Uh… I have absolutely no idea. This feels like unprovoked terrorism on our part, to me. I would love to hear a more optimistic spin.
Unlike the other two, Trump (and his supporters) has been making noises about deserving a third term.
Good thing we’ve got an agreement with Iran where they’ve agreed to not develop nuclear weapons.
Oh wait. :smack:
Israel is in Iranian missile range, so obviously, the US has a lot more to lose. Makes sense.
They will think twice – about how to better defend themselves against these kinds of attacks and they will also think twice about the appropriate form of escalation.
What Trump’s administration is trying to do is to send the message to Iran’s leadership that they are doomed to succumb to America’s economic and military warfare, and that their only option is to accept American demands unconditionally. That is not the world in which Iran intends to live.
Sure, America could fuck Iran right up, but as with Iran, I can almost guarantee that we’re not prepared for the aftermath.
One of the many reasons it was extremely stupid for the U.S. to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. Despite the Shi’ite majority, Iraq under Saddam (who was Sunni) was the military counterweight to Iran in the region. Taking out Saddam and leaving a weakened, divided, Shi’ite-dominated Iraq in the place of his regime has left Iran with little regional opposition that matters, as Iraq is largely allied with Iran now. (Yes, there is Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis strongly prefer to have someone else do their fighting.)
And Lord help us if Trump and his loony-tunes henchmen get us into a war against Iran. We couldn’t control Iraq after Saddam, and Iran is much larger than Iraq and has three times the population. Needless to say, if anyone thinks Trump & Co. have any idea what they’re doing here, I want some of what they’re smoking.
Remember when the Republicans were the ‘daddy party,’ mostly because they were the party that supposedly knew what they were doing with respect to defense and national security? Buaha…never mind, it isn’t funny in the least. 
Yeah, from the Irianian perspective, this is sort of like if our CIA Director was killed while visiting Ottawa. This is a really big deal.
Though, I wonder if the Iranian response is going to be better thought out than this was: they may try to strike back in ways less attributable to them than issuing a press release about who they just killed.
I would also be surprised if Iraq didn’t kick out all US troops in the next few days.
Reckless and dangerous, entirely avoidable. Iran was abiding by the nuclear treaty, but Donald could not bear the notion of honoring a treaty crafted by a black guy, so he tore it up. Now a full scale shooting war seems certain. If you think this will be easy, I think you’ll be disappointed. The Iranian military is not to be trifled with, even by the US. Who knows what the Syrians or Russians will do?
So the knucklehead starts a war without notifying Congress, with the exception of Lindsey Graham, whose response was to immediately begin verbal fellation of the Donald.
This will not end well. Remember those gains on your 401 k in 2019? I think they’ll be gone in 2 weeks. Deficit? How about $3 Trillion.
Freedonia’s Going To War - just because.
You can be sure that Soleimani has been tracked by the US for years. Wonder why they terminated him now.
It’s so fucking transparent - it’s wag the dog time.
(BTW, to those who may spout the party line that Iran/Solemani was about to kill Americans and needed pre-emptive incineration, what do you think about those Iraqi WMD. Got to hand it to them. Very well hidden.)
ETA: A perfect time for Kim Jong Un to do something provocative.
Hey, leave My hometown out of this!
I think they will take the macho alternative of getting even.
This is absolute bullshit.
You can be sure Soleimani has been tracked for years. Why take him out now? Do you really think that the straw that broke Trump’s back was what happened at the embassy? And, please, don’t tell me it was done to pre-emptively prevent “attacks on US personnel”. Sounds too much like “Iraq possesses WMD and we need to find them and destroy them. Now.”
As I said in the other thread, this is wag the dog time. A long-predicted distraction as both impeachment and the election loom.
I read these words, but in my head I hear these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=452XjnaHr1A
I’d be inclined to enlighten you on the mistaken notion that current international conflicts are somehow the result of poorly-drawn borders created by outsiders when they withdrew whatever control they had. This has been used as an excuse for miserable outcomes for every part of the world that was ever controlled by an outside entity during the last couple hundred years.
That’s a very naive view of history, in my opinion. It’s a cheap and easy way to fix blame elsewhere and create victims, as if the conflict(s) and shitty current situation(s) would not exist were it not for interference from outsiders.
If it were the case that externally-drawn borders were crummy, then the peoples within those borders could fix them.
It’s not about macho – that’s the wrong way to view Iran’s position. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Iran believes the United States and its more bootlicking allies are an existential threat to its regime.
If we want to understand the behavior of “crazy” and “macho” testosterone-fueled regimes like Iran and North Korea…we need to understand how they view the outside world working against them. That doesn’t mean we need to sympathize with their world view, but we need to have the ability to understand it – seeing the world from their eyes will lead to more rational decision making on our part instead of this “Fuck you, America’s the leader of the free world and if you don’t do as we tell you, we’ll we’ve got the most powerful military and economic machine in the world to make you comply – but yah, like, freedom and stuff, too.”
Iran has been preparing for war with the United States for 40 something years. Obama, with the coordination of Russia, Europe, and other allies actually got Iran to deescalate, and it’s because the framework represented both a pause and an avenue for a face-saving way out for all parties involved. Ever since Trump decided to tear up that framework simply because it had Obama’s fingerprints on it, Iran has felt an economic noose tighten around its neck.
“Well why don’t they negotiate and spare themselves a war then?”
Right, uh huh. Everything on America’s terms, with no guarantees about the survival of the current Iranian regime and not even ruling out the possibility of a war later that eventually fractures Iran itself. What we’re asking Iran to do, after having watched what happen to their neighbor in Iraq, is to just trust us.
Right. Sure. Okay. Glad we cleared that up.
Iran and North Korea are not mad. They’re not macho. They’ve made the same calculated, rational decision that they are not going to go down without a fight. They are not going to just let America sit back in the pocket and pass all over the field at will. They’re going to blitz once in a while. They’re going to scrap. They’re going to do everything they can to preserve their own survival.
Would somebody kindly break down for me how panicked I should be on a scale of 1–10? I sort of feel like this is a 4, but that may be just because there’s been rather a lot of inflation during the Trump era and I’m getting inured to the news. I know next to nothing about US-Iran issues, or Persian politics, other than that there has been tension for a while, and I don’t feel I can calibrate this.
Hail, hail Fredonia! 
I thought rbroome was being ironic: of the two countries, the U.S. has more to lose… so of course Trump went ahead and did it, because Trump is a moron.
Iraq is owned by the US… There is no sovereignty. We went from regime change, to region change. Hell, Wesley Clark mentioned every country we’d be invading over a decade before we did, and it’s on YouTube - media won’t mention it of course, because their paycheck depends on this warfare state.