Of course it was. That can happen in a ... war. Unfortunately, and as said as it is, it's ... normal during a war.
What's not normal is that US is supposedly not at war with Iran. What's not normal is that there isn't even a slightest effort being made to hold anybody accountable about it. What's not normal is that it probably happened because of AI tools that are right 99.9% of time, but this was this 0.1% of time.
What's not normal is that the US has a Secretary of War that seems to get off on the cruelty and on breaking international law.
> “Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” Pete Hegseth, wearing a red, white and and blue tie and pocket square, bragged to reporters at the Pentagon near Washington. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
> As defence secretary Hegseth has vowed to “unleash overwhelming and punishing violence” on enemies and promised to dispense with “stupid rules of engagement” – rules designed to restrict attacks on civilian populations.
What is the optimal strategy for Iran, if they assume that the regime can withstand the intensive bombardments and people won't take it to the streets like US / Israel are assuming ?
Wouldn't it be to only launch cheap missiles / drones for a week or two to deplete interceptors and only then start using more advanced missiles ?
They actually do. And I say it as a European and I think the Iranian regime is as bad as it gets, and won't shed a tear if they all get executed.
What recent months show us, is that it's a rough world - there are no friends. I'm rooting for European countries to accelerate their nuclear weapons programs. In an ideal world, of course I would be against. But the world is far from ideal. The current alternative is being dictated the rules by Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. Thanks, but no.
Regardless of how it ends, and it can go both ways, we're witnessing history here. This feels like a much bigger development than Russia-Ukraine. Iran is a major partner for Russia and China, mostly for military technology and oil. Hope it's not a start of WW3.
But russia-ukraine is also a much more contained war between 2 parties that will likely end in a stalemate.
The middle east is a much more tangled web of alliances and hatreds, i think the iranian regime falling would have much more harder to predict second order geopolitical effects.
Ukraine will never de jure give up those territories and majority of nations will never recognize those as part of Russia. And it’s 20%, not 30%. Pre full scale war it was 7%, now it is 19%, so during the five years they’ve captured 12% of Ukraine's territory.
Russian goals were:
- Quick decapitation - fail
- Change of government - fail
- Prove that majority of Ukrainians are phone Russians and the moment greater Russia comes everyone will see that Ukraine is not a real state - fail
- Make second Belarus out of Ukraine - fail
- Stop NATO enlargement, Finland and Sweden joined NATO essentially doubling border with NATO - fail
- Dissuade Ukraine from joining EU and make it pro Russian first - fail
- Prove that Russia is a great military power on par with US that can topple regimes at will - fail
- Make Russia strategically independent- fail, Russia is now completely dependent on China
- Destabilize EU - fail, Europe is united like never under US/Russia/China threat
This war will enter history as one of the worst blunders.
I hope you're joking. This is such "Ukrainians are just Russians by a different name" logic. China, Belarus, and North Korea are deep in this conflict, so are all the European countries. There's no stalemate end to this war, only a temporary cease fire or the collapse of Russia.
Depends how you count “big”. Russia-Ukraine has had about 1 million deaths, and has completely changed how Europe thinks about security- it’s hardly a sideshow. Then again, not much territory has changed hands and there has been no regime change yet.
Not true, prior to 2022 February Russia controlled small parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, now they control them almost entirely, as well as good chunks of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts.
All were captured during their thrift store blitzkrieg. Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Mariupol were captured because pro Russian rats sabotaged mine defenses in Kherson oblast.
The casualty-to-death ratio in Ukraine is surprising for modern times, especially on the Russian side. Counting civilians, Ukrainians, Russians, I can see the death count being close to 1M. Partisan sources already put Russian combat losses at around 1.2M personnel. Ukrainian losses might be more than half what Russian losses are. The 1M deaths estimate doesn't seem outlandish.
No it's not. This is an air strike campaign, no boots on the ground. It'll end in two weeks. There is no chance China or Russia get involved, like last time, so "WW3" is completely non-credible.
The previous campaign lasted a whole 13 days and WW3 didn't start. I'm not sure why anybody thinks it'll be different now or why Russia or China would bother going to war for Iran. That makes zero sense.
> The previous campaign lasted a whole 13 days and WW3 didn't start. I'm not sure why anybody thinks it'll be different now or why Russia or China would bother going to war for Iran. That makes zero sense.
We did not move 1/3 of operational USAF capacity and 33% of our deployable Navy for limited strikes.
Okay, and where's the army? I'm not sure what you're expecting without boots to put on the ground. Are the pilots gonna be ejecting to go hunt Khamenei? This argument is meaningless. Again, none of this can lead to WW3 and none of this can turn into a protracted war as in Ukraine-Russia.
You can stop when you have no idea what you're talking about, you know.
You seem like a Trump voter who voted for no more wars doing damage control
Boots on the ground can happen at any time if Iran manages to either hit one of the thousands of US assets in the region or worse they resort to terrorism with a theatrical attack like 9/11 which ended up costing so many lives , money and freedoms ranging from TSA literally up your ass to the destruction of privacy online and offline…..and of course as we all know boots on the ground
The big difference with previous campaign is that now, the Iranian regime is facing existential threat. While the previous war was more a of a show for respective domestic publics, this one feels like there is no coming back.
Of course Russia or China won't go to war for Iran - nobody is saying that. They can get involved though, just as Europe is involved in Ukraine war.
That is not to say bombing doesn't have its uses in war. The bombing of the oilfields of Ploesti in Romania severely damaged the German war machine. But it took Russian boots on the ground in Berlin to effect a German surrender.
Being Serbian, the bombing campaign of 1999. was successful. It lead to the (temporary, 12-years long) regime change, and to the de-facto independence of Kosovo. It ended the war.
There might be boots on the ground eventually given Trump's speech.
>The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission
Iran is hitting back at US bases so it could be related to those risks, rather than a full invasion.
(Crazy idea, maybe the people shouldn’t be left in the dark about their government’s war plans by having a deliberate legislative body debate and vote on it)
It's a sinister statement, but despite everything the U.S. has moved to the region, they didn't move the stuff they would need to move for ground operations.
As big as this is, the Russia-Ukraine war pretty much marked the end of the post-WW2 era and redefined global relations between the powers. In that sense, this is yet another major shift within this new era. But also, the series of events that led to this point does connect to the Russia-Ukraine war, and maybe doesn't happen without it.
> And they will again appear weak and incapable, unable to help their allies
Iran and Russia have various partnership agreements, but are not allies. And Russia has already demonstrated that it doesn't support what are, on paper, close allies in the CSTO, so not defending a non-ally strategic partner really doesn't move the needle on their credibility.
China buys Iranian oil, if they’ll start to but oil from non-sanctioned countries it will push prices up. But the biggest reason for prices to go up is the risk that Iran will attack tankers in the strait of Hormuz or oil infrastructure on Arabian peninsula.
I don't think it's bigger than Russia-Ukraine - it's part of it. This is all about destabilising Iran's incumbent government, which is probably a good thing at the moment. It'll damage supply lines to Russia's Ukraine offensive, give the chance for Iranian citizens to rise up against Khamenei and the IRGC and break the command chain for their foreign proxy operations. Part of Dugan's work on geopolitics, which they seem to be following to the word (c'mon guys seriously?) suggests that Moscow and Tehran should be allied which they are behind the scenes.
As for the nuclear threat, literally Iran said it was going to destroy Israel to the point it had a massive countdown clock in Tehran until Israel blew it up, so meh. If I was on the receiving end of that threat I'd make it a policy to respond to it, escalation or not. I make no claims of the accuracy of the threats past IAEA being unable to verify they aren't enriching stuff.
Doubt it'll escalate into WW3. The only other powers involved are Russia, who are totally hands tied with Ukraine if they like it or not and China is only interested keeping what's left in its sphere of influence later through their outreach initiatives. I suspect most Middle Eastern countries will be quite happy about this conflict as they have persistent problems with Iran as well from the Houthis, Hezbollah and tens of other factions. They won't want to say anything though in case their own citizens turn on them.
The cringeworthy thing is how the US gov are communicating this and that does the operation a lot of damage. It's really quite terrible. Sounds like it was written by a bunch of 9 year olds after too many sugary drinks. Urgh.
> The cringeworthy thing is how the US gov are communicating this and that does the operation a lot of damage. It's really quite terrible. Sounds like it was written by a bunch of 9 year olds after too many sugary drinks. Urgh.
Thats because its not written for you and I. Its written for people who struggle to communicate at an adult level, which is a shockingly large portion of the US.
I think “Make America Great Again” was effective because it means whatever the person hearing it wants it to mean, and there’s no obvious metric by which to measure its success.
The policies on the left tend to have a lot more nuance, which is much harder to fit on a hat.
More like this is a small piece of the puzzle in Russian-Ukraine war. Iran plays quite a big role in supplying Russians. If Iran is taken out, power balance in that war may change too.
I don’t dispute that fact, but the Jews that have immigrated from there have grew up in the Soviet Union and in the Soviet education system, and therefore speak Russian
Additional context: the comment above me stated 2m people have emigrated from Russia to Israel it’s more correct to say that they have emigrated from the Soviet Union
I have to wonder how many are in governmental roles and realized they can steer the US into conflicts and ruining itself without any of those involved identifying as Russian. It's the cleanest backdoor for espionage that there ever was.
Don't worry, they will be seized by the government soon. Sounds crazy right. Not that far from the headline though, that would sound insane a mere 18 months ago.
I know that, that's why I'm asking the question. But if cost and complexity grow drastically with scale, my question is even more relevant, isn't it ?
If it's easy to spin up a competitor, we should rather see more small companies, not less.
From a pure numbers standpoint, absolutely. We're already seeing a wave of folks shipping more PoC products with AI tools. The distinction is that most of these aren't true "competitors" to established companies, more filling gaps and niches if they aren't just a toy clone.
That's the more interesting angle here to me. Rather than building a direct competitor at 10% the cost, agent assisted tooling could make it individually profitable to target small cap, cottage industry type problems that have too much nuance for a one size product. Areas where someone already has deep business insight that provides the value proposition moreso than the labor around coding. Not competitors at 10% the cost, but filling niches that wouldn't have been profitable otherwise.
The danger is that if agents get more capable, the niche markets start to erode. If a generic solution agent can acquire domain knowledge and coordinate with customers, even these 'competitors' become risky again.
There have always been a million small POC clones of popular apps. Twitter, Trello, <insert popular todo app>, etc.
Doing a subset of what a market leader is doing, but worse, with no path to scale or support, isn’t going to go anywhere.
Yesterday someone vibe coded a password manager in 20 minutes and posted it here. Should anyone use it? Absolutely not. It’s a security nightmare, won’t get support, and the architecture is complete trash, requiring the use to run a local server the background that the app and browser extension talk to. Not to mention it will likely never see an update.
Successful competitors do something new. A lazy vibe coded clone doesn’t nothing new, and they don’t even do all the basics.
The country's progress and management is extremely good, however it's enabled mostly by exploitation of migrant workers and various kind of white collar crimes (ie, facilitating business for illegal or sanctionned entities - cf Nvidia chips for China for example)
I think specifically for example of getting Nvidia chips to China, many Singaporeans would say that that is only illegal because the US deems it so. There is no moral reason.
I guess you prefer poor people stay in their poor countries where you don't have to look at them? Allowing migrant workers is a win-win arrangement, and I wish we'd do more of that.
What's not normal is that US is supposedly not at war with Iran. What's not normal is that there isn't even a slightest effort being made to hold anybody accountable about it. What's not normal is that it probably happened because of AI tools that are right 99.9% of time, but this was this 0.1% of time.
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