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Comment by mcphage

2 days ago

> 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.")

  • parafraseando Babylon 5 :

    - We ended poverty - When did this happen? - Simply, we changed the dictionary

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.

  • Iran is not David in this case. They’ve shown that their drone warfare is just a little bit under what the US military can provide. Remember that they destroyed a quarter of a trillion dollars radar installation. And the US has spent billions on munitions. The US can’t actually keep going in this war.

    • Without diminishing the huge cost Iran has been able to inflict on US radar, quarter of a trillion is off by more than two orders of magnitude, maybe three. There are 1-2 confirmed radar system confirmed hit, a couple more suspected hit or damaged. But that is going to be hundreds of millions in damage, nowhere close to 250 billion,

    • I once compared the historic GDP values, and IIRC if Iraq-vs-US in 2003 is 1x baseline, then Iran-vs-US today is 7x. Plus Iran (today) has 2x the population and 3x times the land area than Iraq (today).