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Miscellanea: The War in Iran

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Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#261

Post by Iuz »

> That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress. And this war is dumb as hell.

Proceeds to not mention the Epstein files at all. No comment here mentions it either.

All that mess and all those deep connections that were unraveling... I’m not a US citizen, but has that already been forgotten? Do people not consider that they might be relevant in some way to this situation? Or is raising that possibility now generally viewed as a conspiracy theory?

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#262

Post by dotancohen »

citrin_ru wrote: post #106
lmm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kyiv is frequently attacked with Shahed drones and it is far from frontlines. reply It's a couple of hundred miles from the frontlines in Kharkiv, and the Russian border to the North is even closer.

Shaheds are launched not from the frontline (to avoid a launch site being attacked) but I would agree that a typical attack distance is around 500 km (which is much less than the range stated in wikipedia). Still this unlikely the max range of this drone and there is a tradeoff - one can increase range by reducing the war head mass.

The genius of the Shahid drone is that the fuel is the warhead. Look at Shahid attacks - mostly FA damage, very little HE damage. They are for killing people and destruction of soft infrastructure by fire, not destruction of hardened infrastructure by explosion.

The fuel tank is heavily segmented, so they are difficult to shoot down. When shot, they lose fuel but continue to the target. They get to the target with less fuel, but still get there. The HE them detonates the remaining fuel load.

A Shahid could do a 2500km mission, and arrive with a very small fuel load. That will be effective against targets that already have enough fuel to burn there, such as apartment buildings, petroleum energy infrastructure, office buildings, etc. Less so against places with little flammable material concentration such as hospitals, military installations (other than fuel and munitions depots), roads and runways, etc.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#263

Post by crazygringo »

redwood wrote: post #219

The biggest beneficiary of this whole thing will be the shift to renewable energy. I am surprised to see the greens up in arms about it all.

The ends don't necessarily justify the means. And it might just as well be a shift to nuclear energy instead, which greens are traditionally against.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#264

Post by hersko »

surgical_fire wrote: post #215
hersko wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iran seemingly is coming out of this mess stronger than it was before. This is a wild take. Their top leaders and generals have been killed, they have no control over their own airspace, have their military and civilian infrastructure completely at the mercy of their enemies, and have no navy/airforce any more. Oh, and their currency collapsed. But other than that they are doing great.

Yeah, and for some reason this place that has "military and civilian infrastructure" completely at the mercy of their enemies is right now exercising full control of one extremely important sea trade route, and is wreaking havoc on all gulf states allied to the US, and is successfully hitting targets on Israel. Facts have this annoying tendency of getting in the way of propaganda.

Explain how they are better off than when the war started.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#265

Post by gherkinnn »

redwood wrote: post #219

The biggest beneficiary of this whole thing will be the shift to renewable energy. I am surprised to see the greens up in arms about it all.

The ability of a state to run on energy pulled out of thin air is an obvious strategic benefit.

Surely the resources required to build and maintain solar panels, turbines, dams, and nuclear reactors are logistically more stable than oil has proven to be.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#266

Post by GolfPopper »

GJim wrote: post #214
jmye wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has to be hard for Americans to realise that their government has pissed so much of the world off so badly. It is not hard, at all, for roughly 1/3 of Americans to understand this. Another 1/3 don't think it, or anything past their TikTok feed, matters. The last 1/3 thought Team America was a documentary.

> It is not hard, at all, for roughly 1/3 of Americans to understand this. Sorry, but I don't think they do understand. America has managed to piss off Canada FFS. And lets be honest, you've got to work really hard to piss off the Canadians. Frankly, Americans (former) allies have seen the American people VOTE for Trump. Twice. Even if Trump goes tomorrow, the (former) allies know what a significant proportion of the…

I can't speak for anyone else, but the depth of our self-disgrace is pretty damned obvious. (What I can or should do personally is less obvious.)

Having elected Donald Trump twice - atop all our other failings - is a giant screaming proclamation that the United States is unfit for, and undeserving of, continued existence as a state or government. The responsible thing to do is to hold a Constitutional Convention and dissolve the damned thing, and then the individual states can figure out how they ought to go forward from there. (I don't think current U.S. States are anything like perfect but they're what we have left once the United States government is gone.)

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#267

Post by solatic »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #234
solatic wrote: post #128

Author seems to not care about the prospect of the Iranian regime developing nuclear weapons, putting those weapons into the hands of its terrorist proxies, and sitting back while those proxies turn Western Europe and Palestine into radioactive wastelands (yes, Palestine, because it is not possible to restrict the fallout to just Tel Aviv, and the regime has shown itself to be far more anti-Israel than pro-Palestinia…

What makes you think they will give nuclear weapons to terrorists or use those weapons at all? This does not happen even in the most insane examples like North Korea. The more likely outcome would be that they would be able to avoid getting their schools/hospitals etc. bombed. In your mind US should just nuke iran so there is regime change? Can you calculate how this would play out after that happens?

> What makes you think they will give nuclear weapons to terrorists or use those weapons at all?

a. They have armed and financed their terrorist proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and others), who used those arms and capital to commit acts of terrorism against their regime enemies (the US and Israel).

b. Witkoff literally offered them free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes and they turned him down, bragging that they had enough highly enriched nuclear fuel already for nuclear weapons

c. I can put 2 and 2 together

In what universe does having nuclear weapons protect you from getting schools and hospitals bombed? Israel very likely has nuclear weapons, but Israeli schools and hospitals are getting bombed by Iranian missiles. So what?

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#268

Post by gherkinnn »

beloch wrote: post #71

A few thoughts. 1. The straight of Hormuz is crazy because of the sheer amount of options Iran has to threaten shipping. It's so narrow that they can even hit ships with artillery fire . No need for missiles or drones at all! Lobbing kinetic shells may sound primitive, but anti-missile defences are designed to deal with large projectiles with minutes or hours of warning, not shell-sized projectiles that hit within se…

> This conflict lights a fire under the behinds of all nascent nuclear states. Iran would not have been invaded if they'd managed to build nuclear weapons.

Replace "Iran" with "Ukraine", the difference being that the latter gave them away.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#269

Post by marcosdumay »

beloch wrote: post #71

A few thoughts. 1. The straight of Hormuz is crazy because of the sheer amount of options Iran has to threaten shipping. It's so narrow that they can even hit ships with artillery fire . No need for missiles or drones at all! Lobbing kinetic shells may sound primitive, but anti-missile defences are designed to deal with large projectiles with minutes or hours of warning, not shell-sized projectiles that hit within se…

> If they sink a ship at the right spot, the straight could become barricaded.

Just a minor point, but, the shipping routes are thin, but they are not that thin. It would take several ships to do that.

> Unfortunately, the straight of Hormuz gives Iran the ability to prevent Trump from simply TACO'ing out and proceeding to invade Cuba.

Iran already proposed a soft-victory condition that Trump could use to TACO-out. He can just claim it's Europe problem, so Europe deal with the toll.

It's Israel that won't allow TACO.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#270

Post by dotancohen »

klipt wrote: post #194
beloch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At present, gasoline prices in China have risen by 11% since the war started. In the U.S., they have risen by 33%. The U.S. is dependent on oil and the oil market is global. Even if the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, Americans still pay increased prices for pretty much everything as a result and the economy suffers. The only way around this would be a scheme in which domestic oil producers are forced to sell to Ameri…

Imagine if the US government diverted the billions spent on this war into building out green energy infrastructure. If everyone had electric cars charging from solar then Iran's strait gambit would be much less effective.

American citizens have known since 1973 that their dependence on oil puts them at the mercy of every Middle East dictator. The governments have known this clearly since the 1940s - see the Barbarossa operation. The US had literal generations to reduce their oil dependency and yet chose to remain dependent. It has nothing to do with the current war.
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