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Iran has nobody in charge to lead any sort of negotiations or to order stand down. Now it really is guerrilla war. The type that never ends.
by whatever1 7mo ago
Iran has nobody in charge to lead any sort of negotiations or to order stand down. Now it really is guerrilla war. The type that never ends.
- rayiner 7mo agoGuerrilla war requires people at the grass roots to care. Is that true in Iran? Venezuela seems to have quieted down already.
- ncallaway 7mo agoThe IRGC is 125k-150k people. Many of them are pot committed to the current government, because the IRGC has done... unforgivable things that a new government would be likely to punish. Venezuela is also run by the same security apparatus and government as it was before. We didn't attempt to turn over the entire government.
- rasz 7mo ago>The IRGC is 125k-150k people. Takes Ukrainians 4 months to kill that amount. What you are saying winning is quite doable.
- anabab 7mo agothats in a scenario with soldiers pushing into no mans land under permanent drone control. Israel demonstrates much lower stats when enemy hides underground. I would imagine having no boots on the ground will lower the numbers further.
- ncallaway 7mo agoYou... simply cannot take the numbers from one war and blindly apply them to a totally different one. The comparison isn't apt for a number of reasons. First, Russians are generally on the offensive, which means pushing into Ukrainian controlled territory. Often, they are pushing into defensive lines that have had years of fortification. Second, there are a lot more Russians in Ukraine. To kill 125k people, you have to find 125k people. It's a lot easier to find a Russian in Ukraine that it will be to find an IRGC soldier in Iran if there's an invasion and guerilla operations in response. In Iraq after the conventional military phase, the US killed ~26k insurgents over the course of a decade (and also captured ~120k). Iran is bigger than Iraq, has far more people than Iraq, and has much bigger logistical burdens for an invasion. I could believe that the US Military is quite capable of running some small scale targeted operations within Iran successfully. We can probably pull off operations to do things like attempt to seize and secure uranium stockpiles if we know where they are (though such an operation could also go catastrophically badly, too). I think the US Military could invade Iran and topple the regime, but it would be an enormous lift, and I think there's almost no chance we would have the political will to sustain the costs and casualties that a total invasion would entail.
- Qwertious 7mo agoIran's theocracy is pretty ideologically motivated, they're not just in it for the money.
- rayiner 7mo agoTotally correct. I just don’t have a good handle on how deep the theocracy runs in society.
- fmajid 7mo agoProbably as much as MAGA is in the US.
- rayiner 7mo agoMAGA is just 1990s liberalism. Progressives are the ones experiencing a religious awakening, complete with all sorts of taboos and unfalsifiable shibboleths.
- nullocator 7mo agoYa, No. MAGA is modern Nazism and Christian Nationalism, it was bread out of the Conservative and Republican party of the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, and has been fully embraced by and has enveloped by both. Rejecting hate, racism, indoctrination, and cultism is not "experiencing a religious awakening" it's quite the opposite.
- rayiner 7mo agoBill Clinton passed sweeping laws to curb illegal immigration, including the ban on using federal dollars to support illegal immigrants: https://scholars.org/brief/how-americas-1996-immigration-act-set-stage-increasingly-localized-and-tough-enforcement https://scholars.org/brief/how-americas-1996-immigration-act.... Progressives meantime took positions that were fringe in the 1990s, like cultural relativism, and redefined that as “rejecting hate.” Progressives have elevated cultural relativism to a core religious principle. They can’t even articulate why it’s desirable for immigrants to “assimilate,” because in their world view it must be taken as axiomatic that America wouldn’t be substantively less successful if it was culturally more like Guatemala or India.
- orwin 7mo agoMaduro was such a bad leader that his prime minister sold him to the US. Which means now Venezuela is still a chavist regime, but not under US embargo anymore. This will improve their economy a great deal, and if the regime doesn't capture all the profits for itself, will also improve the QOL of all Venezuelians, hopefully.
- keybored 7mo agoNow Venezuela still has bad government, but without any embargoes imposed by us. This will likely improve the quality of life of the residents now that we don’t try to screw up their economy. Just hoping that the dastardly bad government doesn’t pocket the difference introduced by the better economy from us not screwing up their economy.
- dragonwriter 7mo agoVenezuela wasn’t a regime change war it was a US-backed palace coup that left the entire regime except for the guy at its head in place in exchange for a narrow set of policy favors to the US. It has little in common with Iran, which is more like the 2003 Iraq war (but, so far, without committing ground troops, but there is no way to maintain that with Trump’s stated goal of “unconditional surrender”; that’s going to require a ground forces occupation at a minimum, and probably a ground forces invasion to acheive it) than it is like the recent intervention in Venezuela. Even if they are not particular fond of the regime that is in the process of being destroyed, the Iranian people are likely to resist that, just as occurred in Iraq (with the most significant resistance there coming from forces that were opposed to Saddam’s regime and which had been actively suppressed by it while it was in power.)
- expedition32 7mo agoAmericans have the uncanny ability to make everyone hate their guts. A US occupation will inevitably breed resistance.
- toast0 7mo agoNot too many people like an armed occupation.
- rayiner 7mo ago[flagged]
- nullocator 7mo agoIran can survive the war without regime change, they have infinite Ayatollahs, america just needs to chill out with the "bomb children and commit war crimes and being lead by the great satan and pedophiles" stuff.
- keybored 7mo agoThe US (following Israel’s lead) offensively invaded another country. Nothing Iran could have said about America would make it look more like the Great Satan than what it has done itself. But chill out, Americans say. We only demand that the Ayatollah (or any other Ayatollah) doesn’t exist/are dead. Why do you have to be so, like unchill about it?
- anigbrowl 7mo agoGetting bombed tends to make people care a lot, just not for the people doing the bombing.
- throwaw12 7mo agoIran should negotiate with whom? If someone backstabbed me twice while we were in negotiations, I would not give them 3rd chance for negotiations, US and Israel really f....d their reputation after 2 attacks while in negotiations
- whatever1 7mo ago[flagged]
- heisenzombie 7mo agoI was under the impression that everyone (ie US, UN, EU) basically agreed they complied with the JCPOA right up until the US pulled out of it? Is that not accurate?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- throwaw12 7mo agoI am not expert in Iran, but can you list agreements they didn't keep? I know IAEA was allowed for inspections as agreed, but IAEA started leaking information to Israel and Iran stopped sharing more info with them. Surprisingly, Israel, the country who didn't allow IAEA at all, while owning nuclear arsenal is attacking another country for "not-complying" with IAEA
- jibal 7mo agoThat simply isn't true.
- donkeybeer 7mo agoI vote for nuclear inspections in the only mide eastern country that "doesn't" have nukes. If they don't have nukes, they shouldn't have any problems with inspections. Iran has been a much more trustworthy entity in the nuclear department.
- fmobus 7mo ago