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Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

bbc.com

461–470 of 679 posts

Re: Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes ofc its a world problem, and guess who the world is not going to be happy with?

You can be mad at America and ignore Iran's role if you want, but that doesn't lead you to anywhere productive. The United States like any country is an actor on the world stage that has interests and can take action to defend or assert those interests. If the world thinks this is a problem, they should have mediated between the United States and Iran and helped to prevent conflict. Instead they did next to nothing.…

I think the world has had just about enough of wasting their time trying to mediate with your idiot of a president...

Re: Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's true, it's insane that it worked. It should be obvious to not take orders from twitter. There's a chain of command for a reason and random people on social media are no part of it. Sounds like the opposition forces would have to be so stupid that any number of Looney Tunes style tricks would have worked. Maybe next they can send out a rabbit in a dress to make opposition fall in love with it.

The US President routinely announces policy decisions on social media… You’d lose a lot of money always waiting for news through officials channels. Who knows how slow Yemini military channels are. You’d bet your life on it?

> The US President routinely announces policy decisions on social media…

Yes, our current President also does stupid things, and our military forces shouldn't be using his incoherent ramblings on Twitter to make snap judgements on the battlefield without checking with their chain of command either.

Re: Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US insists Strait of Hormuz is open as it exchanges strikes with Iran - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9gkpp0dkeo Iran says Strait of Hormuz is 'open' but tracking shows few ships moving - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwydexp39ddo

Those have the same implication even if it's written slightly differently. "US insists" makes it clear that "open" is a claim by the US, not an independent fact. The first one doesn't match the supposed pattern where one side's claims are stated as facts, despite the lack of quotation marks.

I think it's a fair example given how untruthful the US administration has been about whether the strait is "open" or not compared to the practical reality. Both would work with or without quotes, but the Iranian one is quoted. Still doesn't show systematic bias, but it's what I asked for.

Re: Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stability and sanity is not happening whether the conflicts stop in Yemen+Hormuz or not. At that point it's just going to go back to tarriff wars and new terror campaigns that the US admin will start somewhere else

The context of this is which party China would prefer to win the midterms. The dems winning would distract Trump from being able to fuck up the rest of the world a bit. My bet would be that China doesn't care much either way, they win regardless.

We agree that China won't care long term. They cannot lose in the current setup

In my view the worst that can happen for China is that Trump gets limited by anything. He's hurting US relations more than he's hurting China short or long-term. Relations take longer to build than trade

"Don't interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake"

Re: Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

#465
post #371

My understanding is we haven’t gotten to full Hormuz apocalypse mode because the Chinese have a ton of stockpiles. And the Red Sea has been an option. Those conditions seem to be changing.

Yeah Chinese oil reserves were much larger than was publicly known. They immediately cut imports by a massive amount as soon as the war started and have been able to keep it up for months. Without that the economic fallout would have been far greater. Not that they are doing it for this reason, but they have done a lot to shield trump from the consequences of his stupid war. But those supplies can only hold for so lo…

China took 5.5 million barrels per day of demand off of the table overnight. A quarter of what went through the strait. They single-handedly stopped catastrophe by months.

Even with that, global strategic petroleum reserves are quickly draining. Last I looked, the US was down to ~290M. There is a legal limit of 250M (though laws don’t matter anymore). The structural floor is also estimated to be somewhere north of 200M.

The world is about to not be able to meet all oil demand for any price.

Re: Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes ofc its a world problem, and guess who the world is not going to be happy with?

You can be mad at America and ignore Iran's role if you want, but that doesn't lead you to anywhere productive. The United States like any country is an actor on the world stage that has interests and can take action to defend or assert those interests. If the world thinks this is a problem, they should have mediated between the United States and Iran and helped to prevent conflict. Instead they did next to nothing.…

The entire world turning against American hedgemony is going to have "productive" repurcussions.

Re: Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can Israel have a nuclear weapon? It is also an insanely violent ethno-theocratic regime.

Believe it or not, they're not exactly a 1-to-1. Up until fairly recently, Israel was a stand-out in the region for actually having things like decently fair elections and a political class derived from a relatively wide sample of its populace. Other countries in the region were either Arab nationalist republics, Islamic republics, or authoritarian monarchies. While it was ethno-theocratic, it was one that seemed to…

The irony of Americans chastising Iranians for not living in a democratic country given how Iran ended up as a theocracy...

Re: Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's zero evidence its less possible, including counter evidence it remains possible because we keep being told we have to attack Iran to prevent them from attaining a nuclear weapon. So apparently, we've yet to do anything to prevent them from doing it. We've just killed children.

> We've just killed children. They killed more than 30,000 of their own people including children and support terrorist regimes in multiple countries that also kill children. > There's zero evidence its less possible On the other hand we bombed the nuclear facilities so what increase in nuclear weapons capability do they have that you are thinking about here? If there's something that has changed I'd be curious to re…

So your argument is its cool that we killed children because they've also killed children? Hell of a take.

The evidence we bombed their nuclear facilities is essentially this administration telling us we bombed their nuclear facilities.

This administration does not have a track record of providing the public with honest assessments of their success.

If we've successfully stopped them from developing a nuclear weapon, which was stated as the point of our preemptive aggression, I'd need a very good reason why we continue to spend billions attacking them.

Re: Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route

#470

The Houthis created a fake audio of a major Yemeni commander telling his troops to retreat which was subsequently amplified on Twitter/X, telegram, etc. Apparently, this helped the Houthis advance quickly as the opposition forces were in disarray. https://x.com/BashaReport/status/2097862335494795579

That sounds like a fake storyline. The much simpler explanation is that the local Saudi merc army sucked. If you followed the whole conflict in the last 20 years this is largely the case - the Saudis aren't really great at warfare, typically depending on foreign mercenaries (also for cleaning etc...). These in turn have very low morale.
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