The only thing Trump achieved so far was replacing Khamenei with Khamenei. Otherwise, it's a total disaster from the strategic point of view. Making the US that much weaker in the long run is somewhat ironic for a guy wearing a MAGA hat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_bombing_of_Iraq#Distracti...
But yes, I generally agree with you. It’s like the US/Israel don’t know how Iranians think about their country, their government, and the history of US in the region.
Do they not know that many people who hate their government’s domestic policy actually support their foreign policy?
Do they know that of dozens of ace fighter pilots (e.g. Jalil Zandi) minted by Iran during the Iraq-Iran war, most of them were “Shah loyalists” who preferred an Islamic Iran over foreign invasion of Iran?
It’s too incredible to think that they don’t know these things, so I guess they don’t care. So the goal must not be military, but something else.
Not, if you start calling US+Israel an Epstein coalition (forces). :-)
It's difficult for someone on this forum to fathom how anyone would _want to die_, but that's how these guys operate. Killing Khamenei did nothing but to grant him exactly what he wanted. He was martyred at the hands of the enemy during the holy month of Ramadan. He had already delegated all his operations and stayed home, waiting for bombs to drop.
Assassinating him simply poured more gasoline to the fire. Decapitating extremist leadership doesn't achieve much (as we just witnessed), you can't kill an ideology like this with guns.
The other thing that I'll mention is about 30% of the population in Iran supports IRGC and within those 30%, at least _half_ of them are willing to die for the cause. in a country of 90M, that's millions of people..
So unless you're going to conduct a genocide, you're not killing all of them, and even if you do, the few that remain will grow again.
United States did a great job exporting liberalism to Iran over the past 40 years and some of those ideas were starting to take shape. However I feel like now they undid all that work and united all IRGC supporters because of the war.
I think TRUMP miscalculated Iranian's abilities to take over the regime. The diaspora celebrating Iran getting bombed are out of touch with the reality of the country.
The US probably asked Israel to not betray the agreement, Israel as usual betrayed the agreement, said to the US 'we will attack during the negotiations', probably because it was effective the last few times they did, and the US couldn't force them to stop, so they had to preemptively strike.
USA can be convinced to do something by Israel, but not forced.
maybe theyre lying; both were very nervous while telling the tale
But to your other point, they both lie often and confidently. If they are nerveus, they probably just thought they look like idiots (regardless of whether they are saying the truth).
Prior political choices prevent the US from saying to Iran "Sorry that Israel attacked you, that's unfair, please don't attack our base, we won't fund Israel military anymore, and we remove the embargo".
Hence, since during the previous ceasefire, Iran told the US "If Israel break the ceasefire again, we will attack your ME bases", US was "forced" into preventive strikes against Iran military installations, and into an offensive war, without any preparation.
I'm not a huge fan of this US admin _at all_, but in this very case, the amateurism isn't caused by the childishness and the whininess (is that a word? i mean constant whining and victimization) of the US admin and their overall lack of skills, but by the fact they were forced into it without preparations.
Is that argument more clear? I feel you talked past my argument which is probably my fault since i have trouble expressing myself without thinking for hours beforehand
USA can tell Israel to not attack. Full stop. It can even tell Israel they will give them less support. And dont tell me that Trump administration would be afraid to pressure or even bully other goverment. If USA did not wanted this war, it would not happened.
Third, USA had option of approaching negotiations seriously. It simply did not.
> US was "forced" into preventive strikes against Iran military installations, and into an offensive war, without any preparation.
This is nonsense. It was not preventive attack, it was active first strike attack against opponent that is not much threat right now.
USA was not in defense. It was not forced to attack either.