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Comment by shash

18 hours ago

That analysis requires discovering what the US’s objectives were. Not sure we can…

Discovering? It was announced a thousand times, maybe you dismissed because none of them were easily achievable?

Opening the Strait, renouncing nuclear program, renouncing ballistic program, regime change. Even Israel will be forced to retreat from Lebanon.

Iran won by choking the Strait and telling USA and Israel they could endure far longer than their aggressors could endure a few missiles and domestic support drop.

A Pakistani-made taco was not in my radar for today.

  • Opening the Strait was not a goal of this action; the Strait was open before this war started. They are trying to sell as a win a return to the status quo ante.

    • I think you will find that Biden closed the straights and that it was going to be reopened and China was going to pay for it. (/s?)

  • I dismissed them because the president and the Pentagon could not seem to articulate the objectives of the war in a way that was cohesive with one another.

    Also,the Strait was open before the war.

    • Yeah obviously opening the strait wasn’t an objective. I think what you’re suggesting is that the mentioned reason - denuclearization of Iran - is unlikely to be the real reason, which may have been something like distraction.

  • > Opening the Strait

    So the US started a war with an objective to open the Strait which only closed due to the war they started.

    Can you explain what you mean here mate?

  • How on Earth was opening the straight an objective of this war, when the straight was open before the war.

    It's like Russia declaring that Russian control of Moscow is an objective of the war with Ukraine.

    > renouncing nuclear program,

    If that was the objective, the US should be declaring war on the guy who scrapped the Iran nuclear deal, because it was accomplishing just that.

I explained the primary cause of this war here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684632

This war is happening today, to exchange a future nuclear war with Iran with a conventional war today. The US and Israel can fight a conventional war with Iran. They cannot fight a nuclear one. In a nuclear war, Israel would be destroyed by nuclear missiles in the two days. The possibility of a nuclear Iran is an existential crisis for Israel, and Israel will do anything possible to prevent Iran from gaining nukes.

That is why we have this conventional war happening today, (with unclear goals), to prevent a nuclear one in the future.

This war was unavoidable btw, it was going to happen sometime this year or next.

  • > This war was unavoidable btw, it was going to happen sometime this year or next.

    Iran was, as per the latest reports I've read, complying with terms and not enriching uranium to weapons-grade or close to weapons-grade. Are there credible reports suggesting otherwise?

    • Those reports are old. IAEA inspectors have not been able to access any of Iran's nuclear facilities since the start of the 12 day war on June 13, 2025. Currently, nobody knows what Iran is doing with their nuclear material.

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  • What do you make of Netanyahu claiming that Iran was weeks from a nuclear bomb, 20-30 years ago?

    What do you make of US/Israel assassinating the supreme leader that had declared a fatwa against nuclear weapons?

    > This war was unavoidable btw

    Wars of choice, thousands of miles away from the nearest US city, are extremely avoidable, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

  • Although it might reflect actual considerations of Israel and, by extension, the US, that's ultimately a very unreasonable take. Iran might not have been trying to build nuclear weapons in the past, as they claimed. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. In contrast, Iran will try to build nuclear weapons in the future with certainty. They'd be insane not to try now, after having been bombed for weeks in an illegal war of aggression against them and having been threatened with massive war crimes and genocide.

Some might argue that the US's (or the POTUS's) objective was simply to disrupt the financial markets.

  • This sounds like goalpost moving. Like if you fail to acheive regime change, just say whateber the consequences of your failure were had been your objectives from the start. According to "some" who might "say"

    • You speak like you and I discussed this before, and you remember where the original goalposts were.

      Many analysts suggested that the attack was a smoke-and-mirrors, and the actual goal has always been financial. Similar to the tariffs story. According to that opinion the outcome of the attempt is irrelevant. Regardless of whether the regime have changed or not, the goal is still achieved.

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Well if the objective was just about distracting from some domestic issue, then maybe it doesn't matter from Trump's perspective.