The amazing part to me is just the perceived invincibility this small circle within the US administration has. You can find dozens of articles with a search limited to Feb 1~Feb 27, plenty of analysis warning of the risks that have now become reality, everything - the strait, no revolution, further radicalization, critically low US stockpiles, abandoning other US partners, gulf destabilization, etc.
In the fantasy imagination of some people, they really think you can take out some military targets of another country and then the oppressed masses will magically revolt, as they completely ignore the failed revolution just a month prior. Surround yourself with enough of these people while excluding and firing those who don't and this is what you get.
It's not just this administration. Everything with the US military has been going clearly downhill since the Millennium Challenge 2002. [1] It was, appropriately enough, a wargame simulating an invasion of Iran. It was a major event involving preparation in years and thousands of individual operators. When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
In modern times we increasingly seem to have entered into an era where people are willing to believe what they want to believe, rather than what they know to be true. And while it's easy to mock politicians and the military for this, this is also a mainstay of contemporary political discourse among regular people, including those who fancy themselves as well educated, on a variety of controversial issues.
I don't know what started this trend, but it should die. At least in terms of war it's self correcting. The US can't handle many more botched invasions or interventions, and I suspect we're already beyond the point of no return in terms of consequences of these errors.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
> Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
Wargames aren't like laser tag matches where one side wins and then it's over, the point of them is to be a training exercise. It's supposed to be closer to D&D than anything, where the person playing the opposing forces plays a similar role to the DM. If you look at interviews from other MC2002 participants, essentially what happened was that the Navy wanted to practice for an amphibious landing. Due to how they moved their ships, the computer running the simulation thought that the entire naval fleet had been instantly teleported right next to a massive armada of small boats that Van Riper had set up, without simulating what would have happened if the naval fleet had seen the enemy ships in the distance. Additionally, in real life Van Riper's fleet could not have held the missiles that he had told the computer they were carrying and now firing at point blank range at the Navy. The simulator that ran the US naval ships' defenses was also not functioning due to the engagement happening in an unexpected area, so it was turned off. Van Riper was able to sink the ships and defeat the navy within the bounds of the simulation, but not in a way that could have happened in real life.
This is basically like if I found an obscure sequence of chess moves that caused the Lichess server to crash and declare me the winner, then used it to beat a bunch of grandmasters, then went on a media tour saying that this proves that there's some massive flaw with how chess strategy is being taught.
Nothing he did was really 'glitching' the game. Yes there were unexpected circumstances, but that's exactly what happens in war as well. As the old saying goes - no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The weapons defenses were turned off because they were having difficulty distinguishing between civilian and hostile targets, which is a completely viable scenario in an asymmetric conflict.
The only big surprise was a rapidly closed engagement zone but even that absolutely could happen in real life, even if through different means. Ukraine's early success with suicide boats was precisely because they were unexpected, undetected, and able to get into range rapidly. If they had simultaneously deployed them at a much larger scale, the results would have essentially been a repeat of MC2002.
And more general, the discovery the 'Iranian' general in MC2002 made, some 24 years ago now, is that the future of warfare wasn't going to be giant behemoth vessels, but lots of really cheap asymmetric systems - another thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated beyond any doubt. Had this lesson been learned it's entirely possible that the US could have ended up on the forefront of advances in war instead of finding itself in a scenario where the bleeding edge of a trillion dollar military budget is literally just cloning Iranian drone tech.
Some of what you're saying is fair. The simulation did have known issues, including glitches with point-defense systems and ships being placed unrealistically close to Red assets due to peacetime constraints on the exercise. The Wikipedia article on MC2002 acknowledges these shortfalls directly.
But you're presenting very specific technical claims (that the boats couldn't physically carry the missiles, that the fleet was "teleported" next to the armada, that the defense simulator was "turned off") as though they're established fact. None of that appears in any sourced material I can find. If you have sources for those claims beyond "interviews from other MC2002 participants," I'd genuinely like to see them.
More importantly, you're glossing over the part that actually matters: what happened after the restart. Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed. They were forbidden from shooting down approaching aircraft during an airborne assault. They were told to reveal the location of their own units. The JFCOM's own postmortem report stated that "the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted."
Even if you accept that the initial result was partly an artifact of simulation quirks, the response wasn't "let's fix the sim and rerun it fairly." It was "let's force a Blue victory and use that to validate the concepts we were supposed to be testing." Van Riper's complaint wasn't just that he won and they took it away. It was that a $250 million exercise was turned into a rubber stamp.
Your chess analogy would be more accurate if, after your opponent crashed the server, the tournament organizers restarted the game but told you which pieces you were allowed to move, then published the result as proof their strategy was sound.
MC2002 was not primarily a wargame to develop operational plans. You can do that much easier and cheaper with a bunch of generals around a map. MC2002 was a training exercise with an element of competitiveness to pressure people under unexpected situations. As a training exercise its prime goal was not to figure out what plans were best but to just exercise plans and get people to do the plan, period. Given that, events that stopped the training exercise, like missileing all the ships, were retcon'd in order to do what the exercise was supposed to do, train people
Wargames have repeatedly been used to align strategic initiatives because they are designed to as closely replicate an adversary's actions and resources as closely as possible. So for instance in better times there was Proud Prophet [1], another wargame, played out in 1983. Its goal was to simulate outcomes of various scenarios involving hot conflict with the USSR. Up to the point of that wargame, the US position towards the USSR had been this sort of 'peace through strength', 'escalate to deescalate' nonsense.
The problem is that the wargame demonstrated that it ended up with the extinction of the Northern Hemisphere every single time. We didn't then change the rules of the game to make it so we could still play nuclear games and come out okay, but instead took this as a major wakeup call. It directly led to a shift in US policy towards the USSR of coexistence, de-escalation, and some degree of reconciliation. Within 7 years the first McDonalds would open in the USSR, and the entire Soviet system would collapse in under a decade after the shift of the strategy driven entirely by this wargame result.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet
Yes, wargames can be used to evaluate strategic and operational plans. However, notice how many boots on the ground were involved in Proud Prophet. My point was that MC2002 was not primarily a wargame for evaluating plans, it was primarily a training exercise where lessons learned from executing the existing plans might be used to wargame out future changes
The Millennium Challenge 2002 is discredited because it had motorcycle couriers that moved at light speed handling all communications and 10' speed boats launching 19' missiles.
After being restarted, the red (opposing) force general resigned due to the restarted game having what amounted to a scripted end, with little to no latitude for the red force to exercise creativity in strategy or tactics. Among the highlights, the red force were required to turn on and leave on their AA radars so that blue force HARMs could take them out, and the red force was prohibited from attempting to shoot down any of the 82nd airborne / marine air assault forces during the assault.
Gen. Van Riper's tactics were apparently discredited in 2002 because they were unfair, but Iran seems not to have received the memo since their moves bear more than a passing resemblance to his.
We have not gotten quite to the "VDV tries air assault, gets wiped out" stage of Iran war yet, as far as I know.
But the US seems to be committed on repeating the Russian experience.
Similar complaints from Trump the other day
“So, it’s it’s uh little unfair. You know, you win a war, but they have no right to be doing what they’re doing.”
https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/2033768757688934424
In fighting games, this is exactly the way "scrubs" think. They lose and appeal to some vague notion of fairness to avoid confronting the reality - they lost!
Would be funny if it wasn't real.
I feel the comparison is too apples-to-oranges, games are designed things with goals like the enjoyment of participants and—on at least some level—a fair playing field.
Wow! He is saying: we said that we won, but they are winning... how are they allowed to be winning when we said that we won... so unfair...
And with him saying that, millions of his followers instantly started believing it with no second thought.
It’s all the VAR referee’s fault.
> The Millennium Challenge 2002 is discredited because it had motorcycle couriers that moved at light speed handling all communications and 10' speed boats launching 19' missiles.
This is not what Wikipedia's summary describes. Now, maybe Wikipedia has the wrong summary, but according to it the challenge wasn't "discredited". By that point the exercise was over, but 13 more days were budgeted for, so the analysts requested their forces to be resurrected so they could play out the rest of the days, with artificial restrictions so that the rest of the challenge was effectively scripted and left no room for the OPFOR to try novel tactics.
One of the generals (of the blue team) is quoted as saying: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?"
Also:
> The postmortem JFCOM report on MC02 would say "As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations."
From Wikipedia:"Such defeat can be attributed to various shortfalls in simulation capabilities and design that significantly hindered Blue Force fighting and command capabilities. Examples include: a time lag in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information being forwarded to the Blue Force by the simulation master, various glitches that limited Blue ships point-defense capabilities and error in the simulation which placed ships unrealistically close to Red assets."
It definitely seems like there were issues with RedFors achievments. But the response is still ridiculous. I would have also resigned in ReFor's shoes.
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Yes, and a lot right. If you think it's wrong in this particular case, please elaborate.
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Implementation details aside, explosive speed boats have decimated Russia's black sea fleet.
Well shit, we should have paid attention when Iran developed light speed motorcycles evidently.
The game being reset makes sense - time and resources have been spent to make it happen, and it's best to get as much value from those resources as possible.
Of course this means learning the lesson of how the first defeat happened. You reset so that you can learn more lessons. If they ignored the lesson of the first defeat, that's stupid. But the reset itself makes sense.
The reset isn't the problem, the entirely nerfing the Red team is the problem. The US took steps to fail to learn from the exercise before it had even finished.
what exactly does one learn from hypothetical light-speed motorcycles?
Does the enemy nation have internet? If so, there's your light-speed couriers.
motorcycles can navigate bombed terrain, your fiber optics cables will be torn...
I can see the following technology replacing motorcycles for communication:
(works up to 20-30km, a bit more if needed)
a) preinstall your fiber optic cable between points A and B (say AA platforms that need/want coordination for distributed passive/multistatic tracking of intruders)
b) when it is torn, send a fiber optic drone from A to B and use its line to replace the torn one (those are flying in Ukraine with bomb payload, now just use its fiber optic reel, you can reuse the drone; not durable, but very cheap and fast repair of radiation-free communication lines)
Today's technology offers so many opportunities ...
Wouldn’t a WiFi mesh network be more reliable in war-torn areas? If you just need communication then actual “internet” is incidental and probably a security risk - just having a fairly secure local mesh network, with nodes covering hot-spot areas, seems like a good idea - it can cross areas where fiber isn’t reliable because of all the war, and it can potentially remove the need for some by-hand communication.
Wifi mesh makes sense in a densely populated area, not over mostly desert.
Also, communication over longer distances (even few km) will add so much latency that it will be unusable for coordinated AA targeting.
Furthermore, all that radiating will just invite bombs from the attacker.
Maybe I was not clear enough about the goal: not "robust command and control communication network", but more of:
quickly and temporarily set up a high-bandwidth low latency communication network to accomplish AA ambush using coordinated mobile passive sensors (a quick radar burst might for initial acquisition might be useful, but probably not necessary).
I learnt something new - wow - we are truly led by idiots.
who rigs the results of a war game and believes the results - only an idiot drunk on power.
War games aren't useful for guessing the real course of the war. 'Iraq' was able to prevent a US invasion in pre 2003 wargames.
Except the US military DID learn from that war game. In the war game the US's fleet was utterly destroyed. In our real life, so far, the US navy has lost exactly zero ship against Iran.
It's very interesting that you can look at the situation and say the war game where Iran destroyed the US navy is "not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion" though. I guess in the end different people perceive the reality differently.
I don’t think the air campaign against Iran and the campaign in the war game are similar at all.
This is an odd place to put a stake in the ground--there are a number of macro trends that have been going on for far longer (e.g. the military-industrial complex, the Cold War, Congress, American football), as well as a few others that have only really come to a head more recently (e.g. demographics, media spheres/tribalization). I would argue that our failure to learn lessons from the Millennium Challenge has a massive overlap with our failure to learn from Ukraine--not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam... The military is not monolithic--remember that the Millennium Challenge was more or less a sparring bout between two parts of the military with different philosophies--and it really takes something like an existential war for meritocracy and common sense to reassert themselves to a meaningful degree.
A smaller point: all military exercises are heavily scripted--it's more or less impossible for them to be otherwise, as you just can't simulate the details of war that matter without actually killing people, breaking things, and giving up your secret game plans. Usually the goal of this sort of thing is to make sure that everything (people, equipment, doctrine) works together more or less as intended, and people have the experience leading and operating in larger units than they do on a routine basis. The PR people then spin it into an unqualified and historic success, validation of our technology and tactics against the forces of evil, blah blah blah. It is still very difficult to draw the right lessons from these sorts of things--even more so when the civilian leadership of the military has 99 things to consider besides a certain kind of pure military effectiveness (and although I have strong feelings here, we're still doing quite well on the tactical and operational levels in spite of everything).
Fun fact: the Millennium Challenge is still taught as a case study in basic officer training, at least in the Marine Corps (well, probably--it definitely was a little over a decade ago).
> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
Are you saying that Iran is capably fighting and killing US personnel, aircraft, and invading infantry?
I am a little confused about the universe you live in. The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum, essentially no different than a dead man walking.
Do you know the names of any alive people in the IRGC chain of command? Have you seen videos or evidence of IRGC doing anything to harm US forces other than lob some stuff and hope it hits? Where are the Islamic Iranian armies and navies you imply to exist?
> The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum
This was by design via the mosaic defense tactic.
They know the US prides itself on decapitation strikes, "taking out the leader of x" was a monthly headline during our time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and during the events of ISIS/syrian civil war. It's how the special forces operated, taking out a "leader", collecting all the names they could find in their possession, and taking those guys out. In the later days of Afghanistan, they stopped even trying to find out who the names were. If you were some mid-level Taliban member's dentist, you'd be fair game.
So Iran built a defense for that, a military that does not need a central command to continue fighting. They have their orders and they'll continue to carry them out. Completely bypass the benefits of highly accurate munitions, cyber intelligence, etc.
That's the same reason the first round of the Millennium challenge won outright. The red-team leadership knew to not expect last year's war today, and used their brains to exploit the weaknesses of a highly mechanized and sophisticated military.
What would such predelegated instructions look like, how large is the state space in that flowchart? How effective is control theory with a tiny state space? This doesn't sound like a survival plan, but a self-splintering plan: some military units will capitulate or defect while others fight on, when pushed till the edge, or is there some kind of direct-democracy-within-the-IRGC? that doesn't sound plausible...
Basically sounds like the military from Imperial Japan during the end of WW2, with scattered units continuing to fight, surrender not believed an option, not aware, or in disbelief that Japan has surrendered...
Let's hope it doesn't have to lead to the same conclusion?
The Swedish military famously works the same way (or at least used to) - they're trained to uphold the Swedish constitution themselves regardless of what their leadership says, with the result that they saved many lives in former Yugoslavia despite orders not to intervene: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/09/20/trigger... .
This isn't a complicated war. The US can't and won't do occupations, so the only thing you need to do is cause problems till they leave.
Iran doesn't have to conventionally defeat the US military and can't: so they're just not doing that, and instead going after valuable economic targets which are politically sensitive to Americans and impossible to defend since they're risk sensitive.
> The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command
There is no reason to believe that
They have been training for decades for exactly this sort of war, and have experienced veterans at all levels
If anything islamic countries never lack, its hierarchy. Endless, suffocating hierarchy, with all levels frozen in fear of the higher echelons. Then there is the clan-element. Certain families, have certain generals, whos underlings are of the same family, all the way down.
One has to abandon the view that what represents to the media as a modern state, with modern institution is actually a state. What you have is several, small states, city-kingdoms basically, ruled by one clan. Connected to one another in a tangle of agreements and contracts. Once you come to this point, you start to understand the structure of the thing and also why it is hard to decapitate.
You elect clowns, you get a circus.
The US has turned into a Wall-e society just getting off on entertainment and bored with civilized, thoughtful politicians. This is the end result of TOO MUCH prosperity for the average American.
They haven't experienced true hardship in generations and we (the rest of the world) is paying the price of their hubris.
“Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders." George Carlin
Watching helplessly from the inside is painful. What makes it worse is I know people who are intelligent and appear to not be hateful SOBs that voted for the clowns, and would do so again. It breaks my brain, and my heart.
IMO those people you're describing are the worst of them all. I can forgive someone too (legitimately) stupid to know better. But many people are not that.
https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%...
Perhaps they are not as intelligent as you think they are.
I believe that highly intelligent people can do incredibly stupid things -- I've seen it first hand.
The correlating factor for those two acquaintances is that they are both devout Christians. I find that to be beyond ironic but also makes sense, as that devotion parallels the appeal to authority and many churches are run by leaders who believe in Supply Side Jesus.
I don't mean this to be inflammatory as it's only an observation, but organized religion is not compatible with modern society,
You’re not the first to make such observations. To quote Barry Goldwater (Republican party nominee for US President in 1964):
> Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
Was he describing America or Iran? Hard to figure out as we seemed to be in War due to similar people in control of another (not)important country :)
It was about America. I think the only overlap between "conservative" Republicans and religious fundamentalists is the "social conservatism", e.g., "family values", "law and order", etc. The quotes are because there's debate about what those terms really mean.
The key difference is that religious fundamentalists pledge their allegiance to the Church, not the country; not "God" either (although they might claim it to be so). They are tribal to their core and anybody outside their church is an "other" and is not worthy of being considered a fellow citizen.
> correlating factor
There's a free ebook from 2006 that tries to dive into it as a personality spectrum:
https://theauthoritarians.org/
It has some interesting assertions/observations about issues like double-standards and fear as a motive.
I agree with your last organized religion comment somewhat, but the jump to devout Christians based off some anecdotes comes off as a bit prejudiced. The "not trying to be inflammatory" is a decent pre-emptive hedge attempt, but still falls flat when reading. This is a pattern I see here sometimes, which is criticism of religion drifting into assumptions about specific groups, and it tends to weaken an argument that was otherwise reasonable. And I'm saying this as someone who is extremely critical of Christianity.
The truth is that people are perfectly capable of making bad decisions regardless of their beliefs. Appealing to authority is not unique to religion. You see this same thing in corporate environments, academic circles, political groups, etc... It's probably more useful to focus on that broader dynamic than tie it to a specific group.
I take no pleasure in my assessment at all, and I would love to be proven wrong.
Let me give you one of countless examples of why I said what I did: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/26/hegseth-pray...
There plenty of other criticisms of groups and systems and people in general. But the "God Says So" crowd is very real and has been with us the whole time.
I consider myself to be deeply spiritual and understand the appeal and would even join in the faith if I thought it was real. But I don't. I wish I didn't have to pay any attention to it or care about it or think about it at all. But I do.
The reason I care, and I speak up about it, is that there are factions in power that embody exactly what my "prejudice" criticizes. This is everyone's business because they are making their faith everyone's business.
Edit: I believe this dialog is germane to HN because the subject is literally about the hacking of democracy itself.
Ironically Jesus always had beef with the religious conservatives of His time: the Pharisees.
>know people who are intelligent and appear to not be hateful SOBs that voted for the clowns, and would do so again.
They are not intelligent.
People seem to think that intelligence can be isolated. Its not. People can fake intelligence through memorizing a bunch of facts, but that's not intelligence. Every part in a persons mind influences every other part.
And its easy to test as well. Nobody who is hard conservative can answer this simple question - "What concrete, hard evidence would you need to see for you to realize you have been wrong and change your stance on which party you support?"
Its along the same lines that any stupid person doesn't realize they are stupid - if they did, they would know the differentiator between smart and stupid and thus can become smart.
From the article:
>Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
>It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.
This situation is not just because we elected a clown, these people donated hundreds of millions to Trump's campaign (Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Elison, etc). The same lobby (the Israel lobby) has contributed hundreds of millions more to almost every US senator, to the point that both political parties are pretty much aligned when it comes to serving Israel. There are plenty of politicians in the Democrat party who are quietly supporting this war because at the end of the day they've been bought by the same lobby.
Kamala (the alternative candidate in the 2024 election) has her own ties to Israel, and publicly said "all options are on the table" to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Which means had she won the election she likely would have also invaded Iran.
It goes beyond just who we elected, it's huge sums of money flowing through our political system and effectively buying our politicians.
>publicly said "all options are on the table" to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Which means had she won the election she likely would have also invaded Iran.
Your second sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first. Obama had similar words to say about Iran during his administration and never invaded.
We had Israel friendly politicians for at least 50 years, all of which who eagerly wanted to fuck up Iran ("Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" anyone?) and we didn't because they were at least sober enough to understand that it was moronic and would obviously be some sort of strategic defeat or decades long boondoggle.
No president has ever been this fucking stupid.
Look, if the goal over the last year has been to destroy America, it’s economy, it’s reputation… you basically couldn’t pick a better set of actions.
It seems pretty obvious that they’re trying to turn America into Russia. Crash everything, and let the oligarchs swoop in and buy up the shattered pieces. Then keep the people divided and depressed using media and drugs.
> it's huge sums of money flowing through our political system and effectively buying our politicians
I disagree strongly with this assertion. But for sake of argument, let's assume it's true: American politics is permanently captured to Israel's interests.
That still doesn't explain this war. "I think most folks understand that this war was a misfire for the United States, but I suspect it may end up being a terrible misfire for Israel as well. Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic – is now openly discussed in both parties. More concerning is polling suggesting that not only is Israel underwater with the American public, but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history."
If, on the other hand, we acknowledge "Netanyahu...is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so," we can allow for similar levels of narcicism and stupidity in the U.S.
Israel is currently busy annexing southern Lebanon, and I don't think it's at all decided how the "hearts and minds battle" in the US will eventually end. (Or how important the popular support even is)
So right now, the state of the war is a win for Israel.
Israel isn't "annexing southern Lebanon". Israel already controlled southern Lebanon and withdrew. Even recently Israel was deeper in southern Lebanon and withdrew - and is now paying the price for that. Israel was already in Beirut .. and not so long ago ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Beirut )
Israel is pushing back Hezbollah that's attacking Israel's north. Hezbollah decided to join the war and it's firing at Israeli civilians and towns with statistical weapons (rockets).
It does seem like it's at least some sort of short term win for Israel but it remains to be seen what the long term game looks like.
And incidentally destroying all villages and emptying the area of all residents while they at it, then destroying the bridges that connect the region to the rest of the country.
Katz is indeed still talking about a "buffer zone", while Smotrich demands a "permanent change of borders". The settler movement has already drawn maps.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-03-...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-03-...
> Israel already controlled southern Lebanon and withdrew.
I don't get what you want to say with that statement. It was already theirs to begin with?
I meant to say if Israel really wanted it then it already had it.
It is a requirement under international law to let civilians evacuate areas where fighting is happening. If Israel accomodates that then they're engaging in ethnic cleansing. If they don't then they're engaging in genocide. Maybe the anti-Israelis should spell a more detailed and acceptable plan of how Israel can get Lebanon to stop lobbing rockets into its cities. If Hezbollah is using villages as cover then they become military objective. Check out what villages on the Ukraine/Russia frontlines look like or in any other war. Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets already from inside the city of Tyre at Israel. Many armies would just flatten it with artillery under this situation.
Smotritch and the settler movement don't get to decide.
But yes, the argument that if Israel doesn't extract a price for aggression is gaining momentum over time. Because it seems nothing else works. Lebanon has no reason to attack Israel. It's not "occupied", it has no "right of resistance", or whatever other bullshit reasons people give to the right of others to lob rockets into Israeli population centers and terrorize its civilians. The Lebanese government gets it as well but unfortunately has no ability to control Hezbollah who are loyal to Iran.
Either way at this time it is not being annexed and there is no plan to annex it. What will likely happen is that some buffer zone will remain occupied until the Lebanese government and UN resolutions decisions demanding Hezbollah is disarmed are applied. If Hezbollah keeps rearming and keeps attacking Israel then we can expect that buffer zone to keep growing over the long term and the retaliation from Israel to become as severe as required to remove that threat. The main change in Israel's policy following Oct 7th is that it will not get into a scenario where it can be surprised again and it will not allow enemy forces to build up the capability to surprise it.
> how important the popular support even is
To see the effect of losing popularity, see how AIPAC's power in the Democratic party has begun to wane following their defeat in New Jersey.
A common mistake those deploying money in politics make is forgetting that the endgame is votes. The money helps buy votes. But if you're losing votes, you're losing votes.
> right now, the state of the war is a win for Israel
If hostilities end right now, yes. There is zero indication that endpoint is proximate.
> If, on the other hand, we acknowledge "Netanyahu...is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so," we can allow for similar levels of narcicism and stupidity in the U.S.
Sure. I don't doubt that many US politicians would start a costly war if it benefitted them. But who are the US politicians it has benefitted?
Trump hasn't gained anything from this war. Nor has Rubio or anyone else in his administration. Netanyahu, however, has benefitted politically and personally, even if only in the short term. Any effort to understand or explain the war should incorporate that.
That is why this conflict is so interesting and momentous, this is a fundamental change in the Middle East.
Israel had 2 major opponents remaining the region: Iraq and Iran.
We invaded Iraq and regime-changed them at the behest of neocons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
>Calls for regime change in Iraq
>Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the PNAC sent a letter to President George W. Bush, specifically advocating regime change through "a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq". The letter suggested that "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq", even if no evidence linked Iraq to the September 11 attacks.
>https://www.twf.org/News/Y2004/0111-Before911.html
The neocons are/were a group of American Zionists, both Jewish and Christian.
Now we are working to eliminate the only remaining rival to Israel in the region: Iran.
Israel will be free to grow into a global superpower after this is complete, Israel is the only nuclear power in the region, they sit at the nexus of the eastern and western hemispheres and on top of abundant energy reserves. _They will not need US support anymore_. This is the fundamental gamble that they are taking with this war. They know that they will lose US popular support both on the left and the right, but if it pays off they will not need that support anymore and will be free to dominate the region.
> Which means had she won the election she likely would have also invaded Iran.
Wow, what an insult, to call her as stupid/cheaply buyable as Trump.
I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have had an alcoholic wife-beating former Fox teleprompter-reader who would not have been able to tell her why it'd be a catastrophe to start bombing Iran... As weak Biden was/appeared to be, at least he had a competent team (ok, it wasn't competent enough to pushback against Adolf Netanyahu).
Probably Harris would've tried to restore the Obama-Iran deal like Biden did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93United_States_rel...), a job that Biden failed because a particular fuckwit fucked it up before him...
For me that was the best insight in the whole article. Here are a few extra sentences for context:
> So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack. It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment. But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
Nonsense. Of course Democrats are also on Israel's side. The US will always take Israel's side in any Middle East dispute. But it's only this infantile man and his clown cart that is stupid enough to go along with any and every hare brained idea that Israel puts forth.
2 things.
First, this "both sides bad" take isn't fooling anyone. Everyone sees through your bullshit that you are pro Trump. Like its easy to tell from just this comment, but if anyone thinks Im being super presumptions, feel free to looks at your comment history and you will see Im right.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890675#46891294
Secondly, the shitty thing for you is that the conservatives in charge have shown themselves to be just very inept. They could have honesty just rode the rest of Trumps term in silence, and Trump would still have been very popular despite the tarrifs, but they had to fuck it up in the most grandeur way possible of starting a new war.
Which means that Republicans are going to lose the support of the average person who is clueless about politics, and can vote one way or another based on vibes, and
Which means Dems are likely going to take a lot of the power back. At which point, it will become socially acceptable to "punish" conservatives and pro Trump people. There is already work going on to process internet comments and extract patterns of speech to cross correlate them across varying accounts on social media to id certain people, and if id'ed you better believe your work, your family, your friends, and whomever else you are going to be connected to are going to get spammed and your life ruined as much as possible.
So Imma be the nice guy and tell you to tighten up you OPSEC because you are doing an extremely poor job at it.
Israel is entirely dependent on USA. If USA says they cant attack, they wont.
Are you sure you haven't got that the wrong way around? As an outsider it looks to me as if Israel shouts 'jump' and the USA says 'how high?'. Which is bizarre when you look at how much support the US gives Israel.
Not bizarre - Israel shouts "money" and the USA says "how much?"
Those bribes to all the senators and reps really pays off, doesn't it? Sadly it's our tax dollars that it is paying off with.
No, I do not have it other way round. Israel defense and economy both depend on USA. Which is why it took mentally challenged president to start an expensive war that only Israel and Russia benefit. Previous presidents including Trump himself did told NO to Israel in the past.
Israel wanted this war, it is not like they would be victims here. But USA is NOT a victim either. Hegseth, Trump and co love the violence, love the bombing and love to cosplay as masculine men. They do not get play the "they made me do it" card.
Third, for christ sake, they sent Witkoff and Kushner to negotiate. Lets not pretend there was any honest attempt at negotiations or war avoidance.
But most US politicians are dependent on Israel-aligned donors, so the US isn't going to say they can't attack. They'll do what they need to in order to keep the money flowing in so they can get re-elected.
> the US isn't going to say they can't attack
America has told Israel not to attack multiple times. Hell, Trump has held Netanyahu back before.
> an find dozens of articles with a search limited to Feb 1~Feb 27, plenty of analysis warning of the risks that have now become reality, everything - the strait, no revolution, further radicalization, critically low US stockpiles, abandoning other US partners, gulf destabilization, etc.
To be fair, one can find plenty of analysis positing everything for the Middle East. The pointed criticisim is, in Devereux's words: "Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s."
I see a lot of people throw this "no revolution" perspective around when everyone involved has been very clear to the Iranian people: that this is the time to stay safe and inside. People rising up will take time, and will be highly unpredictable. No one said otherwise. You imply "analysts already had this all identified" yet you are putting forward a supposition here that's just wildly unrealistic.
Donald trump addressed the Iranian people in a video message and told them to rise up when the war began.
That was in January
No actually it was feb 28th
https://x.com/i/status/2027651077865157033
I think you're conflating the details with what he explicitly was saying on January 13th
Did you even listen to the link you just posted? He makes very clear in his instructions to the Iranian people that they should stay sheltered as bombs will be dropping.
Do go on - what were his instructions on what they ought to do after the bombing stopped?
Overthrow the regime. Has the bombing stopped?
Link?
https://x.com/i/status/2027651077865157033
Seriously, all these armchair "experts" are missing very obvious truths -
1) Every authority figure is telling the Iranian people to stay inside and wait.
2) Revolutions don't happen overnight, the same way that businesses don't succeed overnight, even though from far away it might seem that way.
3) Official Israeli statements estimate it could take up to a year after the war is over for a successful overthrow, even if everything is going according to plan.
The truth is there's a lot of people who want this war to fail, because it will align with their political convictions and hopes.
I will predict right now that no revolution will happen. Revolutions happen because of fragmentation within the regime. If there is one thing that puts all grievances aside then that would be an existential war. Just like during the Iran-Iraq war.
> 1) Every authority figure is telling the Iranian people to stay inside and wait.
Last week: "Our aircraft are striking terrorist operatives on the ground, on roads and in public squares. This is meant to allow the brave Iranian people to celebrate the Festival of Fire. So go out and celebrate...we are watching from above," Netanyahu said, speaking from air force headquarters.
Israel does not want functional moderate goverment in Iran. It would bomb and kill anyone who tries that. Israels plan is to periodically bomb and keep Iran failed state.
It is working on making itself larger cleansing whole areas around it and settling it.
> Israel does not want functional moderate goverment in Iran
Israel would probably be fine with a moderate government in Iran. A moderate Tehran doesn't encourage Hamas and Hezbollah to randomly lob rockets into Israel.
Even if Israel disagreed, a moderate Iran balances Israel in the region. An Iran that has beef with literally every single one of its neighbors other than Turkmenistan cannot provide that balance.
> Israel would probably be fine with a moderate government in Iran.
Maybe, but I think they are genuinely aiming for a failed state.
Israel is a state with a political apparatus that is predicated on providing security. That apparatus needs a persistent (but non-serious) threat to remain in power. I think best case for that power is to have a number of failed, weak states in the Middle East that occasionally launch relatively impotent attacks against Israel. This would also have the side effect of giving hard-line elements in Israel the enough justification to expand their borders and continue ethnic cleansing (e.g. what is happening in Lebanon right now).
I think Israeli position is what a security researcher states in this FT article: https://www.ft.com/content/dd070ee7-7021-4f90-86ec-690fe6aa3...
> Summarising the Israeli government’s position, Citrinowicz said: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future . . . [or] the stability of Iran. > > “That is a point of difference between us and the US. I think [Washington is] more concerned about nation-building and threats to their regional partners,” he added.
> An Iran that has beef with literally every single one of its neighbors other than Turkmenistan cannot provide that balance.
Well, is that better than Israel and its relationships with its neighbors?
> is that better than Israel and its relationships with its neighbors?
Yes. Tel Aviv retains solid security relationships with Jordan and Egypt. And it trades with its region [1]. On a ranking of hegemonic pests, Iran is way ahead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_agreements_of_Israe...
Your facts are a bit out of whack.
Pre-war, Iran had good relations with Qatar and Oman. Also with Pakistan. And Armenia. Their current relations with Iraq are also OK.
They have problems with Saudis, Bahrain, UAE - exactly the countries with extensive US military bases. No surprise there.
And Iran has not (prior to being attacked) attacked any of their neighbours.
The only two neighbouring countries Israel does not have problems with are heavily-bought Jordan and Egypt (Israel still attacked them prior to Camp David accords).
To any non-ideologically blind person it is obvious who is the one stirring the instability in the middle east.
You
>Israel would probably be fine with a moderate government in Iran. A moderate Tehran doesn't encourage Hamas and Hezbollah to randomly lob rockets into Israel.
I don't think they would be happy having a moderate government that could still evolve Iran into a regional leader.
But how would they have an excuse to conduct a genocide then?
Israel doesn't want delusional theocrats running Iran.
It may not be in Israel's national interest having an aggressive Islamist government in Iran, but political incentives and national interest aren't always aligned.
I mean, they kinda do.
Its what happens when you surround yourself with incompetent yes men.
It's not all. I tried as much as I could not commenting on it, but the delusions of _a lot_ of hn users on the subject, even a few whose opinion I respect, were unreal. People who are not MAGA btw.
And I'm not sure most of those realise how delusional they were, even now. They will probably rewire their memory to forget what they believed 3 weeks ago, compress the time they were wrong.
I initially thought the 'manufacturing consent' part of the war was botched, unlike Irak, but now to me it seems that people are much more susceptible to propaganda disguised as 'almost true' information on social media, and I am afraid I might be in the same boat.
It was certainly notable that so many HNers seemed absolutely certain that the Kurds would come to the USA's aid, ignoring the fact that America had facilitated the one-sided ceasefire imposed on Rojava just weeks before.
A few more sceptical voices brought this up, and were told repeatedly that it didn't matter because the Kurds in Syria and Turkey are very different from those in Iraq & Iran.
And there's certainly something in that - but it ignored the clunkingly obvious point that, if America had been thinking at all strategically, a bit more support of Rojava and would have demonstrated to all Kurds that "looking west" would be rewarded.
It has to be hard for Americans to realise that their government has pissed so much of the world off so badly. I suspect we'll see further such errors in analysis and response before the new reality fully sinks in.
Not forgetting Trump personally ordering the withdrawal of all US forces in Northern Syria in his first term, on a weekend so none of the generals were around to talk him out of it.
This resulted in the Turks moving in, massacring all the Kurds they could find, and a few thousand ISIS prisoners (including 60 'high value targets') escaping as the Kurds guarding them fled for their lives.
However Trump said this didn't pose any threat to the US because "They’re going to be escaping to Europe.”
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trumps-syria-withdrawal-i...
Turkey- a key US ally- will never allow the formation of an independent Kurdish nation near their borders.
Maybe it's time for us to decide who our allies are more carefully.
I will never forgive Saudi Arabia for the content of the 28 pages. Those who did 9/11 on us remain unpunished because geopolitics demands that we keep good relations with their "royal family".
I'd be happy to abandon whatever "alliance" we have with Turkey/Hungry, and a few other states that have shown evidence that they don't like democracy and are hostile to it.
Sure, and the question really came down to how much autonomy they'd end up getting within an integrated Syria. The answer turns out to be "not much".
And to make matters worse, Trump didn't even make an attempt to let them down gently - saying "the Kurds were paid tremendous amounts of money, were given oil and other things. So they were doing it for themselves more so than they were doing it for us"...
...and then, 4 weeks later, expected their Iraqi and Iranian cousins to ride to the USA's aid!
Possibly they think they can make up what they lost in good will and cooperation with blackmail and pressure. It is doubtful it will work as reliably as in the past, though (second order effects even left aside).
> so many HNers seemed absolutely certain that the Kurds would come to the USA's aid
I must have missed those, but I would expect HN to be able to count. There really are not a lot of Kurds.
Also the Kurds are very much aware how quickly the US abandoned them in Syria where they joined the fight on ISIS and now are left as a gift to new Syrian regime.
I had a gut feeling the US wasn't serious about the Kurd uprising in Iran when they failed to take PJAK off the terrorist list (Treasury one, not the DoS one), which is necessary to fund them.
> It has to be hard for Americans to realise that their government has pissed so much of the world off so badly.
It is not hard, at all, for roughly 1/3 of Americans to understand this. Another 1/3 don't think it, or anything past their TikTok feed, matters. The last 1/3 thought Team America was a documentary.
> It is not hard, at all, for roughly 1/3 of Americans to understand this.
Sorry, but I don't think they do understand.
America has managed to piss off Canada FFS. And lets be honest, you've got to work really hard to piss off the Canadians.
Frankly, Americans (former) allies have seen the American people VOTE for Trump. Twice. Even if Trump goes tomorrow, the (former) allies know what a significant proportion of the US people want in a leader, and so may be in store at the next election.
I can't speak for anyone else, but the depth of our self-disgrace is pretty damned obvious. (What I can or should do personally is less obvious.)
Having elected Donald Trump twice - atop all our other failings - is a giant screaming proclamation that the United States is unfit for, and undeserving of, continued existence as a state or government. The responsible thing to do is to hold a Constitutional Convention and dissolve the damned thing, and then the individual states can figure out how they ought to go forward from there. (I don't think current U.S. States are anything like perfect but they're what we have left once the United States government is gone.)
> Sorry, but I don't think they do understand.
Sorry, but 1/3 of the country is deeply, keenly aware of what an absolute fucking disgrace the last year and two months have been for us on an international stage. There's no delusion, here, that Canadians are excited about being threatened with an invasion, in spite of your silly black/white post.
You're not. Really you don't understand the impact Trump has had.
Since 1945 America was a solid partner that could be mutually trusted by us all. That trust has been lost for good. There is simply no coming back from that.
_That_ is what you do not understand.
> _That_ is what you do not understand.
My man, you are arguing with someone who fucking understands that. I get you think America is entirely dudes coal-rolling their pickup trucks in Bumfuck Texas because you're angry and you want to call us stupid. And sure, some of us are. But repeatedly telling someone "YOU DON'T GET IT" when they repeatedly demonstrate getting it is supremely childish.
A fair number of people, especially on this site, have like, traveled. Talk to people in other countries. Read the news. Etc. I get your angry and you're lashing out, but good god.
> because you're angry and you want to call us stupid
Please keep the tone civil. I said nor implied no such thing.
Rather, a significant number of posts on HN believe there will be change back to 'normality' when Trump is no longer president. Yet the world has now changed and what is normal has shifted. Maybe you understand that, but many very clearly do not comprehend the gravitas.
I mean, I assumed that any group of people stupid enough to be betrayed by the department of state twice would be first in line to get betrayed a third and fourth time.
It hardly seemed an unreasonable assumption.
The facts are that this administration removed most of the top generals in the pentagon a year ago[0]. Notice the pattern in other areas of the administration when the opportunity for new appointments is created: Loyalty over competence and experience in almost every case. There are a few exceptions, but most were from His first term (Jpowell).
[0]https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/21/cq-brown-trump-fire...
Their key insight is that you don't have to manufacture consent when so many voters just love the guy in the White House and will stand by him no matter what.
Why waste time convincing anybody of anything, when support for the war will just converge on the president's approval rating anyway?
It certainly appears to be a cult of personality. If he had a massive stroke tomorrow, or one of his secret service detail took him out, could anyone around him pick up the baton and get that same level of support?
It is a ring of incompetent yes men, but behind those yes men is a nefarious foreign influence operation. These guys didn't arrive at their bad decisions by accident.
.. and a substantial domestic influence organization. Lots of US donors with US passports handing over good old US dollars. Lots of pro-regime news stations. More since the CBS takeover.
When you listen to the director of counterterrorism explain what happened in the run up to him resigning it fits pretty well the theory that Trump is compromised (possibly with kompromat) by a certain Middle Eastern country.
That used to be plausible. But what new revelation about Trump could hurt him? Misuse of office for personal gain? Trump Tower Moscow? Inciting an insurrection? Harassing young women? Adultery? Rape? Hanging out with a pedophile? Blowjob from a 13 year old girl? [1] Those are all on the record.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct...
That last one isn’t in the article you linked, at least not that I can find.
[1] https://www.postandcourier.com/news/epstein-victim-fbi-trump...
The Epstein videotapes, perhaps
do you have a link?
Look for the Tucker Carlson interview with Joe Kent.
(Tucker Carlson is weirdly intelligent and thoughtful in that interview in a way i did not expect, but Joe said the most eye opening stuff... I have a lot of respect for him)
There is this interesting split on the right on Israel, Tucker Carlson is one of the few large platforms talking on zionism. He also interviewed the US embassador to Israel Mike Huckabee who said they have a "biblical right to land from ‘wadi of Egypt to the great river’" (Greater Israel), he also reported on how Israeli is seeing Turkey as the next threat to eliminate after Iran.
The left, not liberals but actual antiwar/antizionist left has been warning about Zionism and the Iran war for decades, nothing Tucker is saying is new, it's just nobody ever listens to those voices they have no platform are completely ignored in liberal media which is exclusively Zionist and pro-war. So when Tucker talks about it it's the first time most people ever hear this stuff, that's what makes Tucker so dangerous he is a white supremacists with a large platform who reads the room and recognizes the historic unpopularity of Israel, who has built a viable independent media platform for himself. Tucker is what an intelligent fascist Trump 2.0 would look like make no mistake.
> he also reported on how Israeli is seeing Turkey as the next threat to eliminate after Iran.
Good thing that that's not at all true. What you are referring to was an (intentional) mistranslation of a public comment by an Israeli minister, who said that Turkey was their greatest threat after Iran.
[flagged]
Turkey is a NATO member....
You think that matters to Israel or the US?
>he is a white supremacists
He says constantly that he is against blood guilt, the killing of innocents no matter their heritage, and even went so far as to say that he doesn't even necessarily think the large scale replacement of white people in their home countries is a bad thing. I don't know how you could consider that to be white supremacy.
Yeah, I mean, if you ignore maybe half of the things he says about Black Americans or immigrants, you could maybe not see him as a white supremacist. Tucker Carlson is a good political communicator, and he is clever. But he's still a bad person.
> But he's still a bad person.
But that doesn't make him a supremacist. Tucker knows his audience and gives them what they want. He's done content in support of both major parties in the US; he's a true capitalist not a supremacist.
He said immigrants make the country “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.", he credited “white men” for “creating civilization.”, he was pro-iraq war he said he felt “no sympathy” for Iraqis, calling them “semiliterate primitive monkeys.”, he believes in the great replacement theory he said the Biden administration’s immigration policy is like “eugenics” against white people, he said black people killed by police that sparked the BLM protests deserved to have been killed, it's fucking endless like a week ago he called pro-hitler Oswald Mosley one of Britain's 'great war heroes'.
That's why the parent comment said "the large scale replacement of white people in their home countries" as a statement of fact, all you dog whistling nazi fucks
FWIW he has said many times he regrets his role in supporting the Iraq war, and says he has since change his views.
>Biden administration’s immigration
To quote Joe Biden: "An unrelenting stream of immigration, non-stop, non-stop. Folks like me who are of european caucasian descent for the first time in 2017 we'll be an absolute minority. Absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America will be white European stock. That's not a bad thing, that's the source of our strength."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgrliuQW_-Q
Joe Biden's White House sued Texas and Arizona to get them to take down their border walls, and even sent the Border Patrol with fork lifts to forcibly open the barbed wire:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rxPu0OnVoYU
>"the large scale replacement of white people in their home countries" as a statement of fact
In one generation (1965 to now):
USA: 90% (higher than that in most states) -> 50%
UK: 100% -> 83% (predicted to be a minority by 2066)
Australia: 98% -> 55%
New Zealand: 90% -> 67%
Germany: 100% -> 80%
Spain: 98% -> 81%
France: 100% -> 85% (difficult to estimate but likely lower than 85%)
Netherlands: 100% -> 72%
Italy: 100% -> 92%
Denmark: 100% -> 82%
Belgium: 100% -> 64%
Sweden: 100% -> 75%
Norway: 100% -> 90%
This is just one generation, extrapolating these trends out another one or two generations and the result is that whites are a minority in most of their homelands.
>nazi fucks
I mean if you're saying that I want to invade Poland, quite the opposite is true. I'm saying we should leave Poland alone so they can manage their own borders and grow peacefully. :)
Holy shit that's not the point, other people will call you and Tucker white supremacists BECAUSE of the things you believe, do you not see how explaining those things (like the white replacement theory) isn't helpful? Like we already knew you think that, that's why you are a white supremacist in the first place, only other white supremacists will agree with you that's what makes somebody a white supremacist, it's believing those things.
Of course you don't like that, because that vile ideology is thankfully still generally reviled in society so you don't want to be called that. But that's not up to you. It's the same way that obviously the Nazis didn't think they were the bad guys, they thought they were the good guys saving Germany from non-whites and jews destroying their homeland, just like you think white people's homelands are being threatened by non-white people.
"I don't want to be a hated minority in my own country" is not supremacy.
China, Japan, Korea, India are nice places and I have no problem with them controlling their own borders. They are 99% ethnically homogeneous, but I don't think you would spend a second trying to claim they are "asian supremacists".
>do you not see how explaining those things (like the white replacement theory) isn't helpful?
Your original post seemed incredulous that I could claim it was happening at all, then I provided you numbers and now you've moved the goal post from "it isn't happening" to "why would you point out this thing that's obviously happening?".
Calling people Nazis doesn't work anymore, nobody cares. It's obvious your entire view on the topic is based on just trying to apply that label to everything you disagree with.
Fine, he's a bad person and a racist. He feeds his audience racism because his audience is also made up of racists.
> he doesn't even necessarily think the large scale replacement of white people in their home countries is a bad thing
Tell us more about this white replacement theory, do you agree with Tucker?
I mean, Joe Kent resigning in protest over the war with Iran is admirable, but Joe Kent is also a vocal anti-Semite who was upset that US policy was being directed by Israel. And I don't mean that Joe Kent dislikes the Israeli government or its actions specifically, I mean he engages in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and associates with anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes.
These days conflating criticism of israel with anti semitism is a very clear, very obvious and very reliable racist calling card.
Mitch McConnell (adherent of the great replacement theory) accusing Joe Kent of anti semitism gave the accusation the same gravitas it would have if Strom Thurmond or the Grand wizard of the KKK did it.
i.e. it only serves to underscore the accuser's racism.
> These days conflating criticism of israel with anti semitism is a very clear, very obvious and very reliable racist calling card
No it isn't. There are lots of anti-Semites who just don't like Jews irrespective of Israel's foreign policy. There are also a lot of people criticising Israel who are idiots, alongside the–I believe–majority who have thought deeply about the issue and concluded dispassionately.
Yes, anti semites exist but trumped up accusations of anti semitism against israel critics is still one of the most reliable indicators of a vehement islamophobe.
And, they hate anti-racists almost as much as they hate muslims.
Those days people that hate Jews claiming they're "only anti-Zionists" are being white washed while synagogues are shot at and people displaying anything Jewish are attacked on the streets in western countries.
Antisemitism is at all times high. And not the "critical of Israel" type of antisemitism. The "jews control the weather", "space lasers from mars" and "let's kill all of them" type of antisemitism is rampant.
Comments like yours are the racist ones. Maybe you don't understand that but that's a whole problem on its own. People are completely uneducated on what antisemitism is, the traditional blood libels against the Jewish people, the history of the Jewish people, and how all that relates to what's going on today.
Yes and why do you think that is. Constant crying wolf means moderate persons are slowly feeling the word antisemite lose all meaning and therefore the real antisemites are gaining room to legitimise themselves.
I don't think we're crying wolf.
Part of the game played here by the people that hate Jews is to attack the meaning of this word and they are being successful at it. Distortion of words and language is part of the tool set used by the anti-Israel camp here. The anti-Israel camp, which is also (broadly) antisemitic, is intentionally fueling antisemitism while pushing the argument that it's not antisemitism because it's really anti-Zionism or anti-Israel.
For countries like Iran and Qatar Israel should not exist because it's Jewish and Jews should not live in the Middle East because it's Muslim land. In their eyes there is no confusion that these are all the same thing. Only in those eyes of said "moderate" people.
No that's complete nonsense. In today's era actual antisemites won't need guesswork to locate, they'd openly vomit out a salad of zog, greedy bastards, traitors, that 109 country bs, holocaust denialism, etc etc. AIPAC for example has made the calculation that accusing moderate non-racists of antisemitism is much more effective than doing anything about actual hardcore antisemites whom they ignore. Actions like this are the reason words like ZOG are slowly becoming used in the mainstream. The accusation of antisemitism is losing all meaning.
Arabic countries didn't have much trouble coexisting with native jews. You might be overlooking the minor point of shipping Europeans en-masse into a place and displacing people who lived there before natively.
Arabic countries barely tolerated Jews as second class citizens under Islamic rule. That is the truth. What you're regurgitating here is the nonsense. If life was so great for the Jews under Arabic rulers where are the communities of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq? How many Jews are left in those places? Zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world barely touches this topic.
Jews living in present day Israel were subject to pogroms, murder, and ethnic cleansing well before modern Zionism. One random example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1834_looting_of_Safed
So the fairy tale put forward by today's antisemites that you are echoing is historically false and nonsense. That's not to say there were some better periods for some Jews in some areas but as a rule they were still discriminated against, persecuted, and obviously never have the ability to determine their own future or to restore their historical homeland.
I'm not aware of any particular AIPAC policy on this topic so I only have to guess this is some other antisemitic fable. When we see holocaust denial happening right in front of our eyes by maybe people you call "moderate non-racists" then we are going to call that out. Holocaust denial is a strategy of the Palestinians because they believe that the world supports Israel's right to exist as a result of the bad things that happened to Jews by the hands of the German(tm). So their approach to that is to diminish the holocaust and compare it to their own "suffering" (which is another form of diminishing). Some Palestinian leaders like Mahmoud Abbas are outright holocaust deniers and their "opinions" are popular amongst their people: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/07/palestinian-pr...
"shipping Europeans en-masse into a place and displacing people who lived there before natively." -> never happened. Jewish people that migrated to present day Israel did not displace anyone. The displacement that happened in 1948 happened as a result of the war that was started against Israel. "Europeans" meaning Jewish people who also lived there natively, just farther back in history.
See if you talk like this about e.g. Chinese immigration to Vancouver, Canada, and you say they came and displaced the white people who lived there (or the first nations or whatnot). Then you are immediately labelled, correctly, a racist. But it's ok to talk like that about Jewish refugees with nowhere to go, persecuted in Europe, who immigrated to a place they have immense historical connection to, did so legally, wanted to coexist peacefully with in a free and democratic society with everyone in the region, and then when brutally attacked by people who would not accept their right to be there defended themselves.
The accusation of antisemitism isn't really losing its meaning. It still means exactly what it meant. Those people who are being accused are actually antisemites. They are not "moderate non-racists". They are totally racist.
EDIT: So I don't know anything about you. Where you're from. Where you've absorbed your "knowledge" about the middle east and the Jewish people from. But you are repeating some story or narrative you've heard somewhere and that narrative is totally racist. Maybe you're not aware of it but it still is. This is exactly what racism and antisemitism looks like not like what you describe.
I just fed your reply into an LLM as a sanity check and asked whether that reply is antisemitic or racist and got this evaluation: "The statement you’ve shared is a complex mix of political critique and rhetoric that, in several places, moves beyond standard political debate and into the territory of established antisemitic tropes."
It goes on to say: ""The Accusation is Losing All Meaning" This is a common rhetorical tactic. While one can certainly debate whether specific organizations overreach in their definitions of antisemitism, using that debate to excuse or explain away the rise of terms like "ZOG" shifts the blame for bigotry onto the victims of that bigotry."
"European "Mass Shipping"
Referring to the Jewish population in Israel solely as "Europeans" ignores the fact that:
Llms are llms they will reflect status quo thinking in politics, a status quo that is shifting now.
Why the fuck would I have a problem with Chinese immigration to Canada and how the fuck would it be remotely equivalent to European jews forcibly being put on a land at the behest of a colonial power initially then their own terrorism to pressure the brits later? Immigrants to modern Canada have come with legal permission and are peacefully coexisting with the locals as equals. They didn't annex or displace anyone.
>Jews are indigenous to the Levant
The people already living there were much more indigenous than someone who married europeans for hundreds of generations.
This of course brings us to a funny point. Why do you feel a need to defend israelis on the basis of genetics? Its just a country, anyone ofany race should be able to immigrate right? If not then what do you want to say, that it is an ethnostate? If it's an ethnostate what is your opinion on forming an Aryan ethnostate? Do you have a problem with that?
And regarding genetic roots there. If I have 99% Nigerian and 1% French what would you say if I tried to tell you I am French, France is my ancestral land and I need to displace the fake people living in France currently?
I didn't say anything about local jews and arab jews. I am talking about slavic and german etc jews. They don't even look like anyone local. If you showed a photo without any religious garb people would say this person is white.
Again why this both waysing of Israel as simultaneously both a ethnic state for jews and as a liberal secular state? Pick a lane.
I don't give a shit about race, nationalism, religion anyone should be able to move anywhere as long as they aren't harming others. Israels origin and continued present action fails the latter test.
> Antisemitism is at all times high.
It's always high, or did you mean at an all time high? How does antisemitism in America today compare to Russia in the 1800s?
Well it's hard to say. But I meant more or less since WW-II or modern times.
>Those days people that hate Jews claiming they're "only anti-Zionists"
That's mainly what the more racist zionists claim.
Most genuine anti semites are up front about their distaste for Jews and they tend to be on the far, far right.
There's a simple test to distinguish the genuine anti racists and the disguised racists, too:
* I condemn the holocaust unreservedly. It was commited by a regime of absolute evil against innocent people.
* I condemn the Gazan genocide unreservedly. It was commited by a regime of absolute evil against innocent people.
If you're completely happy repeating both of these sentences like I am then you're not one of them.
If you engage in deflection or denial of one of these two UN recognized genocides, well, you're either an anti semite or it's equal and opposite.
>Comments like yours are the racist ones
Im gonna go ahead and assume you will either ignore me or fail the antiracist test.
Here I'm not ignoring you though I probably should.
The problem is you're providing cover for the antisemites even if you're not one yourself (which isn't clear at this point). They will fly under your cover pretending that they actually care about the same thing. We see this "mix" in the conversation (e.g. painting the Jews in the US as not being loyal or serving foreign interests).
The choice of the word "genocide" for the civilians killed in the war in Gaza is antisemitism. You might not think so but it objectively is. That word started getting used around 5 minutes into this war on Oct 8th or so. The Israeli "regime" (aka democratically elected government) is not absolute evil and it is fighting a war against a mix of innocent people and evil people which is true for most wars. While elements of this government may hold opinions that are let's say "extreme" that is different than evil. Evil is what Hamas' attack on Oct 7th looked like. Anyways, evil is meant to manipulate emotions as is genocide. Those are tools of propaganda and their usage indicates a certain mindset. The word genocide is not appropriate because it refers to the aim of destroying a national or ethnic group and Gaza is neither. Even if Israel wanted to kill, and killed, all Gazans that does not fit the commonly accepted definition of this word prior to the war in Gaza. Those that wield the word rely on some legalities that differ from the common usage and that is intentional. According to certain legal scholars even the killing of a single person can be considered a genocide but that's obviously not what the intent is/was. So the usage of this word is a "tell" in a bad way and the singling out of Israel is another "tell". There are ways of expressing your condemnation that would probably avoid the issue and the choices made do matter. The problem is then you'd actually have to say what you really think and that might not stand a test to the factual reality. You might have to also suggest what Israel could have done that would be acceptable to your morals and is something that stands other tests of reason.
The equating/comparison of the war in Gaza to the Holocaust is antisemitism.
The war in Gaza is not a "UN recognized genocide" and that title is meaningless anyways. We don't need to UN to tell us what's right and what's wrong.
There are many examples current and historical where more civilians were harmed, with more intent, and less or no reasons, that haven't drawn the kind of hate and condemnation that is aimed at Israel (or as you say the "regime" whatever that's supposed to mean). That "bias" is what racism and antisemitism is partly about.
So you are clearly possessed of this bias. I claim I have no bias. If you s/Palestinians/Swedes/ and s/Israel/Dutch/ my take on the Gaza war would be exactly the same. I do not view it through a lens of race. I view it purely through the facts of the matter. Any similar example in the world, any other war or conflict, with civilian casualties, I would view through the very same lens. No racism. Maybe you don't know that in every war ever innocent people die. Maybe you don't understand the realities and facts of this specific war. Maybe you don't understand the propaganda war going on. I really don't know. What I do know is that there is a correlation between physical attacks on Jews all over the world and this intentionally distorted view of the conflict so even if you claim that you support one and oppose the other that's clearly not how many people perceive the same propaganda.
> The word genocide is not appropriate because it refers to the aim of destroying a national or ethnic group and Gaza is neither. Even if Israel wanted to kill, and killed, all Gazans that does not fit the commonly accepted definition of this word prior to the war in Gaza.
Your definition of genocide is so narrow that it also excludes the Armenian genocide, are you okay with that? Some groups like those in Constantinople were spared, so a denier might claim that only rural Armenians were targeted, not the whole ethnic group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide_denial#Rheto...).
>Here I'm not ignoring you though I probably should.
Yes it is not wise to out oneself as a genocide denialist - whether it's the holocaust or (in your case) gaza.
>The choice of the word "genocide" for the civilians killed in the war in Gaza is antisemitism.
There was an enormous war crime committed and plenty of evidence, just like there was with the holocaust.
Commitment to genocide denial demonstrates an equal level of racism as a holocaust denier. They are, as I'm sure you'll agree, anti semites whether they admit it or not.
>I view it purely through the facts of the matter. We don't need to UN to tell us what's right and what's wrong.
The UN is there to tell us what happened as a neutral party. THEY view it through the facts of the matter, which is why they confirmed that it is a genocide - over two years after it started and the evidence had mounted up.
It is seems likely that you view this conflict exclusively through a racial prism. That is very sad.
> We see this "mix" in the conversation (e.g. painting the Jews in the US as not being loyal or serving foreign interests).
Nothing special about jews, dual citizens by definition have mixed loyalties, whether they be a dual citizen to Israel, Russia, Egypt, Netherlands, anywhere else.
This is another example where a perfectly general and non-jewish aspect is taken and construed to be "antisemitism".
Genes are also a nice argument. Jews have all kinds of genetic origins from Russians, Poles to Middle Eastern. Would you be saying the same thing if it was jews instead of Palestinians?
Physical attacks on jews are happening precisely because Israel is deliberately confusing real antisemitism and perfectly normal non-racist views. This gives cover to the actual antisemites. People are growing sick of giving disclaimers they condemn the holocaust, they have nothing against jews as a people, etc etc and at that point what do you think someone with less energy and willpower will do once they see an attack: bah whatever.
Did I cite Mitch McConnell? No, I did not. I tried to be clear that I am not accusing Joe Kent of anti-Semitism because he is criticizing Israel, and Mitch engaging in that kind of rhetoric is only serving to make it harder for me to make my point. I am accusing Kent of anti-Semitism because he has a history of engaging in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and consorting with neo-Nazis. My point is simple: we should not respect Joe Kent. His resignation is correct; his reasoning is flawed.
"The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Joe Kent to a top counterterrorism role, overcoming opposition from Democrats who described the retired Army Green Beret as a conspiracy theorist who has associated with White nationalists and other far-right extremists. "
- https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/senate-confirmation-...
Obviously a hero to the some on the far left today.
>Did I cite Mitch McConnell? No, I did not
You didnt cite anything so i googled to see whom or what you might be talking about and thats all that popped up.
It turns your vague accusation only matched the equally vague accusations of a rather nasty white supremacist zionist.
I think that says that Joe Kent is being slandered mainly by some rather extreme genocide denying racists.
Its what happens when your nation state has been raised on an unhealthy diet of warrior narcissism.
I don't think that is the whole picture.
I suggest a significant cause is Trump's arrogance and only listening to the advice he wants to hear.
There are too many people, enriched by the status quo, who won't move until their personal discomfort erodes, even while they're watching it get closer and closer (in denial). People who are going to be jobless in 6 months carrying water for the admin because they're afraid of losing their jobs now. This isn't a hypothetical, because it has been happening continuously for the past year-and-a-half. Yours truly is not exempt, but it's certainly frustrating watching people hem and haw from the other side of the line.
I get that people like me have no pull because we're already designated losers, but it would be nice if y'all would just take our word for it.
This is nothing new, history repeats. Prior to the invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq there were numerous regional experts warning that the result would be chaos, failed states, a rise in extremism and long term instability in the region and indirectly the rest of the world. Millions of us marched through the streets, asking our governments not to make what was obviously a massive mistake.
The US & UK governments were convinced that they would recreate the liberation of Europe, with cheering crowds, flowers in their hair, Mission Accomplished banners and then simply totally dismantle a government & civil service and recreate a new one to their favour. Groupthink is a powerful thing.
At one point you have to consider the possibility that destabilisation is the objective and the apparent stupidity just an excuse.
In the case of Israel, destabilisation and creation of a region of neighbouring failed states is absolutely it's aim as that is an exploitable situation. Iran was the only real opposition to Israel's long term colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing and more recent outright genocide. It was also opposed to Israel's existence and funded terrorism, etc... (whatever caveat the reader needs to understand I'm not a cheerleader of Iran) but historically it is not alone in this and is not the only country ever to be hostile to another. The majority of such situations resolve over time through diplomacy and reason, and yes, significant amounts of violence but it is rare to resolve such an international dispute purely through war. Israel, its government and military have long been clear that they don't seek a status quo, but a chaotic forever war they use to justify their literal bulldozing of surrounding nations.
I have been thinking about this scene a lot recently: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hj_4KIKHRFY&t=60s
America is isolating itself in so many ways. You could rewrite that scene and reach the same conclusion.
What specifically about that scene? Video won't load for many HN readers.
Apparently it's "The Wind Rises: The Looming War", a Japanese anime film.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises>
Ah, it's a scene set in the late 1930s where a German stays at a mountain retreat in Japan, and bonds with the Japanese protagonist who also visited Germany (to learn how to make warplanes). It becomes clear that the German man is fleeing the Nazi government.
https://www.cornel1801.com/animated/Wind-Rises-2013/video-qu...
- It is a nice night. Hier ist Der Zauberberg.
- "The Magic Mountain" Thomas Mann.
- Yes. A good place for forgetting. Make a war in China. Forget it. Make a puppet state in Manchuria. Forget it. Quit the League of Nations. Forget it. Make the world your enemy. Forget it. Japan will blow up. Germany will blow up too.
This recklessness is a theme I keep seeing when reading about preludes to major war. There is always a side who wants diplomacy to fail and war to break out. It seems to me like the American administration is champing at the bit for a war of aggression.
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Honestly, the way this administration has behaved makes me think someone there is obsessed with playing Total War and thinks that’s how the real world works. It’s all about winning battles and painting the map red, white and blue (Greenland, Venezuela, now Iran) with no thought to what they want to achieve beyond that.
I think that criticism legitimately undersells Total War players (and thereby oversells the administrations competence).
Total War involves an understanding and exploitation of high ground, rivers, and choke points. Like just about any war gamer, with a glance at the map of Iran one arrives at The Pentagons stated wisdom on the matter for decades. Geography says you invade all of it, or cede the straight.
We have this issue many paces in the world and people just don’t get it. North Korean nukes are a threat, but the unstoppable artillery barrage that would kill tens of millions in the first minutes of the war is The Issue. You can’t have snipers on a mountain ridge over your house and feel safe.
Dick Cheney and the Bush family spelled it out over and over. They like money and oil.
I never said they were good Total War players ;-)
Don't forget prior saber rattling about Panama. Cuba is still actively on deck.
And here I thought that they acted more like Tropico players.
Hegseth?
They're obsessed with what real white men did the in past centuries, ie old style imperialism, not the current US state of imperialism.
The failed revolution a month prior may have been the US too.
It's after the ramp up in production of weapons used in the shooting war started.
> The failed revolution a month prior may have been the US too
Probably not. History has practically zero examples of foreign-caused popular revolts. When you want your person in power, you do a military coup.
What history is littered with is adversaries (a) constantly fomenting dissent in each other and (b) levelling up convenient revolutions. America has been doing the former in Iran since basically 1979. But to say the recent protests "may have been the US" is ascribing way too much influence to Washington.
"History has practically zero examples of foreign-caused popular revolts"
You should go take a look at what Lenin and many other communists was doing and where he was physically right before the October revolution...
Also, Haiti slave revolt was heavily influenced by the French revolution.
Also, uhh the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom?
> You should go take a look at what Lenin and many other communists was doing and where he was physically right before the October revolution
To what effect? The only other successful Communist revolution prior to the conclusion of the October revolution was the one in Mongolia [1]. It built on decade-old revolutionary ground [2]. (Finland, meanwhile, was seceding from White Russia.)
Trying to cause a revolution from abroad just doesn't work. Exhibit A: right now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_revolution#Successfu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_Revolution
Re: Trying to cause a revolution from abroad just doesn't work.
Are you just blindly ignoring all 'regime changes' supported/caused by US (i.e. from abroad) since WW2?
Some of them do not work (this one is especially botched). Many, many have succeeded (the initial change), with typically less successful outcomes over longer time frames.
And you are totally missing the point of the remark about Lenin and Germany's part (essentially sending him to destabilize Russia in order to help their WW1 efforts - succeeded wildly beyond expectations, to disastrous long term consequences)
> Are you just blindly ignoring all 'regime changes' supported/caused by US (i.e. from abroad) since WW2?
What fraction was popular revolt versus military coup? Engineered from afar?
> totally missing the point of the remark about Lenin and Germany's part (essentially sending him to destabilize Russia
Oh fair, I did miss this. I would argue this is leveling up an existing revolution. But sure, this is the closest N = 1 modern history offers.
What fraction was engineered 'popular revolt'? Read up a bit on the color revolutions... e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
> Are you just blindly ignoring all 'regime changes' supported/caused by US (i.e. from abroad) since WW2?
It is not like the successful ones were popular revolts. They were, simply, a coups. And in Iran specifically, ended up with population hating on USA.
And with Americans being totally Pikachu face shocked about "how come they hate us as much as monarchy we installed there" as even opposition to the theocracy hated on them.
No, the protests were mostly genuine. That's what happens when your country is so up it's own ass with religious totalitarianism that you set yourself up to not have water at all in the next few decades. Average citizens generally get really pissy when you take away the "At least I'm not literally dying" excuse.
The US could not participate in that because we had moved assets to south america to fuck with Venezuela. The war in Iran wasn't started until the USS Ford had been re-positioned back to the middle east.
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> Seriously did you buy this?
Uh yes, water shortages and inflation have a habit of pissing people off.
The CIA, as its tradition demands, never meddles when the conditions are ripe to promote American interests. They just let nature take its course from afar.
> CIA, as its tradition demands, never meddles when the conditions are ripe to promote American interests
Straw man. Nobody argued American interests were unrepresented on the ground.
If you're claiming they've been duped, at least provide an argument to say why they're wrong. Preferably with links to credible research (sigh, what's "credible" anyway?)
Read on the martingale strategy. This is Donald Trump signature strategy. Basically, when something doesn't work, you double down; and it pays off. This strategy keeps working until it doesn't and completely bankrupt the player. Because the strategy has been always paying off for the them (djt & co), they thought they have some kind of a special skill/power that others don't; not realizing that they are just bad at math, geopolitics and strategy.
I think it's perfectly encapsulated by Hegseth's comment about not fighting "with stupid rules of engagement."
The implication is that, the US's military failures in the past have been caused by lefty bedwetters wringing their hands about casualties and restricting the military. More generally, caused by "woke" policies that are about political correctness instead of about military success.
I would bet at least $10 that the top people in the administration are baffled that they haven't won the war yet. They're saying, we did everything right. We got rid of the trans people in the military. We fired the worst women and black people in leadership roles. We put a real tough guy in charge of the military. We told our troops to stop worrying about rules of war and let them off their leash. So why is Iran still able to fight?
That's one of the problems with bigotry and toxic masculinity and that sort of thing. Not only does it lead you to harm people, but it also hurts your ability to actually get things done. Thinking that gay people are destroying society is bad if you're in a position to hurt gay people, but it's also bad if your job involves preventing the destruction of society, because it means that you're going to look at idiotic "solutions" to the problem. And because it's not coming from a place of rationality in the first place, you're not going to eventually say, wait a minute, this isn't working, maybe gay people aren't the problem. You're just going to keep pushing at it harder because you know it's right, and if it's not working then it's just because you haven't done it enough.
> They're saying, we did everything right. We got rid of the trans people in the military. We fired the worst women and black people in leadership roles. We put a real tough guy in charge of the military. We told our troops to stop worrying about rules of war and let them off their leash. So why is Iran still able to fight?
Who exactly is saying this? Your comment is worthless conjecture.
Well duh. That's why that paragraph starts with "I would bet...."
yes and some bets are smart and based on sound logic and evidence. Some are based on stuff pulled out of the better's ass. This is the latter.
Not sure why you keep feeling the need to reply to state the obvious.
Trump doesn't care about the results in Iran. He's getting richer through graft while making himself look big. He's pathetic and we're all paying the price in one way or another.
I suspect Trump may not care about money much, but at the end of the life he wants to be some historical figure. Similar motive was for Putin to invade Ukraine.
Except for the little detail that Ukraine doesn't have a history of launching rockets into allied nations, invading embassies and holding staff hostage, unprovoked attacks against allied interests and ships in international waters and massacring it's own people for the crime of speaking out agains their government.
West is living in its own bubble of misinformation. Including the government.
On many occasions I've read self-soothing wishful thinking messages about my country. In 2022 it was that Russian army is fleeing, all Russian tanks were burned down, and Russian soldiers are deserting from a front lines with a speed of 100,000 persons a day. Here on HN. Written by the people who had no clue how to distinguish Russian tank from Ukrainian tank.
Or in 2022-2023 EU leaders said that Russian soldiers are fighting with shovels and stealing microwaves and washing machines to extract microchips from them.
Or just recently someone wrote to me that we are living in the stone age, whatever that means.
On the other hand, I'm happy that West prefers to live in a bubble with no access to real information. And if you try to convey real information, they'll call you "Kremlin bot" or "North Korean bot" or "Chinese bot". It means that less countries will fall prey to neocolonial practices and wars because you cannot wage wars and govern colonies based entirely on misinformation from propaganda your own media creates out of thin air.
> Or in 2022-2023 EU leaders said that Russian soldiers are fighting with shovels and stealing microwaves and washing machines to extract microchips from them.
And this WAS true. At one point, Ukraine broke through Russian lines and was pushing Russia back as fast as they could get logistics organized.
In response, Russia mobilized about 300000 people and forced them to fight or die. Usually both. Then started offering jailed inmates a chance of freedom by fighting on the front lines for 6 months. It invited freaking North Koreans to fight on the Ukrainian front!
> Written by the people who had no clue how to distinguish Russian tank from Ukrainian tank.
The thing is, in a large war such as the Ukrainian war (or the Iranian war now) you can have multiple total routs of the opposing military. And still not gain anything. The opposing military can be armed with shovels and they might be formed out of the dregs of society, but as long as they hold the line, they can still stop your advance.
Russia _recruited_, not mobilized as usually in popular conception that would equate with conscripted.
Conscription is enforced with martial law only in ukranian territories, by both the official ukrianian government, and by the russia's occuption forces in donbas.
> Russia _recruited_, not mobilized as usually in popular conception that would equate with conscripted.
No. Russia _mobilized_ 300000 people. As in "sent mobilization notices and then grabbed whoever came". It almost resulted in uprisings, so it was quickly abandoned in favor of using prison inmates and later offering $50000 signup bonuses.
It was then memory-holed by the Russian propaganda as if it had never happened.
How can you convince me that your real information is more real than my real information?
Just observe the consequences and use brains (try to ignore ideological blinders).
The Russian economy has not collapsed.
The Russian military has not collapsed.
The Iranian regime has not collapsed.
The Ukrainian regime/state/military has not collapsed. Nor has it reconquered the territory it has lost.
Wait a bit and see if Trump's regime/presidency collapses or not. The same for Iran/Russia/Ukraine/Israel.
The strains (societal/economical/geopolitical) are great and rising, something will give out... (no sanity in sight)
Actually Ukraine just invaded Moscow with drones, causing Putin to cut the whole country off the internet for fear of looking weak.
"further radicalization,"
If by that you mean Iranians in Iran chanting "better our a-hole than yours", I'm not so sure that's radicalization.
No it means people driving cars into synagogues and shooting up bars.
Perceived? US politicians are all mutli millionaires no matter what happens they will be golfing in Hawaii.
At least Roman emperors got assassinated by their own bodyguards.
> plenty of analysis warning of the risks that have now become reality
You can also easily find analysis warning of the opposite: the risks of not invading Iran. See Nazi Germany and WW2 for an example what happens when you fail to contain a belligerently rogue country.
Israel is the country engaged in Lebensraum, so if you want to make a WW2 analogy, Israel is nazi germany here.
Wow, ok...
Iran invaded the US embassy holding 52 civilians hostage, has conducted unprovoked attacks against US, Israeli and other interests for more than 40 years, regularly launches missiles into Israeli airspace, indiscriminately attacks merchant vessels in international waters, massacres and tortures tens of thousands of their own people for the crime of speaking out against their government, sponsors terrorist groups like Hamas that massacred over a thousand people including children, raped women, etc.
As for your comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany, did the countries that Germany invaded have a history of launching rockets and terrorist attacks at Germany? Has Israel rounded up Palestinians in concentration camps and executed millions of them in gas chambers?
But you're saying it's Israel that needs to be contained and they are Nazi Germany. Ok...
Now list all the aggressive acts of Israel in the last whatever years. And think about it.
I'll let you support your own points that you make.
> massacred over a thousand people including children,
That's a classic IDF specialty, Israeli military are masters at shooting and killing children. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o
> Has Israel rounded up Palestinians in concentration camps and executed millions of them in gas chambers?
Yes, jailed for years young boys and even teens without any reason. Why would they need gas chambers when traditional bombing of schools and hospitals is working beautifully and wonderfully to cull the palestinians?
I looked up the claim of seizing tankers and it seems it has only ever happened during context of other wars like with Iraq.
Israel openly celebrates rapists such as when the rapist soldier was released from trial. https://www.timesofisrael.com/5-idf-reservists-indicted-for-...
And you don't need to ask me, just listen to the direct words of Bibi, Bezalel Smotrich and other Israeli government representatives how they want "Greater Israel" and wish for expansionism.
> That's a classic IDF specialty, Israeli military are masters at shooting and killing children. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o
You cite one example of a bad Israeli soldier and extrapolate to all of the IDF. This belies your faulty reasoning and desire to project a perspective based not on facts, but your own biases.
Again, there is no comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel. The countries Germany invaded exhibited zero aggression against Germany. In contrast, Palestinian terrorist groups launch routinely launched rockets into Israel, send terrorists in to blow up civilians, and conducted wholesale massacre and rape in the name of Allah.
Interesting that you ignore than Iran are hostage takers and murderers of their own people. After the first bombings of this war, Iranians in Iran were dancing in the streets.
> I looked up the claim of seizing tankers
I said "attacks" not just seizing. But there was seizing too.
May 2022: two Greek Tankers seized by IRGC commandos 2023: Tankers Advnatage Sweet and Niovi seized by IRGC commandos Jan 2024: St. Nikolas seized by Iranian Navy Apr 2024: MSC Aries seized by IRGC commandos During the Tanker War 1981 - 1988: Iran was responsible for approximately 168 attacks on merchant ships
July 1987: Kuwait tanker MV Bridgeton struck by Iranian mine April 1988: USS SAmuel B. Roberts nearly sunk by Iranian mine. 2019 Limpet Mine Attacks July 2021: Iranian drone strike on MT Mercer Street Nov 2022: Pacific Zircon struck by Iranian drone
Do you think I just gave isolated examples? I gave actual news articles because you would make up stuff and say its not real. These are part of a large trend. Its funny how providing actual hard facts, reported in Israeli media itself, gets me accused of being biased.
Palestine is a fun example. Why limit your looking back to such a short period. Let us rewind a few more decades. Israel itself is the product of violent terrorism and displacement. Israeli's are such nice people they bombed a hotel with innocent British and Arab people and then a future prime minister was from the very terrorist organization. Israel has been belligerent and violent from the very start.
> Do you think I just gave isolated examples? I gave actual news articles because you would make up stuff and say its not real. These are part of a large trend.
You're not being coherent here. What exactly is your point? Yes, you did give an isolated example. How exactly would I make stuff up and say it's not real? If IDF soldiers shooting children unprovoked is part of a large trend, surely this would be documented and reported somewhere?
> providing actual hard facts
Again, where are your hard facts that Israeli's shooting children is a large trend? You merely claiming it doesn't make it a hard fact.
The Palestinians crossed into Israel on Oct 7th, killed and raped music festival attendees, shot families in their homes and kidnapped and hid them in secret tunnels. None of these victims were remotely militant; not even lifting a rock at their murderers. They were living their lives and were viciously attacked. These are hard facts.
> Israeli's are such nice people they bombed a hotel with innocent British and Arab people
The King David hotel bombing was done by the paramilitary group Irgun. After Israel attained statehood, it outlawed the Irgun group, declaring it a terrorist organization. The World Zionist Congress also condemned Irgun's violence. Sorry, your example not only fails prove your point, it does the opposite.
As I said you beautifully ignored who started the conflict, it hardly began on Oct 7. The prime minister literally came out of irgun the terrorist group. Its a known fact.
I just gave one example, you can easily search and see how IDF loves killing children.
And what kind of trend do you need for showing the nature of a peoples who literally cheer and celebrate a rapist being freed from jail?
> As I said you beautifully ignored who started the conflict, it hardly began on Oct 7
In 1947, the UN passed the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. It called for a two state solution, one for the Arabs and one for Israel. Britain supported it, the Jewish Agency supported it. Everyone supported it with the exception of, you guessed it, the Arabs. The Jewish were willing to compromise. Arabs, nope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_...
Immediately after the Partition Plan was adopted by the UN, the 1948 Palestine War started. Guess who attacked first and started it? You guessed it, the Arabs.
> The prime minister literally came out of irgun the terrorist group. Its a known fact.
Sorry, you're getting your facts wrong again. In this list of members of Irgun, do a ctrl-f on Netanyahu and see what you get. That's right, nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_members
> And you don't need to ask me, just listen to the direct words of Bibi, Bezalel Smotrich and other Israeli government representatives how they want "Greater Israel" and wish for expansionism.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free" - Palestinian chant
In a survey conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development 74.7% Palestinians agreed that they support a single Palestinian state "from the river to the sea", while only 5.4% of respondents supported a "one-state for two peoples" solution. 3 out 4 Palestinians supported the Oct 7 massacre of Israelis
Who is expansionist now?
When you have a group who's ideological goal has always been to exterminate the Jewish people and Israel, Israel must defend itself.
>When you have a group who's ideological goal has always been to exterminate the Jewish people and Israel, Israel must defend itself.
The locals didn't particularly give a shit about israel or jews until European jews began forcibly displacing them en masse. Jews lived there for centuries, sometimes treated better sometimes worse than Christians in Europe treated them.
The King David Hotel bombing wasn't started by arabs, it occurred much before the 48 date you have given. Its clear who started shit.
I wasn't talking about Netanyahu coming from Irgun but two other past prime ministers.
>From the river to the sea
Its very pleasing you quoted this slogan. And you accuse me of being biased? Do you know which Israeli political party's slogan this is?
Tell me, is this fake news: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/smotrich-calls-israels-bo... ?
Or any of the politicians quotes here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel
It was a simple analogy you have confused utterly and completely. I said if we are making a WW2 analogy, then Israeli leaders openly talk of Lebensraum, so in that, Israel is the nazi germany.
Iran was "contained" under Obama's deal with them....that Trump tore up....and when he was in the middle of negotiating a new one he attacked Iran who were in good faith negotiations.
The rogue nation here is the US.
> Iran was "contained" under Obama's deal with them
Oh, you mean the JCPOA that Iran violated (before it was rejected by Trump) by failing to disclose storage of undeclared nuclear material at secret sites in Turquzabad between 2009 and 2018 and at Lavisan-Shian, Varamin and Marivan starting in 2003 to early 2000s?
UN watchdog declares Iran in breach of nuclear non-proliferation duties: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202506123029
The JCPOA, had weak stipulations on nuclear constraints that sunsetted after 15 years. The deal did not address Iran's missile program, human rights record or support for proxy terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
> Iran was in good faith negotiation
Iran has historically made promises, broken them and lied about it.
"The best time for Iran to have given up the weapons pursuit was after the 2003 embarrassment of being caught clearly lying about its nuclear program, but it did not. Over the years, the IAEA Board of Governors issued several warnings to the UN Security Council about the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program"
https://thebulletin.org/2025/07/time-for-iran-to-make-a-no-e...
Iran treats it's people like shit and chooses terrorism over the welfare of it's own people
https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/the-islamic-republics-brok...
I think it's pretty clear that this war was initiated by Israel, who asked/hoped that the US would go along with it.
While I can easily imagine the Trump crew is a bit impulsive and unprepared, I am VERY sure Israel went in to this with their usual competency, including very clear plans and targets.
If this eventually results in a half decent Iranian government, that would be the best thing that happened to the world this century! A period of war and high oil prices is a cheap price to pay, IF that actually happens.
>In the fantasy imagination of some people
Could it be fantasy reinforced by some LLM "advisors"? I have a strong feeling that the people in US administration are talking to LLMs which constantly reassure them that their imagination is the best
Famously, the 'Trump Tariffs' were almost certainly determined by LLM, hence tariffs being applied on uninhabited islands.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=trump+tariffs+decided+by+a
Everyone knew the Iranians would close the strait and that it would take time to re-open it. That was the price the administration was willing to pay. Put differently, the regime's traditional deterrence did not work against this administration. You seem to think the administration would not have done this thing with what we know now. What makes you think that?
Trump is quoted saying that Iran would surrender or be pverthrown way before they would close the strait.
This operation was cobbled together between Trump, Hegseth, Rubio and Vance without consulting anyone outside that circle. The way they have been selling it, espwcially the strait stuff, smells of unplanned developements all around.
yeah I did expect US to know all those things...
but what I did NOT expect, is how Iran regime would choose strategically suicidal options just to "feel good"
missile-rambo even on non-combatant countries? that'll trigger self-defense attacks...
$2M per voyage? woah... the stait-users don't have a choice, but "make an example out of" iran...
I mean, iran should have just shot israel with all its missiles (select and focus), and bring that "missle interception rate" down to 40%.
Now what did iran gain from shooting everyone? making more enemies, and showing your weaknesses (96% missile interception rate, even from UAE? wtf...)
don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying Trump was right on starting the war. I actually think what the fk was he thinking back then...
I'm just saying even if you're angry and desperate, there are wise choices and dumb choices
I disagree. Even though I think the Iranian regime has been extremely incompetent overall their war strategy has been surprisingly lucid. They aren't actually risking much more by attacking neighboring countries that are already cooperating with the US. How much is Qatar's military involvement going to move the needle when you're already facing a full-on war with the US and Israel?
Raising the overall costs to the US and its allies is a pretty coherent theory of victory for Iran. Obviously they aren't going to win a conventional fight, but they might be able to inflict enough havoc on energy and commodity markets to the point that it really hurts the US and its allies economically; perhaps enough that they bail out of the war in order to stabilize the global economy.
Trump clearly wanted a quick easy win here and does not want to see massive inflation at home. Sure he personally doesn't give a shit about Americans but the rest of the politicians who enable him do and he's at risk of absolutely torching his own party for years if the war drags on and costs really get out of hand.
All the Iranian regime has to do to win is not lose for enough weeks. If the regime holds out Trump will have to either give up and try to pretend this disaster was a Great Victory, or he'll launch a ground invasion that will almost certainly turn into a quagmire. Bombing civilians makes a popular uprising much less likely, so the US is doing them quite a favor on that front.
Yup, Iran is threatening regime change by targeting the financial stability of American voters.
It's their only play, really.
well... I actually think even when trump is impeached, the democrats will continue -- even more so, to call mr trump "a weak president"
I mean, can US and its allies exactly stop at status quo?
Iran just learnt it can missile nearby neighbors and demand $2M toll fee on the strait users...
even if US just backs down from "epic wut", will iran become "the good guy" and never missile neighbors and stop demanding that $2M toll?
nope: rather, that would mean US and allies will lose its deterrence against Iran completely
iran'll start bullying more on those neighbors, and the toll fee will go up: $2M to $5M to $10M to... even $100M -- I mean, what's stopping iran from doing so?
anyway, I'm just surprised everyone in this forum is trying their best only to say "trump is such an idiot to start the war (well duh?)", and not to look at what choices each nations had/have after trump's dickhead move
Stop projecting on Iran what USA would do in their place (bullying everybody).
Iran was NOT bombing its neighbours and demanding Hormuz toll before the war. Not even after it was bombed last June.
If they had not responded strongly, USA/Israel would keep periodically 'mowing the lawn', not acceptable to any country, especially not for a big and proud nation like Iran.
Btw, the US military bases in Gulf countries are legitimate military targets, and have born the brunt of Iran's attacks. It is just that in our western media the focus is on any civilian damages, and almost all damages to military is hushed up.
Iran has no good way to prevent future attacks (nobody sane would believe any agreement signed by USA), their only way is to make sure beyond any doubt that attacking them again will hurt VERY, VERY much. As a side note, getting rid of USA military bases in the Gulf would be beneficial to them in making any future attacks on them more difficult. Hence the (very true!) messaging 'the USA military bases are not there to protect you, but to help them project power over us (and you!), and are only making you a target, reducing your security, not increasing it'.
>Iran was NOT bombing its neighbours and demanding Hormuz toll before the war. Not even after it was bombed last June.
They were funding and arming proxies that were bombing and destabilizing neighborhoods. Nobody in the region likes Iran, that is precisely why the Gulf States want US bases and a Israeli military pact.
And this is not a reactive policy as it is an explicit proactive policy of exporting the Islamic Revolution and gaining regional hegemony. Which no one wants.
> Iran was NOT bombing its neighbours and demanding Hormuz toll before the war. Not even after it was bombed last June.
Iran has a history of launching rockets into Israel, both through it's proxies an directly. It has also invaded the US embassy holding 52 staff hostage, conducted unprovoked attacks against allied interests, attacks merchant ships in international waters and massacred tens of thousands of it's own people for the crime of speaking out against the government.
Your perception of Iran is delusional.
If using proxies invites invasion, then proportionally the USA should be nuked multiple tims over from the face of the earth given the mass scale of terrorism their proxies have conducted. So this proxy argument is nonsense.
Your reading is very selective. I didn't just mention proxies in my comment.
Under a sane president there would be a pretty clear off ramp available in the form of a negotiated settlement. Iran stops attacking neighbors and the strait in exchange for a US promise to not start another unprovoked war, along with another JCPOA type agreement lifting sanctions and limiting their nuclear development. The problem here is that absolutely nobody trusts trump to actually stick to a deal, especially after he was the one who broke the previous deal and then attacked them twice in the middle of negotiations. Trump's stupidity compounds the mess in ways that no other president would.
Without a negotiating partner Iran basically has to settle the issue with force. They are going to try to do as much economic damage as possible in order to deter current and future attacks, or die trying. Without a ground invasion the attacks on both sides will wind down at some point but it's hard to see how we get to a clean cease fire, it's likely to be a messy uneven one that could flare back up at any point.
The Gulf states are not any more willing than the USA at invading Iran with ground troops. The only thing that changes by making them angry is that slightly more missiles fly into Iran. Which is already accounted for and won't magically reopen the strait.
Actually, Saudi Arabia might get involved.
I doubt US wants them involved.
The coordination will be difficult (I doubt the Saudis are properly, NATO - style, trained for joint actions with USA).
Their involvement would also severely raise the risk of friendly fire (see the F15's over Kuwait).
they couldn't defeat much smaller and weaker Yemen.
Did that involve boot on the grounds or just shelling via cruise missiles or from air? Also, Yemen is poorer, but has more or less the same population as Saudi Arabia.
That doesn't mean they can't be useful, and they do already have a chip on their shoulder wrt Iran because of Iran's support for the Houthis.
Yemen situation is just good indication of how useful they could be, and answer is not much. They don't have good functioning military.
Their military is a paper tiger like Saddam’s was during the Iraq invasion. Modern gear but without the doctrine or officer corps to effectively use it.
My experience while working there years ago was that their armed forces were a weird mix of coup proofing and a nepotistic dumping ground for family members who couldn’t be trusted to help run the family business.
well with all the oil money, saudis and UAE don't even have to send their own citizens:
they can just pay gurkha mercenaries for the job
Iran did not made more ennemies. It attacked countries that did not liked Iran and hosted American assets.
They are easier to hit and harder to defend then Israel. That is depleting defense forces more.
> Iran should have just shot israel with all its missiles (select and focus)
Iran has deliberately escalated the war horizontally to create a bigger mess and to make the military adventure more expensive for America and the world.
Iran is saying, "If you attack us, these are the costs."
As an invading military, you're either willing to pay those costs or you're not.
Well, there's more than just perceived invincibility.
The alternative is recognizing that you can effectively cow large populations of people into submission, no matter how much it sucks, and that the people who do this (in this case, the Islamic theocrats of Iran) can and will forever be a part of the geopolitical landscape with thrall over tens of millions of lives, and seek to influence even more. That there will always - ALWAYS - be a segment of humanity that has no real chance to think differently, to improve their lot, and to peacefully see the changes they want made to their society.
The hope in the immediate post-Soviet era of the early 1990s is that liberalized representative government would spread around the world, and that rules-based order would allow for peaceful resolution of problems through democratic processes and markets. And for a while, this seemed to be the route. Then it became apparent by the late 90s that there were still parties who didn't like the general direction that this was taking, particularly Russia, China, and at least some of the Middle East.
Now that China and the Middle East have become engines of global economic growth, there seems to be a tacit agreement, at least among the people who matter, than authoritarianism is fine so long as the right people get paid and that line continue to go up. In fact, it's more than fine; it's perceived by these people as more efficient at creating economic growth than that messy back-and-forth of representative government. And God forbid you have to set up that representative government after getting rid of an authoritarian one like in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Is it a harbinger of dystopia? Absolutely. But that's the reality that we inhabit.