The Iranians may lose the capability to export oil by losing their island which is main port of export for Iranian oil

Not sure how this got flagged. It is clearly pertinent and accurate… I’m starting to doubt that this platform really enables objective discussion

the comment has good points but then ruins everything saying it was just propaganda that Trump was a Russian asset.

you can say "asset" was exaggeration or whatever, but Trump to Putin was so obviously undeservedly friendly that it already begs the question, plus there's enough suspicious stuff including multiple ex KGB agents who are sure he was recruited/honeytrapped at some point. ignoring it as just democrat propaganda is republican propaganda. only one of those agents is even in US

Is your claim that the Steele dossier was not DNC propaganda, or that there is other evidence he's a Russian asset?

The Steele dossier has been discredited repeatedly.

I don't know who is Steele and never heard of the dossier, so the other thing

You clearly haven’t seen their militaries… the U.S. developed a bunker buster bomb that they didn’t need for anywhere else just to target the Iranian nuclear programme, which is what was used last June and it is believed that Israel hacked the Tehran traffic camera network… I would say this looks like preparation. As an Israeli too, I can tell you that the only thing that the military establishment was developing for in the last couple decades has been Iran… it is why Israel wasn’t prepared for the October 7th attacks from Iran and why in contrast the beeper attacks on Hezbollah (the Shia Iranian-run proxy in Lebanon) were so successful. But just discount the worlds largest and most successful military in history and the 7th largest military exporter… it is good for us when you underestimate us

For Israel, sure - Iran's been considered the existential threat to them, so yeah, that's the IDF's primary focus. Israel's a peer-level state to Iran (with wide error bars around peer, but they're geographically colocated and neither is large or powerful enough to fully overwhelm the other) - without the US's involvement, this would be a very, very costly war for Israel (and likewise, Iran attacking Israel would be very, very costly for Iran without the US too).

For the US, yes, we've spent a lot of time and effort focused on Iran, but our goal historically has been containment - Iran can't win a war against the US, but they're also not an existential threat to the US, so for us, the question's always been a cost/benefit analysis. Iran knows this, so their act for the last 40 years has been to keep the math on the US attacking Iran unfavorable enough to keep it from happening. This is why they never actually built a bomb - Iran's strategic position was calculated around not pushing Israel into the red zone while still making things too expensive for the US to be willing to bear the cost of attacking Iran.

Unfortunately for all parties, there's three primary flaws in the US's strategic posture: the first is we're too fucking big to feel like we have to do our homework anymore. We can "win" any military conflict shy of full open war against China insofar as we'll be the last ones standing, which puts the rest of the world in the position of having to accommodate themselves to us, not the reverse. The second is that as a people, we've got the shortest memory of perhaps any major nation on earth - the Iranian revolution was in 1989 and the coup was 1953, and to Americans, that's not just distant history, it's practically archaeology. Why would we worry about the Iranians? It's been months since they did anything. The third is we've managed to elect the physical embodiment of that short-termism into office and given him and his friends unilateral permission to do whatever they want in the national scale, which means there's no strategic calculus happening at all - whatever plans, frameworks, or understandings we've built over the last 40 years are in the dustbin along with the rest of the woke DEI crap left over from, eg, the Bush administration.

So, yes, the US has been planning for this for 40 years, but we've got the notable flaw of not reading our plans or caring what happened 40 years ago - as the old joke goes, "a serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine."

Sure, Iran (its regime) is bad.

Iran's neighbour, Israel currently has a genocidal regime (where Netanyahu is trying to become the Jewish Ayatollah by crippling its democracy with the help of his right-wing buddies) that has already massacred and injured more than 50,000 children ( https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unimaginable-horrors-m... ). (The Palestinian genocide is still ongoing). The start of the Iranian war with a massacre of 100+ children suggest that an Iranian genocide too is planned.

America is today run by a President who believes that the rise of India, China, Brazil, South Korea, EU etc, means that American might will be challenged soon, and thus America needs to drop its facade of respect for international law and order and use its full economic and military might to strengthen itself. The Attack on Venezuela and Iran has no politically moral goodwill behind it and is a pure resource grab - it's just a return of imperialism not even trying to pretend otherwise, which none of us in the Global South (former colonies) wish to experience again.

So, tell me again, how is Israel and US morally better than Iran?

I live in the US, and I have no idea what support you’re talking about. Is saying this attack on Iran was a massive fuck-up now considered support for the regime? Is pointing out that this chaotic, badly planned conflict looks terrible, and likely will not weaken the regime much at all, now considered support? If anything, it risks giving them exactly what they want: a younger Ayatollah, fresh grievances, and more national unity. Or is any criticism automatically support now?

Agree. Need to see the grey between the black and white of the discourse.

And I’ll add on a friendly reminder to anyone who needs it that only 22% of the USA population voted for the current administration.

Gaza was already a demonstration of what will be done to you and your people if you "unconditionally surrender" to Israel/US. Genocide is what you'll get. And please do keep in mind that Israel is no stranger to lying about it's neighbours as was seen with Saddam Hussein and the mythical weapons of mass destruction back in 2002-2003.

Not necessarily: Money isn’t everything. Russia cannot produce electronics on its own, so only because American companies sell to shell companies that sell to Russia is Russia able to launch missiles and similar high tech weapons on Ukraine and, no, Russia has no chance in hell of winning in Ukraine with the so called (sadly but truly deeply dehumanising) “meat wave” attacks sending in soldiers with little training and just a riffle… So really oil revenues are a way to hurt Russia but not a way to cause them to lose the war, but depriving them of American technology that they need to develop the kinds of weapons that they use to attack Ukrainian cities and power stations and infrastructure probably would

This is such BS… Google also bought YouTube for a bargain price early on… and that is far from the only successful purchase that Google has had

I wonder if instead of shaking their fist at the sky in anger with billionaires, we could run influence campaigns to:

Collect enough money to run marketing campaigns for billionaires to give more money to charity. (I don’t super trust politicians to tax them more and I am not sure that taxing them would even be effective given that there are always tax havens and loopholes, but persuasion should be possible, not extraordinarily expensive and have a high cost-benefit IMHO)

> Collect enough money to run marketing campaigns for billionaires to give more money to charity.

They’ll just counter it with an army of cheap tik tokers portraying you as soyjack and campaign of disinformation.

That is utter BS. If you stop negotiating in order to attack, then you are giving the enemy the advantage of knowing exactly when you will attack. This is one of the most incompetent takes I have ever heard - so much that I have to wonder if you are an Iranian agent