I recall someone (name escapes me at the moment) defining WW3 as ignition in 5 flashpoints between belligerent groupings:
- Eastern Africa esp. Sudan, which we all nearly universally ignore
- Israel Iran
- Russia and a neighbor which we know today is Ukraine
- Pakistan Afghanistan India
- China Taiwan Plus Plus
Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC: Contained conflagration, short targeted exchanges, probability of contamination low, material possibility of nuclear escalation. Case in point: North Korea developed nukes without being invaded, and now that they have nukes, other countries are watching and seeing that NK won't be invaded. What lesson do those other countries draw? And what of a world in which many potential belligerents hold nukes? Hiroshima weeps.
I'd like to add an important attribute here: The revolution will be live-streamed, more-or-less. And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons. I predict this fact will not distress many people, such is the state of humanity.
So to the 7 or so decades of stability we and our ancestors enjoyed, here's looking at you, going down me. But Brettonwoods serves the present the least of any time since its creation. Case in point, w.r.t. eastern Africa, the geopolitical bounds of those ~4 countries seems likely meld to a degree. If we are indeed heading into WW3, I expect the world map to be redrawn afterwards, and the only lessons learned is how to win better in future.
And if we are, while disgruntled old geriatrics go at each others throats via their youthful proxies, I greatly prefer the nukes rust in peace.
Reminds me of Blaise Pascal's quote: 'All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.' Aspiration, you gotta take care man, it just might kill ya.
His French is so simple and yet, incredibly beautiful and elegant, in a way that I am not even able to express in words. Only Voltaire compares.
"tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre." -- "All the woe of man comes from one single thing only: not knowing how to remain at rest, in a room"
In the same text, he follows with:
"Le roi est environné de gens qui ne pensent qu’à divertir le roi, et à l’empêcher de penser à lui. Car il est malheureux, tout roi qu’il est, s’il y pense."
"The king is surrounded by people who think only of amusing the king and preventing him from thinking about himself. For he is unhappy, though he be king, if he thinks about it."
> Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC
You're missing the commonalities, what defined world wars: the full might of industrial economies being dedicated to military campaigns.
World War II's theatres' were incoherent–the Axis interests in e.g. China and the Pacific had basically zero stragegic overlap with Europe and North Africa. (The only parties having to consider a unified theatre being the USSR and USA.) But the entire economic surplus of Europe, Asia and North America was basically dedicated to (or extracted towards) making things that were reasonably expected to be destroyed within the year.
> But the entire economic surplus of Europe, Asia and North America was basically dedicated to (or extracted towards) making things that were reasonably expected to be destroyed within the year.
This is no longer necessary to inflict the catastrophic destruction we're really referring to when talking about a hypothetical WWIII
Another aspect of a WW3 is that people- pretty much ALL people everywhere- who have nothing to do with the war will find their lives threatened or completely changed by it.
I'm less concerned about nuclear escalation than about biological escalation.
It's quite hard to destroy the human world with nukes: you can only blow up big chunks of it, maybe take out enough power plants and supply chains to drop us into a multi-decade or multi-century dark age, or maybe cause a nuclear winter, although the actual risk of that is unclear.
Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species.
We currently have no real safeguards against this. If we ever have descendants, they'll think we were insane during this time period and they'll be right.
Disagree: Most people live in areas dependent on the supply chain. And when the supply chain gets disrupted they aren't going to go peacefully. And there will be enough mobility that areas that could be self-sufficient get hordes descending on them.
Check your thinking. Korea currently has a DMZ dividing it from a war that never really ended and was fought to a stalemate. Their nuclear program didn’t result in military action because they currently have a gun to the head of every South Korean citizen and the backing of a large nuclear neighbour. Those are circumstances you can’t easily recreate elsewhere.
Adding to your point, Seoul is visible from North Korea, and vice-versa, and likely has enough conventional artillery aimed at it that even without nukes an invasion would be Very Bad for the Korean people.
Alexander "the Great" (mass murderer) began his conquests at the age of 20 and had conquered the largest empire the world had ever seen at the age of 26.
Hannibal was in his 20s when he lead the Carthagian campaign against Rome.
Napoleon began at 26 and had conquered half of Europe at 35.
War being a business of old men sending young men to die is a modern thing.
What's missing here is the complex network of alliances that led to WWI. The Iranian regime has alienated virtually everyone, including many of its Muslim neighbors. Nor is the regime part of some overarching international movement, like the communist countries were. Who is going to lift a finger to help Iran?
I'm not supportive of these strikes. Iranians created this government, and if they want to topple it they'll have to be the ones to do it, without foreign intervention.
Interestingly Iran had moderately good relations with Russia, to whom they sold drones, and China, to whom they sold oil. But indeed not enough for either to help defend Iran.
With Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, the US is bottling up Russian and Chinese global influence into smaller regional influence.
> I'm not supportive of these strikes. Iranians created this government, and if they want to topple it they'll have to be the ones to do it, without foreign intervention.
Well, foreign intervention kind of worked in Syria, Libya and Iraq after a few backstops, didn't it? All three countries reduced to rubble and virtually eliminated as threats to the US and Israel. Iran is next on the list, now that they're close to obtaing nukes. Let's not kid ourselves, they're not doing it for the Iranians, the're doing it for themselves. Regime change on their own terms, or if that isn't possible, yet another civil war.
First, I don't think this leads to WW3 although I would agree with you that there is a general global tendency towards escalation. Still, I think we can not call this WW3 and I am not 100% certain this is a build-up to WW3 either.
As for North Korea: I think the situation is not solely about North Korea itself but China. China is kind of acting as protective proxy here. I don't see North Korea as primary problem to the USA, but to South Korea and Japan. Both really should get nukes. Taiwan too, though mainland China would probably invade when it thinks Taiwan is about to have nukes; then again China already committed to invasion - this is the whole point of having a dictator like Xi in charge now.
The situation Russia is in is interesting, because even though they are stronger than Ukraine, Ukraine managed to stop or delay Russia, which is a huge feat, even with support. As Putin does not want to stop, and Trump is supporting him (agent Krasnov theory applies), I think this has escalation potential. Putin is killing civilians in Ukraine daily - I think he does that because he already committed to further escalation against all Europeans. So Europeans need a nuclear arsenal, but european politicians are totally lame - see Merz "we will never have nukes". Basically he wants to be abused by Putin here.
> So Europeans need a nuclear arsenal, but european politicians are totally lame
Are France's 240 submarines-launched thermonuclear ballistic missiles not adequate? Despite the need for security, nuclear proliferation is extremely bad. It seems ideal for France continue to maintain their nuclear weapons while the rest of Europe keeps their hands clean.
China won't invade Taiwan because it would destroy their economy and thus their country. Would wreck the entire world economy and turn every country against them.
It's nice nationalistic rhetoric, but there is literally no upside for them.
> And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons.
Maybe not in the details, but the general geopolitical "axes" (USA/the "West" vs China/Russia/BRICS/"Global South"/etc) have become increasingly obvious in the last years. And so far, most of the recent conflicts fit pretty neatly into that pattern.
Of course there are more things running in parallel, like the general shift to the right, Trump in the US, the specific situation with Israel/Palestine, the emergence of AI, etc.
But I don't see why any of this needs any other "grand secret cause" to explain the current conflicts.
BRICS is Russia wishing that China (much less Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates) were aligned to its interests.
A more accurate description of the way the world is trending:
US / UK / Europe / Japan / South Korea (still tied by defense, if push really comes to shove) vs Russia vs China vs Non-Aligned Nations (India, Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, etc.)
And historically (1960s), in a multi-polar world, middle powers are best served by being ambiguously aligned to force advantageous courting by major powers.
hmmm - but is it really "world war" 3 if it's a bunch of localized conflicts?
I'm a little disappointed that the internet and social media had little impact on universal disclosure about geopolitical matters. My sense is that governments updated their playbooks to both defend against them (e.g. minimize leaking) and leverage them (e.g. bury inconvenient information with propaganda). By comparison, I'm more hopeful about cellphones and bodycams generally reducing excessive police violence and discrimination (emphasis on "reduce").
prediction: the nuclear threat will look quaint compared with disposable million-drone swarms on land and in the air, targeting anything remotely interesting via onboard AI.
I'm surprised such a superstitious reply is so highly-upvoted. There's no "WW3" any more than there is time travel or blue smirfs. It's a hypothetical, but you're talking about it like it's an inevitability. That's just not logically-sound thinking.
We are not heading into WW 3. Those old rich men you worry about have to pay a much higher price in cash for their illusions of control. And that reduces what harm and how long wars can run. Keep an eye on what the markets tell everyone on Monday.
The revolution will be notably public, but not live-streamed. It will come as a swift and decisive reaction to a shock-and-awe deployment that will de-stabilize the state apparatus of a big nation outside of the “west”. The movement will be initially localized but it will spread until a perimeter of containment is setup around developed nations. Much more will come after.
Israel and the US told Iran "Don't try to develop nukes or else." Iran tried to develop nukes and got bombed. Then Iran tried to develop nukes again.
PotUS told Iran "Don't shoot the protestors or else." Iran shot the protestors.
Iran chose to FAFO; "Or else" has now arrived.
I don't like Trump and based on past bad experiences I'm not sure it's wise for the US to start a war in the Middle East. But I don't agree with people who think this war is illegitimate or Iran isn't the bad guy here.
It is difficult to instigate regime change for democratically elected governments.
Iran has an unelected supreme leader.
Israel has a large portion of its population completely disenfranchised.
The US has a generally democratically elected government.
If one of these governments is going to fall during military instabilities, it would most likely be Iran. The US will have significant regime change in November if polling holds.
There is nothing ideal about that outcome. The "regime change" people talk about is intended to look like what happened in Libya: A failed state that falls in anarchy.
Won't there be boots on the ground? We already bombed their facilities and at the time they said best that bombs can do is fuck up the entrance to these tunnels.
Well hopefully this is short, minimally lethal, and leads to regime change for all those involved.
That would be ideal but unfortunately not likely. Nobody will like this comment but US ships are sitting ducks. They have minimal ammo per the pentagon and no oilers. No oilers and low ammo means no prolonged conflict. Only two of the ships are nuclear powered not counting submarines. Most of Iran's military and weapons are deep underground in a massive series of underground cities and tunnels. The US would require boots on the ground if they manage to breach the tunnel openings under the mountains. Should that fail the only viable targets are civilians and that won't win favor with anyone or accomplish anything.
Iranian military could just wait it out if they wanted and then smoke Israel with supersonic missiles when the US leaves. Then we find out if Israel does have the nukes for the Samson option and that would result in the destruction of Israel. Iran's military could survive a nuclear strike but would have to clean up the fallout and I am not sure they could. Anyone not underground would likely get Acute Radiation Sickness and Cancer.
On a positive note if the US can manage to get into the tunnels and send in enough munitions to start detonating the missile stockpile a chain reaction could crack all the concrete and collapse the tunnels. Satellite could detect which tunnel they try to evac from. They have less than 5 days to accomplish the chain reaction assuming this is the plan. From the videos I have seen the missiles are literally lined up like a double-strand fuse.
The US military has seldom had problems with the blowing up the enemy bit. It's providing peace and stability after that happens where they tend to run into problems.
[Update]: It seems my dear leader is hitting all the cities... [1] I am not OK with this. Save the handful of leaders and scientists for ground recon instead of whacking all the citizens. Take out the missiles first. Most of the military and religious leaders are under ground. Take out those underground complexes and Iran is yours.
Yeah, the possibility of a regime collapse / change due to this military action is unlikely. The military goal seems to be to destroy Iran's military-industrial complexes to hamper its missile production. Note however that while Iran has potent missile capability, Iran's underground complexes where it is stored presents its own problems - in the absence of adequate air defence and an Air Force, its enemies can just bomb the openings of these underground complexes, making it very, very difficult for the Iranians to use its missile arsenals from there. (This is what Israel did the last time). As for the scenario you outlined, I highly doubt the US would be willing to send boots to the ground to blow up their missiles manually - urban warfare takes a heavy toll and I doubt if the Trump administration can withstand the criticism if body bags start coming home. Even the MAGA crowd has been unexceptionally hostile to Trump's attack on Israel.
This reminds me of the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza, when a mysterious explosion at a hospital was immediately blamed on an Iraeli strike - first by Hamas, then by the international press. A precise death toll was immediately available: 500 killed. Israel urged caution as they investigated, but were ignored.
Eventually, it was established that 1) the casualty number had been a fabrication, 2) the explosion was in the parking lot, 3) it was NOT caused by an Israeli strike, but by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that had fell short.
Soon the press was forced to issue corrections - New York Times [1] , Le Monde [2], BBC [3]...
This incident looks VERY similar. Which is not surprising, since Hamas was trained in information warfare by the IRGC. Note that Al Jazeera (the media arm of Qatar, who funds Hamas and hosts their leaders in Doha) is enthusiastically amplifying this story with no apparent effort to cross-examine Iran's official source.
I predict that this story will turn out to be fabricated as well.
I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.
I have been reading on the topic of shunyata or emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and have been uncomfortably observing just how much of the artifacts we take to be real and substantial in the world are just "made up". They don't have an inherent reality of their own except what we attribute to them. And yet, made up stories can have very real consequences in terms human suffering.
It ought to be possible to cut through the layers of reifications and simply defuse much of the strife in the world. And yet, we continue to inflict misery on each other unnecessarily.
You’re mistaking the packaging for the product. Religion is the language leaders use. Power, territory, oil corridors, regional dominance, and domestic political survival are what they’re actually fighting over.
Tehran isn’t calculating missile ranges based on sutras. Washington doesn’t position carrier groups because of metaphysics. Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat.
Spiritual narratives make clean moral theater for the public. They mobilize bodies. They sanctify retaliation. But the machinery underneath runs on leverage and deterrence, not theology.
Wake up to the real world.
Calling it primarily religious violence feels tidy and tragic in a philosophical way. It’s harder, and more uncomfortable, to admit that it’s strategic violence dressed in symbols people recognize.
Shunyata is a beautiful lens for seeing through ego. It doesn’t dissolve geopolitics.
Complexity can lead to "more is different" outcomes at higher strata. I would not say reified concepts are "made up" as they can have very real effects on both higher and lower strata.
The fallacy of reification is treating something emergent as a thing-unto-itself rather than a process or interaction born from constituents at a lower stratum. A reified thing can be recognized and changed for this reason. A mental concept needs only a change of mind to mutate, or to be destroyed.
Religion may well prove to be a reification that is destroyed once it is recognized as such. But I do believe that you cannot reduce that which is real and not real to only those things that have physical antecedents at lower strata, as we see emergent phenomena in the physical world as well.
It makes a lot more sense if you picture a bunch of organized, strong and merciless chimps attacking some other chimps to plunder what they have.
Chimps generally agree war is bad and horrific. But some smart, opportunistic and hard-working chimps can create situations that make war possible. Even though the war will only bring losses to most chimps on both sides.
The best political insight in this thread. This is the planet of the apes. If any future historians are reading, some of us primates were aware of the absurdity of the situation, horrified by the senseless violence that erupts again and again, led by sociopathic chimps that somehow managed to organize whole societies against each other and profit from the whole primitive enterprise. What a waste of human potential.
When it comes to battles of religion, Alan watts said it best.
"Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable–that is, human–men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life."
> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.
Can you provide an example of this in 2026?
It seems a little tenable with the ayatollah and Iran. But even here you don’t hear much talk of this being a war in the name of religion anymore. Nowhere near a few years ago and certainly nothing like 9/11 and the Taliban.
And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way. Just a war defending people against attackers at the gates.
The land promised to the Israelites generally extends from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq/Syria, encompassing modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria and Saudi Arabia.
If you're a religious Jew, then you believe you have a mandate from God (so an irrefutable right, or even obligation, needing no justification) to settle and rule not only the West Bank but the entire region. So there will always be that motivation, as long as religious Judaism exists in Israel.
> And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way.
The American ambassador to Israel recently publicly said that Israel has a "biblical right" to the whole of the middle-east! (Watch these two interviews to understand how cleverly, and strongly, Israeli politics is tied up with American evangelical Christianity to keep American polity tied to Israel's existence - https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-fares-abraham-021826 and https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-mike-huckabee-022026 . Both these interviews give you a very insightful picture of how religious fundamentalist Israelis in power are total nutcases, supported by the American Christian fundamentalist fruitcakes).
It's not said in polite company, but Israeli concerns are racial, not religious. If you meet a Jewish zionist, then you've also met an athiest. An explanation of Christian Zionism deserves much longer discussion than can be made here, but how and why such an obvious contradiction to Jesus' ministry gained popularity is something worth studying.
1. Many Israeli Jewish Zionists are either "traditional" (religious but not that much) or Religious Zionist, and they are generally part of the right wing coalition. Actual atheists tend to be in the Israeli (still-Zionist) left.
2. The Zionist conception of Jewish identity is not "racial" in the American sense. The most obvious sense in which this is true is that it considers converts and their descendants full members of the nation. Probably the closest analogies are some Native American nations' identities or Armenian nationalism.
But you're directionally correct - Zionism is not a particularly religious ideology within the Jewish world, and outside of the Religious Zionist minority the political class is (openly!) on the less observant end even on the right.
Once you realize the gospels and the epistles disagree, it becomes a lot easier to understand. Christianity is the practice of cognitive dissonance. The bible, due to the nature, has a lot of mixed messaging.
Imagine, for example, you wanted to write the religion of Liberalism, so you collect the works of all the major thinkers on the subject of liberalism into one book. Now imagine someone gets the bad idea that all these authors must actually have a unified view on what liberalism is, means, and implies. You'll end up seeing that person teach a form of liberalism that's easily countered with other passages from their book and they'll mostly just wave it away because they have their passages and the others are simply you misinterpreting an "obvious" metaphor.
That is christianity in a nutshell, just replace liberalism with god. That's why there are so many sects. Because it's just too easy to yell "Context context context!" when a difficult passage comes up you don't agree with and use "spiritual" as the excuse for why you don't actually have to follow that passage.
There is also point of view that remembers that always right behind US military there is a team building next oil pipeline.
US tried to used China as cheap labor, lost a lot of intelligence and now - look at how much oil Iran has and who is it exporting to and what is the percentage at the destination.
The numbers add up and only the funny (?) thing is - China is (going to) be most eco country, because they already use nuclear power a lot and were forced to work on that.
What a time to be alive, again!
And please, downvote me, comment that US is fighting for some country’s civilians freedom. It’s fun too.
Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes.
There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik).
Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
Religious concerns are, IMHO, always a facade for the underlying economic/territorial/geopolitical reasons. These religious facades help sell the war effort: get young men to enlist and fight to the death for "preserving their identity". And "muh freedom" is just as much a religious motivation to me (unsubstantiated, indoctrinated, unthreatened).
> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.
This just isn't true. Religion is never the reason for these conflicts. It's the excuse. It's how that conflict is sold to the rest of the world. It's how civilians are manipulated into dying in a conflict.
The source of these conflicts is always material. Always.
Reagan's Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig once said [1]:
> Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.
In 1986, then Senator and future president Joe Biden said [2]:
> [Israel] is the best $3 billion ivnestment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to an invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.
Much of US Middle East polciy was aimed to sabotaging and undermining Pan-Arab Nationalism (particularly under then Egyptian President Nasser) [3].
Nothing about any of this has anything to do with faith. In this case it's about oil.
Whatever crimes you think Iran might've done, I'll stack up the US crimes against Iran and it won't even be close, including:
1. Iran was a liberal democracy that the US deposed in 1953 at the behest of the British because BP didn't want to have to pay higher royalties, ultimately leading Mossadegh wanting to "nationalize" their own oil;
2. In 1978, then US-puppet Saddam Hussein expelled Khomenei from Iraq. This was about the time the US realized that Iran was likely lost. it is believed that the reason for this was that a fundamentalist regime was preferred to a Communist one (which was otherwise the likely outcome) as the US didn't want Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. So all this pearl-clutching about the current regime rings hollow when you realize the US helped created it;
3. As punishment for the Revolution, the US supplied weapons to Iraq and fueled the Iran-Iraq war for almost a decade that killed over a million people; and
4. Crippling economic sanctions, which is a fancy way of saying "starving people and denying them medical care", for daring not to be a US puppet.
If you point me to any conflict you think is based on faith, I'll show you the material interests behind it.
> The source of these conflicts is always material. Always.
Since the beginning of the Green Revolution¹, no. The source of these conflicts are always ideological. Always. Ideology may come through religion or some other medium.
Countries don't go occupying land because they need crops or slaves anymore. Material is always cheaper to buy than to get from an occupation. The desire to annex some land is always for somebody's pet project, it doesn't make economic sense.
1 - In a very wide sense. Agriculture stopped being the bottleneck for human populations at some point in the 18th or early 19th centuries.
I think the praise of the strategic value to US military interests are rationalizations and poor ones at that. The Gulf monarchies are allies in a meaningful sense and provide useful material support to the United States. Our “ally“ on the other hand was recently caught running a child prostitution ring and money laundering operation to control business and political leaders in the United States. Kidnapping children and removing their teeth so they can’t bite their rapists for political leverage is going to be remembered by future generations with the same horror and disgust as medieval torture and 20th century concentration camps.
Hey there I'm Israeli and I'm quite politically informed and moderately religiously educated and I have never heard of this "curse of the eighth decade" thing you've heard of.
I think this is probably happening, but also there are just a ton of actual Zionists and Israelis in the tech industry. Unfortunately they visit this site regularly and police it against honest reporting about their crimes.
With things like Openclaw it’s kind of trivial to game forums now. You just have to tell an agent to “post arguments for/against this perspective on this forum.” Give it a few talking points to include if you want to get specific and let it run. Specify the tone so it sounds realistic. It’s literally going to do everything else essentially forever or until you run out of tokens. Comments in a forum are dirt cheap so it’s also going to be very cheap.
Youd have to do a lot of work to make sure it's only a few short sentences, non-specific, and ultra-quippy though.
I mean I'm sure it can be done but if you ask an LLM to produce comment reply without more instruction it's going to write something a lot more thoughtful, respectful, and substantive than a forum user would.
What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days?
Happens all day every day. There are many AI agents starting discussions and replying to comments. This is how The Crappening started on 4chan. Some of them are just future grifters. Some are training AI (I have replied to a few for fun). Some are propaganda bots. Those running the bots will reply with something equiv to Errrm Proof?? when called out. Without root I can not empirically prove it and the botters know that.
I predict about 2 years before the site will have more AI noise than real people. I have no idea what can be done about it aside from tracking the bots and reporting them via email to Daniel and I don't know what he could or would do. HN has always been very hands off which is mostly good but not for this scenario. If nothing is done it will just be bots grifting and AstroTurfing one another to the benefit of Google SEO and most of the humans would eventually go elsewhere with exception of some die-hards that refuse to recognize the situation.
Anonymous internet forums will very likely die out if inference gets another order of magnitude cheaper.
The only solutions are (1) private forums, (2) strict verification or maybe (3) some sort of "web of trust" thing, if someone manages to make it user friendly and not suck.
Mods are explicitly rolling back the no-political advocacy guideline - Dan G has said he’s explicitly unflagging political content which is why HN is filled with left wing activism.
At this point, lines have been drawn. In conservative land, everything conservative is good, everything liberal is bad. So the only sane position to take is the complete opposite.
For example, if you see someone self proclaimed liberal being critical of liberals, that person is probably a conservative or its a conservative bot.
That's not totally true when it comes to Zionism though. Much of the left and the right are united against Zionism. It's the older center liberals and right that are united in being pro-Zionism.
2 countries with the best war technologies on earth must work together to have a war with embargod-country-for-decades.
And those 2 counties are founder of Board of Peace.
The reason it is hard is not due to a power balance. Both of those countries could have sent nukes with minimal efforts.
But their goal is targeted and precise attacks, that effectively destroy targets based on specific, and high quality intelligence.
The other part is that defense against missiles is significantly harder and more expensive than sending missiles. Iran, while relatively poor, has dedicated a significant part of its economy for missile development and production.
Day one and they've already bombed a school and killed dozens of children. The goals, strategy and tactics have not been clearly communicated. You can pray they are using high quality intelligence, but history tells us they are not at all concerned with collateral damage. They likely want to degrade Iran's military capabilities, but they also want them cowed and bleeding.
My greater concern is the people of Iran. Especially since Iran has conscription so the people who end up dieing in a war didn't even consent to being made soldiers.
I'd say being an apartheid state and conducting a live-streamed genocide could possibly be a minor issue. Just a PR issue mind, Lord knows we've given up on our souls long ago.
Ok. So we have just taken out all of Israel's foes with force. They are safe now right? We can stop supporting them militarily in every way now right? They no longer need any weapons, intelligence support, defense support, etc, right? If this is the right path to their long term safety then this must be true.
To take a break from breaking havoc in Gaza, there was an israeli incursion into Lebanon (which included a fantastic supply chain attack) Then they tried to pick a fight in Siria for some BS reason (intervening Siria for protecting some jew friendly faction inside Siria, a la Russia protecting russiansnin Ukraine), then went to Iran, then continued milling Gaza, and now we are back at Iran, again.
> Iranian media now report 40 killed and 48 students injured following the strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, as rescue and recovery efforts continue.
As an Iranian-American that's familiar with the regime, I would take that with a grain of salt. I saw this being reported from the Iranian regime themselves and they know how to manipulate optics and media really well. It's possible, but needs verification. I would also not put it past Iran to build their military infrastructure around schools intentionally (similar to Hamas with hospitals) in the hopes that it has this exact effect. Of course that does nothing to take away from the tragedy of innocent people dying and I'm not trying to negate that in any way, just something to point out.
100%. In another comment [1] I drew a parallel with the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza. Once you understand basic information warfare tactics, they're easy to spot. Why newsrooms still fall for it so easily is the real mystery...
Easy, it was Israel that probably did it and it's been shown time and time again that they can do this without political fallout under the guise that the target was a hiding spot for the military assets of Iran (or Hamas in the case of Palestine bombing).
> Easy, it was Israel that probably did it and it's been shown time and time again that they can do this without political fallout under the guise that the target was a hiding spot for the military assets of Iran (or Hamas in the case of Palestine bombing).
Are you claiming that Iran (or Hamas) site their military bases away from schools (or hospitals)?
No need to worry. They have extensively stress-tested the American public over the past few years and the conclusion is clear: Americans are never going to revolt no matter what you do to them.
I don't think this is terrorism, that's not what the word means. It's a clear and open act of war, so in many ways much worse, but somehow terrorism is a scarier word.
This is also a good deal for the Iranian government since they can transfer hatred people had for them to the America and Israel. No one will see Trump as salvation and the “rally behind the flag” phenomena in times of invasion applies just as much to Iran as it does to the USA.
> Nothing like a war to boost your popularity just before the elections
If he pulls off a regime change, even a Delcy-style swaparoo, he'll get it, and arguably not undeservedly. It will ultimately come down to Iran's capacity to inflict casualties on American forces.
I’m not so sure. This is no where near a priority issue for most Americans, “I can’t afford eggs and the immigrant I buy pizza from got shipped to a warehouse but thank god the regime changed in Iran.”
Trump could liberate every repressed country in the world and it would not impact in the slightest the cold hard fact that neither I nor most the people I know will ever vote R again.
They leveraged special operations forces in Venezuela. Iran has two US carrier groups on their front door; this operation is not going to be as precise as the one against Maduro.
You're acting like people are rational. It's just about power. Appearing strong appeals to the apes inside the humans. And no one is more in touch with his inner ape than Trump.
Trump can literally do all the things that the epstein files accuse him of doing, right on camera in front of everyone, and Americans will still vote for him all because he isn't a "woke" black woman.
Military action in Iran is deeply unpopular, being supported by just 27% of US adult citizens [1]. As an aside, Congress literally doesn't care what voters think [2]. The pearl-clutching about this from Congressional Democrats isn't about policy but process, with the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries saying Congress should authorize this action, not that it shouldn't happen.
I'm interested in what makes empires tick, what their basis of power is.
Spain in the colonial era was propped up by looting silver from Central and South America, for example.
The British Empire is what many (including me) like to call the "drug dealer empire". First tobacco then later opium. Any claims that we didn't know about the health risks of tobacco are complete BS (eg [3]).
Circling back to your point, the US is what I like to call the "arms dealer empire". WW1 and WW2 massively enriched the United States. NATO is essentially a protection racket for Europe and the price is, you guessed it, buying arms from the United States.
And the next Budget has proposed increasing "defense" spending from an already eye-popping $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion [4]. Where does that money go? Arms, weapons programs, defense contractors, the ultra-wealthy.
War is good for business even though it's unpopular.
I hope this war will be short.
And that the result will be Iran becoming a democracy that fully joins the global community. The Iranian people (Persians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, and others), deserve better.
It would benefit the entire world to see Iran integrated and engaged internationally.
I know a lot of the responses are skeptical (for good reason), but the opportunity is certainly there. The pro-regime population is aging out, with the more secular youth taking hold. There has always been an appreciation for American culture (specifically) amongst the general population. This was true when I was there in the 80s and increasingly more true over the decades since. Concessions by the regime over the hijab laws is one example of the society drifting more towards Western norms. Alcohol and western style parties are way more present in the society than ever before. Basically, the foundation for it is certainly there.
Furthermore if Reza Pahlavi does manage to integrate into the society, he will most certainly use his business and political ties here in the US to westernize the society. He's said as much. Some of the more well known Iranian-American business leaders here in the US (CEO of Uber, CEO of intuit, founder of eBay for example) I'm sure would contribute to work towards this also.
There will be push-back from rural areas (just like anywhere else) and the regime will not go away overnight, but the possibility does exist for this outcome. I think the biggest roadblock would be America and Israel intentionally preventing this outcome for the reasons that suit them geopolitically.
EDIT: should have mentioned that after decades of widely known voter manipulation and more or less "mock" elections, Iranians would be happy to finally participate in actual democratic processes where their votes and voices matter
This scenario always imagines that the people getting bombs rained down on them will somehow determine that their actual friends in the world are those dropping the bombs.
Even accepting this, how exactly are these peaceful, western friendly civilians going to withstand a war better than their country's army?
It's very depressing to see this playbook credulously trotted out yet again. When has this worked?
We literally just went through this with Venezuela. They replaced the dictator with the assistant dictator. The Iranian face of regime change making the rounds in Western media is the son of the last Shah.
I was thinking more along the lines of Japan or South Korea. Militarily restrained, but prosperous and strong.
I understand that recent military actions have often made things worse, not better. I am just trying to stay optimistic. From what I know, many Iranians are not enthusiastic about religion controlling law and politics.
There is zero likelihood of that. The IRGC and Iranian forces are a million strong and have a loyal base of support among the population. Without boots on the ground, relying on air power and 'moderate rebels' you are looking at at least a decade of war (using Syria and Libya as best-case-scenarios examples; Assad regime was nothing like the Iranian). The Israelis are dividing the opposition by pushing the out-of-touch monarchists as their would-be puppets and the Trump regime are backing them too. Which means they are not even seriously pushing any viable or credible alternative. They are likely arming the Kurdish and other ethnic factions in the region and stoking ethnic conflict. It is in Israel's interests to prolong the conflict , to degrade Iran's military and economy (like they did in Syria) and even break it up into smaller manageable parts. The monarchists are a moon-shot; Reza Pehlavi is not his father (who also was a US puppet) - Israelis like him because he will be weak and pliable and completely dependent on foreign patronage.
Interesting point on Israel pushing for the monarchy to come back.
Democracy in the middle-east does not result in Israel or US aligned governments, but the monarchies have proven more interested in preserving their autocratic dynasties and quite easy and eager to work with Israel and the US to preserve themselves.
We saw significant success with Germany, Japan, South Korea, and other countries in the past. But more recently, similar efforts seem to have ended in failure.
There is a huge flame war in the comments as people who had money on 27th Feb are claiming the attack started on that date
I think they don’t have an argument because technically the missile can be de-activated up until the last seconds before it reaches its intended target
Still it feels surreal to argue about these things , bomb dropping on humans and other humans attacking each other for the privilege to have their bet honored on when said bombs dropped on the other side of the world
I guess people in intelligence communities had these sort of bets going on ever since WW2 and Vietnam , but still it’s uncanny to see it widespread to potentially the whole population of the internet
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, ...
I tried to access that URL but it's banned in my country (Romania) for being an "exploitative gambling website". It's the first time I've felt that my country has a sensible internet policy.
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.
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.
Americans voted for no new wars, and especially no new wars in the sandbox, and they got a new war in the sandbox.
Americans really have to be among the most gullible people on the planet.
Not to mention that Trump is a paedophile, the open corruption, attempted coup etc... it's like that Hemingway quote. The decline of the USA has been gradual, and then very sudden.
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
A plan? Actually there is. This is all part of the backdrop to end US elections. We can’t have elections in the middle of a major war. And if we do have them we must greatly constrain how they are held while we are at war.
We had elections during WW2, the largest war of all time; we had elections during the civil war when confederate troops were 30 miles from DC. An air campaign in the Middle East is just another tuesday by comparison. This theory falls flat on its face - it is not a reasonable pretext for suspending elections, and this administration does not bother with creating pretexts for its power grabs.
I've been trying to avoid the news for a little over a year now. I needed a detox. ... Is this true? That is, are there legitimate proposals to cancel or constrain the November elections in any significant way? Or, is this all speculation?
> We can’t have elections in the middle of a major war.
Yes we can? Is there any provision in the US Constitution that allows delay of election because of war? We have had elections during most of our recent wars (Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan).
Trump could definitely try. Or pull an emergency card out of his ass. But it doesn't mean there is any provision for cancelling elections because of this 'war' with Iran (which they aren't even calling a war, but a "special combat operation" to get around congress having the war powers)
Yes. The US supports the monarchy, the Kurds and MeK. The CIA was revealed to have armed MeK (despite designation) and my guess is that they do with the Kurds too. The CIA also talks to the Balochi groups as well although I don't know how organized or armed they are.
Needless to say, "regime change" would in reality mean civil war like Syria or collapse like Libya.
The US has spent a lot of time and money on MEK but I don't think they are very effective. Or will be very effective. My understanding is the leader of MEK has n't been seen in years(is probably dead), and MEK members are only allowed to marry other MEK members, so the number of MEK members is way down from their 80s highpoint, and it's not getting better.
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the ‘‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’’.
SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) IN GENERAL.—That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
I don't understand Iran, Hezbollah's and the Houthis' patience with the US actually. It's absolutely shocking. After the US betrayed ALL of it's own fucking allies, in what world does it make sense to negotiate with them?
The Houthis are still "threatening" to do things today after already being decimated and Hezbollah's strength more than halved.
I don't support any of these creeps but if any of them were minimally rational, they would have all gone to total war with Israel and the US the minute they realized what Hamas was doing on October 7th. They look even more naive than Europeans at this point.
It is still unhinged, but not because of nuclear weapons. Ukraine, and now Iran, showed the whole world what happens when you don’t have a nuclear deterrence.
The last time Israel faced an existential threat from its neighbors was 1973. The timeline isn’t entirely clear, but that’s right around the time when they started to have operational nuclear weapons. Many factors contributed to their relative safety since then, but the timing certainly works out for nuclear weapons helping to make that true.
"In the world of strategic studies, there has been a return to ‘theories of [nuclear] victory’. Their proponents draw on the work of past scholars such as Henry Kissinger, who wondered in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy if extending the American deterrent to all of Europe at a time when the threat of total destruction hung over the US itself would actually work: ‘A reliance on all-out war as the chief deterrent saps our system of alliances in two ways: either our allies feel that any military effort on their part is unnecessary or they may be led to the conviction that peace is preferable to war even on terms almost akin to surrender ... As the implication of all-out war with modern weapons become better understood ... it is not reasonable to assume that the United Kingdom, and even more the United States, would be prepared to commit suicide in order to defend a particular area ... whatever its importance, to an enemy’.
One of the recommended solutions was to bring tactical nuclear weapons back into the dialectic of deterrence extended to allied territories, so as to give US decision makers a range of options between Armageddon and defeat without a war. Global deterrence was ‘restored’ by creating additional rungs on the ladder of escalation, which were supposed to enable a sub-apocalyptic deterrence dialogue — before one major adversary or the other felt its key interests were threatened and resorted to extreme measures. Many theorists in the 1970s took this logic further, in particular Colin Gray in a 1979 article, now back in fashion, titled ‘Nuclear Strategy: the case for a theory of victory’.
...
In 2018 Admiral Pierre Vandier, now chief of staff of the French navy, offered a precise definition of this shift to the new strategic era, which has begun with Russia’s invasion: ‘A number of indicators suggest that we are entering a new era, a Third Nuclear Age, following the first, defined by mutual deterrence between the two superpowers, and the second, which raised hopes of a total and definitive elimination of nuclear weapons after the cold war’" [1].
I think the chances we see a tactial nuclear exchange in our lifetimes has gone from distant to almost certain.
Now that the last generation with direct experience of the Nazis is leaving us, it seems like the populace is forgetting the horrors of that time. That also happens to be the last generation with direct experience of nuclear weapons used in war.
1. According to the US and Israel, Iran has been a week away from having nuclear weapons for at least 34 years [1];
2. It's quite clear Iran could've developed nuclear weapons but chose not to. I actually think was a mistake. The real lesson from the so-called War on Terror was that only nuclear weapons will preserve your regime (ie Norht Korea);
3. Israel is a nuclear power. It's widely believed that Israel first obtained weapons grade Uranium by stealing it from the US in the 1960s [2];
4. In a just world, people would hang for what we did to Iran in 1953, 1978-79, the Iran-Iraq War and sanctions (which are a sanitized way of saying "we're starving you"); and
5. The current round of demands include Iran dismantling its ballistic missile program. This is because the 12 day war was a strategic and military disaster for the US and Israel.
Israel has a multi-layered missile defence shield. People usually talk about Iron Dome but that's just for shooting down small rockets. Separate layers exist for long-range and ballistic missiles (eg David's Sling, Arrow-2, Arrow-3). In recent times the US has complemented these with the ship-borne THAAD system.
Even with all this protection, Iran responded to the unprovoked attacks of the 12-day war by sending just enough ballistic missiles to overwhelm the defences, basically saying "if we have to, we can hit Israel".
Many suspect that the real reason the US negotiated an end to the 12 day war was because both Israel and the US were running cirtically low on the munitions for THAAD and Israel's missile defence shield. You can't just quickly make more either. Reportedly that will take over a year to get replacements.
Thing is, pretty much all of this missile defence technology is about to become obsolete once hypersonic missiles become more widespread, which is going to happen pretty soon. I suspect that's a big part of why the US and Israel are now trying so desperately to topple the regime and turn Iran into a fail-state like Somalia or Yemen.
I'm not normally one to encourage nuclear proliferation but when it's the only thing the US will listen to, what choice do countries have?
> Thing is, pretty much all of this missile defence technology is about to become obsolete once hypersonic missiles become more widespread, which is going to happen pretty soon.
I think you'll have to be more specific.
Or I guess to compare with your other observation: """Even with all this protection, Iran [sent] enough ballistic missiles to overwhelm the defences""" -- It's not a binary of "have missile defense or not => every missile will be shot down". An amount of missile defense will make it harder for missiles to successfully hit a target.
Similarly with hypersonic missiles, it's not the binary of "I have a missile that's difficult to defend against, I win".
Having a sword which can defeat a shield isn't in itself sufficient to obsolete the shield. (Infantry can be killed with bullets, yet infantry remain an important part of fighting despite that).
Yes, because "what choice did Iran have" other than:
1. Routinely calling for death to Israel and America, turning it into part of the national curriculum and sowing hate
2. Funding, training, supplying and directing multiple violent proxy organizations around the region which attacked Israel and undermined their own countries (Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in West Bank and Gaza, other organizations in Iraq)
3. Enriching Uranium to clearly non-civilian grade in multiple militarily hardened facilities;
4. Directly attacking multiple Jewish targets around the world (like the AMIA and then embassy bombings in Argentina)
5. Attacking neighboring countries with ballistic and cruise missiles, like the attacks on Saudi Aramco in 2019
6. Holding international shipping and energy markets hostage by threatening to attack ships and tankers in the Persian Gulf
7. Abusing their own citizens, including public executions, persecutions and extreme violence
8. Providing support to Russia in their efforts in Ukraine, and especially drones used for indiscriminate dumb attack waves against civilians and infrastructure
Now we have people arguing that if they had just gotten nukes then they could have continued doing all of that.
> Considering the rationale for this war that kind of seems false
The spring to a nuke is riskier than ever. That doesn't change that nuclear sovereignty is a tier above the regular kind, this is something every one of the global powers (China, Russia and America) and most regional powers (Israel) have explicilty endorsed.
This is an incredibly facile take on the situation. Iran has been a destabilizing regional power with imperial aims for 47 odd years. They even murdered the PM of Lebanon via their proxy army. They’ve been poking the bear for decades, and there are serval occasions where it may have happened sooner in an alternative universe. Had McCain become president in ‘08 we may well have seen a land invasion from US positions in Iraq, as the Iranian Quds force was already fighting US soldiers in Iraq. The whole DoD is now full of Iraq veterans who hate the Iranian government to their bones. It’s shocking this didn’t happen sooner, and probably only didn’t because of luck.
More than taking control of Iranian petrol, this is probably more an attempt at cutting off China access to it (and also generally eliminating one of their allies), same as for the Venezuelan invasion.
I used to believe that, I think there are also some very ambitious people nearby who want to use US armed forces for their benefit - as any rational player who has influence over such power would attempt.
This is part of why we help defend Israel, to constrain wars to conventional means.
In the first Gulf War, we placed the Patriot batteries around Israel, as they said that if an Iraqi biological or chemical SCUD attack hit Tel Aviv, they would vitrify Baghdad.
Having nukes doesn't prevent _anyone_ from attacking you, but it does constrain those attacks to conventional means. And what if you pulled off a decapitation attack against Tel Aviv? Well their fleet of nuclear capable subs would make you pay.
Thanks for pointing this out. I hear people say this over and over, if Iran only had nukes it would be safe to continue propagating terrorism as it has been doing. It’s obviously wrong, as you point out. Russia has nukes. India has nukes. Having nuclear weapons doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want, if anything it brings a higher level of scrutiny. A nuclear Iran would be a serious problem for many and that’s why it’s so critical to make sure that doesn’t happen, not just for Israel but the entire planet.
My totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory is that several of those are sitting in shipping containers in the US and Europe, and that is part of the reason that their interests drive all western foreign policy, despite their open hostility to their 'allies'.
How does that factor in here right now? We haven't used or threatened to use nukes, and at least the public case made is in part that Iran is trying to get nukes and shouldn't.
I say "public case" specifically here, I don't buy that justification but it is still the one being used.
There's an Israeli newspaper from 1984 saying it's a month away. Definitely more than a month passed between '84 and '92.
Btw. They ARE not that far away from the bomb, after they enriched uranium as a consequence of Trump (in his first term) cancelling the Obama treaty.
But they ARE a theocracy and Ajatollah Chamenei released an order (fatwa) forbidding Iran from obtaining and using an a-bomb. The new religious leader might change the religious law tho. I mean the one that comes after Chamenei becomes a martyr.
Funny how, knowing just a little bit more, it all really looks like nonsense created for illiterate, just to take their attention off of Epstein Pedophile Scandal.
The concept of nuclear brinkmanship is part of accepted WMD doctrine. A country can maintain a fixed short interval away from weaponization for decades. It is widely accepted that Iran does have a military nuclear program; the amount of material enriched, the enrichment level achieved and the hardening of the involved facilities are an open testament to that (there are many other intelligence signals that we are not privy to).
I think you're missing the point: a constant justification for bombing Iran is that they are one month, one week, or a couple months from building a nuclear bomb.
If that was true, obviously they would have built one buy now. Being one year away from building would be non-urgency inducing.
The constant lying about timelines does not imply Iran does not enrich uranium, but, as you remember, after the last bombing the leaders of the USA and Israel said they had completely obliterated Iran's nuclear program. Except, apparently After six months they are one week away from a nuke again.
This seems to indicate the USA should be bombing Iran every few weeks, forever, just in case they get a bit faster next time.
Except, when we don't have any scandal or other crisis going on, then Iran does not seem to be getting a nuke quickly. I wonder why.
Tough news day for anyone who has a difficult time holding contradictory ideas in their mind. Pretty sure that includes myself.
On the one hand, Trump is awful for the USA, and the world.
On the other hand, there is a possibility that the freedom-wanting citizens of Iran finally have a slight chance of achieving their goal.
The chance of something truly positive happening seems low. However, as someone who has, for years, watched what happens in Iran via the lens of https://old.reddit.com/r/newiran, I am allowing myself the slightest amount of hope. Iranian people deserve it.
Of course, there is a large chance of this blowing up into something really bad for everyone.
edit: This Ukrainian is currently live streaming with OSINT, and his takes align with many of my actual realist thoughts:
During the election MAGA was yelling that Kamala Harris was going to bring us into war with Iran. They are real quiet now, as usual. Republicans are always the same, cut benefits to the poor, cut taxes on the rich, war with the Middle East. Every, single, time.
While I have no love for the Iranian regime I fear this will end up like the 'liberation' of Iraq: A massive power vacuum in an unstable Islamic regime.
What even is the plan here if the air assault fails? Boots on the ground? In Iran?
Who say US is not regime? It is the world largest regime in the world, with bidders in every country to do their bidding, mass surveillance including their own country men. People blame only Russia, China, Iran etc when US have been doing the same for years.
What even is the plan here if the air assault fails? Boots on the ground? In Iran?
Other than nukes that would be the only option if they can blast the doors to the underground military cities. They will have to do it fast as the ships will not sustain combat for more than 5 days with their current ammo per the pentagon.
I don’t think it’s possible to change regime without boots on the ground which is not currently considered. So there will be no power vacuum, at most Iran military will be weaken. It’s not a big win for the US but would allow Trump to safe face after his demands were essentially rejected.
Iraq was attacking its neighbors every couple of years, Iran is not.
Iran has shown that it is remarkably sane actually, given the aggression shown towards it by Israel and the US and has made a lot of efforts to reach a deal.
Remember, it was the US that exited the JCPOA and now it wants Iran to give up all its misses so that they would be defenseless.
I have no love for theocracies, but I do think the Iranian system is a lot better than the likes of Saudi Arabia, which we're buddy buddy with.
Oh and I guess the founder of Syrian branch of AQ and deputy head of ISIS running Syria is better that what was before too, in your book?
That all being said, we are talking about different cultures. Iranians are on average more educated than Iraqis were/are, and the country is ethnically more homogeneous.
So I have hope that they'll find a way to organize when the current regime falls.
>What exactly do you imagine will replace the Iranian government that is worse?
A regime that only controls the capital, leaving the rest of the country in a power vacuum leading to internal conflicts and sectarian violence that will eventually spill over the borders into Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq etc...
One of the issues with Iraq was that Rumsfeld didn't want to acknowledge that it takes more personnel post-toppling (to rebuild infrastructure and institutions) than during invasion. It seems like the current government could be prone to make the same mistake.
I recommend anyone interested in this to read Cobra II. It's an excellent book.
what are you talking about? Iran is a sophisticated country with a parliament and elections, with a powerful civil society. It has 90 million inhabitants. They graduated more women in STEM disciplines than the USA. Yes, it's a theocracy, but it's more free than Saudi Arabia for instance.
Are the Americans going to bomb the Saudis next? or only if Israel ask for it?
Your description of what happened in Iraq was exactly the point of why we invaded. Iraq and Iran were the two biggest threats to Israel, we got rid of Iraq and now we are removing the only other rival to Israel remaining in the Middle East.
After this, Israel, being the only nuclear power in the region and having massive funding from the American taxpayer, will dominate the entire region. This has always been the goal.
The plan is a show of power. Trump will leave in 2 years, leaving much of the world in disarray because he had no plan whatsoever, and his staff is literally out of the movie Idiocracy. Nothing of lasting value will come out of the horrors that happened in the past 3 years, and in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.
> in 10 years we will look back into the present with disbelief.
You mean in 10 years, when the US is a stable and high-functioning democracy with independent media, a universally liked, charming, and polite president, supported by both the right and the left, who finally manage to overcome their minor differences? Is... is this the direction this is all heading?
> in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.
This is a very optimistic outlook, to the point of naivete, though I really hope you are right. In reality, neither Trump nor his cronies are acting like people who imagine they will be out of power anytime soon. In 10 years the world will likely still be dealing with the fallout of this administration, if not still dealing with the administration itself.
So replacing a fascist with western antagonism and constant threat on American allies, with a somewhat democratic, weak, and western aligned government?
This shows a real ignorance about the true culture of Iran. It is not a Muslim culture. They want to install the son of the shah, and get back to pre-revolution culture.
But liberals will be quick to tell them they don't know best, better to just keep the oppressive ayatollah in power.
Maybe this is correct? I want this to be correct. But American entanglements in the Middle East have often overestimated the size of the “they” you’re referring to. There are many “they’s” in Iran, some of whom have been trained over time to hate the US.
So like, I think this is the right choice, but Trump was elected by MAGA to avoid these kind of entanglements even when it was the right thing to do. In fact, I think “liberals” (not progressive) support this action more than many on the right.
Traditional left/right is not useful to understanding people’s support of our foreign policy in 2026 America. Tucker Carlson will hate this way more than Chuck Schumer.
The place has 90 million people, how do you even deal with this without throwing the whole place into chaos?
Besides, after this the collective west has no moral high-ground anymore, the global south will resent us more than ever. If other countries go to aggressive wars, our condemnation is worthless.
Trump is completely compromised and it was probably the powers that be who told them that this is how it is going to be.
> Besides, after this the collective west has no moral high-ground anymore
They never had any morals, all for their business gains look at Middle East, Africa and Asian countries where they were involved. Europe always looked other way when US does something and vise versa.
There is no such thing as the "global south" other than in the minds of westerners and westernised elites (and elites are getting less westernised). From a western viewpoint you can lump the rest of the world together, but it makes no sense from any other view point.
As for moral high ground. Compared to whom? China? Russia? Myanmar?
If Iran sinks a carrier then the us congress will declare an actual war and that will seal Irans fate. Also, seal the fate of hundreds of thousands of lives.
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
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.
>Iran has negotiated like no one will ever attack it, and that was a correct assumption for decades
Iran had a signed agreement, trump cancelled it. Israel literally killed Irans negotiators just a few months ago. What is this nuclear level ignorance.
> 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?
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.
---
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."
Probably a continuation of the 'mowing the lawn' strategy (as used against the Palestinians). Every now and again use massive military force to set back Iran's capabilities, time and effort they spend rebuilding is time and effort not spent causing problems elsewhere.
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).
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, for some reason, 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.
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.
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'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.
You are lying, they have been trying to avoid this war in any possible way. But Israel wanted this war before they lost the support of the USA population (that it's happening fast) or they have a less accommodating USA president.
Anyway, sticking to the "Death to America" strategy and choosing to run a global proxy war and killing their own people, instead of choosing peace, have led to this moment.
Lets pray for the people of Iran we get rid of the regime this time, and eventually reach peace in the middle east.
I think just forego the hypocrisy and have the Israeli's move the White House over there and put one of their own in it instead of pulling the strings.
Those who know their history also know that the current American administration is of a kind that usually ascends following the rules, but then never voluntarily leaves power.
So I don't think Israel has anything to fear there.
Not only the current administration, no US administration in the recent past or foreseeable future will not be okay with fighting wars for Israel at the cost of American lives and wealth. Some might hesitate or push back more than others, but the end result is the same.
> the current American administration is of a kind that usually ascends following the rules, but then never voluntarily leaves power
Sounds like you might be making a very strong claim! Can you make it more precise? For example, "President Trump will not peaceably transfer power at the end of his current term". Is it something you'd be willing to put money on, for example on Polymarket?
Neither the current administration nor Israel are particularly popular with the US public today, and those are correlated in that Israel has particularly lost support from Democrats and Independents in the US, suggesting that a change in power (legislative or executive, and especially both) in the US government could very easily spell much less favorable US policy toward Israel.
More specifically, seems to be driven by Netanyahu's political accounting. Starting a potential major war going into mid-terms is pretty inconvenient for Trump who could be looking at impeachment over Epstein. But Netanyahu is facing trial and October-7 investigation commissions more imminently and can't wait that long. Netanyahu trumps Trump, evidently.
It was Trump or his immediate environmetn who asked Israeli to attack Iran first (better optics); Israel would have never done this without American approval.
Did Israel want this to happen though ? Yes. But so did the Americans. I guess the negotiations went badly.
Not surprising - people don't count deaths in the Middle East if they're caused by fellow Middle Easterns, except Israel. Living in Europe I've never heard about a protest against Saddam (250,000 - 1,000,000 dead), Khamenei (30,000 in a week?), Assad (> 300,000 civilians) etc. This is business as usual. It's only news if someone else does it.
Are you saying those protested actually got funded by Israel and because Iran killed them, now Israel is retaliating?
Now I really wonder if those protests were indeed fueled and funded by Israel, because we have seen videos of mosques being burned down by protestors, which is strange for Shia Muslim country, even if they don't like their government
"A 2020 Online Survey by Gamaan found that 8.8% Iranians identifying as Atheist and a large fraction (22.2%) identifying as not following an organized religion and only 40% self identified as Muslims."
Compare how much Israel was in the news for targeting militants these past two years in Gaza.
How biased is the press? Iran slaughters 36k people in a week and...
crickets. Israel refuses to let its hostages die while Hamas hides out in hospitals and schools and the world is against Israel not Iran.
Because HNers are not so gullible to swallow and regurgitate this pretext. The Trump administration doesn't care about the people of Iran, any more than Bush cared about the Iraqi Kurds or Afghan women. Just a pretext for geopolitics.
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.
US needs to start thinking that you are not givinig someone freedom bt bombing them. You have soo much of your problems but your money printing machine is working and that is only reason that you can say that. Its not about 90m people its about your pockets...
Trump also said that when he says things he means them, unlike Obama's red lines in Syria (his words). When he said that, it was pretty clear he couldn't back off of attacking Iran.
I assume it took so long because he's going for regime change, not just a few bombings. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, it took the US 5 months to launch a counter-invasion (mostly because of coalition building).
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.
The world already know this. Having an agreement with the USA is a lot like having an agreement with Darth Vader. The terms of the deal can be altered unexpectedly at any time.
That doesn't mean that such agreements are worthless. They can still be of value to the counties making them. It is just that those countries have to take into account the unreliability of the entity they are making the deal with. Deals with the USA involve a lot of forecasting.
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.
I doubt the negotiations were in good faith, probably just a political 'see, we tried' gesture full of deal-breaker bad faith proposals. I think the plan all along has been to attack, probably for more than a year.
You don't go and rename a whole federal department to 'Department of War' when you don't intend to get into wars.
What's predictable is, if you don't have nuclear weapons, you get attacked. Ask Ukraine. If I were a small country (any country for that matter) the first order of business would be to build myself nuclear weapons now.
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.
I hope you’re right but not too confident that will be the case. I wish EU leadership wouldn’t be as spineless as it is. I’m afraid they will accept any opportunity to make things feel as if they are back to the old normal if they are given the opportunity. And that would of course backfire, but long term thinking hasn’t been our strength over the past 3 decades or so…
Somehow world will close eyes again ... Somehow we need to bring back moral standards that we all have deep in ourselves and screw this money world me all made together... I dont have answers or ideas how but this is just nonsense
US has been always playing god, cunning manipulations all over the world. Most of the Europe was silent until recently when Greenland under threat. US benefits from every war either oil, rare metals, trade, weapons, there is always an agenda even though they are not directly involved.
Or you can blame Israel and Zionists lobbying the governments and media that radicals will crawl out under everyone's beds. (PS: it started before Libya)
I think everyone should stop being so nervous. How many times have the U.S. and Israel hit Iran over the past two years?
And people still aren’t used to it? On Monday, the market might not even drop. In fact, a lot of people may want to buy the dip. Everyone hypes up the fear, the big players wait to scoop up bargains, and then what happens? Not only does it not fall, it rebounds instead.
How many times have we seen this script already?
And Iran? Every single time it’s just performance art. I’m already sick of watching it.
Besides, Iran has been heavily sanctioned and blocked by the U.S. and Israel for so many years that its impact on the global economy is basically zero. So what the hell is there to dump over?
Oil prices? Venezuela’s situation has already been dealt with. The U.S. can produce its own oil, Canada still has plenty of oil, and Russia is still selling at bargain-bin prices. Iran and the surrounding major oil-producing countries are barely even moving in sync, and there’s basically no real incentive for anything major to happen to oil. So why the hell would the market drop?
As for all this fearmongering, I’d say go harder. Seriously, make it as apocalyptic as possible, so my gold can moon, I can pick up cheap Taiwan stocks, and short crypto, so I can completely clean out all the people panicking in fear.
Iran is the 5th biggest oil producer in the world. Not only that, it can cut-off the strait of Hormuz which 5 of the top 10 oil producers ship their oil through, including Saudi Arabia which is the nr 1 exporter.
In earlier strikes Iran signaled it did not want to escalate. It warned US bases prior to its attack, and sent small symbolic strikes to pacify their base, while trying to de-escalate through all diplomatic channels.
This time it looks different, Israel/US have targetted their president and political (religious) leader. There is hardly a more existential threat you can imagine for the current regime, so it will do everything in its power to strike back. If you put someone with his back on the wall and start a firing squad, don't expect a non-response.
Beyond that it's the middle east, last time US tried regime change we had two decades of violence with 1m Iraqi's dead and ISIS rampaging in the region. It's a human catastrophe that people are worried about, not just stock markets. To come here and talk about your stocks is insane.
I don’t know why anyone even bothers with this anymore. Literally every single word that comes out of his mouth is a lie. It’s actually staggering to think about. It’s like he is incapable of doing anything that right, correct, or true.
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.
Iran also has a gang of murderous theocratic nutters running it, massacring their citizens for taking to the streets and singing songs, undermining foreign societies, and lending their knowhow and drones to other, bigger psychopaths for their invasions. It'll gladden my heart if the leadership is destroyed, even if some old pretty masonry gets chipped along the way.
[T]he War Department will not be distracted by democracy building interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation building.
- Pete Hegseth, December 6, 2025[1]
Iranians are celebrating, btw. This is what they have been dreaming of. This is their chance to finally take their country back, and I think they'll do it.
I can't think of a better use of US military power in the world than to take out this terrible regime and let the Iranians do the rest. This isn't Iraq or Venezuela. People saying that we can't bomb our way into regime change apparently didn't follow the protests and massacres very closely a couple months ago. Iranians were begging for help so that they could topple the regime.
The news of bombs falling on schools must be really exhilarating to people. Especially for the ones that have children! Finally they have a chance to throw away their government and replace it with a military junta
> People saying that we can't bomb our way into regime change apparently didn't follow the protests and massacres very closely a couple months ago. Iranians were begging for help so that they could topple the regime.
Of course people didn’t follow. Did you see any major news outlet doing live coverage of the events like they did for October 7th? No.
Successful regime change requires a far more significant investment in soft power than America & Israel's current right-wing leadership would even conceive of.
There are always unanticipated consequences in war. Argentina never thought in a million years that an attack on the practically undefended Falklands would result in the loss of the General Belgrano.
I really do not even want to understand the mental gymnastics which one has to undertake to justify the actions of the US and Israel in recent years.
Nor do I even know how to begin to grasp the enablement displayed by Europe as a whole. People constantly cite China’s “human rights abuses” (which seem to pale in comparison to all this) and rightly so, but continue to enable this blood thirsty and power hungry tag team to indulge in flagrant abuses of international law and general morality.
This is a sad day for level headed and empathetic humans across the globe. At which point do we accept that WW3 began quite a while ago? Because it sure as shit did.
Edit: fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion but it’s my truth.
To add to this: anyone who still does not see that Israel is by and far the most dangerous rogue state in the region is (at best) blinded by propaganda.
Iran has repeatedly demonstrated restraint and pragmatism throughout these aggressions on their sovereignty, starting with Israel’s strike on their consulate in Damascus.
There is a curious cognitive dissonance in which people think is somehow more morally correct to do human rights abuses abroad than at home. The US is doing both currently, though.
Very level headed and empathetic to go and claim that 50 countries just lost their right to criticize China because US and Israel are fighting Iran. Trolls having their priorities straight!
Sure seems that way. I don't really see how this military action is justified from a US perspective. Or even from an Israeli one. The most likely justification is that the leadership of the US and Israel are a little bit unhinged and want a war to distract from domestic issues.
Netanjahu is old and wants to secure his 'legacy' by being credited for dismantling Iran, knowing Trump will back him both because he's been fed BS and because the Israelis have enough kompromat to sink him. There's no 'rational' justification for this attack, only madness and huge egos.
Well, it's plausibly justified because the US considers a strong regional ally like Israel a valuable asset to have in the Middle East and if Israel is a regional hegemon [1] then all the better.
There have been many arguments that the US' support of Israel goes against US interests [2], but that really makes no sense. It's not just Trump who has to be convinced to start a war for Israel, it's the entire defense establishment in the US.
And also in Israel. If fighting half a dozen wars all at once was really that bad for Israel, surely, someone would have put a stop in it.
Surely.
_____________
[1] Got that term from J. Mearsheimer, if you were wondering.
[2] Particularly the Tucker Carlson - Judge Napolitano - Col. Daniel Davies continuum of mostly conservative podcast hosts. Or those are the ones I follow closely anyway. They're all convinced it's all "because of the lobby".
I don't want to insult you but your president is a populist and a TV personality. He is not a policy maker, he is more like an actor. So your country went into war mode by changing the name of the Department of Defence to Department of War. This was not a cosmetic change. This means peace times are over and you are in war. Your government acts accordingly.
Since you are still a democracy find those people who make your policy decisions. It's not that yellow man.
I'm not disagreeing with you but "Dept of War" is ENTIRELY a cosmetic change. It's literally just a name. There are people, mostly with desk jobs, who really want to feel like badasses and they really want the Dept of War. The real human consequences of this are unimportant to them and sadly unimportant to the rest of us also.
Ukraine’s TV personality leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems to be doing alright. Also went into war, but not of their own doing, and he has been measured, insightful, aware, throughout this whole war.
There’s more to it than Trump being a TV show personality. Far too complex and insidious than a simple quip.
I don't think the American people can change their country's policy oriented toward a constant state of war, aggression, and invasions of other countries under the current system. This is a constant state policy, regardless of the party or the president. So it can be said that the United States is not a democracy. Money and capital rule, not the people.This can only be changed by a fundamental shift that empowers people over capital.
Of course, I agree that Trump is worse because, by removing the mask of civility and attacking others without first bothering to create propaganda and a narrative about how it is for the greater good and justice, he made the plundering and crimes faster and more efficient.
The moment they made that name change and stated their expansionist agenda it finally became clear to me that this wasn't just MAGA anymore, this was actual fascism.
Whether you think the current targets are legitimate or not, the fact that the U.S. is going to war without seeking any democratic approval anymore is deeply troubling.
An honest discussion about this cannot be had on this site, it's kinda funny how pointless all the comments are here. Yours is the closest anyone is allowed to get and I wonder if yours will stay up.
Ukraine is a democracy with a legitimate leadership that was not planning to acquire nukes and has no history of planning to remove Russia from the map. To suggest that this attack on Iran is the same as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is very misguided.
Iran has been "a week away" from acquiring nukes since Netanyahu first claimed it in the 90s.
Not six months ago, Trump launched a strike that "completely obliterated" Iran's ability to obtain nukes. And then, either because he has the memory of a goldfish, or thinks that we do (both are somewhat true), he pulled out "a week away", again, at the SOTU. "We must attack Iran to destroy what I told you we destroyed last year."
Iran may be planning to do so. But this is just a boogeyman being used (again) by Israel and the US.
Ukraine got rid of nukes and it was massive collosal mistake. In alternative universe where they win and get territory back and get economy on track, they would be 100% warranted to get the nukes.
My point is, Ukraine war and the way it evolved shows that not having nukes is a bad position.
It's not the same as all, whatever you think of the Ukraine, it used to be part of the Soviet Union. Russia and the Ukraine fighting is a "normal" war. The US has absolutely no business attacking Iran. It's entirely unprovoked and at the behest of the terrorist "nation" of Israel, which also should have nothing to do with the US.
> And at the double standards applied to Russians and Israelis in their wars of aggression.
I would argue that funding Axis of Resistance from Hezbollah to Houthis is aggression too. Let’s not pretend that IR minded their own business, and suddenly was under attack.
There was literally a puppet regime in the 70s backed and promoted by the US.
And since then Iran has always been in US and Israeli crossfire.
You also need to try to understand their point of view.
There's no doubt Iran has promoted armed resistance and terrorism, don't get me wrong, but ask yourself how much of this is about their own safety and defence. It's not 0%, far from it.
The war started in 1948 by Europeans attempting to attack and invade Palestine to grab their land to build their mediterranean resort homes. The war never stopped. There was no surrender documents signed. The foreign invaders have always been in the state of war. It's why their colonial outposts are required to have bomb shelters.
Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when the foreign invaders literally burned children alive in 1948 by throwing them into ovens, as happened in the Deir Yassin massacre. Or the rape camps of Tantura. There were 15,000 innocent civilians killed by the invaders when they started this war.
I still can't believe we have to fight Israel's war for them. First the Iraq war and now the Iran war.
> The war started in 1948 by Europeans attempting to attack and invade Palestine to grab their land to build their mediterranean resort homes.
Jewish people lived there for the past two thousands years. Hebron massacre by Arabs happened in 1929.
> It's why their colonial outposts are required to have bomb shelters.
I think they have bomb shelters to save their civilians from bombs.
> Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when the foreign invaders literally burned children alive in 1948 by throwing them into ovens, as happened in the Deir Yassin massacre. Or the rape camps of Tantura. There were 15,000 innocent civilians killed by the invaders when they started this war.
Interesting how you are totally fine with murder of civilians as long as they are the "right" kind of civilians.
It's the Middle East. The birthplace of civilisation. Everyone can legitimately claim everyone else started every conflict in the region because war in Mesopotamia and the Levant literally predates history.
At the end of the day I believe in the primacy of the living. Crimes committed by and against those alive today are infinitely more imporant than those committed by and against their ancestors. I've seen folks take this shit back to King Herod and the Parthians, and it's not a bad historical argument. (The Romans intervened.) It's practically counterproductive, however, inasmuch as focussing on blame versus harm reduction and prevention is counterproductive in any conflict resolution.
One of the separations between the rich and peaceful and the poor and permanently warring is in capacities to forgive. Japan wouldn't be a better place if they committed terrorist attacks against their American occupiers, or decided that they needed blood for Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And Americans wouldn't be happier if we decided to lob a nuke at the British in WWII for burning down our White House in the War of 1812. (France didn't ultimately profit from the Treaty of Versailles.)
> Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when
No. Don't do this to yourself. I get the temptation. But it is the path to becoming a monster. October 7 was an insane horror. So were other things. Atrocities aren't signed; they don't cancel out, just accumulate.
> And at the double standards applied to Russians and Israelis in their wars of aggression
To be fair, this is the new standard. Russia has promulgated it through its actions in Georgia and Ukraine. China with Tibet and Taiwan. America with Iraq, Venezuela and Iran. The old rules-based international order is dead, and with it Pax Americana.
The wishes of a small group of people aren't the default for the majority. This is why the small group of people say that strong leaders for life, with no checks, are normal and natural.
I know I left that Nobel Peace Prize somewhere … but I can't find it because there's so much America First lying around. I know, I'll ask the aliens and the US men's hockey team if they've seen it.
Being attacked should rule out 'war of aggression', but I guess the phrase seems to have lost any meaning in modern discourse. Apparently you can spend all the time calling 'death to X' and then get shocked when others take you seriously.
Can you provide some support for your moral position? You’ve also put “insane horror” in scare quotes, which honestly I find troubling.
Does your moral account provide some justificatory, non-antisemitic framework based on colonialism or oppression that allows us to sidestep the issues with Gazans’ support of Jihad, other extremist doctrines, and the extermination of Jews?
It’s kind of a rhetorical question, but it’s the least I would expect for someone to argue credibly about the morality of the conflict.
"small blip" isn't a political take, it's just wrong.
October 7th was the deadliest per capita terrorist attack since the Global Terrorism
Database started recording in 1970 [1]. Globally, it's third on the all-time list (behind only 9/11 and one IS attack [1]. The confirmed death toll from Israeli social
security data (not government press releases) is 1,139, which still makes it 31
times deadlier than the next worst attack in Israeli history [2][3].
You invoked scale. Those are the numbers. They don't say what you wanted them to say.
And for the record: one atrocity not excusing another cuts both ways. Nobody here
argued otherwise. What was actually said (by the person you're replying to) is that
you cannot use scale as your framework whilst hand-waving away the single largest
data point in the argument.
If you mean the Nakba, Sabra and Shatila, or the current death toll in Gaza — those
are serious. But "decades of far worse crimes" doing the work of making October 7th a "small blip"
doesn't follow. You can have a long ledger of serious grievances and still recognise
that one morning where 1,139 people were massacred (including at a music festival, in
kibbutz bedrooms, in bomb shelters) was not a blip. It was the deadliest single terrorist attack per capita since records began.
There is no moral argument for October 7th, and the reaction is disproportionate and unjustifiable - but inevitable. We should all be so unlucky to have neighbours like those, and nobody knows how we would all act if we did.
While I agree, and I find that Israel is on the wrong side of history, I'm not entirely into seeing this whole matter as black and white.
I have the opinion that modern world history is mostly shaped around each countries/population traumas that echo through society till today.
E.g. the biggest trauma of Ukrainians aren't even the events that are playing recently, but the Holodomor that happened 100 years ago. On the other hand the biggest trauma on Russian side is still the German invasion and war of annihilation happened during the second world war. As both sides see themselves as the victims and see the other side as the aggressor (or collaborator) and none has ever taken a step back to recognize their actions, they simply cannot communicate.
The biggest trauma of China is the century of humiliation where western powers and Japan went above and beyond any decency in their actions. Thus, Chinese society and leadership is all about never being dictated conditions and terms by foreign powers. They see themselves as victims of events that they don't want to see ever again.
The jewish Israeli population biggest trauma are centuries if not millenia of animosity, racism and violence coming from any side, last but definitely not least the Holocaust. Thus Israel is all about security at all costs, even if it means bending any sign of human decency. Again, they see themselves as victims and their actions will always go in that direction.
Sadly many parts of the world, many countries, many societies, are simply too scarred and unable to take a step back from the victim mentality and recognize their own actions.
Israelis are unable to recognize they are Goliath and not David from the longest time, they are unable and unwilling to say sorry, the last Israeli leader that tried, got assassinated by one of his own.
The arabic/muslim population in the area too see themselves as victims of the post world war 2 events, and they are as well unable to recognize how scarred and traumatized is Israeli society from centuries of events, including modern ones where they had to survive against hostile Arab coalitions aimed to annihilate them.
So, without a generation of leaders able to recognize and understand the role of history and those traumas and empathize with the other sides we're trapped in those loops of aggression.
FIFA might be the one organization that can go toe to toe with Trump I’m corruption. And I mean that in the worst way possible. Qatar was using literal slave labor to get stadiums built and the organization just shrugged when informed like it was just another Tuesday.
He could drop a nuke on Greenland tomorrow and they’d probably say they don’t want the sport to be tangled in political disagreements and if anything the World Cup can help everyone heal.
As Ukrainian, I don't remember launching missiles on russia, or, in fact, any aggression towards russia. In its turn russia did recognize borders with Ukraine in multiple treaties, and on top of that security guarantees promised in exchange of 3rd by the size world nuclear arsenal.
Just a quick reminder, that Iranian and Hamas policy towards Israel is extermination. Palestine was never recognized by Israel or USA. Israel is not recognized by Iran.
So tell me, what parallels do you see between these conflicts? Human misery and destruction is hardly a common ground, and even in that, scale is incomparable.
Look up what the Iranian regime has done to his people and to others, including US and European countries, since 1979 and you'll understand that the only reason US allies are cautious and not fully behind this campaign is that toppling the regime means high uncertainty as to what would replace it...
I know some people weren't alive then, but the invasion of Iraq started off pretty good for the US... Sort of how Russia imagined it's march on Kiev would go (!3) 4 years ago.
What replaced Sadaam was the US, and that went horribly for everyone.
People still believe October 7th attacks weren't intentionally allowed?
There is a lot of legitimate debate on this topic as the security failures are unusual and are still officially being discussed in Israel.
I see no "smoking gun" for this yet, but yeah, there are a lot of indicators, such as alarm calls by military observers being ignored beforehand, IDF units having been moved from the Gaza envelope to the West Bank before, etc.
Of course, Netanyahu could counter those rumors by establishing a state commission if inquiry, but instead he fights tooth and nail to prevent this from happening...
It's a well documented fact that Netanyahu has always wanted and actively supported Hamas leadership in order to have no reasons to sit at the table of with the PLA.
When the other side is led by what you can easily sell to the world as terrorists, you're by default the good guys.
What a pile of non-sense. I despise literally everyone in the Israeli government, but suggesting this was allowed by anyone in the government/military/intelligence is the lowest low form of ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Nothing like this is "officially discussed in Israel", unless you mean "repeatedly officially denied".
People like you still spread stupid lies about it, but no one with any sense believes them. There is no legitimate debate on the subject, only propaganda, and it comes from Benjamin Netanyahu directly.
Obviously, it’s the same stupidity that “allowed” the 7th of October attacks to happen. These people are way too scared and hateful of Palestinians to conspire with them like this. They allowed it to happen through sheer incompetence. They just let their guard down, quite literally.
If they could actually cooperate well enough to work together on something like the 7th of October of attacks, which were under active planning for at least two years and involved thousands of highly trained men, don’t you think they’d be able to cooperate on something positive too?
Well either utter incompetence of every part of military of israel, or planned to allow it to happen. They even removed most of the guards spread across the region, those who were left were often only with pistols from what I've heard. They were closely monitoring hamas training for exactly this just before it happened.
Sure, some incompetent russian fsb officer who got his place thanks to nepotism may miss that, but mosad, on border with one's mortal enemy? Give me a break, there is 0 logic and knowledge of the involved parties in such thinking.
But its expected, say soviet union went to great lengths to make state terror official and legal, justified and all by th books. Not sure for whom since all knew what chaotic terror was happening all the time and there was often no logic in who was next, but the face of the regime needed to have everything straight and square.
Anyway, those who actually care about the topic understand it well, its not some superbly hidden scheming bur rather facts in plain sight. The rest of folks simply don't care
> I guess Israel can play the "October 7th" card at least which was an insane horror.
The islamic republic of Iran has been slaughtering tens of thousands of peaceful protesters who don't want to live under sharia laws anymore. Hunting wounded in hospitals and executing them.
It's obvious there's a movement in Iran that tries to topple the islamist regime. In my city, in the EU, I see cars with iranian flags and I've seen iranian in exile call for the international community to do targetted strikes.
I'm not defending the strikes but let's not make it sound like the US is launching nukes on peaceful monks in Tibet either: we're talking about evil islamist regime that slaughtered tens of thousands of unarmed people a few weeks ago.
I was going to say it's false equivalence to compare the Russian attack on Ukraine which was peaceful with a newly installed democratic leader and Iran which has an iffy dictatorship slaughtering thousands of unarmed protestors and exporting terrorism all over with aspirations to make that nuclear.
That was obviously exaggerated, think about the planning and resources needed to execute a stadium worth of people across a country. Not possible in a few days without extreme preparation, or bodies rotting everywhere.
What does it matter? There won't be any consequences for it. He can just do this now and then later the supreme court or congress will say something that also won't matter. The trade war wasn't legal, was struck down, yet is still happening.
> Do Americans even read or care about Constitution anymore?
Supreme court does not, so why should random Americans?
It is not like the high but malleable ideals in it mattered. Its only use is to be able to claim in abstract "we have these freedoms and protection" while the court system renders them void in practice.
> Working towards war with Iran has been bipartisan US policy for decades now
Obama signed the Iran nuclear deal in July 2015 [1].
Biden didn't put any policy focus on Iran, in part becase, with the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult to distill any policy focus from that Presidency following Covid. But he also didn't ratchet up pressure in any material way [2]. (And to be clear, I'm not saying that's good.)
What I would like people to understand is that this isn't a partisan issue. As bad as Trump is, American foreign policy is uniparty. Just look at the rhetoric from the Democratic Party leadership on an Iran strike. You have the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries quibbling over the procedure not the policy, saying Congress needs to approve action, not that that action is belligerent or unwarranted.
October 7 happened under a Democratic president and continued essentially unchanged under Trump. Biden consistently lied about "red lines" and seeing a ceasefire [1].
The problem here isn't one party or one persident, it's America's commitment to imperialism, of which Iran is just one aspect. Since WW2 especially there has been so much regime change done or aided by the US as well as military action, it has it's own Wikipedia page [2].
And what did Kamala Harris promise to change about Biden's Middle East policy? Absolutely nothing [3]. It's a big part of why she lost and the DNC don't want to admit that so they're trying to cover up the 2024 autopsy [4].
Don't fool yourself into thinking anything would be different under a Kamala Harris administration.
I’m not sure what would have happened under a Dem administration. I’m not sure I’m against action in Iran.
But one the whole like precedents of the Trump Administration, was that we were going to ignore foreign entanglements, even if they could be perceived as being in our interests.
It’s wild to me how much Trump seems like Bush 2.0 when I think Trump was something of a reaction to Bush 1.0.
So much of both parties is actually alike, underneath a window dressing of differences (eg woke/anti woke), and a complicit media which does its best to amplify and brainwash people into believing. When it comes to policies that actually affect the elites, the deep state military industrial complex/intelligence services or financial interests, it is a uniparty. Look at how Obama continued the war on terror for example, after running on “hope and change”.
You say that like US and Israel hit Iceland or Portugal. Like, Iran wasn't source of terror on Middle East, funding terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbolla and Houthi. Like, Iran didn't make "death to Israel, death to America" their national idea.
Remind us of Ukrainian rocket attacks on Russian cities, that provoked Ruso-Ukrainian war.
You can't not know all of this, so you're either a hamas/russian shill or a useful idiot.
I really hope our Government seeks out all these terrorists and Iran boosters on Hacker News who work in high tech. It’s a supply chain risk and none of them should be working.
That's the policy being followed here. If you remember back a few weeks, Iran killed likely 30,000 of its own citizens. On top of that, they will not negotiate about medium and short-range missiles or stopping of nuclear production.
A power like that that happily goes after it's neighbors, directly or indirectly is a threat to everyone.
Applying those particular criticisms to Iran and not Israel is a special kind of irony given the past ~75 years (but especially the last 2-3), and when the latter is presently attacking the former unprovoked.
Apropos of nothing in particular, back in the previous millennium, UNIX (and Linux) had the `fortune` command. It would spew out a "cookie" - a pithy one-/two-liner, usually funny, often thought-provoking, and sometimes offensive (when invoked with `fortune -o`)
I had added it to my `motd`; it would give me a chuckle every time I logged in.
One of the cookies I recall:
A nuclear war can ruin your whole day. [1]
And that's what I think of when I see this absurd new war.
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
Attacking Iran is bipartisan consensus unfortunately.
Schumer, for example, is an avowed Zionist and would love to attack Iran. Case in point: His leadership worked to delay Massey and Khanna's war powers resolution until after this attack so they could say "Well, I guess we're too late. Darn."
The ICE killings, deportations of US citizens, and the general anti-US sentiments around the world show that lesser evil exists, and that not voting can have consequences.
It's a shame that it took all this for the Democrats to even begin the dialog about Israeli money in politics, and perhaps they may even realize that nobody wants to vote for pro-war neoliberals.
I've long suspected DJT is on a rampage of radical, ragebait news worthy actions to take the news away from the Epstein files. I hate that it's working and many people have to suffer because of it.
There wasn't a war between the Siam and Khmer, just some clashes plus their conflict is irrelevant to the rest of the world. I am not aware of crypto going down during that time? If I remember correctly it was close to ATH.
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?
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.
Nukes do not help against guerilla warfare: their destructive power is so big that they are really unreasonable attack weapon, and only a deterring factor instead.
They protect against being "policed" by big world countries.
Eg. if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons, Russia would not have been invading them (or are they "protecting" them, as promised when they took their nuclear arsenal for destruction?). If Iran or Iraq had nuclear weapons, they would not have been bombed by US.
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 war like the next war, is the war to end all wars"
- David LLoyd George, c.1916
The first wars were fought between tribes and then later between kingddoms for power/minor differences and trying to increase influence and alliances. Religion and race and many other discriminating factors are used for both sides to get support of the people, the people who are actually gonna carry the rifle and risk their lives and lose it, this drives the next war to redeem the losses of the first one, to take revenge.
This then creates a community which dislikes the other community and now we are here.
We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. … If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.
- Bertrand Russel in Skeptical Essays.
Humanity has had a history written with bloodshed but the problem right now seems to me that we don't know how to write future, we lack a vision for other prospects, it seems to me that we jump into the newest Hype on the block and its all so wishy-washy. Contrary to people saying its a western issue, I think its an whole world issue, its just that the west is particularly impacted by it.
Has there been a desensitization in things in recent years?
I know of atleast one leader (King Kaniska) who fought for land (Modern day Orrisa) and won and then saw the bloodshed and screams on the ground and decided to not repeat it and I think he spent later of his life trying to promote peace.
I am sure that there must be other leaders in the history of past as well but perhaps its the problem of history as well which can sometimes glorify wars.
I think the biggest problem right now is being noise. We have created machines so large that humans have lost dignity and are treated unfairly at scale in terms of Renting places at scale owned by shell companies who'd rather have it empty than give you affordable housing. Prices seem to be increasing and I don't think modern social media helps in giving people dignity quite the opposite at times and it's very likely someone is reading this who may have contributed to making the machine.
With this being a political thread, I see comments from both sides[0], I don't think I have too much to add politically to the discussion but perhaps I just wanted to treat out that its best we treat each other with dignity in this thread and in general because I do believe that's the only thing we can do which can bring change. It's gonna be extremely hard for people to treat others with dignity while taking sides which talk about wars killing people, but I don't know what else to say. Iranian censorship for its people but I am not sure if the current idea of America brings me thinking of liberation. One can wish for pure democracies in such regions but its gonna be extremely hard and even grass-roots movements of these can be shut down by intrusive forces whether foreign or govt itself and given that the region is extremely shaky relying on oil which can be extracted from ground leading to a less dependence on people themselves for Iranian govt.s being the reason why they can be so censoring. They have shown enough power to fight massive protests but as I said earlier, the current picture of America don't exactly give me the idea of bringing pure democracy in the region either.
My prayers to the Iranian people who are stuck between a rock and tough spot.
(there are no sides, its a circle, a circle of people who start wars and the people who fight wars)
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 region 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.
Apparently you don't even have to give Americans the neocon foreign policy spin anymore, we generate it ourselves.
To wit, after Maduro was kidnapped and the exact same regime kept in place (minus selling oil to Cuba), and Trump openly said it was to control the oil, most of the reactions were pretending we live in a universe where the US does these things to spread democracy.
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 valid justification on this specific case is probably highly debatable. I think a reasonable argument could be made)
The thing is, as sudden as this seems to the general public, this is something that takes months of planning. Having served in the Navy for eight years, I know that this kind of thing doesn't necessarily happen overnight. That doesn't mean it _couldn't_. The US military certainly does have the ability to plan a strike very quickly.
But, most likely, this was planned behind closed doors. Based on the reports, I bet this was probably planned shortly after Trump took office. It just so happens that it's a good distraction from the Epstein files.
I hate the direction this country's government is taking. It sucks. I just want to leave at some point. I don't want my family to grow up here anymore.
Of course there was a military plan for this since months, but that does not mean that plan was surely to be executed. (A likely option I assume)
What I find worrying is the standard tactic seems to be to do negotiations, let the other side assume there is hope for a other solution - and then attack hard all of a sudden. Already the second time. It might be effective short term, but it erodes what is left of trust negotiating with the US.
This one isn't all bad. From Trump's recent speech:
>Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand
It may not work but it's not a bad objective. My mum in the UK is a Bahai and a lot of those are refugees from Iran because they say be nice and tolerant and the Iranian government imprisons or kills them for so doing. Blasphemy etc. The are not a good lot.
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.
If you're willing to go through all this trouble, why not just become politically active? Don't underestimate what a motivated individual can do. All these public figures (or institutions) swaying the country back and forth are only people too.
I was politically active in the USA, in the only way I believe can make any meaningful change: direct action, mutual aid.
The American political system is captured by two neoliberal (one now post liberal, fascist) parties, and you have to sell your soul to "accomplish" anything, only to watch it yet ratcheted away by your own party, or obliterated by the fascists.
This is a laudable position, and I don't say this to discourage you or others from taking this action, but taxation does not effectively constrain US military spending, as long as the USD remains globally desirable and the US retains the ability to print more of them.
You're a good person and I feel similarly. We live under the Fourth Reich.
I do not think ceasing work is the right move, but definitely get involved politically and don't equivocate when you condemn our elected "representatives".
It might also soothe your soul to be in the company of like-minded individuals. A Quaker prayer is a sure place to find many.
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.
Speaking of markets... Polymarket was trading yes on this happening at quite interesting odds, "yes" was trading at around 30¢ or better over the next few days just a few hours ago...
I was quite surprised to see it that low... and also to find it is inaccessible for trading if a US national. Just looking at the platform it seems predominantly US driven so I gather many people are willfully attempting to breach the ToS (and probably lie to the IRS) when using it...
I can't help but think that all this shit is because Netanyahu really wants to put off more court hearings on his lame ass corruption charges. I really can't wait for him and his cronies (in Israel, and the West) to be brought to justice.
Without having to wait for the history books to do their thing.
His court appearance are continuing as scheduled, twice a week, for the last year. except for some specific incidents where he had to leave of cancel due to running a state.
No matter what you think, there is no way for him to avoid these hearings
Great, for those minor charges of accepting what, something like 150k Eur in gifts. As opposed to life in prison for genocide, which he clearly and absolutely deserves.
While Netanyahu definitely deserves that, don't expect anything to change for the better in Israeli foreign policy if he gets deposed and tried. Israeli politicians have become radicalized to a level that is hard to imagine from a European or US perspective.
Even the leader of the "left wing" opposition has recently explicitly stated that Israel was gifted the entire region from the Euphrates to the Nile by God, so they would have a right to own the entire region, but that this must be balanced by security concerns and tactical realities. This happened in response to the US ambassador's explicit public remarks in the Tucker Carlson interview that also asserted Israel's God-given right to the entire region. Note that this region, from the Euphrates to the Nile, includes about half of Irak, parts of Syria, most of Lebanon, parts of Saudi Arabia, and of Egypt.
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.
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.
Currently an absolute shit load of C17s landing in Germany after leaving the PG region. I guess we know which country finally caved and let the US use them for whatever fresh conquest this is.
Germany is one of the most pro-Israel countries and known for using excessive police voilance against pro-Palestina protestors and strongly denies that there is a genocide going on in Gaza.
Classic playbook. This war will last the next three years. Trump admin will leak information and let Iranian cells in US cause terrorism, giving them the excuse to install domestic mass surveillance locally. They'll use that as a means to stay in power.
I find the nuclear motivation an excuse. I mean, enrichment plants or not, if Iran wants a few nukes I am pretty sure that Russia would part with some enriched material and smuggle it pretty easily to Iran.
My theory is that Israel has dirt (Epstein files maybe) on Trump and holds him by the balls. The second idea is that this is an obfuscation campaign to have the public opinion forget about Epstein, the state of the real economy, the falling approval rates, or all of the above.
What makes you think Trump is not interested in this himself they just offered him hotels and land. Him getting blackmailed is I feel a lot of people that have voted for him are using as a coping mechanism.
The attack on Iran proves the point just like Russia attacking Ukraine if you want to protect your territories you need nuclear weapons. Canada, Greenland and countries in South America should also look to acquire nuclear weapons as once they are done with Iran you will be the next.
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.
Ben Franklin was asked what kind of govt would the newly formed United States have. He was sadly right when he replied 'A republic, if you can keep it'
One of the (many) pretexts for the war, at least from Trump seems to be that Iran 'interfered' in US elections. From the Washington post
'President Donald Trump shared an article about Iran seeking to interfere in U.S. elections on his Truth Social account a couple of hours after U.S. strikes began in Iran early Saturday.
“Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” the post read, with a link to a piece from Just the News, a conservative website from which Trump frequently shares articles. Shortly after, the president posted another article from the site, albeit unrelated to Iran; it was about the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor Fani T. Willis.'
Does the US even have a functioning Congress left? Who will even believe such a preposterous lie? Even the most die hard MAGA supporter will find it hard to believe this fabrication.
It's like Trump doesn't feel the need to even maintain the fig leaf of a causus belli. He must truly feel that he is now the king of the United States to be so emboldened.
Trump launching bunker-busters on his midterm chances. Which depending on how bad it goes, potentially means impeachment and prison. Whatever it is the Israelis have on him, it must be good.
Works out great for Netanyahu though as is customary. He can be PM for a while longer and stave off his own impending trial and imprisonment. If this goes well for Israel, he might even get that pardon that Trump campaigned for tirelessly.
The most likely and capable retaliation will be cyber/info wars.
Iran has sophisticated influence operations and will likely flood social media with disinformation designed to deepen political divisions and erode trust in institutions.
This advice serves even if you don’t believe the above. Be deeply skeptical of all viral content in the coming days and weeks, especially anything designed to change your opinions, or provoke outrage/fear. Verify before sharing. Expect deepfakes. Stick to primary sources when possible.
It kind of reveals Trump as a big liar. Not that this is a surprise, but even in his own self-image he can no longer try to shift the blame to others. Now he committed to war until regime change occurs.
Rep Raskin said his search of the unredacted Epstein files found Trump listed more than one million times.[1]
And just days ago it was discovered that documents involving FBI investigations into allegations by one or more victims against Epstein and Trump were not released by the DOJ.[2]
I trust Trump still has time to testify to Congress about his connections to Epstein like others have been doing.
Meanwhile yesterday:
>>>the U.S. designated Iran as a “state sponsor of wrongful detention” and demanded that the country release any Americans in its detention.[3]
US president can be democrat or republican, republicans can control the Senate or the House, or the democrats can control the Senate or the House - regardless of who is in power, Israel's interests by US are always met. US can wreck havoc on close relations and ties with Europe, Canada, etc. - but relation to Israel never changes. You can oblivious to all this, but the truth is: Israel de facto controls the US.
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.
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.
Ideally we would completely restructure the government to have multimember districts and change the Senate.
Within the current structure, we need to implement ranked/scored voting to break the two party system and the implied complete control it has over our government. It's so much easier for big money to control the narrative, control the candidates, and play off extreme polar politics when the voting system makes people choose the "lesser of two evils".
Were I king for a day in the US, and could only do one thing to help America, changing our voting system to some kind of rank/scored system would be it. Ending gerrymandering and Citizens United are also important but honestly less so than this.
It’s still pretty unclear how in the US is planning to go. For example, manifold 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...
What a gift to the deeply unpopular Iranian regime. Nothing galvanizes support for whatever-you-have more than an external threat.
Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump.
The Iranian regime may fall, but it'll be like Iraq. We'll get something like ISIS out of it, or worse, and the place will be a complete basketcase of civil war for 25+ years. Or we'll be there for 25 years in another "forever war." Bravo.
>“Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump”
I think this is a scenario Steven miller fantasizes about while playing with action figures but that’s the closest it gets to being real.
Sure derogatory terms for liberals, as you term the left, would support the armed forces if China invaded hawaii but expecting them to also support Trump is fantasy. Like supporting America and supporting Donald Trump are entirely different matters and usually divergent.
most liberals do not support the assassination of politicians. after the guy got killed, there was a massive search on social media where right wingers were looking for anyone who mocked him, and they got like a handful of people.
One of the main reasons Iraq is like Iraq is the Iranian meddling and their proxy organizations which operate in Iraq with impunity. The Iraqi government is entirely subservient to the Iranians.
As the recent wave of protests in Iran came after the 12 days where Iranian regime was dealt a massive blow, I think your analysis is wrong. Iranians consider this an opportunity. Also, the scale of violence unleashed on the Iranian public by the regime is staggering; it’s not about the regime being simply “unpopular”.
The Iranian people overthrow their government and establish what they want?
My point is that an outside force coming in will help the current regime and/or the ideas behind it. Even if the current regime falls, democratic or pro-Western ideas in Iran will be seen as aligned with the invading force and rejected by many people who might otherwise be open to them.
Is there anyone who likes being invaded by a foreign power, ever?
>Do you have any better ideas or is it your position that evil dictators get to rule forever?
If president Trump doesn't declare martial law, start a civil war, military coup or change the constitution of the USA, he will stop ruling in 3 years. We can wait that long.
Things were starting to come undone naturally then we decided to 3rd party the whole thing
Do you think the people fighting ICE in the streets of Minneapolis would welcome a joint Chinese+North Korean decapitation strike on Washington and cruise missiles flying over Portland?
I’m a Brit, married to an Iranian who still has a large family in Iran. I’ve got to witness first hand quite the opposite to what you describe, at least with the British mainstream media. With the exception of one religious aunt who is married to a military man, OP’s comment reflects the feeling of all the Iranian family and friends we know. And FWIW, I can point to Iran on a map, and I am not Mossad.
Iran is on the other side of the Persian Gulf from Dubai, where Iranian tourists flock to buy Disney, Apple and other embargoed products without restrictions.
Oh bless, caring about civilians! How about the more than 16,000 children murdered and about 4000 child amputees. Yes, it's super reassuring that you care about civilians.
Can any Iran simps explain why the regime couldn't just agree to zero enrichment and cease its weekly ritual of organized mobs chanting:
> DEATH TO AMERICA
in the streets like blood-thirsty lunatics, something for which there was no equivalent in the US even after 9/11 (mobs chanting "Death to Muslims/Islam"), let alone doing so with governmental encouragement as happens in Iran?
Do they not realize how many Americans aren't pro-Israel and aren't invested enough in the Middle East and its politics, proxy wars, and human rights abuses to want the US to support Israel in military action against Iran, except for their nuclear ambitions, and regularly professed eternal hatred for our country?
Last I checked, no one dared to attack them before they had nukes because of China's promise (made good in 1950) to use their military to defend the regime in Pyongyang, and the massive array of conventional artillery pointing at Seoul just across the DMZ, where 25% of South Korea's population resides. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192139
That they'll never, in some capacity, attempt use them against the country they weekly collectively chant death to?
EDIT: thanks, dang, for the
> posting too fast
cooldown, for all of my four posts.
> perhaps we could negotiate a peace deal in which israel and iran both agree to give up nuclear weapons and allow for IAEA inspections
I completely agree with you. Isreal has better relations with its neighbors than its ever had, has destroyed Iran's proxies, and given its obvious conventional military supremacy and lack of regional nuclear-armed foes and US-backing, its nuclear stockpile is just a destabilizing force in the region, and them voluntarily disbanding it would earn them a great deal of goodwill and a moral highground.
The current Iranian regime has destruction of Israel as one of their main goals. Not the other way around. I’m sure if Iran will have less threatening leadership Isreal will not bother them.
We don't have many details regarding the negotiations, but early reports suggest that Iran agreed to the "no high-enrichment" line. It was the proxy support and MRBM standoff weaponry that caused the talks to collapse (allegedly).
There's no way you can defend the Iranian leadership. Toppling them is not shameful, just like ousting Saddam Hussein was IMO reasonable. The problem is what happens afterwards.
And you think the US, now currently sliding into authoritarianism itself, will install an enlightened democracy upon the Iranians?
This is WW3 in slow motion. The goal is to takeover Eurasia and contain the Russian-Chinese alliance by eating away at the edges and removing all unaligned or hostile energy sources.
> 30,000 in 2 days - half the 2-year death toll of Gaza ; With no artillery , air-strikes or heavy weapons, without million-man armies facing off in pitched battles, without health system collapsing with 100s of thousands of injuries in 48 hours, photos or satellite imagery of mass graves and bodies littering the streets
Agreed. I had an Iranian colleague also reach out who was ecstatic about this news. The hacker in me is curious to see how it all unfolds, as well as to see all the curious discussion that arises on this forum.
Even HN is astroturfed to heck and filled with bots. The ratio of good faith informed dialog to Reddit like slop in these threads is wild. The old HN would never have such “obvious” black and white answers.
Seems that they are behaving intelligently - pummeling the IRGC. If the IRGC fails the public will probably have a bit of small talk with the regime officials and functionaries while the regular army and police will probably look vague amused from the sides.
Regarding the protests in the preceding week, while the iranian people probably had valid problems with their government, its so pbvious the actual scenes we saw in the news were orchestrated to manufacture consent. Its barely hidden anymore.
If you see a sudden uptick in protests in a country the US/isreal see as an enemy, you can bet its probably just the step in the playbook preceding military action
Protests have been happening in Iran for years and their frequency and depth increasing. Last one was “Woman life freedom” movement because the government killed a girl for bad hijab.
It’s not new, you just started paying attention now.
I know its not new, the iranian governemnt has always been cruel to dissidents. I guess my point is a sudden uptic in participants and media coverage of them is the indicator of manufactured consent
The protests were there before. Maybe you didn't know about them, but many people have been protesting. These are 40 day protests - iran funerals are 40 days afer the death, and 40 days ago iran killed tens of thousands of protesters who now are having funerals. (Iran deach culture is more complex than that, but for discussion the above works)
Iran: We are going to get nukes at any cost and wipe Israel and the United States off the face of the earth. It is our destiny.
Israel and the US: You serious?
Iran: Yes.
...
Iran, after being bombed to a slightly earlier point of the Stone Age than they've spent the past ~50 years: We are working hard trying to find the guy responsible for this.
FAFO, as they say. Meanwhile, literally the entire Middle East and the rest of the world besides Russia will be happy to see these clowns gone. Bon voyage.
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 10 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.
agreed. Although "starts another war" dismisses 50 years of history. Iran never stopped being at war with US and Israel and they clearly were never going to agree to a deal that left them without the nuclear capability to wipe both US and Israel off the map.
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.
But russia-ukraine is also a much more contained war between 2 parties that will likely end in a stalemate.
The middle east is a much more tangled web of alliances and hatreds, i think the iranian regime falling would have much more harder to predict second order geopolitical effects.
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.
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.
That is not to say bombing doesn't have its uses in war. The bombing of the oilfields of Ploesti in Romania severely damaged the German war machine. But it took Russian boots on the ground in Berlin to effect a German surrender.
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
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.
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.
More like this is a small piece of the puzzle in Russian-Ukraine war. Iran plays quite a big role in supplying Russians. If Iran is taken out, power balance in that war may change too.
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.
Will not one of you try to steelman this decision? Or do you truly, fully believe the entire US government and intelligence complex, supported by roughly 50% of your compatriots, are warmongering baboons?
If assume the goal of the US administration is to really limit the weapons of mass destruction
then why the previous peacefull attempts were thrown out? I remember Iran agreed to limit the production or ivite the people to watch their actions, the US sanctions were even lifted in 2015. But then later reiplemented by the US for some reason.
unrelated to all of this, I don't understand what's the problem is with a country developing nuclear weapons. US can nuke Iran with ICBMs anyway if they try to use them?
Israël is threatened by Iran. Iran has been working on nukes. There have been negotiations but they haven't been definitive yet, and Iran has never been a trustworthy negotiating partner anyway. That is why this President ditched the last round of agreements.
That's the steelman. Reality is that half my compatriots are warmongering baboons.
I am saddened by your gullibility. Your first instinct is to trust this administration? Who has repeatedly showed utter contempt for the very idea of truth, the constitution, the rule of law, and science, merely because half of American voters are brainwashed?
This administration's arguments do not deserve to be steelmanned.
I think it's possible it's a good decision (As with most wars in the middle east, I think hubris is playing a heavy role and we're underestimating the risks involved) but I think I'm in the minority and this is _not_ supported by 50% of my compatriots.
I don't know if by 50% you're talking about left vs right, but I'm center left, and a decent number of center-left thought leaders support this action. I think the people who support this are a relatively narrow 25-30% of remaining neo(lib|con)s in the center, and the more left and the America First right crowd hate this. My guess would be loosely speaking Trump's base hates this more than the typical HN poster. Tucker Carlson for instance will be way more against this than anyone here.
I don't understand. I was under the impression that this a tech site. Why is there so much politics on here? What is all the rage bait. Are these bots or people who have inject politics and rage bait into every single place. Whatever you think of the Israel/Palestine conflict, maybe there can be places or website where some of us just want tech articles and interests.
I can't name a single thing this administration has done well, or competently and this is no exception. Unless, of course, you count killing innocent people between military action, aid cuts and ICE.
I recall someone (name escapes me at the moment) defining WW3 as ignition in 5 flashpoints between belligerent groupings: - Eastern Africa esp. Sudan, which we all nearly universally ignore - Israel Iran - Russia and a neighbor which we know today is Ukraine - Pakistan Afghanistan India - China Taiwan Plus Plus
Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC: Contained conflagration, short targeted exchanges, probability of contamination low, material possibility of nuclear escalation. Case in point: North Korea developed nukes without being invaded, and now that they have nukes, other countries are watching and seeing that NK won't be invaded. What lesson do those other countries draw? And what of a world in which many potential belligerents hold nukes? Hiroshima weeps.
I'd like to add an important attribute here: The revolution will be live-streamed, more-or-less. And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons. I predict this fact will not distress many people, such is the state of humanity.
So to the 7 or so decades of stability we and our ancestors enjoyed, here's looking at you, going down me. But Brettonwoods serves the present the least of any time since its creation. Case in point, w.r.t. eastern Africa, the geopolitical bounds of those ~4 countries seems likely meld to a degree. If we are indeed heading into WW3, I expect the world map to be redrawn afterwards, and the only lessons learned is how to win better in future.
And if we are, while disgruntled old geriatrics go at each others throats via their youthful proxies, I greatly prefer the nukes rust in peace.
Reminds me of Blaise Pascal's quote: 'All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.' Aspiration, you gotta take care man, it just might kill ya.
His French is so simple and yet, incredibly beautiful and elegant, in a way that I am not even able to express in words. Only Voltaire compares.
"tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre." -- "All the woe of man comes from one single thing only: not knowing how to remain at rest, in a room"
In the same text, he follows with:
"Le roi est environné de gens qui ne pensent qu’à divertir le roi, et à l’empêcher de penser à lui. Car il est malheureux, tout roi qu’il est, s’il y pense."
"The king is surrounded by people who think only of amusing the king and preventing him from thinking about himself. For he is unhappy, though he be king, if he thinks about it."
> Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC
You're missing the commonalities, what defined world wars: the full might of industrial economies being dedicated to military campaigns.
World War II's theatres' were incoherent–the Axis interests in e.g. China and the Pacific had basically zero stragegic overlap with Europe and North Africa. (The only parties having to consider a unified theatre being the USSR and USA.) But the entire economic surplus of Europe, Asia and North America was basically dedicated to (or extracted towards) making things that were reasonably expected to be destroyed within the year.
> But the entire economic surplus of Europe, Asia and North America was basically dedicated to (or extracted towards) making things that were reasonably expected to be destroyed within the year.
This is no longer necessary to inflict the catastrophic destruction we're really referring to when talking about a hypothetical WWIII
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British Empire was heavily involved in Europe, North Africa and South-East Asia. Events in India had great consequences on Europe
The USSR on the other hand barely had any involvement in the Pacific theatre, entering in August 1945.
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looks at Russia's economy
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Another aspect of a WW3 is that people- pretty much ALL people everywhere- who have nothing to do with the war will find their lives threatened or completely changed by it.
I'm less concerned about nuclear escalation than about biological escalation.
It's quite hard to destroy the human world with nukes: you can only blow up big chunks of it, maybe take out enough power plants and supply chains to drop us into a multi-decade or multi-century dark age, or maybe cause a nuclear winter, although the actual risk of that is unclear.
Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species.
We currently have no real safeguards against this. If we ever have descendants, they'll think we were insane during this time period and they'll be right.
Disagree: Most people live in areas dependent on the supply chain. And when the supply chain gets disrupted they aren't going to go peacefully. And there will be enough mobility that areas that could be self-sufficient get hordes descending on them.
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There’s no chance a kit in a basement can produce a biological weapon that will be successful.
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> It's quite hard to destroy the human world with nukes
what about bio weapons? smallpox in the americas, for an example of many at the page below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi...
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Check your thinking. Korea currently has a DMZ dividing it from a war that never really ended and was fought to a stalemate. Their nuclear program didn’t result in military action because they currently have a gun to the head of every South Korean citizen and the backing of a large nuclear neighbour. Those are circumstances you can’t easily recreate elsewhere.
Adding to your point, Seoul is visible from North Korea, and vice-versa, and likely has enough conventional artillery aimed at it that even without nukes an invasion would be Very Bad for the Korean people.
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The DPRK is a nuclear armed buffer state and shall remain so for the forseeable future.
> Reminds me of Blaise Pascal's quote: 'All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.'
Ah but this is where modern technology comes in! Social media, Tiktoks, video games, porn...
The great pacifier.
> 'All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.'
old men's*
Alexander "the Great" (mass murderer) began his conquests at the age of 20 and had conquered the largest empire the world had ever seen at the age of 26.
Hannibal was in his 20s when he lead the Carthagian campaign against Rome.
Napoleon began at 26 and had conquered half of Europe at 35.
War being a business of old men sending young men to die is a modern thing.
Epstein files have more potent power in them than any nuclear arsenal.
No way this many rich powerful people would go down without destroying at least half of the world.
What's missing here is the complex network of alliances that led to WWI. The Iranian regime has alienated virtually everyone, including many of its Muslim neighbors. Nor is the regime part of some overarching international movement, like the communist countries were. Who is going to lift a finger to help Iran?
I'm not supportive of these strikes. Iranians created this government, and if they want to topple it they'll have to be the ones to do it, without foreign intervention.
Interestingly Iran had moderately good relations with Russia, to whom they sold drones, and China, to whom they sold oil. But indeed not enough for either to help defend Iran.
With Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, the US is bottling up Russian and Chinese global influence into smaller regional influence.
Agreed, nobody is going to help out Iran.
If anyone does it'll be China giving them missiles to hit a US boat.
That would make the US turn tail. Not start a war with China.
As for Iranian leadership, they just need to dig deep and wait this out. I can't imagine they don't have plenty of hardened bunkers.
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> I'm not supportive of these strikes. Iranians created this government, and if they want to topple it they'll have to be the ones to do it, without foreign intervention.
Well, foreign intervention kind of worked in Syria, Libya and Iraq after a few backstops, didn't it? All three countries reduced to rubble and virtually eliminated as threats to the US and Israel. Iran is next on the list, now that they're close to obtaing nukes. Let's not kid ourselves, they're not doing it for the Iranians, the're doing it for themselves. Regime change on their own terms, or if that isn't possible, yet another civil war.
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“The revolution will be livestreamed” is not used correctly and not what “will be televised” means. You are using it in the opposite manner actually.
Op made an evocative point but then immediately betrayed it.
It is interesting to think about the difference of livestreaming versus television.
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First, I don't think this leads to WW3 although I would agree with you that there is a general global tendency towards escalation. Still, I think we can not call this WW3 and I am not 100% certain this is a build-up to WW3 either.
As for North Korea: I think the situation is not solely about North Korea itself but China. China is kind of acting as protective proxy here. I don't see North Korea as primary problem to the USA, but to South Korea and Japan. Both really should get nukes. Taiwan too, though mainland China would probably invade when it thinks Taiwan is about to have nukes; then again China already committed to invasion - this is the whole point of having a dictator like Xi in charge now.
The situation Russia is in is interesting, because even though they are stronger than Ukraine, Ukraine managed to stop or delay Russia, which is a huge feat, even with support. As Putin does not want to stop, and Trump is supporting him (agent Krasnov theory applies), I think this has escalation potential. Putin is killing civilians in Ukraine daily - I think he does that because he already committed to further escalation against all Europeans. So Europeans need a nuclear arsenal, but european politicians are totally lame - see Merz "we will never have nukes". Basically he wants to be abused by Putin here.
> So Europeans need a nuclear arsenal, but european politicians are totally lame
Are France's 240 submarines-launched thermonuclear ballistic missiles not adequate? Despite the need for security, nuclear proliferation is extremely bad. It seems ideal for France continue to maintain their nuclear weapons while the rest of Europe keeps their hands clean.
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China won't invade Taiwan because it would destroy their economy and thus their country. Would wreck the entire world economy and turn every country against them.
It's nice nationalistic rhetoric, but there is literally no upside for them.
Taiwan needs nukes on low flying hypersonic cruise missles now. Seems that would halt Chinese aggression.
> And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons.
Maybe not in the details, but the general geopolitical "axes" (USA/the "West" vs China/Russia/BRICS/"Global South"/etc) have become increasingly obvious in the last years. And so far, most of the recent conflicts fit pretty neatly into that pattern.
Of course there are more things running in parallel, like the general shift to the right, Trump in the US, the specific situation with Israel/Palestine, the emergence of AI, etc.
But I don't see why any of this needs any other "grand secret cause" to explain the current conflicts.
BRICS is Russia wishing that China (much less Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates) were aligned to its interests.
A more accurate description of the way the world is trending:
US / UK / Europe / Japan / South Korea (still tied by defense, if push really comes to shove) vs Russia vs China vs Non-Aligned Nations (India, Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, etc.)
And historically (1960s), in a multi-polar world, middle powers are best served by being ambiguously aligned to force advantageous courting by major powers.
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hmmm - but is it really "world war" 3 if it's a bunch of localized conflicts?
I'm a little disappointed that the internet and social media had little impact on universal disclosure about geopolitical matters. My sense is that governments updated their playbooks to both defend against them (e.g. minimize leaking) and leverage them (e.g. bury inconvenient information with propaganda). By comparison, I'm more hopeful about cellphones and bodycams generally reducing excessive police violence and discrimination (emphasis on "reduce").
prediction: the nuclear threat will look quaint compared with disposable million-drone swarms on land and in the air, targeting anything remotely interesting via onboard AI.
“A bunch of localized conflicts” is what contemporaries thought WWII was before people realized the larger pattern.
I'm surprised such a superstitious reply is so highly-upvoted. There's no "WW3" any more than there is time travel or blue smirfs. It's a hypothetical, but you're talking about it like it's an inevitability. That's just not logically-sound thinking.
WWII, contemporaneously, was thought of as several small regional wars: “wow, that Hitler guy has started a bunch of small limited conflicts.”
It was only when one stood back to regard the whole picture that it became clear that something larger was happening.
OP is making the same point.
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We are not heading into WW 3. Those old rich men you worry about have to pay a much higher price in cash for their illusions of control. And that reduces what harm and how long wars can run. Keep an eye on what the markets tell everyone on Monday.
The revolution will be notably public, but not live-streamed. It will come as a swift and decisive reaction to a shock-and-awe deployment that will de-stabilize the state apparatus of a big nation outside of the “west”. The movement will be initially localized but it will spread until a perimeter of containment is setup around developed nations. Much more will come after.
Israel and the US told Iran "Don't try to develop nukes or else." Iran tried to develop nukes and got bombed. Then Iran tried to develop nukes again.
PotUS told Iran "Don't shoot the protestors or else." Iran shot the protestors.
Iran chose to FAFO; "Or else" has now arrived.
I don't like Trump and based on past bad experiences I'm not sure it's wise for the US to start a war in the Middle East. But I don't agree with people who think this war is illegitimate or Iran isn't the bad guy here.
Well hopefully this is short, minimally lethal, and leads to regime change for all those involved.
>leads to regime change for all those involved
Including for the U.S. and Israel?
Pretty sure he chose his words carefully.
It is difficult to instigate regime change for democratically elected governments.
Iran has an unelected supreme leader.
Israel has a large portion of its population completely disenfranchised.
The US has a generally democratically elected government.
If one of these governments is going to fall during military instabilities, it would most likely be Iran. The US will have significant regime change in November if polling holds.
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He said what he said.
Did he stutter?
One can only dream.
It’s possible
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We can only hope.
I did not see the US butchering 30k protesters in 2 days.
And no, stop your American exceptionalism, ICE is not the same.
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There is nothing ideal about that outcome. The "regime change" people talk about is intended to look like what happened in Libya: A failed state that falls in anarchy.
> look like what happened in Libya: A failed state that falls in anarchy.
This comment just shows that you have no idea what Iran is, and how it differs from Libya.
Libya is a loose conglomerate of tribes. Iran majorly Persian that see themselves as one nation. Completely different dynamics.
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Iraq? Afghanistan? Vietnam?
I don't think any of these were short.
Desert Storm was short. The second Iraq War, the stupid one, was not.
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You can’t be short, minimal lethal AND regime change. Gotta be pretty bloody to make that happen.
Unless like Venezuela. Or like 1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
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Based on previous American wars in the middle east wouldn't you say that's unlikely?
Won't there be boots on the ground? We already bombed their facilities and at the time they said best that bombs can do is fuck up the entrance to these tunnels.
u sweet summer child.
Well hopefully this is short, minimally lethal, and leads to regime change for all those involved.
That would be ideal but unfortunately not likely. Nobody will like this comment but US ships are sitting ducks. They have minimal ammo per the pentagon and no oilers. No oilers and low ammo means no prolonged conflict. Only two of the ships are nuclear powered not counting submarines. Most of Iran's military and weapons are deep underground in a massive series of underground cities and tunnels. The US would require boots on the ground if they manage to breach the tunnel openings under the mountains. Should that fail the only viable targets are civilians and that won't win favor with anyone or accomplish anything.
Iranian military could just wait it out if they wanted and then smoke Israel with supersonic missiles when the US leaves. Then we find out if Israel does have the nukes for the Samson option and that would result in the destruction of Israel. Iran's military could survive a nuclear strike but would have to clean up the fallout and I am not sure they could. Anyone not underground would likely get Acute Radiation Sickness and Cancer.
On a positive note if the US can manage to get into the tunnels and send in enough munitions to start detonating the missile stockpile a chain reaction could crack all the concrete and collapse the tunnels. Satellite could detect which tunnel they try to evac from. They have less than 5 days to accomplish the chain reaction assuming this is the plan. From the videos I have seen the missiles are literally lined up like a double-strand fuse.
The US military has seldom had problems with the blowing up the enemy bit. It's providing peace and stability after that happens where they tend to run into problems.
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[Update]: It seems my dear leader is hitting all the cities... [1] I am not OK with this. Save the handful of leaders and scientists for ground recon instead of whacking all the citizens. Take out the missiles first. Most of the military and religious leaders are under ground. Take out those underground complexes and Iran is yours.
[1] - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/us-and-israel-attac...
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Yeah, the possibility of a regime collapse / change due to this military action is unlikely. The military goal seems to be to destroy Iran's military-industrial complexes to hamper its missile production. Note however that while Iran has potent missile capability, Iran's underground complexes where it is stored presents its own problems - in the absence of adequate air defence and an Air Force, its enemies can just bomb the openings of these underground complexes, making it very, very difficult for the Iranians to use its missile arsenals from there. (This is what Israel did the last time). As for the scenario you outlined, I highly doubt the US would be willing to send boots to the ground to blow up their missiles manually - urban warfare takes a heavy toll and I doubt if the Trump administration can withstand the criticism if body bags start coming home. Even the MAGA crowd has been unexceptionally hostile to Trump's attack on Israel.
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I can't imagine a world where the US military only has the logistics for a five day offensive.
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What yt channel?
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I know you won't believe me here but dude you are absolutely full of shit
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> Minimally lethal
“Israel strikes two schools in Iran, killing more than 80 people”
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/2/28/israel-strikes-...
Welp, better luck next time
This reminds me of the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza, when a mysterious explosion at a hospital was immediately blamed on an Iraeli strike - first by Hamas, then by the international press. A precise death toll was immediately available: 500 killed. Israel urged caution as they investigated, but were ignored.
Eventually, it was established that 1) the casualty number had been a fabrication, 2) the explosion was in the parking lot, 3) it was NOT caused by an Israeli strike, but by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that had fell short.
Soon the press was forced to issue corrections - New York Times [1] , Le Monde [2], BBC [3]...
This incident looks VERY similar. Which is not surprising, since Hamas was trained in information warfare by the IRGC. Note that Al Jazeera (the media arm of Qatar, who funds Hamas and hosts their leaders in Doha) is enthusiastically amplifying this story with no apparent effort to cross-examine Iran's official source.
I predict that this story will turn out to be fabricated as well.
UPDATE: preliminary reports from the OSINT community seem to indicate that the story was indeed a fabrication... https://x.com/tarikh_eran/status/2027784301840846939
[1] https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2023/the-new-york-times-e...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/10/24/a-no...
[3] https://deadline.com/2023/11/bbcs-international-editor-grill...
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I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.
I have been reading on the topic of shunyata or emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and have been uncomfortably observing just how much of the artifacts we take to be real and substantial in the world are just "made up". They don't have an inherent reality of their own except what we attribute to them. And yet, made up stories can have very real consequences in terms human suffering.
It ought to be possible to cut through the layers of reifications and simply defuse much of the strife in the world. And yet, we continue to inflict misery on each other unnecessarily.
You’re mistaking the packaging for the product. Religion is the language leaders use. Power, territory, oil corridors, regional dominance, and domestic political survival are what they’re actually fighting over.
Tehran isn’t calculating missile ranges based on sutras. Washington doesn’t position carrier groups because of metaphysics. Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat.
Spiritual narratives make clean moral theater for the public. They mobilize bodies. They sanctify retaliation. But the machinery underneath runs on leverage and deterrence, not theology.
Wake up to the real world.
Calling it primarily religious violence feels tidy and tragic in a philosophical way. It’s harder, and more uncomfortable, to admit that it’s strategic violence dressed in symbols people recognize.
Shunyata is a beautiful lens for seeing through ego. It doesn’t dissolve geopolitics.
> Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat.
"Security doctrine" is quite a euphemism for aggressive territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing, which is tightly wrapped in religious rhetoric.
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Complexity can lead to "more is different" outcomes at higher strata. I would not say reified concepts are "made up" as they can have very real effects on both higher and lower strata.
The fallacy of reification is treating something emergent as a thing-unto-itself rather than a process or interaction born from constituents at a lower stratum. A reified thing can be recognized and changed for this reason. A mental concept needs only a change of mind to mutate, or to be destroyed.
Religion may well prove to be a reification that is destroyed once it is recognized as such. But I do believe that you cannot reduce that which is real and not real to only those things that have physical antecedents at lower strata, as we see emergent phenomena in the physical world as well.
It makes a lot more sense if you picture a bunch of organized, strong and merciless chimps attacking some other chimps to plunder what they have.
Chimps generally agree war is bad and horrific. But some smart, opportunistic and hard-working chimps can create situations that make war possible. Even though the war will only bring losses to most chimps on both sides.
The best political insight in this thread. This is the planet of the apes. If any future historians are reading, some of us primates were aware of the absurdity of the situation, horrified by the senseless violence that erupts again and again, led by sociopathic chimps that somehow managed to organize whole societies against each other and profit from the whole primitive enterprise. What a waste of human potential.
I have a very hard time understanding how the US is attacking Iran because of Christianity. I cannot even anticipate the hypothesis.
When it comes to battles of religion, Alan watts said it best.
"Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable–that is, human–men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life."
> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.
Can you provide an example of this in 2026?
It seems a little tenable with the ayatollah and Iran. But even here you don’t hear much talk of this being a war in the name of religion anymore. Nowhere near a few years ago and certainly nothing like 9/11 and the Taliban.
And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way. Just a war defending people against attackers at the gates.
The land promised to the Israelites generally extends from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq/Syria, encompassing modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria and Saudi Arabia.
If you're a religious Jew, then you believe you have a mandate from God (so an irrefutable right, or even obligation, needing no justification) to settle and rule not only the West Bank but the entire region. So there will always be that motivation, as long as religious Judaism exists in Israel.
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> And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way.
The American ambassador to Israel recently publicly said that Israel has a "biblical right" to the whole of the middle-east! (Watch these two interviews to understand how cleverly, and strongly, Israeli politics is tied up with American evangelical Christianity to keep American polity tied to Israel's existence - https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-fares-abraham-021826 and https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-mike-huckabee-022026 . Both these interviews give you a very insightful picture of how religious fundamentalist Israelis in power are total nutcases, supported by the American Christian fundamentalist fruitcakes).
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This attack was literally lined up to coincide with the israeli holiday of purim, a celebration of murdering their enemies:
https://x.com/chrisbrunet/status/2027665287982502195
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The evangelicals support isreal due to religious obligation.
Project 2025, a christian nationalist policy advisement widely followed by the current regime, prescribes supporting isreal
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It's not said in polite company, but Israeli concerns are racial, not religious. If you meet a Jewish zionist, then you've also met an athiest. An explanation of Christian Zionism deserves much longer discussion than can be made here, but how and why such an obvious contradiction to Jesus' ministry gained popularity is something worth studying.
Not entirely accurate:
1. Many Israeli Jewish Zionists are either "traditional" (religious but not that much) or Religious Zionist, and they are generally part of the right wing coalition. Actual atheists tend to be in the Israeli (still-Zionist) left.
2. The Zionist conception of Jewish identity is not "racial" in the American sense. The most obvious sense in which this is true is that it considers converts and their descendants full members of the nation. Probably the closest analogies are some Native American nations' identities or Armenian nationalism.
But you're directionally correct - Zionism is not a particularly religious ideology within the Jewish world, and outside of the Religious Zionist minority the political class is (openly!) on the less observant end even on the right.
Once you realize the gospels and the epistles disagree, it becomes a lot easier to understand. Christianity is the practice of cognitive dissonance. The bible, due to the nature, has a lot of mixed messaging.
Imagine, for example, you wanted to write the religion of Liberalism, so you collect the works of all the major thinkers on the subject of liberalism into one book. Now imagine someone gets the bad idea that all these authors must actually have a unified view on what liberalism is, means, and implies. You'll end up seeing that person teach a form of liberalism that's easily countered with other passages from their book and they'll mostly just wave it away because they have their passages and the others are simply you misinterpreting an "obvious" metaphor.
That is christianity in a nutshell, just replace liberalism with god. That's why there are so many sects. Because it's just too easy to yell "Context context context!" when a difficult passage comes up you don't agree with and use "spiritual" as the excuse for why you don't actually have to follow that passage.
There is also point of view that remembers that always right behind US military there is a team building next oil pipeline. US tried to used China as cheap labor, lost a lot of intelligence and now - look at how much oil Iran has and who is it exporting to and what is the percentage at the destination. The numbers add up and only the funny (?) thing is - China is (going to) be most eco country, because they already use nuclear power a lot and were forced to work on that.
What a time to be alive, again! And please, downvote me, comment that US is fighting for some country’s civilians freedom. It’s fun too.
> Buddhism
No one lives up to their ideals on a day-to-day basis:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
Fallacy.
(Wrong) Knife fight: a fight between people about knives
(Right) Knife fight: a fight between people using knives
Religion poisons everything.
Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes.
There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik).
Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
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It had nothing to do with religion, that element is used to distract.
They are following their books like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Religious concerns are, IMHO, always a facade for the underlying economic/territorial/geopolitical reasons. These religious facades help sell the war effort: get young men to enlist and fight to the death for "preserving their identity". And "muh freedom" is just as much a religious motivation to me (unsubstantiated, indoctrinated, unthreatened).
Religion isn't the facade, it is the medium through which other reasons are transmitted
> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.
This just isn't true. Religion is never the reason for these conflicts. It's the excuse. It's how that conflict is sold to the rest of the world. It's how civilians are manipulated into dying in a conflict.
The source of these conflicts is always material. Always.
Reagan's Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig once said [1]:
> Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.
In 1986, then Senator and future president Joe Biden said [2]:
> [Israel] is the best $3 billion ivnestment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to an invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.
Much of US Middle East polciy was aimed to sabotaging and undermining Pan-Arab Nationalism (particularly under then Egyptian President Nasser) [3].
Nothing about any of this has anything to do with faith. In this case it's about oil.
Whatever crimes you think Iran might've done, I'll stack up the US crimes against Iran and it won't even be close, including:
1. Iran was a liberal democracy that the US deposed in 1953 at the behest of the British because BP didn't want to have to pay higher royalties, ultimately leading Mossadegh wanting to "nationalize" their own oil;
2. In 1978, then US-puppet Saddam Hussein expelled Khomenei from Iraq. This was about the time the US realized that Iran was likely lost. it is believed that the reason for this was that a fundamentalist regime was preferred to a Communist one (which was otherwise the likely outcome) as the US didn't want Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. So all this pearl-clutching about the current regime rings hollow when you realize the US helped created it;
3. As punishment for the Revolution, the US supplied weapons to Iraq and fueled the Iran-Iraq war for almost a decade that killed over a million people; and
4. Crippling economic sanctions, which is a fancy way of saying "starving people and denying them medical care", for daring not to be a US puppet.
If you point me to any conflict you think is based on faith, I'll show you the material interests behind it.
[1]: https://archive.ph/tMTBd
[2]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-b...
[3]: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v12...
> The source of these conflicts is always material. Always.
Since the beginning of the Green Revolution¹, no. The source of these conflicts are always ideological. Always. Ideology may come through religion or some other medium.
Countries don't go occupying land because they need crops or slaves anymore. Material is always cheaper to buy than to get from an occupation. The desire to annex some land is always for somebody's pet project, it doesn't make economic sense.
1 - In a very wide sense. Agriculture stopped being the bottleneck for human populations at some point in the 18th or early 19th centuries.
I think the praise of the strategic value to US military interests are rationalizations and poor ones at that. The Gulf monarchies are allies in a meaningful sense and provide useful material support to the United States. Our “ally“ on the other hand was recently caught running a child prostitution ring and money laundering operation to control business and political leaders in the United States. Kidnapping children and removing their teeth so they can’t bite their rapists for political leverage is going to be remembered by future generations with the same horror and disgust as medieval torture and 20th century concentration camps.
> Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk,
Airstrip one is disappointed.
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Hey there I'm Israeli and I'm quite politically informed and moderately religiously educated and I have never heard of this "curse of the eighth decade" thing you've heard of.
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Isreal did have some polarization among liberal-conservative sides recently. Protests and all that. Could be
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What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days? Are mods strict about it?
I lots of relatively new accounts coming with what seems to me extreme, but altogether pop-culture acceptable opinions
I think this is probably happening, but also there are just a ton of actual Zionists and Israelis in the tech industry. Unfortunately they visit this site regularly and police it against honest reporting about their crimes.
> Unfortunately they visit this site regularly and police it against honest reporting about their crimes.
I think that's called "disagreeing".
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Luckily you don’t get to regulate who can participate in public discourse
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100%. Especially on topics involving countries with vast online propaganda operations.
HN doesnt have any defense against it, and the userbase is small enough that it would be highly effective.
I've seen lots of suspiciously new accounts hoping into these conversations. Saying questionable things.
With things like Openclaw it’s kind of trivial to game forums now. You just have to tell an agent to “post arguments for/against this perspective on this forum.” Give it a few talking points to include if you want to get specific and let it run. Specify the tone so it sounds realistic. It’s literally going to do everything else essentially forever or until you run out of tokens. Comments in a forum are dirt cheap so it’s also going to be very cheap.
Youd have to do a lot of work to make sure it's only a few short sentences, non-specific, and ultra-quippy though.
I mean I'm sure it can be done but if you ask an LLM to produce comment reply without more instruction it's going to write something a lot more thoughtful, respectful, and substantive than a forum user would.
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What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days?
Happens all day every day. There are many AI agents starting discussions and replying to comments. This is how The Crappening started on 4chan. Some of them are just future grifters. Some are training AI (I have replied to a few for fun). Some are propaganda bots. Those running the bots will reply with something equiv to Errrm Proof?? when called out. Without root I can not empirically prove it and the botters know that.
I predict about 2 years before the site will have more AI noise than real people. I have no idea what can be done about it aside from tracking the bots and reporting them via email to Daniel and I don't know what he could or would do. HN has always been very hands off which is mostly good but not for this scenario. If nothing is done it will just be bots grifting and AstroTurfing one another to the benefit of Google SEO and most of the humans would eventually go elsewhere with exception of some die-hards that refuse to recognize the situation.
Anonymous internet forums will very likely die out if inference gets another order of magnitude cheaper.
The only solutions are (1) private forums, (2) strict verification or maybe (3) some sort of "web of trust" thing, if someone manages to make it user friendly and not suck.
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Maybe this comment is also AI.
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we need to start a paywalled private HN forum
You should point out the exact posts.
Mods are explicitly rolling back the no-political advocacy guideline - Dan G has said he’s explicitly unflagging political content which is why HN is filled with left wing activism.
I mean does it matter?
At this point, lines have been drawn. In conservative land, everything conservative is good, everything liberal is bad. So the only sane position to take is the complete opposite.
For example, if you see someone self proclaimed liberal being critical of liberals, that person is probably a conservative or its a conservative bot.
That's not totally true when it comes to Zionism though. Much of the left and the right are united against Zionism. It's the older center liberals and right that are united in being pro-Zionism.
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2 countries with the best war technologies on earth must work together to have a war with embargod-country-for-decades. And those 2 counties are founder of Board of Peace.
The reason it is hard is not due to a power balance. Both of those countries could have sent nukes with minimal efforts.
But their goal is targeted and precise attacks, that effectively destroy targets based on specific, and high quality intelligence.
The other part is that defense against missiles is significantly harder and more expensive than sending missiles. Iran, while relatively poor, has dedicated a significant part of its economy for missile development and production.
> their goal is targeted and precise attacks
Day one and they've already bombed a school and killed dozens of children. The goals, strategy and tactics have not been clearly communicated. You can pray they are using high quality intelligence, but history tells us they are not at all concerned with collateral damage. They likely want to degrade Iran's military capabilities, but they also want them cowed and bleeding.
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Bored of Peace.
To obliterate a nuclear program that they claimed was totally obliterated last year
while repeating the claim that Iran is a week from having a bomb....the same claim the nutty yahoo has made for nearly 3 decades now.
Come on, you haven't lived if you were a high school senior and didn't stuff a bunch of middle schoolers in lockers with your bros for fun.
Well. Iran gets a lot of weapons from Russia which spends a whole lot of their GDP producing weaponry.
yes, yes. Poor Iran.
My greater concern is the people of Iran. Especially since Iran has conscription so the people who end up dieing in a war didn't even consent to being made soldiers.
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Yes. Poor Iran.
Because America and Israel.
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> 2 countries with the best war technologies on earth must work together to have a war with embargod-country-for-decades
It gives us a regional coalition partner. That's never a bad thing, regardless of circumstances.
> It gives us a regional coalition partner. That's never a bad thing, regardless of circumstances.
You missed the point. The fact that it requires two of them to gang up on Iran says something about how capable Iran is in defending itself.
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I'd say being an apartheid state and conducting a live-streamed genocide could possibly be a minor issue. Just a PR issue mind, Lord knows we've given up on our souls long ago.
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Ok. So we have just taken out all of Israel's foes with force. They are safe now right? We can stop supporting them militarily in every way now right? They no longer need any weapons, intelligence support, defense support, etc, right? If this is the right path to their long term safety then this must be true.
To take a break from breaking havoc in Gaza, there was an israeli incursion into Lebanon (which included a fantastic supply chain attack) Then they tried to pick a fight in Siria for some BS reason (intervening Siria for protecting some jew friendly faction inside Siria, a la Russia protecting russiansnin Ukraine), then went to Iran, then continued milling Gaza, and now we are back at Iran, again.
No, support will never falther.
Iranian regime was the entire middle east’s foe, including Irans. Speak to your local Persian.
For sure a lot of people in Iran hate the regime. But given their 40 or so years of rule, I doubt they could achieve that without a strong basis.
And yeah Iranians out of Iran definitely hate it too.
If by local you mean an émigré, they might be the worst person to ask.
Meanwhile Pakistan launched airstrikes on Afghanistan
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/feb/27/pakistan-...
> Iranian media now report 40 killed and 48 students injured following the strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, as rescue and recovery efforts continue.
Congrats America!
As an Iranian-American that's familiar with the regime, I would take that with a grain of salt. I saw this being reported from the Iranian regime themselves and they know how to manipulate optics and media really well. It's possible, but needs verification. I would also not put it past Iran to build their military infrastructure around schools intentionally (similar to Hamas with hospitals) in the hopes that it has this exact effect. Of course that does nothing to take away from the tragedy of innocent people dying and I'm not trying to negate that in any way, just something to point out.
100%. In another comment [1] I drew a parallel with the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza. Once you understand basic information warfare tactics, they're easy to spot. Why newsrooms still fall for it so easily is the real mystery...
I bet this story is a fabrication as well.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47199047
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You being Iranian-american bares no weight on your opinion
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Easy, it was Israel that probably did it and it's been shown time and time again that they can do this without political fallout under the guise that the target was a hiding spot for the military assets of Iran (or Hamas in the case of Palestine bombing).
> Easy, it was Israel that probably did it and it's been shown time and time again that they can do this without political fallout under the guise that the target was a hiding spot for the military assets of Iran (or Hamas in the case of Palestine bombing).
Are you claiming that Iran (or Hamas) site their military bases away from schools (or hospitals)?
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It's been shown time and time again that the world will eat up any propaganda against Israel without waiting to hear any facts at all.
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Iran regime launched a missile during their last ditch attack on every country in the middle east and it fell on a school.
> Iranian media
UPDATE: Reports now say that over 80 school children between the age of 7 and 12 were killed in Minab.
How is the Epstein Regime going to survive this politically? How is the Senate (Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, etc.) going to survive this politically?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47199047
I think you forgot /s to your last two points
He could drop a bomb on a school in Ohio, and still enjoy 40% support. There is no red line for these people.
No need to worry. They have extensively stress-tested the American public over the past few years and the conclusion is clear: Americans are never going to revolt no matter what you do to them.
You really believe that news that comes from Iran media at this point?
And the tens of thousands of Iranians murdered for protesting? Did you care about them?
Can you explain how this relates to that?
Some people are getting killed so more people should be killed?
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Did Israelis kill them? No. So, why would anyone care?
Did you see non-stop coverage about it from NYT, WaPo or others? No.
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I'm tired of Israelis killing innocent people
Then wake up
Peace president ah? American terrorists never learn to mind their own business in their own country. Where are all the MAGA clowns?
How exactly attacking Iran make their country great? Murdered million children in Iraq and now they started their terrorism in Iran.
I don't think this is terrorism, that's not what the word means. It's a clear and open act of war, so in many ways much worse, but somehow terrorism is a scarier word.
> but somehow terrorism is a scarier word.
It is, because it might impact normal citizens. Nobody has ever invaded US so coensequences of real war are unknown to most.
Some Iranian kids in Iran celebrating, I think https://x.com/shadygrooove/status/2027667467456442730
I know of at least 80 Iranian kids today who aren't in position to celebrate.
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This is also a good deal for the Iranian government since they can transfer hatred people had for them to the America and Israel. No one will see Trump as salvation and the “rally behind the flag” phenomena in times of invasion applies just as much to Iran as it does to the USA.
Nothing like a war to boost your popularity just before the elections
> Nothing like a war to boost your popularity just before the elections
If he pulls off a regime change, even a Delcy-style swaparoo, he'll get it, and arguably not undeservedly. It will ultimately come down to Iran's capacity to inflict casualties on American forces.
I’m not so sure. This is no where near a priority issue for most Americans, “I can’t afford eggs and the immigrant I buy pizza from got shipped to a warehouse but thank god the regime changed in Iran.”
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Is our memory so short? Regime change in Iraq destabilized that region for 2 decades.
>Delcy-style swaparoo,
I think IRGCs are much more robust and zealous than whatever Maduro had.
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somehow I dont think regime change is gonna happen before the midterms or even before 2028
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Trump could liberate every repressed country in the world and it would not impact in the slightest the cold hard fact that neither I nor most the people I know will ever vote R again.
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They leveraged special operations forces in Venezuela. Iran has two US carrier groups on their front door; this operation is not going to be as precise as the one against Maduro.
Only I’m not exactly sure what constituency will support this war.
He wasn’t even smart enough to leave America open to attack, manufacture a pretext, and rally people around the flag like 9/11
Heck, there was even a better case in Korea & Vietnam. Even Venezuela. What’s the case this is America’s problem?
Funny how Iran is America's problem so much but Ukraine is not, despite signed security assurance to the Ukrainian people.
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The Jesus people love it when Americas army support Israel
The racists love it when Muslims get killed
> Only I’m not exactly sure what constituency will support this war.
The remaining neocons who have surprisingly managed to weasel their way back into influence.
If a democracy is meaningfully created in Iran I will consider that a huge win for Trump and it would certainly make me more sympathetic to his party.
To be clear, I don't think the chances of that happening are high.
Nothing like a war to boost your popularity just before the elections
Congress will not let him have a third term regardless of what he says or thinks.
Congress seems to be quite toothless lately.
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> Congress will let him...
Lol, 'let'. Whose going to stop him?
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In russia they had 2 terms limit as well. Putin found a quick work-around by basically running through Proxy.
I can see JD being a figurehead with very public Trump support.
You sure? Seems like a war for no reason is hardly going to get popular support.
From a man who campaigned on No New Wars.
You're acting like people are rational. It's just about power. Appearing strong appeals to the apes inside the humans. And no one is more in touch with his inner ape than Trump.
Americans are bloodthirsty freaks. Killing people is always popular with Americans.
Nothing like a war to push Epstein out of the headlines.
The popularity aspect is irrelevant.
Trump can literally do all the things that the epstein files accuse him of doing, right on camera in front of everyone, and Americans will still vote for him all because he isn't a "woke" black woman.
Military action in Iran is deeply unpopular, being supported by just 27% of US adult citizens [1]. As an aside, Congress literally doesn't care what voters think [2]. The pearl-clutching about this from Congressional Democrats isn't about policy but process, with the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries saying Congress should authorize this action, not that it shouldn't happen.
I'm interested in what makes empires tick, what their basis of power is.
Spain in the colonial era was propped up by looting silver from Central and South America, for example.
The British Empire is what many (including me) like to call the "drug dealer empire". First tobacco then later opium. Any claims that we didn't know about the health risks of tobacco are complete BS (eg [3]).
Circling back to your point, the US is what I like to call the "arms dealer empire". WW1 and WW2 massively enriched the United States. NATO is essentially a protection racket for Europe and the price is, you guessed it, buying arms from the United States.
And the next Budget has proposed increasing "defense" spending from an already eye-popping $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion [4]. Where does that money go? Arms, weapons programs, defense contractors, the ultra-wealthy.
War is good for business even though it's unpopular.
[1]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54158-few-americans-suppor...
[2]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/
[3]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15198996/
[4]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-proposes-massive...
You really think the elections will happen
I hope this war will be short. And that the result will be Iran becoming a democracy that fully joins the global community. The Iranian people (Persians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, and others), deserve better.
It would benefit the entire world to see Iran integrated and engaged internationally.
I know a lot of the responses are skeptical (for good reason), but the opportunity is certainly there. The pro-regime population is aging out, with the more secular youth taking hold. There has always been an appreciation for American culture (specifically) amongst the general population. This was true when I was there in the 80s and increasingly more true over the decades since. Concessions by the regime over the hijab laws is one example of the society drifting more towards Western norms. Alcohol and western style parties are way more present in the society than ever before. Basically, the foundation for it is certainly there.
Furthermore if Reza Pahlavi does manage to integrate into the society, he will most certainly use his business and political ties here in the US to westernize the society. He's said as much. Some of the more well known Iranian-American business leaders here in the US (CEO of Uber, CEO of intuit, founder of eBay for example) I'm sure would contribute to work towards this also.
There will be push-back from rural areas (just like anywhere else) and the regime will not go away overnight, but the possibility does exist for this outcome. I think the biggest roadblock would be America and Israel intentionally preventing this outcome for the reasons that suit them geopolitically.
EDIT: should have mentioned that after decades of widely known voter manipulation and more or less "mock" elections, Iranians would be happy to finally participate in actual democratic processes where their votes and voices matter
This is unlikelly because Iranian regime is going to execute false flag operations against their people to steer public opinion in their favour.
Not if the US kills the whole regime. They certainly have the firepower. And Israel has the intelligence.
This scenario always imagines that the people getting bombs rained down on them will somehow determine that their actual friends in the world are those dropping the bombs.
Even accepting this, how exactly are these peaceful, western friendly civilians going to withstand a war better than their country's army?
It's very depressing to see this playbook credulously trotted out yet again. When has this worked?
We literally just went through this with Venezuela. They replaced the dictator with the assistant dictator. The Iranian face of regime change making the rounds in Western media is the son of the last Shah.
> Fully joins the global community
If by that you mean that Iran will become a toothless vassal state of the U.S.-Americans, then God forbid.
What do you mean by “toothless”?
I was thinking more along the lines of Japan or South Korea. Militarily restrained, but prosperous and strong.
I understand that recent military actions have often made things worse, not better. I am just trying to stay optimistic. From what I know, many Iranians are not enthusiastic about religion controlling law and politics.
There is zero likelihood of that. The IRGC and Iranian forces are a million strong and have a loyal base of support among the population. Without boots on the ground, relying on air power and 'moderate rebels' you are looking at at least a decade of war (using Syria and Libya as best-case-scenarios examples; Assad regime was nothing like the Iranian). The Israelis are dividing the opposition by pushing the out-of-touch monarchists as their would-be puppets and the Trump regime are backing them too. Which means they are not even seriously pushing any viable or credible alternative. They are likely arming the Kurdish and other ethnic factions in the region and stoking ethnic conflict. It is in Israel's interests to prolong the conflict , to degrade Iran's military and economy (like they did in Syria) and even break it up into smaller manageable parts. The monarchists are a moon-shot; Reza Pehlavi is not his father (who also was a US puppet) - Israelis like him because he will be weak and pliable and completely dependent on foreign patronage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinon_Plan
Interesting point on Israel pushing for the monarchy to come back.
Democracy in the middle-east does not result in Israel or US aligned governments, but the monarchies have proven more interested in preserving their autocratic dynasties and quite easy and eager to work with Israel and the US to preserve themselves.
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There is virtually zero recent historical precedent supporting your wish, and plenty of precedent suggesting the opposite will happen.
I wonder why that is.
We saw significant success with Germany, Japan, South Korea, and other countries in the past. But more recently, similar efforts seem to have ended in failure.
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the drones just have to fly slower for the kids and schools…”Easy, you just don't lead 'em so much”
There seems to be an uptick around 1am on Polymarket.
https://polymarket.com/event/us-strikes-iran-by
There is a huge flame war in the comments as people who had money on 27th Feb are claiming the attack started on that date
I think they don’t have an argument because technically the missile can be de-activated up until the last seconds before it reaches its intended target
Still it feels surreal to argue about these things , bomb dropping on humans and other humans attacking each other for the privilege to have their bet honored on when said bombs dropped on the other side of the world
I guess people in intelligence communities had these sort of bets going on ever since WW2 and Vietnam , but still it’s uncanny to see it widespread to potentially the whole population of the internet
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.
I tried to access that URL but it's banned in my country (Romania) for being an "exploitative gambling website". It's the first time I've felt that my country has a sensible internet policy.
Yes many markets began to react at 1:14AM EST.
Does this contribute to global warming? Are the governments waging war paying their CO2 tax?
I'd think they emit slightly more than a cow's fart.
War is the ultimate distraction.
Clinton bombed Serbia for 1/100th the severity of the Epstein files.
With maps:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g0pnnj8xyo
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.
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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...
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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.
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I thought he wasn't allowed to start a war without a vote in congress?
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This may be the bloodiest "Wag the Dog" in modern history. They may create an Ig Nobel peace prize specifically for this.
Once again mass killing civilians and setting a country of 100 million inhabitants into chaos.
But yes, poor American soldiers.
"Some of you are going to die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
Trump is calling them heroes now. But we know what he really thinks: "suckers and losers".
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/john-kelly-con...
> Trump: "The lives of American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties - that often happens in war."
Coming from President Bone Spurs ...
You forgot the Obama wars for some reason?
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Americans voted for no new wars, and especially no new wars in the sandbox, and they got a new war in the sandbox.
Americans really have to be among the most gullible people on the planet.
Not to mention that Trump is a paedophile, the open corruption, attempted coup etc... it's like that Hemingway quote. The decline of the USA has been gradual, and then very sudden.
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"Some of you may die, but that is a risk I am willing to take."
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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
Bibi needs Israel to keep fabricating wars. He will go to trial for previous charges if Israel runs out of wars.
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> Israel going along
Honinbo-sensei, you seem to have failed to recognize puppy-go for what it is and also to identify the player.
s/politics/optics/
NYT gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/28/world/iran-strikes-t...
There are reports that Ali Khamenei has been killed:
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202602280738
Again, little to no information for the US public. No approval from Congress.
Calling for the people to rise up. You can't bomb your way into regime change. Are we supplying arms to groups?
Is there a plan beyond pointless death and regional chaos the president would like to share?
A plan? Actually there is. This is all part of the backdrop to end US elections. We can’t have elections in the middle of a major war. And if we do have them we must greatly constrain how they are held while we are at war.
We had elections during WW2, the largest war of all time; we had elections during the civil war when confederate troops were 30 miles from DC. An air campaign in the Middle East is just another tuesday by comparison. This theory falls flat on its face - it is not a reasonable pretext for suspending elections, and this administration does not bother with creating pretexts for its power grabs.
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What, is the US Ukraine? Is it under attack?
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I've been trying to avoid the news for a little over a year now. I needed a detox. ... Is this true? That is, are there legitimate proposals to cancel or constrain the November elections in any significant way? Or, is this all speculation?
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> We can’t have elections in the middle of a major war.
Yes we can? Is there any provision in the US Constitution that allows delay of election because of war? We have had elections during most of our recent wars (Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan).
Trump could definitely try. Or pull an emergency card out of his ass. But it doesn't mean there is any provision for cancelling elections because of this 'war' with Iran (which they aren't even calling a war, but a "special combat operation" to get around congress having the war powers)
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That's an absurd stretch with no basis in fact or history.
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So, I heard Epstein started a war in the middle east...
> Are we supplying arms to groups?
Yes. The US supports the monarchy, the Kurds and MeK. The CIA was revealed to have armed MeK (despite designation) and my guess is that they do with the Kurds too. The CIA also talks to the Balochi groups as well although I don't know how organized or armed they are.
Needless to say, "regime change" would in reality mean civil war like Syria or collapse like Libya.
The US has spent a lot of time and money on MEK but I don't think they are very effective. Or will be very effective. My understanding is the leader of MEK has n't been seen in years(is probably dead), and MEK members are only allowed to marry other MEK members, so the number of MEK members is way down from their 80s highpoint, and it's not getting better.
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Or Irak.
The list of exemple is long enough, no need to add Iran.
We already had ISIS thanks to the mess in Irak and Libya.
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> is there a plan...
probably not, outside of making more revenue for raytheon
>No approval from Congress.
To be fair that's been the case for decades. Trump's hardly new in this.
Needs to notify Congress within 48 hours (and he did beforehand), and has 60 days before needing Congress to declare war.
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For better or for worse, the War Powers Resolution acts as standing approval.
Campaign to move the headlines from Epstein to something else, perhaps?
...In a couple of weeks.
> No approval from Congress.
I don't support it but there's blanket approval from Congress from the AUMF.
This authorizes an attack on Iran?
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This joint resolution may be cited as the ‘‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’’. SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES. (a) IN GENERAL.—That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
And when was that approval passed?
The take home message from this is that the only way for any country to be secure is to have nuclear weapons.
And not to negotiate with the US in good faith.
The US demands were clear - no nuclear capability whatsoever, not really a hard demand to meet if you're coming "in good faith".
Iran decided to play stupid games and found out.
I don't understand Iran, Hezbollah's and the Houthis' patience with the US actually. It's absolutely shocking. After the US betrayed ALL of it's own fucking allies, in what world does it make sense to negotiate with them?
The Houthis are still "threatening" to do things today after already being decimated and Hezbollah's strength more than halved.
I don't support any of these creeps but if any of them were minimally rational, they would have all gone to total war with Israel and the US the minute they realized what Hamas was doing on October 7th. They look even more naive than Europeans at this point.
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Not sure Iran was doing that, but for sure Maduro wasn’t.
Not sure it affects the outcome.
North Korea looks a lot less unhinged now.
It is still unhinged, but not because of nuclear weapons. Ukraine, and now Iran, showed the whole world what happens when you don’t have a nuclear deterrence.
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Do you believe it’s a good thing North Korea has the bomb?
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Israel has nuclear weapons. Did it keep them safe?
From invasion or forced regime change? Yes (But I don't think the nukes actually helped in that regard).
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Pretty safe if you ask me, judging from their…location and historical context.
Historically, Israelis have been much safer than most of their neighbors Oct. 7th notwithstanding.
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The last time Israel faced an existential threat from its neighbors was 1973. The timeline isn’t entirely clear, but that’s right around the time when they started to have operational nuclear weapons. Many factors contributed to their relative safety since then, but the timing certainly works out for nuclear weapons helping to make that true.
Well, proximity is a factor...
"In the world of strategic studies, there has been a return to ‘theories of [nuclear] victory’. Their proponents draw on the work of past scholars such as Henry Kissinger, who wondered in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy if extending the American deterrent to all of Europe at a time when the threat of total destruction hung over the US itself would actually work: ‘A reliance on all-out war as the chief deterrent saps our system of alliances in two ways: either our allies feel that any military effort on their part is unnecessary or they may be led to the conviction that peace is preferable to war even on terms almost akin to surrender ... As the implication of all-out war with modern weapons become better understood ... it is not reasonable to assume that the United Kingdom, and even more the United States, would be prepared to commit suicide in order to defend a particular area ... whatever its importance, to an enemy’.
One of the recommended solutions was to bring tactical nuclear weapons back into the dialectic of deterrence extended to allied territories, so as to give US decision makers a range of options between Armageddon and defeat without a war. Global deterrence was ‘restored’ by creating additional rungs on the ladder of escalation, which were supposed to enable a sub-apocalyptic deterrence dialogue — before one major adversary or the other felt its key interests were threatened and resorted to extreme measures. Many theorists in the 1970s took this logic further, in particular Colin Gray in a 1979 article, now back in fashion, titled ‘Nuclear Strategy: the case for a theory of victory’.
...
In 2018 Admiral Pierre Vandier, now chief of staff of the French navy, offered a precise definition of this shift to the new strategic era, which has begun with Russia’s invasion: ‘A number of indicators suggest that we are entering a new era, a Third Nuclear Age, following the first, defined by mutual deterrence between the two superpowers, and the second, which raised hopes of a total and definitive elimination of nuclear weapons after the cold war’" [1].
I think the chances we see a tactial nuclear exchange in our lifetimes has gone from distant to almost certain.
[1] https://mondediplo.com/2022/04/03nuclear
Who will be launching the tactical nuclear attacks? The US is no longer equipped with tactical nukes, as I understand it (corrections welcome).
Now that the last generation with direct experience of the Nazis is leaving us, it seems like the populace is forgetting the horrors of that time. That also happens to be the last generation with direct experience of nuclear weapons used in war.
Those who paid any attention to Ukraine already figured it out
I just want to expand on this.
1. According to the US and Israel, Iran has been a week away from having nuclear weapons for at least 34 years [1];
2. It's quite clear Iran could've developed nuclear weapons but chose not to. I actually think was a mistake. The real lesson from the so-called War on Terror was that only nuclear weapons will preserve your regime (ie Norht Korea);
3. Israel is a nuclear power. It's widely believed that Israel first obtained weapons grade Uranium by stealing it from the US in the 1960s [2];
4. In a just world, people would hang for what we did to Iran in 1953, 1978-79, the Iran-Iraq War and sanctions (which are a sanitized way of saying "we're starving you"); and
5. The current round of demands include Iran dismantling its ballistic missile program. This is because the 12 day war was a strategic and military disaster for the US and Israel.
Israel has a multi-layered missile defence shield. People usually talk about Iron Dome but that's just for shooting down small rockets. Separate layers exist for long-range and ballistic missiles (eg David's Sling, Arrow-2, Arrow-3). In recent times the US has complemented these with the ship-borne THAAD system.
Even with all this protection, Iran responded to the unprovoked attacks of the 12-day war by sending just enough ballistic missiles to overwhelm the defences, basically saying "if we have to, we can hit Israel".
Many suspect that the real reason the US negotiated an end to the 12 day war was because both Israel and the US were running cirtically low on the munitions for THAAD and Israel's missile defence shield. You can't just quickly make more either. Reportedly that will take over a year to get replacements.
Thing is, pretty much all of this missile defence technology is about to become obsolete once hypersonic missiles become more widespread, which is going to happen pretty soon. I suspect that's a big part of why the US and Israel are now trying so desperately to topple the regime and turn Iran into a fail-state like Somalia or Yemen.
I'm not normally one to encourage nuclear proliferation but when it's the only thing the US will listen to, what choice do countries have?
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-n...
[2]: https://thebulletin.org/2014/04/did-israel-steal-bomb-grade-...
> Thing is, pretty much all of this missile defence technology is about to become obsolete once hypersonic missiles become more widespread, which is going to happen pretty soon.
I think you'll have to be more specific.
Or I guess to compare with your other observation: """Even with all this protection, Iran [sent] enough ballistic missiles to overwhelm the defences""" -- It's not a binary of "have missile defense or not => every missile will be shot down". An amount of missile defense will make it harder for missiles to successfully hit a target.
Similarly with hypersonic missiles, it's not the binary of "I have a missile that's difficult to defend against, I win".
Having a sword which can defeat a shield isn't in itself sufficient to obsolete the shield. (Infantry can be killed with bullets, yet infantry remain an important part of fighting despite that).
Yes, because "what choice did Iran have" other than:
1. Routinely calling for death to Israel and America, turning it into part of the national curriculum and sowing hate
2. Funding, training, supplying and directing multiple violent proxy organizations around the region which attacked Israel and undermined their own countries (Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in West Bank and Gaza, other organizations in Iraq)
3. Enriching Uranium to clearly non-civilian grade in multiple militarily hardened facilities;
4. Directly attacking multiple Jewish targets around the world (like the AMIA and then embassy bombings in Argentina)
5. Attacking neighboring countries with ballistic and cruise missiles, like the attacks on Saudi Aramco in 2019
6. Holding international shipping and energy markets hostage by threatening to attack ships and tankers in the Persian Gulf
7. Abusing their own citizens, including public executions, persecutions and extreme violence
8. Providing support to Russia in their efforts in Ukraine, and especially drones used for indiscriminate dumb attack waves against civilians and infrastructure
Now we have people arguing that if they had just gotten nukes then they could have continued doing all of that.
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Considering the rationale for this war that kind of seems false
> Considering the rationale for this war that kind of seems false
The spring to a nuke is riskier than ever. That doesn't change that nuclear sovereignty is a tier above the regular kind, this is something every one of the global powers (China, Russia and America) and most regional powers (Israel) have explicilty endorsed.
This has nothing to do with nuclear weapons. The only problem here is that iran has petrol. Thats it.
This is an incredibly facile take on the situation. Iran has been a destabilizing regional power with imperial aims for 47 odd years. They even murdered the PM of Lebanon via their proxy army. They’ve been poking the bear for decades, and there are serval occasions where it may have happened sooner in an alternative universe. Had McCain become president in ‘08 we may well have seen a land invasion from US positions in Iraq, as the Iranian Quds force was already fighting US soldiers in Iraq. The whole DoD is now full of Iraq veterans who hate the Iranian government to their bones. It’s shocking this didn’t happen sooner, and probably only didn’t because of luck.
You've completely misunderstood the poster's point. Nations are being taught that without nuclear weapons you could be attacked in this new world.
> Iran has petrol
More than taking control of Iranian petrol, this is probably more an attempt at cutting off China access to it (and also generally eliminating one of their allies), same as for the Venezuelan invasion.
I used to believe that, I think there are also some very ambitious people nearby who want to use US armed forces for their benefit - as any rational player who has influence over such power would attempt.
100% -- unfortunate, sad, and entirely predictable
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Israel has a lot of nukes (while they pretend they don't) and that does not prevent them from being attacked.
It probably prevents armed warships from attacking them. It doesn't, as you correctly point out, prevent guerilla warfare.
This is part of why we help defend Israel, to constrain wars to conventional means.
In the first Gulf War, we placed the Patriot batteries around Israel, as they said that if an Iraqi biological or chemical SCUD attack hit Tel Aviv, they would vitrify Baghdad.
Having nukes doesn't prevent _anyone_ from attacking you, but it does constrain those attacks to conventional means. And what if you pulled off a decapitation attack against Tel Aviv? Well their fleet of nuclear capable subs would make you pay.
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Thanks for pointing this out. I hear people say this over and over, if Iran only had nukes it would be safe to continue propagating terrorism as it has been doing. It’s obviously wrong, as you point out. Russia has nukes. India has nukes. Having nuclear weapons doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want, if anything it brings a higher level of scrutiny. A nuclear Iran would be a serious problem for many and that’s why it’s so critical to make sure that doesn’t happen, not just for Israel but the entire planet.
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My totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory is that several of those are sitting in shipping containers in the US and Europe, and that is part of the reason that their interests drive all western foreign policy, despite their open hostility to their 'allies'.
How does that factor in here right now? We haven't used or threatened to use nukes, and at least the public case made is in part that Iran is trying to get nukes and shouldn't.
I say "public case" specifically here, I don't buy that justification but it is still the one being used.
How does it factor in? How doesn't it?
If Iran had deployable nukes, would they get invaded?
Name a country that got bombed to credibly destroy the government, and had nukes. I'll wait.
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On another note, Canada is the only country that ever decided against having them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
You missed like, *checks notes* 186 other non-nuclear-armed states parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
https://www.iaea.org/topics/non-proliferation-treaty
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South Africa got rid of its nukes after the apartheid ended.
Ukraine literally had them and gave them up
well, they were one week away from a nuke, as usual.
We need to get the Iranians working on nuclear fusion instead.
They were going to get AGI before US but don’t worry, the last openai funding and this war will save US
since 1992!
There's an Israeli newspaper from 1984 saying it's a month away. Definitely more than a month passed between '84 and '92.
Btw. They ARE not that far away from the bomb, after they enriched uranium as a consequence of Trump (in his first term) cancelling the Obama treaty.
But they ARE a theocracy and Ajatollah Chamenei released an order (fatwa) forbidding Iran from obtaining and using an a-bomb. The new religious leader might change the religious law tho. I mean the one that comes after Chamenei becomes a martyr.
Funny how, knowing just a little bit more, it all really looks like nonsense created for illiterate, just to take their attention off of Epstein Pedophile Scandal.
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The concept of nuclear brinkmanship is part of accepted WMD doctrine. A country can maintain a fixed short interval away from weaponization for decades. It is widely accepted that Iran does have a military nuclear program; the amount of material enriched, the enrichment level achieved and the hardening of the involved facilities are an open testament to that (there are many other intelligence signals that we are not privy to).
I think you're missing the point: a constant justification for bombing Iran is that they are one month, one week, or a couple months from building a nuclear bomb.
If that was true, obviously they would have built one buy now. Being one year away from building would be non-urgency inducing.
The constant lying about timelines does not imply Iran does not enrich uranium, but, as you remember, after the last bombing the leaders of the USA and Israel said they had completely obliterated Iran's nuclear program. Except, apparently After six months they are one week away from a nuke again.
This seems to indicate the USA should be bombing Iran every few weeks, forever, just in case they get a bit faster next time.
Except, when we don't have any scandal or other crisis going on, then Iran does not seem to be getting a nuke quickly. I wonder why.
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Tough news day for anyone who has a difficult time holding contradictory ideas in their mind. Pretty sure that includes myself.
On the one hand, Trump is awful for the USA, and the world.
On the other hand, there is a possibility that the freedom-wanting citizens of Iran finally have a slight chance of achieving their goal.
The chance of something truly positive happening seems low. However, as someone who has, for years, watched what happens in Iran via the lens of https://old.reddit.com/r/newiran, I am allowing myself the slightest amount of hope. Iranian people deserve it.
Of course, there is a large chance of this blowing up into something really bad for everyone.
edit: This Ukrainian is currently live streaming with OSINT, and his takes align with many of my actual realist thoughts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUdeA0zukq4
People are posting these choice quotes:
"In order to get elected Barack Obama will start a war with Iran"
—Donald Trump, Nov 29, 2011
"Barack Obama will attack Iran to get re-elected."
—Trump, Jan 17, 2012
"Now that Obama's poll numbers are in tailspin watch for him to launch a strike on Libya or Iran. He is desperate."
—Trump, Oct 9, 2012
During the election MAGA was yelling that Kamala Harris was going to bring us into war with Iran. They are real quiet now, as usual. Republicans are always the same, cut benefits to the poor, cut taxes on the rich, war with the Middle East. Every, single, time.
Ill doers are illdeemers.
While I have no love for the Iranian regime I fear this will end up like the 'liberation' of Iraq: A massive power vacuum in an unstable Islamic regime.
What even is the plan here if the air assault fails? Boots on the ground? In Iran?
> While I have no love for the Iranian regime
Who say US is not regime? It is the world largest regime in the world, with bidders in every country to do their bidding, mass surveillance including their own country men. People blame only Russia, China, Iran etc when US have been doing the same for years.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/w6_2Ul3Ght8
> Who say US is not regime?
Who says it isn't? Regime literally means a system of government [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regime#Usage
I generally use 'regime' for autocratic governments.
Trump is democratically elected, for now.
I'm not actually sure if this is correct, English is not my native language.
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What even is the plan here if the air assault fails? Boots on the ground? In Iran?
Other than nukes that would be the only option if they can blast the doors to the underground military cities. They will have to do it fast as the ships will not sustain combat for more than 5 days with their current ammo per the pentagon.
Why would warships only have ammo for 5 days??
I don’t think it’s possible to change regime without boots on the ground which is not currently considered. So there will be no power vacuum, at most Iran military will be weaken. It’s not a big win for the US but would allow Trump to safe face after his demands were essentially rejected.
I imagine CIA political officers are on the ground right now.
Iraq was not an Islamic regime in the same sense. It was not a theocracy. There were non Muslims in senior political positions.
The Iraqi government was a lot more stable.
What exactly do you imagine will replace the Iranian government that is worse?
Iraq was attacking its neighbors every couple of years, Iran is not.
Iran has shown that it is remarkably sane actually, given the aggression shown towards it by Israel and the US and has made a lot of efforts to reach a deal.
Remember, it was the US that exited the JCPOA and now it wants Iran to give up all its misses so that they would be defenseless.
I have no love for theocracies, but I do think the Iranian system is a lot better than the likes of Saudi Arabia, which we're buddy buddy with.
Oh and I guess the founder of Syrian branch of AQ and deputy head of ISIS running Syria is better that what was before too, in your book?
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That all being said, we are talking about different cultures. Iranians are on average more educated than Iraqis were/are, and the country is ethnically more homogeneous.
So I have hope that they'll find a way to organize when the current regime falls.
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>What exactly do you imagine will replace the Iranian government that is worse?
A regime that only controls the capital, leaving the rest of the country in a power vacuum leading to internal conflicts and sectarian violence that will eventually spill over the borders into Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq etc...
Nothing at all could be worse!
One of the issues with Iraq was that Rumsfeld didn't want to acknowledge that it takes more personnel post-toppling (to rebuild infrastructure and institutions) than during invasion. It seems like the current government could be prone to make the same mistake.
I recommend anyone interested in this to read Cobra II. It's an excellent book.
Was ISIS better or worse than Iran's government is now?
what are you talking about? Iran is a sophisticated country with a parliament and elections, with a powerful civil society. It has 90 million inhabitants. They graduated more women in STEM disciplines than the USA. Yes, it's a theocracy, but it's more free than Saudi Arabia for instance.
Are the Americans going to bomb the Saudis next? or only if Israel ask for it?
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Iraq’s Ba’ath party were secularists.
“ There were non Muslims in senior political positions.”
What are you talking about?
Iraq is >95% Muslim, but there are a few different sub groups. With those numbers there were few in government then and now who are not Muslim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Iraq
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No government and another perpetual war zone.
Your description of what happened in Iraq was exactly the point of why we invaded. Iraq and Iran were the two biggest threats to Israel, we got rid of Iraq and now we are removing the only other rival to Israel remaining in the Middle East.
After this, Israel, being the only nuclear power in the region and having massive funding from the American taxpayer, will dominate the entire region. This has always been the goal.
After this, Israel, being the most dangerous rogue state in the world and extremely divided internally, will likely devolve into civil war.
One hopes, anyway. That’s the best chance we have to remove the Nazis currently in power here.
After Iran falls - Turkey is next.
What does it mean "fail"?
What is the goal, to overthrow the regime, so success would mean a change of government?
(sorry, I haven't followed)
The plan is a show of power. Trump will leave in 2 years, leaving much of the world in disarray because he had no plan whatsoever, and his staff is literally out of the movie Idiocracy. Nothing of lasting value will come out of the horrors that happened in the past 3 years, and in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.
> in 10 years we will look back into the present with disbelief.
You mean in 10 years, when the US is a stable and high-functioning democracy with independent media, a universally liked, charming, and polite president, supported by both the right and the left, who finally manage to overcome their minor differences? Is... is this the direction this is all heading?
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> in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.
This is a very optimistic outlook, to the point of naivete, though I really hope you are right. In reality, neither Trump nor his cronies are acting like people who imagine they will be out of power anytime soon. In 10 years the world will likely still be dealing with the fallout of this administration, if not still dealing with the administration itself.
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> Boots on the ground? In Iran?
Trump is a coward. He knows that boots on the ground will mean massive losses.
The only way he does that is if someone convinces him that they can go in and out very quickly.
Unlike Venezuela I doubt there are people in the right place to oust Khamenei.
Update
Turns out they bombed him
So replacing a fascist with western antagonism and constant threat on American allies, with a somewhat democratic, weak, and western aligned government?
Sounds like a good idea
It sounds like you believe that the people of Iran don't support the regime and are secretly loving america.
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This shows a real ignorance about the true culture of Iran. It is not a Muslim culture. They want to install the son of the shah, and get back to pre-revolution culture.
But liberals will be quick to tell them they don't know best, better to just keep the oppressive ayatollah in power.
Maybe this is correct? I want this to be correct. But American entanglements in the Middle East have often overestimated the size of the “they” you’re referring to. There are many “they’s” in Iran, some of whom have been trained over time to hate the US.
So like, I think this is the right choice, but Trump was elected by MAGA to avoid these kind of entanglements even when it was the right thing to do. In fact, I think “liberals” (not progressive) support this action more than many on the right.
Traditional left/right is not useful to understanding people’s support of our foreign policy in 2026 America. Tucker Carlson will hate this way more than Chuck Schumer.
The place has 90 million people, how do you even deal with this without throwing the whole place into chaos?
Besides, after this the collective west has no moral high-ground anymore, the global south will resent us more than ever. If other countries go to aggressive wars, our condemnation is worthless.
Trump is completely compromised and it was probably the powers that be who told them that this is how it is going to be.
> Besides, after this the collective west has no moral high-ground anymore
They never had any morals, all for their business gains look at Middle East, Africa and Asian countries where they were involved. Europe always looked other way when US does something and vise versa.
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There is no such thing as the "global south" other than in the minds of westerners and westernised elites (and elites are getting less westernised). From a western viewpoint you can lump the rest of the world together, but it makes no sense from any other view point.
As for moral high ground. Compared to whom? China? Russia? Myanmar?
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one thing though - food and oil supplies at risk - if the airspace and shipping lanes remain shut down for 1 month or more.
people in the Middle East will literally starve
and china will run out of fuel - though they've gone mostly electric
> though they've gone mostly electric
Who on earth told you this?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Previous conflicts between the involved parties were intense but also defined by constrain on both sides.
Israel did not mass bomb civilians, and Iranian agents did not commit sabotage against infrastructure on US soil.
I hope this pattern persists.
A hand full of determined Ukrainians managed to blow up North Stream, some people plunged part of Berlin into darkness for 2 weeks.
Power and data cables as well as pipelines are as vulnerable in the US, as they are here. Maybe even more so.
A regime that truly feared for its existence, might decide to escalate, since there is nothing to loose.
I think the latter, the US is explicitly attempting a regime change operation so Iran has no reason for restraint.
The US is aware of this, that's why they evacuated all their bases etc within range
> explicitly attempting a regime change operation
I missed that press release. Where is it?
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Israel has been mass bombing civilians right next door for years now.
Then explain how the Population of Palestine keeps growing.
> Israel did not mass bomb civilians
Within an hour Israel blew up an elementary school, killing 80 civilians.
A school located at 27.109828°N, 57.084744°E was hit and partially collapsed. That is the extent of the hard evidence.
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Nothing went dark for weeks as a German you should know that.
Maybe not weeks, but there was extensive damage and parts of Berlin went dark https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/07/europe/berlin-power-outag...
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I thought the forever wars and quarrels with people we know nothing of were over?
EDIT: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-february-28-2026/
It’s high time for regime change in the US.
If some chinese samples of this unstoppable carrier killer made its way to Iran already.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iran-nears-deal-buy-supe...
Also, the US News media silence on this is noteworthy.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=reuters+cm-302+missile&ia=w...
If Iran sinks a carrier then the us congress will declare an actual war and that will seal Irans fate. Also, seal the fate of hundreds of thousands of lives.
So US citizens like you actually expect other countries to accept being attacked by you without as little as defending themselves?
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According to the Times of Israel Khamenei has been killed. I think that already counts as actual war.
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I'm not so sure.
I think Trump would taco.
A carrier is fair game, especially when you shoot first.
There wouldn't be a coalition with half of Europe. Because of bridges burned.
This seems to be a short range (290km) anti-ship cruise missile. Definitely not an unstoppable carrier killer
What could threaten US carries are China’s DF-21D/26D – anti-ship ballistic missiles with reported ranges of > 2000km – and Iran is not getting them
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-carrier-killer...
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.
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> The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state.
You can bomb the leadership all day long.
Without boots on the ground the regime will probably continue.
I don't see how this stops Iran from building nukes. Sure they may have a temporary set back.
But do you think this will change their minds?
Can they even negotiate a resolution with the US. Given that the current administration won't honor its own agreements.
Did Trump issue an ultimatum here? And demand something?
Iran's nuclear program cannot produce usable nuclear weapons just with enriched uranium, so there's no risk at all for them to blackmail anybody.
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.
>Iran has negotiated like no one will ever attack it, and that was a correct assumption for decades
Iran had a signed agreement, trump cancelled it. Israel literally killed Irans negotiators just a few months ago. What is this nuclear level ignorance.
> The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state.
North Korea aspires be to be a Israel-style nuclear blackmail state.
The biggest blackmail rogue state right now is the US.
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> 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?
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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.
Why do you call the concept a "North Korea style nuclear blackmail state" and not an "Israel style nuclear blackmail state"?
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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.
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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?
The point is that Israel can't tolerate any competition in the area.
Wesley Clark: "We're going to take out 7 countries in 5 years":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWxKn-1S8ts
Yeah, regime change and no nukes.
> 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.
They are boxing in China. Taking away China’s oil. First Venezuela. Now Iran.
Decoupling from China while taking out China’s allies is the overarching foreign policy.
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."
Probably a continuation of the 'mowing the lawn' strategy (as used against the Palestinians). Every now and again use massive military force to set back Iran's capabilities, time and effort they spend rebuilding is time and effort not spent causing problems elsewhere.
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
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Well, they're probably killing thousands of their people there. This country was once aligned with us. We may yet have an ally there.
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.
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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, for some reason, 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.
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.
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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'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
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Islamophobia is unacceptable and should not be allowed in any community.
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> 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...
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Here is a 12 minute video showing OSINT of various attacks, and Iranian counter-attacks.
https://youtu.be/ZmtRhiI9uWU
Gotta derail any peace talks!
Can't have Gaza have relief for a second!
What does this have to do with Gaza? One would think that if the IDF is busy in Iran, it will probably be less busy in Gaza.
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LOL. The US is on it too. So what you have to say for yourself now?
What peace talks? The ones where for over a year Iran refused to deescalate their nuclear war program and the now Europe range ballistic missiles?
You are lying, they have been trying to avoid this war in any possible way. But Israel wanted this war before they lost the support of the USA population (that it's happening fast) or they have a less accommodating USA president.
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"Trump Rolls the Dice on Regime Change" (1)
What a headline. Anybody else have this on their election day bingo card?
Midterms should be a blood bath though, right? Right? (insert Anakin meme).
1. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-rolls-the-dice-o...
Needs a war to cancel the mid terms.
Destroying alliances that took decades to build and then initiating multiple ill-advised military incursions is quite the play.
I believe this is related for Iran's decades old calls for "Death to America"/"Death to Israel".
> Death to....
Is the translation "Down with....".
No it's not.
I believe that’s related to Israel’s genocide of Palestinian children and America’s unending unconditional support of the same.
Anyway, sticking to the "Death to America" strategy and choosing to run a global proxy war and killing their own people, instead of choosing peace, have led to this moment.
Lets pray for the people of Iran we get rid of the regime this time, and eventually reach peace in the middle east.
Hopefully Khamenei is dead. Sticking with "Death to Israel" was not a good plan for him. I hope the regime goes down ASAP.
No, it's because of the country is run by fanatics.
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Leta hope the good side wins.
Saving private Epstein has a nice ring to it
We all saw this coming decades ago, they weren't exactly subtle.
That regime in the US. It is truly baffling.
I have to wonder how much of this is driven by Israel accounting for the risk of less favorable US relationship in the future.
Pre-emptive violence; not even justified with a narrative of escalating threat.
Bleak for anybody who knows their history.
I think just forego the hypocrisy and have the Israeli's move the White House over there and put one of their own in it instead of pulling the strings.
Those who know their history also know that the current American administration is of a kind that usually ascends following the rules, but then never voluntarily leaves power.
So I don't think Israel has anything to fear there.
Not only the current administration, no US administration in the recent past or foreseeable future will not be okay with fighting wars for Israel at the cost of American lives and wealth. Some might hesitate or push back more than others, but the end result is the same.
> the current American administration is of a kind that usually ascends following the rules, but then never voluntarily leaves power
Sounds like you might be making a very strong claim! Can you make it more precise? For example, "President Trump will not peaceably transfer power at the end of his current term". Is it something you'd be willing to put money on, for example on Polymarket?
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Literally this week, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans polled favored Palestine over Israel.
To be clear, I'm not trying to suggest that's why we're bombing Iran today. Just pointing out a data point supporting your hypothesis.
The US has moved half of its navy in the region, and there are doubts about its support?
“In the future” is not “now”.
Neither the current administration nor Israel are particularly popular with the US public today, and those are correlated in that Israel has particularly lost support from Democrats and Independents in the US, suggesting that a change in power (legislative or executive, and especially both) in the US government could very easily spell much less favorable US policy toward Israel.
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That is only 6% of our Navy. Not half.
"Let's do it now, when they'd still move half their navy there for us, rather than in the future, when they might not."
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And it happened on a Friday night. Best time of the week for the least news impact.
In the great age of grift wars ideally last no more than the time between Friday market close and Sunday futures open.
More specifically, seems to be driven by Netanyahu's political accounting. Starting a potential major war going into mid-terms is pretty inconvenient for Trump who could be looking at impeachment over Epstein. But Netanyahu is facing trial and October-7 investigation commissions more imminently and can't wait that long. Netanyahu trumps Trump, evidently.
> is pretty inconvenient for Trump who could be looking at impeachment over Epstein
I mean, it is a pretty convenient distraction from the epstein files tho, so win-win for Trump/Netanyahu
It was Trump or his immediate environmetn who asked Israeli to attack Iran first (better optics); Israel would have never done this without American approval. Did Israel want this to happen though ? Yes. But so did the Americans. I guess the negotiations went badly.
"Negotiations"
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I'm surprised this has not been mentioned, for context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
I think that's because nobody believes for one second that these strikes are a retaliation for that.
Epstein files and plummeting poll numbers are more likely reasons
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Not surprising - people don't count deaths in the Middle East if they're caused by fellow Middle Easterns, except Israel. Living in Europe I've never heard about a protest against Saddam (250,000 - 1,000,000 dead), Khamenei (30,000 in a week?), Assad (> 300,000 civilians) etc. This is business as usual. It's only news if someone else does it.
this is so true
Maybe because nobody believes in the "exporting democracy" excuse anymore
> nobody believes in the "exporting democracy" excuse
Has this been argued?
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Are you saying those protested actually got funded by Israel and because Iran killed them, now Israel is retaliating?
Now I really wonder if those protests were indeed fueled and funded by Israel, because we have seen videos of mosques being burned down by protestors, which is strange for Shia Muslim country, even if they don't like their government
"A 2020 Online Survey by Gamaan found that 8.8% Iranians identifying as Atheist and a large fraction (22.2%) identifying as not following an organized religion and only 40% self identified as Muslims."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism_in_Iran
Compare how much Israel was in the news for targeting militants these past two years in Gaza.
How biased is the press? Iran slaughters 36k people in a week and... crickets. Israel refuses to let its hostages die while Hamas hides out in hospitals and schools and the world is against Israel not Iran.
Yeah, the:
>Trump urges Iranians to keep protesting, saying 'help is on its way'
stuff if pretty relevant.
If you think Trump did that because he cares about Democracy I have some news for you regarding the Jan 6 rioters...
Because HNers are not so gullible to swallow and regurgitate this pretext. The Trump administration doesn't care about the people of Iran, any more than Bush cared about the Iraqi Kurds or Afghan women. Just a pretext for geopolitics.
Rookie numbers. Wait until they got liberated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
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.
This is bad-faith rationalization. Looking at your comment history confirms that you only use HN to steer political narratives.
US needs to start thinking that you are not givinig someone freedom bt bombing them. You have soo much of your problems but your money printing machine is working and that is only reason that you can say that. Its not about 90m people its about your pockets...
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How did the US justify this?
The way they justify everything in the modern time.
“The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.”
If you are in the US, pray that you are never weak.
They stopped doing that, really.
You might've missed it but the "department of defense" is now "department of war'.
Here is their attempt: https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-trump-address-f662a4f3378...
Weapons of mass destruction, as usual.
1. Iranians protested.
2. Islamists massacred them.
3. Trump said "help is on its way" ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/13/trump-promises... )
4. Now is the help.
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Trump also said that when he says things he means them, unlike Obama's red lines in Syria (his words). When he said that, it was pretty clear he couldn't back off of attacking Iran.
I assume it took so long because he's going for regime change, not just a few bombings. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, it took the US 5 months to launch a counter-invasion (mostly because of coalition building).
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
Canadian here...
The world already know this. Having an agreement with the USA is a lot like having an agreement with Darth Vader. The terms of the deal can be altered unexpectedly at any time.
That doesn't mean that such agreements are worthless. They can still be of value to the counties making them. It is just that those countries have to take into account the unreliability of the entity they are making the deal with. Deals with the USA involve a lot of forecasting.
I'm pretty sure US higher-ups have been publicly describing Iran regime change as a todo-list item for a while now...
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.
I doubt the negotiations were in good faith, probably just a political 'see, we tried' gesture full of deal-breaker bad faith proposals. I think the plan all along has been to attack, probably for more than a year.
You don't go and rename a whole federal department to 'Department of War' when you don't intend to get into wars.
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What's predictable is, if you don't have nuclear weapons, you get attacked. Ask Ukraine. If I were a small country (any country for that matter) the first order of business would be to build myself nuclear weapons now.
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They were literally in the middle of negotiations, but Trump started the war anyway...
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there is news iran accepted to zero nuclear enrichment so what are you saying?
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Did Israel bomb the Iranian negotiators again?
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 believe everything the US says? lol
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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-...
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I hope you’re right but not too confident that will be the case. I wish EU leadership wouldn’t be as spineless as it is. I’m afraid they will accept any opportunity to make things feel as if they are back to the old normal if they are given the opportunity. And that would of course backfire, but long term thinking hasn’t been our strength over the past 3 decades or so…
Somehow world will close eyes again ... Somehow we need to bring back moral standards that we all have deep in ourselves and screw this money world me all made together... I dont have answers or ideas how but this is just nonsense
US has been always playing god, cunning manipulations all over the world. Most of the Europe was silent until recently when Greenland under threat. US benefits from every war either oil, rare metals, trade, weapons, there is always an agenda even though they are not directly involved.
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Or you can blame Israel and Zionists lobbying the governments and media that radicals will crawl out under everyone's beds. (PS: it started before Libya)
You realise you are doing the “Thanks Obama” thing
Trump does something: "it's Obama/Biden's fault!"
Tiresome.
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Bored of Peace
I think its only just getting started
USA, bombing for peace since bombs were invented.
I think everyone should stop being so nervous. How many times have the U.S. and Israel hit Iran over the past two years? And people still aren’t used to it? On Monday, the market might not even drop. In fact, a lot of people may want to buy the dip. Everyone hypes up the fear, the big players wait to scoop up bargains, and then what happens? Not only does it not fall, it rebounds instead. How many times have we seen this script already?
And Iran? Every single time it’s just performance art. I’m already sick of watching it.
Besides, Iran has been heavily sanctioned and blocked by the U.S. and Israel for so many years that its impact on the global economy is basically zero. So what the hell is there to dump over?
Oil prices? Venezuela’s situation has already been dealt with. The U.S. can produce its own oil, Canada still has plenty of oil, and Russia is still selling at bargain-bin prices. Iran and the surrounding major oil-producing countries are barely even moving in sync, and there’s basically no real incentive for anything major to happen to oil. So why the hell would the market drop?
As for all this fearmongering, I’d say go harder. Seriously, make it as apocalyptic as possible, so my gold can moon, I can pick up cheap Taiwan stocks, and short crypto, so I can completely clean out all the people panicking in fear.
Iran is the 5th biggest oil producer in the world. Not only that, it can cut-off the strait of Hormuz which 5 of the top 10 oil producers ship their oil through, including Saudi Arabia which is the nr 1 exporter.
In earlier strikes Iran signaled it did not want to escalate. It warned US bases prior to its attack, and sent small symbolic strikes to pacify their base, while trying to de-escalate through all diplomatic channels.
This time it looks different, Israel/US have targetted their president and political (religious) leader. There is hardly a more existential threat you can imagine for the current regime, so it will do everything in its power to strike back. If you put someone with his back on the wall and start a firing squad, don't expect a non-response.
Beyond that it's the middle east, last time US tried regime change we had two decades of violence with 1m Iraqi's dead and ISIS rampaging in the region. It's a human catastrophe that people are worried about, not just stock markets. To come here and talk about your stocks is insane.
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.
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Not the first time Trump has wagged the dog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_dog
A mere 8 months ago, Trump and his cronies were saying that Iran’s nuclear program was “totally obliterated” every chance they got.
And perhaps more importantly, “Suggestions otherwise are fake news”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...
New day, new talking points. Surely this isn’t a surprise to you?
16 months ago, he was campaigning on no new wars.
Presumably, what he meant was 'No, new wars!'
I don’t know why anyone even bothers with this anymore. Literally every single word that comes out of his mouth is a lie. It’s actually staggering to think about. It’s like he is incapable of doing anything that right, correct, or true.
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.
Iran has marvelous cities, sim of the greatest humanity archeological treasures.
It hurts my heart to see Americans destroying them (and the thousands of lifes).
Iran also has a gang of murderous theocratic nutters running it, massacring their citizens for taking to the streets and singing songs, undermining foreign societies, and lending their knowhow and drones to other, bigger psychopaths for their invasions. It'll gladden my heart if the leadership is destroyed, even if some old pretty masonry gets chipped along the way.
> massacring their citizens for taking to the streets and singing songs
The US is also doing this albeit fewer people.
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Isn't Iran also famous for destroying landmarks that don't glorify the official state religion?
[1]: https://www.war.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/4354431/rem...
Iranians are celebrating, btw. This is what they have been dreaming of. This is their chance to finally take their country back, and I think they'll do it.
I can't think of a better use of US military power in the world than to take out this terrible regime and let the Iranians do the rest. This isn't Iraq or Venezuela. People saying that we can't bomb our way into regime change apparently didn't follow the protests and massacres very closely a couple months ago. Iranians were begging for help so that they could topple the regime.
The news of bombs falling on schools must be really exhilarating to people. Especially for the ones that have children! Finally they have a chance to throw away their government and replace it with a military junta
Good job parroting Iranian propaganda
> People saying that we can't bomb our way into regime change apparently didn't follow the protests and massacres very closely a couple months ago. Iranians were begging for help so that they could topple the regime.
Of course people didn’t follow. Did you see any major news outlet doing live coverage of the events like they did for October 7th? No.
Probably not the dead ones
They didn't celebrate the last time Israel & the U.S. attacked them & they aren't celebrating now.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/01/trump-kham...
Successful regime change requires a far more significant investment in soft power than America & Israel's current right-wing leadership would even conceive of.
Interesting times intensifies. It's only February.
There are always unanticipated consequences in war. Argentina never thought in a million years that an attack on the practically undefended Falklands would result in the loss of the General Belgrano.
The whole Anthropic DoW tiff was related to this, and folks were downvoting me even minutes before the first strike for making the connection:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189853#47191060
I really do not even want to understand the mental gymnastics which one has to undertake to justify the actions of the US and Israel in recent years.
Nor do I even know how to begin to grasp the enablement displayed by Europe as a whole. People constantly cite China’s “human rights abuses” (which seem to pale in comparison to all this) and rightly so, but continue to enable this blood thirsty and power hungry tag team to indulge in flagrant abuses of international law and general morality.
This is a sad day for level headed and empathetic humans across the globe. At which point do we accept that WW3 began quite a while ago? Because it sure as shit did.
Edit: fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion but it’s my truth.
To add to this: anyone who still does not see that Israel is by and far the most dangerous rogue state in the region is (at best) blinded by propaganda.
Iran has repeatedly demonstrated restraint and pragmatism throughout these aggressions on their sovereignty, starting with Israel’s strike on their consulate in Damascus.
There is a curious cognitive dissonance in which people think is somehow more morally correct to do human rights abuses abroad than at home. The US is doing both currently, though.
There is no need to gymnastics. Iran materially supports russian war against Ukraine.
Very level headed and empathetic to go and claim that 50 countries just lost their right to criticize China because US and Israel are fighting Iran. Trolls having their priorities straight!
He did not make that claim and even said criticism of China’s abuses is warranted. Zionist shill.
Are all our foreign policy decisions now made in Tel Aviv to suit Israel?
Sure seems that way. I don't really see how this military action is justified from a US perspective. Or even from an Israeli one. The most likely justification is that the leadership of the US and Israel are a little bit unhinged and want a war to distract from domestic issues.
Not only is it unjustified, attacking during a negotiation seriously undermines future negotiations. This is a massive self face punching exercise.
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Netanjahu is old and wants to secure his 'legacy' by being credited for dismantling Iran, knowing Trump will back him both because he's been fed BS and because the Israelis have enough kompromat to sink him. There's no 'rational' justification for this attack, only madness and huge egos.
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Well, it's plausibly justified because the US considers a strong regional ally like Israel a valuable asset to have in the Middle East and if Israel is a regional hegemon [1] then all the better.
There have been many arguments that the US' support of Israel goes against US interests [2], but that really makes no sense. It's not just Trump who has to be convinced to start a war for Israel, it's the entire defense establishment in the US.
And also in Israel. If fighting half a dozen wars all at once was really that bad for Israel, surely, someone would have put a stop in it.
Surely.
_____________
[1] Got that term from J. Mearsheimer, if you were wondering.
[2] Particularly the Tucker Carlson - Judge Napolitano - Col. Daniel Davies continuum of mostly conservative podcast hosts. Or those are the ones I follow closely anyway. They're all convinced it's all "because of the lobby".
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I am not convinced that Israel is such an important ally.
I suspect a fourth column.
Israel is not an ally, it's the puppet. What is happening is what the Anglo-Americans want.
You know the answer ;-)
No. They're made in Virginia and broadcast to proxies around the world.
Seriously, I'm constantly amazed by how oblivious some Americans are. You got it all backwards.
Israel is the tip of the USA spear. We've seen this already, this should come as no surprise.
What makes you think it suits Israel? There is only one person here it serves
careful, you might get flagged by the self appointed hackernews mods
Always have been.
Oh, it's not only Israel. It's also a powerful distraction from the Epstein files.
Wait, weren't the Epstein files a distraction from war operations?
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This doesn't even benefit Israel, it benefits a bunch of power-hungry sociopaths in Israel.
Nope. In Jerusalem.
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My theory was they were waiting for the finale of Tehran on Apple TV
The president of peace btw.
I'm baffled at the lack of calls to boycott the Fifa world cup in US.
And at the double standards applied to Russians and Israelis in their wars of aggression.
I guess Israel can play the "October 7th" card at least which was an insane horror.
I don't want to insult you but your president is a populist and a TV personality. He is not a policy maker, he is more like an actor. So your country went into war mode by changing the name of the Department of Defence to Department of War. This was not a cosmetic change. This means peace times are over and you are in war. Your government acts accordingly.
Since you are still a democracy find those people who make your policy decisions. It's not that yellow man.
> find those people who make your policy decisions
Genuine question: who put Iran in their policy portfolio?
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>I don't want to insult you but your president is a populist and a TV personality. He is not a policy maker, he is more like an actor.
All of them are, even those that haven't had a show on TV.
I'm not disagreeing with you but "Dept of War" is ENTIRELY a cosmetic change. It's literally just a name. There are people, mostly with desk jobs, who really want to feel like badasses and they really want the Dept of War. The real human consequences of this are unimportant to them and sadly unimportant to the rest of us also.
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Ukraine’s TV personality leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems to be doing alright. Also went into war, but not of their own doing, and he has been measured, insightful, aware, throughout this whole war.
There’s more to it than Trump being a TV show personality. Far too complex and insidious than a simple quip.
I don't think the American people can change their country's policy oriented toward a constant state of war, aggression, and invasions of other countries under the current system. This is a constant state policy, regardless of the party or the president. So it can be said that the United States is not a democracy. Money and capital rule, not the people.This can only be changed by a fundamental shift that empowers people over capital.
Of course, I agree that Trump is worse because, by removing the mask of civility and attacking others without first bothering to create propaganda and a narrative about how it is for the greater good and justice, he made the plundering and crimes faster and more efficient.
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The moment they made that name change and stated their expansionist agenda it finally became clear to me that this wasn't just MAGA anymore, this was actual fascism.
Whether you think the current targets are legitimate or not, the fact that the U.S. is going to war without seeking any democratic approval anymore is deeply troubling.
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I'm not American.
The Trump admin would sooner drop nukes on LA then cede a fair election.
An honest discussion about this cannot be had on this site, it's kinda funny how pointless all the comments are here. Yours is the closest anyone is allowed to get and I wonder if yours will stay up.
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Ukraine is a democracy with a legitimate leadership that was not planning to acquire nukes and has no history of planning to remove Russia from the map. To suggest that this attack on Iran is the same as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is very misguided.
Iran has been "a week away" from acquiring nukes since Netanyahu first claimed it in the 90s.
Not six months ago, Trump launched a strike that "completely obliterated" Iran's ability to obtain nukes. And then, either because he has the memory of a goldfish, or thinks that we do (both are somewhat true), he pulled out "a week away", again, at the SOTU. "We must attack Iran to destroy what I told you we destroyed last year."
Iran may be planning to do so. But this is just a boogeyman being used (again) by Israel and the US.
Ukraine got rid of nukes and it was massive collosal mistake. In alternative universe where they win and get territory back and get economy on track, they would be 100% warranted to get the nukes.
My point is, Ukraine war and the way it evolved shows that not having nukes is a bad position.
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You forgot the genocide they have going and the current attempt to starve Cuba into submission with their little "blockade"
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It's not the same as all, whatever you think of the Ukraine, it used to be part of the Soviet Union. Russia and the Ukraine fighting is a "normal" war. The US has absolutely no business attacking Iran. It's entirely unprovoked and at the behest of the terrorist "nation" of Israel, which also should have nothing to do with the US.
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> And at the double standards applied to Russians and Israelis in their wars of aggression.
I would argue that funding Axis of Resistance from Hezbollah to Houthis is aggression too. Let’s not pretend that IR minded their own business, and suddenly was under attack.
There was literally a puppet regime in the 70s backed and promoted by the US.
And since then Iran has always been in US and Israeli crossfire.
You also need to try to understand their point of view.
There's no doubt Iran has promoted armed resistance and terrorism, don't get me wrong, but ask yourself how much of this is about their own safety and defence. It's not 0%, far from it.
Just FYI, Chomsky, answering "Is Iran a Threat?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdxxVxtHK2M
It's called R2P.
I support resistance against Zionist terror, that's in the best interest of US citizens. They're literally fighting the Epstein people.
Not to mention all the numerous threats to wipe Israel off the map by Iran, Hez etc.
Let's not pretend Iran is innocent please. Or Hamas either.
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The war started in 1948 by Europeans attempting to attack and invade Palestine to grab their land to build their mediterranean resort homes. The war never stopped. There was no surrender documents signed. The foreign invaders have always been in the state of war. It's why their colonial outposts are required to have bomb shelters.
Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when the foreign invaders literally burned children alive in 1948 by throwing them into ovens, as happened in the Deir Yassin massacre. Or the rape camps of Tantura. There were 15,000 innocent civilians killed by the invaders when they started this war.
I still can't believe we have to fight Israel's war for them. First the Iraq war and now the Iran war.
> The war started in 1948 by Europeans attempting to attack and invade Palestine to grab their land to build their mediterranean resort homes.
Jewish people lived there for the past two thousands years. Hebron massacre by Arabs happened in 1929.
> It's why their colonial outposts are required to have bomb shelters.
I think they have bomb shelters to save their civilians from bombs.
> Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when the foreign invaders literally burned children alive in 1948 by throwing them into ovens, as happened in the Deir Yassin massacre. Or the rape camps of Tantura. There were 15,000 innocent civilians killed by the invaders when they started this war.
Interesting how you are totally fine with murder of civilians as long as they are the "right" kind of civilians.
> war started in 1948
It's the Middle East. The birthplace of civilisation. Everyone can legitimately claim everyone else started every conflict in the region because war in Mesopotamia and the Levant literally predates history.
At the end of the day I believe in the primacy of the living. Crimes committed by and against those alive today are infinitely more imporant than those committed by and against their ancestors. I've seen folks take this shit back to King Herod and the Parthians, and it's not a bad historical argument. (The Romans intervened.) It's practically counterproductive, however, inasmuch as focussing on blame versus harm reduction and prevention is counterproductive in any conflict resolution.
One of the separations between the rich and peaceful and the poor and permanently warring is in capacities to forgive. Japan wouldn't be a better place if they committed terrorist attacks against their American occupiers, or decided that they needed blood for Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And Americans wouldn't be happier if we decided to lob a nuke at the British in WWII for burning down our White House in the War of 1812. (France didn't ultimately profit from the Treaty of Versailles.)
> Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when
No. Don't do this to yourself. I get the temptation. But it is the path to becoming a monster. October 7 was an insane horror. So were other things. Atrocities aren't signed; they don't cancel out, just accumulate.
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> And at the double standards applied to Russians and Israelis in their wars of aggression
To be fair, this is the new standard. Russia has promulgated it through its actions in Georgia and Ukraine. China with Tibet and Taiwan. America with Iraq, Venezuela and Iran. The old rules-based international order is dead, and with it Pax Americana.
> the old rules-based international order
At most that was a couple of decades, it's not like that's an ancient status quo.
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The wishes of a small group of people aren't the default for the majority. This is why the small group of people say that strong leaders for life, with no checks, are normal and natural.
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> To be fair, this is the new standard.
It's not. It's the same standard that existed forever.
> Russia has promulgated it through its actions in Georgia and Ukraine. China with Tibet and Taiwan. America with Iraq, Venezuela and Iran.
Don't forget India with Goa and pakistan, bangladesh, etc.
You are my favorite hindu zionist. I mean you are my favourite hindu zionist.
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> China with Tibet and Taiwan
What do you mean? China has bought Tibet from the British. And what have they done with Taiwan?
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I know I left that Nobel Peace Prize somewhere … but I can't find it because there's so much America First lying around. I know, I'll ask the aliens and the US men's hockey team if they've seen it.
surely you mean the coveted FIFA Peace Prize!
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Being attacked should rule out 'war of aggression', but I guess the phrase seems to have lost any meaning in modern discourse. Apparently you can spend all the time calling 'death to X' and then get shocked when others take you seriously.
You seem to have forgotten that the US attacked Iran first, which made this regime even possible in the first place.
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> Being attacked should rule out 'war of aggression'
It usually does. The argument here is about the proportion of the response.
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>I guess Israel can play the "October 7th" card at least which was an insane horror.
If October 7th is an "insane horror", what words will suffice to describe the decades of far worse crimes committed by Israel?
Considering the scale of suffering caused by this conflict, October 7th was just a small blip.
Can you provide some support for your moral position? You’ve also put “insane horror” in scare quotes, which honestly I find troubling.
Does your moral account provide some justificatory, non-antisemitic framework based on colonialism or oppression that allows us to sidestep the issues with Gazans’ support of Jihad, other extremist doctrines, and the extermination of Jews?
It’s kind of a rhetorical question, but it’s the least I would expect for someone to argue credibly about the morality of the conflict.
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"small blip" isn't a political take, it's just wrong.
October 7th was the deadliest per capita terrorist attack since the Global Terrorism Database started recording in 1970 [1]. Globally, it's third on the all-time list (behind only 9/11 and one IS attack [1]. The confirmed death toll from Israeli social security data (not government press releases) is 1,139, which still makes it 31 times deadlier than the next worst attack in Israeli history [2][3].
You invoked scale. Those are the numbers. They don't say what you wanted them to say.
And for the record: one atrocity not excusing another cuts both ways. Nobody here argued otherwise. What was actually said (by the person you're replying to) is that you cannot use scale as your framework whilst hand-waving away the single largest data point in the argument.
If you mean the Nakba, Sabra and Shatila, or the current death toll in Gaza — those are serious. But "decades of far worse crimes" doing the work of making October 7th a "small blip" doesn't follow. You can have a long ledger of serious grievances and still recognise that one morning where 1,139 people were massacred (including at a music festival, in kibbutz bedrooms, in bomb shelters) was not a blip. It was the deadliest single terrorist attack per capita since records began.
There is no moral argument for October 7th, and the reaction is disproportionate and unjustifiable - but inevitable. We should all be so unlucky to have neighbours like those, and nobody knows how we would all act if we did.
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/hamass-october-7-attack-visual...
[2] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social...
[3] https://www.csis.org/analysis/hamass-october-7-attack-visual...
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While I agree, and I find that Israel is on the wrong side of history, I'm not entirely into seeing this whole matter as black and white.
I have the opinion that modern world history is mostly shaped around each countries/population traumas that echo through society till today.
E.g. the biggest trauma of Ukrainians aren't even the events that are playing recently, but the Holodomor that happened 100 years ago. On the other hand the biggest trauma on Russian side is still the German invasion and war of annihilation happened during the second world war. As both sides see themselves as the victims and see the other side as the aggressor (or collaborator) and none has ever taken a step back to recognize their actions, they simply cannot communicate.
The biggest trauma of China is the century of humiliation where western powers and Japan went above and beyond any decency in their actions. Thus, Chinese society and leadership is all about never being dictated conditions and terms by foreign powers. They see themselves as victims of events that they don't want to see ever again.
The jewish Israeli population biggest trauma are centuries if not millenia of animosity, racism and violence coming from any side, last but definitely not least the Holocaust. Thus Israel is all about security at all costs, even if it means bending any sign of human decency. Again, they see themselves as victims and their actions will always go in that direction.
Sadly many parts of the world, many countries, many societies, are simply too scarred and unable to take a step back from the victim mentality and recognize their own actions.
Israelis are unable to recognize they are Goliath and not David from the longest time, they are unable and unwilling to say sorry, the last Israeli leader that tried, got assassinated by one of his own.
The arabic/muslim population in the area too see themselves as victims of the post world war 2 events, and they are as well unable to recognize how scarred and traumatized is Israeli society from centuries of events, including modern ones where they had to survive against hostile Arab coalitions aimed to annihilate them.
So, without a generation of leaders able to recognize and understand the role of history and those traumas and empathize with the other sides we're trapped in those loops of aggression.
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> The president of peace btw.
Europe is to blame, according to him.
FIFA might be the one organization that can go toe to toe with Trump I’m corruption. And I mean that in the worst way possible. Qatar was using literal slave labor to get stadiums built and the organization just shrugged when informed like it was just another Tuesday.
He could drop a nuke on Greenland tomorrow and they’d probably say they don’t want the sport to be tangled in political disagreements and if anything the World Cup can help everyone heal.
I can't believe the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize would do such a thing.
I for one can no longer take the FIFA Peace Prize seriously.
As Ukrainian, I don't remember launching missiles on russia, or, in fact, any aggression towards russia. In its turn russia did recognize borders with Ukraine in multiple treaties, and on top of that security guarantees promised in exchange of 3rd by the size world nuclear arsenal.
Just a quick reminder, that Iranian and Hamas policy towards Israel is extermination. Palestine was never recognized by Israel or USA. Israel is not recognized by Iran.
So tell me, what parallels do you see between these conflicts? Human misery and destruction is hardly a common ground, and even in that, scale is incomparable.
Pax Romana peace.
Look up what the Iranian regime has done to his people and to others, including US and European countries, since 1979 and you'll understand that the only reason US allies are cautious and not fully behind this campaign is that toppling the regime means high uncertainty as to what would replace it...
I know some people weren't alive then, but the invasion of Iraq started off pretty good for the US... Sort of how Russia imagined it's march on Kiev would go (!3) 4 years ago.
What replaced Sadaam was the US, and that went horribly for everyone.
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People still believe October 7th attacks weren't intentionally allowed? There is a lot of legitimate debate on this topic as the security failures are unusual and are still officially being discussed in Israel.
I see no "smoking gun" for this yet, but yeah, there are a lot of indicators, such as alarm calls by military observers being ignored beforehand, IDF units having been moved from the Gaza envelope to the West Bank before, etc.
Of course, Netanyahu could counter those rumors by establishing a state commission if inquiry, but instead he fights tooth and nail to prevent this from happening...
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It's a well documented fact that Netanyahu has always wanted and actively supported Hamas leadership in order to have no reasons to sit at the table of with the PLA.
When the other side is led by what you can easily sell to the world as terrorists, you're by default the good guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
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If that was an attitude of Israel towards its people they wouldn't go to such length to return the hostages home.
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What a pile of non-sense. I despise literally everyone in the Israeli government, but suggesting this was allowed by anyone in the government/military/intelligence is the lowest low form of ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Nothing like this is "officially discussed in Israel", unless you mean "repeatedly officially denied".
People like you still spread stupid lies about it, but no one with any sense believes them. There is no legitimate debate on the subject, only propaganda, and it comes from Benjamin Netanyahu directly.
Obviously, it’s the same stupidity that “allowed” the 7th of October attacks to happen. These people are way too scared and hateful of Palestinians to conspire with them like this. They allowed it to happen through sheer incompetence. They just let their guard down, quite literally.
If they could actually cooperate well enough to work together on something like the 7th of October of attacks, which were under active planning for at least two years and involved thousands of highly trained men, don’t you think they’d be able to cooperate on something positive too?
Well either utter incompetence of every part of military of israel, or planned to allow it to happen. They even removed most of the guards spread across the region, those who were left were often only with pistols from what I've heard. They were closely monitoring hamas training for exactly this just before it happened.
Sure, some incompetent russian fsb officer who got his place thanks to nepotism may miss that, but mosad, on border with one's mortal enemy? Give me a break, there is 0 logic and knowledge of the involved parties in such thinking.
But its expected, say soviet union went to great lengths to make state terror official and legal, justified and all by th books. Not sure for whom since all knew what chaotic terror was happening all the time and there was often no logic in who was next, but the face of the regime needed to have everything straight and square.
Anyway, those who actually care about the topic understand it well, its not some superbly hidden scheming bur rather facts in plain sight. The rest of folks simply don't care
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Careful people will call you an antisemite for even bringing this topic.
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Do you support the Iranian regime?
> I guess Israel can play the "October 7th" card at least which was an insane horror.
The islamic republic of Iran has been slaughtering tens of thousands of peaceful protesters who don't want to live under sharia laws anymore. Hunting wounded in hospitals and executing them.
It's obvious there's a movement in Iran that tries to topple the islamist regime. In my city, in the EU, I see cars with iranian flags and I've seen iranian in exile call for the international community to do targetted strikes.
I'm not defending the strikes but let's not make it sound like the US is launching nukes on peaceful monks in Tibet either: we're talking about evil islamist regime that slaughtered tens of thousands of unarmed people a few weeks ago.
I was going to say it's false equivalence to compare the Russian attack on Ukraine which was peaceful with a newly installed democratic leader and Iran which has an iffy dictatorship slaughtering thousands of unarmed protestors and exporting terrorism all over with aspirations to make that nuclear.
That was obviously exaggerated, think about the planning and resources needed to execute a stadium worth of people across a country. Not possible in a few days without extreme preparation, or bodies rotting everywhere.
if he has no consequences for this, and he won't
it would be very bad to be Cuba right now
considering when the midterms are and about how long it would take afterwards to move all the ships
I mean why would he stop with Iran?
All of the US is now a "constitution-free zone"
> it would be very bad to be Cuba right now
Yesterday Trump proposed that the US take over Cuba. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-...
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Do Americans even read or care about Constitution anymore?
Congress declares War.
Even Bush sought out Congressional approval and had a resolution passed before invading Iraq.
These guys are speed running the fascist playbook. Disregarding laws is one step.
What does it matter? There won't be any consequences for it. He can just do this now and then later the supreme court or congress will say something that also won't matter. The trade war wasn't legal, was struck down, yet is still happening.
> Do Americans even read or care about Constitution anymore?
Supreme court does not, so why should random Americans?
It is not like the high but malleable ideals in it mattered. Its only use is to be able to claim in abstract "we have these freedoms and protection" while the court system renders them void in practice.
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Almost a quarter of Americans are functional illiterate, and it's getting worse for new generations
50%+ have below sixth grade reading comprehension
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Surely this was approved by the Board of Peace. /s
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"We haven't killed as many as the totalitarian religious fundamentalists" is a really shitty justification for your behavior.
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So what? You still believe you're the world police?
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6 million kids? whole palestine has less total population, gaza has less than 1 million total population, no?
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And all that Israel did to the Palestinians before October 7th.
why do you stop at 6 million, sir holocaust inverter? why not say israel killed 6 billion?
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> Working towards war with Iran has been bipartisan US policy for decades now
Obama signed the Iran nuclear deal in July 2015 [1].
Biden didn't put any policy focus on Iran, in part becase, with the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult to distill any policy focus from that Presidency following Covid. But he also didn't ratchet up pressure in any material way [2]. (And to be clear, I'm not saying that's good.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93United_States_rel...
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Not sure how you can say that considering that he did it without Congressional approval? It’s literally all him.
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You gotta be kidding
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What I would like people to understand is that this isn't a partisan issue. As bad as Trump is, American foreign policy is uniparty. Just look at the rhetoric from the Democratic Party leadership on an Iran strike. You have the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries quibbling over the procedure not the policy, saying Congress needs to approve action, not that that action is belligerent or unwarranted.
October 7 happened under a Democratic president and continued essentially unchanged under Trump. Biden consistently lied about "red lines" and seeing a ceasefire [1].
The problem here isn't one party or one persident, it's America's commitment to imperialism, of which Iran is just one aspect. Since WW2 especially there has been so much regime change done or aided by the US as well as military action, it has it's own Wikipedia page [2].
And what did Kamala Harris promise to change about Biden's Middle East policy? Absolutely nothing [3]. It's a big part of why she lost and the DNC don't want to admit that so they're trying to cover up the 2024 autopsy [4].
Don't fool yourself into thinking anything would be different under a Kamala Harris administration.
[1]: https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/the-biden-admin...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/8/8/biden-vs-harris-...
[4]: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-2024-autopsy-harris-gaz...
> The problem here isn't one party or one persident, it's America's commitment to imperialism, of which Iran is just one aspect.
Iran is as imperialistic if not more. Why you are against US "imperialism" but for Islamic Republic's one?
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I’m not sure what would have happened under a Dem administration. I’m not sure I’m against action in Iran.
But one the whole like precedents of the Trump Administration, was that we were going to ignore foreign entanglements, even if they could be perceived as being in our interests.
It’s wild to me how much Trump seems like Bush 2.0 when I think Trump was something of a reaction to Bush 1.0.
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Trump has been publicly mulling over an attack on Iran for several weeks. It’s been headline news everywhere.
I did not not notice any opinions, one way or the other, from other American politicians. Correct me if I’m wrong ( with link, of course. )
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So much of both parties is actually alike, underneath a window dressing of differences (eg woke/anti woke), and a complicit media which does its best to amplify and brainwash people into believing. When it comes to policies that actually affect the elites, the deep state military industrial complex/intelligence services or financial interests, it is a uniparty. Look at how Obama continued the war on terror for example, after running on “hope and change”.
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You say that like US and Israel hit Iceland or Portugal. Like, Iran wasn't source of terror on Middle East, funding terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbolla and Houthi. Like, Iran didn't make "death to Israel, death to America" their national idea.
Remind us of Ukrainian rocket attacks on Russian cities, that provoked Ruso-Ukrainian war.
You can't not know all of this, so you're either a hamas/russian shill or a useful idiot.
Israel makes sure Hamas is funded, are they a valid target now?
I really hope our Government seeks out all these terrorists and Iran boosters on Hacker News who work in high tech. It’s a supply chain risk and none of them should be working.
>I guess Israel can play the "October 7th" card at least which was an insane horror.
More than twice as many people died in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria than on October 7th.
My regard is thus: lobs less than half an intercontinental ballistic roll of paper towels at Tel Aviv
>And at the double standards applied to Russians and Israelis in their wars of aggression.
Russians invading Ukraine is NOT the same at all. You lefties are running Reddit and now HN. I am done. So done.
"Peace through strength"
That's the policy being followed here. If you remember back a few weeks, Iran killed likely 30,000 of its own citizens. On top of that, they will not negotiate about medium and short-range missiles or stopping of nuclear production.
A power like that that happily goes after it's neighbors, directly or indirectly is a threat to everyone.
Applying those particular criticisms to Iran and not Israel is a special kind of irony given the past ~75 years (but especially the last 2-3), and when the latter is presently attacking the former unprovoked.
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>A power like that that happily goes after it's neighbors, directly or indirectly is a threat to everyone.
Is the US a threat because of its actions towards Venezuela?
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Apropos of nothing in particular, back in the previous millennium, UNIX (and Linux) had the `fortune` command. It would spew out a "cookie" - a pithy one-/two-liner, usually funny, often thought-provoking, and sometimes offensive (when invoked with `fortune -o`)
I had added it to my `motd`; it would give me a chuckle every time I logged in.
One of the cookies I recall:
A nuclear war can ruin your whole day. [1]
And that's what I think of when I see this absurd new war.
[1] http://fortunes.pbworks.com/w/page/14107138/politics
special operation
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.
How can you look at the current support for Trump and conclude you would've won in the US by not supporting Israel?
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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.
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Attacking Iran is bipartisan consensus unfortunately.
Schumer, for example, is an avowed Zionist and would love to attack Iran. Case in point: His leadership worked to delay Massey and Khanna's war powers resolution until after this attack so they could say "Well, I guess we're too late. Darn."
They absolutely do matter. Though not on this issue. Permanent war in the Middle East is a bipartisan issue.
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The ICE killings, deportations of US citizens, and the general anti-US sentiments around the world show that lesser evil exists, and that not voting can have consequences.
It's a shame that it took all this for the Democrats to even begin the dialog about Israeli money in politics, and perhaps they may even realize that nobody wants to vote for pro-war neoliberals.
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they do when you hear for months that we need to elect people that will stop the senseless wars - then they do matter
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I've long suspected DJT is on a rampage of radical, ragebait news worthy actions to take the news away from the Epstein files. I hate that it's working and many people have to suffer because of it.
Crypto going down while Gold going up (on XAUt) suggests the market thinks this war is not going to go necessarily to the US/Israel advantage.
as iran is a major player in crypto money laundering then it could price its fall
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202602279443
why?
is not crypto going down on any "multinational"* war?
*war amid thai and kambodgia is not "multinational" kind of, just example of not any
There wasn't a war between the Siam and Khmer, just some clashes plus their conflict is irrelevant to the rest of the world. I am not aware of crypto going down during that time? If I remember correctly it was close to ATH.
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?
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?
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Or we can all shoot ourselves in the face. Faster, cheaper, and guaranteed to work every time. Ish.
> 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.
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Nukes do not help against guerilla warfare: their destructive power is so big that they are really unreasonable attack weapon, and only a deterring factor instead.
They protect against being "policed" by big world countries.
Eg. if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons, Russia would not have been invading them (or are they "protecting" them, as promised when they took their nuclear arsenal for destruction?). If Iran or Iraq had nuclear weapons, they would not have been bombed by US.
>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...
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Can't tell if sarcasm
"This war like the next war, is the war to end all wars"
- David LLoyd George, c.1916
The first wars were fought between tribes and then later between kingddoms for power/minor differences and trying to increase influence and alliances. Religion and race and many other discriminating factors are used for both sides to get support of the people, the people who are actually gonna carry the rifle and risk their lives and lose it, this drives the next war to redeem the losses of the first one, to take revenge.
This then creates a community which dislikes the other community and now we are here.
We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. … If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.
- Bertrand Russel in Skeptical Essays.
Humanity has had a history written with bloodshed but the problem right now seems to me that we don't know how to write future, we lack a vision for other prospects, it seems to me that we jump into the newest Hype on the block and its all so wishy-washy. Contrary to people saying its a western issue, I think its an whole world issue, its just that the west is particularly impacted by it.
Has there been a desensitization in things in recent years?
I know of atleast one leader (King Kaniska) who fought for land (Modern day Orrisa) and won and then saw the bloodshed and screams on the ground and decided to not repeat it and I think he spent later of his life trying to promote peace.
I am sure that there must be other leaders in the history of past as well but perhaps its the problem of history as well which can sometimes glorify wars.
I think the biggest problem right now is being noise. We have created machines so large that humans have lost dignity and are treated unfairly at scale in terms of Renting places at scale owned by shell companies who'd rather have it empty than give you affordable housing. Prices seem to be increasing and I don't think modern social media helps in giving people dignity quite the opposite at times and it's very likely someone is reading this who may have contributed to making the machine.
With this being a political thread, I see comments from both sides[0], I don't think I have too much to add politically to the discussion but perhaps I just wanted to treat out that its best we treat each other with dignity in this thread and in general because I do believe that's the only thing we can do which can bring change. It's gonna be extremely hard for people to treat others with dignity while taking sides which talk about wars killing people, but I don't know what else to say. Iranian censorship for its people but I am not sure if the current idea of America brings me thinking of liberation. One can wish for pure democracies in such regions but its gonna be extremely hard and even grass-roots movements of these can be shut down by intrusive forces whether foreign or govt itself and given that the region is extremely shaky relying on oil which can be extracted from ground leading to a less dependence on people themselves for Iranian govt.s being the reason why they can be so censoring. They have shown enough power to fight massive protests but as I said earlier, the current picture of America don't exactly give me the idea of bringing pure democracy in the region either.
My prayers to the Iranian people who are stuck between a rock and tough spot.
(there are no sides, its a circle, a circle of people who start wars and the people who fight wars)
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.
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They’re not nuking Tehran, they’re dropping targeted bombs on government/military sites.
Get in touch with your local Iranian community. You’d be surprised how much they’re cheering the bombing on.
You might be surprised that people inside Tehran are shouting “get the mullahs out” and cheering us on.
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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 region 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.
> This is about Israel's national security interests and hegemonic ambitions.
This sums it all up succinctly. Emphasis on the “hegemonic ambitions” part.
Apparently you don't even have to give Americans the neocon foreign policy spin anymore, we generate it ourselves.
To wit, after Maduro was kidnapped and the exact same regime kept in place (minus selling oil to Cuba), and Trump openly said it was to control the oil, most of the reactions were pretending we live in a universe where the US does these things to spread democracy.
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 valid justification on this specific case is probably highly debatable. I think a reasonable argument could be made)
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The 'tens of thousands' figure is one primary justification. Iran (eventually) getting a nuke is another.
All I can do is sit here and sigh.
The thing is, as sudden as this seems to the general public, this is something that takes months of planning. Having served in the Navy for eight years, I know that this kind of thing doesn't necessarily happen overnight. That doesn't mean it _couldn't_. The US military certainly does have the ability to plan a strike very quickly.
But, most likely, this was planned behind closed doors. Based on the reports, I bet this was probably planned shortly after Trump took office. It just so happens that it's a good distraction from the Epstein files.
I hate the direction this country's government is taking. It sucks. I just want to leave at some point. I don't want my family to grow up here anymore.
Of course there was a military plan for this since months, but that does not mean that plan was surely to be executed. (A likely option I assume)
What I find worrying is the standard tactic seems to be to do negotiations, let the other side assume there is hope for a other solution - and then attack hard all of a sudden. Already the second time. It might be effective short term, but it erodes what is left of trust negotiating with the US.
This one isn't all bad. From Trump's recent speech:
>Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand
It may not work but it's not a bad objective. My mum in the UK is a Bahai and a lot of those are refugees from Iran because they say be nice and tolerant and the Iranian government imprisons or kills them for so doing. Blasphemy etc. The are not a good lot.
Why is no one calling it the Epstein War?
This is the beginning of 3rd world war.
What makes you think that?
Would you be willing to back up that claim with money on a prediction market?
It's very subjective, not appropriate for a prediction market.
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Un-redact the Epstein files.
what's going on in the epstein files that he's bombing iran
Not a single person who claim Trump is a peace president will admit they are wrong.
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.
If you're willing to go through all this trouble, why not just become politically active? Don't underestimate what a motivated individual can do. All these public figures (or institutions) swaying the country back and forth are only people too.
Btw, an example of a person making a difference: https://www.youtube.com/garyseconomics
I would rather vote for a person from hackernews than any other politician right now tbh...
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I was politically active in the USA, in the only way I believe can make any meaningful change: direct action, mutual aid.
The American political system is captured by two neoliberal (one now post liberal, fascist) parties, and you have to sell your soul to "accomplish" anything, only to watch it yet ratcheted away by your own party, or obliterated by the fascists.
That would be unsound? Travel to Europe _before_ giving your assets away so you can stick the landing and work on building useful stuff there instead.
This is a laudable position, and I don't say this to discourage you or others from taking this action, but taxation does not effectively constrain US military spending, as long as the USD remains globally desirable and the US retains the ability to print more of them.
I’ll be a willing receptacle for your donations. I am homeless living with schizoaffective disorder and could use the help!
You're a good person and I feel similarly. We live under the Fourth Reich.
I do not think ceasing work is the right move, but definitely get involved politically and don't equivocate when you condemn our elected "representatives".
It might also soothe your soul to be in the company of like-minded individuals. A Quaker prayer is a sure place to find many.
USA can't stop engaging in wars no? Now food prices are gonna go up because gas prices will go up. Or all prices will go up.
>USA can't stop engaging in wars no?
Eisenhower explained why in his farewell address.
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.
Go look at photos of the Iranian Revolution. You’ll see pictures of millions of Iranians involved.
It’s infantilizing to act like Iranians weren’t capable of their own decisions, or their own mistakes in this case.
This talking point that “the CIA did it“ has never been accurate.
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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.
I guess it depends from which angle you see this. Things are not black & white.
A big chunk of the world sees the US as the biggest terrorist state in the world, followed up by Israel...
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Usa makes the bombs that israel uses to attack gaza every day.
this global escalation will be the reason elections are cancelled.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Thankfully the stock market is closed
Speaking of markets... Polymarket was trading yes on this happening at quite interesting odds, "yes" was trading at around 30¢ or better over the next few days just a few hours ago...
I was quite surprised to see it that low... and also to find it is inaccessible for trading if a US national. Just looking at the platform it seems predominantly US driven so I gather many people are willfully attempting to breach the ToS (and probably lie to the IRS) when using it...
Nothing more important than dow 50,000
* "dollars"
That always happens before an expected event or attack on another country.
Casino.
If Americans would like to better understand what it is that they actually did last year: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/killing-for-content/
I take this as a confirmation that more "nuclear material" i.e. unpublished Epstein files still exist.
There's at least 14TB of unpublished files left. A little under half of the 6 million documents.
And that's only the ones the FBI didn't "somehow" fail to collect.
There's at least 14TB of unpublished files left.
And that's only the ones the FBI didn't "somehow" fail to collect.
They’re calling it Operation Epstein Fury
Peace and profit.
I hate that we apparently have to take sides when commenting ..
Comment freely. Ignore karma. Here are some uBlock rules that help:
You don’t have to take sides. I haven’t landed on a particular POV here. You’re free to take a breath and think about things.
I can't help but think that all this shit is because Netanyahu really wants to put off more court hearings on his lame ass corruption charges. I really can't wait for him and his cronies (in Israel, and the West) to be brought to justice.
Without having to wait for the history books to do their thing.
His court appearance are continuing as scheduled, twice a week, for the last year. except for some specific incidents where he had to leave of cancel due to running a state.
No matter what you think, there is no way for him to avoid these hearings
Great, for those minor charges of accepting what, something like 150k Eur in gifts. As opposed to life in prison for genocide, which he clearly and absolutely deserves.
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While Netanyahu definitely deserves that, don't expect anything to change for the better in Israeli foreign policy if he gets deposed and tried. Israeli politicians have become radicalized to a level that is hard to imagine from a European or US perspective.
Even the leader of the "left wing" opposition has recently explicitly stated that Israel was gifted the entire region from the Euphrates to the Nile by God, so they would have a right to own the entire region, but that this must be balanced by security concerns and tactical realities. This happened in response to the US ambassador's explicit public remarks in the Tucker Carlson interview that also asserted Israel's God-given right to the entire region. Note that this region, from the Euphrates to the Nile, includes about half of Irak, parts of Syria, most of Lebanon, parts of Saudi Arabia, and of Egypt.
Same, this is disgusting. Actions like these need oversight by the US people.
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.
lol we all hope
If they don’t put boots on the ground, it won’t. They can bomb Iran back to the stoneage, as it has no viable air defenses.
I guess countless Iranians dying in the process doesn’t matter at all? As long as the Americans are killing them from far away, it’s all good?
>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)
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> 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?
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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.
Hopefully they finish the job this time and rid us of this horrible islamist regime, to make Iran great again !
Currently an absolute shit load of C17s landing in Germany after leaving the PG region. I guess we know which country finally caved and let the US use them for whatever fresh conquest this is.
Germany is one of the most pro-Israel countries and known for using excessive police voilance against pro-Palestina protestors and strongly denies that there is a genocide going on in Gaza.
And its not allowed to film the police crimes. They can lawfully demand to turn your camera off, because of privacy laws. Welcome to Germany.
Nothing to do with nuclear weapons. They are trying to surround and isolate Turkey as the only other military heavyweight of the middle east.
Israel and the US have already shown their cards in Syria. It is not peace they are after, it is regional domination.
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/399731975432728576
let's try to keep to credible sources here eh
Joke? Or someone really dont know it's his account?
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Classic playbook. This war will last the next three years. Trump admin will leak information and let Iranian cells in US cause terrorism, giving them the excuse to install domestic mass surveillance locally. They'll use that as a means to stay in power.
I find the nuclear motivation an excuse. I mean, enrichment plants or not, if Iran wants a few nukes I am pretty sure that Russia would part with some enriched material and smuggle it pretty easily to Iran.
My theory is that Israel has dirt (Epstein files maybe) on Trump and holds him by the balls. The second idea is that this is an obfuscation campaign to have the public opinion forget about Epstein, the state of the real economy, the falling approval rates, or all of the above.
What makes you think Trump is not interested in this himself they just offered him hotels and land. Him getting blackmailed is I feel a lot of people that have voted for him are using as a coping mechanism. The attack on Iran proves the point just like Russia attacking Ukraine if you want to protect your territories you need nuclear weapons. Canada, Greenland and countries in South America should also look to acquire nuclear weapons as once they are done with Iran you will be the next.
So another war of aggression by Israel.
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.
Given the amount of planes this isn’t going to be a single precision strike
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Yeah bro no one voted for this.
Ben Franklin was asked what kind of govt would the newly formed United States have. He was sadly right when he replied 'A republic, if you can keep it'
One of the (many) pretexts for the war, at least from Trump seems to be that Iran 'interfered' in US elections. From the Washington post
'President Donald Trump shared an article about Iran seeking to interfere in U.S. elections on his Truth Social account a couple of hours after U.S. strikes began in Iran early Saturday.
“Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” the post read, with a link to a piece from Just the News, a conservative website from which Trump frequently shares articles. Shortly after, the president posted another article from the site, albeit unrelated to Iran; it was about the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor Fani T. Willis.'
Does the US even have a functioning Congress left? Who will even believe such a preposterous lie? Even the most die hard MAGA supporter will find it hard to believe this fabrication.
It's like Trump doesn't feel the need to even maintain the fig leaf of a causus belli. He must truly feel that he is now the king of the United States to be so emboldened.
/sought/ to interfere.
See Stephen Fry on attempted chemistry.
Trump launching bunker-busters on his midterm chances. Which depending on how bad it goes, potentially means impeachment and prison. Whatever it is the Israelis have on him, it must be good.
Works out great for Netanyahu though as is customary. He can be PM for a while longer and stave off his own impending trial and imprisonment. If this goes well for Israel, he might even get that pardon that Trump campaigned for tirelessly.
I don't see Trump in prison, that's just not in his DNA.
He'd definitely off himself in a bunker, in line with his great idol.
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The most likely and capable retaliation will be cyber/info wars.
Iran has sophisticated influence operations and will likely flood social media with disinformation designed to deepen political divisions and erode trust in institutions.
This advice serves even if you don’t believe the above. Be deeply skeptical of all viral content in the coming days and weeks, especially anything designed to change your opinions, or provoke outrage/fear. Verify before sharing. Expect deepfakes. Stick to primary sources when possible.
At this moment, dont know what looks more terrifying. This war the US just got itself into, or the contents of the unreleased Epstein files...
They must be commensurate, because one is meant to drown out the other.
It kind of reveals Trump as a big liar. Not that this is a surprise, but even in his own self-image he can no longer try to shift the blame to others. Now he committed to war until regime change occurs.
> Iran, pledging to lay waste to the country’s military and obliterate its nuclear program.
Is that the same program that was totally obliterated in June 2025 according to Trump?
"Obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before"?
Rep Raskin said his search of the unredacted Epstein files found Trump listed more than one million times.[1]
And just days ago it was discovered that documents involving FBI investigations into allegations by one or more victims against Epstein and Trump were not released by the DOJ.[2]
I trust Trump still has time to testify to Congress about his connections to Epstein like others have been doing.
Meanwhile yesterday:
>>>the U.S. designated Iran as a “state sponsor of wrongful detention” and demanded that the country release any Americans in its detention.[3]
You just can't make this shit up.
1: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/10/trump-epstein-files-jamie-r...
2. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-t...
3. https://au.news.yahoo.com/us-designates-iran-state-sponsor-0...
US president can be democrat or republican, republicans can control the Senate or the House, or the democrats can control the Senate or the House - regardless of who is in power, Israel's interests by US are always met. US can wreck havoc on close relations and ties with Europe, Canada, etc. - but relation to Israel never changes. You can oblivious to all this, but the truth is: Israel de facto controls the US.
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.
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.
Or one South African-Canadian-American triple citizen pouring $300 million dollars in elections. I am shocked that campaign donations are legal.
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Ideally we would completely restructure the government to have multimember districts and change the Senate.
Within the current structure, we need to implement ranked/scored voting to break the two party system and the implied complete control it has over our government. It's so much easier for big money to control the narrative, control the candidates, and play off extreme polar politics when the voting system makes people choose the "lesser of two evils".
Were I king for a day in the US, and could only do one thing to help America, changing our voting system to some kind of rank/scored system would be it. Ending gerrymandering and Citizens United are also important but honestly less so than this.
Can we not with the blatant antisemitic dogwhistles...?
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Coming as a shock to only the most gullible people on Earth.
Fell For It Again one-hundred-time world champions.
It’s still pretty unclear how in the US is planning to go. For example, manifold 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...
3 days ago this was in the news:
> "Epstein files: DOJ withheld documents about claim Trump sexually abused minor"
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/epstein-trump-doj-garcia.htm...
Will it even make a single newspaper or talk show this weekend?
Do you people seriously think that planning such a large scale operation can take 3 days?
What a gift to the deeply unpopular Iranian regime. Nothing galvanizes support for whatever-you-have more than an external threat.
Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump.
The Iranian regime may fall, but it'll be like Iraq. We'll get something like ISIS out of it, or worse, and the place will be a complete basketcase of civil war for 25+ years. Or we'll be there for 25 years in another "forever war." Bravo.
>“Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump”
I think this is a scenario Steven miller fantasizes about while playing with action figures but that’s the closest it gets to being real.
Sure derogatory terms for liberals, as you term the left, would support the armed forces if China invaded hawaii but expecting them to also support Trump is fantasy. Like supporting America and supporting Donald Trump are entirely different matters and usually divergent.
> Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump.
Huh? If anything, he'd try to put blame on "Antifa" and "the radical left."
> Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump.
Judging by how they responded to the assassination attempt(s) on Trump and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I don't really believe that.
You're mistaking attention bait on social media for majority opinion. Almost nobody IRL sympathized with Kirk's shooter or wants to see people shot.
Social media is brain poison.
most liberals do not support the assassination of politicians. after the guy got killed, there was a massive search on social media where right wingers were looking for anyone who mocked him, and they got like a handful of people.
One of the main reasons Iraq is like Iraq is the Iranian meddling and their proxy organizations which operate in Iraq with impunity. The Iraqi government is entirely subservient to the Iranians.
As the recent wave of protests in Iran came after the 12 days where Iranian regime was dealt a massive blow, I think your analysis is wrong. Iranians consider this an opportunity. Also, the scale of violence unleashed on the Iranian public by the regime is staggering; it’s not about the regime being simply “unpopular”.
Do you have any better ideas or is it your position that evil dictators get to rule forever?
Provide aid to the local population and provide support to grassroots resistance. Things do not need to be flashy to be effective
The Iranian people overthrow their government and establish what they want?
My point is that an outside force coming in will help the current regime and/or the ideas behind it. Even if the current regime falls, democratic or pro-Western ideas in Iran will be seen as aligned with the invading force and rejected by many people who might otherwise be open to them.
Is there anyone who likes being invaded by a foreign power, ever?
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>Do you have any better ideas or is it your position that evil dictators get to rule forever?
If president Trump doesn't declare martial law, start a civil war, military coup or change the constitution of the USA, he will stop ruling in 3 years. We can wait that long.
how about a negotiating a peace deal between the Israel and Iran wherein they both agree to give up nuclear weapons and allow for IAEA inspections
Things were starting to come undone naturally then we decided to 3rd party the whole thing
Do you think the people fighting ICE in the streets of Minneapolis would welcome a joint Chinese+North Korean decapitation strike on Washington and cruise missiles flying over Portland?
"Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States"[0]
So we're going to war with Iran based on election fraud conspiracies from MAGA?
0: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1161475725227...
The headlines in Europe are that Israel is carrying out preventive strikes, the USA is helping.
And that's certainly the deathbed of any hopes to a mullah regime change. They will come out stronger than before.
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Paywall : https://archive.ph/M6Ywb
Latest update of the page archived here: https://archive.ph/VqSqj
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hello IDF bot account!
What a weird comment. I’ve had my account for six years and live in the USA. You can go look at my activity if you want.
Can we please keep this childish discourse to sites like reddit.
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I’m a Brit, married to an Iranian who still has a large family in Iran. I’ve got to witness first hand quite the opposite to what you describe, at least with the British mainstream media. With the exception of one religious aunt who is married to a military man, OP’s comment reflects the feeling of all the Iranian family and friends we know. And FWIW, I can point to Iran on a map, and I am not Mossad.
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I'm afraid the IRCG won't be able to pay your next paycheck...
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Iran is on the other side of the Persian Gulf from Dubai, where Iranian tourists flock to buy Disney, Apple and other embargoed products without restrictions.
Next question.
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Your account was created 32 days ago with no submissions or comments until today.
How's the weather in Tel Aviv?
If you need me to be in Tel Aviv so that your worldview don’t get cracks, sure then I’m there
Here people in Teheran cheering the F15 in the sky https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVS9D-ZjAHT/?igsh=NHNtNnAzM2t...
Stay blind to reality to maintain your privileged antiamerican antisemitic stand
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There is no sane person in the world will believe that Israel and USA will make Iran a better place, its just a hell going to be.
Is it helpful for a conversation if you call an entire people insane?
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Posted from Tel Aviv
If you need me to be in Tel Aviv, so that your view of the world holds then sure I’m there.
You're getting lots of downvotes etc. I find it weird that people find it too surprising that Iranians are fed up with the Mullah regime.
I have some (female) student friends from Iran, and they're all happy about this intervention. They want the Ayatollah to be gone.
All Iranian people I've met so far absolutely hate the regime. But then again, I'd probably not get into contact with islamists.
I’m astonished too. People don’t want it to be true because they can’t comprehend someone liking Israel.
Of course, it’s not a one-sided issue. I assume it’s 90% pro-Western and the rest pro-regime.
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Free to enjoy the puppet government we install
Nothing is worse than this. Come over and live here if you want
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Oh bless, caring about civilians! How about the more than 16,000 children murdered and about 4000 child amputees. Yes, it's super reassuring that you care about civilians.
I honestly would prefer to live in a theocracy governed by the Westboro Baptist Church, as insane as it would be, than by the current Iranian regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_executions_in_Iran
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guidance_Patrol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_state-sponsored_terro...
We are already seeing civilians killed: https://aje.news/p4rw7y?update=4345551 [Five killed in Israeli attack on elementary school in Iran]
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Hamas and Iran are to blame for that. And now there is a chance to avoid these deaths in the future.
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Can any Iran simps explain why the regime couldn't just agree to zero enrichment and cease its weekly ritual of organized mobs chanting:
> DEATH TO AMERICA
in the streets like blood-thirsty lunatics, something for which there was no equivalent in the US even after 9/11 (mobs chanting "Death to Muslims/Islam"), let alone doing so with governmental encouragement as happens in Iran?
Do they not realize how many Americans aren't pro-Israel and aren't invested enough in the Middle East and its politics, proxy wars, and human rights abuses to want the US to support Israel in military action against Iran, except for their nuclear ambitions, and regularly professed eternal hatred for our country?
No one dares to attack North Korea because they have nukes. Ayatollahs surely want the same but didn’t have enough time/resources.
Current stance on negotiations is a miscalculation IMHO, they likely wanted for negotiations to drag on for a long time.
Last I checked, no one dared to attack them before they had nukes because of China's promise (made good in 1950) to use their military to defend the regime in Pyongyang, and the massive array of conventional artillery pointing at Seoul just across the DMZ, where 25% of South Korea's population resides. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192139
I think iran wants nuclear weapons to ensure its survival against israel
So we're supposed to
>justtrustmebro
That they'll never, in some capacity, attempt use them against the country they weekly collectively chant death to?
EDIT: thanks, dang, for the
> posting too fast
cooldown, for all of my four posts.
> perhaps we could negotiate a peace deal in which israel and iran both agree to give up nuclear weapons and allow for IAEA inspections
I completely agree with you. Isreal has better relations with its neighbors than its ever had, has destroyed Iran's proxies, and given its obvious conventional military supremacy and lack of regional nuclear-armed foes and US-backing, its nuclear stockpile is just a destabilizing force in the region, and them voluntarily disbanding it would earn them a great deal of goodwill and a moral highground.
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The current Iranian regime has destruction of Israel as one of their main goals. Not the other way around. I’m sure if Iran will have less threatening leadership Isreal will not bother them.
We don't have many details regarding the negotiations, but early reports suggest that Iran agreed to the "no high-enrichment" line. It was the proxy support and MRBM standoff weaponry that caused the talks to collapse (allegedly).
https://www.thejournal.ie/iran-agrees-in-breakthrough-talks-...
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shameful for the west, and a tragedy. leave iran alone. defending the mullahs wasn't exactly on my bingo card, but here we are...
please, can somebody in the US or Israel have an "are we the baddies" epiphany?
There's no way you can defend the Iranian leadership. Toppling them is not shameful, just like ousting Saddam Hussein was IMO reasonable. The problem is what happens afterwards.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/27/i...
> defending the mullahs wasn't exactly on my bingo card, but here we are...
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
And you think the US, now currently sliding into authoritarianism itself, will install an enlightened democracy upon the Iranians?
This is WW3 in slow motion. The goal is to takeover Eurasia and contain the Russian-Chinese alliance by eating away at the edges and removing all unaligned or hostile energy sources.
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So how do the recurring airstrikes help the protesters?
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> 30,000 in 2 days - half the 2-year death toll of Gaza ; With no artillery , air-strikes or heavy weapons, without million-man armies facing off in pitched battles, without health system collapsing with 100s of thousands of injuries in 48 hours, photos or satellite imagery of mass graves and bodies littering the streets
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
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Hacker news needs to hear more of this. They are very out of touch with actual Iranian people who are cheering this on.
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Ask your colleague if his family is still there... May be not.
or ask another colleague whose family is still there. Would be different answer.
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Agreed. I had an Iranian colleague also reach out who was ecstatic about this news. The hacker in me is curious to see how it all unfolds, as well as to see all the curious discussion that arises on this forum.
Killing people that blind women for refusing to wear headscarf is always a good deed.
It may be infeasible to do it, or bad idea because of geopolitical or similar reasons, but no - in Iran's regime case - we are not the baddies.
Go America, go Israel, fuck ayatollahs.
The headline says "US and Israel". Why are you all focusing on Israel?
Earlier headlines did just state Israel, US involvement became evident somewhat later.
Iran FTW
Please, can the administration do something useful for America instead of… whatever this is?
Can we follow the age old adage WWJD?
What would (Xi) Jinping do?
> What would (Xi) Jinping do?
Make himself dictator for life and purge his party of dissenters?
But also expand through trade and renewables, rather than war and oil.
Much nuance, wow.
Yes and then what? Bankrupt his empire by getting into global wars? Yeah sure.
Luckily that can never happen in America.
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Why does HN continue to delete all comments against this?
Enable "show dead" in your profile to see things that get flagged to oblivion and that action is by the user-base not moderators.
Do you have any proof for this?
This war shows Hamas was resistance group and Israel was actual oppressor and terrorist.
Israel attacked Iran
Israel attacked Lebanon
Israel oppressed and kidnapped Palestinians
World is getting destroyed by couple hundred Israeli and US maniacs, by the way, all of whom are connected via Epstein
To hell with america!
This is war... huh... wow!
Love the Burzum reference, but it's low quality on a discussion forum. Downvoted.
What's there to discuss about this absolute shit show?
Even HN is astroturfed to heck and filled with bots. The ratio of good faith informed dialog to Reddit like slop in these threads is wild. The old HN would never have such “obvious” black and white answers.
Good. Let them have it!! Free Iran!
Most people's definition of freedom isn't being bombed by the US and Israel.
Seems that they are behaving intelligently - pummeling the IRGC. If the IRGC fails the public will probably have a bit of small talk with the regime officials and functionaries while the regular army and police will probably look vague amused from the sides.
>> Seems that they are behaving intelligently
You seem to have missed the little detail the US is now at war.
There was a deal with Iran, but Trump throw it away because was closed by Obama and Israel did not like it...
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Regarding the protests in the preceding week, while the iranian people probably had valid problems with their government, its so pbvious the actual scenes we saw in the news were orchestrated to manufacture consent. Its barely hidden anymore.
If you see a sudden uptick in protests in a country the US/isreal see as an enemy, you can bet its probably just the step in the playbook preceding military action
Protests have been happening in Iran for years and their frequency and depth increasing. Last one was “Woman life freedom” movement because the government killed a girl for bad hijab.
It’s not new, you just started paying attention now.
I know its not new, the iranian governemnt has always been cruel to dissidents. I guess my point is a sudden uptic in participants and media coverage of them is the indicator of manufactured consent
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The protests were there before. Maybe you didn't know about them, but many people have been protesting. These are 40 day protests - iran funerals are 40 days afer the death, and 40 days ago iran killed tens of thousands of protesters who now are having funerals. (Iran deach culture is more complex than that, but for discussion the above works)
Iran: We are going to get nukes at any cost and wipe Israel and the United States off the face of the earth. It is our destiny.
Israel and the US: You serious?
Iran: Yes.
...
Iran, after being bombed to a slightly earlier point of the Stone Age than they've spent the past ~50 years: We are working hard trying to find the guy responsible for this.
FAFO, as they say. Meanwhile, literally the entire Middle East and the rest of the world besides Russia will be happy to see these clowns gone. Bon voyage.
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 10 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."
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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.
agreed. Although "starts another war" dismisses 50 years of history. Iran never stopped being at war with US and Israel and they clearly were never going to agree to a deal that left them without the nuclear capability to wipe both US and Israel off the map.
That's funny, I can't shake the thought that China's AI tech could be helping the ayatollahs' conduct their retaliation strikes.
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.
But russia-ukraine is also a much more contained war between 2 parties that will likely end in a stalemate.
The middle east is a much more tangled web of alliances and hatreds, i think the iranian regime falling would have much more harder to predict second order geopolitical effects.
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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.
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).
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> Russia-Ukraine has had about 1 million deaths
I wish... But estimates say between 230,000 and 468,500 dead orcs.
One million casualties is injured, missing, and dead… not just the dead.
> 1 million deaths
Casulties, not deaths.
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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?
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Chinese state media is already reporting it's "unlikely to be contained" https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202602/28/WS69a2a669a310d686...
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Bombing never wins wars, with one exception.
bombing of: -N.Vietnam -Germany -Serbia -Sudan -Tunisia -England
Exception:
-Japan
That is not to say bombing doesn't have its uses in war. The bombing of the oilfields of Ploesti in Romania severely damaged the German war machine. But it took Russian boots on the ground in Berlin to effect a German surrender.
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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.
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Could be more of an intimidation tactic. The United States of Israel wouldnt go to a land war in Iran, 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.
What happens when Iran responds by firing missiles on Israel or on a US ship and inflicts major casualties on either targets, though?
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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
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Iran’s oil is sanctioned hence not on public market. Does it really have much influence?
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WW3 started with the invasion of Ukraine.
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.
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I doubt either of them is keen to enter the fray here. Russia is making shaheeds at home now anyway
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.
More like this is a small piece of the puzzle in Russian-Ukraine war. Iran plays quite a big role in supplying Russians. If Iran is taken out, power balance in that war may change too.
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Uh, Iran is involved in the Ukraine war, and this even goes so far that Ukraine has attacked Iranian shipping in the Caspian sea.
https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1154545/Ukraine-strikes-cargosh...
(not just once)
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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
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thats definitely not the reason they wont participate. Its just a public excuse
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.
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I am saddened by all of these comments.
Will not one of you try to steelman this decision? Or do you truly, fully believe the entire US government and intelligence complex, supported by roughly 50% of your compatriots, are warmongering baboons?
If assume the goal of the US administration is to really limit the weapons of mass destruction
then why the previous peacefull attempts were thrown out? I remember Iran agreed to limit the production or ivite the people to watch their actions, the US sanctions were even lifted in 2015. But then later reiplemented by the US for some reason.
unrelated to all of this, I don't understand what's the problem is with a country developing nuclear weapons. US can nuke Iran with ICBMs anyway if they try to use them?
Ok, fine.
Israël is threatened by Iran. Iran has been working on nukes. There have been negotiations but they haven't been definitive yet, and Iran has never been a trustworthy negotiating partner anyway. That is why this President ditched the last round of agreements.
That's the steelman. Reality is that half my compatriots are warmongering baboons.
Yes.
Greetings from the European Union.
I am saddened by your gullibility. Your first instinct is to trust this administration? Who has repeatedly showed utter contempt for the very idea of truth, the constitution, the rule of law, and science, merely because half of American voters are brainwashed?
This administration's arguments do not deserve to be steelmanned.
I think it's possible it's a good decision (As with most wars in the middle east, I think hubris is playing a heavy role and we're underestimating the risks involved) but I think I'm in the minority and this is _not_ supported by 50% of my compatriots.
I don't know if by 50% you're talking about left vs right, but I'm center left, and a decent number of center-left thought leaders support this action. I think the people who support this are a relatively narrow 25-30% of remaining neo(lib|con)s in the center, and the more left and the America First right crowd hate this. My guess would be loosely speaking Trump's base hates this more than the typical HN poster. Tucker Carlson for instance will be way more against this than anyone here.
I don't understand. I was under the impression that this a tech site. Why is there so much politics on here? What is all the rage bait. Are these bots or people who have inject politics and rage bait into every single place. Whatever you think of the Israel/Palestine conflict, maybe there can be places or website where some of us just want tech articles and interests.
I can't name a single thing this administration has done well, or competently and this is no exception. Unless, of course, you count killing innocent people between military action, aid cuts and ICE.