At this point, no country in the world will ever again 'make a deal' with the US, because while pretending to negotiate with you they try to ram a knife into your back.
You can blame that on Obama and EU countries bombing Libya despite them agreeing to all nuclear demands, not this war (where it's unsurprising that negotiations can fail).
It was pretty obvious that if the negotiations failed that the US would respond by attacking Iran. Iran didn't seem willing to give up their nuclear weapons program regardless of the quite predictable consequences.
1. The U.S. and Iran had already negotiated and signed a nuclear agreement between our countries but Trump reneged on the already-negotiated agreement.
2. Trump claimed that his previous attacks on Iran within the last year “completely and totally obliterated” their nuclear program, “obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before” - both direct Trump quotes. Trump was quite clear that Iran’s nuclear program had already been destroyed like nothing had ever been destroyed before.
It was Trump who cancelled to JCPOA. Also, sending Witkoff and Kushner as negotiators is already an obvious sign the US is dishonest about preventing conflicts through diplomacy, otherwise they would send experienced diplomats. It is really the US Epstein Class Deep State government to blame here.
They could have named the DOD the "Department Of Peace", instead they called it the "Department Of War", showing their true face and trajectory.
At this point it is really the people of the US to rise up and implement a Regime Change from within to change things for the better.
You all just keep lying endlessly, I think most people get it at this point. Iran was prepared to go further than the JCPOA, it was never enough because it was never about nuclear weapons.
As I recall Iran said quite openly, in response to the US troop buildup, that they would see an attack by Israel as an attack by the US, suggesting that they could target e.g. carriers instead of Israel if Israel attacked them.
I’m honestly perplexed. I had anticipated a scenario like “the US feared Iran was unstable and attacked to protect nuclear material”. It seems this would give them reasonable cover. I don’t see how Israel going along helps
While I think this (and Venezuela) are arguably the biggest missteps this administration is making, it's hardly a partisan point. The political establishment loves war more than perhaps anything else. In 2016 alone Obama bombed half a dozen different countries with more than 26,000 munitions for an average rate of three bombs dropped every hour, every day, for a year. [1] Nobel Peace Prize embodied.
I think the only way to get away from the warmongering is to go for a third party. But even they would likely be corrupted by the excessive influence of the military industrial complex. Eisenhower was not only right, but plainly prophetic.
Not defending that peace price but:
Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.
Trump this time around didn't inherit a major us deployment in a conflict area. No Iraq, no Afghanistan. Also, he's doing military strikes by himself, no Congress involved.
Syrian and Libia were both essentially civil wars with an oppressive regime with Syria using allegedly chemical weapons.
Your source is a very weird site. Countries Obama bombed 2026??? What does that even mean. Is it just a typo in the main heading and the title?
A war? Of course not. It’s a major combat operation. Only congress can declare wars. We haven’t had any in decades. They should call it the Dept. of Major Combat Operations.
The occurrence of a war is a fact whether or not it is declared, and whether or not the actor waging war does so consistent with the legal requirements their nation's laws put on doing so.
As soon a country agrees to enter a conflict on a side, which the original axes declare to be a war, it's at war. You can tell the media whatever you want of course.
Iranian people, rise up and overthrow the regime. This opportunity may not come again soon.
A weakened regime that stays in power would be a terrible outcome to all this.
Any regime that massacres thousands of its own citizens should expect a bomb on their doorstep. That’s moral clarity and I’m glad America is finally delivering it.
Even if you don't support US & IL standing in the frontlines against the terror regime, at least pray for the freedom of the people of Iran, 90m people held hostages by the regime. If you are pro-peace, do not be hypocrite, some wars are needed to defeat evil.
Due to distance planes need to take off many hours before the bombs drop.
You can get an edge here by moving your ass somewhere where you can see the planes take off, maybe a team with people at multiple locations - boats near the aircraft carrier, near military bases in Israel, ...
Regardless of how it ends, and it can go both ways, we're witnessing history here. This feels like a much bigger development than Russia-Ukraine. Iran is a major partner for Russia and China, mostly for military technology and oil. Hope it's not a start of WW3.
No it's not. This is an air strike campaign, no boots on the ground. It'll end in two weeks. There is no chance China or Russia get involved, like last time, so "WW3" is completely non-credible.
The previous campaign lasted a whole 13 days and WW3 didn't start. I'm not sure why anybody thinks it'll be different now or why Russia or China would bother going to war for Iran. That makes zero sense.
There might be boots on the ground eventually given Trump's speech.
>The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission
It's a sinister statement, but despite everything the U.S. has moved to the region, they didn't move the stuff they would need to move for ground operations.
Depends how you count “big”. Russia-Ukraine has had about 1 million deaths, and has completely changed how Europe thinks about security- it’s hardly a sideshow. Then again, not much territory has changed hands and there has been no regime change yet.
I don't think it's bigger than Russia-Ukraine - it's part of it. This is all about destabilising Iran's incumbent government, which is probably a good thing at the moment. It'll damage supply lines to Russia's Ukraine offensive, give the chance for Iranian citizens to rise up against Khamenei and the IRGC and break the command chain for their foreign proxy operations. Part of Dugan's work on geopolitics, which they seem to be following to the word (c'mon guys seriously?) suggests that Moscow and Tehran should be allied which they are behind the scenes.
As for the nuclear threat, literally Iran said it was going to destroy Israel to the point it had a massive countdown clock in Tehran until Israel blew it up, so meh. If I was on the receiving end of that threat I'd make it a policy to respond to it, escalation or not. I make no claims of the accuracy of the threats past IAEA being unable to verify they aren't enriching stuff.
Doubt it'll escalate into WW3. The only other powers involved are Russia, who are totally hands tied with Ukraine if they like it or not and China is only interested keeping what's left in its sphere of influence later through their outreach initiatives. I suspect most Middle Eastern countries will be quite happy about this conflict as they have persistent problems with Iran as well from the Houthis, Hezbollah and tens of other factions. They won't want to say anything though in case their own citizens turn on them.
The cringeworthy thing is how the US gov are communicating this and that does the operation a lot of damage. It's really quite terrible. Sounds like it was written by a bunch of 9 year olds after too many sugary drinks. Urgh.
> The cringeworthy thing is how the US gov are communicating this and that does the operation a lot of damage. It's really quite terrible. Sounds like it was written by a bunch of 9 year olds after too many sugary drinks. Urgh.
Thats because its not written for you and I. Its written for people who struggle to communicate at an adult level, which is a shockingly large portion of the US.
> And they will again appear weak and incapable, unable to help their allies
Iran and Russia have various partnership agreements, but are not allies. And Russia has already demonstrated that it doesn't support what are, on paper, close allies in the CSTO, so not defending a non-ally strategic partner really doesn't move the needle on their credibility.
As big as this is, the Russia-Ukraine war pretty much marked the end of the post-WW2 era and redefined global relations between the powers. In that sense, this is yet another major shift within this new era. But also, the series of events that led to this point does connect to the Russia-Ukraine war, and maybe doesn't happen without it.
I have to wonder how many are in governmental roles and realized they can steer the US into conflicts and ruining itself without any of those involved identifying as Russian. It's the cleanest backdoor for espionage that there ever was.
Ever since the ICE stuff I've been desperate to find a way to not pay my taxes - even if it means donating 2, 3x, hell 4x my tax bill to somewhere else. Obviously it's basically impossible to do this (especially if your income is all self employment income) outside of just spending every penny you earn on something that could be viably considered a business expense. So I'm wondering if I should just straight up stop working until I can relinquish my USA citizenship.
Spend down my savings and assets till I have almost nothing to exit tax, exit, and then start working again.
I don't want to fund the bombing of strangers I have no quarrel with.
Are there any accurate sources on how many Iranian citizens the Iran regime has killed in the past couple of months? (some sources suggest tens of thousands, but I wonder if it could be a 'WMDs' situation [lie to get support for a war]).
Trump said in the State of the Union [0]:
> in just over the past couple of months with the protests they've killed at least 32000 protestors
And just moments ago Trump says 'tens of thousands' [1]
I don't get that argument at all. Americans felt that they were missing out on all the fun, so they decided to kill even more Iranians? Does anyone really believe that bombing cities saves lives?
Why are we even talking about this? As if this is being done for the 'protestors'? Netanyahu didn't visit the White House 6 times in the last year to advocate for the welfare of the Iranian people. The "negotiations" over the last several weeks weren't over protestors - it was over the Nuclear program, ballistic program and proxy forces. It wasn't even about US interests. Iran offered mining, oil and other valuable rights. Trump wasn't buying. This is about Israel's national security interests and hegemonic ambitions. Protestors are just pawns in service of that.
If this turns into a full-scale war or a civil war breaks out, we are looking at 1 million Iranian deaths conservatively speaking. Just look at happened at every single foreign intervention in the region - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia. How does a million dead Iranians help them? How does it help the Americans, and the world if oil infrastructures or shipping lanes are targeted ? How does it help the regional or Europe when millions of refugees flood out, and armouries are broken open and weapons and insurgents flood the region (like it did with Iraq and Libya)? It helps Israel greatly though, since they take out their arch nemesis, their conventional military and the nuclear program. And they think can shield themselves from the chaos they create around them.
Its probably not the reason they are attacking (except in as much that it makes the iranian regime vulnerable). However i would say that yes, humanitarian intervention is one of the only non self-defense justifications for war that anyone has ever accepted in the post-ww2 era. (Edit: to clarify, im saying its the type of thing people build justifications for war around. Whether its a justification on this specific case is probably highly debatable. I think a reasonable argument could be made)
But this will undoubtedly increase the general level of adversarial feelings and justifications of violence worldwide for many decades to come. The seeds of the next ISIS were planted today
> However i would say that yes, humanitarian intervention is one of the only non self-defense justifications for war that anyone has ever accepted in the post-ww2 era
So when is the US intervening in Ukraine then? Russia is literally doing human safari with drones hunting down civilians in Kherson.
Another mid east war entirely on Israel’s behalf, another war Americans will pay tax for, die for- just so Israel can keep grabbing few parcels of lands from Palestine.
we sure dodged a bullet in 2024 elections and elected the right people to stop all these senseless wars that were one of the cornerstones of the election campaign
Voters don't lose elections, campaigns do. Harris failed, and this kind of "turning around of the blame" thing that Dems try to do is why they don't win elections.
Remember when we bombed Iran at Fordow? It happened less than a year ago. Iran sent some perfunctory retaliation, and everyone forgot the whole affair. Same with this. Nothing ever happens.
What an utter betrayal of no war by DJT. This is the final straw. Era of Trump is dead, we are back to neoconservative era. I guess Adelsons are too hard to say no to.
It’s still pretty unclear how in the US is planning to go. For example, poly market still rates the chance that Iran’s regime falls this year at 46%, which should be a given if the US put boots on the ground. https://manifold.markets/SaviorofPlant/will-irans-regime-fal...
Citizens United is an existential threat for USA. You cannot have Israeli-American dual citizens pouring $200 million dollars in elections. and that’s just her alone. This is simply not sustainable.
I was discussing this with a friend today. It just feels like there's no point to these actions.
Not in the sense of "I don't ideologically agree with our decision to do this," but in the sense of, "I do not see how this accomplishes any ideological or practical goal."
What are they trying for? Regime change in Iran? No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before. Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
A US president who vocally and repeatedly promised he would not start new conflicts keeps starting them, and there's not even a reason. It's infuriating. I have my partisan opinions, but that should not be a partisan statement! It's just disturbing!
The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state.
Iran has negotiated like no one will ever attack it, and that was a correct assumption for decades
However, due to Iran's overly aggressive use of questionably rational proxies, Hamas has dragged it into a regional conflict where it lost most of its proxies power.
After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state, so the only leverage they had left was ballistic missiles, which were also handled quite reasonably by Israeli air defense.
In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal that heavily restricts Iran's ability to enrich as well as ICBM, trigger with existing uranium stockpiles removed.
As Iran due to ideological reasons refused, and IMO had miscalculated this will be a win-win, as losing will quell the protests, the only thing really left is the metaphorical stick
Does Iran not have the same rights of self-defense and sovereignty as the US and Israel?
> The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state
The US and Israel are currently nuclear blackmail states. The rational move for Iran to prevent itself from being bullied is to have nukes like North Korea.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US
190 countries signed the non proliferation treaty for a very good reason, so no they don’t have the right to it in any sense of the word on the international stage.
Especially not when they’re mass murdering protestors and funding islamic extremism left and right
Okay so neither then does Israel yet here we are a country with illicit nuclear weapons that murdered scores of thousands of civilians has what standing to do what now?
They actually do. And I say it as a European and I think the Iranian regime is as bad as it gets, and won't shed a tear if they all get executed.
What recent months show us, is that it's a rough world - there are no friends. I'm rooting for European countries to accelerate their nuclear weapons programs. In an ideal world, of course I would be against. But the world is far from ideal. The current alternative is being dictated the rules by Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. Thanks, but no.
Next up, Hannibal Lector marches for change of regime in I-ran and better life for I-ranians. When asked if that's not a bit odd, he says, get back at me when my crimes are on a similar scale.
The NPT did not exist at the time of the US developing nuclear weapons, and it explicitly allows US (and other pre-existing nuclear powers') weapons.
Israel, like India and Pakistan, simply never signed it, forgoing the international nuclear technology market as a consequence but also avoiding a treaty obligation not to develop them.
That was before the revolution. The revolutionary government still honored the deal, but that's been obviously a losing move for a while. The whole Middle East recognizes that, just look at how many countries Pakistan has sharing agreements with recently.
No such right exists, except in moral terms, but if you are going to invoke morals, the Iranian regime does not hold up well. So no, they do not.
Perhaps you will argue that the US or Israel or Pakistan or North Korea have conducted themselves in a way where they do not have that moral right either, but that is a different debate, and either way it is moot because they do have them.
> The rational move for Iran to prevent itself from being bullied is to have nukes like North Korea
North Korea invaded South Korea, stole a US Navy ship (the Pueblo, which they still proudly exhibit), dug large infiltration tunnels under the DMZ, kidnapped hundreds, or even thousands people from SK (and Japan, to a lesser extent), and have assassinated, or attempted to assassinate, multiple SK heads of state, and perpetrated acts of terror like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858
What did the US or SK do to them before their nuclear program that constituted "bullying?"
This comment is so wrong. Trump's strikes won't "prevent" anything, it's domestic posturing to look tough. You cannot bomb your way into regime change.
> After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state
That's also wrong. Trump claimed Iran's enrichment capabilities were totally destroyed, but they weren't.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal
America already had a good deal. Trump got rid of it.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal that heavily restricts Iran's ability to enrich, and as Iran due to ideological reasons refused, and IMO miscalculated this will be a win-win, as losing will quell the protests, the only thing really left is the metaphorical stick
Didn't we have one of those a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it /s
Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
The contradiction is that they’re weak at this minute - militarily and economically and politically. But they won’t be this weak in the future.
- Military - their regional proxies destroyed, missile and drone stocks low, provably weak air defences.
- Economically - the currency is worthless, extreme inflation for seven years and hyper inflation for a few months, the economy is currently producing nothing due to unrest, they have a massive water shortage of their own making. They have no goods worth exporting. Their oil is sanctioned, meaning only China will buy from them and at a steep discount. And oil is extremely cheap at this minute.
- Politically - they have no friends willing to bail them out. Russia has no money to spare. China doesn’t care about anyone outside of China. North Korea is even poorer. All sections within Iranian society detest the mullahs running the government. They’re hanging on by killing tens of thousands of protestors.
Trump bets that Iran’s leaders are at their weakest since their war with Saddam ended in 1988. Meaning now is the best time to negotiate a deal where they hand over their fissile material and uranium enrichment equipment. In return they could get a heavy water reactor(s) that produces energy but no fissile material.
If he lets this opportunity slip Iran could fix all of their many problems in a year or three. Manufacture more missiles and drones. Build up their proxies once more. Maybe the price of oil recovers. Russia’s war ends and they aid Iran best they can. The economy recovers and the Iranian people stop trying to overthrow the government. Maybe a conflict starts elsewhere that draws America’s full attention.
Will Trump get that deal? Probably not. That fissile material is the only leverage the mullahs have. If they give it up they’ll be toppled like the other dictators who gave up their weapons programs - Gaddafi and Saddam.
> Didn't we have one of those a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it /s
Yes, although it had merit it was far worse than what can be signed now, especially the sunset clause was problematic
> Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
that's the nature of nuclear weapons, your conventional force can be abysmal (pretty much NK situation vs US) and yet you can create epic destruction
> And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
Yes, the thing here is the long term goal of signing a deal, whose main goal is removing the existing highly enriched uranium from Iran and restricting their ability to redevelop nuclear capabilities. Essentially this is the part where "Diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means" (to highly paraphrase), because the alternative to a deal is maintenance attacks such as these every two years
I dont see how it is fair from USA to demand others dont have nukes. Ukraine made mistake of trusting ISA and giving them away and now USA basically support Russia in their invasion.
Iran is a bad guy state ... but the "fair" atgunent hwre dont apply.
On Israel, is it possible that they feel their influence on US foreign policy is waning and they want to push over Iran before they can’t do it anymore, even if the propaganda in America hasn’t been sufficiently set up yet to provide cover? Where pushing Iran over is useful because having weak neighbors is good for their expansion?
Possibly wishful thinking, but that’s the only way I can make it make sense in my head.
You don’t unseat the Fraudster in Chief while at war. So starting a war is a slightly less conspicuous trick than outright preventing relevant elections from taking place.
Yes, when you ask the basic Clauzewitz question about "continuation of politics by other means": what are the war aims, and how is this action connected to them?
What are the strikes even against?
Do they seriously think that after Iran shot all the street revolutionaries, another group will come forward and collapse the government?
Are they treating Iran as Big Serbia? It's a very different situation!
> What are they trying for? Regime change in Iran?
Seems like it. I can't imagine what else they might try for.
I suppose USA might think some shock and awe will result in iran making concessions at the bargaining table, but that seems unrealistic to me.
> No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before.
That seems very debatable.
> Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
Well they did take action against israel (you could say they were indirectly responsible for oct 7). Now they are facing said existential threat.
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Ultimately though. Iran has been a major threat to both israeli and US interests, largely by funding proxy groups that take violent action against those interests. That's your motive for a war.
Iran is currently weak, facing multiple internal and eexternal crisises.
A war is happening because there is a limited window where iran is weak but the window potentially won't remain. That's the reason behind a lot of wars in history.
It accomplishes the goal of diverting attention away from the recent revelations of a pedophile ring among the elites having operated from a private island for decades, with current US president and serial rapist Trump being best friends with the ring leader.
It's bound to be incredibly successful at accomplishing that goal.
Similarly, wars against Iraq and Afghanistan were very successful in diverting attention away from 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers being from Saudi Arabia, and later on from the funding provided to one or more of the hijackers by Saudi officials. With a certain Ms. Maxwell being asked to join the investigatory committee on the event in question.
Yes, but there is also the other elephant in the room. Don’t underestimate Trump, he may not have read about Michael Parenti’s explanation of The Assassination of Julius Caesar: where he argues that Caesar was killed not as a tyrant threatening republican liberty, but as a popular reformer who challenged the Roman oligarchy's wealth and power and thirst for wars.
Maybe Parenti doesn't explicitly equate JFK's killing to Caesar’s, the similarity lies in both being elite-driven assassinations to preserve power: Caesar by Roman senators against reforms, akin to theories of JFK's killing over anti-war shifts and perceived threats to entrenched interests. Critics note Parenti's JFK work critiques official narratives as state cover-ups, mirroring his Caesar "people's history" inversion of "gentlemen historians."
Anyone raising their weapon against Israel in the last 20 years was armed, supplied, funded, trained and directed by Iran. There’s a special division called Quds in the IRGC responsible just for that. The list includes Hizbollah, Assad’s former regime in Syria, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthis, Hizbollah in Iraq and others.
Israel being an ethnic supremacist state for more than the last 20 years [0], on a determined mission to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population from their ancestral land [1], this comment unintentionally makes Iran sound like the good guys in this story. (I do not support any form of theocracy).
Israel has an extremely varied ethnic makeup. It is surrounded by countries whose ethnic majority approaches 100%, but nobody calls them "ethnic supremacist".
Israel is definitely not the ancestral homeland of the Arabs, and Wikipedia cannot change that.
Cultural Arabs and Ethnic Arabs are not the same thing.
Ethnic Arabs are from the Arabian peninsula. Islam's expansion started a slow process of Arabization whereby indigenous people in lands that ended up under the control of the Muslim caliphate/empire started speaking Arabic and adoptic Arabic culture, not dissimilar to the previous process of Romanization or Hellenization.
TL;DR People who today call themselves Palestinians are biological descendants ancient Jews who converted to Christianity and/or Islam, started speaking Arabic, and never left the land.
That's what genetic studies and history converge on, and what the early zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion also happened to believe in, until it became inconvenient to do so.
They were only aligned with us after we overthrew their democratic secular government in 1953, and installed an unpopular authoritarian monarchy as sole leader. The reason we overthrew their government is because they felt we were ripping them off in oil deals and wanted the right to audit and cancel those deals (and renationalize their oil fields) if we weren't playing fair. Then in 1979 that puppet government was overthrown in a "real" revolution, which gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran which always had a chip on its shoulder against the West.
The protests in Iran today are almost certainly being extensively backed by the CIA and other US organizations. Do not mistake a minority as necessarily representing much more than themselves. Of course they might (I certainly don't have any particular insight in the "real" Iran), but you could certainly see something similar happening in the US with extreme groups, left or right wing, becoming visibly active if they were able to find a strong backing/organizing power that made them believe that they could genuinely overthrow the government. The point being that the actions and claims of those groups would not necessarily represent the US at large.
Their endgame is genocide. They will be happy to only enslave the Iranian people too. Seriously, USA and its colony in Palestine are colonialist supremacists and they just want to extract all the resources and don't mind killing all the people of that land.
Some people here might not be American or were too young to remember the lead up to the Iraq War, but it was transparently bullshit. Many people knew this. But if you dared say that, supporters would actively ruin your life. The Dixie Chicks were one of the most popular music acts in the US at the time, a country band that broke out of country and was getting huge appeal across the US. They dared to say they opposed the war. Their careers never returned.
Now with social media that isn't completely locked down, some voice of opposition can slip through and assure people that, yes, this is crazy. No, we don't need to blow the shit out of towns across the world. But these social media sites are all owned by government-aligned mega billionaires. They're rolling out AI that can comment and act very, very human and endorse everything the government does. They can auto-police opinions and spit out thousands of arguments and messages of harassment against them in seconds. Soon they'll be autoblocking any sense of disagreement.
It's at that point they can say that this is done to defend America. This is done to defend freedom. This desert country that's too screwed up to even manage its own internal affairs is somehow so dangerous that it's going to destroy the whole world with nukes it doesn't even have so we must destroy them all now. Dear leader always has your interests at heart. And you'll have no info to point to saying otherwise. Everyone who dares question it will be mocked, ridiculed, fired. Even if this administration fails, the tools are being built and laid out for the next, and I really don't know how humanity will overcome it. And I hate that I can't have optimism in this situation.
This discussion is one where it's worth looking at commenters' histories. Many have several pages where the bulk of their posts are defending Israel, saying war with Iran is necessary, and various related things. It's kind of spooky
While true for the Iraq war I don't think that holds as true anymore. Even a lot of MAGA recognise that getting into wars in the Middle East does nothing but cost the taxpayer billions/trillions of dollars for nothing to show.
That's because there's a glimpse of reason that still pokes through with influencers sometimes saying "you know, I think (thing) might not be good so I hope Trump doesn't do it." Then when trump does (thing), they always backpedal and say it's great. Pre-election inflation was a problem. Now prices are great. Epstein was a problem. Now they say nobody cares. War with Iran was bad. In 2 days influencers will all have a prepared message supporting it and in 3 days half the country will absolutely support it.
It's regime change this time. Trump published a message calling for all Iranian military forces to surrender and the Iranian people to take over the government.
It's a nakedly imperial gambit, the Western ruling classes are attempting to deny Middle Eastern oil to Russia and China. Iran is their only capable opposition in the region, every other Gulf country is a bought-and-paid-for satrapy which just cosigned a genocide on its doorstep.
The US department of war said last month that it was "obliterated"
>No other military in the world could have executed an operation of such scale,
complexity, and consequence as Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER. Yet the Joint Force did so
flawlessly and obliterated Iran’s nuclear program.
The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
opportunity cost-wise, iran could have poured all the money they did in nuclear enrichment instead into missiles, air defense, etc, and they would not be having as much problems as they do now.
nuclear enrichment is extraordinarily expensive and really not all that great of a deterrent when you have them. just look at fairly recent tussels between india, pakistan and china. Russia was invaded and didnt nuke ukraine.
> My advice for rulers … hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
Just need one flight from Pyongyang. Why suggest involving a major power given that you’ve just laid out the strategic need for nuclear weapons to deter interference from… major powers? Your post lacks coherency.
If nukes are so good why Israel isn't safe? Or in other words you overestimate how useful nukes are. On contrary for Iran them having nukes mean Israel have to guess if coming missiles contain nukes or not and whatever to strike back with their own nukes where as now they can freely sand missiles without escalation concerns.
Israel isn't safe? They are probably the most well defended country on the earth. A very capable domestic military and the full power of the US as an attack dog willing to do their bidding.
Israeli nukes are the main reason we haven't had regime change in Tel Aviv at the hands of a Turkish/Egyptian/Saudi/Iranian coalition. Israeli nukes are why Iran has had to settle into a pattern of slow, distant, annoyance via proxy forces (which lack a capability for existentially challenging the IDF).
Anti-nuclear proliferation should now be treated as crime against humanity. Nuclear proliferation is only way to ensure world peace. Every single country should get nukes and capability to use them against each others. And be fully ready to do it.
I hope you and I never get the opportunity to learn how this would end. We’ve had nukes on Earth for less than 100 years, do you expect the next few thousand to go that well? Do you think in that time, nobody will ever roll a nat 1 on a wisdom check?
This was doesn't benefit the US whatsoever. I am getting tired of our taxes going to another useless war, like the Iraq one, that only benefits a foreign entity, aka Israel.
Iran could have been contained and Obama was right on his approach. We don't know the details of the strikes, but I hope it doesn't go into a full blown war, but this will be another Iraq like disaster, and american people are getting tired of doing the bidding of Isreal, a country that is already mirred into doing a genocide. This war is already unpopular in pools. Iran's regime is terrible to its people, but this has the potential to be another disaster where countless of people could die.
It won't go to a full blown war. They will bomb some stuff and declare victory. Once they sailed two carrier battle groups over there an attack of some sort was a foregone conclusion.
>We don't know the details of the strikes, but I hope it doesn't go into a full blown war
Well, if the Chinese are smart, they will capitalize on this opportunity. They can prop up the Iranian regime with intelligence, weapons, and financial support the same way US & EU prop up Ukraine. The purpose would be to bleed US munitions stocks even faster than they already are, as well as increase attritional losses in platforms and personnel. China's stranglehold on rare earths and their export restrictions are making it more difficult for the US to restore its weapons stockpile. I'm sure China can crunch some numbers to identify the point of maximum weakness if the US is forced to sustain an anti-Iran air and naval campaign 30/60/90+ days. Then Xi can try to overlap that window of weakness with one of the two invasion windows against Taiwan (mostly due to weather in the Taiwan Strait). I don't think the PLA is dumb enough to try a full amphibious assault, but they could definitely initiate their blockade then.
I don’t believe China has any intention to support anyone by military means. Best case they will keep on trading and that’s it. Iran is alone. Maybe Turkey makes a crazy move to support seeing it sees itself as next in line if Iran falls. This is the biggest present to European powers, which I think will be hoping that it will keep US busy for rest of Trump’s presidency. They have the Ukraine excuse to distance themselves and let everyone get weaker while they arm themselves up. Internal political tensions in US will also give them leeway to more actively influence American politics and these will be even worse with a long war pitched against a scandal background. Then again, Trump may be a genius, get this done in a couple of months and leave everyone grasping for a new strategy.
If China didn't anticipate the US attacking Iran after Maduro was deposed and the resulting impacts on their oil supplies, then they are asleep at the wheel.
I might be convinced that the Administration was concerned about people being forced to live under Islamic rule if it was as eager for war with Saudi Arabia as it is with Iran.
(I wouldn't support it any more in that case, but I would be more inclined to believe that its motivation might actually have anything to do with "Islamic rule".)
No. There are dozens of countries with despotic regimes, including Israel. And I also have no interest in zionist or any religious ideals exported either. If this were justification we would also be bombing Israel, which has committed far worse crimes than Iran.
Iran is a lesson to all: as soon as Israel or the US take a disliking to you you have to rush for nuclear weapons.
Iran has been the grown up in the room for well over a decade at this stage and it didn't matter one bit. You cannot appease Israel or the US because that don't want to be appeased, they want to bomb Iran into a lawless wasteland. They could have switched to a secular liberal democracy and it'd make no difference.
Don't know why you are being down voted. I mean Iran had a democracy that was toppled by the CIA when they tried to nationalise their resources in favour of a puppet dictator. If the US cared so much about human rights why not go invade Saudi Arabia.
Iran makes the drones that russia uses to attack Ukraine every day. Iran makes the rockets Houthis use to attack ships. Iran provides rockets andgunding to Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran is a terrorist state.
They have chosen the weekend not to disturb the stock markets. They may pull that off when they get inside support as the corruption of the regime has made it unpopular with business class and the middle class. Trump may achieve another 'Venezuela' short war.
I'm very skeptical that external attacks bring about a resurgence of domestic Iranian protest resulting in a tidy regime change. I think the downward lurch of BTC tells you how it's going to go, because Trump's mouth is writing checks others are going to have to cash and there's a lot of contradictions involved.
How is he guaranteeing immunity to members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard if they do nothing? Likewise, if he's telling the general Iranian public to simultaneously rise up and stay home, how does he plan to manage the hoped-for happy ending? In the event they succeed and topple the regime, are they just going to let bygones be bygones with the suddenly displaced IRGC while also giving Trump the keys to their treasury?
I still cannot understand what "Claud helping to conduct attacks" could possibly mean. Like, they asked an LLM to use tool calls to look up strategic info, maps, and military asset inventory and then write a plan for where to point the missiles? How is a text generator helpful here, whose job could it make meaningfully easier in the chain of command?
"Here is 5000 petabytes of signals intelligences, you can run queries, give me the hierarchy of my enemy, the house address of anyone within 3 degrees of separation of their leadership or weapons industry, the next house address they're likely to be at if trying to flee my strikes, and the time they're all most likely to be there. Then schedule drone strikes on the houses."
Getting publicly kicked to the curb by the Trump admin mere hours before it starts another war is probably the best thing that could have happened to Anthropic. Not sure how well OpenAI's parachuting in is gonna look with hindsight. I have a feeling we won't have to wait that long to find out.
At this point, no country in the world will ever again 'make a deal' with the US, because while pretending to negotiate with you they try to ram a knife into your back.
You just need access to the videos then the pedo cabal does whatever you want
You can blame that on Obama and EU countries bombing Libya despite them agreeing to all nuclear demands, not this war (where it's unsurprising that negotiations can fail).
It was pretty obvious that if the negotiations failed that the US would respond by attacking Iran. Iran didn't seem willing to give up their nuclear weapons program regardless of the quite predictable consequences.
You believe everything the US says? lol
It was Trump who cancelled to JCPOA. Also, sending Witkoff and Kushner as negotiators is already an obvious sign the US is dishonest about preventing conflicts through diplomacy, otherwise they would send experienced diplomats. It is really the US Epstein Class Deep State government to blame here.
They could have named the DOD the "Department Of Peace", instead they called it the "Department Of War", showing their true face and trajectory.
At this point it is really the people of the US to rise up and implement a Regime Change from within to change things for the better.
You all just keep lying endlessly, I think most people get it at this point. Iran was prepared to go further than the JCPOA, it was never enough because it was never about nuclear weapons.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/peace-within-reach-...
Feb 25:
>White House officials believe ‘the politics are a lot better’ if Israel strikes Iran first
>As the administration mulls military action in Iran, officials argue it’d be best if Israel makes the first move.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/25/white-house-politic...
Looks like the rumor was incorrect. Both jointly attacked (NYtimes - https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/28/world/iran-strikes-t...)
But Israel announced it first, which they maybe hoped would amount to the same thing PR wise.
The rumor above specifically talks about letting Iran retaliate against Israel which would then lead US to attack.
I'm not sure what's the logic behind that PR-wise, but regardless, it didn't happen.
As I recall Iran said quite openly, in response to the US troop buildup, that they would see an attack by Israel as an attack by the US, suggesting that they could target e.g. carriers instead of Israel if Israel attacked them.
I’m honestly perplexed. I had anticipated a scenario like “the US feared Iran was unstable and attacked to protect nuclear material”. It seems this would give them reasonable cover. I don’t see how Israel going along helps
Just now:
Trump: "The lives of American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties - that often happens in war."
Another republican president starting a war in the middle east, once again sacrificing American lives.
While I think this (and Venezuela) are arguably the biggest missteps this administration is making, it's hardly a partisan point. The political establishment loves war more than perhaps anything else. In 2016 alone Obama bombed half a dozen different countries with more than 26,000 munitions for an average rate of three bombs dropped every hour, every day, for a year. [1] Nobel Peace Prize embodied.
I think the only way to get away from the warmongering is to go for a third party. But even they would likely be corrupted by the excessive influence of the military industrial complex. Eisenhower was not only right, but plainly prophetic.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/list-of-c...
Not defending that peace price but: Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.
Trump this time around didn't inherit a major us deployment in a conflict area. No Iraq, no Afghanistan. Also, he's doing military strikes by himself, no Congress involved.
Syrian and Libia were both essentially civil wars with an oppressive regime with Syria using allegedly chemical weapons.
Your source is a very weird site. Countries Obama bombed 2026??? What does that even mean. Is it just a typo in the main heading and the title?
A war? Of course not. It’s a major combat operation. Only congress can declare wars. We haven’t had any in decades. They should call it the Dept. of Major Combat Operations.
The occurrence of a war is a fact whether or not it is declared, and whether or not the actor waging war does so consistent with the legal requirements their nation's laws put on doing so.
Isn't the currently trendy term "special military operation"?
The USA never even declared the Vietnam "conflict" as a war, or Korea, come to that, though that did at least have the backing of the UN.
As soon a country agrees to enter a conflict on a side, which the original axes declare to be a war, it's at war. You can tell the media whatever you want of course.
"Some of you are going to die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
Get the mullahs out.
Iranian people, rise up and overthrow the regime. This opportunity may not come again soon.
A weakened regime that stays in power would be a terrible outcome to all this.
Any regime that massacres thousands of its own citizens should expect a bomb on their doorstep. That’s moral clarity and I’m glad America is finally delivering it.
Even if you don't support US & IL standing in the frontlines against the terror regime, at least pray for the freedom of the people of Iran, 90m people held hostages by the regime. If you are pro-peace, do not be hypocrite, some wars are needed to defeat evil.
There seems to be an uptick around 1am on Polymarket.
https://polymarket.com/event/us-strikes-iran-by
Due to distance planes need to take off many hours before the bombs drop.
You can get an edge here by moving your ass somewhere where you can see the planes take off, maybe a team with people at multiple locations - boats near the aircraft carrier, near military bases in Israel, ...
Sure, it could be that. My money is on something a bit simpler.
Regardless of how it ends, and it can go both ways, we're witnessing history here. This feels like a much bigger development than Russia-Ukraine. Iran is a major partner for Russia and China, mostly for military technology and oil. Hope it's not a start of WW3.
> This feels like a much bigger development than Russia-Ukraine.
Russia-Ukraine war is 1M+ combat casualties deep and is nowhere near finished. You are out of touch.
No it's not. This is an air strike campaign, no boots on the ground. It'll end in two weeks. There is no chance China or Russia get involved, like last time, so "WW3" is completely non-credible.
> ...no boots on the ground. It'll end in two weeks
Why do we never learn from history?
Yes ... why do we never learn from history? What's with the selective memory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_war
The previous campaign lasted a whole 13 days and WW3 didn't start. I'm not sure why anybody thinks it'll be different now or why Russia or China would bother going to war for Iran. That makes zero sense.
While it's possible, it's unlikely. Iranian regime is in a corner - they have no choice anymore but to escalate, and escalate quickly.
There might be boots on the ground eventually given Trump's speech.
>The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission
Very foreboding.
It's a sinister statement, but despite everything the U.S. has moved to the region, they didn't move the stuff they would need to move for ground operations.
Depends how you count “big”. Russia-Ukraine has had about 1 million deaths, and has completely changed how Europe thinks about security- it’s hardly a sideshow. Then again, not much territory has changed hands and there has been no regime change yet.
> not much territory has changed hands
Russia occupies about 20% of Ukraine, an area three times larger than the country I live in (the Netherlands).
> 1 million deaths
Casulties, not deaths.
One million casualties is injured, missing, and dead… not just the dead.
Russia and Ukraine are now at war for the fifth year running, you're just used to the fact that there is ongoing war in Europe.
Could be more of an intimidation tactic. The United States of Israel wouldnt go to a land war in Iraq, that's unwinnable
This is about Iran, not Iraq.
There's no land campaign. It's an isolated series of strikes for PR reasons and wishful thinking about Iran collapse.
I don't think it's bigger than Russia-Ukraine - it's part of it. This is all about destabilising Iran's incumbent government, which is probably a good thing at the moment. It'll damage supply lines to Russia's Ukraine offensive, give the chance for Iranian citizens to rise up against Khamenei and the IRGC and break the command chain for their foreign proxy operations. Part of Dugan's work on geopolitics, which they seem to be following to the word (c'mon guys seriously?) suggests that Moscow and Tehran should be allied which they are behind the scenes.
As for the nuclear threat, literally Iran said it was going to destroy Israel to the point it had a massive countdown clock in Tehran until Israel blew it up, so meh. If I was on the receiving end of that threat I'd make it a policy to respond to it, escalation or not. I make no claims of the accuracy of the threats past IAEA being unable to verify they aren't enriching stuff.
Doubt it'll escalate into WW3. The only other powers involved are Russia, who are totally hands tied with Ukraine if they like it or not and China is only interested keeping what's left in its sphere of influence later through their outreach initiatives. I suspect most Middle Eastern countries will be quite happy about this conflict as they have persistent problems with Iran as well from the Houthis, Hezbollah and tens of other factions. They won't want to say anything though in case their own citizens turn on them.
The cringeworthy thing is how the US gov are communicating this and that does the operation a lot of damage. It's really quite terrible. Sounds like it was written by a bunch of 9 year olds after too many sugary drinks. Urgh.
> The cringeworthy thing is how the US gov are communicating this and that does the operation a lot of damage. It's really quite terrible. Sounds like it was written by a bunch of 9 year olds after too many sugary drinks. Urgh.
Thats because its not written for you and I. Its written for people who struggle to communicate at an adult level, which is a shockingly large portion of the US.
I don't think that's the case. I think it's some of those people got elected.
They got elected because they communicated effectively with people in a way those people understood.
Trump speaks like a 4th grader and it is extremely effective.
Otoh, what russia desperately needs in the short term is oil prices to go up, so there is probably a major silver lining for them.
> Otoh, what russia desperately needs in the short term is oil prices to go up, so there is probably a major silver lining for them.
And they will again appear weak and incapable, unable to help their allies
> And they will again appear weak and incapable, unable to help their allies
Iran and Russia have various partnership agreements, but are not allies. And Russia has already demonstrated that it doesn't support what are, on paper, close allies in the CSTO, so not defending a non-ally strategic partner really doesn't move the needle on their credibility.
Isn’t this a fact set in stone by now? Armenia, Syria, Iran in the previous months
Iran’s oil is sanctioned hence not on public market. Does it really have much influence?
As big as this is, the Russia-Ukraine war pretty much marked the end of the post-WW2 era and redefined global relations between the powers. In that sense, this is yet another major shift within this new era. But also, the series of events that led to this point does connect to the Russia-Ukraine war, and maybe doesn't happen without it.
Putin said it himself, there are over 2 million russians in Israel - they will not participate
Russian Speakers* a lot of them are from previous Soviet republics like Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Belarus and Ukraine
I have to wonder how many are in governmental roles and realized they can steer the US into conflicts and ruining itself without any of those involved identifying as Russian. It's the cleanest backdoor for espionage that there ever was.
thats definitely not the reason they wont participate. Its just a public excuse
https://archive.ph/RgVtf
Ever since the ICE stuff I've been desperate to find a way to not pay my taxes - even if it means donating 2, 3x, hell 4x my tax bill to somewhere else. Obviously it's basically impossible to do this (especially if your income is all self employment income) outside of just spending every penny you earn on something that could be viably considered a business expense. So I'm wondering if I should just straight up stop working until I can relinquish my USA citizenship.
Spend down my savings and assets till I have almost nothing to exit tax, exit, and then start working again.
I don't want to fund the bombing of strangers I have no quarrel with.
What are that pizza place google statistics?
Did anybody need those? The deployment of half the US army near israel was not enough evidence?
Those spiked like 50x in the past 4 months. Doesn't seem to mean anything.
The only time it didn't spike was for the Venezuela Maduro operation.
At this point, the pizza index is another vector of (dis)information managed by the Pentagon.
Once that side channel was found, it was kind of inevitable it would be plugged. Even under a normal administration, that's an opsec leak.
Are there any accurate sources on how many Iranian citizens the Iran regime has killed in the past couple of months? (some sources suggest tens of thousands, but I wonder if it could be a 'WMDs' situation [lie to get support for a war]).
Trump said in the State of the Union [0]:
> in just over the past couple of months with the protests they've killed at least 32000 protestors
And just moments ago Trump says 'tens of thousands' [1]
Is this confirmed or conjecture?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l-iErpskb8&t=1h21m20s
[1] https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/2027651077865157033
I don't get that argument at all. Americans felt that they were missing out on all the fun, so they decided to kill even more Iranians? Does anyone really believe that bombing cities saves lives?
Whether it will in this case i don't know.
But yes, i do think sometimes war can be a net positive for civilians over the alternative in the long term. Not often, but sometimes.
Why are we even talking about this? As if this is being done for the 'protestors'? Netanyahu didn't visit the White House 6 times in the last year to advocate for the welfare of the Iranian people. The "negotiations" over the last several weeks weren't over protestors - it was over the Nuclear program, ballistic program and proxy forces. It wasn't even about US interests. Iran offered mining, oil and other valuable rights. Trump wasn't buying. This is about Israel's national security interests and hegemonic ambitions. Protestors are just pawns in service of that.
If this turns into a full-scale war or a civil war breaks out, we are looking at 1 million Iranian deaths conservatively speaking. Just look at happened at every single foreign intervention in the region - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia. How does a million dead Iranians help them? How does it help the Americans, and the world if oil infrastructures or shipping lanes are targeted ? How does it help the regional or Europe when millions of refugees flood out, and armouries are broken open and weapons and insurgents flood the region (like it did with Iraq and Libya)? It helps Israel greatly though, since they take out their arch nemesis, their conventional military and the nuclear program. And they think can shield themselves from the chaos they create around them.
I think its incredibly difficult to get confirmed numbers in a situation like that.
I do think its on the higher end though as i dont think they would have bothered with a costly extended internet blackout if the number was small.
Why does it matter? Is it justification to attack them?
Its probably not the reason they are attacking (except in as much that it makes the iranian regime vulnerable). However i would say that yes, humanitarian intervention is one of the only non self-defense justifications for war that anyone has ever accepted in the post-ww2 era. (Edit: to clarify, im saying its the type of thing people build justifications for war around. Whether its a justification on this specific case is probably highly debatable. I think a reasonable argument could be made)
But this will undoubtedly increase the general level of adversarial feelings and justifications of violence worldwide for many decades to come. The seeds of the next ISIS were planted today
> However i would say that yes, humanitarian intervention is one of the only non self-defense justifications for war that anyone has ever accepted in the post-ww2 era
So when is the US intervening in Ukraine then? Russia is literally doing human safari with drones hunting down civilians in Kherson.
So I suppose you'll be attacking Saudi Arabia after this if you're so worried about humanitarian conditions?
The 'tens of thousands' figure is one primary justification. Iran (eventually) getting a nuke is another.
Anything to get the topic off Epstein.
Another mid east war entirely on Israel’s behalf, another war Americans will pay tax for, die for- just so Israel can keep grabbing few parcels of lands from Palestine.
we sure dodged a bullet in 2024 elections and elected the right people to stop all these senseless wars that were one of the cornerstones of the election campaign
It's baffling to me that the DNC decided it was more important to support Israel than win the election and do good things at home.
Harris had all sorts of good things planned at home. It’s baffling to me that some voters thought it was more important to lose the election.
Voters don't lose elections, campaigns do. Harris failed, and this kind of "turning around of the blame" thing that Dems try to do is why they don't win elections.
Remember when we bombed Iran at Fordow? It happened less than a year ago. Iran sent some perfunctory retaliation, and everyone forgot the whole affair. Same with this. Nothing ever happens.
idk about that, telling people to get ready for body bags does not sound like the hands-off fireworks show of previous episodes.
What an utter betrayal of no war by DJT. This is the final straw. Era of Trump is dead, we are back to neoconservative era. I guess Adelsons are too hard to say no to.
It’s still pretty unclear how in the US is planning to go. For example, poly market still rates the chance that Iran’s regime falls this year at 46%, which should be a given if the US put boots on the ground. https://manifold.markets/SaviorofPlant/will-irans-regime-fal...
Coming as a shock to only the most gullible people on Earth.
Citizens United is an existential threat for USA. You cannot have Israeli-American dual citizens pouring $200 million dollars in elections. and that’s just her alone. This is simply not sustainable.
I was discussing this with a friend today. It just feels like there's no point to these actions.
Not in the sense of "I don't ideologically agree with our decision to do this," but in the sense of, "I do not see how this accomplishes any ideological or practical goal."
What are they trying for? Regime change in Iran? No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before. Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
A US president who vocally and repeatedly promised he would not start new conflicts keeps starting them, and there's not even a reason. It's infuriating. I have my partisan opinions, but that should not be a partisan statement! It's just disturbing!
The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state.
Iran has negotiated like no one will ever attack it, and that was a correct assumption for decades
However, due to Iran's overly aggressive use of questionably rational proxies, Hamas has dragged it into a regional conflict where it lost most of its proxies power.
After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state, so the only leverage they had left was ballistic missiles, which were also handled quite reasonably by Israeli air defense.
In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal that heavily restricts Iran's ability to enrich as well as ICBM, trigger with existing uranium stockpiles removed.
As Iran due to ideological reasons refused, and IMO had miscalculated this will be a win-win, as losing will quell the protests, the only thing really left is the metaphorical stick
Does Iran not have the same rights of self-defense and sovereignty as the US and Israel?
> The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state
The US and Israel are currently nuclear blackmail states. The rational move for Iran to prevent itself from being bullied is to have nukes like North Korea.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US
Fair if you're the US, sure.
Dictatorships have no "rights". People have rights.
190 countries signed the non proliferation treaty for a very good reason, so no they don’t have the right to it in any sense of the word on the international stage.
Especially not when they’re mass murdering protestors and funding islamic extremism left and right
Okay so neither then does Israel yet here we are a country with illicit nuclear weapons that murdered scores of thousands of civilians has what standing to do what now?
Israel never signed the NPT, like India and Pakistan.
Opposition to Iran’s regime does not imply support for Israel’s
They actually do. And I say it as a European and I think the Iranian regime is as bad as it gets, and won't shed a tear if they all get executed.
What recent months show us, is that it's a rough world - there are no friends. I'm rooting for European countries to accelerate their nuclear weapons programs. In an ideal world, of course I would be against. But the world is far from ideal. The current alternative is being dictated the rules by Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. Thanks, but no.
The US is also murdering protesters and funding Christian extremists. So what now?
Get back to me when the scale is similar and I will change my mind
So around November.
Next up, Hannibal Lector marches for change of regime in I-ran and better life for I-ranians. When asked if that's not a bit odd, he says, get back at me when my crimes are on a similar scale.
> The US and Israel are currently nuclear blackmail states.
Neither of these states have at any point said anything on the modern era that can be implied to be a threat to nuke anybody.
Part of that is because it would be a bad strategy for them, but nonetheless "nuclear blackmail state" and "nuclear state" is not the same thing.
Trump had done it several times.
Trump says a lot of shit.
Iran signed the NPT.
The NPT did not exist at the time of the US developing nuclear weapons, and it explicitly allows US (and other pre-existing nuclear powers') weapons.
Israel, like India and Pakistan, simply never signed it, forgoing the international nuclear technology market as a consequence but also avoiding a treaty obligation not to develop them.
That was before the revolution. The revolutionary government still honored the deal, but that's been obviously a losing move for a while. The whole Middle East recognizes that, just look at how many countries Pakistan has sharing agreements with recently.
No such right exists, except in moral terms, but if you are going to invoke morals, the Iranian regime does not hold up well. So no, they do not.
Perhaps you will argue that the US or Israel or Pakistan or North Korea have conducted themselves in a way where they do not have that moral right either, but that is a different debate, and either way it is moot because they do have them.
> The rational move for Iran to prevent itself from being bullied is to have nukes like North Korea
North Korea invaded South Korea, stole a US Navy ship (the Pueblo, which they still proudly exhibit), dug large infiltration tunnels under the DMZ, kidnapped hundreds, or even thousands people from SK (and Japan, to a lesser extent), and have assassinated, or attempted to assassinate, multiple SK heads of state, and perpetrated acts of terror like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858
What did the US or SK do to them before their nuclear program that constituted "bullying?"
> Does Iran not have the same rights of self-defense and sovereignty as the US and Israel?
Iran signed Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
And US signed Budapest Memorandum. Both are equally hollow.
The former government, a US puppet regime. Why should they honor a deal that doesn't benefit them when the US and Israel refuse to play by the rules?
>Does Iran not have the same rights of self-defense and sovereignty as the US and Israel?
No. If they wanted self-defense and sovereignty they should have become stronger not weaker after the revolution.
This comment is so wrong. Trump's strikes won't "prevent" anything, it's domestic posturing to look tough. You cannot bomb your way into regime change.
> After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state
That's also wrong. Trump claimed Iran's enrichment capabilities were totally destroyed, but they weren't.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal
America already had a good deal. Trump got rid of it.
Why do you call the concept a "North Korea style nuclear blackmail state" and not an "Israel style nuclear blackmail state"?
Has Israel even officially confirmed they have nukes? And who have they blackmailed with the nukes?
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal that heavily restricts Iran's ability to enrich, and as Iran due to ideological reasons refused, and IMO miscalculated this will be a win-win, as losing will quell the protests, the only thing really left is the metaphorical stick
Didn't we have one of those a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it /s
Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
The contradiction is that they’re weak at this minute - militarily and economically and politically. But they won’t be this weak in the future.
- Military - their regional proxies destroyed, missile and drone stocks low, provably weak air defences.
- Economically - the currency is worthless, extreme inflation for seven years and hyper inflation for a few months, the economy is currently producing nothing due to unrest, they have a massive water shortage of their own making. They have no goods worth exporting. Their oil is sanctioned, meaning only China will buy from them and at a steep discount. And oil is extremely cheap at this minute.
- Politically - they have no friends willing to bail them out. Russia has no money to spare. China doesn’t care about anyone outside of China. North Korea is even poorer. All sections within Iranian society detest the mullahs running the government. They’re hanging on by killing tens of thousands of protestors.
Trump bets that Iran’s leaders are at their weakest since their war with Saddam ended in 1988. Meaning now is the best time to negotiate a deal where they hand over their fissile material and uranium enrichment equipment. In return they could get a heavy water reactor(s) that produces energy but no fissile material.
If he lets this opportunity slip Iran could fix all of their many problems in a year or three. Manufacture more missiles and drones. Build up their proxies once more. Maybe the price of oil recovers. Russia’s war ends and they aid Iran best they can. The economy recovers and the Iranian people stop trying to overthrow the government. Maybe a conflict starts elsewhere that draws America’s full attention.
Will Trump get that deal? Probably not. That fissile material is the only leverage the mullahs have. If they give it up they’ll be toppled like the other dictators who gave up their weapons programs - Gaddafi and Saddam.
But if you don’t ask you don’t get, right?
> Didn't we have one of those a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it /s
Yes, although it had merit it was far worse than what can be signed now, especially the sunset clause was problematic
> Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
that's the nature of nuclear weapons, your conventional force can be abysmal (pretty much NK situation vs US) and yet you can create epic destruction
> And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
Yes, the thing here is the long term goal of signing a deal, whose main goal is removing the existing highly enriched uranium from Iran and restricting their ability to redevelop nuclear capabilities. Essentially this is the part where "Diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means" (to highly paraphrase), because the alternative to a deal is maintenance attacks such as these every two years
In previous attack by US, midnight hammer, single location was targeted. And event for that they prepared - moved part of stockpiles away.
> how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
baby and a granade. You want to keep granade out of the hands of the baby.
Acquire weapon = acquire power;
Keep it without weapon = keep it weak(er).
I dont see how it is fair from USA to demand others dont have nukes. Ukraine made mistake of trusting ISA and giving them away and now USA basically support Russia in their invasion.
Iran is a bad guy state ... but the "fair" atgunent hwre dont apply.
The biggest blackmail rogue state right now is the US.
On Israel, is it possible that they feel their influence on US foreign policy is waning and they want to push over Iran before they can’t do it anymore, even if the propaganda in America hasn’t been sufficiently set up yet to provide cover? Where pushing Iran over is useful because having weak neighbors is good for their expansion?
Possibly wishful thinking, but that’s the only way I can make it make sense in my head.
Netanyahu has been pushing for the US to attack Iran since the 80s, it's been a lifelong dream of his. This has nothing to do with self defense.
You don’t unseat the Fraudster in Chief while at war. So starting a war is a slightly less conspicuous trick than outright preventing relevant elections from taking place.
Yes, when you ask the basic Clauzewitz question about "continuation of politics by other means": what are the war aims, and how is this action connected to them?
What are the strikes even against?
Do they seriously think that after Iran shot all the street revolutionaries, another group will come forward and collapse the government?
Are they treating Iran as Big Serbia? It's a very different situation!
Or is this just for the Posting?
To save the persians from islam
Islamophobia is unacceptable and should not be allowed in any community.
> What are they trying for? Regime change in Iran?
Seems like it. I can't imagine what else they might try for.
I suppose USA might think some shock and awe will result in iran making concessions at the bargaining table, but that seems unrealistic to me.
> No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before.
That seems very debatable.
> Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
Well they did take action against israel (you could say they were indirectly responsible for oct 7). Now they are facing said existential threat.
---
Ultimately though. Iran has been a major threat to both israeli and US interests, largely by funding proxy groups that take violent action against those interests. That's your motive for a war.
Iran is currently weak, facing multiple internal and eexternal crisises.
A war is happening because there is a limited window where iran is weak but the window potentially won't remain. That's the reason behind a lot of wars in history.
It accomplishes the goal of diverting attention away from the recent revelations of a pedophile ring among the elites having operated from a private island for decades, with current US president and serial rapist Trump being best friends with the ring leader.
It's bound to be incredibly successful at accomplishing that goal.
Similarly, wars against Iraq and Afghanistan were very successful in diverting attention away from 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers being from Saudi Arabia, and later on from the funding provided to one or more of the hijackers by Saudi officials. With a certain Ms. Maxwell being asked to join the investigatory committee on the event in question.
Yes, but there is also the other elephant in the room. Don’t underestimate Trump, he may not have read about Michael Parenti’s explanation of The Assassination of Julius Caesar: where he argues that Caesar was killed not as a tyrant threatening republican liberty, but as a popular reformer who challenged the Roman oligarchy's wealth and power and thirst for wars. Maybe Parenti doesn't explicitly equate JFK's killing to Caesar’s, the similarity lies in both being elite-driven assassinations to preserve power: Caesar by Roman senators against reforms, akin to theories of JFK's killing over anti-war shifts and perceived threats to entrenched interests. Critics note Parenti's JFK work critiques official narratives as state cover-ups, mirroring his Caesar "people's history" inversion of "gentlemen historians."
Anyone raising their weapon against Israel in the last 20 years was armed, supplied, funded, trained and directed by Iran. There’s a special division called Quds in the IRGC responsible just for that. The list includes Hizbollah, Assad’s former regime in Syria, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthis, Hizbollah in Iraq and others.
Israel being an ethnic supremacist state for more than the last 20 years [0], on a determined mission to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population from their ancestral land [1], this comment unintentionally makes Iran sound like the good guys in this story. (I do not support any form of theocracy).
[0] https://www.btselem.org/topic/apartheid [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Palestinians
Israel has an extremely varied ethnic makeup. It is surrounded by countries whose ethnic majority approaches 100%, but nobody calls them "ethnic supremacist".
Israel is definitely not the ancestral homeland of the Arabs, and Wikipedia cannot change that.
Cultural Arabs and Ethnic Arabs are not the same thing.
Ethnic Arabs are from the Arabian peninsula. Islam's expansion started a slow process of Arabization whereby indigenous people in lands that ended up under the control of the Muslim caliphate/empire started speaking Arabic and adoptic Arabic culture, not dissimilar to the previous process of Romanization or Hellenization.
TL;DR People who today call themselves Palestinians are biological descendants ancient Jews who converted to Christianity and/or Islam, started speaking Arabic, and never left the land.
That's what genetic studies and history converge on, and what the early zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion also happened to believe in, until it became inconvenient to do so.
Well, they're probably killing thousands of their people there. This country was once aligned with us. We may yet have an ally there.
They were only aligned with us after we overthrew their democratic secular government in 1953, and installed an unpopular authoritarian monarchy as sole leader. The reason we overthrew their government is because they felt we were ripping them off in oil deals and wanted the right to audit and cancel those deals (and renationalize their oil fields) if we weren't playing fair. Then in 1979 that puppet government was overthrown in a "real" revolution, which gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran which always had a chip on its shoulder against the West.
The protests in Iran today are almost certainly being extensively backed by the CIA and other US organizations. Do not mistake a minority as necessarily representing much more than themselves. Of course they might (I certainly don't have any particular insight in the "real" Iran), but you could certainly see something similar happening in the US with extreme groups, left or right wing, becoming visibly active if they were able to find a strong backing/organizing power that made them believe that they could genuinely overthrow the government. The point being that the actions and claims of those groups would not necessarily represent the US at large.
If we attacked every country in the world killing thousands of its own people we'd be at war with half the world right now.
Including the US.
Their endgame is genocide. They will be happy to only enslave the Iranian people too. Seriously, USA and its colony in Palestine are colonialist supremacists and they just want to extract all the resources and don't mind killing all the people of that land.
It gets his base fired up and excited.
Some people here might not be American or were too young to remember the lead up to the Iraq War, but it was transparently bullshit. Many people knew this. But if you dared say that, supporters would actively ruin your life. The Dixie Chicks were one of the most popular music acts in the US at the time, a country band that broke out of country and was getting huge appeal across the US. They dared to say they opposed the war. Their careers never returned.
Now with social media that isn't completely locked down, some voice of opposition can slip through and assure people that, yes, this is crazy. No, we don't need to blow the shit out of towns across the world. But these social media sites are all owned by government-aligned mega billionaires. They're rolling out AI that can comment and act very, very human and endorse everything the government does. They can auto-police opinions and spit out thousands of arguments and messages of harassment against them in seconds. Soon they'll be autoblocking any sense of disagreement.
It's at that point they can say that this is done to defend America. This is done to defend freedom. This desert country that's too screwed up to even manage its own internal affairs is somehow so dangerous that it's going to destroy the whole world with nukes it doesn't even have so we must destroy them all now. Dear leader always has your interests at heart. And you'll have no info to point to saying otherwise. Everyone who dares question it will be mocked, ridiculed, fired. Even if this administration fails, the tools are being built and laid out for the next, and I really don't know how humanity will overcome it. And I hate that I can't have optimism in this situation.
This discussion is one where it's worth looking at commenters' histories. Many have several pages where the bulk of their posts are defending Israel, saying war with Iran is necessary, and various related things. It's kind of spooky
While true for the Iraq war I don't think that holds as true anymore. Even a lot of MAGA recognise that getting into wars in the Middle East does nothing but cost the taxpayer billions/trillions of dollars for nothing to show.
That's because there's a glimpse of reason that still pokes through with influencers sometimes saying "you know, I think (thing) might not be good so I hope Trump doesn't do it." Then when trump does (thing), they always backpedal and say it's great. Pre-election inflation was a problem. Now prices are great. Epstein was a problem. Now they say nobody cares. War with Iran was bad. In 2 days influencers will all have a prepared message supporting it and in 3 days half the country will absolutely support it.
It's regime change this time. Trump published a message calling for all Iranian military forces to surrender and the Iranian people to take over the government.
It's a nakedly imperial gambit, the Western ruling classes are attempting to deny Middle Eastern oil to Russia and China. Iran is their only capable opposition in the region, every other Gulf country is a bought-and-paid-for satrapy which just cosigned a genocide on its doorstep.
Oil to Russia? Please review that
Coals to Newcastle.
> No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before.
How do you know?
The US department of war said last month that it was "obliterated"
>No other military in the world could have executed an operation of such scale, complexity, and consequence as Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER. Yet the Joint Force did so flawlessly and obliterated Iran’s nuclear program.
https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/202...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strikes_on_Irani...
Good 1 hour presentation on youtube
https://youtu.be/SxqipJgtTdk?si=YfWRzjcflhWHR276
(Note: Iran did move some stuff away before the attack)
My previous comment:
The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
opportunity cost-wise, iran could have poured all the money they did in nuclear enrichment instead into missiles, air defense, etc, and they would not be having as much problems as they do now.
nuclear enrichment is extraordinarily expensive and really not all that great of a deterrent when you have them. just look at fairly recent tussels between india, pakistan and china. Russia was invaded and didnt nuke ukraine.
I thought Ukraine surrendered her nukes?
> My advice for rulers … hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
Just need one flight from Pyongyang. Why suggest involving a major power given that you’ve just laid out the strategic need for nuclear weapons to deter interference from… major powers? Your post lacks coherency.
If nukes are so good why Israel isn't safe? Or in other words you overestimate how useful nukes are. On contrary for Iran them having nukes mean Israel have to guess if coming missiles contain nukes or not and whatever to strike back with their own nukes where as now they can freely sand missiles without escalation concerns.
Israel isn't safe? They are probably the most well defended country on the earth. A very capable domestic military and the full power of the US as an attack dog willing to do their bidding.
They have good defence, but:
- it costs money and attention
- good is not the same as perfect (there are some casualties from time to time)
>If nukes are so good why Israel isn't safe?
Israeli nukes are the main reason we haven't had regime change in Tel Aviv at the hands of a Turkish/Egyptian/Saudi/Iranian coalition. Israeli nukes are why Iran has had to settle into a pattern of slow, distant, annoyance via proxy forces (which lack a capability for existentially challenging the IDF).
Anti-nuclear proliferation should now be treated as crime against humanity. Nuclear proliferation is only way to ensure world peace. Every single country should get nukes and capability to use them against each others. And be fully ready to do it.
I hope you and I never get the opportunity to learn how this would end. We’ve had nukes on Earth for less than 100 years, do you expect the next few thousand to go that well? Do you think in that time, nobody will ever roll a nat 1 on a wisdom check?
https://www.angryflower.com/422.html
Let's bring this idea to an ultimate level- each country to have a warhead able to wipe everything, sort of project Sundial...
After all if your country is too small, it may be worthless to have nukes that probably would be destroyed by neighbors on launch...
That would work. Reasonable power balance would be reached. And negotiations could happen from equal perspective.
One step further: every man, woman and child should have a launch button.
(My bet would be: max one day)
Can't tell if sarcasm
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/399731975432728576
let's try to keep to credible sources here eh
This was doesn't benefit the US whatsoever. I am getting tired of our taxes going to another useless war, like the Iraq one, that only benefits a foreign entity, aka Israel.
Iran could have been contained and Obama was right on his approach. We don't know the details of the strikes, but I hope it doesn't go into a full blown war, but this will be another Iraq like disaster, and american people are getting tired of doing the bidding of Isreal, a country that is already mirred into doing a genocide. This war is already unpopular in pools. Iran's regime is terrible to its people, but this has the potential to be another disaster where countless of people could die.
indeed. One of the only positive things Obama did internationally.
The regime may be horrific, but the only route out was through supporting and encoraging change and opening up and progressive forces.
It's a country with 90 million people, and many groups and external influences. Could end up like Iraq.
and it's Europe that will experince the political chaos as result of pressure from refugees, not the US.
It won't go to a full blown war. They will bomb some stuff and declare victory. Once they sailed two carrier battle groups over there an attack of some sort was a foregone conclusion.
>We don't know the details of the strikes, but I hope it doesn't go into a full blown war
Well, if the Chinese are smart, they will capitalize on this opportunity. They can prop up the Iranian regime with intelligence, weapons, and financial support the same way US & EU prop up Ukraine. The purpose would be to bleed US munitions stocks even faster than they already are, as well as increase attritional losses in platforms and personnel. China's stranglehold on rare earths and their export restrictions are making it more difficult for the US to restore its weapons stockpile. I'm sure China can crunch some numbers to identify the point of maximum weakness if the US is forced to sustain an anti-Iran air and naval campaign 30/60/90+ days. Then Xi can try to overlap that window of weakness with one of the two invasion windows against Taiwan (mostly due to weather in the Taiwan Strait). I don't think the PLA is dumb enough to try a full amphibious assault, but they could definitely initiate their blockade then.
I don’t believe China has any intention to support anyone by military means. Best case they will keep on trading and that’s it. Iran is alone. Maybe Turkey makes a crazy move to support seeing it sees itself as next in line if Iran falls. This is the biggest present to European powers, which I think will be hoping that it will keep US busy for rest of Trump’s presidency. They have the Ukraine excuse to distance themselves and let everyone get weaker while they arm themselves up. Internal political tensions in US will also give them leeway to more actively influence American politics and these will be even worse with a long war pitched against a scandal background. Then again, Trump may be a genius, get this done in a couple of months and leave everyone grasping for a new strategy.
It would take weeks for China to shop stuff. (Unless they have done their homework in advance)
There's been rumors of Chinese kit arriving in Iran, but nothing concrete:
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/02/10/how-iran-gained-the-ab...
If China didn't anticipate the US attacking Iran after Maduro was deposed and the resulting impacts on their oil supplies, then they are asleep at the wheel.
> Iran could have been contained and Obama was right on his approach.
So you don't care about people forced to live under IRGC rule and their desire to export their Islamic ideals elsewhere?
Do you really believe this “altruistic” angle?
Yes, I don't want to live under Islamic rule.
I might be convinced that the Administration was concerned about people being forced to live under Islamic rule if it was as eager for war with Saudi Arabia as it is with Iran.
(I wouldn't support it any more in that case, but I would be more inclined to believe that its motivation might actually have anything to do with "Islamic rule".)
Where do you live where Islamic rule is a worry?
Many people want to though, and no one is forcing you to.
No. There are dozens of countries with despotic regimes, including Israel. And I also have no interest in zionist or any religious ideals exported either. If this were justification we would also be bombing Israel, which has committed far worse crimes than Iran.
Iran is a lesson to all: as soon as Israel or the US take a disliking to you you have to rush for nuclear weapons.
Iran has been the grown up in the room for well over a decade at this stage and it didn't matter one bit. You cannot appease Israel or the US because that don't want to be appeased, they want to bomb Iran into a lawless wasteland. They could have switched to a secular liberal democracy and it'd make no difference.
Don't know why you are being down voted. I mean Iran had a democracy that was toppled by the CIA when they tried to nationalise their resources in favour of a puppet dictator. If the US cared so much about human rights why not go invade Saudi Arabia.
Iran makes the drones that russia uses to attack Ukraine every day. Iran makes the rockets Houthis use to attack ships. Iran provides rockets andgunding to Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran is a terrorist state.
They have chosen the weekend not to disturb the stock markets. They may pull that off when they get inside support as the corruption of the regime has made it unpopular with business class and the middle class. Trump may achieve another 'Venezuela' short war.
I'm very skeptical that external attacks bring about a resurgence of domestic Iranian protest resulting in a tidy regime change. I think the downward lurch of BTC tells you how it's going to go, because Trump's mouth is writing checks others are going to have to cash and there's a lot of contradictions involved.
How is he guaranteeing immunity to members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard if they do nothing? Likewise, if he's telling the general Iranian public to simultaneously rise up and stay home, how does he plan to manage the hoped-for happy ending? In the event they succeed and topple the regime, are they just going to let bygones be bygones with the suddenly displaced IRGC while also giving Trump the keys to their treasury?
I can't shake the thought that Claude is quite possibly helping to conduct these attacks.
Maybe it's a good thing that Anthropic will no longer be associated with the US government's attacks in another six months.
I still cannot understand what "Claud helping to conduct attacks" could possibly mean. Like, they asked an LLM to use tool calls to look up strategic info, maps, and military asset inventory and then write a plan for where to point the missiles? How is a text generator helpful here, whose job could it make meaningfully easier in the chain of command?
Target selection?
"Here is 5000 petabytes of signals intelligences, you can run queries, give me the hierarchy of my enemy, the house address of anyone within 3 degrees of separation of their leadership or weapons industry, the next house address they're likely to be at if trying to flee my strikes, and the time they're all most likely to be there. Then schedule drone strikes on the houses."
Getting publicly kicked to the curb by the Trump admin mere hours before it starts another war is probably the best thing that could have happened to Anthropic. Not sure how well OpenAI's parachuting in is gonna look with hindsight. I have a feeling we won't have to wait that long to find out.