Dawg....

Nobody here is worried about our ability to engage the Iranian's conventional military. What I don't want is to pull another Iraq. Remember that? Rolled into Baghdad in the blink of an eye, did the "Mission Accomplished" banner on a carrier and everything.....and then we stayed a REALLY long time. Nobody wants to stay there a really long time. They say they have no intention of doing that. I'll believe it when I see it.

 

Very true. I agree and hope we avoid that.

 

and yet, they’ll have to be dealt with sooner or later. you choose. iran is much more of a threat than iraq ever was. so we screwed the pooch on iraq. doesn’t mean we say “no more” because of reasons. it’s like saying “why do we have police? haven’t people learned not to commit crime?”

cat…

 

I don't trust this sudden and convenient change on narrative from the crowd that was chanting "no more pointless wars" a year and a half ago and the same president that denounced this exact thing when his opponent eas in charge. And I haven't seen a compelling enough justification for this change of heart.

So to your analogy: I'm not question why we have police. I'm suspicious as to why this officer is so hell bent on enforcing a specific law when during his job interview he told us all that enforcing this specific law was wreckless.

 

Never thought I'd see the day that POTUS would publicly ask the PRC for military support. And yet here we are.

Separate topic: for those of us hyper-focused on the price of a barrel of oil, you are missing the forest for the trees. It's true that oil has certainly been more expensive, on an inflation-adjusted basis, in our recent history. Gas prices in the US have not (yet) exceeded their all-time highs. The impact on things like airline ticket prices and people's daily commutes (to name a few things) will be obvious to all. The reason we are so sensitive to gas (oil) prices is partly because it's just about the only product in the world where you get multiple daily reminders of the price, simply by passing a gas station, which most of us do many times a day. So the psychological effect of rising gas prices is more acute than it is for other commodities. If the price of wheat rises, you'll eventually notice that bread is more expensive, but it's not driven into your mind multiple times a day.

What is not as obvious is the less visible, but very real, effect of a near-closure of the SOH on all sorts of other things that modern civilization depends on. LNG is one of them. Fertilizer as well -- fully 30% of the world's seaborne-traded fertilizer goes through the SoH. Without fertilizer, you can't grow crops. Without crops, you can't feed people. That's not politics. That's just reality.

So when people say things like "Oil is down today!" as a justification for the current madness we're witnessing, I really feel that they're only looking at one part of the picture.

And then you have the second- and third-level effects, such as:

• Huge boost to Russian oil earnings, which will help them continue to pulverize Ukraine. And if you can watch what's been happening to civilian lives in Ukraine since 2022 without being horrified and revolted, I don't know what to tell you.

• Massive credibility and economic hit to our allied Gulf nations. Those countries have helped enforce a level of stability in the Gulf for decades. While the Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, etc. have plenty of financial reserves to cushion the blows (ie the near total shutdown of commercial aviation, just to name one), the rulers of those nations have (mostly) held Islamic fundamentalism at bay, through a pretty clear bargain with their citizens: we'll keep you rich, and you help us keep the peace. But the current chaos, if prolonged long enough, could lead to significant unrest in those countries, which is the last thing an already-destabilized Middle East needs.

• This has already been raised, but in this current attempt to topple the Iranian regime, we've managed instead to replace an 86-year-old autocrat with his son (likely more hard-line than his father). We also killed his wife, at least one son, his mother, a sister, and likely more. So let's think about that for a moment. You're the new leader of Iran. Your #1 enemy just killed pretty much your entire extended family. How likely are you to behave more rationally than your father? Not bloody likely, I'd say.

I only see three ways this goes:

1) Iraq, but worse. A fruitless attempt to take and hold significant ground in Iran, sparking off a conflict with no end in sight and (realistically) no potential for an American victory.

2) Stalemate. We continue a relentless aerial campaign until we've done to urban Iran what Israel did to Gaza. That won't bring the Iranian regime down. It'll just turn one hundred percent of the population against us. Kill enough civilians, especially kids in schoolhouses, and even the most anti-government folks in Iran will hate us more than they hate Khamenei and his ilk. And then we'll have another 9/11, just maybe with drones instead of hijacked airliners.

3) POTUS declares "victory" and moves on to the next distraction. Hopefully not involving a nuclear-armed state.

To be clear: I detest the Iranian regime with all of my being. (It's personal, for me.) And I supported the June 2025 strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. I'd love to see this regime gone.

But this war is not going to topple the mullahs. Only the Iranian people themselves can do that. All we are doing is creating even more instability in a region that was already waiting to blow.

 

Trump - "we don't want to say we won too soon...but we won, in the first hour, it was over."

Are any updated reports after the first hour available? Why's he asking for China to help it we won 12 days ago?

 

Unfortunately, the bandaid should have been pulled off decades ago, but here we are. It was going to happen sooner or later. Later perhaps would have rallied the world into making it Iraq and Pakistan’s largest parking lot, but no one really knows.

 

As I pointed out in another thread, we cooperate with PRC in that region for anti-piracy on an ongoing basis.

They are practical, not like say IR or DPRK, and careful not to antagonize or alienate us to a degree that prevents collaboration on activities of mutual interest. They do have an interest in global oil prices.

 

Yes, not ideal at all. But it sounds like junior is in a coma, maybe not going to recover. So hopefully he might just be a virtual figurehead for the committee in charge while they figure out WTF to go from here.

Agree, worst case. But I'm cautiously optimistic that congress will put their feet down at that point, and reclaim the War Powers which they've abdicated (along with so many other powers).

Also tend to think that Trumps inner circle and family will talk him out of that, if he were to decide to go there.

But there is a fine line, we *might* be able to occupy Kharg Island and select beach-front real estate near the Strait with minimal BoG to extort their oil export economy and protect the rest of the world's imports. Maybe without getting into a quagmire. This is what I'd consider the realistic worst case... OIF style BoG is pretty unlikely.

Unlikely I thik. We are being *extremely* selective about targeting, avoiding not only civilians but critical civil and economic infrastructure. Last analysis I saw indicates that the Iranian Man on the Street blames the regime for this mess, not the US (yet). Yes there are always Baby Milk Factories, but as long as 99% of the civil population doesn't have any first-hand experience they might not fall in behind the regime. The military leaders running this grew up learning hard lessons from their predecessors.

Could be. Regime would then have a very strong incentive to lay off the SoH... that might even be explicitly negotiated through cutouts on the DL.

Same. I was not in favor of this, but IL was going in last year regardless, and we had the tools to really get after the problem so it made sense to follow through in 2025.

True, and I'm not optimistic.... IRGC fanatics are deeply embedded in all aspects of society, economy, and government. It's basically like the old KGB... regime falls and what do you get? Putin.

Actually many other gulf nations, especially the GCC, will consider the region to be more stable after this, since IR will have lost all of their air, sea, and most of their TBM capability. IR will almost certainty stay home and lick their wounds for a long time to come, even if their attitude hasn't been adjusted one bit. Especially considering most of their malign influence proxies have already been neutered by IL. I wouldn't have advocated for it, but now that the bandaid is ripped off, it might be better in the long run.

One thing I can say is that IR's intentions towards us couldn't have gotten any worse, they had been systematically killing Americans for a couple decades.

 

They specifically told us it was thoroughly yanked off and not to question them on it...