Comment by bad_haircut72
2 days ago
When Russia invaded Ukraine, nobody (even the Ukranians) imagined that 5 years later they would have their own missiles hammering Russia 2500kms in the rear. Americans need to start accepting that a) the Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years and b) Iran will probably in a better place than they are now, strategically speaking.
> Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years
The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
What's the goal of the US/Iran war? So far it seems like the goal is to mostly return to the status quo prior to the war. I can't imagine that could continue 5 years because there's just not an objective. Of course, I could easily be mistaken.
> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
To make certain people money by shorting the oil market. There is a reason why these "peace" deals are always announced on Fridays.
I never got the logic of this conspiracy theory. If you’re trying to make money insider trading off some events, wouldn’t you want markets to be open when the events occur? You’d like to be able to enter and exit your position immediately before and after any news breaks. Markets being closed when a deal is announced makes it less efficient to trade on that news.
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That’s exactly why it could continue indefinitely. A war with no goal can’t be won. Nor can it be abandoned without bruising powerful egos.
Per the spec of the last 25 years, they will let it run until the party in control of the White House changes. The new party will be responsible for the exit & cleanup phase.
There hasn't been a clear goal for an American war since the first Gulf War.
The goals for intervention in the Serbia/Bosnia conflict were clear and noble, IMO.
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clear goal is making trillions to war profiteer friends, is this too hard to see for the public?
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I'm not sure its accurate to imply that being completely delusional means you have no goal. Gulf War part II had a goal regardless of the deceit involved. The Afghanistan war though I thought took the cake for the sheer delusional premise.
To tie it to the sibling comment about Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown who was the High Representative for Bosina & Herzegovina was also one of the lone voices warning about the Afghanistan war in the beginning.
I wasn't able to find the article containing the original warnings, but here is one article from the early days[0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/11/britainand9...
Once you've lost something (I think sooner or later, Iran will succeed in sinking a big US ship) then even if you cant win, you also cant leave else its an admission of defeat - so it drags on and on and on.
I'm not sure the US would behave as rationally in that scenario as you hope
I think they can already sink any US ship that comes in range if they want to. And the US knows it too. But for different reasons, it's in neither's interest to go there.
I think the current leadership in Tehran is pragmatic enough to want to avoid that. Of course, the longer this drags on, the more likely they are to be replaced by hard-liners
The have the Strait of Hormuz, a much bigger asset than sinking a US ship
> I think sooner or later, Iran will succeed in sinking a big US ship
Sinking or even just seriously damaging a U.S. aircraft carrier — approx. 5K people in crew + airwing, billions of dollars in ship and aircraft — might trigger a Pearl-Harbor or 9/11 fury among the American public. No U.S. president could get away with even a "proportionate" response, let alone doing nothing.
Think of the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1965, which led to the U.S.'s widened involvement in Vietnam on the basis of grossly-distorted reports about alleged attacks — which never happened — on U.S. destroyers (which are comparatively small ships). [0] If Iran were to actually sink a U.S. aircraft carrier, then Trump-Hegseth-Miller might well nuke Tehran in response.
We sure as hell don't need anything like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 by a terrorist. It triggered a cascade of some of the stupidest and costliest government decisions in history. Belgrade, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, London, they all effed it up almost beyond belief. WWI cost millions of lives and untold billions in resources that could have been put to far better use. Iran sinking a U.S. carrier could be a similar trigger.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
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> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
What's the goal?! The US/Iran war has a ton of goals! Every day a new goal, each as improbable as the last.
Not only that, but even the status of the goals is insane.
Right now Republicans are just flipping a coin every day to decide whether each "goal" is (A) a critical need where only Dear Leader can save us or (B) a glorious victory for Dear Leader who has solved everything forever.
We saw the same with the the mutually-incompatible and shifting "goals" of the illegal taxes on American buyers (tariffs.) Some of those "goals" were being pre-declared as achieved simply by announcing the policy. (Narrator: "They weren't.")
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As with Ukraine, it's a David and Goliath kind of conflict and in both conflicts, the temptation for Goliath to escalate by leveraging scale is predictable, tempting and frought.
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The US had the power to start the war. The US doesn't have the power to stop the war.
It takes one party to start a war, but it takes (at least) two to end it.
The war ends when all involved parties agree that it ends, not because one party is tired of it.
The only way the US alone can end the war in Iran is to ensure complete surrender, and then stay put for 20 years like Iraq and Afghanistan, only to leave like a thief in the night and things reverts to what they were before, only with more local hate for the US than was already there (as most islamic states sees the US as the great devil).
I think most European nations learned their lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of those were NATO operations btw. Article 5 was invoked for Afghanistan, but the NATO contribution was limited to a naval operation and patrolling of US airspace. NATO is a defensive treaty, not an aggressive one. The actual ground invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq was done by a US led coalition of the willing, and when the US started the Iran war, most european leaders openly declared that this was not europes war.
It absolutely does, it can simply choose to not bomb Iran after Iran enforces regulations on its (shared with Oman) waterway.
Bombing Iran for a month because Iran fired on 4 ships that were violating its SoH rules is wildly disproportionate and optional.
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> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
I'm just a layman, but the goal seems obvious to me. First it's not US/Iran but US + Israel / Iran. From Israel's point of view, I assume the goal is the preemptive destruction of Iran's military capabilities (especially nuclear weapons).
This is not a very charitable explanation, it takes politicians at their word during a war. (One should not do that, and you can refer to Putin’s language at 2022 as a parallel example to Trump’s)
The initial US goals clearly were: 1. Regime change 2. Denial is of nuclear weapons
It’s also clear these goals were not achieved. So the US changed tactics and goals. (Same as Russia no longer plans on capturing Kiev it seems)
Most likely the US is stalling for time due to oil markets and has the same intentions as before, limited only by current capability.
I think regime change is likely to happen within two years. Just not in Iran.
According to The Economist, the Iranian theocracy is no longer in power, the IRGC is. Still, not the regime change Trump was hoping for, that's for sure.
> Khamenei’s killing has accelerated Iran’s transition from a theocracy to an ambitious nationalistic state dominated by military men. The irgc appears to wield power with few constraints. Clerics who challenged its influence—including former Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani—were conspicuously absent from the [funeral] processions.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/middle-east-and-africa...
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> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
It varies. Which is the problem.
I can think of a few:
1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions. This one might actually be working to an extent.
2) Severely kneecap the Iranians' military ambitions in the Middle East as a whole, particularly with respect to Israel. This remains unknown. Their neighbors seem content to give them a pass for launching missiles into their infrastructure, possibly on the grounds of shared religion. Maybe they'll get tired of it.
3) Cause regime change in Iran. Not happening now. Might not happen in the foreseeable future.
3 happened. The new boss is the old bosses son though so it wasn't a useful change.
>1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions.
Every time someone hits them, they learn that they wouldnt be hit if only they had a nuclear weapon.
Initially it's unclear what the goal was. But now the goal must be opening the strait of Hormuz ASAP. There's going to be serious economic fallout if that doesn't happen[0]. It remains to be seen how realistic that goal actually is. Iran has big advantages in their favor.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/08/business/iran-oil-trump-strai...
Can we agree on "the strait was open before the war" so it can't be a goal for the war.
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Trump has clearly stated many times the goal is to prevent Iran from obtaining nukes. Many times. Repeatedly, again and again, and all negotiations are directed towards that first and foremost.
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If it's continue 5 years, the country connected to this war in this region will go fast downstairs and maybe even end in a broken state. I don't sympathies with any monarch country there, but no one wants more unstable countries, especially in the Arabic region.
> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
kneecaping china by cutting off a huge source of its oil imports. Russia will not be able to make up the difference.
All countries are affected, not just China.
> The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
Or at least the Donbas... I can't imagine they'd want a border pressing up against nato without a rump state in between.
Write off depreciation on military hardware?
> The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
No, it has a goal to keep Putin in power.
The Iran war happened to move people's interest from a certain set of files about a certain group people onto something else.
It succeeded by that standard, but now has created the mess that you can't just start a war with a country to distract your voters and not suffer any consequences from it.
Iran was not thrilled to be bombed to play a part in this distraction.
Someone making Putin the image of Russia clearly doesn't understand the country and inhaled to much propoganda. Sorry
The Trump administration forgot all of the lessons of Vietnam.
If it weren't for those bone spurs maybe that war wouldn't be so forgotten
Maybe because they dogged it?
The goal is a very simple one: make Trump look good. It wouldn't be the first war in history to be driven by pure vanity of an absolute ruler.
It's to distract from the Epstein files.
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> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
Distract from the Epstein files. If you think anything else you:
I'm not sure anything is a distraction from the Epstein files. I don't think the administration cares about the Epstein files. What would be the fallout if they were all released? We already know that a lot of wealthy people were raping children. It's not like the US is going to prosecute.
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> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
Distraction from Epstien Files
the goal of the war in iran is to produce a regime change that will prevent them from having nukes targeting israel
islamic iran with nukes makes israel untennable and the us puppets in the gulf too
the us will be forced to physically invade now that the first strike failed
the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel
Pakistan has nukes and I don't see the Gulf/Levant quaking in their boots
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> the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel
It seems to be tolerating Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir just fine!
Imagine the different place Israel would be if it pursued Oct 7 as a criminal act instead of a pretext to commit genocide. Enormous strategic blunder by the Netanyahu regime. Israel would not be a global pariah state and it's entirely possible that regime change in Iran would have succeeded. But you are never going to regime change a people who know with certainty that they will be butchered/raped/tortured by their supposed "saviors" the Israelis. There is literally nothing worse than surrendering to Israel.
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Well at this point the goal is for Iran to stop randomly blowing up innocent cargo ships. Or firing missiles at airports and cities in retaliation.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/iran-war-live-us-says-iranian-...
That sounds like it would be a return to the status quo.
If that's the goal then the US and Israel are doing their best to stop it from happening. Iran is responding to provocations. Stop provoking them, no more blown up ships.
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The don't blow randomly ships.
The US and Iran agreed (Point 4 and 5) on, for the next 60 days, Iran is "chief of traffic" in the strait.
Iran say now, ships have to take the route close to Iran. But some ships like to take the route close to Oman. Iran is just shooting on these ships.
> Iran will probably in a better place than they are now, strategically speaking
How could that be? Are they getting an influx of $300 billion dollars or something?
It’s an odd declaration and maybe based on Rus/Ukraine. But Ukraine is doing better now than in the first week of the “Special Military Operation” due to having a lot of rich allies who have (in fits and starts) given them a lot of money and gear, and due to a Russia which has stretched its military and economy to the breaking point.
By contrast, Iran’s only allies are its terrorist affiliates in Lebanon, Gaza, and the Houthis. Those guys can’t do much to help. China and Russia (see above though) are willing to do business with them but don’t really give a crap about Iran surviving.
Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former. Iran though will not be better off for it, I’m pretty confident. (Other than their surviving religious fanatics will be even more suicidally devout.)
> Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former.
Can they? https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio... says
“In the 39 days of the air and missile campaign before the ceasefire, U.S. forces heavily used the seven munitions in Table 1. For four of them, the United States may have expended more than half of the prewar inventory”
According to that article, they expended ballpark a third of their inventory of expensive weapons systems such as Patriots or Tomahawk missiles, each with a production lead time of at least 3 years.
If so, they would run out of those expensive weapons in three more months.
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Have you taken a look at Iran's targeting capabilities and the assets they were able to destroy? More importantly, have you considered who facilitated those targeting capabilities?
https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/war-above-w...
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It's sarcasm, a bit, because the last published deal revealed the USA was going to pay Iran 300 billion to end the shooting war that Israel and the USA started. https://www.npr.org/2026/06/23/nx-s1-5866577/iran-trump-deal...
> Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former.
I disagree. The huge problem here is that USAF is showing how they are doing things over and over again. For China it is a treasure trove of data and ideal place for testing of their gear to detect and later shoot down US stealth aircraft which USA is constantly threating to use against China.
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I believe the assessment is based on the desire of the US to offer concessions (such as sanctions withdrawal) in order to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Which will be painful in the medium term, but less so in the long run as oil is diverted around it.
They'll be getting the Hormuz toll money.
Russian goals are vastly different from US'. US has no intent to incorporate Iran or fight out for each and every mountain village. US goals might not be easily achievable either but for completely different reasons. Iran is also unlikely to get 10% of the logistical support Ukraine has.
US may not take Iran under them, but they will grip the Iran's economy by controlling their oil and gas resources. It is what US doing in Irque, all oil sales going through bank of New York, they not only take cuts from sales but also make threats like we would not send dollars if you did not do this and that.
US involvement in the Middle East has ruined those countries. It is not a just middle east where ever they involve they ruin others ex: Trump's Congo deal which locked in their mineral for decade without any benefit to poor Congos
So if the Iran war is still going on in 5 years the global economy has collapsed. I'm not sure people realize just how quickly this situation is going to be dire. 2-3 months more of this and certain countries are going to have rolling blackouts. We will be having shortages of avgas and huge price spikes in avgas, gas and diesel. Diesel in particular is going to have a massive impact on inflation.
Oil futures don't currently reflect this because a lot of players have exited the market because they're sick of being fleeced by Donald Trump who has bet big and then announced yet another fake ceasefire, at least a dozen times. We actually have a bunch of short positions, such that we risk a Gamestop like short squeeze.
Ukraine is harder to figure out because it's really difficult to get good information. We have people on one side saying Russia is on the verge of collapse (and has been for 3 years) while it's also clear that Russia still has a manpower advantage and Ukraine's army is facing desertion and a lack of soldiers to draft. It's also unclear what the real impact of strikes on oil infrastructure deep in Russia are really changing the battle lines and overall position. If anything it might just exacerbate the energy crisis brought on by the Iran war.
lol, no. no comparison between those wars
Big difference between the two - America has elections.
Iran and Russia have elections too
It's hard to imagine them in a better place; they seem to have us by the balls already.
History reveals that every war is won by the nation with superior industrial capacity.
> History reveals that every war is won by the nation with superior industrial capacity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichimeca_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)
You’d be pretty hard pressed to refer the victor of any of these wars as having “superior industrial capacity” compared to their opponents.
Is this some kind of subtle gag?
The Mongol army was much less industrialized than the people they conquered though so I'd say it's factor but not decisive.
People assumed Russia would press with their full might and that has just yet to ever happen. Why don't they carpet bomb all of the ukraine? Why not fire off a littany of missiles? Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Everyone assumed the war would be over in two weeks, because it really could have ended in two weeks if russia went full throttle early on. But there must be some factors at play that prevent total war from seeming like an attractive option. Maybe fear of equal reprisal. And in the end you get this slog of a war, with an unchanging front line and various headlines every few weeks of some one off piece of infrastructure or industry being destroyed, and little coming after that. I'm not sure what these factors are exactly, but clearly they exist to quiet the beast and have this slow drip war be the optimal outcome compared to alternatives. Maybe the threat of NATO taking control of the war is what keeps it at its current slow pace.
- Why don't they carpet bomb all of the Ukraine?
Russia does not have anywhere near enough aircraft to do that. If they tried, they'd lose more of their air force.[1] Russia does not have much of an aircraft industry left. For one thing, much of the USSR's aircraft industry was in Ukraine.
- Why not fire off a litany of missiles?
Nuclear? Russia so far has not wanted to cross that threshold and start WWIII. Non-nuclear, they have to build them.
- Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Because Russia is running out of manpower reserves. The draft in Russia now covers all males from 18 to 30. In that age range, men can no longer leave Russia. Russia has 1.4 million military casualties so far, with about 400,000 deaths. Currently, the casualty rate is higher than the new recruit rate. Conscript soldiers serve for one year, but there is heavy pressure to sign up as a "volunteer" with no time limit. The Russian tradition of throwing recruits into battle with a huge casualty rate continues. It worked in WWII, but cost 20 million lives. It hasn't been working in Ukraine. The Ukrainian claim is that the survival time for a new soldier on the Russian front lines is four hours. This is probably exaggerated.
It was policy for a while that the draft wasn't enforced too strictly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was to avoid generating political opposition to the war. That seems to be over.
[1] https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/putin-cant-fix-this-the-...
> The draft in Russia now covers all males from 18 to 30. In that age range, men can no longer leave Russia.
This is incorrect.
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Russia has no ability to carpet bomb anyone anymore. They have only a handful of operational strategic bombers left and little or no capability to manufacture new ones. Much of the USSR's old heavy aircraft supply chain was in Ukraine. So Russia is unwilling to risk their aircraft in defended airspace because they need to preserve them as part of their strategic nuclear deterrent triad.
> People assumed Russia would press with their full might and that has just yet to ever happen
I don’t think you are appreciating how large the Ukraine is, how deficient the Russian military is and how depleted its population has become.
Look at the losses they are taking, with military casualties having passed a million. Their military spending is a huge portion of GDP (as mush as 50%, see wiki). Their parking lots of mothballed tanks are depleted and their refineries smashed. Russia is teetering and may not be able to sustain this much longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_Russia
Other than nukes, Russia does not have significant spare capacity. They use missiles and drones with months of their production. They fly bomber aircraft as close to the front as they can. They've burned through most of their cold war era stockpiles of equipment. 0.5-1% of their entire population is a casualty of this war (so probably closer to 5% of their working age men).
My understanding is that Russia's "full throttle" isn't actually as strong as they had posed...
It has to be stronger than Israel just from scale, and that seems plenty strong enough to level a modern city in a few days or weeks.
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> Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Because it's hugely politically unpopular. There's a risk that this will happen after the parliamentary election this autumn.
> Why don't they carpet bomb all of the ukraine?
In Chinese we call it "wash the ground with missiles", and many Chinese and Taiwanese say this constantly as a threat or concern. It's amusing that many people think this is a practical thing to happen, and keep bringing it up.
You cannot mass troops easily in the days of satellite and targeted long ranged missiles. They mass 20 million troops but they have to transport them down supply lines and house them all to get them close to the front. They'd be picked apart.
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