It was a great start. Iranians celebrated his death, which made me happy.
I think one idea is that if you can kill enough regime leaders, perhaps a moderate leader may emerge?
Or perhaps there may be a military coup? Which may be a lesser of two evils?
The Iranians I’ve spoken to don’t feel like it was counterproductive. They actually feel like Trump has done more than any other president to damage the regime.
What’s the alternative? More economic sanctions? The status quo of the last 40+ years has accomplished nothing.
Anti-regime Iranians want action. They want us to make a move. We killed a lot of regime leaders and destroyed their military capability. That’s something. Now we have to see how that chess move played out.
So this 10 point plan that was “not good enough” according to Trump on Monday 6th April, now as the deadline looms, it’s suddenly “a workable basis” for negotiations?
Frankly if Iran get nothing more than a complete lifting of sanctions this would be a massive climb down for the US.
Trump's rhetoric was all bluster, he actually had no leverage and was unwilling to pay the cost to continue the war (mostly in terms of cost to himself). He needed an offramp and this was it.
The civilian price will be terrible.
But this could be one way:
Destroy all power plants and desalination plants. Rations will be given out by “peace keepers” on the condition that IRGC members surrender and are taken prisoner. Missiles and drones can be exchanged for rations as well.
Assuming that USA would succeed to do such a destruction, their "peace keepers" would never have enough rations to feed so many people as they are in Iran.
The only way for USA to succeed would be to attempt to kill most of the Iranians, which would only make even more clear that USA are not the "good guys" and they have lost long ago the moral authority to demand anything from others in international relationships.
This. The damage to the agricultural supply chain is already done. Fuel & fertilizer isn't staged where it needs to be for planting, which means the entire capacity to generate harvest is now offset & going to be prohibitively expensive, resulting in domestic food insecurity, which will make offering rations (read weaponized famine), politically untenable. As far as I'm concerned, the man just added war criminal to his list of accomplishments. Smfh.
Hitting desalination plant will mostly (and almost only) hurt the population outside of IRGC power circle, exactly the population the USA incited to rebel for a few years, with pakistani help. Basically South Alborz. Iran did have a water crisis, but it was agricultural water that made them have to import more food, not an issue of drinking water. The only way to truly start a global Iranian famine (what a terrible weapon tbh, i can't help but to think less of people who think about using it, it's impossible for me to stay neutral,it is an inhumane stance, and i would be ashamed of having it) is to block Iran northern trading routes to Russia/Kazakhstan/Azerbaijan, which, to be clear, is impossible.
Couldn’t you significantly degrade transportation via air campaign?
The problem, I think, is that these radical governments will refuse to abdicate even in the face of complete destruction. Look at what happened to Gaza.
Maybe, but you would have to hit them from Turkey, it is the limit of the f35 range from anywhere else. And bombing ships with b52 is expensive and dumb.
> The problem, I think, is that these radical governments will refuse to abdicate even in the face of complete destruction
Last time a government did this for a few years, we did get the 'keep calm and carry on' posters, so...
Could work in cooling the belligerence of Israel too, especially if we can manage to decommission all their nukes in the strike. Don't look at me, you're the one who brought up nuking.
With precision guided munition and air superiority there is no need for indiscriminate nuclear bombs.
But Japan does go to show that:
1. Leadership change is not voluntary, even when faced with obvious military dominance.
2. requires horrific destruction
3. Can be good for the long term of the country.
Let’s not forget IRGC has a long list of atrocities and oppression to their name. Yes… yes… you might say the same of USA, but it is categorically different.
It isn't different. Much of Iran's conflicts can at least be seen as reactive. The USA and Israel love invading countries unprovoked and on naked lies. Their kill count in illegal and immoral wars far exceeds anyone else. If we want to go that route, just don't, because by that token the entirety of South America must nuke the USA several hundred times.
Israel in any case isn't much better. Random Mileikowskis and Androvich's claiming ancient levantine connections and killing and stealing land over this nonsense.
Iran depends on desalination for around 3% of its drinking water, and has said that any such attacks on its infrastructure will see the same to any country that has support the USA/Israel military actions.
USA allies in the region will be largely uninhabitable, since they depend on power and desalination for their existence.
Still, maybe that is what Trump, the crazy bastard, wants.
Yeah, the amount of magical thinking about this conflict in the USA is disturbing. Iran is dry, but it's not just desert. The military will have backup generators and priority access to any generator infrastructure or repair capability. The ones that will suffer are the civilians, and the fanatics will just see that as martyrdom.
You can't defeat religious fanatics that welcome pain just by inflicting pain, especially by inflicting it mainly on other people.
Martyrdom is more like they are prepared to die for the cause, as long as they are remembered for their sacrifice, which is not fundamentally differen US or the religious fanatics that are Israeli troops
They don't welcome pain any more than Buddha did when he sacrificed himself so the tigress could feed and raise her cubs.
If someone founds a company, grows it and owns $1bn of its stock, they don’t have $1bn in cash to distribute. They have a degree of control over the economic activity of that company. Should that control be taken away from them? Who should it be given to?
I can see an argument when it comes to cashing out, but I’m not clear how that should work without creating really weird incentives. Some sort of special tax?
Well yeah. After some amount, you get 100% taxes. So that instead of having billionaires who compete against each other on how rich they are or on the first one to go contaminate the surface of Mars or simply on power, maybe we would end up with people trying to compete on something actually constructive :-). Who knows, maybe even philanthropy!
So, who owns and runs the companies? How do new companies get formed?
I'm not against higher taxation of the wealthy. I think inequality is a serious problem. The issue is what the wealth of these people isn't a big pile of cash they are wallowing in, it's ownership of the companies they build and operate. Is that what we want to take away? How, and what would we do with it?
I think it makes more sense to tax it as that power is converted into cash. I'm not clear how a wealth tax should work.
> I think it makes more sense to tax it as that power is converted into cash
Yeah, that makes sense to me. And those are all good questions of course :-).
> So, who owns and runs the companies?
I guess ownership stays the same, we just need to prevent the companies from growing too big. Because the bigger they are, the more powerful their leaders get, for once (aside from all the problems coming from monopolies). But by taxing them, we prevent the people owning those companies from owning 15 yachts and going to space for breakfast :D.
> How do new companies get formed?
I don't know if that's what you mean, but I often hear "if you prevent those visionaries from becoming crazy rich, nobody will build anything, ever". And I disagree. A ton of people like to build stuff knowing they won't get rich. Usually those people have better incentives (it's hard to have a worse incentive than "becoming rich and powerful", right?).
Some people say "we need to pay so much for this CEO, because otherwise he will go somewhere else and we won't have a competent CEO". I think this is completely flawed. You will always find someone competent to be the CEO of a company with a reasonable salary. Maybe that person will not work 23h a day, maybe they won't harass their workers, sure. But will it be worse in the end? The current situation is that such tech companies are "part of the problem, not of the solution" (the problem being, currently, that we are failing to just survive on Earth).
Also ships are still transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from Iranian ports taking goods in from China, with who knows what on board. They are also exporting more oil now than they were before the war.
I mean special military operation, not war. Only congress can declare war.
Even the Philippines, a US ally, has struck a deal with Iran for safe passage. Meanwhile, Oman is working with Iran on a toll scheme. There's an emerging chance that no US-flagged vessel crosses the Straight of Hormuz again in our lifetimes (except maybe for a retreating 5th fleet).
The Philippines may be a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan, but they need to deal with Iran to keep the lights on. The rationing situation is quite bad in a lot of east Asian countries.
> a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan
And a US colony/territory for the 43 years before Japan invaded. They were ruled by a US puppet state in a supposed "transition to independence" at the time Japan invaded, however it's unclear how much actual independence they would have had in practice.
I mention this because:
1. The way you state it makes it sound like they were somehow independent before the war.
2. It explains why MacArthur was there with the US army to resist the Japanese invasion from the first day it happened (Dec 7, 1941)
3. Its history worth looking into to contextualize just how bad the US has always been at taking over places. Acting as if this is post WW2 (as the media does) is counter-productive to truly understanding the number of really botched invasions the US has done.
It’s done some pretty decent ones as well. Western Europe including West Germany, Japan, arguably South Korea although they went through a period of dictatorship, but all are staunch US allies. There have been failures too for sure. Over all of I was going to be invaded by somebody, with America at least there’s a chance it might be a least worst option.
I'd love to see a democratic Iran, but this was was utterly pointless and counterproductive.
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