of this, or anything that involves a lot of “weird algebra”. They don’t need it, and it uses ROM, RAM, and battery in quantities that would matter for a half-ounce fob with a $1.00 BOM cost.
That doesn’t mean it’s hard for a quarter-ton, $5000 military device with a DSP in 2026. It wasn’t hard in 2006. I’d have to work out more of the design than I care to spend the time on to decide whether you’d have had to consult a real world expert to tell you how to do it in 1996, but my instinct is to say no.
Military cryptographers probably could have done most of it in 1986; I’m not sure about the “one mine can’t even tell which other mines were supposed to get a given message” part. They probably would have had to use hardware you wouldn’t want to put in a mine, though.
Seriously, the cryptography for that application is not a problem. Even if you count the 20-year military adoption lag, if that kind of remote control isn’t out there right now, has to be a *non-cryptographic* reason.
@Sok Puppette, command detonated mines are definitely a thing: the Brits were using them in late WW1 to defend Scapa Flow. They were remote controlled by cables, over a short distance only.
The military factor is that there is a big, big, difference between not getting a confirmation back from your TV or garage door and not getting a confirmation back from something that can explode and kill you. It’s true that perfect is the enemy of good enough, and that gold-plating military weapons is a problem, but in this special case where the goal is **not** to cause death and destruction you really do need 100% reliability. You can still block a strait if only 50% of your mines explode when they’re supposed to, but declaring that the strait is now safe for civilian ships because there’s only a 1% chance of being blown up won’t be convincing.
And the sea, even shallow, is a hostile environment for electronics. Salt water corrodes things, radio doesn’t work, sonar gets bounced and distorted in weird ways, anything on the sea bottom gets covered in mud or oysters, in wartime there are explosions going off and shock waves travel really well through water, … This is why those old fashioned contact mines with spikes are still around.
I think it’s as simple as “If you provide a way to deactivate, there exists the possibility someone will steal it and use it.”
Since that risk is present, you don’t enable a failsafe. Same reason there’s no way to stop the nukes once the button is pushed.
“A war college seminar group could do better.” This is what’s killing me! Senate could have confirmed a war college seminar group, and they *would* best the people actually confirmed.
Another thing to note about the costs for the US (and to a lesser degree Israel) is how horrifically untrustworthy and unstable this makes them look to everyone, allies and enemies alike. You may think Obama overpaid for the Iran Deal (personally I think it was probably the best compromise realistically in view from the negotiations) but Trump’s actions, first in pulling out of a bunch of international deals, but far worse in killing a foreign leader in the middle of negotiations, mean that any future US President will be forced to overpay in any international deal to counter the inevitable and very understandable concern of “What happens when the US just decides to attack us instead” requiring greater costs for the US upfront instead of ongoing benefits. This is another (and perhaps the most emphatic) step on absolutely ruining US soft power and negotiating ability. I would not be shocked to see countries other than Iran rush to put more work into nuclear programmes, reasoning that any other deterrent won’t keep the US from war these days, while traditional allies of the US become harder to work with because they are quite rightly outraged by the US acting in this manner.
Honestly, even with regime change friendly to the US from the first strike, this war may not have been an overall win for US interests.
On the face of it, Canada needs nuclear weapons, and that is certainly a country other than Iran.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/should-canada-have-nuclear-weapons-9.7081432
“Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States”
Good luck convincing Hegseth.
(Sorry, bad pun, I know you meant the country in Africa…)
Hah!
Fun fact: Chad has a Chad-shaped head.
Thank you for your comments about the relatively low strategic importance of the Middle East. I have the impression that in political arguments, even many people who hate each others’ guts and disagree on almost everything else still agree that the Middle East is really vitally strategically important. And I tend to think that they’re all wrong on that.
Re: your comments on market reactions to all this. Given your pro-market leanings, you’ll probably disagree with me on this, but when I hear people talking about how markets supposedly make rational decisions based on supply and demand and all that, I generally want to respond by paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher in a way that she herself would *definitely* have *disapproved* of, and say that there’s no such thing as “The Market”, there are only individual economic actors. These individual economic actors have not only their interests, but also their attitudes, their preferences, and yes, their prejudices. (That, and not any supposed “market rationality” is also, by the way, the real reason by business people as a group tend to get paid more than other professional groups. But I’m getting off topic.)
And, well, the specific individual economic actors who work on “the markets” are usually people who are politically right-wing, who are not too bright in some contexts (although often smart by some measures and always absolutely convinced of their own brilliance), and who have repulsive personalities. So they love someone like Trump, they love someone like Hegseth, they think the more schoolgirls you blow to pieces in their schools, the more awesome and badass you are, and they simply can’t imagine that such clearly awesome and badass actions taken by such clearly awesome and badass people could ever possibly have bad economic impacts on anyone who matters. So they’ll probably underestimate the economic impact of this war until stuff actually starts to physically run out in a lot of places.
While you are correct that the market is ultimately just individual buyers and sellers, there are two things to remember. First, “the Market” here is by no means only American, or even western. By the numbers the market they may not even be a plurality of those, and Wall Street makes up a smaller portion of that.
Second, the direct damage the market can currently assess is primarily through higher oil & LNG pricing. Long-term diplomatic consequences are not something bankers can realistically assess in the short term.
This does not mean that influential Finance Guys have gotten it right. For example, one Talking Head recently explained he initially assumed we had a plan to quickly reopen the Strait of Hormuz, precisely because it was blindingly obvious, and was shocked when he realized there was no such plan. Markets still have not yet priced in the cost of irrational US leadership, but at the same time most Buyers&Sellers have not yet seen the impacts hit and are not sure how to react.
Fair points.
I’m reminded of a cartoon in a 2008 edition of The Economist, which showed how “word of mouth” could swing waves of buying and selling; a full refutation of the idea that The Market is inherently rational. I only wish I still had that copy of The Economist – it went walkabout aroudn the time of the Christchurch earthquakes.
I’m pleasantly surprised that the Economist, of all places, once published something like that.
I remember it. And it was on the cover!
This is very well written and argued. My dissention here is mostly in the form of “Yes, and…”. I think that the tactical case is extremely well argued – I hope that there is something that Devereaux has not seen that makes the situation better, but I have no idea what it is.
What I would like to add to the conversation is that the Iranian Mullahs go rather beyond odious. I think we could apply that justly to the Putin regime in Russia and various similar ones. What you have in Iran goes beyond that.
Basically, I do not think that the Mullahs represent a brutal but conventional regime, bound by the logic of realpolitik. They are a fanatical and messianic one. And that is very, very different beast.
The Iranian revolution was the catalyst for basically all the modern era’s _jihad_, the demonstration that a reactionary, bronze-age madness could be foisted on a modern society. It was – and is – proof that the Enlightenment can be defeated. I mean _really_ defeated, you Americans – not people voting against abortion, but a regime that says that virgins may not be hanged so they must be ceremonially raped to allow for the hanging.
There was a hope – and I still hold out for this – that by destroying that regime you would garrotte the confidence of the Jihad, that the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotheshood would be put on notice that they were allowed to exist on sufferance, that the modern world can get rid of them any time it so chooses. That is not an ignoble ambition, and it is not a completely unrealisitc one.
The people of Iran are not just rejecting the Mullahs, _they are rejecting Islam_. Mosques are burning, Zoroastrianism is reviving. That is a lethal blow to the confidence of the Jihad. I have some desperate hope that it is possible to rip out the cancer of the Mullahs by empowering the Iranian people.
There was also a fear – and a fear that I definitely still have – what such a regime might do with nuclear weapons. _Maybe_ it would just use those for blackmail and to maintain a status quo where its jihadi forces operate with impunity all over Eurasia. That would not be fun. But there is really the horrifying possibility that their propaganda really meant what it said, that they would immediately _use_ those nuclear weapons. That when they call their nuclear scientists “nuclear mujahideen” and when Hezbollah marches under flags of a mushroom cloud, that that really does mean what it looks like.
Imagine the consequences of the Mullahs firing nuclear weapons at Israel or America. Imagine the retaliatory strikes. Imagine the wave of terror and chaos that would engulf the world in the wake of that holocaust.
Remember, when the mullahs seek ICBMs, the “I” stands for “intercontinental”. They don’t need ICBMs to hit Israel.
I should say that the idea of nukes as deterrents is one of humanity’s truly fucking stupid ideas. Just read the history of how close we came to global annihilation due to accidents. But this is even stupider.
I am fully aware that this makes the situation even bleaker, since a messianic regime could hang on even when it is absolutely, definitely going to lose. But the above should be born in mind
I also feel the need to speak to the sympathy for the Palestinians. Let’s be clear about what we are talking about here: the Palestinian cause is the cause of Jihad. This isn’t a nationalist movement with secular aims. Preachers of HAMAS do not merely call for the annihilation of Israel; they openly speak of the reconquest of _Spain_. You don’t just see attacks on Israeli civilians in other countries – that would be a scandal enough – you see open attacks on _Jews_.
I am pro-Israel not because I have any particular sympathy for the Israeli leadership – I commend to your attention the work of Israel Shahak and the latest edition of Haaretz – but because I have a very clear idea of what the forces on the other side would do to me and mine if they had half a chance.
I do think that the waning sympathy for Israel has less to do with this current war and more to do with nearly three decades of anti-Israel propaganda and obfuscation of the nature of the jihad, encapsulated by the perfectly parodic “queers for palestine”.
For all the deranged fantasies being written about the march of Iranian jihadists they have consistently behaved like rational actors prioritising the security of their state and their continued existance. The nature of their government is reprehensible, but no more, or less, than that of Saudi Arabia which is a long-term US ally.
As for the waning sympathy of Israel, that has to do with three decades of brutal repression of Palestinians, repeated wars with tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and the fact that the public has been able to see all this happen on their screens every week. Most recently the forced displacement of a million Lebanese civilians in preparation for an operation where Israeli government ministers are openly calling for the conquest and annexation of Lebanese territory.
The Iranian regime has subsumed 20-50% of their economy for decades towards destroying Israel, a country Iran was previously on decent terms with. They are the first country since WWII to pursue a nuclear bomb with the intent to use it offensively. What part of that is “rational actors prioritizing their security”?
Use The Bomb offensively against Israel? And the Palestinian populace just collateral? Doesn’t add up.
The Ayatollahs have never cared about the Palestinians, or anyone. They’re proudly and openly a death cult who only cares about killing Jews.
1. Despite the incendiary comments made by various Iranian officials, there is no reason to think that the relevant decisionmakers were actually pursuing completion of a nuclear bomb at all in the last few decades, let alone completion of a bomb with ‘intent to use it offensively’. Their strategy has clearly been establishing *breakout capacity* in an attempt to get the benefits of a nuclear deterrent while dodging some of the diplomatic/economic (becoming North Korea) effects of being considered a ‘nuclear rogue state’. The alternative is thinking that they’ve been sitting at “months or weeks from a nuke” for 20 years because – what, because they’re incompetent?
2. There’s some sleight-of-hand in “previously on decent terms with”. Yes, the Shah’s regime was on excellent terms with the Israelis, including cooperation between Mossad and SAVAK. Having ties to the secret police is not the sort of thing that endears you to a new revolutionary regime! And despite that, and US support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War (Iran’s defining national trauma), the Islamic Republic came into the 21st century with a surprisingly positive working relationship with the US/Israel that W Bush decided to scrap in the Axis of Evil speech for absolutely no reason. From this, we get the ‘Axis of Resistance’ and Iranian ‘forward defense’ – from this, we get Ahmadinejad – from this, we get Iranian IEDs in Iraq.
The Iranians might not be perfectly spherical rational actors, but the idea that the aggression is one sided is just absurd. How many times does the IRGC have to try and get along only for a Republican president to spit in their face before they give up?
“And despite that, and US support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War (Iran’s defining national trauma),”
My impression was that the US was kind of playing both sides during that war. I mean, there was an entire major political scandal in the US about secret, and later not-so-secret, ties with Iran.
Ah right I usually say “death to my positive working relationships” on the regular, that’s a normal Tuesday.
Or fire missiles at them while they’re escorting merchant ships through a war zone and then never even show remorse. Totally innocent.
Or establishing (Hezbollah) and funding terrorist organizations (Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis) in a ring around your ‘positive working relationships’. Very normal behavior.
Or blow up Jewish community centers halfway around the world in the mid-1990s. Positive! Working!
Hating America, Israel, and Jews is theologically foundational to the Iranian regime, and they’ve consistently acted on it.
The Palestinian cause goes all the way back to the beginning of Jewish colonialism in Palestine, many decades before the Iranian revolution, and many decades before the creation of HAMAS. Palestinian Christians have also historically played a big part in it. You might accurately describe people or fractions within the Palestinian cause, but to imagine that the destruction of HAMAS or the Iranian regime would suddenly make the Palestinians happy with their treatment is delusional.
Jews are from Judea. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand the conflict.
Whatever. That was 2000 years ago. Everyone has ancestors from 2000 years ago, many of whom lived in different places, and we don’t generally believe that gives them the right to kick out people living there now.
Exactly. Compare Nathan Goldwag’s comparison of Zionism with various less-talked-about European irredentist movements. https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-banality-of-zionism/
So where are Jews indigenous to? Because the European answer is pretty clearly “not Europe”. And obviously it isn’t the Americas. And congratulations, because of the expulsions from Muslim lands we’ve now listed every places that Jews live, within a rounding error.
If indigeneity is a foundation of the moral right to protect yourself, and you want Jews to be indigenous nowhere, it sure sounds like you don’t want Jews to exist anywhere.
By the way, Jews never stopped living in Israel.
@bagel:
“So where are Jews indigenous to? ”
The lands of Israel/Palestine. I just don’t think that’s all that relevant.
“If indigeneity is a foundation of the moral right to protect yourself, ”
That’s a *very* big “if”, which I do not agree with at all.
@Raphael
Kzikas states there is a moral right to oppose colonialism. So either they believe in some version of “indigeneity as a foundation of the right to self defense”, or they don’t believe that most Palestinians have any claim over Israel (having not lived there in multiple generations). Perhaps you two should figure that out between you.
My advice is to come up with an answer that doesn’t disenfranchise Native Americans.
The issue is that Palestinians are also indigenous to Palestine, and a Palestinian living in a refugee camp on the West bank has a far greater connection to the land than, say, a jewish American who has never set foot in Israel.
And more to the point, jewish existance in Israel looks like it requires the dislocation and disenfranchisement of Palestinians en masse into a permanent underclass without rights, to be violently, brutally, subdued by the IDF when they get restless. That is certainly the explicitly stated policy of the current Israeli government, that will never support an independent Palestinian state but will also never offer the Palestinians living in the occupied territories citizenship or the vote.
There’s a word for this in Afrikaans you might be familiar with. Apartheid.
So why should anyone with any kind of democratic sentiment support jewish nation building at this cost in Palestinian lives?
@ettochett the number one predictor of Arab population growth over the last century has been proximity to Jewish hospitals. If Israel intends to dislocate Arabs, they’ve been wildly ineffective at it.
Since you offered me a word, let me offer you one. Israeli Arabs are full citizens of Israel. Palestinians are not, and therefore not Israelis. No country applies its laws to people who are outside it; you can’t disenfranchise someone who has never been enfranchised. If you want Israel were to apply Israeli law to Judea and Samaria there’s a word for that in English … annexation. If you want there to be a future Palestinian state, the legal pathway there is to continue to apply separate law to it.
Israel was literally founded on the dislocation of arabs.
And Israel is happy to apply their laws to the population of the West Bank and Gaza. Military law, for Palestinians. Civilian law for jewish settlers. There is no recourse for a palestinian in the occupied territories who is harassed, assaulted, or even murdered by a jew. The police is Israeli, the courts are Israeli, and they will not even give lip service to justice.
Palestinian statehood is dead, Israeli voters have spent the last 20 years rejecting it, and instead opted for apartheid and racial supremacism.
I do not care where anyone’s ancestors lived 2000 years ago. I don’t in any other situation and I don’t in this one. I don’t know where my ancestors lived 2000 years ago, and I don’t care. It has no moral relevance.
You can’t colonize the place you’re from. Jews never stopped living in Israel, and have been told in no uncertain terms we’re not from anywhere else. Obviously we’re by and large not from the Americas. The European answer is pretty clearly “not Europe”. And congratulations, because of the expulsions from Muslim lands we’ve now listed every places that Jews live, within a rounding error.
So where are Jews indigenous to? If indigeneity is a foundation of the moral right to protect yourself (anti-colonialism!), and you want Jews to be indigenous nowhere, it sure sounds like you don’t want Jews to exist anywhere.
And that has moral relevance.
The Jews already living in Palestine couldn’t colonize Palestine, and they didn’t colonize Palestine. Other Jews did. Look at the first Israeli cabinet: 12 members, where 1 was from the middle east and 11 were from Europe or North America. Look at how many years it took until Israel got a non-European prime minister.
Colonialism is ultimately a description of how the colonizer interacts with the colonized; A process of colonization was imposed on the Palestinian people, and the nature of that process isn’t changed by the history of the colonizer.
Compare Liberia: The African Americans that founded Liberia had been taken from Africa as slaves much more recently than the diaspora, but they were colonizers, because they interacted with the native population through a system of colonization.
Where are African Americans indigenous to? A new Back to Africa seeking to set up a second Liberia would certainly be colonization, so by that measure they can’t be indigenous to Africa (if we accept the argument that you cannot colonize a place you’re indigenous to).
I’d consider American Jews and African Americans pretty comparable here. Both are long existing communities in America that have faced marginalization and othering. Maybe its just a relatively normal thing for people to be non-indigenous? Where are white Americans indigenous to for that matter? They’re not Native Americans, but if they created a movement like Zionism aimed at Europe they would certainly be colonizers.
@Kzickas Let me be frank. Who was the first leader of the Palestinian? When were they autonomous? What organizing principles do they have besides subjugating Jews?
Jews were given independence for helping overthrow the Ottoman Empire, as part of its decolonization. The plan was for a dozen Arab states, with Jews in them (as they had been for 2500+ years), and one Jewish state, with Arabs in it. Now there are a dozen Arab states with no Jews in them, and one Jewish state with Arabs in it. Sure seems like one of those countries has more commitment to pluralism than the rest.
And if your definition of colonialism is so broad that it means “moving” and “being successful” then it sure makes anti-colonialists seem like real losers.
@bagel,
My heart breaks for you. You are arguing as though facts and reason and morality mean anything here.
> If indigeneity is a foundation of the moral right to protect yourself (anti-colonialism!), and you want Jews to be indigenous nowhere, it sure sounds like you don’t want Jews to exist anywhere.
Well… yeah. Duh. How can this be surprising? What do you think “globalize the Intifada” means?
Take them at their word.
Like I keep banging on about, if they don’t care about Nigerian and Sudanese Christians, or Pakistani and Bangladeshi Hindus, and Yazidi…. why would they care about you?
It really is that simple. I wish it wasn’t, but it is.
” Look at how many years it took until Israel got a non-European prime minister.”
The fourth prime minister of Israel was non-European – Yigal Allon, who became PM in 1968. 20 years after the foundation of the country doesn’t seem that long. Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu are also non-European – Rabin and Allon were born Palestinians, Netanyahu was born in Israel.
Which is why Ashkenazim look so European, and why Mizrahim look so Arab, and why Ethiopian Jews look so Ethiopian and why the Kaifeng Jews look so Chinese? Of course, there were _NEVER_ any _conversions_ from other religions to Judaism at any point in history, so we must conclude that the Judaeans of 0CE looked liked Europeans and Arabs and Ethiopians and Chinese – simultaneously!!! Reductio ad absurdum. While simple economics, which even the Romans understood, meant that they never exiled a population en masse, let alone unnecessarily, while changing religions and languages doesn’t change the genetic identity – and the Samaritans are still there, proof positive of my argument. Ergo, I deduce that the Palestinians of today were the Jews of the first century CE. To consider any other option means believing in something as believable as Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods.
I think the Ancient Hebrews resembled present-day Samarians. While Judaism is not actively proselytizing it has no problem accepting converts. Interbreeding with neighbouring peoples was also inevitable. However, all Jewish groups contain members biologically descended from the Ancient Hebrews. Most Jews don’t care about it but still.
Again, you’re making a category error. The category error you’re responsible for is confusing religion with ethnicity. Tell me, when were Sammy Davis Jnr’s ancestors exiled from Judaea?
“What I would like to add to the conversation is that the Iranian Mullahs go rather beyond odious. I think we could apply that justly to the Putin regime in Russia and various similar ones. What you have in Iran goes beyond that.
Basically, I do not think that the Mullahs represent a brutal but conventional regime, bound by the logic of realpolitik. They are a fanatical and messianic one. And that is very, very different beast.”
Someone killed by a merely “odious” regime is as dead as someone killed by a fanatical and messianic one.
“The Iranian revolution was the catalyst for basically all the modern era’s _jihad_, the demonstration that a reactionary, bronze-age madness could be foisted on a modern society. It was – and is – proof that the Enlightenment can be defeated. I mean _really_ defeated, you Americans – not people voting against abortion, but a regime that says that virgins may not be hanged so they must be ceremonially raped to allow for the hanging. ”
First, the founding of Islam was more than a thousand years after the beginning of the Iron Age.
Second, if you would have paid attention, you would have noticed that the anti-Enlightenment forces in the USA have gone far beyond “voting against abortion” by now. They are clearly trying to destroy centuries of Enlightenment-based improvements, and perhaps even thousands of years of people, even when they did horrible things, at least paying lip service to the idea that people should treat each other decently. And unlike the Mullahs in Iran, they have a fairly high chance of succeeding.
“There was a hope – and I still hold out for this – that by destroying that regime you would garrotte the confidence of the Jihad, that the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotheshood would be put on notice that they were allowed to exist on sufferance, that the modern world can get rid of them any time it so chooses. That is not an ignoble ambition, and it is not a completely unrealisitc one. ”
You think that the modern world can get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood any time it so chooses? OK, present a carefully worked out step-by-step plan for doing that.
Besides, if messianic movements are as fanatical and irrational as you say they are, then I don’t see how anything you do can “put them on notice”.
“The people of Iran are not just rejecting the Mullahs, _they are rejecting Islam_. Mosques are burning, Zoroastrianism is reviving. That is a lethal blow to the confidence of the Jihad. I have some desperate hope that it is possible to rip out the cancer of the Mullahs by empowering the Iranian people. ”
Whom, exactly, do you mean by “the people of Iran” in this context? I admit that I do not know much about Iran. But if Iran is anything like the few countries that I *do* know something about, then there’s a *range of political opinions* among the people there. Probably a lot of people who hate the regime, and of lot people who like it. With repression being as brutal as it is, I don’t see how anyone can reliably tell which side is numerically how strong.
From what I’ve heard, apparently in the USA, depending on which circles you move in, you might well spend a lot of time either without meeting anyone in real life who voted for Trump or without meeting anyone in real life who voted for Harris. It wouldn’t make sense to describe the people in either kind of social circles as “The People of the USA”. And I see no reason to assume that Iran is all that different in that regard.
Generally, I pretty much agree with the fictional character of Sam Vimes on the question of whether the concept of “The People” makes sense in the first place.
“I also feel the need to speak to the sympathy for the Palestinians. Let’s be clear about what we are talking about here: the Palestinian cause is the cause of Jihad. This isn’t a nationalist movement with secular aims. Preachers of HAMAS do not merely call for the annihilation of Israel; they openly speak of the reconquest of _Spain_. You don’t just see attacks on Israeli civilians in other countries – that would be a scandal enough – you see open attacks on _Jews_. ”
I do not share your apparent belief that if a demographic group contains a lot of people with horrific political views, that justifies genocide against that group.
Besides, see my point above about cultures usually containing ranges of political opinions. There are a lot of people in a number of European countries who say very horrible things. That would not justify murdering *me*, although I’m European myself.
And, while Israel is doing what it’s doing, I simply don’t see why it should matter all that much what the other side might theoretically want to do. Actual murder usually matters more than hypothetical murder.
“I am pro-Israel not because I have any particular sympathy for the Israeli leadership – I commend to your attention the work of Israel Shahak and the latest edition of Haaretz – but because I have a very clear idea of what the forces on the other side would do to me and mine if they had half a chance.”
Yes, the Jihadists would do horrible things to me and mine if they had half a chance. So would a lot of other groups around the world, some of which, in my estimate, have a much bigger chance of reaching their goals than the Jihadists.
“I do think that the waning sympathy for Israel has less to do with this current war and more to do with nearly three decades of anti-Israel propaganda and obfuscation of the nature of the jihad,”
Yes, when more and more people start to oppose people whom you support, that can certainly only be because of nefarious propaganda. It can’t possibly be because of anything done by the people you support. Keep telling yourself that.
The belief that the dominant wind of propaganda in the anglosphere is anti-israel is alone enough to completely dismiss this person as a crank fully out of touch with reality.
Year of our lord right the fuck now is the most pro-palestine america has ever been and yet you will get death threats for the rest of your life if you, as a children’s entertainer, show support for suffering palestinian children. In supposedly liberal strongholds like film if you voice support for palestine you will get censored and sometimes even blacklisted.
People like me have been begging people to care about palestine for decades and noone listened. People are getting radicalized against israel now because of things israeli soldiers and politicians post proudly to their own social media.
I mostly agree, but I think you’re confusing “the anglosphere” with “the USA”. Other English speaking countries have traditionally had a less pro-Israel public discourse.
As a general rule, it seems to be a common psychological effect that human beings tend to notice things they don’t like more than things they like. One of many results of that is that in some places, both supporters of Israel and supporters of the Palestinian cause can look around themselves and conclude that they’re lone truth-tellers who have the prevailing winds against them.
I don’t think there really is any equivalence here. The palestinian cause is and has always been at least somewhat popular but it lacks structural support from basically any moneyed interest or mainstream politics. In the uk and canada its very rare to actually have a pro-palestine politician at any level of power unless the definition of pro-palestine is just “thinks genocide is distasteful but still fully supports israel”. Heck both of those countries are passing laws to crack down on protests largely targeted at protests of israel.
But it is a very real dynamic, no better example I can think of than american evangelicals crying persecution when an objective look at what their whinging about isn’t persecution but a lack of preferred treatment they used to enjoy.
@Rosalind Chapman:
“The palestinian cause is and has always been at least somewhat popular but it lacks structural support from basically any moneyed interest or mainstream politics. In the uk and canada its very rare to actually have a pro-palestine politician at any level of power unless the definition of pro-palestine is just “thinks genocide is distasteful but still fully supports israel”.”
Politics isn’t the only field of power.
Arguably not even the most important one.
@Rosalind Chapman: Given that even their fellow Arabs hardly support them (bear in mind, Black September was named after an event involving the Jordanians, not the Israelis), why would you expect Western governments be any more sympathetic?
There is a difference between complaining on the behaviour of a relatively small number of aggressive Islamists and believing all Muslims to support them. The later often include believing the mere presences of people looking somewhat like stereotypical Arabs to be a threat. Such beliefs are actually a problem here in Europe. I find it disturbing you seem to have trouble grasping there is any other way of thinking than his own black-and-white one.
Sorry, this was aimed at Robert Bosch.
I do think there have been some credible sources on the idea that there’s a growing degree to which at least the urbane middle class of Iran has been growing disillusioned with Islam, resulting in either growing self-identification as irreligious or exploration of Zoroastrianism as an alternative faith with nationalist significance.
But I also agree that it is a greatly inflated narrative amongst anti-Iranian and generally Islamophobic reactionaries, in a format of trying to delegitimize the cultural significance and legacy of Shia Islam in the region, despite it having been the characteristic Iranian religion for hundreds of years.
Certainly, tracing all radical Islamic terrorism, most of which is highly fundamentalist and specifically Sunni, back to a Shia regime, is patently absurd.
(This is also a point where it bears reminding that Twelver Shia Islam has a complex process of designating religious authority and hierarchy that points towards multiple leaders. While Khamenei tried to characterise himself as pre-eminent among ayatollahs and thus possessed of highest guiding authority in the religion, that was disputed even by other high ranking scholars that resided within Iran. Outside of the regime’s reach, Ali al-Sistani is regarded as the most eminent scholar and authority in Twelver Shia. He is, incidentally, an advocate for democracy in opposition to the kind of ruling authority of Imam’s found in the current Iranian constitution, and calls for non-sectarianism.)
I agree. For comparison, in the 2024 US Presidential election, more than three million people voted for the various third-party and independent candidates combined. That was, by any reasonable standard, really a lot of people. If they would have all assembled in one place, they would have been a very large crowd. I would certainly not have turned down an offer of getting one dollar from every single one of them.
They were also about 2.13 percent of the total vote.
I am not ruling out that the vast majority of Iranians might hate the regime. I am not ruling out that the vast majority of Iranians might support the regime. I just don’t see how I can *know* the truth about this. And I don’t think that photos or videos of large crowds either attacking mosques or holding up portraits of the now-dead previous Supreme Leader while wearing headscarves can *prove* either possibility to me.
And here we have the real fault line. We can argue whether or not the war can be won or whether the tactics make sense, but the fact is that that is not the real or the main argument. The real argument is between those who see the hideous evil of the Iranian theocracy and those determined to make excuses for it – like Isator Levi over here, hot from making excuses for the forces of Jihad we came to know as ISIS.
This is an old and ignoble tradition, observed back in the ’30s and ’40s by Orwell. Underneath the “peace at any price” crowd, there was the fairly blatant insinuation that Hitler and the Nazis were really not all that bad.
Case in point here. Ali Sistani, in his list of the uncleans places you – yes, _you_, the Infidel – just behind “pig and dog” but above “the sweat of an excrement-eating animal.”.
Note also how Isator carefully ignores the way that the Islamic regime orders virgins to be raped so that they might be hanged, and all of it other lovely elements of its rule.
And there is the willful ignorance and dishonesty:
> Certainly, tracing all radical Islamic terrorism, most of which is highly fundamentalist and specifically Sunni, back to a Shia regime, is patently absurd.
Here is what I actually wrote:
> The Iranian revolution was the catalyst for basically all the modern era’s _jihad_, the demonstration that a reactionary, bronze-age madness could be foisted on a modern society
Got that? I did not say that the whole basis for modern jihad goes back to the Islamic regime – I am fully aware that _jihad_ dates back to Islam’s foundings. What I wrote was that the Iranian revolution was a catalyst, that it showed that the forces of barbarism could actually triumph, even in the modern era.
Bottom line: this is the real argument about this war. It is between those who recognise the Mullahs as the barbaric savages they are, and those determined to make excuses for them because Orange Man Bad.
I happen to agree that he is bad, but nowhere near as bad as the Mullahs.
“And here we have the real fault line. We can argue whether or not the war can be won or whether the tactics make sense, but the fact is that that is not the real or the main argument. ”
When someone starts a war, whether they should have done so or not *is* the real and main argument.
“The real argument is between those who see the hideous evil of the Iranian theocracy and those determined to make excuses for it – like Isator Levi over here, hot from making excuses for the forces of Jihad we came to know as ISIS.”
Point. To. Examples. Which words written by Isator Levi make excuses for the Iranian theocracy? Quote them. Or take back your BS.
“This is an old and ignoble tradition, observed back in the ’30s and ’40s by Orwell. Underneath the “peace at any price” crowd, there was the fairly blatant insinuation that Hitler and the Nazis were really not all that bad.”
Orwell had fairly strong opinions on “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’”. Ring any bells?
“Note also how Isator carefully ignores the way that the Islamic regime orders virgins to be raped so that they might be hanged, and all of it other lovely elements of its rule.”
He does not specifically mention that aspect, but neither do some of the *supporters* of the war in this very thread.
“Bottom line: this is the real argument about this war. It is between those who recognise the Mullahs as the barbaric savages they are, and those determined to make excuses for them because Orange Man Bad. ”
Nope. If I wasn’t so sure that you’re a True Believer, I’d accuse you of lying over this. The opening post of this very thread is opposing this war without making any excuses whatsoever for the Mullahs.
“I happen to agree that he is bad, but nowhere near as bad as the Mullahs.”
That leads to an almost “philosophical” question of which forms of badness are how bad relative to each other. So far, Trump hasn’t yet caused as much misery among his own people as the Mullahs have. But so far, he has still been restrained by a system in a way the Mullahs haven’t been since they took power. And the people around him are working very hard at changing that.
What’s more important, IMNSHO, though, is that Trump and his followers might well succeed at actually destroying the West, at least in the form in which it has existed in recent generations. The Mullahs would love to do that, but they don’t have the power to do so. That makes Trump more of a threat both for our host and for me, personally, than the Mullahs are.
You know, considering the line that you responded to at the start of this whole tangent, does this constitute an argument that the United States actually should make it a matter of policy to intervene to stop every single repressive authoritarian regime in the world?
And not just the ones ruled by Muslims.
Or Communists, at a guess.
Like as far as your other assertions, I’ll confidently say that you don’t have a clue what the nature of my discourse was at the time Iranian people were engaging in mass protests against the regime (beyond what anybody might infer from my comment referencing a familiarity with religious disillusionment in the populace). But the thing is, there’s a big difference between the advocacy and the hope that a society will be able to escape the dominance of totalitarian authoritarianism in the way that countries like Taiwan, Korea, and Greece did. Hopefully especially like Korea, where an official attempting to pull a coup got shut down right quick and is going to die in prison.
A person can equally hold a position that making war on them in this particular manner is unjust for unrelated reasons, will not actually improve the lives of common Iranians between the destruction visited upon them and the likelihood of more deeply radicalising the ruling powers and anybody who might be victimised by the war, and is generally a major destabilizing element in a tense and sensitive region (as well as the general premise that it is not good for the world in general for these kinds of things to escalate to war through the combination of the destructive scope of the weaponry, the expense of them, and the extent to which the modern world is dependent on international webs of commerce).
For the last of those, I suspect that you think of all of this talk about the effect of rising energy and food prices as decadence of people that lack the grit to oppose evil, but it has real effects on real people’s lives, and is going to disproportionately affect people barely getting by, for whom cheap food and heat is not a matter of luxury but survival.
Is there anything you expect to have to sacrifice for the sake of the outcome you desire?
@Isator Levi:
“A person can equally hold a position that making war on them in this particular manner is unjust for unrelated reasons, will not actually improve the lives of common Iranians between the destruction visited upon them and the likelihood of more deeply radicalising the ruling powers and anybody who might be victimised by the war, and is generally a major destabilizing element in a tense and sensitive region (as well as the general premise that it is not good for the world in general for these kinds of things to escalate to war through the combination of the destructive scope of the weaponry, the expense of them, and the extent to which the modern world is dependent on international webs of commerce). ”
I guess it’s a fundamental brain structure issue. Some people have brains that are able to understand that there are many different things in the world, and some people’s brains are built in such a way so that they can only understand the existence of two different things, the thing-that-they-like and the thing-that-they-hate. There can’t, for them, be any distinctions *within* each of these things. And that’s why this guy seems to sincerely believe that *of course* you and me have said exactly the kinds of things Iranian regime supporters would say.
“Is there anything you expect to have to sacrifice for the sake of the outcome you desire?”
Well, he has to suffer the horrible fate of people he hates anyway saying mean things about him, though I don’t know him well enough to tell whether he sees that as some kind of big sacrifice.
Isator,
> Like as far as your other assertions, I’ll confidently say that you don’t have a clue what the nature of my discourse was at the time Iranian people were engaging in mass protests
I am entirely happy to believe that you were on the side of the protests and reversed course because of the Orange Man. Or that you were willing to sigh soulfully that this was just so horrid but that nothing, nothing could be done…
Against that I would put your ignoring the atrocities of the Mullahs, your endorsement of the nonsense propaganda term “Islamophobia” (correctly described as being invented by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons) and your endorsement of Ali Sistani.
Is it too much to ask for a little consistency? Let us say that there was, say, an American politician who had a list of uncleans and listed black people alongside dogs, pigs and animals that eat excrement. This might raise a few eyebrows, no? That might be considered… disqualifying?
But of course, to ask for a little consistency is too much like taking you seriously
>A person can equally hold a position
Yes, a person can. You don’t. You will note that I did not accuse Devereaux of making excuses for the Mullahs, for the very simple reason that he doesn’t. But you do. Remember, I’ve seen you make excuses for the forces that we came to know as ISIS. I have seen you take the boring and contemptible line that if the forces of jihad decide to open slave markets, it is only because they’ve been radicalized by western action, while anything that western powers do is only because they are big horrid meanies.
There is a reason I do not take you seriously.
“Is it too much to ask for a little consistency?”
I can’t speak for Isator, but *I* am consistently opposed to all the mass-murdering hateful autocratic democracy-haters in the world.
*You* are the one who argues that some of them have to be supported because they are the smaller evil compared to others, and that it’s Morally Unserious and Decadent to suggest otherwise.
The reason you do not take me seriously consists of a lot of preconceived narratives concerning the basis of a lot of opposition that you use to fill out spaces in arguments to reinforce your world view.
Combined with layers of argument that are dived into at varying levels at will. You start off with a point of “protesters of the Iraq War in 2003 were pro-jihad”, and turn comments on the perspective of things they would endorse in Iraqi insurgency that are unrelated into excusing atrocities that happened years later.
I won’t ask someone to take it as a given that I think things like decapitating foreign journalists or domestic opposition on live TV are a bad (I do, but there are enough people out there who don’t). I will say that I’m not constantly affirming that point because it’s not the thing under discussion at the time, it’s ultimately giving ground to argument that isn’t made in good faith, and it largely functions as a post hoc justification of these military interventions.
At the very least, I will take your repeated affirmation that the idea of Islamaphobia has no legitimacy whatsoever validates the perspective that this is a worldview that uses the existence of atrocities to demonise an entire demographic of people.
As far as radicalisation goes, in a different format I could go into more depth with the intersectional world view that holds people as ultimately possessing moral agency for their own actions at the same time that the context in which their own worldviews are formed and altered is significant for accurately attributing larger trends, and the relevance of several power dynamics to that. Like, radical Islam is a thing I do view as having a core of its own homegrown reactionary conservatives at the heart of it, which are frequently if not always formed in response to progressive movements by other Muslims. At the same time as I regard the continuous flow of soldiers to them as continuously arising out of the environment created by larger international powers, which is not very discerning in its targeting. There is a recent entry on this site about how this is the way insurgencies work, how the occupying power retaliating at the populace at large (which the insurgent force does try to strategize for by hiding inside them) helps radicalise the populace in favour of the insurgents. The Islamist groups have moral agency, but so do the global powers that fight back against them, and part of why they fight back in such a manner is driven partially by the fact that they’re motivated more by national self-interest than they are with moral opposition to atrocities.
Or in cases where the crimes are committed by governments rather than insurgent groups, how the crimes are not characteristically Muslim, but characteristically totalitarian. How most of the things you are disgusted by have been carried out by governments that were in no way Islamic, and many of which were friendly to the US government, and indeed reinforced by such. Which brings back to the significance and the impact of global power dynamics.
And where the significance of describing it as characteristically Muslim is because that cultivates a world view that extends that disgust away from totalitarian regimes and reactionary insurgencies and into hundreds of millions of people just living their lives. An attitude that is apparent with a person that characterises all Palestinian people as valid military targets.
And now this post is going to be several inches long and only a couple wide because it’s formed several lines in on a comment section, and this is why I don’t find this a good format for going into the level of detail I think the topic warrants.
Still, if nothing else, I take comfort in the presumption that it’s very unlikely a random observer would look at how you’ve characterised me and take that seriously either.
Because that’s the main thing; I don’t care if you take me seriously, I certainly don’t care to try and change your mind on something. I just don’t want you to have the last word, or at least on an unchallenged word, where somebody could see a one-liner and not read more deeply into it.
@Isator Levi:
“The reason you do not take me seriously consists of a lot of preconceived narratives concerning the basis of a lot of opposition that you use to fill out spaces in arguments to reinforce your world view.”
Yes, the guy’s entire line of attack against you and me here comes down to the idea that, since we are *sometimes* saying *some* things that the worst and most stereotypical anti-imp types would say, we must therefore, clearly, agree with everything the worst and most stereotypical anti-imp types would say, and be the same personality type to boot.
It’s a “logic” that goes something like, “Alice say X, Y, and Z, and Bob says X, so obviously, Bob has to say, or at least think, Y and Z, too!”
Which is, of course, completely ridiculous as an understanding of how the world actually works.
“Still, if nothing else, I take comfort in the presumption that it’s very unlikely a random observer would look at how you’ve characterised me and take that seriously either.
Because that’s the main thing; I don’t care if you take me seriously, I certainly don’t care to try and change your mind on something. I just don’t want you to have the last word, or at least on an unchallenged word, where somebody could see a one-liner and not read more deeply into it.”
Couldn’t have put it better myself. I got into this exchange hoping to demonstrate that the guy’s opponents have rational, fact-based arguments, while he himself is reduced to screaming about how everyone who seriously disagrees with him loves the Mullahs, and I think I have succeeded at that.
Isator,
> The reason you do not take me seriously consists of a lot of preconceived narratives…
No, dear, It’s because I have seen you make excuses for the forces of ISIS. 🙂 And the record is completely plain.
I presented you with the evidence – open endorsement of the forces of jihad in Iraq, and your comment was “Errrm, akshually… they’re only mean because Bush…”
Meanwhile you ignored the actual insurgent force there which is a member of the Socialist International 🙂
You are not worth taking seriously.
> At the same time as I regard the continuous flow of soldiers to them as continuously arising out of the environment created by larger international powers,
See? You think that the reason that we have, e.g., the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Pakistan is because the “larger international powers” were horrid to them. Poor dears. When you see how those “larger international power” – who are, lets face it, probably Jews – treat them, of course it is completely understandable that they kidnap Hindu daughters for rape and sex slavery, burn down Christian churches and massacre worshippers in Nigeria, blow up civilians in Niger…. (all examples from this week, btw)
The poor dears cannot help themselves. They are just reacting to those sinister “larger international powers”.
Funny, few people have been treated so vilely by the USA as the people of Vietnam and the number of terror attacks by the Vietnamese on Americans has been zero.
You are not worth taking seriously.
@Robert Bosch:
“> At the same time as I regard the continuous flow of soldiers to them as continuously arising out of the environment created by larger international powers,
See? You think that the reason that we have, e.g., the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Pakistan is because the “larger international powers” were horrid to them. ”
As far as I can tell, in the very quote you’re responding to, Isator Levi was not talking about Pakistan at all. He was talking about the core area of ISIS. It’s you who is pathologically unable to understand that there are various different things in the world.
I was going to put this down to your hallucinations, but it could well be the case that it is only your lack of reading comprehension 😀
Isator,
I mean it is beyond parody. You assert that the reason that we have jihadis is that the “international powers” are being big meanies. But the only reason anyone is critical of Islam is that they have a phobia.
People like you are self-parodying.
@Robert Bosch:
“Isator,
I mean it is beyond parody. You assert that the reason that we have jihadis is that the “international powers” are being big meanies. ”
No, he’s asserting that that’s a contributing factor. See, that’s one of the differences between the two of us and you: We are able to understand that things happen for many reasons, while you insist that everything that everything must have one big reason, and assume that even people who disagree on everything else must clearly understand that you’re right on the “everything has one big reason”-point.
By the by, so long as you keep referring to taking people seriously, do you think any external observers are fooled by the fact that you’ve based your position on a grab bag of unrelated atrocities and keep selectively picking which one to attach to which response?
That people will overlook that you’re talking about Iraq in one instance and then jump to Pakistan in another? Back and forth between geographic locations and time periods as required?
“By the by, so long as you keep referring to taking people seriously, do you think any external observers are fooled by the fact that you’ve based your position on a grab bag of unrelated atrocities and keep selectively picking which one to attach to which response?
That people will overlook that you’re talking about Iraq in one instance and then jump to Pakistan in another? Back and forth between geographic locations and time periods as required?”
Based on what I’ve seen of him here, I’m not ruling out that he might be seriously unable to understand an idea as complicated as “different places and time periods are different places and time periods”. It’s a bit more complicated than “Muslims bad, everyone anti-Muslim good”, after all.
The word “Islamophobia” usually means “fear of and/or hostility towards people believed to be Muslims”.
Lena,
No, it means anyone who is critical of Islam.
Against slavery? You are islamophobic. Against rape? Islamophobic. Against genocide? Islamophobic. Against theocracy? Islamophobic. Against paedophilia? Islamophobic.
What would you like to call the idea of everyone from the MENA countries being evil?
Raphael,
I thank you. I keep saying that Western societies are so decadent that they have individuals who will support the most reactionary and murderous movements in the world because they don’t like their democratic opposition – and here you leap forward to prove me right! I really cannot thank you enough.
> I do not share your apparent belief that if a demographic group contains a lot of people with horrific political views, that justifies genocide against that group.
Oh, but you do, but you do… What do you think the Palestinian cause is, if not genocidal? Oh, I am sure that if it were successful and all the Jews in Israel were slaughtered you might be willing to possibly consider a moderate suggestion that you were not entirely on board with that.
The thing is, there are actual genocides going on. You can see the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, you can see what is being done to the Christians of Nigeria. I am old enough to have demonstrated for the Yazidi people, and you know something? Not one of the pro-Palestinian whiners showed up to support us. Nor will you hear a peep from that crowd about, say, the Maasalit genocide.
Let’s cut the crap. We have our opinions because we have both chosen our sides. You just chose the wrong one. I get why you chose it – supporting Israel is, like, totally uncool, and you might get bad grades, and Orange Man Bad and so on. Fair enough. It’s still the wrong side.
I chose mine because I had no desire to turn a blind eye to the most horrific atrocities. Not just against Israel, mind you, though see October 7th. The “pro Palestinian” mob broke out into celebrations _before_ Israel retalliated. But, like I say, I have no interest being on the side that is blithely insouciant to what is being done to the Hindus of Pakistan, the Christians of the Sudan and so on.
Oh, and those are real genocides, not the fictitious “genocide” in the Palestinian areas. If Israel wanted to genocide the Palestinians, there are plenty of models it could emulate. But let’s not pretend facts mean anything, hmmm?
(Exit question: you know who else says that civilian casualties in a war amount to genocide? Answer: German neo-Nazis who talk about the ‘Bomben-Holocaust’. Fine intellectual pedigree you have there)
Do you have any thoughts on contemporary persecution of Uyghurs in China, or the Bosnian genocide?
“Raphael,
I thank you. I keep saying that Western societies are so decadent that they have individuals who will support the most reactionary and murderous movements in the world because they don’t like their democratic opposition – and here you leap forward to prove me right! I really cannot thank you enough. ”
“Decadent” is what the enemies of the West call us. If you agree with them on that point, don’t go around accusing *other* people of supporting them.
And now point to exact specific words where I supported any murderous or reactionary movements. You won’t be able to, which will prove how wrong you are.
“Oh, but you do, but you do… What do you think the Palestinian cause is, if not genocidal? Oh, I am sure that if it were successful and all the Jews in Israel were slaughtered you might be willing to possibly consider a moderate suggestion that you were not entirely on board with that. ”
I have not, anywhere in this thread, stated support for “the Palestinian cause” (which is a broader than you’re willing to admit, anyway). I oppose what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. That does not mean that I support the political views of any particular Palestinians themselves. No matter how pathologically unable people like you might be to understand that, there are intermediate steps between wanting to see someone murdered and wanting that someone succeed in everything they want.
No matter how genocidal some Palestinians’ *intentions* might be, so far, they do not have the power to carry out these intentions. Israelis do.
“The thing is, there are actual genocides going on. You can see the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, you can see what is being done to the Christians of Nigeria.”
Yes. Those are all horrible things. None of them justify your own support for genocide.
” I am old enough to have demonstrated for the Yazidi people, and you know something? Not one of the pro-Palestinian whiners showed up to support us. Nor will you hear a peep from that crowd about, say, the Maasalit genocide. ”
I am not responsible for everything every person with whom you’re lumping me in because you’re pathologically unable to understand nuance or subtlety has or hasn’t said or done.
“Let’s cut the crap. We have our opinions because we have both chosen our sides. ”
No. You have chosen a side. And since you’re pathologically unable to understand that some people simply do not think in simplistic absolutist terms the way you do, you have a compulsion to assume that everyone who doesn’t support your side must be as much an absolutist supporter of the other side as you are of yours. Your assumption has nothing to do with reality.
In fact, I have always been extremely careful about choosing sides. If it wasn’t for that, perhaps I’d be an elected politician or an elected politician’s staffer by now.
But aside from voting and taking part in internet arguments like this one, I’ve almost never been politically active. And one main reason for that is that I’ve almost never seen a political movement which I was willing to *wholeheartedly* support.
But thank you for demonstrating that you know nothing about me.
” I get why you chose it – supporting Israel is, like, totally uncool, and you might get bad grades, and Orange Man Bad and so on. Fair”
Ah yes, the traditional right-wing fantasy about how supposedly, no one ever opposes you for seriously valid reasons. That’s why you’ll never get us, and you’ll never really be able to appreciate our strength. I’m almost surprised that you’re not suggesting I’m being paid by George Soros.
In any case, I have never been cool, or had much desire to be so; I haven’t had to worry about grades in a long time; and yes, I do think Donald Trump is, in fact, very bad, and that the fact that you’re using that glib phrase to dismiss any serious opposition to him shows that *you’re* mostly fine with murderous reactionary movements when it suits you politically.
“I chose mine because I had no desire to turn a blind eye to the most horrific atrocities.”
That’s a fairly staggering lack of self-awareness.
“Not just against Israel, mind you, though see October 7th. The “pro Palestinian” mob broke out into celebrations _before_ Israel retalliated.”
Repeating myself, I am not responsible for everything every person with whom you’re lumping me in because you’re pathologically unable to understand nuance or subtlety has or hasn’t said or done.
“Oh, and those are real genocides, not the fictitious “genocide” in the Palestinian areas.”
How, exactly, is putting more than a million people into a position where they have no source of food *not* genocide?
” If Israel wanted to genocide the Palestinians,”
Some leading Israeli politicians have made their intentions in that regard perfectly clear.
“there are plenty of models it could emulate.”
Their chosen models seem to be a number of bit-by-bit gradual genocides in the Americas, and a number of human-engineered famines.
“But let’s not pretend facts mean anything, hmmm?”
Interesting comment from someone who makes various ridiculous assumptions about what I’m supposedly saying, and why I am supposedly saying it, that have no basis in fact whatsoever.
“(Exit question: you know who else says that civilian casualties in a war amount to genocide?”
I have not, anywhere, said that civilian casualties in a war *generally* amount to genocide. I am saying that the particular number and type of civilian casualties in Gaza clearly demonstrate genocide.
“Answer: German neo-Nazis who talk about the ‘Bomben-Holocaust’. Fine intellectual pedigree you have there)”
Germany’s main current neo-Nazi party has the full support of the Trump Administration. That is, the people where, whenever someone is serious about opposing them, you dismiss that stance with the glib phrase “Orange Man Bad”. Fine intellectual pedigree you have there.
To take this in no particular order:
>Germany’s main current neo-Nazi party has the full support of the Trump Administration.
Really? The Trump administration has come out in favour of the NPD, now known as “Die Heimat”? That should have been headline news.
Oh, wait. You mean the AfD. You know, the party lead by a lesbian married to a Sri Lankan woman that enjoys widespread support from the gay community, and is the only one to actually oppose Jew-hatred and take the side of the Yazidi during the genocide.
Words mean things. You oppose the AfD? Fine. But to call them neo-Nazi is just unserious…
…but then you are fundamentally unserious and your words don’t mean anything – they are not really connected to any sort of reality. It’s why the Palestinians are facing genocide despite their population constantly increasing, while the explicitly genocidal aims of the Palestinians are ignored, and the Hindus and Christians and Yazidi can all go hang.
It’s why Trump keeps succeeding. It isn’t that people are blind to his folly and his wickedness, it is that it doesn’t matter when the alternative are people like you who make excuses for actual forces of tyranny, slavery and genocide.
Like I say, we have both chosen our sides. You just lack the honesty to admit that you have made a choice – but you have. When you make consistent excuses for one side and assume the worst of the other, when you engage in naked propaganda, then you have chosen a side.
Sorry, but that is the way that it works.
> “Decadent” is what the enemies of the West call us. If you agree with them on that point, don’t go around accusing *other* people of supporting them.
Tip: “I know you are but what am I?” stopped being cool in kindergarten. By “decadent” I mean something specific: morally unserious, using language as a social signal unconnected to reality, and unable to conceive that there is a real world with real people beyond your shores and outside of your class and therefore make all choices based on your parochial biases – and to be completely unable to stand for anything.
I am happy to use the word “pathetic” if you prefer.
“To take this in no particular order:”
You’re taking a few small parts, which you mistakenly think you have good answers to, and ignoring the rest. Presumably because you don’t have any answers to the rest.
“Really? The Trump administration has come out in favour of the NPD, now known as “Die Heimat”? That should have been headline news.”
That party used to have a fairly serious amount of support in elections in some places. That electoral support seems to have mostly collapsed by now. What do you think where their voters have gone?
“Oh, wait. You mean the AfD. You know, the party lead by a lesbian married to a Sri Lankan woman that enjoys widespread support from the gay community, ”
Yes, so some of their best friends are lesbians and gays and Asians. You clearly think that’s a devastating argument against what I’m saying. And somehow, I’m the unserious one.
More seriously, you yourself would certainly mock, scoff at, and dismiss that particular line of argument if someone would make it about Jews in leading positions in movements or camps which you hate.
“…but then you are fundamentally unserious and your words don’t mean anything – they are not really connected to any sort of reality. ”
If you want to claim that my words are not really connected to any sort of reality, it would make more sense to demonstrate that instead of just asserting it.
“It’s why the Palestinians are facing genocide despite their population constantly increasing,”
I’m specifically talking about what Israel is doing in Gaza. Are you arguing that the Palestinian population in Gaza has increased in the last two years? With what food?
“while the explicitly genocidal aims of the Palestinians are ignored”
I am not ignoring those aims. Repeating myself, no matter how pathologically unable people like you might be to understand that, there are intermediate steps between wanting to see someone murdered and wanting that someone succeed in everything they want.
And because, no matter what delusions you might have about me, I do understand that there is a physical reality beyond the world of words, I think that while words matter, actions matter too, and so does the extent to which people are actually physically able to put their words into actions.
” and the Hindus and Christians and Yazidi can all go hang.”
Proof that I think that. I don’t.
“It’s why Trump keeps succeeding.”
As of now, the last time Trump has clearly succeeded was in November 2024. I know from my own experience that, from a certain age onwards, time really flies, in ways that are both frustrating and depressing. But 16 months can be a very long time in politics, and in this case, they clearly were.
” It isn’t that people are blind to his folly and his wickedness, it is that it doesn’t matter when the alternative are people like you who make excuses for actual forces of tyranny, slavery and genocide.”
You seem to assume that the average Trump supporter supports Trump for the same reasons as you do. That is a naive, short-sighted, and, frankly, reality-denying assumption to make.
If you would look at what Trump supporters are actually saying about him, it’s pretty clear that they mostly don’t see him as foolish or wicked. They see him as basically the greatest man who ever lived. They constantly talk about how amazing he is.
Or in some cases, they used to, until they decided that he was too close to “the Jews” after all. Nick Fuentes didn’t temporarily support Trump because he’s so deeply concerned about genocidal Jew-haters.
Feel free to quote the words in which I have made excuses for actual forces of tyranny, slavery and genocide any time you like.
“Like I say, we have both chosen our sides. You just lack the honesty to admit that you have made a choice – but you have.”
Ironically, to the extent to which I *have* chosen a side, it’s exactly the side that you *think* you have chosen, while you’re supporting some of its most dangerous enemies.
That is, the side of Western modernity and the Enlightenment. Now, as you partially, but only partially, understand, there are a lot of people in the world right now who would like to destroy these things.
One of these groups of people are the jihadis. Their chances of destroying Western modernity and the Enlightenment in the West itself are fairly small. Some other such groups are some of the core components of the Trump coalition, and their friends in Russia. They have, right now, much better chances of succeeding. And that’s why I see jihadis as a lower priority than some of your friends and allies for now.
But, that said, I have no plans of ever supporting anyone or anything *unconditionally*. Only a completely morally bankrupt person would do that.
“When you make consistent excuses for one side and assume the worst of the other, when you engage in naked propaganda, then you have chosen a side.
Sorry, but that is the way that it works.”
Quote my “consistent excuses”. Quote them.
“Tip: “I know you are but what am I?” stopped being cool in kindergarten.”
It’s what you’re hurling at me when you accuse me of supporting genocide.
“By “decadent” I mean something specific: morally unserious, using language as a social signal unconnected to reality, and unable to conceive that there is a real world with real people beyond your shores”
One thing I do conceive about the real world with real people beyond my shores is that it is *complicated*. Anyone who doesn’t get that doesn’t get the world. And you are completely unwilling, and perhaps neurologically unable, to get that.
“and outside of your class”
Oh, please tell me what you think what class I belong to. This is probably going to be pretty unintentionally funny.
“and therefore make all choices based on your parochial biases”
See, that’s what you’ll never get about us, your opponents: You don’t get that many of us have reasons for opposing you that are based, not on our lack of experience with the world, but precisely on our experiences with the world, and with those bad aspects of it that you ignore or actively support.
You will probably never get that, while most of the time, these days, Christian religious conservatism is less outright murderous than Muslim religious conservatism, it still can and often does cause serious damage to the lives of many people, and those people are unlikely to be interested in your lectures about how they would have had it much worse under the Mullahs, and therefore if they’re morally serious, they have to ally themselves with Christian fundamentalists.
But I guess their experiences are just “parochial biases” to you.
You will probably never get that many people oppose right-wing economic policies because their consequences led them into serious financial desperation, sometimes to life-threatening extents.
But I guess their experiences are just “parochial biases” to you.
You will probably never get that many people oppose right-wing political movements because they or people close to them got directly attacked, perhaps physically, by the bigoted haters who form the core of such movements.
But I guess their experiences are just “parochial biases” to you.
You will probably never get that many Jews oppose Trump because his supporters kept photoshopping their faces into cartoon gas chambers on social media.
But I guess their experiences are just “parochial biases” to you.
You say that I, and your opponents in general, are unable to conceive that there is a real world with real people beyond our shores. But to you, what happens to many of the real people beyond *your* shores is just a collection of “parochial biases”.
Tell that to the Sandy Hook parents.
> Tell that to the Sandy Hook parents.
“Because Sandy Hook, it’s fine for me to suck off the Mullahs”
I confess, that is a new one on me….
> More seriously, you yourself would certainly mock, scoff at, and dismiss that particular line of argument if someone would make it about Jews in leading positions in movements or camps which you hate.
If there were prominent Jews at the head of HAMAS, I would take notice.
…sorry, that didn’t go the way you thought it would, did it? XD
Your claim, you silly little person, wasn’t that the AfD was naughty and horrid. It was that they were neo-Nazi. And you have provided not a shred of evidence and ignored the counter-evidence
> Quote my “consistent excuses”. Quote them.
Basically, everything you have written 😀
Like I say, I am not in the business of taking you seriously. You’ve taken a side, with the rapey-murder-kill-the-Jews-slave-the-Yazidi people. I’ve chosen the other side 🙂
I chose my side because I am against the whole rapey-murder-slavery thing, and you chose your side because otherwise the cool kids will make fun of you. That is all this is, and I am not going to make you feel better about yourself by pretending that you are worth taking seriously.
(pro-tip: no one can do that. It’s not a complex)
“> Tell that to the Sandy Hook parents.
“Because Sandy Hook, it’s fine for me to suck off the Mullahs”
I confess, that is a new one on me….”
No, because of, among many other things, Sandy Hook, and more specifically, the campaign of smears and harassment against the grieving parents afterwards, I think it’s important to fight against any political movement that would welcome people like the people who did that into their midst. Because unlike you, I think there is a real world populated by real people beyond the shores of what I like to pay attention to.
“If there were prominent Jews at the head of HAMAS, I would take notice.”
There are Jews in prominent roles in organizations where no serious person would equate these organizations with Hamas, but you probably would.
…sorry, that didn’t go the way you thought it would, did it? XD
“Your claim, you silly little person,”
You forgot to call me a “Big Poopyhead”. That would have even more definitely proven that you are a serious person and I am not.
“wasn’t that the AfD was naughty and horrid. It was that they were neo-Nazi. And you have provided not a shred of evidence”
There’s this Höcke guy, of whom you might have heard. Though I guess that as a card-carrying serious person who acknowledges reality better than others, you will go on pretending he doesn’t exist, shouting “Lalalalala I can’t hear you!” at anyone who brings him up.
“and ignored the counter-evidence”
I explicitly acknowledged your counter-evidence, and explained why it doesn’t matter that much.
“> Quote my “consistent excuses”. Quote them.
Basically, everything you have written 😀 ”
If there would be any concrete quotes proving your point, you would have quoted them by now. After all, it’s not as if you lack a strong motivation to do so.
“Like I say, I am not in the business of taking you seriously.”
You were taking me seriously enough to talk at length about how silly and wrong I am, back when you still thought that you would be easily able to take everything I have to say apart. That didn’t work out, so you switched to simply ignoring most of my points, because you can’t answer them. Now, finally, you’re going out in one last blaze of empty bluster, which is what people generally do when they got nothing.
No wonder you support a President who’s all about empty bluster.
“I chose my side because I am against the whole rapey-murder-slavery thing,”
No, you’re only against it when your favorite enemies do it. I’m always against it. That’s the difference.
“and you chose your side because otherwise the cool kids will make fun of you. That is all this is,”
You have not provided a shred of evidence for that claim. What does that make you, by your own standards?
“individuals who will support the most reactionary and murderous movements in the world because they don’t like their democratic opposition”
Since your memory extends so clearly back through 22 years, you might recall how people in Barack Obama’s political camp were constantly critical of the fact that he was continuing and to some extent escalating the military actions of the preceding administration (particularly the drone strikes), and failed to shut down Guantanamo Bay.
People who are critical of this stuff do in fact try to hold their own elected officials to task for it.
Speaking of Guantanamo Bay – I wonder how many people still remember that from 2007 to 2014 at the very least, there had never been more than a third of Americans who had supported closing it?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/171653/americans-continue-oppose-closing-guantanamo-bay.aspx
(Besides the obvious moral implications, I hope this example would show to some of those taken in by the “popularists” etc. that it is very much possible to get elected in a democracy while holding unpopular stances on key issues – and on the left too, not just the right.)
@Raphael,
There actually is a political party/movement in Germany that really does share many essential characteristics with Nazism. It is violently anti-democratic, and I mean that literally, both in the sense that it is violent and opposed to democracy as a matter of principle. It hates Jews. It worships war – thinks that war is a noble enterprise. It seeks the restoration of lost and vanished empire for the purposes of world conquest.
That party is Hizb ut-Tahrir.
And I am going to guess you have never even thought about it…
You think that’s bad, just wait until you discover the sect that’s ubiquitous in pretty much any German city with a large migrant population, whose founding cleric preached that Jews are “the Devil incarnate”, that all Jewish homes and synagogues should be burned to the ground, and that anybody who refuses to sign on to this program is an infidel, even endorsing wild conspiracy theories like the idea that Jewish doctors routinely attempt to murder their non-Jewish patients with slow-acting poisons. And these are far from idle threats: the violent anti-Semitic crimes perpetrated by adherents of this sect are among the worst in modern German history, which is obviously saying quite a lot.
Unfortunately, woke political correctness is so rampant in today’s Germany that it’d be pretty much unthinkable for any major German politician to stand up and demand that this sect’s adherents renounce the teachings of their anti-Semitic founder, let alone demand that they abandon Lutheranism altogether.
@Skinner,
Ah, you must think you’re clever.
Yes, because Martin Luther was anti-Semitic 500 years ago, we shouldn’t talk about murderous Jew hatred today.
Live with that if you can…
Ah, a cultural crusader. Haven’t seen one of those in a day.
I unfortunately had to see this one for the last several days back in the last Dune post.
Guess how quickly seeing the Fremen and Imperium through the lens of contemporary politics stopped being subtext.
The better question is: guess how many posts it took you to prove my point.
You know, constantly reasserting that Islam is the greatest existentially threatening evil that is enabled by effete weaklings does not in itself constitute a proof of the reality of Islam as the world’s greatest evil, the existence of effete weaklings, or that the functionality of ongoing atrocities is the result of effete weaklings.
There was no proof there, just continuous repetition of cliches.
@Isator Levi
“that is enabled by effete weaklings”
What, the guy is talking about “effete weaklings”? And than he’s accusing *me* of having the intellectual pedigree of neo-Nazis?
It is not the term that was literally used, but I regard it as an apt way to summarise the apparent thinking behind why genocide happens in the modern world, and general viewpoint of people he disagrees with politically.
I actually wrote that you were willing to make excuses for the forces of jihad while assuming the worst of the West because you are morally unserious and don’t see beyond the prejudices of your class. “Effete weakling” is a dunce’s cap that you have skilfully fitted on your own head. I would never dream of removing it.
“I actually wrote that you were willing to make excuses for the forces of jihad while assuming the worst of the West”
Provide concrete examples of Isator Levi either making excuses for the forces of jihad or assuming anything about the West. Not individual Western leaders, but the West in general.
““Effete weakling” is a dunce’s cap that you have skilfully fitted on your own head. I would never dream of removing it.”
The idea that some people are “effete weaklings” and that that is a serious factor in politics is an important part of the way Nazis, old and neo, thought and think. It is also, interestingly enough, an important part of the way Mullahs think. It is generally an important part of the way many of the worst people in the world think.
So if you think that way yourself, it’s ridiculous for you to go around accusing other people of sharing intellectual pedigree with neo-Nazis or supporting Mullahs.
Raphael,
> The idea that some people are “effete weaklings” and that that is a serious factor in politics is an important part of the way Nazis, old and neo, thought and think. It is also, interestingly enough, an important part of the way Mullahs think
Absolutely, 100% true! So I think it is highly significant that both you and Isator here introduced it, and obsess about it.
I mean, it fits with your anti-Jewish views, your sympathy for jihad and, well, basically everything you write.
(for the record, I don’t think you think your are those big burly macho types you obsess over. I know you think that as long as you suck up to them, it’ll always be someone else loaded onto the trains. Spoiler: it won’t)
“Absolutely, 100% true! So I think it is highly significant that both you and Isator here introduced it, and obsess about it.”
We introduced it in the context of describing what we think is going on inside your head.
“I mean, it fits with your anti-Jewish views,”
I am not voting for a party that includes a leading politician who’s on the record as saying that he thinks it’s a serious problem that Hitler is always just seen as a bad guy. I am not cheering on a President who first rode to power on a wave of passionate supporters who, already back then, loved to post gas chamber memes to social media.
“your sympathy for jihad and, well, basically everything you write.”
Quote. Where. I. Am. Expressing. Sympathy. For Jihad.
Quote. Me.
“(for the record, I don’t think you think your are those big burly macho types you obsess over. I know you think that as long as you suck up to them, it’ll always be someone else loaded onto the trains. Spoiler: it won’t)”
What? The only context in which I’ve brought up that type in this thread at all was when I was *making fun of* the people who are obsessed with it.
*You* are the one who’s supporting a movement that’s all about admiring that type.
Of course, they say that when it comes to right-wingers like you, every accusation is a confession. Now, I don’t think that’s always true. When right-wingers accuse us of having too much empathy, it clearly isn’t.
But with most of what you’ve said so far? Yep, perfectly true. Accusing me of supporting genocide? Check. Accusing me of supporting enemies of the Enlightenment? Check. Accusing me of supporting antisemites? Check. Accusing me of sucking up to big burly mach types? Check.
Oh, and just for the record, I know very well that if Western democracy gets destroyed, I’ll probably get killed. That’s *why* I think it’s so important to fight against people like you.
> We introduced it in the context of…
So, you are the ones who introduce it and it is somehow my fault 🙂 Sure, sure, kid, whatever you need to tell yourself 😀
>I am not voting for a party that includes a leading politician who’s on the record as saying that he thinks it’s a serious problem that Hitler is always just seen as a bad guy. I am not cheering on a President who first rode to power on a wave of passionate supporters who, already back then, loved to post gas chamber memes to social media.
That guy sounds just _awful_. 😀 Tell me, when did you first start seeing him. Is he in the room with you right now? Can other people see him? Did you start seeing him after your dad left? XD
Don’t worry, there are options for people like you. Medication and institutionalization works wonders. 😀
“>I am not voting for a party that includes a leading politician who’s on the record as saying that he thinks it’s a serious problem that Hitler is always just seen as a bad guy. I am not cheering on a President who first rode to power on a wave of passionate supporters who, already back then, loved to post gas chamber memes to social media.
That guy sounds just _awful_. 😀 Tell me, when did you first start seeing him. Is he in the room with you right now? Can other people see him? Did you start seeing him after your dad left? XD”
Are you telling me that you are not voting for a party that includes a leading politician who’s on the record as saying that he thinks it’s a serious problem that Hitler is always just seen as a bad guy?
Are you telling me that you are not cheering on a President who first rode to power on a wave of passionate supporters who, already back then, loved to post gas chamber memes to social media?
Given that you’re definitely doing the latter, and probably doing the former, I’m quite glad that you are not in the room with me right now. Who knows what you’d do?
Rafael,
No, no I am not 😀 But enough about me, lets talk about you.
Olanzapine and Clozapine can work. There are also many institutions that can take you up. I would suggest a lobotomy but there isn’t much in there to fish out in the first place…
“Rafael,
No, no I am not 😀 ”
Are you denying that you support Donald Trump, or are you denying that Donald Trump has, from the start, had the passionate support of lots of people who love to post gas chamber memes on social media?
If it’s the former, you are contradicting some of your earlier posts here. If it’s the latter, you are contradicting well-known and easily observable facts.
“But enough about me, lets talk about you.
Olanzapine and Clozapine can work. There are also many institutions that can take you up.”
Yes, I do have various mental issues. Unlike right-wingers like you, I am not in denial about them, because I don’t think of myself as infallible. And unlike in your case, it doesn’t reduce me to a pathologically simplistic absolutist black-and-white single-villain-ideology worldview.
“I would suggest a lobotomy but there isn’t much in there to fish out in the first place…”
Always good to know that people are taking their cues on handling political opponents from the Soviet authorities.
Rafael,
> If it’s the former, you are contradicting some of your earlier posts here
I was going to put this down to your hallucinations, but it could well be the case that it is only your lack of reading comprehension 😀
Nowhere did I say that I was a supporter of Trump. I actually said that he was a very bad man. I just don’t take the side of the Mullahs as a result.
> Yes, I do have various mental issue
Oh, I could tell. Believe me, everyone could tell 😀
“Oh, I could tell. Believe me, everyone could tell 😀”
As I said, one difference between you and me that I’m aware of it. My issues don’t include a *complete* lack of self-awareness.
Oh, and just out of curiousity, are you unable to read the letters of the Latin Alphabet, or do you seriously believe that you can somehow make me feel bad about myself by constantly misspelling my name? Or is it yet another effect of your, by now, demonstrated habit of reading only half of what other people are writing, and falsely assuming that you can imagine the other half?
“I just don’t take the side of the Mullahs as a result. ”
Neither am I. Yet you’re absolutely convinced that I am. I was going to put this down to your hallucinations, but it could well be the case that it is only your lack of reading comprehension 😀
Incidentally, for the whole perspective of “you only have this world view because of a starting position of hating American Republicans”:
I actually have the world view because I am Irish, and the substance of my history education was largely concerned with the dynamics between the United Kingdom/British Empire and the island of Ireland. Where the British were not universally designated as rapacious monsters, and the crimes and atrocities of Irish rebels were not shied away from. And yet, I was also educated to see it in terms of the larger power dynamics in play, of which of these countries was stronger and had priorities that created an exploitative relationship with the other, and how that created the context for the existence of bodies like the IRA. Where the ultimate thing that ended Irish political violence was not so much “overwhelming force against the people perpetrating it” as changing the conditions that guided regular people in its direction.
A country where things like the Good Friday Agreement have are a landmark achievement in the ending of sectarian violence as part of a process of normalizing civil rights for a persecuted minority.
That is the lens through which I view similar conflicts in the world.
Isator & Raphael,
To take you more seriously than you deserve, there is a book you should check out: “The Enemy at Home” by Dinesh D’Souza. He makes the same argument that you do, that the jihadis are only horrid and mean because of our behaviour, but with an interesting twist. Instead of saying it’s all the fault of western foreign policy, he says it is all the fault of western social liberalism. He piles on quote after quote of the preachers of Jihad condemning the West for its indulgence of sodomy, usury, women’s emancipation…. And he therefore draws the conclusion that if we want the jihad to go away, we should reign those things in.
If you can see what is wrong with that argument, you will see how you look.
Tata for now.
“Isator & Raphael,
To take you more seriously than you deserve, there is a book you should check out: “The Enemy at Home” by Dinesh D’Souza. He makes the same argument that you do, that the jihadis are only horrid and mean because of our behaviour,”
Problem is, the very fact that you believe that we are saying that in the first place is just a result of your poor reading comprehension, and perhaps your basic brain structure.
*I* have, before this comment, not said anything here on the causes of jihadism at all. For what it’s worth, I think it’s mainly an extreme form of religious traditionalism, which has all kinds of reasons, none of which are good ones.
As for Isator, he has said that one contributing factor to some forms of jihadism is bad things done by major powers. That is neither a statement of a single cause nor an excuse for anything.
But your brain seems to have such a simple structure that it genuinely can not understand anything more complicated than “Four legs good, two legs bad!” And therefore, when you saw Isator talking about horrible actions by major powers helping the recruitment of jihadists, you instantly thought “He’s clearly saying that that’s the only reason why they’re so horrible, and absolving them of blame!”
And when you saw me agreeing with some of Isator’s points, you instantly thought “He’s clearly on the same side as Isator, so he must agree with everything that the fantasy version of Isator which lives inside my head is saying!”
Stuff like that is why it’s unlikely that anyone smart enough to understand the fundamental flaws of single-villain ideologies would take *you* seriously.
You accuse Isator, me, and everyone else who is serious about opposing Trump and his allies is unable to comprehend that there’s a real world populated by real people with real lives. But you seem to be completely unable to understand what real people even *are*. You seem to be completely convinced that the world is entirely populated by one-dimensional caricatures.
Of course, chances are that all of this will fly right over your head, because it’s simply too complicated for you to understand, and you will therefore ignore it, like you ignored most of the points in my more recent comments.
D’Souza’s argument is based in a combination of already holding various bigotries that are complementary to what would otherwise be his enemies, and offloading the threat of violence as a scare tactic to help validate those bigotries and sell the demonisation of them to the public.
My argument is based in the idea that the actions and policies taken in the self-interest of the world’s most powerful countries are major contributing factors to creating an environment in which reactionary conservatives and general authoritarian strongmen can thrive, and find a consistent stream of footsoldiers.
These are not the same.
I don’t know if you’ve yet seen my posts talking about my personal cultural experience as an Irish person, but it’s my object example of how doing nothing but cracking down on a populace engaged in sectarian insurgency does not work, and the thing that is effective is de-escalating to create conditions that change hearts and minds.
Do you have any example of the opposite having a desirable end result?
(In addition to this, I will acknowledge the fact that de-escalation of Irish militancy also came as a result of people within that camp who saw that the insurgency wasn’t really working either, and came to their own position of seeking peace. For Islamist insurgent movements in the world, I recognise that such a thing is somewhere between far less and non-existent, although I think that is not helped by the far greater scope of threat they have to face. For the totalitarian regimes of the world… there have been movements of moderation within Iranian politics and society that were gradually gaining ground. Part of the current problem is the extent to which the Trump administration undercut them.)
“For the totalitarian regimes of the world… there have been movements of moderation within Iranian politics and society that were gradually gaining ground. Part of the current problem is the extent to which the Trump administration undercut them.”
Sorry, but here we disagree. First, those great movements of moderation within Iranian politics and society basically seem to have been the Susan Collins of pro-regime politics. And second, I don’t see why I should care about people moderately stoning others to death.
As for the Ireland comparison, yes, there are some parallels, but I don’t think anyone during the Troubles ever did anything quite as bad as, say, ISIS. While we’re at it, on the other side of the equation, the last time the British starved large numbers of people in Ireland was in the 19th century, and I think even back then, they didn’t besiege people and prevent them from leaving to look for food elsewhere, or shoot them to death when approaching purported food distribution centers.
And cultural conditions are different. For instance, I don’t think that even during the stuffiest years under de Valera, the Republic was ever quite as unpleasant a place to live as the jihadist-run parts of the Middle East.
A better comparison for the modern Middle East might be a hypothetical parallel history version of Ireland where, for the last hundred years, people did *not* have the option of relatively easily moving to richer, less culturally conservative places where they already spoke the local language.
Isator,
Like I say, neither of you are worth taking seriously. Isator, your whole line amounts to a whine that D’Souza is excusing the jihad for _bad_ reasons while you are excusing the jihad for _good_ reasons.
Newsflash: I don’t care. I don’t care why you are throwing down with the rapey murder people, and I am also not buying your self-pitying self-justification.
In any case, the distinction between people like you and D’Souza isn’t even the distinction between a louse and a flea. I have never forgotten how, when we had our Kristallnacht back in ’06 and the Charlie Hebdo massacre more recently, you lot made weaselly excuses for that.
> I don’t know if you’ve yet seen my posts talking about my personal cultural experience as an Irish person,
Oh, lord, this just keeps getting worse. Yes, we all remember how the IRA crashed a protestant dance, raped and murdered the girls, and shared their videos of doing this to wild celebrations among their own people. We all remember who the Protestants rounded up Catholics for sale on the slave market. We all remember…
Wait, we don’t remember any of that. Maybe it is because – hear me out – the Irish aren’t fucking stone age inbred savages? Maybe that is why we have suddenly seen Catholics and Protestants in Ireland unite against the real menace?
(yes, yes, you think calling people “stone age inbred savages” is mean. I think torture-rape-murder is mean. It’s another point where we differ…)
I notice that even Raphael is taken aback by this line of nonsense. And well he might be. The kind of savagery we see from the Jihad and the peoples that support it is not only well beyond the Troubles of Ireland, it is well beyond even Nazi Germany. The Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to hide their atrocities. The forces of Jihad boast of them and celebrate them.
But let me not let Raphael off the hook here:
> And therefore, when you saw Isator talking about horrible actions by major powers
Actually, no. What I have said is that when you and he decide to give “reasons” for the Jihadis on one hand, and then assume that the “major powers” are doing “horrible actions” just ‘cos, then you have chosen your side. It is not a side that I want any part of.
I am not accusing you of ideological sympathy here, mind you. I don’t think you have a deep understanding of the theology of Jihad. I think you are taking your side out of a mixture of class-interest and political self-image.
I just don’t care.
@Robert Bosch:
“Like I say, neither of you are worth taking seriously.”
Given that you have, with no shred of factual evidence whatsoever, made all kind of claims about me and my life of which I, since I know a bit about myself and my life, know that they are bullshit, I don’t see why anyone should find your claim to be an authority on who or what should or shouldn’t be taken seriously all that convincing.
If I would tell you that I know for sure, with absolute certainty, that you live in a small cottage deep inside a forest, and you would know that, well, you don’t, you would probably conclude from this that I generally have no idea what I am talking about. Same with your statements about me.
Anyway, your apparent belief that either Isator or me *wants* to be taken seriously by you is almost cute in its unshakable certainty that everyone craves your approval.
“Newsflash: I don’t care. I don’t care why you are throwing down with the rapey murder people, and I am also not buying your self-pitying self-justification.”
Interestingly enough, that’s a pretty good description of my view of you. Although I admit that I have some minimal interest in your motives as a matter of basic psychological curiosity.
“I have never forgotten how, when we had our Kristallnacht back in ’06 and the Charlie Hebdo massacre more recently, you lot made weaselly excuses for that.”
I have never made any excuses, weaselly or otherwise, for the Charlie Hebdo massacre. And in 2006 I was actually temporarily pro-Israel, which I am, of course, not at all proud of. Besides, I strongly doubt that you knew I existed in either 2006 or 2015.
So your claim to have never forgotten how I made weaselly excuses for either atrocity is simply a plain, bold-faced lie. Unless it is based on your pathological inability to understand obscure, difficult concepts like “different people are different from each other”.
“(yes, yes, you think calling people “stone age inbred savages” is mean. I think torture-rape-murder is mean. It’s another point where we differ…)”
You do realize – oh wait, you probably don’t – that you are calling most of the targets of the raping and murdering “stone age inbred savages”, too?
This fits in well with the tendency of many right-wingers to simultaneously see the people of the Middle East generally as worthless monsters, and see them as oppressed masses who should be liberated from the tyranny of the worthless monsters who rule over them, using either line of argument depending on what’s convenient at any given moment. Which one is it?
“But let me not let Raphael off the hook here:
> And therefore, when you saw Isator talking about horrible actions by major powers
Actually, no. What I have said is that when you and he decide to give “reasons” for the Jihadis on one hand, and then assume that the “major powers” are doing “horrible actions” just ‘cos,”
I have not, either here or anywhere else, assumed that the major powers are doing horrible actions “just ‘cos”. As usual, you love to talk about the importance of facing facts, but make up fact-free bullshit about people you don’t like whenever it suits you.
“then you have chosen your side. It is not a side that I want any part of.”
Ah yes, the choosing sides thing you love to talk about. Let’s cut through the crap on that, shall we?
I have chosen the side of democracy, personal freedom, and careful, critical though, and of opposing all types of autocratic, antidemocratic, hateful mass-murderers and wannabe mass-murderers.
You have chosen the side of *some* of the world’s autocratic, antidemocratic, hateful mass-murderers and wannabe mass-murderers because you think they are a smaller evil necessary to fight against some of the world’s *other* autocratic, antidemocratic, hateful mass-murderers and wannabe mass-murderers.
You have basically decided to throw in your lot with some fascists because you think that they will defend you against some other fascists. Hint: they won’t.
You don’t like how this makes you look, so you’ve convinced yourself, and work hard at convincing others, that the side I have chosen doesn’t actually exist, that, as a practical matter, everyone *has* to choose some of the world’s autocratic, antidemocratic, hateful mass-murderers and wannabe mass-murderers over some others, and that therefore, since I oppose those autocratic, antidemocratic, hateful mass-murderers and wannabe mass-murderers with whom you’ve sided, I must support those autocratic, antidemocratic, hateful mass-murderers and wannabe mass-murderers whom you hate.
Basically, your attitude towards Trump and the broader Trumpist movement is like the belief of 1930s British Appeasement politicians that this nice, certainly a bit unbalanced but still generally agreeable, Herr Hitler would surely protect them from those nasty Bolsheviks. You know very well how that worked out. Well, call me whatever you want, but I think Mustache Man was Bad.
Oh, now you’ll probably repeat your claim that you don’t actually support Trump, you just see him as the smaller evil. Yes, I know, you don’t support Trump, not at all. You just, almost coincidentally, viciously attack or snidely dismiss anyone who seriously opposes him.
That is, funnily enough, something you have in common with the pre-March-2026 version of Glenn Greenwald. Perhaps the two of you should meet and bond over common experiences.
“I think you are taking your side out of a mixture of class-interest”
I have not given you any good reasons to think you know which class I belong to. There is only the possible *bad* reason that I might have said some things that somehow reminded you of some other things said by some people who belong or belonged to this or that class. But that’s not, by any rational standard, a sound line of reasoning.
Once again, the guy who claims to care more about facts than most people here makes up fact-free bullshit about people he doesn’t like because it suits him.
But, in any case, just out of curiosity, please tell me which class you think I belong to. I have two different theories about your views on that and wonder which one it is.
“I just don’t care.”
Oh, that’s fine. I don’t care why you have temporarily, indirectly, chosen to side with people like Björn Höcke, Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, either. Yes, I know, some of them oppose this war while you support it, and some of them have even turned against the Glorious Leader recently. But before that happened, you were willing to share a camp with them.
Responding to something from another subthread here to keep things easier to keep track of:
“That is, of course, not true. There is a reason that I wrote that Devereaux’ piece is very good. There are people who are opposed to this war for serious reasons.
That isn’t you or your chum Isator. You are both morally unserious and unlettered”
I have not, as far as I can see, posted anything in this thread that is all that different from what Bret has written, except for some small comments on economic matters. The fact that you think I have just demonstrates you poor reading comprehension.
Raphael,
> Interestingly enough, that’s a pretty good description of my view of you.
Show me one place where I throw down with the rapey murder people. Just one.
….
Dam da da dum…
… thought so.
It’s not the case that we are both defending legitimate yet opposing moral viewpoints. I mean, it _really_ isn’t. It’s the case where you take the side of the rapey murder people and I don’t.
It’s that simple.
But wait. Let me guess. You have the midwit idea that “it’s never that simple”.
Except it really is.
> I have chosen the side of democracy, personal freedom,
Lol. Go tell it to the Palestinians whose side you have taken. Go on, see how far you get.
> You have chosen the side of *some* of the world’s autocratic, antidemocratic, hateful mass-murderers and wannabe mass-murderers
Name them, bucko 🙂 Name the autocratic, anti-democratic chappies I am in favour of. Come on humiliate yourself further!
…
Yah. Thought so.
> I have not given you any good reasons to think you know which class I belong to
Oh, but you have, you have. Sorry, but you guys are walking cliches 🙂 It is _extremely_ obvious what your class and background are, what insecurities drive your views.
> I don’t care why you have temporarily, indirectly, chosen to side with people like Björn Höcke, Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens,
Lol. Seriously, lol. You silly, silly little man: Carlson, Fuentes, Owens are all _on your side_. They are all pro-Mullah, making excuses for the Jihad, anti-Israel and anti-Jew….
These are your people, dummy. Embrace them 🙂
Well, tell then which class Raphael is of, for us others watching this fight. If you don’t, you prove him right that you can’t. And I might have missed something in some earlier thread, but we’re does he say he supports islamism? Or is your claim just besked on a a priori refusal to accept the possibility of a third position? But would that not rather mean that they are supporting islamism unconsciously (like Orwells “pacifism is objectively pro fascist”), rather than having chosen a side?
@Micael Gustavsson:
For now, I have two working theories about his “knowledge” (in the “what you know that ain’t so”-sense) on that matter:
First, he might think that I’m a member of the cocktail party circuit chattering classes. That was my initial guess. If that’s what he thinks, it would have been more fun if he had said so openly from the start, because that would have given me a more clear-cut opportunity to laugh at him. My membership of the cocktail party circuit chattering classes would certainly come as interesting news to my bank account, the contacts list on my phone, my CV, and anyone visiting me at my place.
For what it’s worth, if that’s his guess, err, I mean, “certain obvious knowledge”, then I’m not even denying that the walking cliches he talks about exist, and that some of them really are as bad as he says they are. It’s just that his absolute certainty that I “am” that type would be a textbook example of jumping to false conclusions based on insufficient evidence. Which, of course, is exactly what much of his view of the world, his place in it, and his friends’ and enemies’ places in it, is based on.
Messrs. Dunning and Kruger might have something to say on that. Although he might well see them as walking cliches in that mold, too.
Anyway, my second, IMO less likely, theory is that he might think that I am a low-income person who opposes the politicians he has sided with for economic reasons. That would be a lot closer to the truth. Not the whole truth, mind you, but closer. But I don’t see how basing my politics on not wanting to starve would be something to apologize for. After all, if I starve or freeze in the street, it won’t help me much if I spend the last few days of my life a little bit safer from Mullahs than I might otherwise have been. And if he doesn’t want me to oppose the politicians he’s sided with because those politicians want me to starve, he might try to convince those politicians to stop wanting me to starve.
As for your last point, to be fairer to him than he probably deserves, he has explicitly said that he sees me as “just” objectively pro-jihad rather than consciously so. It’s funny if he brings up Orwell, though, given that he’s a walking illustration of what Orwell was getting at in his Notes on Nationalism, and to some extent in his depiction of the sheep in Animal Farm. (“You might say that it’s more complicated than ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’, but it really is that simple!”)
@Robert Bosch:
“Raphael,
> Interestingly enough, that’s a pretty good description of my view of you.
Show me one place where I throw down with the rapey murder people. Just one.
….
Dam da da dum…
… thought so.”
If you’d be a bit more into serious thought of any kind, you might have considered that writing several lines of back-and-forth between you and your enemies based on the absolutely certain assumption that they won’t be able to say anything at the point where your script requires them to not be able to say anything can be a bit short-sighted.
Did you seriously believe that I would not anticipate that very question, and think about my answer in advance?
To quote you:
“It’s why Trump keeps succeeding. It isn’t that people are blind to his folly and his wickedness, it is that it doesn’t matter when the alternative are people like you who make excuses for actual forces of tyranny, slavery and genocide.”
There you are. Trump’s folly, which even you admit exists, definitely includes being murder-y, and probably includes bing rapey, too.
Most famously, there are, of course, the cases of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Yes, I know, in Good’s case, her not-at-all murderers fans are arguing that it was really self-defense because her car supposedly bumped a bit into him, though clearly not enough to seriously affect his aim when he shot her immediately afterwards. Yeah, sure, whatever. As for Pretti, it’s a lot more difficult to spin forming a group of people to beat up a man who is lying on the ground for a while, and then shooting him dead, as self-defense. Though, knowing you, you might well try.
And those are just two cases where there were cameras at hand to record what was happening. Does anyone know for sure how many cases there are where there were no cameras present, or the videos never got public?
Now, you might argue that those are just two people, and the Mullahs and other jihadists are murdering a lot more people all the time, and I am silly and unserious and decadent and, for some reason, little, for not getting that. But you weren’t asserting that you’re throwing down with the much less murder-y people who are a lot less bad than the really bad murder-y people whom you oppose. You were asserting that you’re not throwing down with any murder-y people at all, period.
False.
Stephen Miller has explicitly told ICE and CBP officers and agents that they have absolute immunity for everything they do on the job. I’ll leave the legal assessment of that claim to the lawyers. But from a simple common sense perspective, he was clearly saying “Do whatever you want, including things that, under other circumstances, would be seen as murder or rape, and you won’t get into trouble.” If that’s not a murder-y and rapey stance, I don’t know what it is.
Then there are all those people in boats whom the US Military under Trump keeps blowing to pieces from the air. Yes, Trump and his officials keep claiming that they’re all drug smugglers, but that crowd lies so much that there’s no reason to believe them on that point.
There’s also all those schoolgirls blown up in Iran. Yes, war. Feel free to explain to me how doing stuff like this brings the USA closer to victory, without using underpants gnomes logic.
You’re probably eager to tell us all about how this is still the smaller evil compared to supporting jihadists now. But thankfully, the choice is not between supporting Trump and supporting jihadists. The options are
1) supporting Trump and the larger Trumpist movement – and yes, explicitly saying that his folly and wickedness don’t matter is a form of supporting him;
2) supporting Mullahs and jihadists; and
3) opposing both.
You have picked the first option. I have picked the third. You don’t like how this makes you look. Therefore, you try to convince everyone that the third option doesn’t exist, and this means that, since I’m against the first option, I must have picked the second one.
Bullshit.
You’re right that it’s not the case that we are both defending legitimate yet opposing moral viewpoints. You simply don’t. It’s that simple.
As for rape-y, Trump has been found civilly liable for sexual abuse, even before we get to Epstein. His connections to Epstein are well known. It seems unlikely that his Attorney General is still withholding so many of the Epstein Files because there’s absolutely nothing bad about him in them. Some of the people around him, like Steve Bannon and Alan Dershowitz (perhaps Israel’s most prominent defender in the court of public opinion), are even more entangled in the Epstein case than him. Back in his first term, Trump appointed Alex Acosta as Secretary of Labor. That is, the man who, as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, had gotten Epstein his initial slap-on-the-wrist deal.
Megyn Kelly, one of Trump’s better-known supporters, has explicitly defended Epstein himself. Would she have wanted to do that if she had been certain that Trump is completely clean in that regard?
I don’t know this for sure. But I think it’s possible that you’re now eager to deliver a lengthy speech about how this, again, proves my unseriousness, silliness, and decadence, because as bad as Epstein might have been, the jihadists are raping a lot more people, and therefore, any serious moral person can see that it is necessary to side with Epstein’s friends against the jihadists.
If that should be the case, please post that speech here as soon as possible. I can’t wait to read it.
But the rapey and murder-y stuff of the Trump people themselves pales compared to the atrocities of the people whom they’re helping to carry out their plans. That is, the people currently running Russia.
Yes, I know. Putin supports the Mullahs, which makes him, in theory, your mortal enemy. But you yourself have explicitly stated that Trump’s folly and wickedness don’t matter. And you know very well that this folly and wickedness include his support for Putin, at least inside Europe.
There are few evil things the jihadists have done that Putin’s people haven’t done. Up to and including openly bragging about their atrocities on the internet. They murder, they rape, they enslave. And they’re just getting started. What they have done in Ukraine and Syria is an appetizer for what they might well eventually do all over Europe, one of the core parts of the West.
And you say Trump’s folly and wickedness, which includes making it more likely that Putin will succeed with his plans, doesn’t matter.
Yes, we have really both chosen our sides.
Your response might be that Putin’s regime is just “odious”, while the jihadists are “messianic”. Yes, I’m sure that the experience of being murdered, raped, or enslaved by an “odious” regime is a lot more pleasant than the experience of being murdered, raped, or enslaved by a “messianic” regime.
“> I have chosen the side of democracy, personal freedom,
Lol. Go tell it to the Palestinians whose side you have taken. Go on, see how far you get.”
I have not taken the side of letting the Palestinians achieve everything they want. I have taken the side of not slaughtering them. You will, of course, say that there’s no difference. Let’s use another example:
I am very much, very decidedly, against murdering you. But at the same time, you can clearly see that I am not at all in favor of you reaching all your political goals.
That’s my position on the Palestinians, too.
See? It’s not that complicated.
“> You have chosen the side of *some* of the world’s autocratic, antidemocratic, hateful mass-murderers and wannabe mass-murderers
Name them, bucko 🙂 Name the autocratic, anti-democratic chappies I am in favour of. Come on humiliate yourself further!
…
Yah. Thought so.”
First, those parts of the Western Far Right who are still behind Trump. That’s easy.
Second, those parts of the Western Far Right who have, by now, broken with Trump because they see him as too close to Jews. Yes, of course you hate them as much as I do, but back when they were still parts of the Trump coalition in good standing, which wasn’t that long ago, being part of the same broader political alliance as them might have led you to some denial or rationalizations, but wasn’t a deal breaker for you.
Third, the people running Russia. This is trickier, since they’re for the Mullahs and you’re against the Mullahs, but Trump’s enabling of them is clearly not a deal breaker for you.
Fourth, the voters in Germany who used to vote for the NPD and now vote for the AfD. OK, go ahead. Tell us all that people like that don’t exist, and that the NPD’s/Heimat’s level of success in elections just purely coincidentally collapsed at about the time the AfD rose. Or tell us all that if there are people like that, it’s only because they have seen the error of their ways and turned against neo-Nazism. I can’t wait to read that.
“> I have not given you any good reasons to think you know which class I belong to
Oh, but you have, you have. Sorry, but you guys are walking cliches It is _extremely_ obvious what your class and background are, what insecurities drive your views.”
Se my reply to Micael Gustavsson above. Your “logic” there comes down to, “Alice says some things that Bob says, too, and Bob has a lot of personal traits which I know very well, so clearly, Alice has those personal traits, too!” Which is not logic at all.
“Lol. Seriously, lol. You silly, silly little man:”
You might be even more successful at finally, clearly proving, once and for all, that between the two of us, you are the serious one and I am the unserious one, if you would put a bit more creative variation into the names you call me.
“Carlson, Fuentes, Owens are all _on your side_. They are all pro-Mullah, making excuses for the Jihad, anti-Israel and anti-Jew….
These are your people, dummy. Embrace them”
Aside from the fact that I am not pro-Mullah, I am not making for the jihad – which excuse did I make for it? And when? – and I am not anti-Jew, there’s the tiny detail that, while there’s some infighting between them and you now, it wasn’t that long ago that you were all supporters in good standing of the same political alliance.
Now, if you had any inclination at all towards any kind of, you know, thoughtfulness, the fact that so many people with whom you used to make common cause would make you think. “Why do all these Nazis keep appearing in my network of political alliances?”, stuff like that.
But, of course, nothing is ever going to make someone like you think. You’re way too contended spending you’re entire life just having knee-jerk reactions.
I’ll also note that you’re leaving Höcke out of your restatement of my list. Does the presence of a politician who has defended Hitler in the upper ranks of a political party which you, in turn, defend, not matter to you? Or are you going to tell us all that Höcke doesn’t actually exist and I’m just hallucinating him?
All that said, however, thinking more carefully about all this has brought me to the conclusion that we do have a little bit more in common than I would have thought at first.
We are both, first and foremost, passionate opponents of Appeasement. We just have completely different views of who the people where it is absolutely important not to appease them are.
You think it’s the jihadists, who have the power to do gruesome things in some parts of the traditional Muslim world, and might get that power in other parts of the traditional Muslim world in the future, and can commit terrorist acts worldwide, but who, outside of fever dreams, don’t have much chance of taking over major places elsewhere.
I think it’s first, the people running Russia, who might well militarily conquer half of the West, and second, the West’s own Far Right, which might well politically take over the other half, and turn it into something that might still pay lip service to the glories of Western Civilization, but which would be ruled and run in a way indistinguishable from any random tinpot dictatorship.
You could say that for me, February 2022, and before that, the run-up to February 2022, played the role in my life that 9/11 played for some people with political views similar to yours. It threw things into sharp relief, made choices starkly clear, and showed me what the stakes are, and why it is important to fight.
The possibilities are survival or destruction of everything I love, hold dear, and care about. I am for survival.
That’s what this is about.
Go on, tell me that I think that way because I’m afraid of the cool kids making fun of me. Show how very serious you are.
Raphael,
> There you are. Trump’s folly, which even you admit exists, definitely includes being murder-y, and probably includes bing rapey, too.
Let me see if I understand this logic: when I say that Trump is in power largely because he cannily exploits the moral bankruptcy of the other side, this is the same thing as supporting Trump, which is the same thing as making excuses for the October 7 people.
Right.
As I say, you are not worth taking seriously. You can’t point to one word of _support_ here. Which is why your long whine about Trump and his administration is neither here nor there.
What I have offered is a moderate defence of his supporters, and I know that is the real objection. I know they are NQOCD (Not Quite Our Class Dear), they are terribly uncouth and certainly didn’t go to finishing school – I mean college…
Anyway. Let’s talk about your boy Fuentes and your boy Carlson. They’re both anti-Trump and anti-Israel and so on.
> You do realize – oh wait, you probably don’t – that you are calling most of the targets of the raping and murdering “stone age inbred savages”, too?
No, no I really am not. Like I say, I’ve taken the side of Israel. You know, the victims of this.
> I have chosen the side of democracy, personal freedom, and careful, critical though, and of opposing all types of autocratic, antidemocratic, hateful mass-murderers and wannabe mass-murderers.
Unless those are the forces of Jihad, in which case you can’t wait to make excuses and give reasons why they can’t be opposed. Or just turn a blind eye.
I notice it was I, and not you, who called out Isator’s defence of Ali Sistani.
And there’s this:
> There’s also all those schoolgirls blown up in Iran. Yes, war. Feel free to explain to me how doing stuff like this brings the USA closer to victory, without using underpants gnomes logic.
This is proof of what I mean. You first of all ignore the fact that there are many saying that this was an IRGC rocket – and it is _Iranians_ saying this. You then act as though this is an absolute moral stain on the US, and that there is no difference between this and the deliberate targeting of civilians that is done by the Mullahs. This is the same thing your chum Isator does.
This is exactly the way that your boy Fuentes and the neo-Nazi revisionists at the Institute for Historical Review argue. They first of all inflate the allied killings of civilians in the firebombing (which actually was a direct targeting of civilians). They then take this as proof of allied wickedness. They the downplay the Nazi atrocities and elide the difference between casualties in war and deliberate mass murder of your own civilians.
This is how you lot argue, and you wonder I don’t want to be on your side? You and Fuentes and Carlson and Isator and the IHR are people I can do without, thanks all the same.
> You just, almost coincidentally, viciously attack or snidely dismiss anyone who seriously opposes him
Really. Well when I see someone who seriously opposes Trump, I will be sure to apologise.
What I have done is snidely dismiss people who unseriously oppose him – people like you to whom this is all so much mental masturbation.
If you want someone who seriously opposes Trump, I would instance Matt Taibbi who literally wrote a book called “Insane Clown President”, who has been anti-Trump from day one – and who is dismissed by people like you because he treats the populist anger at the system seriously.
> Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens,
Again: these are all your people. Anti-Israel, anti-America, anti-Trump, anti-Jew, pro-Shariah…. these are your people.
Own them.
> First, those parts of the Western Far Right who are still behind Trump. [cut out a long paragraph of paranoid fantasy]
Please cite where I have defended any of these. Go on, show me. And please stop wasting everyone’s time with your delusions.
Again, you have me confused with your boy Fuentes.
To give one example, my comment about the AfD is that they are not neo-Nazi. That is it. You haven’t provided a shred of evidence to the contrary, you have just shifted the goalposts and thrown your toys out of the pram.
Like I say, not serious. Because you’re not about seriously opposing the AfD, you are about maintaining your own fevered fantasy of your own moral value.
Completely unserious.
This thread is so tiresome (especially in this format, where you can’t just “collapse” tedious branches) that I confess to half-reading many of the exchanges. I think I would rather note that this right here seems like the most “Bronze Age” thing in the region.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-support-expulsion-palestinians-gaza-poll
You can only prove things that are true.
If you try to demonstrate that “the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotheshood would be put on notice that they were allowed to exist on sufferance, that the modern world can get rid of them any time it so chooses”…you’ll discover they weren’t, and we can’t. And the whole world will see it.
Similarly, everyone can see that the conduct of Israel and the US in this war is far worse than that of Iran. So telling us about how awful they are reflects poorly on “our” side as well. If he’s the devil, and he’s fighting more honourably than you are…
> Similarly, everyone can see that the conduct of Israel and the US in this war is far worse than that of Iran. So telling us about how awful they are reflects poorly on “our” side as well. If he’s the devil, and he’s fighting more honourably than you are…
It’s amazing how people get all huffy when I point out that the real argument isn’t about tactics but about those who are in defending the Mullahs and those who are against them. 😀
The Iranian revolution was the catalyst for basically all the modern era’s _jihad_, the demonstration that a reactionary, bronze-age madness could be foisted on a modern society. It was – and is – proof that the Enlightenment can be defeated. I mean _really_ defeated, you Americans – not people voting against abortion, but a regime that says that virgins may not be hanged so they must be ceremonially raped to allow for the hanging.
Take a look at the American administration right now. People like Mike Huckabee, Pete Hegseth, and Ted Cruz think that Israel is entitled to annex large portions of the Middle East because the Bible says so and that the Crusades were something really cool that America should try and re-enact. This goes vastly beyond just opposing abortion (although that certainly plays a large part in it, it’s all connexted for these people). Pete Hegseth’s spiritual father believes that slavery in the American South wasn’t that bad, that people in non-Christian religions are “taunting God” and should be banned from publicly practicing their religions, and let’s not even get into what he thinks about women, and this is the guy who preached at the Pentagon a couple of weeks ago.
The idea that this is about secularism versus aggressive Islamic expansionism lost any possible relevance a long time ago (if it was ever meaningfully true, which I don’t think it was, it’s certainly not true as of today).
“People like Mike Huckabee, Pete Hegseth, and Ted Cruz think that Israel is entitled to annex large portions of the Middle East because the Bible says so”
Not quite true.
“Pete Hegseth’s spiritual father believes that slavery in the American South wasn’t that bad…let’s not even get into what he thinks about women,”
Doug Wilson is less “racist” and more “hyperpartisan ‘libertarian’ who isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is.” (Way too many people view the ACW as a battleground to wage political warfare on). As to what he thinks about women, it’s definitely not in line with Western egalitarianism, and he’s a bit too “trad”, but it’s a far cry from the Iranian position.
Not quite true.
Fair enough, you’re welcome to correct me. But, I’m willing to bet that even your corrected version of what these guys believe is going to be outrageous enough (not to mention, destructive of the entire post-1945 system of norms and values regarding conquest and aggression).
As to what he thinks about women, it’s definitely not in line with Western egalitarianism, and he’s a bit too “trad”, but it’s a far cry from the Iranian position.
It really isn’t- how many women scientists or engineers do you think there would be in America if Doug Wilson ever got his way? Not to mention that, policy beliefs aside, his whole manner of speaking about women drips contempt.
@Robert Bosch,
If you feel like you must slag on Islam and “The Jihad”, whatever that means, can you at least leave Hindus, Zoroastrians and Yazidis out of it? Donald Trump’s voting base are no friends of theirs, they want to convert the “pagans” every bit as much as their Muslim equivalents do.
(And I would also add, that Donald Trump and the rest of the American Republican government are currently doing vastly more damage to the world, and will do vastly more if they get their way, than overzealous religious mobs in Pakistan could ever do in their wildest dreams.)
Personally, I’ve become somewhat unconvinced Iran was previously actually intent on making a nuclear weapon, mostly because, well, why haven’t they done so? They’ve had enrichment capability for quite a long time, sufficient to enrich to weapons-grade, and you can look up the basic principles of a fission device on the internet. The main obstacle to nuclearization is enrichment capability they’ve had.
I don’t know quite what they were playing at with their enrichment, but they’ve passed up multiple chances to make it into nukes. I am told the previous Khameni opposed them on religious grounds.
You can look up the basic principles of a F-1 (Saturn V) rocket motors on the internet too… But “basic principles” are not “actual, functional physical objects in hand”. I am certainly not saying that Iran cannot do so (or has not done so), but going from the former to the latter takes a significant amount of difficult work. (And the same is true of actually building the centrifuges required for enrichment. Looking it up? Easy. Actually doing it in the real world? Hard.)
Broadly speaking, for a modern state actor the primary constraining factor on making a simple nuclear weapon is having 6.2kg of weapons-grade plutonium (or ~60kg of weapons-grad uranium). It’s an engineering and industrialisation problem, not a physics and weapon design one.
The physics is well understood and pretty much completely declassified by now. The actual practical implementation for simple nukes likewise – getting implosion working is fiddly high explosive work, but it’s a well understood concept and your mundane bomb engineers can get that working (perhaps with some bench tests absent fissile material). Having the fissile material is the blocker.
There’s a reason that nuclear proliferation management focuses on enrichment facilities and volumes of highly enriched material.
If nothing else, note that the Hiroshima bomb (the ‘Little Boy’ gun-type) was never tested as an integrated unit. Some bench tests, only. Efficiency was bad, but sufficient. And anyone with 60-odd kg of enriched uranium (and 80 years of leaked secrets) should be able to replicate it well enough to contaminate a city, if not worse.
(The Nagasaki / ‘Fat Man’ / implosion-type was the design tested at Trinity, and so might possibly require more nuance to build today.)
Even for an implosion bomb, getting the basic Mk4 sort of model working is probably doable without any full live-fire tests, things like computer simulation are a lot more advanced now than they were in 1945.
Doing any of the more clever things that the US or Soviets did since, like boosted designs or miniaturised warheads or thermonuclear bombs? Those are all going to start needing real testing pretty fast, the details are a lot more secret still.
The other big constraint I didn’t mention is the simple weapons are _big_. Making a warhead you can bolt to the top of an arbitrary medium range ballistic missile is a much harder problem than making a Fat Man equivalent.
>Making a warhead you can bolt to the top of an arbitrary medium range ballistic missile is a much harder problem than making a Fat Man equivalent.
Not really. Hollow pits and advanced implosion system designs are out there in the open literature. And they too can be tested without requiring SNM.
And even a Fat Man equivalent need not be as big as Fat Man. Just upgrading the detonation system from a 32 to a 96 point system (as we did for the MK 5/W5) dramatically drops the size and weight. In the same vein, it’s almost certain no modern designer would use something as relatively low performance as Composition B and Baratol. Replacing the solid core with a hollow pit could also allow a significant decrease in size and weight.
Taking what it’s the open literature and capturing the low hanging fruit won’t produce a warhead that’s small by the standards of the bg nuclear powers… But it also won’t be anywhere near Fat Man/MK III in terms of mass or volume.
“Personally, I’ve become somewhat unconvinced Iran was previously actually intent on making a nuclear weapon”
The entire US intelligence community thinks you are absolutely right about this. Every year since 2003 they’ve been saying “no, Iran is pretty much definitely not building a nuclear weapon”. So your position is not way out on the wild fringes – it’s the consensus.
It really is amazing that the Iranians were dancing in the streets when this war started, but Israel (and America) lost public support with Americans.
But of course, the Ayatollahs weren’t just odious to Iranians. They’ve done more than “just” provoke Israel; they’ve proven they have the desire to destroy Israel and are constantly pursuing credible means, nuclear and otherwise. To Israeli planners, that’s the biggest threat; as they say they’d rather be alive to be disliked than dead but fondly remembered. And it’s possible that creates strategic traps for Israel, but it’s also possible that being the US’s most tightly integrated ally in the region is more important to securing the US’s support than public sentiment. After all, the US continues to be allies with the Saudis. And equally, it’s possible that the US public sentiment was already lost and now is Israel’s last chance to shatter the Ayatollah’s genocidal ambitions.
And for all the attention on Israel, many Gulf states wanted the war in the first place:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/28/trump-iran-decision-saudi-arabia-israel/
and *continue* to want the war, despite the cost and the risks:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/politics/saudi-prince-iran-trump.html
And whether or not Trump’s government ever tries to sell this idea to the media, Iran has made itself strategically important by becoming a Chinese client state. They create much of the trouble that continually prevents America from pivoting to Asia. The oil they send in exchange for that support fills China’s strategic reserve that they are building up for the purpose of invading Taiwan. And the threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz – now realized – was meant to be a card to play to prevent the US closing the Strait of Malacca, itself to prevent or stop that future invasion of Taiwan. And all of that beside the fact that Iran has been keeping Russia’s drone warfare alive.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-91-is-the-iran-war-about-china-a/id1794590850?i=1000750309082
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-94-americas-war-not-israels/id1794590850?i=1000752614732
The tight American-Israeli military integration:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-96-the-first-war-israel-fought-in-english/id1794590850?i=1000753991917
And for all that it is indeed difficult to snuff out the drone and missile launches or win the shot exchange, it seems that the air campaign is having that effect because the *crews* are starting to refuse what they see as a certain death sentence. Moreover, Iran pays the IRGC in oil revenues. The fungibility of oil forces Iran to choose between allowing their own oil (paying the IRGC, their regime security) and not allowing it out (economic pressure on the US, their political objective). Their “security fees” are a clever way to try to have it both ways, but if the US takes Kharg Island then to the extent that the Iranian regime still exists they’ll have a very hard time paying the IRGC to shoot protestors.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-99-are-we-winning/id1794590850?i=1000756035796
“It really is amazing that the Iranians were dancing in the streets when this war started, but Israel (and America) lost public support with Americans.”
1) Who exactly are these “the Iranians” you’re talking about? See my points elsewhere in this thread about countries having different political views among their populations.
2) America did not lose support among Americans, the current American political leadership did. Yes, right-wingers in many places like to take a “We *are* the country” stance, but that’s just one example of their usual arrogant delusions.
3) Yes, Americans tend to care more about direct impacts on their own country than about what happens oceans away. Yes, that’s more self-centered than people should be, but Americans are hardly alone in that attitude.
4) Have you paid attention during the last quarter of a century? Have you noticed how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned out for the USA? Well, a lot of other people have. So it’s not “amazing” that many Americans aren’t eager to repeat the experience on a larger scale.
5) Some people have this strange and weird thing called “a functioning sense of right and wrong”, and therefore aren’t eager to cheer on people who take pride in blowing schoolgirls to pieces. Though I’ll admit that that’s less of a factor in US politics than it should be.
“To Israeli planners, that’s the biggest threat; as they say they’d rather be alive to be disliked than dead but fondly remembered.”
Congratulations – by spending the last few years, and to a lesser extent, the last decades, doing the things they’re doing, Israel’s political leaders have probably ensured that in a few decades, the Israeli state will be remembered, and not fondly, rather than alive.
“And it’s possible that creates strategic traps for Israel, but it’s also possible that being the US’s most tightly integrated ally in the region is more important to securing the US’s support than public sentiment.”
Unlike some small patch of land somewhere in the Middle East, the non-Russian countries of Europe and the non-Chinese countries of East Asia actually *are* of vital strategic importance to the USA. And that doesn’t stop the US political leadership from doing everything they can to throw us to the wolves. Kissinger once claimed that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics. Well, that applies to many other countries, too.
“And whether or not Trump’s government ever tries to sell this idea to the media, Iran has made itself strategically important by becoming a Chinese client state. They create much of the trouble that continually prevents America from pivoting to Asia. The oil they send in exchange for that support fills China’s strategic reserve that they are building up for the purpose of invading Taiwan. And the threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz – now realized – was meant to be a card to play to prevent the US closing the Strait of Malacca, itself to prevent or stop that future invasion of Taiwan. ”
Iran can’t invade Taiwan. China can try to. And they’re more likely to succeed, more likely to think that they’ll succeed, and therefore more likely to try in the first place, if the US Military is entirely tied down in the Middle East. The US has already started to move military assets from the Asia/Pacific region to the Middle East. That’s not going to be bad for China.
1) For example: https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW971401032026RP1/ and https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/crl49eg3n92o And of course 90 million people won’t always feel the same way about things! But there’s enough evidence that a lot of Iranians were happy to make the uniform dismay in America odd.
2) Yes granted but that’s what people poll for, so…
3) No argument?
4) Sure, we don’t want another GWoT. But some wars are necessary, and even moral. And it’s at least an interesting signal that most or all of Iran’s neighbors are enthusiastic about this war despite bearing a large part of the cost.
5) Nobody is happy about that? You picked the one thing that everyone in the war agrees was a tragedy.
I think you might benefit from actually reading what I said instead of just mining it for takes. It’s becoming clear to me, across these threads, that you don’t believe that Israel – half of the world’s Jews – have any practical right to exist or defend themselves in the ancient Jewish homeland. And if you were never going to tolerate them in the first place, why should they waste time kowtowing to you? If you want to influence someone, you need to make them choose between options. Consider it.
(Further consider that the week before October 7th, the Israeli Knesset was actively discussing increased economic cooperation with Gaza as a way to deter Hamas. What are you going to propose that Israel wasn’t already going to do?)
Kissinger was a charming liar about important issues. That’s what he’s most famous for. I don’t know if quoting him helps your cause.
And, indeed, the fact that the US’s resources are finite is presumably part of why Trump wanted a quick victory in Iran. Defang Iran as a Chinese outpost who can counter (Strait of Hormuz) one of your big plays (Strait of Malacca), and then you can finally actually pivot to Asia with a strengthened hand to defend Taiwan with. It’s a risky gamble, but not senseless.
1) I’m not denying that there were Iranians dancing in the streets. I’m skeptical about the idea that *the* Iranians were dancing in the streets. Since you’re probably Israeli, I think you know very well that, even if a political faction in a country is able to assemble a lot of followers in one time and place to do something that looks impressive on Youtube, it doesn’t mean that they have “the country”, or even most of the country, behind them.
3) No, I sort of agree with you that it would be generally better if human beings would pay more attention to other parts of the world and not just their own backyards. But it is what it is.
4) I don’t see how turning this into another GWoT can be avoided by now. And I have a very low opinion of the people ruling the gulf states.
5) Based on everything I’ve seen of the USA’s political right-wing and their friends in other countries since I first started paying attention to them, I don’t see any reason to believe that all that many of them see this as a bad thing. I mean, Hegseth himself has talked about how great it is that the US Military no longer has “stupid rules of engagement”, and about how his air strikes are “raining death and destruction from the sky”. And I’m supposed to believe that he and people who think like him see killing a lot of schoolchildren as a tragedy?
“It’s becoming clear to me, across these threads, that you don’t believe that Israel – half of the world’s Jews – have any practical right to exist or defend themselves in the ancient Jewish homeland. And if you were never going to tolerate them in the first place, why should they waste time kowtowing to you? If you want to influence someone, you need to make them choose between options. Consider it.”
Oh, I don’t want anyone to kowtow to me. Since I dislike Israel, I almost kind of like it when they do things that are extremely stupid from a political strategy perspective. I just wish they could do that without causing so much death and destruction.
“Kissinger was a charming liar about important issues. That’s what he’s most famous for. I don’t know if quoting him helps your cause.”
Yeah, but, even a stopped clock and all that.
“And, indeed, the fact that the US’s resources are finite is presumably part of why Trump wanted a quick victory in Iran.”
I don’t see any reason to credit Trump or the people around him with that much understanding. I’m not sure that they’re even aware that the USA have finite resources, or that it matters. They might well think that the USA have infinite resources – Trump has explicitly said so himself – and that the only reason why any US plans have ever failed is that the country constantly had stupid, incompetent, and/or treacherous leaders before Trump.
If you look at both the Trump people’s political decisions and their messaging strategy, it quickly becomes clear that they care mainly about how things look like on TV and in internet memes, and not much about what happens in physical reality.
The current US Secretary of Swinging Big Clubs, err, I mean, War, if you go by his public speeches, seems to think his job is to be the US Military’s chief drill sergeant, not a careful manager of resources. He seems to think that worrying about careful management of resources is the kind of girly stuff only pathetic loser contemptible beta male weaklings would bother with.
@Bagel,
I do find it rather adorable and heartbreaking that you think facts matter with this crowd…
Let’s say things had gone perfectly. I mean, 100% perfect. The people rise up, the Mullahs are gone, the mosques torn down, Iran becomes a modern, secular democratic state with all the liberties we love and cherish.
In what fantasyland do you think it would make a damn bit of difference? This crowd – Isator & Rafael being ripe examples – would be sneering that it is an illegitimate American/Zionist puppet state.
Try and tell me I am wrong.
1) You are wrong.
2) You might as well speculate about what might happen if Xi Jinping would see the error of his ways and start making speeches about the greatness of Western liberal democracy tomorrow. The likelihood is about the same.
Couple of random notes:
1. This apparently went viral enough to be on the top page of Memorandum, so that’s a new one. Although it does give me real “running into your teacher at the grocery store” vibes.
2. Saw you got an invite to LessOnline. I hope you go! It’s a great event with a great group of people. But also they could really use more experts in non-STEM fields to talk to.
I knew this was was a huge, tragic mistake but I didn’t realize quite how bad it was until you laid it all out so cogently. Thanks.
I appreciate the tagging with ‘Oh no’. Great analysis.
> One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.
I have a tactical quibble here: one of the really interesting, signal features of the war in Ukraine has been the rough air parity. Both sides have high-quality AEW&C and enough Sams and random Manpads scattered around to dissuade flights over their territory. (Russia uniquely has Mig-31s, but their main effect is to keep Ukrainian aircraft further back from the front, while Russian aircraft can fly a bit closer; the fighter superiority matters a lot less than the Sam/Manpad parity.) Suffice to say that this would not be the case during an American land adventure in Iran. Manpads will be a threat, but, if there are any operational Sams or fighters left in Iran at the moment, I’d be surprised if they’re still there by the time boots are on the ground. In that environment, the only reason Shaheds would be getting through is because the US chooses not to engage them because the total cost of the Sidewinder and airframe flight hours comes out as too expensive relative to their target. FPVs are a more serious threat, but there’s no certainty that they’d be able to operate at anywhere near the scale we see in Ukraine when there’s pervasive airborne surveillance; shooting down the drones is probably not going to work, but getting at the drone teams is a real possibility. In Ukraine, drone teams are prize assets and treated as such; taking out the other side’s drone team is a major tactical-operational objective, and it’s realistic for both sides to attempt it – and they don’t have all of the advantages the US would have in Iran.
Not to say this changes much of anything – the ground force would still face massive challenges, and all of Bret’s strategic points are totally right – but I think we shouldn’t over-index on drones in non-peer warfare. They’d be more like an evolution of IEDs: nasty and an attritional thorn, politically bad for a country that values the lives of its soldiers, but not actually militarily relevant if you’re not also facing a peer adversary that can use them to pose dilemmas.
But politically bad is militarily relevant for a country waging a war of choice with no clear objectives.
“In that environment, the only reason Shaheds would be getting through is because the US chooses not to engage them because the total cost of the Sidewinder and airframe flight hours comes out as too expensive relative to their target.”
Getting through by flooding the defences with cheap attack drones is still getting through.
Sidewinder and airframe flight hours? Put an APKWS pod on an MQ-9 and Uncle Sam is joined by Uncle Bob.
Got reminded of Asimov’s Foundation. Particularly “Merchant Princes”.
How familiar are you with the series, by the way?
“The Merchant Princes” is written by Charles Stross.
Isaac Asimov wrote “The Big and the Little”, published in 1944, and re-titled “The Merchant Princes” as the fourth part of “Foundation” in 1951.
A surprising number of Iranian-Canadians believe that even though this lawless and unprovoked war is immensely stupid (C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute), it might be better than leaving the current regime in power in Tehran (example). I just don’t see how the US-Israeli attack could lead to a better situation.
I don’t think it fundamentally changes anything in your post, but I’m not sure that the IRGC are bought in from top to bottom. According to Hooman Majd, (at least at some point), there were a decent chunk of Iranians who would do mandatory military service in the IRGC because it was seen as the easier of duties compared to the regular military or police service. Because there was a lot more ideological training and prayer than there was in the army.
One more thought, about Israel and its potential diplomatic isolation. I suspect that Iran’s actions in the first week of the war, firing missiles at targets in several neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, may end up in the long run being a political/diplomatic gift to Israel (almost certainly an unintended one on Iran’s part), as suddenly Iran is looking more likely to find themselves diplomatically isolated in the MIddle East. Not completely, I’m sure, but a lot more isolated than they would have been had they not attacked neighbors who were previously sympathetic to them.
I also think that had Iran had a functioning leadership in place, the missiles targeted at Iran’s friends/allies/sympathizers (whatever the right word is for any given country) would not have been launched. I suspect that those launches were ordered by people looking at the tactical picture but not the larger strategic picture. Which would mean, if my analysis is right, that those launches happened due to the confusion that Israel caused with their opening salvo: by opening the war with a decapitation strike which took out much of the upper echelons of Iran’s political and military leadership, Israel ensured chaos and confusion among the Iranian military, and allowed them to make a massive diplomatic blunder that would not have happened without that initial decapitation strike. I could be wrong — maybe Ayatollah Khomeini would still have ordered those launches if he had not been killed in the first strike. But your comment about diplomatic isolation reminded me of the thoughts I had on Iran’s likely diplomatic isolation when I first heard that they had launched missiles at Qatar and other nearby countries.
After the Israelis already set the precedent that Qatar hosting Hamas representatives for approved negotiations was sufficient grounds for the IDF to attack a residential district of Doha, it’s hard to imagine consistent grounds to turn around and act shocked (shocked!) by the Iranians launching attacks against U.S. military bases.
In other words, much like Captain Renault, it’s easy to imagine these countries taking such a stance if they’re already otherwise inclined to do so, but the Iranian attacks wouldn’t be the actual reason for this stance, any more than the roulette tables were the reason for closing down Rick’s.
Honestly don’t think that matters much simply because the Gulf states were already hostile to Iran (and to some extent vice-versa) and had been in reapprochment with Israel for some time, to various extents.
On the possibility of escorting tankers and cargo ships – even if it worked it would slow down traffic through the strait a great deal. To 10% or less of the usual traffic according to Lloyds: https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1156589/Naval-escorts-would-cap-tanker-transits-at-under-10-of-normal-volumes
That’s probably bad enough that it’s not worth even trying.
What that frame refuses to examine is the possibility that Israeli strategy is long, coherent, and succeeding brilliantly — that the military degradation (or ideally state collapse) of Iran, the invasion of Lebanon (Litani and S Lebanon would give Israel 20% more freshwater and arable land), the expansion into Syria (Mt. Hermon peak, and Golan evidence of the long strategy playing out), the 100% Israeli stock market rally, the defense tech boom, the IMEC positioning (Hormuz busted, just go through the new overland routes terminating in Haifa)
… all of this is the product of a strategic vision that has been executing consistently for years, using American power as an instrument wherever possible. Gotta be comfy with that.
Until Israel stretches itself too thin and find itself under risk of being destroyed and its population driven out of the nation.
Israel cannot, in fact, escalate endlessly against the entirety of the middle east. And that they think they can is going to get Israelis killed in very large numbers.
Agreed. Especially considering that their continued belligerence appears to actually be effecting the domestic political situation of the allies they’re relying on to actually survive (broadly, the USA and Europe).
Israel survives because it has effectively been enjoying near carte-blanche support from its allies. That is looking increasingly tenuous.
There’s signs that Israel is already stretching itself too thin, at least in military manpower. They were already seriously discussing removing the draft-exemption on ultra-orthodox Jews as the Gaza war went on. And while there’s a ceasefire right now, enforcing the Yellow Line takes a lot of ground troops still. And now they’re preparing for a ground invasion into Lebanon, and flying strikes against Iran *and* Lebanon, and their missile defences have to be considerably more active – their manpower requirement can hardly have gone down.
There’s Israeli opposition politicians who’ve said the government is basically scraping the bottom of the barrel. The professional soldiers are exhausted, and even the reservists have been forced to be in uniform far longer than they were meant to be.
I don’t think Israel is in danger of actually being invaded right now (no neighbouring country is in a position to do so even if there weren’t the threat of the US counter-attack). But both the war exhaustion and the non-achieving of any war goals might become a political liability for the current government and weaken them and their strategic vision long-term.
Just one comment, this war, same as the venezuelan operation, is to keep the petrodollar on control. USA is literally fighting for its survival.
The USA base economy collapsed on the 70s, the only way that USA survived was because of their control of the international commerce, and thus being able to finance its trade balance deficit with debt.
The appearance and lately strengthening of the BRICS group has allowed to avoid most of the damage of the economic sanctions (see north korea, its now commercing and going to international events), and the increased pressure to avoid the dollar on international commerce, has put them in this position. They need to control the petrol commerce, USA cannot survive otherwise
While the start if this war is idiotic, both on the initial aerial attacks and the way israel triggered it, this war has been coming for a while.
Saying otherwise is like the people that says that the first world war was because of the assassination of the archduke, no it was just what it triggered, the conditions for it were already there.
“this war, same as the venezuelan operation, is to keep the petrodollar on control. USA is literally fighting for its survival.”
This makes the decision more stupid not less. If the USA is genuinely fighting for its survival as the hegemon of the world (which, I note, is not actually the same as fighting for its survival), and that rests on the status of the petrodollar…then why in the hell would they put themselves in this much of a compromising position?
1. It was overwhelmingly likely that Iran would succeed at closing the Strait of Hormuz, and that the USA (and any allies it could cobble together with its Spartan-like failure of a diplomatic policy) would struggle to reopen it. We’ve known this for 40 years at least.
2. It was also enormously predictable that the Iranian government could say something like ‘tell you what, if you start paying in Yuan we’ll let your boats through’, which is the first actual direct threat to the petrodollar we’ve seen, and is wholly enabled by US aggression. Lo and behold, they have started to do this, and I’ve seen it reported that long-time major US allies like Japan have agreed to pay in Yuan.
3. The US’ failure to secure a strong and convincing victory, and general bungling of any and all diplomacy with its allies, seriously rocks the foundation on which the USA’s hegemony rests. This was in train beforehand (cough Greenland), but this is a major nail in the coffin.
All of this was tiresomely predictable, with just not being a warlike belligerent bunch of idiots being the obvious alternative.
From the USA’s perspective, the worst thing about this entire mess is just how sensible it’s making China look…
I loved Mick Ryan’s sangfroid on this point:
“One of the most underappreciated insights from the Iran war is that America’s strategic decision-making apparatus does not need to be deliberately compromised to produce poor outcomes. It is doing that on its own.”
Point is that they need to be the hegemon to not collapse economically. if the dollar is not the international exchange media, the economy will be a disaster, and it will do a political collapse.
This is desperation, it was already coming in the democrat goverment, i didnt say it was going to work, because nothing is going to work, because the changes needed to avoid this are both to late, and against the core of the hegemon or whatever you want to call it
I had a sudden picture of hyperinflation in the US, like the hyperinflation Germany suffered in the 1920s and early thirties, and thought, well, Trump’s headed in that direction anyway.
Hum… Such a long article might worth a lot of comments.
Still I guess you are right on most practical points and thus, we can agree the current gamble is very risky. And the global consequences truly dramatic.
But the whole issue is to know if thinking that managing religious fanatics armed nuclear weapons is not an even bigger and riskier gamble. In other words, no matter how bad an action may be, procrastinating and doing nothing can be even worse.
Because I don’t think that resistance to Israel is the Iranian regime’s “raison d’être”. It is far more the matter of much older rivalry with Arabs/Sunni regimes (and more specifically with the Saudi regime, the custodian of the Holy Sites) aimed at demonstrating that the Persian/Shiite regime (under a religious leadership instead of a secular one), is capable of doing what no Sunni regime has ever been able to do.
And, as Israel, which have no territorial disputes or whatever with Iran, is just the prize of the game, it makes negotiations between both countries almost impossible without regime change. While in the meantime, for all kind of political reasons, the USA cannot let Israel disappear (admittedly, so far).
I believe if that is not taken into account the situation cannot be fully understood.
“managing religious fanatics armed nuclear weapons is not an even bigger and riskier gamble”
For all of the rhetoric about how the Iranian regime are religious fanatics…its certainly seems that by every single credible assessment they have been behaving sensibly and rationally in terms of their nuclear policy.
I know it’s popular to be scared of religious fanaticism (and for good reason), but there has only been one single instance of a nuclear strike and that was conducted by folks who were not religious fanatics. There have been fanatical polities in possession of nuclear weapons for decades (North Korea certainly, but I personally would also put zionist Israel in that box…certainly the current administration)…and they have behaved sensibly and rationally.
People seem to raise ‘religious fanaticism’ as a factor, despite it flying entirely contrary to the actual observed facts. It’s bizarre.
And in the end, as you demonstrated, the only option is to disrupt the Iranian chain of command and economy so much that the regime collapses by itself or negotiate by fear of doing so.
Which might be, I fully agree, quite difficult. But, as regime collapse do, can also happen quite suddenly. Who knows ?…
PS : Thinking that the weapons used in Iran could have been better employed in the Ukrainian war seems a bit weird after such a demonstration…
It seems to me that Russia poses quite the same problem than Iran. If not worse. A (very) large country with natural ressources and a powerful industrial base, a resilient population, an entrenched regime. And the world biggest nuclear arsenal on top of that. All for a piece of land that is even of less strategical interest for the US.
The only difference is that Russia, which is ethnically and culturally an European country, could be brought back into the Western fold much more easily. If only negotiations on its terms could take place. But I guess we are getting off topic here…
I think the actual difference is that Ukraine is strategically significant to Europe, which is the USA’s single largest and most supportive ally globally.
This is important for the USA because China is proving itself to be capable of challenging the might of the USA individually, but is unlikely to be able to challenge a truly united USA and Europe (and the rest of the status quo coalition).
Thus, it is in the US’ interest to support its allies with their strategic concerns. Instead, it has elected to torch its allies’ strategic concerns (all of them, be they European, Middle East, or Eastern…aside from Israel), and add some new ones for no perceivable gain. The USA cannot remain hegemon with the support of Israel alone.
I’ve said it in a previous comment, but the most dangerous thing about all of this from the US’ perspective is just how sensible China is seeming in comparison.
I would hazard describing the situation as the current US (and Hungarian) governments considering themselves to have relationship with other governments, not states, and in turn considering those other governments to have relationships with them as governments (~parties), not as states.
I think this is in some fashion (i.e. I make no claims as to direction of causation) related to collapsing into a single concept many (all?) of the following:
– the SQC as a collection of countries;
– the institutions structuring the SQC, such as NATO;
– the shared interests of the SQC members, such as free trade;
– the ideological foundation describing the shared interests, filed under the word “liberalism”;
– other domestic political concerns, subject to reasonable disagreement, with some parties/etc. being described as “liberal”.
Probably not many people care about the example of Hungary, but its present government follows the hypothesis quite formulaically. It produces lots of domestic speeches against the EU in particular. It exercises its veto rights in the EU and NATO with such frequency as to prompt serious discussion of altogether reforming basic procedures to prevent opportunities for such. It licks the boots of the Russian government (see Hungary’s conduct wrt the Ukraine war, or — it happens to be election season and they are challenged by a moderate-right (not even liberal), pro-SQC party — its election posters; a prominent part of its messaging is to run attack ads against Volodimir Zelensky, a head of a foreign government) even though Hungary, as an ex-WarsawPact member, is on Russia’s wishlist of conquests. It licks the boots of the Chinese government, e.g. by participating in the Belt and Road program (with a project that is stupid at all levels of analysis as transportation infrastructure, but creates a debt to China). It licks the boots of the current US government, but frequently spoke against its immediate predecessor.
The current US government follows the model less consistently (its hostility to China is not explained by this hypothesis), but with more extreme actions (floating territorial …requests(?) against countries with with the US has an alliance, but whose governments the current US government considers to be ideological enemies).
Yeah that fits quite well with my experience of Nigel Farage in domestic UK politics, effectively self-appointing himself as a US ambassador for a right-wing-government-in-waiting of the UK (and him doing this long before his party was anywhere near popular in the polls).
It kinda fits with the idea of a ‘rich boy’s club’ that includes all the people they like and think like them, who are intent on trying to rule as much of the world as possible.
Trump is ‘in’. Orban is ‘in’. Anyone on the Epstein List is ‘in’. Farage is sort of loitering at the door. Putin is ideologically ‘in’ (as in, the people of the ‘rich boy’s club’ seem to look to him as a shining example of what they could be, rather than him necessarily actually being in the club).
“The only difference is that Russia, which is ethnically and culturally an European country, could be brought back into the Western fold much more easily.”
It is a fact of life that the Russian ruler would rather take Beijing’s orders than Washington’s. The people who want to Make Russia Great Again are not going to want to obey America’s whip, however much you want them to. And the idea that you can gain a new follower by screwing over your existing followers for him, popular though it has ever been in Washington, has to my knowledge never worked. Because you cannot win A’s trust by betraying B.
I do worry that Trumps now best move is to blame Israel for all of this and signal hard to the portion of his base to whom jew and israeli are synonyms (despite most american zionists being evangelical christians).
Its an old and common lie “oh the king only did this unpopular thing because he was tricked by the jews” and I can see large portions of the american far-right gearing up to employ it again.
Alex Jones went from “covering” the war on Iran, to ranting about how Trump was just a poor man trying his best in a bad situation, to ranting about how this could all be prevented if the jews just accepted jesus into their hearts. These are coherent connected thoughts in his mind and the minds of an upsetting number of americans.
You’re so right. Sigh.
Oh god, he can try to pull that card for the Epstein mess too. He’s going to do it isn’t he?
He might be too convinced that his good buddy Jeff was an unfairly smeared and witch-hunted great guy to try that.
‘Jeff was coerced too…he was as much of a victim as I was’
If you’re quite happy to divorce your rhetoric from any semblance of reality you can spin stuff however you like. The question is whether his base will believe it. Probably, which is frustrating.
Donald Trump is horribly incompetent without grasping it. To me being a genius means being exceptionally good at what you are doing for a living. If he had been he would not have consistently failed to manage the fortune he inherited from his father. The Trump family’s wealth would have significantly increased instead of decreasing as it is documented to have had.
Politically he seems to arbitrarily jump between pre-Enlightenment myths and 19th century ideas. Probably versions of both corrupted my rumour too. He does not consider the possibility of others by themselves wanting something else. Or he takes it for granted other groups are out to get his own. When he accuses other of something he never asks himself if the accusation is humanly possible. All those systematic errors indicate a habitual thoughtlessness. He never seems to have realised he even needs to consciously reflect over things.
Somehow he has come to believe he can get anything he wants if he just exploit and press heavily onto others. But if such things are done arbitrarily and thoughtlessly they don’t work. Yet his very thoughtlessness meant he never considered the possibility of himself doing anything wrong. Hence his hatred of people different from himself. The damage his hatred may cause is limited by a combination of his own incompetence and other American federal politicians’ willingness to stop him.
A couple points:
First, the key threat from Israel’s perspective is Iran’s ballistic missile program, not because it inherently entails Israel being physically wiped off the map under a barrage of Iranian missiles, but because of the threat to Israel’s “qualitative military edge”, the premise that it must always be able to escalate against any regional opponent to a point where the target lacks the capacity to respond in kind. Obviously Israel does have nukes, but the international norm against nuclear first strike is a genuine constraint that Israel certainly doesn’t want to run the risk of violating, so Iran being able to go tit-for-tat in long-range conventional strike capability would be a genuine existential threat to Israel’s hyper-belligerent strategic posture in the region. Think of how the perception of qualitative Spartan heavy infantry superiority was broken by the otherwise strategically marginal defeat at Tegyra, even before the decisive blow at Leuctra — or, for a more polemically-charged modern comparison, think of how the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale helped shatter the perception of the apartheid-era South African Defense Force’s qualitative battlefield superiority over neighboring African militaries, an important milestone on the road that ultimately led to the end of apartheid and the extension of formal political equality to black South Africans.
Second, any analysis of the strategic balance of this war needs to account for the most extreme option on Iran’s escalation ladder, even more drastic than closing the Strait of Hormuz: rendering the Gulf monarchies more or less uninhabitable by striking at desalination plants. This infrastructure is far too sprawling and complex to be remotely defensible from concerted Iranian missile/drone offensive, and taking these plants offline even for a matter of weeks could easily require rapid mass evacuation of large cities like Doha, Dubai, and Riyadh. (Entirely aside from the longer-term geopolitical ramifications, this would likely require enough mass-scale logistical support from the U.S. military to cancel out its capacity for sustained offensive operations against Iran in the meantime.) As with North Korean use of nukes, Iran would presumably hesitate to play its “erase the GCC from the map” card unless it was under imminent threat of state collapse, but also as with a nuclear-armed North Korea, disregarding the presence of such an important card in the state’s back pocket seems like severe strategic malpractice, which the Trump administration certainly seems to have committed here.
And this countries can probably retaliate on Tehran power plants and dams. After all, the city was said to be already on the verge of evacuation for lack of water weeks before the war.
Hopefully, it will make everyone think twice…
Drought in Iran and drought in the GCC countries is a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Look at Iran, and you see a habitable if somewhat arid region undergoing a relatively normal sort of drought crisis thanks to factors like declining rainfall, overallocation to ill-conceived agricultural usages, unsustainable management of aquifers and dam reservoirs… once you adjust for general economic affluence and state capacity and so forth, that could easily be a description of the current state of the Colorado River watershed in the southwestern United States. Hitting Iran’s desalination capacity would make these problems worse, but it wouldn’t destroy Iran outright.
On the other hand, desalination is the near-exclusive basis for the GCC countries’ ability to even exist as modern urbanized societies at all, and pulling the plug on desalination would force all but a sliver of the population to choose between immediate evacuation or dehydration within weeks.
It’s the desalination plants that genuinely horrify me. What are the rough numbers, that something like 80% of the water used in the Arabian Peninsula is from desalination plants, and that something like 100 million people could be affected if those go down? And that Israel has a similar proportion of water from desalination?
It is not logistically possible to replace that water before people die of thirst. Either people evacuate en masse from the region, or they die.
That is genuinely the nuclear option. And rumor has it that Iran threatened to add the plants to their target list along with power plants in this latest round of escalation, where Trump threatened to start targeting power plants if the Strait remained closed for two more days. He seemed to blink, and extended the deadline, but then also poked at the red line by seeming to attack at a nuclear power plant.
If Trump decides to turn around and start mass bombing power plants, that puts the ball in the Iranian court for escalation. And their behavior seems to be to try for diplomatic consistency, answer tit for tat, and follow up on threats that they have made. If they do ramp up the escalation to par, we can only hope they target power plants. If they were to take out all of the Israeli desalination capability, which is some 80% of their water, I think that first of all, it abjectly cripples Israel as a state and ends their ability to meaningfully contribute to the war, and second of all, I think that would genuinely be enough to provoke an Israeli nuclear strike.
Wasn’t this the plot of a James Bond movie?
If Barbara Tuchman were only around to add a chapter to The March of Folly…
Not to get too deep into US politics, but ‘only stupid, fascist countries start wars for the sake of it’ may be more applicable than we’d like to admit. Trump doesn’t have the mental capacity to hold a message in his head for a single press conference at this point – all that’s left is pure id, and when you hear him or someone like Hegseth talk, you get the feeling that the main motivator is that blowing stuff up is good and manly and powerful.
Or, to paraphrase, dropping bombs is penis and not dropping bombs is vagina. It’s all gender!
Or, to paraphrase, dropping bombs is penis and not dropping bombs is vagina. It’s all gender!
Not only is this American regime demonstrating that everything the Communists ever said about American capitalism turned out to be true, it’s also demonstrating that everything the feminists ever said about “toxic masculinity” turned out to be true as well.
(Maybe that’s somewhat exaggerated for rhetorical effect, but you get the point). A surprising amount of this US regime really is all about gender.
For a revisionist historian, Bret Devereaux displays a rather shocking lack of skepticism lack of source skepticism.
He accepts and repeats the most inflated estimates of how many protestors Iran killed with no examination of sources or evidence. Meanwhile, he never stops to denounce the genocidal Israeli regime as odious, despite its atrocities in Gaza and elsewhere outweigh any committed by Iran in scale, which have been documented in exhaustive detail.
Or perhaps he’s not blind to the repugnance of the Zionist regime and the criminality of its partners and puppets in the United States government – maybe he’s just afraid he’ll look unpatriotic if he doesn’t remind of us of how he much agrees with Our Greatest Ally every other paragraph.
Regardless, take it as good news that even complacent centrists who swallowed the manufactured consent whole are forecasting the failure of this evil and illegal war.
“For a revisionist historian, Bret Devereaux”
What exactly is “revisionist” about him? He disagrees with a lot of *the pop culture version* of history, but that’s not exactly unusual among historians.
” maybe he’s just afraid he’ll look unpatriotic if he doesn’t remind of us of how he much agrees with Our Greatest Ally every other paragraph.”
Feel free to point to one point where he describes Israel as anyone’s “Greatest Ally”. Or one point where he talks about how much he agrees with them. And if *this post* looks to you like the kind of thing written by someone who is afraid of being called “unpatriotic” by the kind of jingoists who love to call everyone and everything “unpatriotic”, you should compare it with the stuff written by the kind of people who really *are* afraid of that.
If you can’t even properly read a blog post that you’re responding you and that is presumably easily available to you, you shouldn’t lecture other people about their poor assessment of sources.
maybe he’s just afraid he’ll look unpatriotic if he doesn’t remind of us of how he much agrees with Our Greatest Ally every other paragraph.
Considering how many death threats i routinely get on social media from people with American flag profile pictures, I would say that Bret’s caution is totally understandable (if not exactly admirable).
How “cautious” is he? He’s clearly burned his bridges with that crowd long ago. I don’t see how V. V.’s description of his post bears any resemblance to the actual text of his post.
I think the description of the crimes of the Iranian regime are pertinent here because this is a context in which people might try to argue that war upon Iran is justified by them. There are other contexts in which people can say that the crimes of Israel against Palestine were not a justification for the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 2023.
That said, I wouldn’t say an article that describes the Israeli government as having intended for Iranian regime collapse followed by a country in chaos and imagining a future in which Israel is diplomatically and economically isolated is exactly friendly to the country’s current government and its policies.
>how he much agrees with Our Greatest Ally
Did you miss the multiple paragraphs talking about how bad it is to allow the “junior partner” in our security relationship to drag us into a war?
In “Collections: Against the state”, you said that prison regimes are easily conquered due to their inefficiency. It seems like Iran is a pretty archetypal prison regime, so by that logic shouldn’t it have collapsed relatively quickly? That seems to contradict what is said in this post about the bad gamble.
If the United States wanted to invade and conquer Iran, there is very little the Iranian regime could do to stop it.
But the United States does not want to do that, thus this situation.
I think the US would collapse before Iranian resistance if we occupied Iran
Perhaps. Then again, Britain and Russia conquered Iran in the last week of August, 1941. But they didn’t do it by bombing alone.
Imperial Iran probably wasn’t well equipped to hold out against such an invasion, but I think any assessment of the metrics need to consider that they largely didn’t try.
In any case, that would be a very different proposition to an Iran with modern weaponry supported by a more industrialised homeland, that has been developing strategic plans against the prospect of invasion for decades, that probably has a fair bit of ideological cohesion if conventional military needs to convert to insurgency, and has seen example of how that thing can work and fail in the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Given how the air war is going, I think we’d be looking at a repeat of Iraq or Afghanistan; a fairly quick (not as quick) siezure of the capital and major cities, then a forever insurgency coupled with a failure to stand up a local government and military force.
Isator, if they didn’t try to resist that suggests that they thought resistance of any kind pointless. But it may also tell us something about the politics of the operation *in Iran*.
War may be about destruction, but conquest is about construction. (Of political coalitions, not architecture.)
If the US could look forty years into the future, as the Iranian regime evidently has done since it came to power, then the US would conclusively do everything it could to transition to renewable sources of energy. Do that and all the leverage the Iranians have disappears. Alas, Trump has just spent billions in taxpayer money buying out holders of offshore leases who were building wind energy mills, etc. This administration, to the contrary, wants us to be more dependent than ever on oil and gas. And so the merry-go-round continues.
Great post, but I was hoping for more of a follow up to this introductory point under the Strategic Implications section:
> Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.
The Implications section noted that no strategic aims (regime change, ending Iranian nuclear weapons) have been accomplished yet, and then moved on to the costs. If those strategic aims will definitely not be achieved, fine, but I’d like that stated explicitly. Otherwise, I’d be interested in a discussion of the scenario in which those aims are achieved, compared against the costs.
I suppose it was implicitly covered by the point about the USA having exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal, and oil exports. Regime change and nuclear disarmament aren’t directly about those, so as nice as they might be (especially for Israel), they’re ultimately not impactful on everyday American lives. Still, they’re not *nothing*, and both regime change and nuclear disarmament have some bearing on the likelihood of the Strait of Hormuz being closed (or heavily taxed) in the future.
What happens if the US commits to blowing up any ships that Iran lets through?
It loses a significant amount of favour with practically every single country in the world save Israel.
I mean, it’s already been doing that for quite some time, with the instigation of this war simply another point in a broader trend. But that doesn’t mean it can’t sink lower.
Plausibly less bad: Iran, no longer having an interest in the strait remaining navigable to any ships, lays a minefield in the straits. Or at least sends some fishing boats to suggestively waddle around, and taunts everyone “if you think we’re bluffing, go on, call the »bluff«”.
Plausibly worse: China and/or Russia make a public offer to take ships stuck in the Gulf under their flag. Some ships take it, load Iranian oil (or pay a toll
ah) and play chicken with the US Navy. Does America break her commitment? Or does America honor its commitment and in so doing, commit a traditionally recognized act of war against China/Russia?This move is not hypothetical. In the OG Gulf War, Iraq/Iran shooting at tankers lead to an offer by the USSR to reflag them (as protection against strikes by the belligerents, not the US), and to prevent the USSR gaining prestige by pulling it off, the same offer by the US, which was accepted in droves, and lead to the USN having to escort tankers through the straits.
Typo check:
> Even with the regime were to collapse
Even *if* the regime
> my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing
extra word “has”
> with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production
*while* Israel has
(also I believe there should be a comma at the end of this phrase)
> primal scream issued into the avoid
into the *void*
Thanks for the post!
Your analysis on the US’s part of this war (and the international trade/economy part) is very insightful, thank you!
It’s on Bibi’s strategy that I’ll disagree. My suspicion is that the Israeli plan is long-term and very audacious. Your observation that Israel may lose the US as its main ally will have been made in Israel also. Israel is faced simultaneously with needing a new ally and having the Iranian regime at its weakest point yet.
Thus the plan appears to be to kill two birds with one stone: do a full regime-change in Iran, and end up with a new Iranian government that is genuinely supportive of Israel.
Hence also Israel’s objection to a Rodriquez-like figure that Trump is trying to get: a Trump-pliable regime figure isn’t going to get you the needed Israel-Iran friendship and alliance!
The method appears to be to degrade the regime’s repressive capacity to the point that a popular uprising can work. As to the obvious question of why there’s haven’t even been protests since the war started: the Iranian population has been specifically asked to wait, by both Netanyahu and Pahlavi (and more recently also by adm. Cooper).
Now, that’s not to say that people will take to the streets again when the call comes, much less that it’ll succeed in overthrowing the regime. But the idea that regime-change is unlikely in the short term is simply wrong: it hasn’t been tried yet!
Iranian politics broadly has two poles: the more ‘Persian’ urban middle classes and the more ‘Shi’a’ – generally lower class, more rural. Both came together against the Shah, one for his westernisation (offensive to Persian cultural values) and corruption, the other for his perceived lack of Shi’a religiosity. The current regime looks much more to the Shi’a side (note this is very different from, say, Saudi Wahhabism or the ISIS brand of Islam), but there is still a considerable ‘Persian’ element.
Any regime change is not likely to end up friendly to the US or, even more, Israel, even if more ‘Persian’ and less ‘Shi’a’. Israel has spent the last two decades assassinating Iranian scientists and military leaders, moved on to bombing and basically made clear its preferred vision is of an impotent Iran – something akin to Syria or Iraq. The US wants a Venezuela – a subordinate. These are not a future either pole can accept.
It is a historical fact that the previous regime in Iran *was* friendly to the US. It cannot be impossible if it has already happened.
Having said that, this US regime is probably despised almost universally by every historic ally.
There is the crime against humanity option (which, to be clear, I am not advocating): keep bombing Iran until organized society collapses. If power stations, water systems, bridges, police buildings, and similar are destroyed at sufficient scale, it becomes impossible to govern the country in any meaningful sense or to do the manufacturing needed to produce weapons that can threaten Hormuz. As you pointed out, this didn’t work in WWII, but we have much better precision today: much higher useful damage per bomb.
Unsure about this. Guerilla armies can sometimes exercise fairly high amounts of power without controlling any power stations, water systems, bridges, police buildings, etc.
You also have a lot less bombs, is the problem.