By Connor O’Keeffe
The problem with this new campaign in Iran is not merely that it will likely have bad near-term consequences, but that it represents the American government doubling down on the imperial project that is causing our accelerating national crisis.
Without a doubt! Trump is wrong this time!
Although I do agree with what he did in Venezuela, since those poor people are mired in misery and there are millions of Venezuelan migrants!
There is so much to say about this that its hard to summarize, but to try:
Its basically impossible to imagine how "America gets something out of Iran" war. The idea that we are going to drop a few weeks of bombs and suddenly Iran is going to love Israel and the 2 will exist in some sort of lasting peace is beyond the limits of credulity.
It is, however, possible to imagine US gets something out of toppling Maduro.
Iran doesn't have to love Israel
The goal is to neuter and defang Iran specifically the theocracy, the radical Islamic theocrats
I have gone back and forth on this: part of me wants to see Iran nuke Israel, we nuke Iran, then we can focus on a world with no Iran or Israel (if only...)
That's not really how that would work. There's still a Japan, for instance, not to mention the enormous diasporas of both Iran and Israel.
I really hate the term Diaspora
and I am not the only one
Why?
it feeds and validates victim status
for example: anti Semitism is the oldest form of discrimination
who the fuck cares, you want a trophy for being the oldest victim
"Diaspora" has nothing to do with victimhood
I admit that I haven't war gamed this completely
If they want to obtain economic natural resources while simultaneously appearing to the general public as a kind of liberating nation...
That's a good move...
And I also say that peace between Iran and Israel is not going to happen; this rivalry or division has existed for centuries...
Venezuela seems different because Maduro was basically sold out by his underlings, as I understand it. That means there was something in place for after his removal.
Do we know for sure Khamanei wasn't sold out too?
I read that US handed Israel a no-kill list of people within the regime. Which suggests the possibility that there is a US friendly contingent, maybe able to take power.
I also read that Khameni left the military with standing orders to retaliate on their own if the chain of command were to break.
I think these two facts are pretty plausible explanations of the observable data, including rocket attacks on Arab neighbors that don't seem to have much strategic purpose.
If both claims are true, it would suggest that there is a power struggle internally, and whoever comes out on top will determine the course of the war and of Iran.
I don't know that he wasn't, but this already went much less smoothly than Venezuela.
My understanding is that the Iranian military is structurally decentralized and that it answered to someone else, anyway.
It seems to me like they're striking at neighbors who are collaborators with the US/Israel.
Right, but it's the lack of strategic purpose that suggests certain elements may be rogue. Like the attack on Turkey, for example.
But you're right, this is already way messier than Venezuela, and for how much the MAGA base hates refugee-driven immigration, this is going to create another swell of that.
Two things to consider:
If history has taught us anything, it's that no matter how much we analyze a situation...
There's always something more behind it, and it simply depends on the perspective from which it's viewed.
I agree with you!
Now we just have to wait and see what will happen politically in that country, since right now the government's power is in a sort of limbo...
How have things been for regular people since the removal?
I know it wasn't great in the immediate aftermath.
There is still no real, tangible improvement.
And I would say that the main obstacle for those still living in Venezuela to move towards a better future is the parasitic and state-dependent mindset left by more than 25 years of socialism.
Without a doubt, socialism is a cancer!
The number of dumb shits that can't tell the difference between starting forever war and ending one is too damn high
May we see them end at some point or are we required to take your word for it?
Decapitation and ~80% degradation in under a week is warp-speed progress relative to the last 50 years of pussy-footing
Petro self-sufficiency in the last 10 years has been a rapid change of incentives over the last 80 years
Every neighboring country has been aggressed, aligning incentives against regional tail risk
The treasury has cut the balls off the London Financial Center by using this as a trigger to re-shore maritime insurance
Cutting the balls off the London Financial Center helps makes Israel a US puppet, not the Chatham House puppet its been since the Europeans created it
There's basically no path to laundering trillions over a decade+ like was done in Iraq, which was largely only justified by keeping it out of Iran's hands
The only tail risk I see, which no dumb shit normies regurgitating NGO slop, libertarian cope, and TDS are talking about... is if this a setup for cassus belli with China... who has technical officers beta testing their hypersonics and satellite constellation based targeting from within Iran as a proxy
I'm of the belief we've had a backroom deal with China to avoid something major with Taiwan, but that doesn't mean the greater pacific containment issue won't go hot.
It's almost like the legion of .mil planners know shit that armchair virtue signalers don't
Well this is a different perspective. Sounds like something Tom Luongo would say
Only loosely familiar as I see his articles pop up under ZH from time to time, just did a search to see what he's saying and found this from today: https://metalsandminers.substack.com/p/tom-luongo-if-the-fed-has-to-expand
Notable lines from the description:
Maybe he's been reading my SN shitposts, or just pays even a little bit of attention and doesn't outsource his thinking to globoslop
This is crazy! This city of London is a big deal in the globalist agenda but yet they don’t get not nearly the coverage WEF gets
Anything that gets a lot of attention is usually the wrong thing. WEF is like Israel and the Epstein files, it's normie bait to distract from the much bigger thing
Imagine a public school teaching kids about War Plan Red, unthinkable, and yet plenty of public school teachers are teaching kids about the USS Liberty these days.
Make a concrete falsifiable prediction, so we can gauge who the real dumbshit is.
Will we be out of Iran within the year? Spend less than $1T? Kill fewer than 10,000 people? Lose fewer than 1000 Americans? What observable benefit will we see and when?
Are your falsifiable predictions that DoW we will spend 1T on this or lose 1k Americans?
Not a chance of either, only way that happens if is this goes mask off with China directly
IRGC is allegedly 190k personnel, so any number under that is over performance.
Benefit is we spend less in Saudi and the region generally as overall risk pricing comes down with the tumor removed
Whatever private investment productivity can grow from that is gravy on top
I intended those only as examples of specific claims, not what I expect to happen.
If you give a timeframe, then this will do for a specific prediction, although I won't grant that it's sufficient on its own to justify the costs of a war.
Defense compacts and infrastructure alignment move incrementally over decades, so to put anything less than 10 years on it would be retarded... So let's use 1 decade as a unit of measure. However, there's already been work going into this for 10 years already, Iran's neighbors are in an increasingly better position to take the ball and run with it much sooner, or maybe the problem gets entirely dumped in Turks lap if Iran becomes a Kurdish state. Perhaps they got Syria in exchange for having to deal with Iran too.
Given that, any sane person that's not a globalist shill or virtue signaling beatnik can easily conclude that the spending on a sandlot half a world away will in 10 years be less expensive without Iran as a concern, such as its been for the last 50 years, than it would be with that festering.
What the globo-slop articles that virtue signalers outsource their thinking to ignore is the sunk costs.
Pretty much everything we've done in the middle east for half a century has come back to Iran in one form or another. These operations are like a lump sum payment to settle the debt we've already incurred for less than if we kept making interest-only payments.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. Virtue signaling doesn't consider this.
It's hard to believe you grew up in Taxachusetts, I mean MA
This is a bad standard, though. It needs to be enough cheaper to make up for the trillions that have been spent on this project and the millions of lost lives. At any reasonable rate of discounting, that's unlikely, not to mention the assumption that America needed to be spending money on the Middle East in the first place.
I get it though. We're all idiots and there's no plausible way to assess your claims.
This is 95 percent correct
I approve this message
5% sounds like fightin' words
Lmao
Bahahaha