the bombing of the girls school should never have happened and is inexcusable,
but otherwise increasing the future safety by annihilating the military structure of an aspiring nuclear power for say $50B / 250M inhabitants = $200 per person, sounds like a steal
if only this would have been done before and thus instead of a genocide in Gaza!
This thing is far from over. Iran will indefinitely be able to block the straight. The us will be stuck in this defensive position for months, until it pulls out and effectively loses the war.
It's clear we are going to lose, because we cannot topple the regime without putting troops on the ground, which we will never do. Setting that as a war aim doomed this whole effort from the start.
Ground invasion would literally be Vietnam again. And don't say they'll never do it. Reports from classified briefings indicate a draft is seriously being considered.
I'm not surprised they would consider it, but it seems hilariously stupid. Even as cynical as I am about politics in this country this will never fly with most of Trump's supporters.
This isn't targeting immigrants or Democrats though, unless they try to only draft Democrats it's going to be them, their sons, their brothers and husbands getting told they have to go die.
Vietnam was all for nothing either. In the end nothing was accomplished and really it didn't matter that the communists took over a tiny unproductive piece of land across the world. It was a pointless war and many people on both sides (including many of their civilians) died needlessly just for a dick waving contest :( I really hope this won't come to that.
> but otherwise increasing the future safety by annihilating the military structure of an aspiring nuclear power for say
The problem is that there's always a very convenient aspiring nuclear power to hit. In hindsight they rarely never were a real threats (Iraq, Cuba). And what became real threats have historically been downplayed by the american government (North Korea).
Iran is real threat to oil circulation in that region, they applied this tactics many times before. Now imagine if we come to current situation 5 years later when Iran has missiles with nuclear warheads?
Feel free to list the details about when, how and why it happened before ;) interestingly none of these scenario would even have happened if they had nukes to begin with, how weird
The only weird thing in this story is that we keep preemptively bombing the same people for at best vague reasons (they were about to attack us trust me bro) and at worst complete made up lies (they have mass destruction weapons, look at my jar of anthrax).
depends how you define "attack us". Iran is part of Iran-Russia-China axis, which goals are very explicit in expanding influence and territories (Ukraine, Taiwan, Syria, Iraq, Gulf states). If they succeed, Western world will be cut from semiconductors and oil and become much weaker.
Might, may, could, potentially, maybe... Virtually nothing happened in decades and now that the US/Israel decided time was up the situation is more fucked than it has ever been, potentially pushing the Iranian government into more radicalism, good job! That will teach them. "we had to attack because they could theoretically cut us from oil in a distant future", how is it going so far?
How did it go in Iraq? Afghanistan? What's up with kidnapping Maduro? Is this what the "western world" is about? Securing resources by bombing people preemptively because they might do something you don't like one day?
You can't look at the recent history of the region and point the finger at literally anyone else other than the US with a straight face lmao, you're the blood thirsty nation who's military industrial complex got out of hand, just watch the latest videos posted by the official white house accounts, only psychopaths would come up with these
> it was decades of very intense proxy wars: Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon. Iran didn't hesitate to attack oil assets
Compared to the US and Israel who only mind their own business and never do any shady things of course. Russia says the same thing about the US in Ukraine, but there it's a dirty propaganda lie, when it comes to Iran it's just the Real Truth ™
Plenty of other nations (including Iran for decades) are not getting this stick. Carrots were even offered. The USA has remained remarkably calm remarkably long. Imagine this had been executed before Hamas parachuted a Jewish music festival? Gaza wouldn't have been sandwiched between Israel on one side and Iran's Hamas on the other. Imagine Iran had fallen (it hasnt yet) before that event. Israel wouldn't possibly have been able to "justify" doing a genocide in Gaza even to its own population!
you are putting words in the mouth of your discourse partner: approaching nuclear weapons capabilities is the reason for attack, waiting until its too late is obviously not considered an option.
Like when Iraq was just about to drop anthrax all over the US? We should study the psychology of normies falling over and over for the same propaganda techniques even when it goes again their own interests
What makes you think Iran was not a real nuclear threat?
The USA even bungled up an operation (with the goal of gaining better intel and internal domestic spies in Iran) by convincing an Iranian physicist to carry convincing plans to an address in Iran. That physicist got so sh-scared (who wouldn't) that the nuclear bomb designs would be so transparently bugged that he feared for his life. He did the unexpected: he recognized which parts of the designs were obviously manipulated for failure and corrected them before indeed depositing at the address. He feared and figured that other physicists in Iran would quickly spot the same manipulations in the weapon design, and he would effectively be committing suicide by thus proving himself a spy!
you don't train such huge proportions of the population towards physics without nuclear weapon ambitions
you don't enrich uranium to absurdly high levels for peaceful energy production (sorting isotopes is expensive)
you don't assassinate with hydrogen cyanide (generic non-brand equivalent of Zyklon B) random minorities (like Mahsa Amini) just because they would like to study law, and happen to have a less-regime aligned attitude, unless you are running a chemical weapons program (which apparently wasn't really halted after the Iran-Iraq war)
Attacking Iran has made the entire region less safe and so far there is no evidence Iran has been deterred. They continue to successfully hit targets with missiles and drones, and they have expanded operations to successfully close the Strait of Hormuz. Seems like it would have been a lot cheaper to not attack Iran and instead to rein in Israel, an existing nuclear power that is the primary destabilizing force in the Middle East.
Both Israel's as well as Iran's and for that matter all nuclear ambitions of any nation should be reigned in, as humanity was doing for a while after the first cold war, with the progressive reduction treaties etc. From the perspective of the USA, a medium-future nuclear attack by Israel was much less likely than a medium-future nuclear attack by Iran.
Closing the Strait of Hormuz is quite easy, scorched-earth-tactics (well scorched-sea-tactics) like sea-mines are a lot easier than conquering territory.
Just look Bosnia&Herzegovina and the huge minefields that were deposited there.
This doesn't show Iran's resilience, and sea mines can be cleared.
There's a long list of cards the USA holds and somewhere down that line there are options like announcing total destruction of neighborhoods of Teheran, and advising the inhabitants to leave, starting with the richest (and thus regime aligned) neighborhoods. Just gradually announce the carpet bombing neighborhoods and provide ample time for evacuation. Watch your demands being met one by one: defuse your sea mines, if one more goes off thats another richest neighborhood gone, give up your for-energy-generation-over-enriched uranium (there is no discussion of its existence as Iran was pleading an insignificant dilution of part of this stockpile) or that another richest-neighborhood-thats-left gone.
Unlike the human-shields / hostage-taking tactics of the IRGC / ayatollah, it would target not innocent third parties nor the lives but the possessions of the regime-aligned parts of the population.
All the people you forced to study physics for the megalomaniac dreams of the regime? Allow them to flee the country (and take their inkling nuclear skills with them) and welcome them with a new free life. In the west we don't gas your girlfriends, sisters, nieces over a few hairs sticking out from under their headwear.
People repeat the patterns of their breaktrhoughs / successes.
There were many factions around the time the current regime rose to power.
Which one won? Which one was reluctantly given bargaining power by the free world? The faction that took hostages.
Ever since, whenever the regime felt threatened (internally or externally) they resort to hostage taking and human shields.
No sane person puts a girls school in a semi-used military complex, especially not in that hotbed of the middle east, with Iraq as a neighbour, Israel not much further, and while sponsoring and weaponizing groups like Hamas.
Destroy civilian areas neighborhood by neighborhood until they comply? That's not only a war crime - that would create an international humanitarian crisis and millions of refugees. Tehran alone is a city of more than 9 million people. The IRGC doesn't care how many civilians the U.S. kills. It only strengthens their case that the war is existential and America/Israel want to obliterate Iran. They have a huge stockpile of missiles and drones that are not easily destroyed. Mines are not needed to close the strait, just the credible threat of drone and missile strikes, and no ship will sail through.
"Regime-aligned civilians" is a slippery slope that is essentially collective punishment. Most anyone in Iran can be tied to the government through jobs or family, and they are not segregated by level of "regime alignment", so you would be obliterating the homes of many civilians who might otherwise oppose the government.
Genuinely flabbergasted that you came up with that strategy unprompted when not even Hegseth ("drink blood from the skulls of our enemies") has suggested it AFAIK. Your post genuinely reads like the monologue of a cartoonish villain.
At the time of the bombing that school was not on Open Street Map, instead the military base (where the school was installed!) had been added a bit more than 5 years ago. Obviously international law requires targets to be thoroughly verified, which obviously didn't happen.
I am not blaming OSM for what happened, but just to avoid having a great FOSS project being used for unverified targetting: perhaps we should have stronger requests for verification for military domains around the world. OSM could contact the governments and ask if any non-military entities reside in that base. If the government refuses to confirm or deny, or just pretend there is no school, then OSM can bring this response up at a later date.
Would expect nothing less of the current administration than to use Open Street Map in their killing campaign (maybe Apple Maps should have been cross-checked)
Hey, I typically avoid the use of proprietary maps, but I am very interested in how Apple Maps knew there was a school before the bombing.
I am also interested in seeing verifiable proof that Apple Maps displayed a school there before the attack occured, and I certainly agree all available maps should have been checked, including past satellite imagery, which surely would have betrayed the presence of large amounts of children (from shadow lengths). As I said before, what happened there was inexcusable.
What is known is that Israel and USA divided the targets according to respective materiel proximity, which MUST mean that a common list of targets would have been maintained and then divided by proximity / weapon range. This means that in theory Israel could have selected the target, just like USA may have selected certain more northern targets, and then misplaced trust could have enabled blindly bombing a target selected by the other nation state.
In other words I certainly see it as a possibility that Israel intentionally shared this target pretending not to know about the girls school. They certainly can be suspected of having a motive: revenge for the killings of their children on the music festival. The genocide in Gaza apparently doesn't sufficiently quench their thirst for revenge, especially since everyone knows Hamas is effectively Iran-in-Gaza. From the perspective of Israel it's also an excellent way to ensure sustained conflict between Iran and the USA, and thus force the USA to continue contributing firepower in this escalation.
IF the above were the case, in my opinion the best move for the USA is to acknowledge as quickly as possible that while they bombed the target location, that this target selection was by Israel.
With many they can't. They didn't do it to North Korea because that would involve China and cause WWIII and besides, they would level Seoul with conventional artillery.
But really, North Korea seems to be more quiet since they have them. I think the world would have been less safe if they'd been attacked.
I have seen no convincing evidence that NK has miniaturized nuclear weapons sufficiently to put in on an ICBM, nor have I seen convincing evidence that they can handle the complexities of re-entry. If they want to be taken seriously they should give actual demonstrations instead of posturing. You know, like how US / Russia used to allow each other to inspect each others submarines, count warheads, etc.
NK can feign concern like revealing trajectory choices, radar signatures etc. but those can all be addressed: stick a big retroreflector on it that drowns out any actual radar signature, use a ridiculous trajectory, that still puts a representative heat and temperature burden on the re-entry vehicle, and so on and so on.
It seems NK doesn't want to be taken seriously (and the same for Israel when it comes to nuclear weapons to be honest).
Oh I'd take them seriously alright. All they have to do is put one inside a ship and sail it inside a harbour. Or in the back of a semi.
That's a risk not worth taking. They have exploded several, they're a credible threat now. But they only seem to be interested in using it as a deterrent, which is the sane choice given mutually assured destruction. They won't use them offensively as they'll just get wiped out.
If they had been attacked before building them I'm sure many people in Seoul would have died from artillery attacks and perhaps China would have got into a hot war with the US. I think we're better off that it didn't.
I'm pretty sure Iran would have done the same thing.. They're pretty sane too. Evil and terrible murderers to their citizens but they're not going to play nuclear chicken with a thousand times more powerful enemy.
The US had a joint nuclear program with Iran for decades... After the revolution they didn't even pursue nuclear weapons until they understood it was the only thing you can get to protect yourself from Israel and American bullying.
> before and thus instead of a genocide in Gaza!
Lmao yeah OK buddy, your dollars are financing both, and many more, atrocities
You are making assumptions, I don't earn or pay tax dollars or euros.
I have a youth trauma, that I refuse to sponsor through (obligatory) healthcare and taxes. No taxes means no income. Fine I'm a homeless bum!
All I see is angry circumcised men being sent to fight another nation's angry circumcised men, instead of addressing the perpetrators of their traumas, work from the individual perspective not the collective one.
> After the revolution they didn't even pursue nuclear weapons until they understood it was the only thing you can get to protect yourself from Israel and American bullying.
I see this claim a lot, but it appears to not be true: plenty of nations have no nuclear weapons program and aren't being bullied; while Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and clearly is being "bullied".
Yes Trump is a clown, in most democracies we can select who brings the bad news and can do the posturing. Most policy is deep state and persists across electoral swings from one party to another. It's not because Trump has been selected as the mouthpiece in charge, that the plans weren't drafted by "deep state" (non-elected) servants and organizations.
The whole republicans vs democrats is a ridiculous joke, you don't have to tell me about it.
Republic: from latin Res publica (the affairs or decisions or matters that belong to and thus need to be decided by the public) so basically "power to the people"
Democracy: from greek dēmokratía, dēmos and krátos (people and rule or power) so basically "power to the people"
So we have 2 parties claiming to stand for the same thing "power to the people" and a never ending fight for the Greek term or the Latin term. Most US citizens don't even understand greek or latin!
What does every elite do in fear of its population? Divide and conquer: divide your population in half and have them fight for a greek term and have the other half fight for a latin term, but use dead old languages so people are blinded from seeing they want the same thing!
if only this would have been done before and thus instead of a genocide in Gaza!