The Quds force is a terrorist organization, not a foreign government.
Forgot to mention how important of a point this is and how emphatically the US Navy will act to keep this very important shipping lane open. It’s the black goop, stupid.
The Quds Force is a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, itself a unit of the Iranian Armed Forces. Yes, it is designated a terrorist organization, but one that is officially and operationally part of a foreign government, in the same way that for example Kidon is a unit of Mossad within the Israeli government, or Seal Team 6 is part of the US government.
They’re more full of expendable men.
It is very likely that if Iran decides to respond in a very aggressive way, it will mostly come in the form of terrorist attacks and other asymmetrical forms of warfare like cyber-warfare. Iran needs its military too much to throw it into an American meat grinder.
Mining the Strait of Hormuz, using their subs to blockade the strait, terror attacks on Americans, attacks on Israel, forcing Iraq to eject the U.S. military, attacking Americans throughout the ME to make it hard for Americans to work there…that’s the kind of stuff we should expect in response.
Good. I am certain our troops don’t want to be in that hellish environment, and their presence isn’t really required anymore.
This to me is a very important crux to the matter. Why are we messing around in this part of the world anyway, again? Oh yeah…black goop.
Since I no longer have the awesome power of issuing bets, I will offer a guarantee: There is literally NO WAY that the US will allow ANYONE to shut that strait down. It’d be the foundation of WWIII. That Navy I mentioned comes into play, not to mention the interests of other nations waiting for the same black goop. Iran risks actual utter destruction pursuing this line of reasoning.
You’re right that engaging Iran’s conventional forces gets us nowhere which is why we probably aren’t going to do it. War takes many forms, and while war with Iran is possible, as in overt war rather than the last 40 years of covert war, it’s going to look an awful lot like the covert war, except no one will bother denying what’s going on. They’ll kill some of ours, we’ll kill a lot of theirs and it will all be fought anywhere but in Iran or the US. If Iran decides to take the battle to US soil, that’s where things get crazy.
Iran was willing to pause their nuclear program. They have never expressed even the slightest willingness to stop waging war all over the world. It’s basically their whole reason for existing.
All that is possible, and all that will involve Iran paying a higher price than we do. We’ve been letting them get away with this nonsense for too long. If this isn’t a turning point then it wasn’t worth doing.
It’s also possible that Iran now gets the message and will behave better. At least until we elect a new President, in which case they’ll see how far they can get with him or her.
We’ve already told the mullahs that our goal is to destroy them. How much higher a price will they have to pay?
When you back somebody into a corner, you have to expect they will come out swinging. The US thinks we’re in this for cheap oil and national prestige; the mullahs think they are in this for their very existence.
Oh, like bombing Pearl Harbor was Imperial Japan’s show of force to discourage the Americans from getting involved in WWII? How did that work out?
The “message” Iran got from this is that the US now feels it is OK to assassinate whomever they don’t like, wherever they may be. That is not going to lead to submission, quite the contrary. It would not surprise me if the Iranians now start conducting their own targeted assassinations.
As already stated - the US is in this for oil, the Iranians are in it for their very existence. Who is more motivated?
I get the impression your definition of “behave better” is “Middle Eastern nations let the world powers run roughshod over them, giving no resistance to others exploiting them”. We wouldn’t stand for that, why would they?
That’s not true, and it has nothing to do with Iran. No government in the world wants any country other than their own (if that) to have nuclear weapons. You think that if, say, the Netherlands wanted a nuclear program, the rest of the world wouldn’t try to get them to stop? If the United States could, it would prevent *anyone *from having nukes, including its allies; Russia, China, UK, Israel et al would do the same. It’s just common sense.
If the Iranians truly think the message is that we are going to take them out, then they’ll be making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Personally though, I think they have more sense than that.
Honestly, I’m at a loss as to why any SDMB board members would think we’re out to eliminate the mullahs. We might get to that point, but do you two honestly believe that US policy?
The United States* has a policy*?
It’s amazing to me that this kind of neocon thinking isn’t totally extinct. It’s nuts to think this could possibly improve things. Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bolton were and still are wrong.
This is the sort of right-wing blindness and stupidity that drives me nuts.
No, we didn’t make a deal with Iran that requires them to stop being a bad actor across the Middle East. That deal wasn’t going to happen.
What the last sane President and his Administration rightly figured was that if Iran was going to continue to be a bad actor, it was far better for it to be a bad actor without nukes than a bad actor with nukes.
So we negotiated the JCPOA, Iran stopped working towards having nuclear weapons (a fact which the JCPOA allowed us to routinely verify), and otherwise continued to be a bad actor in the Middle East.
The Nutcase Party, aka the GOP, crapped all over this deal because it didn’t keep Iran from being a bad actor. So their Nutcase President pulled us out of the deal, and now Iran’s out of the deal too. So now they’re a bad actor that’s back on the road to having nuclear weapons. Winning!
The GOP apparently believes that merely by being sufficiently macho and threatening towards Iran, we should be able to make it stop doing anything we don’t like.
Oddly enough, this is a repeat of our relationship with North Korea under a previous sequence of Dem/GOP Administrations.
NK was on the road to nukes, but Clinton negotiated the Agreed Framework with them, and they ceased their nuclear weapons development. Then Bush and his crew came into power, and they decided that the Agreed Framework constituted appeasement (IIRC, it included food aid to NK), so they pulled us out of it. Again, the idea was that we were big and powerful, they weren’t, and we should be able to dictate terms to them. NK had nukes before Bush left office.
How anyone can believe that the GOP is the stronger party with respect to issues of defense and national security is beyond me. That may have been true 25 years ago, but a lot has happened since then to demonstrate that this is no longer the case. Yet the notion persists, which boggles my mind.
Not sure what you’re arguing here. That we SHOULD just have a Cold War with a vastly inferior power? Or not fight back at all against their proxies killing our citizens?