how is it an incredible strength to say things like “ill have the honor of taking cuba”

i bring this up not to poke specific partisan bs because we all know(and many people in this thread lamented on) the former president’s mental abilities, but rather i bring this up because it (subjectively) validates people’s opinions that we are concerned about the facts. I dont trust whats happening. The last 2 times we did this alot of gold and blood were spilled in the sand

 

It used to be that if you just wanted to avoid topics like pay, religion or especially politics, you could.

Once you said buzz off, people wouldn’t bother you.

At some point, people stopped not bothering about it and no amount of shushing or changing the subject world work.

Somewhere over the past few years, it’s morphed again, and now people actually can get downright hostile when you say you don’t talk about politics.

 

I suggest you go find and watch Joe Kent's appearance on Shaun Ryan's show. It might be "enlightening". Joe changed his position for one thing only. It has nothing to do with Israeli influence. Just like it had nothing to do with Russian influence.

There is a good op-ed piece in Al Jazera (yes Al Jazera) written by a long time intelligence analyst who specializes in how authoritarian regimes successfully project force. I recommend you read it. It's well written, good pros and cons and well balanced. The short of it is this operation is working. That's why I will post here we need to let them do their work. In time we'll learn whether this was a major strategic blunder or the operation that secured a true and lasting peace in the ME. I think that's something we've been trying to attain for many decades now.

 

How do you envision securing the nuclear material in Iran?

 

It could in theory be done with quick raids. There are many obstacles but one of the big ones was always the need to get significant air lift into a denied area... that problem at least has been solved, we have air dominance now.

You would also need very good intel.

By quick raids, I don't mean a platoon/ODA level SOF element either, I think it would look more Operation Market Garden, pretty big muscle movement, with lot's of CAS capability on call.

Obviously risky, but even a partial success would be good, the less material they have to start with, the longer the road to Boom.

 

In the 10 days between Israel starting the current campaign and the US joining it, there was a lot of activity at Fordow. Many trucks, the analysts showed that the trucks were dump trucks, not the specialized vehicles needed to transport centrifuges or the cylinders containing the nuclear materials.

So, it looks like the Iranians filled the entrance to the facility with a bunch of dirt. If that is true, now you're talking about something very different than a quick raid.

 

You know Operation Market Garden was a failure right?

 

Another interesting wrinkle in the Iran situation is the JCPOA. Trump tore that agreement up in 2018 after his administration certified that the Iranians were in compliance with it twice. That agreement left many problems to solve, but one thing is for sure: if that agreement had been left in place and the Iranians continued to follow it, they wouldn't have the stockpile of nuclear material they do now.


https://2009-2017.state.gov/e/eb/tfs/spi/iran/jcpoa/

 

I wasn't opining on whether it would fail, succeed, or somewhere in the middle. Just describing a sense of how it would go down.

 

I was involved at the time JCOA was developed. The main problems with that deal, as implemented...

1) Our allies in the region did not consider it adequate for their security. The nuclear restrictions were temporary.

2) IR took their new-found economic windfall and applied it to more regional malign influence. So maybe less centrifuges, but more exported terror, insurgencies, missiles, proxy support, etc.

So behavior didn't change, it just morphed into other directions.

The deal was not a success for the US, other than maybe one guy's political legacy.