Could the US lose its war on Iran

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cremeegg

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Of course it depends on how winning and losing are defined. The US could at any point declare victory and move on.

However, I think that there is a real possibility that Iran could cause sufficient damage to Saudi Arabia and the other gulf states to seriously impact the US economy.

Of course the price of oil is the first impact, but gulf states will probably find themselves needing capital to rebuild, with US public borrowing high and the huge appetite for capital to invest in AI the risks are great.

If a major shortage of capital occurs this will push interest rates up.

If Iran is still bombing Saudi oil facilities in 6 months the US could be in trouble.

Apart from the gulf states the other major financiers of US investment are the Chinese. They must be looking on in bemusement.
 
Iran claim to only be attacking US bases in the Gulf States.
They immediately denied having attacked the Aramco oil facility in Saudi Arabia and there are claims that Mossad agents were subsequently arrested in Saudi Arabia and Qatar in connection with that. The theory is that Israel (the instigator of this war) are trying to bring in the Gulf States to the conflict which would of course be in their favour.
It's hardly novel to say that in order to win this war all Iran has to do is to survive while Trump needs something quickly that he can spin as a victory.
Since the death of Khameni Iran have rebuffed offers of talks from Trump who had been hoping for a 1 to 3 day war.
Their logic apparently is that all a ceasefire does is give Israel and the US, time to prepare for the next round, continue sanctions etc
until they finally win.
Instead Iran wants to do what they failed to do in June last year and this time inflict serious pain on Israel (and on the US), even if they have to endure it themselves in the process.
This is making the US and Israel desperate to deal a knockout blow as they cannot do a long war. So they have doubled down and are expending everything they have in order to achieve that. A few weeks and they will have used up pretty much everything with little hope of resupply.
Iran's strategy as I understood it was
1) to use their stock of older missiles and drones to exhaust the very limited stock of interceptors and thereafter to hit Israel hard.
2) close the straits of Hormuz
and
3) reveal to the other Gulf States that the US is unable to protect them and that in fact, hosting US bases is actually a liability
with the ultimate goal of having the US kicked out of the region.
However according to General Caine the number of missiles that Iran have been launching is reducing day by day although he was cautious about calling exactly what that meant. There are a number of possibilities including large scale damage to missile sites and perhaps more pertinately their launchers or that perhaps Iran is hunkering down, doing the rope a dope until the US/Israel punch themselves out.
Most commentators who aren't MSM stooges reckon that this war is a major miscalculation by Trump due to hubris (stemming from his 'victories' in Venezuela and elsewhere) and just the fact that he's a moron and is surrounded by estate agents and yes people.
If Iran sticks it out no amount of lipstick on his victory pig will save Trump in the mid-terms and then he's toast after that.
 
Im not a fan of Stamer as a politician but with his barrister hat on he was exact in questioning the legality and objective of going to war with Iran.

If the Iranian people want to rid themselves of a theological authoritarianism and open their society to democratic principles and structures I say fair play to them and wish them every success in achieving it.
I think they are deluded if they think that is what the US and Israel have in mind though.

This a complete shambles.

At least with the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, 9/11 was fresh in the mind and we had near 2 years of Islamaphobia, terror threats and alerts, and concocted stories of WMD to brow-beat us into passively accepting it.

With this effort, its all over the place. One minute its to wipe out the Iranian nuclear capability which was apparently obliterated six months ago. Then its to stop an imminent threat, or an imminent threat that is 30yrs in the making if you are listening to Naziyahoo. Then its lauding the Iranian protestors while US protestors are executed in Minnesota and labelled as terrorists by high office. Then its because of Israel were going to attack anyway etc.

No-one can take a word of what the US administration and Israeli regime are saying seriously. As a combination surely no-one can argue against that the lunatics are in charge? Naziyahoo, Ben Givr, Gallant, Smotrich, Strook, Trump, Rubio, Hegseth, Lutnick, Vance, Bondi, to name a few.

A worrying development is over 200 complaints made from within the US military that commanders are telling their troops that the war is part of Gods divine plan and that Christian Evangelicalists/Zionists believe Trump has been anointed by God to bring forth The Second Coming of Christ.

As I understand, they believe the 2nd Coming will occur during times of widespread global conflict and instability.

Trump once questioned why the US with its nuclear arsenal it doesnt use them? Iran is a huge country with large desert plains and mountainous regions. It would not surprise me if a tactical nuke was used if this war starts to drag on with no end-game in mind.
 
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Sister Sara said:
A worrying development is over 200 complaints made from within the US military that commanders are telling their troops that the war is part of Gods divine plan and that Christian Evangelicalists/Zionists believe Trump has been anointed by God to bring forth The Second Coming of Christ.
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There's a book called The Darkening Age, written by Catherine Nixey who is the daughter of a former Nun and a former Benedictine Monk. It examines the destruction of the Classical World by Christianity. The echoes of that sound disturbingly familiar to what is happening now in the USA.

It is not inevitable that religion destroys science and reason, the "Golden Age" of Islam was a result of the Arab conquest of Central Asia in the 7th Century and their assimilation of the vast multicultural cities in what are now Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan which was then the centre of the world. They were, if anything, Persian in identity and part of a vast interconnected civilisation stretching from Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf. Those cities gave us the Astrolabe, Algebra (from Al-Jabr, a thesis written by al-Khwarizmi), Anthropology (attributed to the polymath al-Biruni) and a vast number of other scientific breakthroughs that we now assume to have a European origin. All that was lost after the Mongol Conquests and a crushed and broken Islam became the backward looking fundamentalist religion that suppresses free thinking and scientific enquiry, just as Christianity did and does wherever it holds a dominant position.

I have no sympathy for their leadership. They are evil people who in order to suppress the recent protests killed in one month more of their own people than the Israelis have killed in Gaza in nearly two and a half years. The problem is that this war has nothing to do with helping the people of Iran. In fact its hard to see any rational purpose for the war.

What I do know is that the destruction of Iran/Persia, after decades of vicious oppression by its fundamentalist totalitarian leadership, is a humanitarian, cultural and historical tragedy.
 
More than 36,000 killed in just two days in January.

The Guardian give the figure of in excess of 30,000.

Both of those are for the same few days. The protests continued, as did the killing.
We don't know the total but it's certainly way more than those killed in the first two days.
 
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Purple said:
More than 36,000 killed in just two days in January.

The Guardian give the figure of in excess of 30,000.

Both of those are for the same few days. The protests continued, as did the killing.
We don't know the total but it's certainly way more than those killed in the first two days.
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The real figure is in the low thousands.
The figures quoted in western media are what you get when you trade truth for institutional access.
The other day the BBC interviewed three Iranians all of who said they welcomed the bombs. They deliberately gave the impression that this was the common view on the streets when it is anything but. It's all about the framing.
 
losttheplot said:
Not a cult, totally normal. Imagine if Biden did this.
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See my post above; the imposition of religious teachings where science and reason is subordinate to the beliefs of a bronze age cult is what Gibbon wrote about when he authored The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
 
The FT is reporting that Qatar says that the war will force the complete cessation of energy exports from the Gulf within days, causing oil to go to $150 a barrel and “bring down the economies of the world”.

I'd like to thank the people in the Shannon region who opposed the construction of an LNG terminal. You and those like you have ensured that we are one of the most exposed nations in the developed world to oil and gas supply stocks.
 
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