Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It's really hard to say, but probably not good (there was an Atlantic article about this last week). Part of the dynamic here is the idea that the SL can't back down without losing so much domestic credibility that he puts the regime at risk; being in a shooting war with the West probably reinforces the regime's position. The flip side of this is that I don't think there were many signs that the opposition was in position to challenge the SL any time soon.

View on HN

They lack the capability to do much aside from disrupt shipping with SRBMs. They've taken down only one drone, which is one less than the Houthis. Their ballistic capability is heavily degraded. Their military leadership is gone. Their airforce is gone. Their air defense is gone. They're a paper tiger and I don't understand why people still think there's the prospect of some kind of grand retaliation. They're not holding back, they just can't do anything.

As if conventional responses are the only way to retaliate. We are talking about Iran here. They're all about asymmetric warfare.

Their intelligence heads are also all gone. What kind of response do you envisage?

Well. Some guys with a tiny fraction of the funding Iran has managed to fly a few airliners into some buildings a few years back.

So, I imagine there are perhaps unconventional options available to a country which is fully willing to fund terrorist groups for decades against a country with a very large amount of largely unprotected infrastructure.

But who knows? It just seems a bit premature to argue Iran's defeat. Feels a bit... mission accomplished.

Even more reason for them to go. It’s not good enough to continue taking it from Iran.

Ahh, trying to bomb your way to regime change in the Middle East. This feels so familiar. What could possibly go wrong?

If only those who advocated for war were forced to fight in them.

I fought in Iraq.

Will you be volunteering to fight in Iran next? And any wars that fall out of it from a country with twice the population of Iraq being destabilized?

I am already volunteering

But I dont think we are invading

Obama attacked Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. We aren’t there now are we?

December 1, 2012 - 300th drone strike on Pakistan.

Obama executed 563 drone strikes on Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan alone while in office.

> Obama attacked Pakistan

I’m scratching my head on this because Pakistan was and is still a US ally, but I guess you mean the Bin Laden operation?

No, the 300 drone strikes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan

From your link: "However, despite the public opposition of Pakistani officials, multiple former Prime Ministers gave covert permission to the United States to carry out these attacks."

Makes sense, they were in the tribal areas where I assume the government was losing control of their monsters.

Point is we weren’t at war with those countries.

Clinton - Yugoslavia 1999

Obama - Airstrikes on Libya in 2011

Goes back to the War Powers Act of 1973.

[flagged]

Thanks!

[flagged]

They were already doing that in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq and Bahrain. They weren't holding back before, and they won't hold back after. But their ability to do that is now severely degraded. The officials overseeing these programs are now gone. The weapons they were sending to these groups are now reduced.

> Their intelligence heads are also all gone. What kind of response do you envisage?

It does not mean that their ability to gather intelligence or use it is 100% gone. It most likely means they are a bit in disarray because of their top-down command structure. And maybe it takes a day or two until they put someone in charge.

Ukraine just demonstrated how to mess with long range aviation parked in the open.

I'm not saying it's easy, but there are many soft targets in America.

But yeah, who knows. The wise choice here is to go home and not play. The US and Israel are not about to invade with ground forces.

And if they were it'd be without support from European countries.

What planet have you been living on the past 25 years? Iran has a population of almost 100 million as well as a sizeable diaspora across the world. If even a small percentage of the population engages in terrorism, that translates into thousands of potential actors. And unlike a state-to-state war, this is the kind of distributed, unpredictable threat that’s much harder to deter or contain.

Agree that they can't retaliate through their military, but if they did it would likely be through terror attacks on civilians.

A tactital victory does not translate to a strategic victory. I'd like to remind you the "Mission Accomplished" fiasco by George W, that was followed by more than 10 years of war and hundreds of thousands dead.

It's going to be a very bad time for American interests and people outside of the United States in the next few years.

afaik Iran is a very very different case demographically from Iraq and Afghanistan- in terms of being bigger, more modern and secular. It seems like those are dynamics that make it harder to go to war/stay in war.

Quite the contrary, the religious populace is more likely to fall in line and decide the government knows best; it’s the secular populace that is demanding retaliation and critical of the government for not pursuing nuclearization already.

If you're in Iran it makes sense that you would want that if you feel that Israel is a threat. (But it doesn't make it a good idea).

I meant that demographically, if your populace isn't as poor, battle hardened and religious (like Afghanistan) maybe going into a long ground war is less politically feasible?

In Afghanistan they had basically just been fighting a war, where the last war in Iran was 30 years ago?

> I meant that demographically, if your populace isn't as poor, battle hardened and religious (like Afghanistan) maybe going into a long ground war is less politically feasible?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

Excerpts:

> 95,000 Iranian child soldiers were casualties during the Iran–Iraq War, mostly between the ages of 16 and 17, with a few younger

> The conflict has been compared to World War I: 171 in terms of the tactics used, including large-scale trench warfare with barbed wire stretched across trenches, manned machine gun posts, bayonet charges, human wave attacks across a no man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as sulfur mustard by the Iraqi government against Iranian troops, civilians, and Kurds. The world powers United States and the Soviet Union, together with many Western and Arab countries, provided military, intelligence, economic, and political support for Iraq. On average, Iraq imported about $7 billion in weapons during every year of the war, accounting for fully 12% of global arms sales in the period.

That was 40 years ago though. So no one fighting on the ground in that war would be fighting on the ground in a war that starts today.

No, but they're the ones making the decisions about fighting such a war. The child soldiers in the 1980s are the politicians, the diplomats, and the generals in the 2020s.

“…and we turned out just fine!”

They say that for WWI that it was one of the aspects that kept it "more civilized" (whatever that means in the context of war).

Ah I see what you mean. Yes they don’t have the birth rate (or the suicidal fanaticism) to sustain a decades long attritional war against an occupation like Afghanistan or Yemen can.

But given the size of the existing Iranian population and geography, and the lack of any significantly sized pre-existing anti-government military faction, I’m not sure the US military is large enough to even occupy Iran in the first place, absent a draft.

It would be reaaalllly stupid for the USA to invade Iran.

Hopefully Iran is the one that blinks for the reasons above.

Why would they blink when they know they are safe from a boots on the ground invasion for the forseeable future?

I think they probably like having an GDP 25x larger than North Korea's. Gets a lot harder to export your products around the world when you're squared off against the US.

How does that follow?

We don’t need to occupy Iran to absolutely decimate their economic output.

What else are you going to do? Iran has been sanctioned by the US for decades.

Can you really sell "we'll be bombing civilians for years"?

They still trade oil with China, that is as much as the rest of the world they need. Of course, getting trade overland is a bit more difficult than by boat which is mostly cut off during a war.

> if you feel that Israel is a threat

Israel is very clearly, without any question or doubt, a serious threat to every one of its neighbors.

Jordan seems pretty safe and happy to me.

Like the Pager attack thats just another long game it seems: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/14tcxgq/zionist_ve...

EDIT, clearer map: https://www.islam21c.com/wp-content/uploads/The-alarming-det...

It has a peace treaty with Jordan and Egypt. Also, they signed the Abraham Accords with UAE and Bahrain. As far I know, there is no risk of conflict with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, nor Oman. Who else am I missing?

Half joking: (ignoring Trump's recent "threats") Is the US a threat to Canada or Mexico?

Mexico is more of a threat. So many drugs flow North. It’s slowly killing generations of people for decades.

Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus? Really?

This doesn't sound right to me. Sources?

One data point I heard recently was 80% of Iranians oppose the current regime. That said I've also heard there is wide support for Iran to have a nuclear program. Presumably as a matter of national pride. I would still imagine the secular population to be less inclined to go to war with Israel in general.

The only Iranians I've personally talked to are ones that live in the west. They generally want to have peace with Israel and want to see the regime removed. Again very anecdotally they are still not happy about Israel bombing Iran but if the regime is actually somehow magically removed I don't think attacking Israel would be a high priority for a hypothetical secular or democratic regime.

The fact that someone dislikes their government's current ruling regime doesn't mean they want the US to invade and install a puppet government instead. It's a false dichotomy.

> if the regime is actually somehow magically removed I don't think attacking Israel would be a high priority

Attacking Israel hasn't been a high priority for Iran. When Israel bombed an Iranian consulate, Iran referred it to the security council and waited, but the security council took no action. When Israel carries out an assassination within Iran, Iran did the same thing. Only after the UN refused to do anything to hold Israel to account did Iran retaliate. Then recently Israel launched a massive series of strikes against Iran, assassinating top members of its military and blowing up apartment buildings. It seems clear that the Iranian government didn't want to go to war with Israel, but at a certain point they ran out of options.

First letter: https://digitallibrary.un.org/nanna/record/4043282/files/A_7...

Second letter: https://digitallibrary.un.org/nanna/record/4055716/files/S_2...

    > Attacking Israel hasn't been a high priority for Iran.

Really?

It is interesting that you made no mention of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, not Houthi in Yemen. All are well-known proxies for Iran to militarily harass Israel. They all receive direct funds and weapons from Iran.

lol. Watch Khameni’s morning broadcast where they have hundreds of delusional adherents shouting “Death to America, Death to Israel” 50 times in a row. I’m sure you’ll come out feeling the same way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqu0L0PGOIw

Those are words. None of this refutes the clear pattern of escalations I described coming from Israel.

It’s called defense

And mein kampf was a book

Result 5 of 9 for "Death to America".

Do you like it when people quote you out of context? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44342393

Iran has been attacking Israelthrough its proxies. Israel struck the Iranian consulate in a country they're at war with meeting proxies they're at war with. This is indeed an escalation. As a response Iran launched a huge number of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, which is a major eacalation and direct attack.

more than 50% of americans oppose the current US regime[0] but thats not descriptive of wanting to tear the whole setup down

[0] https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker

Not that secular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonyad

I don't know that much. But I have heard about how in terms of daily outlook a lot of Iranians aren't very religious. Esp. compared to other countries in the region.

On the other hand, the internal Cyber Police HQ got bombed today. If the institutions of internal suppression are sufficiently disrupted, maybe some form of resistance could be form. Who knows.

People keep wishcasting this idea, but just because many/most Iranian people don't like the regime does not mean they want to be bombed by Israel/the USA.

The one thing we’ve learned over and over again since WWII: strategic bombing does not actually achieve any objective except temporarily disrupting logistics. If anything it strengthens the resolve of the people being bombed, giving the target regime more ammunition to carry on.

This is dumb. Strategic bombing did work in WWII, but it was never as effective as its advocates claimed at the time mostly because the bombs rarely hit anything important. They had to drop far more munitions than originally envisioned to actually do critical damage to infrastructure.

You can't really compare WWII dumb bombs dropped from 25,000 feet to modern precision weapons that can hit precisely the weakest point on a target, times thousands of targets, within the span of a few hours or days.

I mean, we literally just watched a massively successful strategic bombing campaign over the last week! Desert Storm was massively successful, Iraqi Freedom (the actual invasion, pre-nationbuilding part) was massively successful, Israel's bombing of Hezbollah was massively successful. I don't know how anyone can argue that strategic bombing with precision munitions isn't successful.

Cambodia says hi. No one did it better than Kissinger.

What part of "strategic precision bombing is not the same as carpet bombing" did you not grasp.

Yes, I agree that bombing random forest is not that useful.

What precision bombs were used to level Gaza? See, I don’t believe the word “precision” here, one too many murderous actors involved.

Strategic bombing doesn't work. With the exception of maybe nukes, wars aren't won from the sky and strategic objectives are hard to achieve. The bombing prior to Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom was operational bombing, its purpose was to flatten resistance so the Army could roll in.

It appears that no matter what, no matter the technology involved (maybe with the exception of nukes), you always need grunts on the ground to hold it.

Did the US ever invade Japanese home islands (Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, Hokkaido) during the war? I am pretty sure they got some of Okinawa then dropped two nukes, then Japan surrendered. Do I have the order of events incorrect?

The order of events is correct, but leaves out the Soviet invasion of Manchuria which started just before the bombing of Nagasaki.

Yes, you're most probably not taking into consideration the Soviets' incursion into Northern Manchuria, which started on August 9th. The last thing the Japanese leadership wanted was to see a big part of their country turn communist.

With all respect please type out SL. I and many others don’t know what that means. For us it’s just two random letters thrown into a sentence

I assume it's Supreme Leader.

Supreme Leader

Reply on news.ycombinator.com