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Over the next few weeks, keep your eyes on the Middle East

MisterWorst

MisterWorst

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nmerritt11 said:
it's a poker game where Iran has a 3-7 off suit going all in against two players with aces and kings and the flop comes out with aces and kings. It is just a dumb move...

With Israel's intelligence paired with the US...I'd go all in on the USA and Israel. And anyone that thinks there are no boots on the street in Iran by both militaries has their head in the sand. Special Forces and Special Ops are in places no one even know
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Iran has a crap hand and the US/Israel have enough chips that they can bully Iran with the pot. But Iran just has to make it to the next hand, that's how they win. I think it was Kissinger (rest in piss) who said guerillas win by not losing and conventional forces lose by not winning. In that same vein, an extended air campaign will be damaging to Iran but it isn't going to boot them from the card table.

By boots on the ground I mean conventional ground forces. There isn't a significant enough presence of armed opposition groups in Iran outside of small pocket of Kurds in the north west and Baluchis in the south east around Sistan and Baluchistan. There's nothing approaching the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan that the US can support with SAD/SOG or other, nonconventional, forces. Again, the IRGC has a monopoly of force within the country. It's far more likely that regime change in Iran looks like the IRGC cutting the Clerics out of the picture than Shah 2: Return of the Shah.
 
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Dungeon09

Dungeon09

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nmerritt11 said:
oh I see you only used a portion of my comment...you realize that majority of my classmates who are still friends today served or still serve. My brother was special ops...I understand what boots on the ground means. But way to C&P only a portion of my comment. Hope it made you feel good

Typical liberal move
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“I went to the citadel” is such a goofy inclusion and you’re not fooling anyone acting like it wasn’t there as some sort of appeal to your personal authority.

You know a lot of people who served. Sure. We all do. America just spent the last 2 decades at war. My high school graduating class has more guys with combat injuries than collegiate athletic letters. Anyone with a middle class or lower upbringing who was 10-17 years old on 9/11 is exactly the same.
 
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Baldinger's Finger

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I once went to a HS graduation at the Citadel.

Forrest Gump GIF by GrayDuckDent
 
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nmerritt11

nmerritt11

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The live press conference in Oval Office has been pretty good and answered a lot of questions
 
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P. Marlowe

P. Marlowe

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Brucepg2000 said:
It’s asinine to think that if they really wanted to deal with all of the pushback they couldn’t just roll through Ukraine. They have been using a knife in situations where they usually use a hammer. They could have and still can carpet bomb that entire country. I've been poking this Bear in the eye for the past 30years.
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Holy sħit.
 
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nmerritt11

nmerritt11

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GDead_Tiger said:
The President is saying Iran attacked first now. I don't think it is political to say that the messaging on this has been uh all over the place
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That’s not at all what he said…he said they felt they were going to attack first so thy moved accordingly. But continue to make up ****.

He did say that they have attacked neighbors in the past for no reason. But he did not say that they attacked first in this situation.
 
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P. Marlowe

P. Marlowe

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firegiver said:
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“ The aforementioned one-year fissile-material breakout estimate assumes that Iran would use its declared nuclear facilities to produce fissile material for a weapon.…. Neither the U.S. government nor the IAEA have publicly described any evidence that Iran is conducting covert fissile material production nuclear activities.

During JCPOA negotiations, the breakout timeline was an unclassified proxy measure of Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities. A State Department official described the breakout "concept" in a September 2021 email as "a useful metric to help quantify" U.S. negotiating goals and as "a useful analytic framework to structure the negotiation of technical measures related to enrichment." The timeline was also "helpful in explaining the deal and selling it politically," the official noted, adding that the timeline has "become an important political yardstick" for evaluating the agreement's merits.”

That’s not intel….
 
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tigres88

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nmerritt11 said:
That’s not at all what he said…he said they felt they were going to attack first so thy moved accordingly. But continue to make up ****.

He did say that they have attacked neighbors in the past for no reason. But he did not say that they attacked first in this situation.
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"Pentagon tells congress there was no sign that Iran was going to attack the U.S. first."
 
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GDead_Tiger

GDead_Tiger

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nmerritt11 said:
That’s not at all what he said…he said they felt they were going to attack first so thy moved accordingly. But continue to make up ****.

He did say that they have attacked neighbors in the past for no reason. But he did not say that they attacked first in this situation.
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Ah I saw a headline/readout that was "Trump: Iran may have attacked first". I misinterpreted what the "may" in that sentence was. I thought he was saying "yeah there is actually a possibility Iran attacked first" when he meant "Iran may have been planning to hit Israel/us first"

Speaking of making stuff up, I am asking again if you can point to where I have defended Iran's regime.
 
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nmerritt11

nmerritt11

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tigres88 said:

"Pentagon tells congress there was no sign that Iran was going to attack the U.S. first."
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im simply saying what is being said live as I watch…post whatever you want. Yall can continue to defend Iran all you want. They’re responsible for more than 32k deaths…

USA and Israel both felt there was a threat so they handled it. Germany is at the White House and are on board with overthrowing this regime.

The fact Trump is helping to make this happen has a lot of people pissed off.

This is not a bad thing
 
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nmerritt11

nmerritt11

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GDead_Tiger said:
Ah I saw a headline/readout that was "Trump: Iran may have attacked first". I misinterpreted what the "may" in that sentence was. I thought he was saying "yeah there is actually a possibility Iran attacked first" when he meant "Iran may have been planning to hit Israel/us first"

Speaking of making stuff up, I am asking again if you can point to where I have defended Iran's regime.
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you’ve defended Iran and the attacks in this entire thread. I don’t need to go back through it and copy and paste
 
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MisterWorst

MisterWorst

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tigres88 said:
Please don't get political. This is a *military ops* thread.

Alot of Americans just don't want a repeat of the early 2000's or the other countless wars America has gotten embroiled in the Middle East.

It's really not a hard concept
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The best part is that this joke is 3-4 years old at this point.
 
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GDead_Tiger

GDead_Tiger

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nmerritt11 said:
im simply saying what is being said live as I watch…post whatever you want. Yall can continue to defend Iran all you want. They’re responsible for more than 32k deaths…

USA and Israel both felt there was a threat so they handled it. Germany is at the White House and are on board with overthrowing this regime.

The fact Trump is helping to make this happen has a lot of people pissed off.

This is not a bad thing
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Who is defending Iran here?

The Pentagon is saying there was no intel pointing to an imminent attack by Iran. Rubio and now Trump have said we had to proactively launch a defensive strike against Iran because they may have been/were planning a first strike. Those are two contradictory statements. Either Iran was about to attack or they weren't. Shoot, I think Rubio said something to the effect of "Israel was going to attack Iran, which meant Iran would hit some of our bases, so we had to hit Iran with Israel first".

Yes, Germany thinks the ayatollah's regime should be out. Europe doesn't support Iran, especially because Iran is allies with Russia. The Iranian regime has basically no friends
 
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MBRO

MBRO

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ChucktownK said:
Very true, they lob SS-26s over daily, and it does them no good at all.

Russians always use a hammer, heavy handed is the only way the Russians know to do things.
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Sounds like the one-way suicide drones based on the Iranian Shahed are a major component right now. Zelenskyy says they've launched 57,000 to date.

Of course, we knocked it off with LUCAS. More than half the cost (I think they are $35,000 each?) and many equipped with StarShield, making them more resistant to GPS jamming.
 
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Teddy44

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Any reason why people are making this out to be about Iranian nuclear capability? We have been politically involved in Iran since the 1950s. Sure I prefer Israel to Iran, but their beef is not our problem. The nuclear weapons talk is just to sell the war. Funny enough, most bush hating trump supporters eat it right up. And why do those same people hate Bush? For involving us in regime change wars we couldn’t win and weren’t in the interests of the American people because he was an empty suit. Trump is now doing the same thing. If you come at me about being a liberal, I’d bet I’m much more right wing than you’d first assume
 
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MisterWorst

MisterWorst

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GDead_Tiger said:
Who is defending Iran here?

The Pentagon is saying there was no intel pointing to an imminent attack by Iran. Rubio and now Trump have said we had to proactively launch a defensive strike against Iran because they may have been/were planning a first strike. Those are two contradictory statements. Either Iran was about to attack or they weren't. Shoot, I think Rubio said something to the effect of "Israel was going to attack Iran, which meant Iran would hit some of our bases, so we had to hit Iran with Israel first".

Yes, Germany thinks the ayatollah's regime should be out. Europe doesn't support Iran, especially because Iran is allies with Russia. The Iranian regime has basically no friends
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Of course Japan had to bomb Pearl Harbor, the US had openly gamed War Plan Orange! /s
 
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P. Marlowe

P. Marlowe

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GDead_Tiger said:
Yes, the Israelis hit the meeting. Not sure how many died. Their reasoning was, per the article I saw, "we don't want to them to pick a new supreme leader." Israel's goal is to make Iran a functionally failed state a la Syria or Libya
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Seems reasonable to not want another theocratic ******** to replace the theocratic ******** they just dispatched. Allowing that to happen runs the risk of allowing them to centralize leadership and command structures and start consolidating power. Part of the success so far is due to the fact that the command structure has been completely destroyed. You can’t allow that to be reassembled.
 
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firegiver

firegiver

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P. Marlowe said:
“ The aforementioned one-year fissile-material breakout estimate assumes that Iran would use its declared nuclear facilities to produce fissile material for a weapon.…. Neither the U.S. government nor the IAEA have publicly described any evidence that Iran is conducting covert fissile material production nuclear activities.

During JCPOA negotiations, the breakout timeline was an unclassified proxy measure of Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities. A State Department official described the breakout "concept" in a September 2021 email as "a useful metric to help quantify" U.S. negotiating goals and as "a useful analytic framework to structure the negotiation of technical measures related to enrichment." The timeline was also "helpful in explaining the deal and selling it politically," the official noted, adding that the timeline has "become an important political yardstick" for evaluating the agreement's merits.”

That’s not intel….
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Ok fine. Share the intel i need to consider so I understand the need to perform a preemptive strike. Marco Rubio stated it was because another country was going to strike Iran and thus Iran would retaliate against us, so we stuck first to hurt their capabilities.
Im going to assume we all agree that country was Israel. So what Intel besides the above prompted our need to strike?
 
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MisterWorst

MisterWorst

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P. Marlowe said:
Seems reasonable to not want another theocratic ******** to replace the theocratic ******** they just dispatched. Allowing that to happen runs the risk of allowing them to centralize leadership and command structures and start consolidating power. Part of the success so far is due to the fact that the command structure has been completely destroyed. You can’t allow that to be reassembled.
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At this point the only real question is if the IRGC thinks having a puppet ayatollah to maintain a veneer of theocratic authority suits their needs more than becoming an open military security state. But the silent coup has been going on for years at this point; most of the parliament consists of former IRGC members and the IRGC itself has direct control over most of Iran's major economic output.
 
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GDead_Tiger

GDead_Tiger

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P. Marlowe said:
Seems reasonable to not want another theocratic ******** to replace the theocratic ******** they just dispatched. Allowing that to happen runs the risk of allowing them to centralize leadership and command structures and start consolidating power. Part of the success so far is due to the fact that the command structure has been completely destroyed. You can’t allow that to be reassembled.
Click to expand...
Israel has targeted the homes of Iranian opposition leaders. They don't just want to change the regime, they want to remove any form of leadership entirely. That is what I meant by turning it into a new Libya
 
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tboonpickens

tboonpickens

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nmerritt11 said:
im simply saying what is being said live as I watch…post whatever you want. Yall can continue to defend Iran all you want. They’re responsible for more than 32k deaths…

USA and Israel both felt there was a threat so they handled it. Germany is at the White House and are on board with overthrowing this regime.

The fact Trump is helping to make this happen has a lot of people pissed off.

This is not a bad thing
Click to expand...
literally nobody is defending Iran

questioning the way this administration works (hey we decimated their nukes program a year ago but now they're back within weeks of being launchable mmmkay) and our ability to institute regime change without boots on the ground while launching another forever war in the middle east in no way = defending Iran.

you don't know if this is a bad thing or not yet. we could wind up involved in another quagmire like Iraq/Afghanistan for decades (did W ever locate the WMDs?) where we burn human capital and trillions of dollars while subverting our standing in the region overall. we could severely damage the global economy depending on what happens with oil. nobody knows any of this stuff at the moment.
 
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Teddy44

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GDead_Tiger said:
Israel has targeted the homes of Iranian opposition leaders. They don't just want to change the regime, they want to remove any form of leadership entirely. That is what I meant by turning it into a new Libya
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And that’s a problem. Libya is now a mad max hellscape, much worse than it was under Gaddafi. Sure, he was a dictator who was probably a terrible guy. Anybody please show me why that was our problem (our being the greater American public) and how the situation there now is better for us or them? We should be BUTTING OUT but our political class cannot help themselves. They are either so reeetarded they can’t see what’s happening right in front of them, or they are profiteering. Israel and Iran want to fight? Let em. I don’t care.
 
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ClemsonGentleman

ClemsonGentleman

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tigres88 said:
Please don't get political. This is a *military ops* thread.

Alot of Americans just don't want a repeat of the early 2000's or the other countless wars America has gotten embroiled in the Middle East.

It's really not a hard concept
Click to expand...
I'm old. I don't want another Vietnam, which started as a police action and sending in advisors.
 
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tboonpickens

tboonpickens

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Teddy44 said:
And that’s a problem. Libya is now a mad max hellscape, much worse than it was under Gaddafi. Sure, he was a dictator who was probably a terrible guy. Anybody please show me why that was our problem (our being the greater American public) and how the situation there now is better for us or them? We should be BUTTING OUT but our political class cannot help themselves. They are either so reeetarded they can’t see what’s happening right in front of them, or they are profiteering. Israel and Iran want to fight? Let em. I don’t care.
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The Epstein class also is desperate for distractions. Don't underestimate the motivation on that front.
 
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MisterWorst

MisterWorst

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GDead_Tiger said:
Israel has targeted the homes of Iranian opposition leaders. They don't just want to change the regime, they want to remove any form of leadership entirely. That is what I meant by turning it into a new Libya
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Yeah the problem is that, in this case, Israel and the US are bedfellows of convenience rather than due to a shared vision of the region's future. Ostensibly the US wants Iran to transition into a state which can become a normalized member of the international order. The US views Iran through the lens of future great power conflict with Russia (lol) and China, and in theory a future Tehran which is going to be more US-aligned, or at least not tied to Moscow (lol) and Beijing is advantageous to US foreign interests.

Israel doesn't care about any of this; a failed state in Iran serves Israel's security interests by eliminating the threat of a possible nuclear-armed, hostile power. I think it was one of the former Israeli defense ministers who said that Israel must become like a rabid dog, too dangerous to bother. Israel being the only nuclear power in the middle east is sufficient to secure their own national security interests. Obviously this conflicts with US interests given it'd severely hamper the ability to transit the Strait of Hormuz, create a massive refugee crisis in the region and Europe, and create a massive power vacuum that would enable radical groups like AQ to thrive in.

Going back to my first post, states are rational actors that act in the interest of their continued survival. The US can negotiate with a state, even a hostile one like Iran. They can't negotiate with a failed state consumed by civil war between theocratic remnants, the IRGC factions, and religious and ethnic minorities, all of whom will have competing interests and varying degrees of openness/friendliness to the US and its interests.
 
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