Wasn’t the Straits of Hourmuz open prior to Israel’s surprise attack on the Ayatollah?
Why are US taxpayers funding Israel’s military ambitions to the detriment of US interests?
Of course, with the bipartisan culture of corruption in Washington this will never be investigated.
Buckled up America, this is a redo of the expensive and embarrassing 20-year exercise in futility in Iraq & Afghanistan.
intercst
So what would you do now?
Our global economic problems going forward have more to do with the yield curve.
First thing, when you’re in a hole, stop digging.
Second thing, get rid of the two people who started digging the hole.
Third thing, see if you can reset with the leaders of Iran and go back to the treaty which allowed verified inspections of nuclear facilities.
That would be a start.
And, as small compensation for killing their leader, maybe give them back their own money.
Sure now
And if Iran said no?
We might have to sweeten the deal. It’s entirely possible that by making war against Iran, we have put ourselves in a worse position to secure our goals than we were in before. If we can’t destroy their nuclear programs and missile capacity solely through bombing, and therefore have to find an agreed diplomatic arrangement in order to achieve those goals, we might find it much more difficult to do that now than in 2015.
Umm, no. The yield curve isn’t causing the price of gas to go up by 40%..The yield curve isn’t crashing the stock market. The yield curve didn’t close the Strait of Hormuz. The yield curve didn’t lift sanctions on Russian and Iranian oil making both countries stronger.
No, Trump did all that with his stupid war and now the U.S. and the rest of the West is in a way worse position than we were before the war.
And if iran insists on having nuclear weapons? What is your next move?
Economically the yield curve is worse than the war.
Trump is really messing around on the economy.
Don’t know. They’ve never formally insisted on having nuclear weapons before, instead preferring to assert that their nuclear program was for domestic energy production. It would be a significant change for them to formally admit they were pursuing a nuke. Granted, we’ve completely upended their prior vision of national security and cut the legs out from under the leadership that had advocated that being under the weapons threshold was sufficient for their safety - so maybe they make that change.
If they were to do that, we’d face some very difficult choices. But it would be foolhardy to make our current plans assuming that this would be their position, rather than determining whether that’s where they are.
It’s not just Iran.
Why would any country trust the United States after we killed the people who could approve an agreement IN THE MIDDLE OF NEGOTIATIONS?
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
Iran has threatened the Strait of Hormuz before. But let’s be clear—Hormuz is also its own economic lifeline, its gateway to the outside world. In normal times, they’re not going to disrupt traffic unless they believe they have no other choice, and this war is pushing them right up against that line. There’s nothing new or surprising here. Given how sensitive we are, they don’t need to do much—just add a bit of pressure where it already hurts. They don’t need a nuclear weapon to do that, though this war may very well push them to rethink their fatwa against it.
Right now, the leverage actually sits with Iran, because we are highly sensitive to oil prices and stock market declines. We can bomb a country back to the neolithic, yet we can’t stand or have no patience to endure the hit to our wallets—let alone sustained casualties in our military.
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran is larger and far more capable than either. Like them, its tolerance for pain is higher than ours—not because we are more civilized, quite the opposite. It’s because they have less and less to lose and are increasingly focused on survival. You don’t win against an opponent like that. The U.S. should step back.
Iran, regardless of who governs it, will seek to assert what it sees as its rightful place in the Middle East. It won’t accept subjugation. It won’t simply take some American money and concede its position. Smaller and weaker Arab states have done that, but that’s not Iran’s path. Turkey is the other regional power with ambitions that don’t fully align with the U.S.—or more specifically, with its proxy, Israel.
Al,
60% enrich is 1 week from bomb material.
400 kg or g was reported as enough for 11 bombs.
What do we do when confronted with that?
Aw,
Did you trust that regime’s leadership prior to the war?
Do you agree with religious freedom in the Middle East?
We could do what we’ve been doing for the last 5-6 years - which is not to take any action at all, and rely on Iran’s own self-interest to keep them somewhat constrained. Iran’s strategic policy has been to stay within a few weeks of breakout (weapons-grade enrichment) since 2021. Although we constantly say that Iran wants a nuclear weapon, the regime has been split between different factions on their nuclear program. Some in the regime certainly advocated in favor of going for breakout and developing a weapon. But the prevailing factions, and thus Iranian policy, was to stay below breakout.
The strategic reason for that is obvious. If Iran gets a nuke, the rest of the ME will as well. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and perhaps the UAE would almost certainly move towards getting nukes of their own. That actually makes Iran worse off - it dramatically increases the risk to their own country. They’ve wanted to be free to try to foment discord in other nations in ways that increase their influence, but if they’re surrounded by nuclear powers, that gets far too risky for them to play that game any more. And they want to play that game.
Having an active nuke program but staying below breakout was a “have your cake and eat it too” strategy - it gave them the ability to posture a bit like a nuclear power, but since they didn’t have an actual bomb it wouldn’t set off a scramble for other nations to go nuclear.
The smart thing to do would have been to maintain the status quo in place after 2015, when Iran had not enriched anywhere near 60% but retained the ability to do so. The second-smart thing would have been to let them stay at 60% but try to use diplomacy, sanctions, bribes, monitoring, and the threat of greater consequences to keep them at that level - an unsatisfying but more stable status quo.
But actually starting a war with them? Completely idiotic. You’ve now eliminated any reason they would have had to stay below breakout without preventing them from racing to bomb material once the war is over. You’ve empowered the faction who promoted going nuclear, proven them right (that staying below breakout was enough to protect them), and used up your escalation threat.
What about our politics, if we won’t take action with others in power here? I am talk when Iran goes for it.
How much power should this regime have over us, sa, the uae, Israel and others?
How much religious power should the regime have over a country that is not their religion? I am talking iran itself.
Should there be religious freedom?
Should the us tuck tail over religious bigotry and violence?
Lots of “should” questions there, but we don’t have the ability to remake the world as it “should” be. We tried that with Afghanistan, and look how it turned out. There should be religious freedom in Afghanistan, and we tried very hard to make it happen - and we failed. There should be a free and democratic Iraq, and we tried very hard to make it happen - and that didn’t work out the way we wanted either.
None of your “shoulds” can be accomplished with air power alone. They can only possibly be accomplished with a massive ground invasion - and even then, the odds are pretty low that would be successful. And since you don’t seem to support that kind of massive ground invasion, those questions aren’t really relevant.
Afghanis are 99.7% Muslim with 85% plus being Sunni.
Persians are 35% Muslim. You are comparing apples to oranges.
Doesn’t matter. In all three countries, you had a solidly entrenched authoritarian regime that had worked for years (decades) to eliminate internal opposition to their control. So just like Afghanistan and Iraq, you need to go in with a full ground invasion if you want to dislodge that regime - and keep U.S. forces there long enough to stand up a new government and defend it against the old regime trying to regain power.
You’re not willing to do that, from your past posts here. So it’s irrelevant whether one things Iran “should” have a more egalitarian, pluralistic, or more rights-based government - unless that’s the type of war that you’re advocating we fight. What’s achievable with the type of campaign we are fighting at present is much more limited.
You also seem fixated on the fact that Iran is majority Persian with a Muslim minority, as if that matters to the analysis. It does not. Iraq was governed by an authoritarian Sunni minority, roughly the same size as the Muslim minority in Iran - and when they were overthrown, it was that displaced minority that caused the massive problems we had. Similarly, estimates of Taliban support in Afghanistan show that they are only supported by a tiny minority of the population (less than 30%), with most Afghanis opposed to their rule. It doesn’t matter. A well-armed and organized minority can thwart the preferences of a majority - which is what happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan.