OttoboyEmpire [none/use name]

another useless musing, which i will graciously append here instead of adding as a new comment:

i guess maybe we would’ve have heard more from other sources if this were the case, but still: i’m skeptical that Trump knew/understood what Israel was up to here. sure, he brags about being in the know, but isn’t this likely just occidental face-saving? like, “oh, that terrible, insanely reckless and stupid strategic play that Israel made? the one that, had they done it without our say so, would make us look like little idiots and worms? ya, we knew about it and thought it was a cool idea actually.” bullshit. they would rather look stupid and in control than smart and out of control; they don’t have the guts to call out Israel’s complete horseshit privately, and of course they can’t do it publicly. it reminds of Merkel disclaiming her entire foreign policy and credibility just so she could pretend that she wasn’t outsmarted by Putin (which she wasn’t, so there should be no shame in that (she was outsmarted by Biden/the Americans)). these people are delicate, self-defeating dipshits.

useless, evidence free/vibe-based musings: look, obviously it’s no joke and anything could happen, but: I think Taco Trump is a real thing. we saw this in Trump 1, we’ve seen this with the tariff regimes – dude does not have the bandwidth or perseverance to commit to any big project. he wants to chill and hold court and rack up easy wins – he does not want a huge mess on his plate, he does not want to go to briefings everyday, he does not want to affectively cede power to the brass (which he will have to do if this blows up)*. he likes exploding Soleimani, he likes funding Ukraine pre-war (these are easy sops to the hardliners, where any blowback doesn’t immediately redound back to him). i think it’s clear that he is or feels obligated to appease the hardliners as he dismisses their grander plans.

and so i think the state of things is something like this: Trump really hopes that he can figure out a way to just drop a MOAB and claim a W an get out of there (i’m sure he doesn’t really care if it actually succeeds or not); the hardliners are putting their feet in the bargaining door by braying for immediate declaration of war, and Trump is appeasing them by at least gathering USA forces at the gates; and that’s good enough for the hardliners because it increases dramatically Iran intentionally or accidentally killing Americans and forcing Trump’s hand.

the upshot of this, i think, is for Iran to be cool. you don’t have to trust the americans; you can trust, assuming that you can establish a credible, durable threat of bombing imperial oil wells** and closing the straight, that Trump doesn’t want to light the commercial world on fire – that he doesn’t want to saddle himself with more work and meetings and his rich business colleagues yelling at him. he does not want the smoke.

*i really think that the threat of a loss of practical power to the institutional military is/has been a serious factor in producing Trump the dove. however, it may be now, in Trump 2, that this factor is diminished, if it’s the case that Trump was able to effectively remove the institutionalist neocons and replace them with loyalist MAGA deus volt freaks; then maybe he doesn’t care if they’re calling the shots.

**could be wrong here as well. i assume spiking the cost of oil would be bad for everyone, but the geopolitics/macro nerds in the thread might better explain that oil going up is bad for everyone but comparatively better for the US, and is a win actually.

dude absolutely does not want the responsibility/work load of waging a war

rad dude – congrats on making it happen

secret nuke

conspicuous cope

forlorn at the prospect of US joining the conflict – obviously at the cosigning of evil, but ultimately just highlighting that nothing at all has changed since 2003. no hugging, no learning, just cascading grotesqueries. fuck bush, fuck trump, fuck cuomo, fuck biden, fuck clinton, fuck kamala, fuck the zionists, fuck starmer. gramsci says we are between worlds, but the interregnum of monsters now nears 100 years of his writing. to what end! the ancien regime will be just a brief prologue to the endless cruelty of capital, an endless interlude.

yes, it’s a dominos being frequented, and not the exchange of salvos portending ww3, which have me thinking something is afoot.

huge cope, but could Russia/China’s voiced/material support be a function of US involvement?

maybe russia has its hands tied but could it or China be providing surreptitious material support atm? and outward support if US becomes more involved?

do we know if MN provides for special elections to replace them?

blocked

For decades, Iran has followed an “aggressive proxy” strategy of confronting Israel under which they provided arms, technical know-how, and occasionally direct military support to proxy forces positioned to directly attack Israel. This is why Lebanese Hezbollah, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Baathist Syria received so much support from Iran. It’s why Suuni Hamas got the same. . . .

. . .

The thing is that it’s not the 1990s any more. It’s the 2020s and Iran is an increasingly wealthy and industrialized country and the Iranian elite increasingly leery of an endless jihadist project against Israel they get no return on investment from. . . .

. . .

And, well, the Israelis just killed three of the architects of that very IRGC-focused “forward proxy” strategy, who probably lobbied and would have continued to lobby in favor of a strategy that saw military resources poured into funding [projects and factions against genocide.]

doomers high stepping over QIran like AI over Ty Lue – the genocide will continue, inexorable.

you just go take more Palestinian land

that certainly makes sense, but i wonder how much punishment Iran is prepared to sustain – Israel says they’re preparing for 2 weeks of war (which I assume means much longer).

i imagine oil fields are easy/soft targets – is it possible that Israel could knock out Iran’s ability to destroy the wells, or could that be accomplished sort of trivially with cheap drones or something?

thanks. damn, it was over before it started – they do not have the appetite for this.

Pardon my ignorance, but wasn’t part of Iran’s deterrence the threat that it would torch all the Empire-aligned Sunni oil wells, if, uh, it were to be bombed/decapitation struck?

lots of very serious self-styled “materialists” here somehow believe that being insufficiently optimistic over iran stacking Ls over the last year and a half has and will continue to have a casual effect on the World.

really makes you think!

i’m not dooming – i’ve been assured since last year, by our very best QIran posters, that Iran is in control, it’s just waiting to strike when it’s not so gosh darn hot!

yep. the BBB is being framed as reasonable austerity, and schumer gives no push back whatsoever and sits with his thumb in his ass and complains about Trump not being tough enough on iran.

long day’s journey into night is so fucking sick. but it should be seen in 3D and the mutual aid board needs to pony up and pay everyone to get a big beautiful 3D TV so they can watch it correctly