I’m not too sure about that. What more than makes up for those things is that Iran is now more pissed off than they were before. In other words, their increased willingness to start shit / continue to do shit more than makes up for their reduced ability to actually do said shit on the battlefield. Think of it like a hornets nest. A stirred up, angry hornets nest with only 100 hornets is more dangerous than a calm hornets nest with 120 hornets.
I dislike analogies for the simple reason that they are often too simple.
Do you live with an undisturbed hornets nest, letting it grow despite knowing it is a threat, in hopes you won’t accidentally disturb it when it’s got 500 hornets?
Yes. And if the smaller bully ends up beating the bigger bully, and making him look like a total loser… can’t help feeling like the little guy deserves a bit of a pat on the back. Even if he’s an asshole too.
I think it’s likely Iran comes out of this with new streams of money: unfrozen assets, reduced sanctions, and/or Hormuz tolls.
The modern US military is quite good at destroying another nation’s official military materiel. What it can’t do is conquer a territory and hold it. The US destroyed half of Iran’s navy in a day in 1988 under operation praying mantis. In Iraq the US destroyed most of the official Iraqi military in a few days/weeks in both 1991 and 2003.
But actually occupying a nation is different. We suck at that, pretty much any nation is terrible at that since WW2.
Ideally the US, Israel and Arab world will do more to strike IRGC targets and arm the public so they can rebel against the hardliners in charge. Roughly 80-85% of the Iranian people do not support the government there.
Right. At least we were. What I’m wondering is if that has changed. Has Trump messed up the US military so much that they are no longer good at destroying another nation’s official military material, at least if we’re talking about Iran? Is it possible that Trump has messed things up so much (by firing competent generals, wasting ammunition that is limited, etc.) that even the initial invasion would be nowhere near as easy as the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions of the early 2000s? I think there’s a good possibility that we may have reached that point.
Until I have a better solution than listening to my idiot cousin Eddie’s advice of poking it with a stick in the hopes they’ll choose a more docile queen amenable to my wants and needs, yes. I’ve got no love for Iran but that doesn’t mean I think this, war, conflict, or whatever the administration is calling it, is a good idea.
I’m not an expert, but I would assume not. In part because a lot of the ammunition we are running out of is defensive weaponry, not offensive. We’re running out of defensive systems designed to shoot down missiles, but we likely still have a lot of offensive weapons.
Also the situation in Iran is complex in the sense that the official military (the Artesh) is not the same as the IRGC. The IRGC is made up of ideological hardliners who support the regime. The Artesh is made up of conscripts who generally do not like the regime and supposedly there are situations where the Artesh refuses to support the IRGC, or help the IRGC suppress the public.
That article discusses how the Iranian people feel let down that the Artesh didn’t protect them from the IRGC. But the point is that, the Artesh is at worst, neutral. They’re not a threat so targeting their military hardware would just incite them to fight back.
So in a war the US would need to distinguish between the IRGC and official military
What are their opinions on Iranian strikes on Israel? Are they in favor?
So being weaker makes the little bully morally superior to the big bully? There’s an inverse relationship between strength and morality?
Being weaker makes you more sympathetic. IMO the Trump administration and Iranian regime are close to add bad as it gets in morality, and I don’t think I could say with any certainty which one is worse (Trump’s has caused hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of deaths, Iran’s has caused a fraction of that… and for the record, I’d put the current Israeli government up there with both). Based on its power, Trump’s America is doing far more harm to the world than either Iran or Israel IMO.
Not in Iran in 2026.
Many of the news articles I read are from back in the spring, but assert that Iran’s navy and army are 50-66% intact and troops mostly unaffected. Their ballistic missile production has started up again and replenishing what they’ve spent.
This isn’t due to a failure of the US administration’s prosecution of the war; it’s a reflection on what the US is (thankfully) unwilling to do.
Unfortunately it came with the demonstration that most US military bases in the region are not far enough from Iran and thus are not only an asset, but a liability to the host states.
Where the US administration failed is not in the planning and prosecution, but in choosing to fight the war at all (presumably against internal recommendations).
It’s more complicated for the Arab world.
Before the war, Iran had positive relationships with a good chunk of this world. Not just Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq; but also Qatar, Oman, Egypt, and even UAE (despite fighting a proxy war in Yemen). Iran cooperates with Pakistan along their shared border despite Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia having a joint defense agreement.
I’ve only done a little reading, but enough to see that there is a web of complexity – not just in the Middle East, but also including North and East Africa. The regional powers are simultaneously competing, cooperating, and fighting each other. The US can’t just ignite a war and expect the other states to join in.
Yeah but the IRGC and Artesh are not the same thing. The US and Israel are probably attempting to avoid hitting the Artesh and their military, while targeting the IRGC military.
Artesh aside, are you asserting that the US has destroyed the IRGC navy, air force, missiles, and troops ala the Iraq invasion?
If that was the case, the US would have control of the strait and would have moved back into position at its gulf bases.
There was a reason the US never moved into Iran before; it’s because we cannot succeed with what we are (again thankfully) willing to commit.
I think the idea that the Artesh would actually be a neutral party is laughable. So if the Kurds or someone were actually trying to depose the current government in Iran and take out the revolutionary guards the Artesh would literally stand aside and wait out that conflict?
The only believable hypothesis is that if and when a revolution actually does come the Artesh will defect to them but they’re waiting for that to happen to avoid the appearance that they’re a military junta and/or foreign collaborators.
At any rate, under the current trajectory, the outcome that the US et al are hoping for is that the blockade deprives the regime of rresources until it’s unable to maintain power. This is a blunt instrument - at the end the revolutionary guard and all other armed factions will be deprived equally. I’m struggling to understand the desired outcome where the shooting war spared one military branch, but having apparently failed to sufficiently degrade the elements that kept the regime in power we’re now hoping to starve them all equally. Either the Artesh are beneficial to the goals of this war or they aren’t.
IMO, no, even if you postulate that America is the bad guys, that does not make Iran the good guys or in any way sympathetic.
At the same time, one’s sympathies should go to the innocent civilian victims of wars. Relatively few are complicit in political machinations, but everybody gets screwed over.
I think that Iran did receive some measure of sympathy as a result of being attacked by a country that was, at the time, ostensibly negotiating peace.
Can we parse this out?
“that does not make Iran the good guys”: agreed.
" or in any way sympathetic": how does that follow? Having no sympathy for them seems to be some sort of black-and-white thinking, where they must be good in order to merit sympathy. A wrong done to a baddie is still a wrong, and the victim of the wrong still derserves sympathy.
Put another way, if someone murders your local high school fentanyl dealer, you might get some sort of satisfaction on one level, but it’s still wrong, and you can feel sympathy for the murder victim even if you also think he was heading for a bad end anyway and probably deserved one.
That is true. Also, without focusing on feelings like sympathy, one may not agree with the regime or even view them as legitimate, but, nevertheless, they are the ones one must negotiate with because they are in control of the country. It appears that that is what all the regional countries are doing. (Not sure about Israel, but they have not been trading missile barrages for a bit so there appears to be some sort of understanding even there, even if no peace deal.)