Comment by tristanj
12 hours ago
I disagree. Iran was about to lose. If this ceasefire had not happened, the US and Israel would bomb all of Iran's electricity and fuel facilities. That's what was supposed to happen today, and is what forced Iran to the negotiating table with an hour to spare.
Without electricity, there is no modern life. There is no ability to communicate, pay salaries, run a business, have running water, etc. Without fuel, there are no logistics; there is no capability to transport an army. Nor is there an ability to transport food, people will starve; it would cause an enormous civilian crisis, and this would cause massive riots bigger than the ones seen in January.
The Iranian government would have no ability to coordinate a response, and Iran would collapse within a week. The country would devolve into chaos, into paramilitary factions, and a civil war would start, similar to in Syria.
The US and Israel have been sitting on this the entire time. They don't want to do it, because it would cause near permanent economic damage to Iran.
Once Iran showed it had no ability to prevent the US/Israel from doing a indiscriminate bombing campaign, it was clear the US and Israel could always win this war through this outcome.
It never had any ability to prevent an indiscriminate bombing campaign, and never did. And nobody ever thought otherwise.
It only ever had to prove it could keep the strait closed. Which it did. And now the americans are going away, and they can get back to hanging students from cranes.
The USA has failed to achieve any of its strategic goals, and is going home, defeated.
The conflict is far from over, this ceasefire is unsustainable as neither side wants to agree to the demands of the other.
A ceasefire mostly benefits the US, since it can bring in more military assets across the globe. Ships and troops are still weeks away from arriving & being able to participate in combat operations.
A negotiated settlement is preferable to total destruction of the Iranian economy, and large destruction in the middle east, by all parties involved.
I expect the conflict to resume after two weeks, or later this year, after midterms.
…except very few died. The Iranian and US casualties and entire ME casualties since the operation started combined are less than 15% of the Iranian citizens slaughtered a month before this all started.
Do we not care about deaths anymore? Avoiding war and death is a win for everyone.
They did not manage to bomb Germany, North Korea, or North Vietnam into submission and they tried for years. Winning through bombing alone has never worked.
Do not underestimate the effects of modern precision bombing, the technology moved forward (especially if we compare it with II. world war). Today it's much easier to destroy any kind of infrastructure, power plants, bridges, dams, water preparation facilities, waste treatment, cement, steel production, food silos, fuel storage, vehicle manufacturing, etc.
This is very important because, population in cities is much more dependent on infrastructure, than rural population. Rural population is mostly self sufficient. Over 60% of Iranians live today in cities, but under 20% of Vietnamese lived in cities at the time of Vietnam war. Vietnam was also strongly supported by China, with transportation using Laos and Cambodian.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
Iran is even now under sever water crisis.
https://www.wri.org/insights/iran-war-water-crisis-middle-ea...
So a large scale bombing of all Iranian infrastructure would probable not cause the fall of the regime, because they have the guns and can take anything they want, but the suffering and famine of Iranian people would be enormous.
Sometimes large scale bombing causes submission, for example fire-bombing of Japanese cities (atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in the scale of destruction and loss of life comparable to Tokyo fire bombing, only much cheaper in the number of airplanes).
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01171/
My point is that you can't bomb a country into submission. You can use strategic air power in addition to other methods, but the bombing alone was proven again and again to fail. More often than not, it hardens the enemy's resolve.
Bombing Britain failed. Bombing Germany failed (except for dragging the Luftwaffe into a war of attrition). Bombing Japan failed on its own until Japan had no navy left afloat, and the Russians savaged their army in China. The bomb accelerated a victory achieved through other means.
In Korea, Americans levelled cities and infrastructure until there was nothing left to bomb. That did not win the war.
In Vietnam, Linebacker failed. Linebacker II bought slightly more favourable terms for the US in negotiations, but in the end, North Vietnam won.
Even the Desert Storm curbstomp would not have worked without boots on the ground.
I'm just rehashing a better post on this exact topic: https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
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No, it would achieve the three primary goals of this conflict.
It would cause catastrophic economic damage to Iran, and given how politically unstable Iran currently is (millions of people rioted earlier this year), the regime would not survive the oncoming civil unrest.
It would be a humanitarian disaster, but from the US/Israel's point of view, it would be a victory. An Iran with no electricity has no capacity for industry, and has no ability to manufacture missiles, drones, or have a nuclear program.
Without ability to manufacture missiles, Iran would be unable coerce people to buy into it's Hormuz transit toll system, and the strait would reopen.
This weakened Iran would have no ability to produce nukes, close the strait, and make missiles; for at least a decade while they recover economically.
> This weakened Iran would have no ability […], close the strait, […]
Here is where we disagree. And i think this is the only point which matters.
I agree with you that the US always had the ability to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure. I agree with you that doing so would cause catastrophic economic damage, civilian unrest, regime overthrow etc. It would seriously disrupt their nuclear program for sure.
What it wouldn’t do is reopen the strait. As long as some ships pay the toll those monies can be used to pay the “warfighters” and their weapons. It is relatively cheap to do so. Ukraine demonstrated this with their unmanned surface vessels. This they can do even if the whole hinterland of Iran is in flames and turmoil.
In fact the more their economy collapses the more lucrative this coastal piracy “business” relatively to other opportunities becomes. People who “before the bombing” had better things to do will find that shaking down foreign ships is still doable “after the bombing”. Some of it will be out of ideology and hate for sure, destroying all the civilian infra of a country tends to whip up emotions in people. But fundamentally they can keep doing it because it is a business which pays.
And regime overthrow won’t help with this either. In the absence of a strong central coordinating force you might get multiple separate pirate outfits camping at different parts of the coast trying to take tolls. That obviously wouldn’t improve their economic success, but would increase chaos and hinder transportation even more.
In short while the USA could destroy Iran as a nation, doing so would not eliminate the threat to shipping in the region.
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"Without ability to manufacture missiles, Iran would be unable coerce people to buy into it's Hormuz transit toll system, and the strait would reopen."
You don't need missiles to keep Hormuz closed. Cheap drones, naval mines and such are enough, and those don't require that much production capabilities, especially if you get some help from Russia. It's enough to hit a ship every now and then, which keeps the insurers away.
Even without any infrastructure IRGC could wage a guerrilla war for a long time.
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Turning Iran into another Afghanistan would not have been a win for anyone with a memory longer than the last two election cycles.
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Putting aside the fact that the humanitarian disaster you envision would not produce the simple result you expect, it's quite disturbing that you have completely glossed over the fact that destroying Iran's ability to produce electricity is a war crime.
Committing an act of genocide against a country of 90+ million people would be the death of the US as we know it.
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Nobody with any slight acquaintance with history could believe any of these.
Well yes, if cruelty is the goal, bombing civilians is cruel.
If I'm not mistaken, the Obama administration was about to accomplish every single one of those goals with a treaty, which the Trump administration cancelled. Bombing a country into accepting terms that they had already agreed to is not that impressive.
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The Iranian military is very decentralised and designed specifically with American capabilities in mind. So am not sure they would collapse. And a defending force is far less dependent on logistics in the short term. Also, Iran has a culture of sacrifice.
Iran and the US exist in a state of equilibrium of opposite strategies. The US is unwilling to risk its troops and sees sacrifice as weakness but otherwise applies maximal pressure. And Iran is willing to sacrifice its citizens and sees that as noble. And outside of a black swan event there is little hope of change.
Each side sees its enemies greatest military strength as a moral weakness and will keep fighting. Whilst conversely believing that sacrifice/maximal remote force may someday work. Iranians are not going to pivot because their culture has been forged as a response to exactly this kind of pressure. Nor will America suddenly see the sacrifices of thousands of it's men as virtuous. So things probably just revert back to the same equilibrium.
The point is that America blowing up power plants and Iran absorbing casualties is just an extension of the status quo.
> The US and Israel have been sitting on this the entire time. They don't want to do it, because it would cause near permanent economic damage to Iran.
That is such an incredible interpretation of the situation that basically requires you to ignore basically every economic problem being faced from this insanity currently and in the near future.
Sure, the US an Israel were just "too concerned" about the Iranian economy to do war crimes.
Yes? How is it a misinterpretation?
If the US ended up damaging power plans and desalination plants, that would mark a clear inflection point in the number of "friends" the US has militarily, economically, and politically. Sure, Israel would still be a big fan, and maybe Saudi Arabia, but otherwise the US would become a pariah.
It would be damaging to Iran and potentially hundreds of thousands or millions would die.
That's a lot of blood debts.
There is no way the US would walk away from that situation into a better outcome.