- The USA eventually declares some arbitrary "victory" condition.
- Iran will be left even poorer, and much less able to defend itself conventionally, but will remain under the same regime. Very likely they give up cooperating with atomic energy inspectors and do what North Korea did to a acquire weapons.
- Israel's ability to dictate US foreign and military policy will be degraded long term. What many commentators do not see is how anti-Israel younger consevatives trend in the US now. It will be decades or
before a serious anti-Israel republican candidate will be fielded, but it is inevitable, and even your typical greatest-ally-wall-kissers will have to moderate themselves.
Will be very interesting to see what the mid terms bring. Some on the American right are already talking about voting democrat to protest - MAGA was specifically sold to them as an antidote to necon middle eatern entanglements.
The problem the US and Israel now have is that no amount of preemptively declaring victory and withdrawing will make it safe to pass through the Straight of Hormuz again.
The US can't win without taking control of Iran's nuclear materiél. They can't do that without ground troops. And any ground invasion of Iran is going to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
Iran won't be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. North Korea was under China's protection but no one is going to protect Iran. The USA, Israel, and maybe some of the Gulf states will continue occasionally "mowing the grass" whenever the threat level increases.
(I'm not claiming that this is a good scenario, just a likely one.)
I am not seeing a scenario were they can be stopped. They are already surviving under combined US/Israeli strikes. Short of being attacked with weapons of mass destruction...
... oh dear god this administration is dumb enough to try that, isn't it?
Iran can be stopped. Building nuclear weapons plus delivery systems isn't easy and requires a major industrial effort. They won't be allowed to sustain that effort, or rebuild the air defenses necessary to protect it.
There is no reason to believe that they haven't already developed and worked out the details of all that, in case they'd ever need it. Now the US and Israel have killed the only man who was preventing it from being done, the late supreme leader. I cannot imagine the next supreme leader (that is about to be announced) not immediately cancelling the prohibition on building nuclear weapons (to be made public only after they've been built, ofc), and giving the order to build ~10 nuclear warheads (the amount that they can build based on the amount of 60% enriched fissile material they currently possess). With two nuclear powers relentlessly attacking them, it would be suicidal of them to not order the immediate building of nuclear weapons ASAP.
You're really missing the point. Just because someone gives the order to develop nuclear weapons doesn't mean that their defense industrial base has the capacity to do it, or that it can be protected against future strikes. Furthermore, if Iran declared that it did possess working nuclear weapons that wouldn't be a deterrent: it would trigger an immediate and massive preemptive attack by the USA and Israel.
The point was addressed in the first sentence of my previous reply.
As for a preemptive attack, which I imagine you meant would be nuclear since they're already giving it all they've got with their non-nuclear attacks, it is already clear that Israel and USA don't have a way to stop Iran's faster missiles, and they would have no way to prevent Iran nuking Tel-Aviv and Haifa in return. At that point Israel would cease to exist as a state and as a society. They would never risk that. The entire decades-long war against the middle east by USA and Israel is fought for the benefit of Israel, not for its destruction.
> As for a preemptive attack, which I imagine you meant would be nuclear since they're already giving it all they've got with their non-nuclear attacks, it is already clear that Israel and USA don't have a way to stop Iran's faster missiles, and they would have no way to prevent Iran nuking Tel-Aviv and Haifa in return.
Israel generally has fairly solid intelligence in Iran and would almost certainly take whatever action is necessary to prevent Iran from building a Nuke...potentially all the way up to using small tactical nukes in targeted strikes on nuclear facilities if conventional attacks would be insufficient. Any preemptive attack would likely occur before Iran actually were acquire a viable nuclear weapon.
No, you're still missing the point. I mean a massive US conventional attack. So far in the current conflict the US has used only a fraction of its capability, and only targeted military and government facilities. In a scenario where Iran claimed to have nuclear weapons then the US would hit much harder and aim to cause so much infrastructure damage and civilian casualties that Iran would be unable to build much of anything more complex than short-range rockets.
This is an absurd fantasy. Most of Iran's military capability is deep inside mountains. If the US & Israel wants to adopt a strategy of Vietnam-style carpet bombing to devastate the entire country, not only will they be making themselves pariahs (which they're already on the way to doing) but they will be incentivizing Iran to hit Israel with dirty bombs, which will collapse the Israeli economy in short order.
A massive conventional attack against a nuclear power is historically not a thing. That's the whole point of a nuclear deterrent. No one is attacking Russia or North Korea under pretenses of humanitarian interventions. A massive conventional attack that would tear Iran apart would be a sufficient reason to initiate nuclear armageddon between Israel and Iran, as it would be a doomsday event for Iran either way; might as well go down swinging. Again, that's the whole point of a nuclear deterrent. It's what Israel's Samson option is, even though none of their enemies ever possessed nuclear weapons.
No, you're still missing the point. The massive conventional attack will tear Iran apart before they construct enough nuclear weapons to present a credible deterrent.
No, you're still missing your own arguments, based on which this discussion thread has been based. Citing your exact words:
> Furthermore, if Iran declared that it did possess working nuclear weapons that wouldn't be a deterrent: it would trigger an immediate and massive preemptive attack by the USA and Israel.
I've been discussing this under the assumption from your own words that "it did possess working nuclear weapons" ('it' being Iran). If you are now changing this to a massive escalation before they even get it, then that is out of scope for this discussion. I would argue they are already doing that to the extent that they can, as they have to tread carefully since Iran can also destroy all key infrastructure in Israel as well.
Having a working nuclear weapon is not the same thing as having a viable vehicle to deliver the nuclear weapon somewhere useful, unless we're talking like, suitcase nukes or whatever. It's hard for me to estimate what the timeline would be to retrofit their existing ballistic missile platform to be suitable, but it's not a super easy task - timeline in peace times would be years, most likely. War likely accelerates it... unless the key people you need for the program, the supplies, testing resources, etc., are victims of the war.
'Working nuclear weapons' is a really broad scale so it's tough to extrapolate without knowing if it means "they can send a person with a low yield weapon somewhere and blow it up vs. "they can launch a high yield weapon on a ballistic missile anywhere within 2000km"
Aside from the fact that the Iranian Regime never said that...why exactly should westerners care about the fate of Israel?
I know they think they are special, but to me they are just another West Asian country. I have zero reason to support them over Yemen, Lebanon, Iran, or any other state. Arguably I have more reason to resent them, considering how much money and blood we have spent furthering their cause and how ungrateful they are in return.
And you know what's the worst thing? I don't know if its my sample bias, but I see very rarely Israelis complaining about actual "gas the kikes white power" hateful antisemite filth which have actually risen in quantity quite a lot recently. The only people who get smeared with the antisemite label are people who hundreds of times even to the point of most normal people would stop seeing the distinction between jews and Israeli actions but they still clarify the various ways they aren't talking about jewish people or judaism as a religion but Israeli governments actions, and perfectly reasonable people like the Irish get labelled as "extreme antisemites". You know what signal this sends? If repeatedly clarifying the difference between jews in general and criminal actions of Israel gets the label of antisemite and actual blood and soil neo nazis get ignored then perhaps people should become actual loud and proud antisemites, this is what Israelis mindset signals to people.
The only "greatest ally" that sold secrets to china, attacked american ships and refused to apologize, has characters like Pollard as heroes, jailed and tortured the man who exposed their illegal theft of nuclear weapons tech from South Africa, ....
>Israel apologized the same day of the incident. They also paid $13m in reparations (much more if we adjust for inflation).
That's the "public" view yes. Many survivors disagree of course.
The entity who committed theft was Israel not Mordechai, however I reread it and it looks like it was a secret collaboration with South Africa not theft. But the main point is, why should you listen to whining about Iran having nukes from a country that blatantly lies about its own nukes and refuses to let its nukes be inspected? Iran is a much more responsible party clearly when it comes to the nuclear department.
It's also very well known that Israel secretly sold western defence tech secrets to China.
They're not, they're just a temporary European colony that cannot survive without constant pouring of resources from the collective West. Like the crusader states of the 11th and 12th century. It's not a real country.
I do not support the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Palestine any more than I support the current Jewish ethnic cleansing of Arabs in Palestine. Both groups want to force the other into the western world and I reject both.
No ethnic cleansing will be required, and the dissolution of apartheid South Africa tells us how things will play out. Once the state is degraded enough, they will largely all emigrate on their own since the jewish supremacy that is currently in full swing will be no longer. They will not want to live in a state where others have equal rights. The few who don't mind it will remain and live on with the majority that currently enjoys little to no rights.
I'm trying to sell simplicity to my target market, who I would call "semi-tech literate". Maybe it's stupid and I should sell whatever Forbes thinks is cool, but I just can't shake this feeling that I should be solving actual business problems.
We failed a bid for a project because of simplicity. We were to migrate a service running on an on-prem Kubernetes installation and a three, or five, node Apache Cassandra cluster to Azure.
The service saw maybe a few hundred transaction per day, total database size: 2 - 3GB. The systems would hold data about each transaction, until processed and then age it out over three months, making the database size fairly stable.
Talking to a developer advocate for Azure we learned that CosmosDB would get a Cassandra API and we got access to the preview. The client was presented with a solution were the service would run as a single container in Azure Websites and using CosmosDB as the database backend. The whole thing could run within the free tier at that point. Massive saving, much easier to manage. We got rejected because the solution didn't feel serious and to simplistic for an organisation of their scale.
On the other hand I also once replaced a BizzTalk server with 50 lines of C# and that was well received by the client, less so of my boss who now couldn't keep sending the bill for a "BizzTalk support contract" (which we honestly couldn't honour anyway).
They have been chanting "down with America" - that does not mean "murder every single person in America with their missiles (which can't reach America)"
"Death to" is a mistranslation of "marg bar", a phrase that is also applied to traffic, and inflation.
Do the Iranians want to kill all traffic and all... inflation?
I'm grant you that I do not speak Persian, but I do speak Arabic and Hebrew. In Arabic the phrase موت لامريكا is common enough. And this Hebrew sign in Tehran says "prepare your coffins":
So I do appreciate you educating me on the literal meaning of the Persian phrase, yet I dispute your interpretation that they state no intention of murdering us. Quite the opposite, the more I research it the more Hebrew banners in Tehran I see and I can conclude not only are they capable of murdering myself and my children, they have intent as well.
Likely the actual goal, as dictated by Israel and the Jewish Lobby in the US, is to destabilise Iran long term in a sort of Syria situation, so they cannot threaten Israeli hegemony in the region.
Remember even a non Islamic Iran is still a threat to Israeli power if it remains unified and intact.
Last I checked, International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court tend to disagree.
To say nothing about overuse/abuse of the term 'terrorist' and weasel words 'terrorist aligned ideologies'.
To say nothing about being randomly in the vicinity of a person Israel might consider terrorist might put you in mortal danger, simply because they do not care about 'collateral damage'.
To say nothing about being Palestinian child being a 'future terrorist'.
To say nothing about trying to document what they are doing might put you in mortal danger (just look up the number of journalists killed by Israel).
Is every death at the hands of Israel against someone who is terrorist or has "terrorist-aligned ideologies"? If not, is every unjustified death of a civilian just "one IDF soldier doing something bad"?
You are handwaving away any sort of accountability from Israel. It is impossible, given your framing, for Israel to ever do anything wrong.
Israel funded terrorist organisations in Syria, and in Palestine itself - most famously the group Hamas.
Many of the terrorist groups Iran funds operates in areas illegally occupied by the Israeli military, making them legitimate resistance fighters.
And Israel itself is a terrorist state - they achieved independence via the actions of Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine like Igrun, Lehi - which included several future Israeli Prime Ministers as members.
So no, I do not trust Israel with nukes - they should be disarmed immediately.
Israel supports Hamas financially several times, a.) so they can justify a crackdown on Palestinians b.) to weaken the other political groups in Palestine that wanted to negotiate with Israel so only the most radical group is left to represent Palestinians, right wing Israeli assassinated the prime minister who negotiated a peace deal with PLO and the right wing is now in represented at top o government in Israel.
I genuinetely do not think Hasbara like this works anymore. The overton window on this has irrevocably shifted since 2023 and it would be a better strategy for you to live within this new reality, rather than making ludicrous claims that the middle eastern country most vehemently trying to shape western views on the region is... Qatar. It just comes across as an obvious projection, and only encourages sentiment that has a real potential to become harmful to you personally.
That is, unless posts like thos are designed to encourage that sentiment, which I sometimes suspect.
I think this shifted overtone window has partially to do with why they started this war to begin with, they see the writing on the wall and their window of opportunity is closing. Trump is at historic lows in polling [1]; 65% of democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians over Israelis (17%) [2]. HN is just a generally reactionary place, I wouldn't read to much into that.
Instead of claiming "whatever bullshit you come up with" at me, go search for Qatari influence in English too. I prefer Qatari sources in Arabic because then one cannot claim a biased source, but for those who can not read Arabic there is ample English language discussion.
Here's just the first two Google results, enjoy, there's quite a few more from both sides of the US political divide if you would like to start nitpicking sources.
Everybody got flagged in this thread lol What is your argument again? Is it that Qatar used propaganda to make americans anti-war in the middle east or something? I don't even know at this point.
I guess the concepts and some of the vocab are important (though I feel compelled to point out that þurh is cognate with through as well).
But Old English inflecting nouns, rather than relying on indefinite and definite articles, gives the language a very different quality to German. Also stuff like negative concord.
It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with.
I hear this premise repeated time and time again. Search the internet. I believed this premise, and actually started studying German again while waiting for my Old English textbook to arrive. It did not help.
I do not need to search the internet as I am fluent at German as well.
The knowledge of Modern High German helps little to none as far as the comprehension of Old English is concerned. From a modern German speaker's perspective, Old English – with a relatively small number of exceptions – is gibberish.
Words to do with light are so subtle between German and English. Like Kraftwerk tells me neon lights are "schimmerndes" in German, which I will take their word on, but they also say they are "shimmering" in English which is definitely not true.
scyn/schön/sheen are a different root from schein/shine, for what its worth.
Also I realise now "forlet" is very archaic in modern english whereas "verlassen" is very common in modern german, which would have helped.
What I just learned is that OE scīnan, to shine, gives OE scimrian, "to shine fitfully" [1]. Fascinating: Gothic skeima - torch, lantern.
[1] Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. sᴄᴇɴᴇ paragraphs 8,9.
Also fascinating: "prob from Old Norse skaerr" "is English sheer, bright, hence pure, hence sole, hence also transparent, perpendicular" under paragraph 10.
and further down the rabbit-hole, OHG filu-berht, full bright. Name of St. Philibert, "whose day falls on August 22 early in the nutting season". Norman French noix de filbert.
- The USA eventually declares some arbitrary "victory" condition.
- Iran will be left even poorer, and much less able to defend itself conventionally, but will remain under the same regime. Very likely they give up cooperating with atomic energy inspectors and do what North Korea did to a acquire weapons.
- Israel's ability to dictate US foreign and military policy will be degraded long term. What many commentators do not see is how anti-Israel younger consevatives trend in the US now. It will be decades or before a serious anti-Israel republican candidate will be fielded, but it is inevitable, and even your typical greatest-ally-wall-kissers will have to moderate themselves.
Will be very interesting to see what the mid terms bring. Some on the American right are already talking about voting democrat to protest - MAGA was specifically sold to them as an antidote to necon middle eatern entanglements.
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