Comment by epolanski

AIPAC is a thing...

And now of course you're going to label me an AIPAC nutter, but in this particular case I think the evidence is fairly plain given the collaboration between the two countries on this. If Israel had done this by their lonesome or if the US had not involved Israel then you could make the case that they reached this point independently, right now it looks to me as if collusion is a 100% certainty and that the US is executing a foreign policy that will not benefit it but that will benefit Israel. It also makes me wonder whether this will end up as a Venzuela re-run where the top names change but everything else remains the same, just with US companies the beneficiaries of the oil, which is, besides policy the main driver behind these things anyway.

Make a genuine guess…

I see this as Trump going after governments that were close to Russia and China. Which is why he is going after Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.

Also there are many countries in the middle east that we are friends with which would be happy if Iran falls.

The voters

The rumor I heard was that high-level Pentagon generals had subtly suggested that Trump target Iran. The reason was to distract his attention from Greenland. Logic goes that if you have a reality TV star who built his brand on being a tough guy in the White House, it's far better that he attack a theocratic dictatorship that funds a host of terrorist organizations and whose country is already on the verge of collapse than a NATO ally and fellow democracy that didn't do anything to us.

Indeed, the permanent bureaucracies and think tanks have advised all administrations:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt6wpgvg

This is bipartisan. The long term goals were to start with Libya, Iraq, Syria and then Iran. The latter two required Russia to be tied up in another conflict.

They don't explicitly put Iran in their portfolio because for Reality TV it is better to be a peace lover.

Now, undoubtedly the Democrats will pretend to complain, but Schumer and Pelosi want this, too.

[I am expanding on your comment, not trying to contradict anything.]

Cosmetic changes are frequently decisive in politics. "literally just a name" discounts the genuine power of names.

If you go to https://www.war.gov/ it says Department of War. The person in charge calls himself the Secretary of War. Warfighters are being sent into Iran. Presumably to engage in warfare. People are gonna die.

What's cosmetic about this?

Wasn’t it originally called the department of war also? If anything “department of defense” was doublespeak, as it was already primarily for war.

> 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

Of course we can. People disagreeing with you doesn't mean they don't exist.

These are the Senate seats in play this cycle [1]. How many of those do you think would be flipped based on any foreign policy item?

If you're on this thread you pay attention to foreign policy. The notion that someone doesn't–not isn't informed, but literally doesn't to any degree–is almost more foreign than the strangest countries we read about. But the truth is most Americans have never ranked any foreign policy item as being in their top three issues since the Vietnam War.

We could change it if we wanted to. We don't because it's not personally pertinent or worse, it's boring. (And, I'd argue, because a lot of foreign-policy oriented activists are preaching for the choir versus trying to actually effect change.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elec...

That's assuming the people don't vote for this because they want this.

Many Americans have a hero complex. Their national mythology post World War II includes them being the "good guys" against the "bad guys." That mythology needs a bad guy.

> 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.

I'm pretty sure MAGA was always fascism. I mean, all the signs were there and people were sounding alarm bells almost immediately.

This is clearly not fascism, and not very different from what the US is accustomed to. Let's not waste the meaning of words by throwing them at any occasion.

I an opposed to Trump's unhinged offensive, but let's not fall prey to media narrative. Nobody called similar actions "fascism" before (or they did, as the word is thrown around casually in the US, but then nothing has changed). Similarly, when Obama vastly expanded deportations and the like, nobody cared.

I don't like Trump. At all. I think he's a terrible president on the whole and a shameless opportunist. But I don't like one-sided politics and hypocrisy even more so, and I dislike hysteria. History and long term trends paint us a different picture of current events. Most people's horizons are limited to the shallow, tendentious, cherry-picked, and sensationalist news cycle, unfortunately, regardless of outlet. Should we criticize Trump? Yes. But we should criticize all leadership when they do what they should not be doing.

BTW, the Dept. of War was the original name from 1789 to 1947. Curiously, it was soon after the change to Dept. of Defense that people like Eisenhower began to worry about the Military-Industrial Complex. That should give us pause. The name change conceals the intention, and coincides with a hungry imperial war machine that WWII helped bring into existence. Recall that Americans were largely isolationist before that.

But the Iranian regime isn’t at all fascist, right?

The guy’s in the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame. He’s been seeking or serving in office for over ten years. We all know. It’s old ground.

> Ukraine got rid of nukes and it was massive collosal mistake.

They couldn't operate them, all electronics were in Moscow anyway, nor afford to maintain them or even guard them.

At the very same time Ukraine's corrupted military sold out on the black market tens of billions of weaponry.

In your alternate universe, bad actors acquire and reverse engineer those nuclear weapons resulting in a world that's much more dangerous.

> My point is, Ukraine war and the way it evolved shows that not having nukes is a bad position.

Israel (allegedly? idk) has nukes. Did it stop October 7th? Did it stop Iran from firing ballistic missiles?

The war of today is not an open war (the war in Ukraine did not start on February 24 2022, but in 2014) where nuclear deterrence matters. Nuke will never help if the war is waged through proxies.

Ukraine never had operational control of the missiles in its territory

By now the nukes would have been useless. You need to have a continuous ballistic and nuclear program to manufacture new nukes and missiles as the old ones become stale.

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> The US has absolutely no business attacking Iran.

Iran's theocratic regime just murdered tens of thousands of protestors, regularly organizes chants of "Death to America", calls the US "The Great Satan", sponsors terror organizations all around the region, has (through their Houthi proxies) cut off critical sea lanes in one of the most strategic areas, is very close to developing nuclear weapons (with enough HEU already to build maybe a dozen bombs), has extensive ballistic missile magazines and expertise, and is working on ICBMs explicitly to reach the US homeland.

But oh yeah, this is totally unprovoked and the US has no business attacking Iran. Right.

Meanwhile "from the river to the sea" was actual Likud's election slogan before Hamas co-opted it. There are absolutely elements in Israel - and to be clear, in its government, with the ability to and motivation to make it happen, not just extremists posting on their forums - what are quite happy with the idea of razing both Gaza and the West Bank to the ground for settling. And their idea of what to do with the people displaced by this ranges from collateral damage to a shrug of the shoulders and making them someone else's problem.

> Not to mention all the numerous threats to wipe Israel off the map by Iran, Hez etc.

That's a well debunked lie told by zionists for decades. Nobody cares anymore. Besides it's "israel" wiping palestine off the map.

> Let's not pretend Iran is innocent please. Or Hamas either.

Far more innocent than israel.

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> that was a couple of decades, it's not like that's an ancient status quo

Sure. The century-long peace following the Napoleonic Wars was also some decades.

Our default state, unfortunately, is war. But we sought to change that after the horrors of WWII (and the nuclear bomb), and it's worth nothing where those noble goals succeeded. It's sad that project is over. But something being sad doesn't mean it isn't true.

> wishes of a small group of people aren't the default for the majority

In a geopolitical context, the words and actions of the powerful are what count. And those words and actions currently point–uniformly–towards sovereign borders not being a red line.

Goa was part of India before colonized and Pakistan is the epic center of terrorism.

> Don't forget India with Goa and pakistan, bangladesh, etc.

Literally down thread (well, up now–I commented before you got downvoted) [1].

> You are my favorite hindu

You're a recurring racist troll. News at 11.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195844

> insane that the West commits war crimes and people still comment: “It’s china’s fault”

Insane that people see a list of common actions by Russia, China and America and still conclude Chinese victimhood.

No one here is saying this is China fault, they’re saying the current situation is on par for how the USA, China and Russia treat the world.

In this thread the only reason people have brought up Chinese issues are because the strong defensiveness of others like China is some saint. They’re not.

Also I think two more examples were missed, how Ukraine wouldn’t have been invaded without china’s tolerance of their ally doing it, and Hong Kong repression. Also how Iran and Ukraine make it much more likely they finally go for Taiwan like they’ve been posturing to do.

To deny China isn’t like Russia and the US in this regards is like thinking Trump was going to be the peace president as he claimed

> only major country/culture that has never been aggressive towards it's neighbors is India

I have Indian heritage, and I heard this take growing up, and I'll concede that India is on the peaceful side of the international median. That said, the folks in Sri Lanka [1][2] and Bangladesh [3] would aggressively disagree. (Book recommendation: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida [4]. Also, anything by Assamese authors.)

And this thesis really only applies to modern India. Pre-EIC India was a subcontinent of warring states. And even for the "modern India" designation, we have to ignore the violence of political integration [5][6].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_intervention_in_the_Sri...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffna_hospital_massacre

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Moons_of_Maali_Almei...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_India

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Hyderabad

1971: India intervened militarily in East Pakistan, leading to the creation of Bangladesh.

1987–1990: India deployed ~70,000 troops to Sri Lanka and engaged in combat during the civil war.

Sure:

https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/conflic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Pakistan_wars_an...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy6w6507wqo

Because it's only existed since 1947?

What? Kashmir, Pakistan, China, Sri lanka... I don't think has any neighbors it hasn't been aggressive towards. Was this sarcasm and I missed it?

> China has bought Tibet from the British

China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1951 [1].

You may be thinking of Hong Kong, which the British invaded and annexed from the Qing dynasty [2] and then handed back to China in 1997 [3] under conditions that Beijing defaulted on in 2019 [4].

> what have they done with Taiwan?

Same as America has been doing with Greenland.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hong_Kong

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handover_of_Hong_Kong

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...

Laser pointers are to cats as sparkly objects are to Trump.

covfefe

> You seem to have forgotten that the US attacked Iran first, which made this regime even possible in the first place.

Bombing of US marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 was funded, and organized by Iran. Just take half day off, and read a bit on the role of Islamic Republic in Middle East in the past 40 years. I guarantee your stance of "US attacked first" will change to the "unclear" at the least.

There were tens of thousands of Iranian rockets fired at Israel just since Oct 7. Hezbollah did the majority of the launches, but there's no doubt about who sent the rockets or for what purpose. What would be a proportional response to that?

Yeah, they're just quotes. It's a quote.

>Can you provide some support for your moral position?

Yes, of course. A bunch of people from Europe decided to move to Palestine and start a religious ethnostate there. In doing so they expelled and murdered lots of local residents.

The surviving locals are understandably less than happy about this, and have continued to fight to defend their lands to this day.

Since then, the those people have caused far more harm to non-jewish Palestinians than non-jewish Palestinians have caused to the those people.

>allows us to sidestep the issues with Gazans’ support of Jihad, other extremist doctrines, and the extermination of Jews?

It's perfectly natural that Gazans would support the extermination of jews. In the extreme environment that Israeli jews force Palestinians to live in, it's fundamentally ridiculous to even describe it as an extremist position.

In a comfortable European context it's certainly extreme, but that's a fundamentally dishonest way of portraying it.

They're not "scare quotes", they're quotes.

I notice that your database does not for whatever reason contain any of the actions taken by the Israeli government, why is that?

How are we supposed to get an understanding of the scale of these events while totally disregarding Israeli actions?

> October 7th was the deadliest per capita terrorist attack since the Global Terrorism Database started recording in 1970

> You invoked scale. Those are the numbers. They don't say what you wanted them to say.

1200 Oct7 vs tens of thousands in annexation and retaliation.

The numbers speak for themselves. No need to cherry pick.

The reaction by the Israelis against the Palestinians is even worse

How can you claim this with a straight face, when Israel has slaughtered Palestinians like cattle every chance they have. And when they're not killing them with direct violence, they are robbing them of basic necessities and human dignity.

And how can you claim October 7th wasn't an act if war? The main thrust of the attacks were targeting military installations. Much more than Israeli actions in Gaza before or since, which have clearly been done in service of genocide since Israel was created.

The Palestinian genocide has not been a regular war, it has been an absolute extermination campaign that is still ongoing.

You’ve just explained my own thoughts better than I ever have been able to, especially what with the political minefield that is literally anything mentioned in your post. Brilliantly articulate. I have half a mind to commit your entire comments text to memory and just repeat it ad verbatim whenever I am asked about my opinions on these things.

you are simplifying too much - whats then US trauma in this case and all other cases of invasion and coups in the lat 75 years?

Maybe trauma you are talking about it's just excuse to control opinion of voters and manufacture consent but under the hood its just all about power and being rich (not always but in many cases).

This is a great post. It really sheds light to basically all the modern conflicts. Thanks.

This really puts so many modern conflicts into perspective. Everyone sees themselves as victims. Unfortunately, a consensus on who is and isn't a victim will always be highly elusive.

One of the most sane and dispassionate takes I've seen. Kudos.

I agree that we should remember historical traumas, but I don't agree they suffice to explain international politics.

Take the Greeks (that's my people! Us!) and the Turkish. I guess people in the West don't remember this but the Israelis are not the only people in the Middle East who have a word that means "disaster" (Shoah, for the Israelis; Καταστροφή- Catastrophe for us), that when anyone says it everyone knows exactly which disaster is spoken of. They are not the only people who lost the land their ancestors inhabited for thousands of years (Ionia, for us Greeks), who lost their greatest city (Constantinople, the City), who lost their greatest temple that was turned into a Mosque (the Hagia Sophia). Us, Greeks, too, have suffered these ignominies at the hand of the Turkish. Our common history with the Turkish is one of war, destruction, violence and blood. So much blood.

Genocide? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide Check. Ethnic cleansing? Check. Death marches through the deserts? Check, check, check.

And yet, since the Catastrophe, in 1922, we have been at peace with the Turkish, even through serious hot episodes in the Mediterrannean, like Cyprus. That's 100 years of peace, after 1500 years of history of war.

It can be done. The trauma can be overcome, if both sides agree to it. To quote none other than Moshe Dayan: if you want to make peace you talk to your enemies, not your friends.

Preach brother. Collective trauma traps us all

> The jewish Israeli population biggest trauma are centuries if not millenia of animosity, racism and violence coming from any side ... 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.

I don't see this any different to terrorism apologia (the trauma of 1mn dead in Iraq and another million in Afghanistan, for example). I guess, if the leaders wear suits & ties and hide behind the garb of democracy, then we should all understand why military they command commit crimes against humanity.

  Every perpetrator of terrorism sees himself as a victim. Such is the case not only with individual terrorists, who often compete with their enemies over who is more victimized, but also with terrorist groups and nation states.

- Bessel van der Kolk (author, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma).

The problem isn't the "trauma". The problem is the excuse.

> they are as well unable to recognize how scarred and traumatized is Israeli society from centuries of events

First, 400mn Arabs (or 2bn+ muslims) aren't a monolith or brainless zombies. Second, the "centuries of events" is just European guilt. Nothing to do with the Arab world.

Extremely great post with detailed examples

> 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.

The sad reality (imo) about this truth is that the qualities needed to be a leader aren't empathy. There was a vid about it which went more into detail but When you observe leaders, you find that they are extremely weird and sometimes psychopathic.

To me it also feels like if a leader is emphatetic towards the other part, other leaders more extreme would spring up saying that he's an enemy from within or something equivalent to it.

The empathy of the leader is one of the most disregarded qualities. I would go so far as to say that leaders aren't even empathetic towards the general population of their own nations/community sometimes.

It's really sad but the Empathy you mention and cowardice can look the same to many & the Empathatic leader would get booted out of/not given a chance.

For example, within America itself, I feel like John mccain was a good guy and I would consider him empathetic in the sense that I remember seeing interviews of him saying that he and Obama just have some minor differences in policy making when there were people attending his rallies asking that they don't feel safe about Obama.

I am just gonna say that This leader of republican party was lost for what is now Donald Trump.

Oh I just watched the rally/interview again[0], when he said that you don't have to be scared of Obama, he was audibly booed by the public. (But also they clapped once when he said later in the campaign that Obama was decent person?)

It isn't impossible to have empathetic leaders but I do think that perhaps as a civilization, we would need to take class act/honesty/integrity more into account than we take in the current system which to me all across the world sometimes feel like picking the lesser evil/not-greater-good at times though I can only speak for myself.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIjenjANqAk

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If you know the history of the Iraq War you would know a lot of the reasons it went bad was Iranian involvement

Also, the official explanation how October 7 could have happened honestly makes no sense to me. Somehow Hamas suddenly gained super powers on that day and could break through the "containment" that ostensibly had been perfectly adequate before. And because of their mysterious newfound strength, it was also imperative to bomb Gaza to bits and impossible to go back to the security situation as it was before...

> well documented fact that Netanyahu has always wanted and actively supported Hamas leadership

To be fair, this is also explained by the Delcy Rodriguez strategy: the bastard you know trumps the bastard you don't. Israel could have become complacent thinking they had a deal with Hamas and, as long as they kept the money flowing, the Palestinians had no rational reason to attack. (Which they didn't. October 7 was a stupid move.)

Israel obviously consists of different groups with different incentives. We shouldn't undermine the years of protests by many citizens, some of which are still seeking justice from those responsible for the security failures (particularly Netanyahu).

> on border with one's mortal enemy

I have no special stake or knowledge of this, but Israel hasn't treated Gaza or Palestinians as their "mortal enemy"... more of a problematic-but-largely-contained source of rockets and hateful rhetoric, at least until 2023.

Incompetence can't be ruled out.

I've listened to podcasts discussing the Israel military. One thing that people need to realize is that the IDF and it's leaders are skewed incredibly young. The mandatory service paired with the fact that people often don't stay in service means that they have 30 year old colonels and 35 year old generals.

They don't have the sort of career and institution knowledge like the US military has.

In Italy a famous jewish actor commenting a law that wants to make antisemitism illegal said it's a bit weird a former fascist minister gets to decide that he's antisemite.

https://www.ilgiornaleditalia.it/news/politica/765547/ddl-an...

Trump is basically a glorified realtor with the intellect of a single celled organism.

The hope would be if more Americans were reading it, and understanding, then they would hold leaders more accountable and we wouldn't even get in this situation. The founding fathers kind of assumed an educated population, even if debating and disagreeing, would come to better conclusions. This current method of "lets cut education so the population doesn't know what is going on" is really a long term plan for the religious right to take over. But they are thinking in decades and generations.

This thing is not actually getting worst "for generations". By available data, it was improving a lot for generations with only minor drop.

You don't?

2 mil, actually. But not 6 million kids...

Obama is the one outlier here. As far as I'm aware, all other presidents since '79 saw this as inevitable if not desirable.

Congress hasn't publicly supported the attack. That is an extremely important step, and required for any operation lasting more than 30 days if I'm not mistaken, but it doesn't mean a majority of Congress hasn't already made clear they do support this.

He's right though. He's calling out that this is policy, not just Trump.

Still however pulls the trigger commits the crime.

The current Iranian regime is in power thanks to US imperial interests. Comical amount of ignorance.

Resisting the imperialist goals of the US itx proxies doesn't make you imperialist. It's not only moral. It's generaly permissible under international law.

Take for example the UAE, which has been hit by the Iranian response, who is essentially singlehandedly responsible for the genocide in South Sudan and it does so with the blessing of the US.

The UAE arms the RSF using arms they get from the US and steal Sudanese gold, which they launder through Dubai and Switzerland.

But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that everything Iran has done and is doing is "imperialism" (which, again, it is not), how do you even begin to argue "if not more [than the United States]"? US imperialism touches virtually every country on Earth. Iran at best has regional influence.

"I’m not sure what would have happened under a Dem administration."

Hard to say. Under Obama we got the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

It is amazing that anyone took his campaign claims at face value. There's an extensive record of him just saying whatever gets cheers/votes/money.

The dirty little secret here is that the Democratic establishment and thus many Democratic politicians like what's happening. They just don't like how it's being done.

What's they're doing is both bad policy (IMHO) and bad politics. Why is it bad politics? Because this military action is deeply unpopular and you cannot outflank the Republican Party on the right about American imperialism. Remember when Kamala Harris promised the "most lethal" military? What does that mean? And why?

But hte other reason this is bad politics is for the reason you state: it cedes the political ground of being the "peace president" to Trump. Memories are short because he did exactly the same thing in 2015 eg [1][2] and again in 2020 eg [3]. The last one is particularly funny because Biden did exactly what Trump promised to do but the Trump still beat Biden over the head for it.

There's no consistency in any of this. Trump was never a peace president. We knew it was a lie at the time. We know it's a lie now. Nobody cares.

But when the supposed opposition party mirrors his policy positions and offers no resistance to anything that's happening, who are voters going to listen to? The guy who talks about peace, even though he's lying, or the guy who says nothing about peace and just thinks Trump should've consulted with Congress but nothing otherwise should change? Or, worse, sometimes Trump isn't being tough enough?

Then Senator Joe Biden in 1986 called Israel "the best $3 billion we make" and if Israel didn't exist we'd invent on to protect our interests [4] while Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State called Israel an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the region.

The JCPOA was a rare W for Obama (who was otherwise the Deporter-in-Chief and the Drone King). Trump of course dismantled it at the behest of the Adelsons. Did Biden reinstate it? Of course not.

The best case for an establishment Democratic administration now is to do nothing while promising nothing and reversing nothing that ultimately brings in the next Trump, just as Biden/Harris did in 2024.

That's the long version of why I say there's no difference. In the short term there might be. Even that's debatable of course. But long term the ratchet effect only gets worse.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/donald-...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/13/donald-trump...

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/08/donald-trump...

[4]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-b...

I guess we can laud Rep. Jim McGovern [1].

[1] https://archive.is/LvDf2

I am curious what your plan would be for Obama to extricate us from the GWOT and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

> and when the latter is presently attacking the former unprovoked.

Did you miss the whole “axis of resistance” funded and driven by Iran?

Yes