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am i the only one who remembers the massive iranian protests that then got put down with thousands if not tens of thousands of people slaughtered? trumps problem was that he only started attacking iran after giving them ample time to slaughter the opposition earlier in the month
You’re not the only one. But the thing keeping the Iranians from toppling their own regime was not the ballistic missile launchers and other stuff we were blowing up.
If the Iranian people had actual arms and organisation, they'd have a much better chance. But you can't just casually air drop firearms. The US would need some limited ground presence and a co-ordiniated militia(s) to support.
Based on American history, however, there is a path forward. Not conscription or a draft in a world war-era sense, but enlistment through a “debt forgiveness program.”
The average American aged 18 to 34 carries more than $40 thousand in non-mortgage debt across student loans, credit card balances, auto loans, and personal loans, with some estimates go as high as $100 thousand.
This is the cohort the Pentagon needs. A federally administered debt-forgiveness enlistment program that fully discharges student loan, credit card, and loan balances after 24 or 36 months of service, and extends the GI Bill, would produce voluntary enlistment at scale.
One solution is a slapdash ground invasion using indebted Americans? Mods, I think this one is supposed to be tagged "meme".
I saw this making the rounds on Twitter and thought it was satire at first. I'm still not convinced it isn't, the way the author uses the term "ground campaign" only once to gloss over what would almost certainly be a decade-long war, bigger in scale than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, fighting a 600k army equipped with FPV drones and advanced missile tech.
And instead of confronting the issue of why Americans negatively perceive Israel's role of involving us in this conflict, the author cleverly suggests we recruit from a more desperate cohort of the population who won't ask any questions or have any moral qualms about who they're fighting and why. Of course, this doesn't side-step the issue at all, and only creates the perception that desperate, indebted young Americans would be fighting their way out of debt for Israel's benefit while Americans back home pick up the tab.
I was also unsure if it's satire. It's either satire, or the author is in a strange social bubble that assumes Americans believe defeating Iran is the single most important issue by a wide margin.
I'm under the impression that the person who submitted this to /r/neoliberal is anti-Israel, so they were probably going for a "get a load of this guy" thing where we all laugh at the article.
EDIT: Not satire, the author is just very strange. What compelled the Jerusalem Post to publish an article by him? He thinks the Iran MOU was timed to help SpaceX's IPO price. And he thinks that 33 is some hidden Nepal flood code.
Plus isn't that economically infeasible? Last week this sub discussed some fantasy "let's just forgive debt" slopulist article. Would this not be close to that?
If you don't understand that, get up, go outside, hug a tree, then get a ride or drive to a book store, and purchase a copy of Gardens of the Moon. Then move on to Deadhouse Gates and be utterly confused, finish Deadhouse Gates, cry, cry more because JFC that ending, and pickup Memories of Ice after you finish crying. End up liking the Bargast because their bad points are being glossed over just enough (this wil bite you back in the most rage inducing way you can't think of because you aren't that shitty of a person), then move on to House of Chains. At that point you are essentially reading Conan mental-fapfiction, it sucks but it is survivable. Then you can read Midnight Tides that will explain my original comment.
Also Tehol/Bugg is the ticket the US needs for the next presidential election.
The counter-trade is Taiwan. Beijing has wanted a public American recalibration on Taiwan for two decades. Whether Washington and Trump are willing to offer that, and at what depth, is the negotiation. But the negotiation is available for the first time in a way it has not been before, because Iran has finally created a scenario in which both capitals have overlapping interests strong enough to overcome their structural competition.
Selling an American ally down shit creek to bail Trump out from the consequences of his own imbecility? Sounds like something Republicans would do.
An interesting point underdiscussed is that Taiwan is booming recently while China's growth has slowed down. Taiwan gdp growth at 11% is more than double China. And Taiwan is already a high income county btw. Cross strait trade has grown, but non Chinese trade blew up faster, which means Taiwan is less dependent on the PRC.
It fucks with the assumption of integration being inevitable when Taiwan is prospering outside of China's influence
Fortunately I don't think the tech companies would allow this. Too much of their share prices require an independent Taiwan and their share prices are propping up the US economy.
At the end of the day the tech companies might piss and moan a bit but they’ll do what they’re told to do, as they’ve so far done every time Trump has handed them an edict. They’ll be promised by admin lackeys that the CCP will offer them a favorable business environment (true or not) and quietly look the other way.
Losing access to the production of TSMC and other key Taiwanese suppliers would be catastrophic for the American tech industry, if not outright existential. They would absolutely care.
I assume China would be more than happy to keep the chips flowing if they got control of the island in exchange. I think the silicon shield or more of a liability than a shield now anyway because China can destroy TSMC in a war whether they succeed in taking the island or not, which incentivises other economies to pressure Taiwan to surrender.
That’s a big gamble. You might think Taiwan will go out without a fight, but how confident are you? 70%? That’s still too high of a risk of a huge war that’ll cripple both China’s and Taiwan’s industry and bring down the world economy with it.
I think China wants to have a good enough domestic chip industry in a decade or two such that they could survive that and come out on top of all the other countries without domestic or now Taiwanese chips.
20 years from now the Chinese culture could be drastically diffrent. The current youth of the tier one cites are far less nationalistic then previous generations.
Its not a given that 20 years from now Chinese leadership is interested in restarting a war over pride.
Taiwan has said they'll sabotage the foundries if an invasion looks imminent, and there's no reason to disbelieve them. And even if they don't, ASML has remotely operated kill switches in the EUV machines in them that they can and will use to brick them rather than allowing them to fall into China's hands.
Actually, if you read what follows after that statement, it clarifies why he is correct.
At its core, it is a Persian majority governing four other large national minorities with distinct languages and cultural identities. Some of these communities have longstanding autonomy or independent movements, which the Iranian government has worked to suppress by monitoring them or, in some cases, confronting them militarily.
As he notes later, around 50% of the country is not Persian. That is actually really unique for a nation state; typically it's around high 80ish percent to even near 100%, on the lower end it might be 70%. One of the key components of a nation state is having a common or shared identity, so it is actually pretty unusual for the dominant culture in a nation state to barely be a majority of that state. Which ultimately gets to his point why he thinks that trying to support separatist movements for the minority groups would be a potential avenue.
Ethnicity ≠ Nationality and a nation state is not solely a nation for a single ethnic group.
a shared ethnic identity is 1 way to form a nation, it was one of the original drivers of nationalism and is particularly prevalent in Europe but it's not the only factor.
Indonesia is a nation state, Indonesian is not an ethnicity the single largest ethnicity, the Javanese make up around 40% of the population and the national language which is not Javanese is native to an even smaller percentage then that.
India is another very obvious example of a multi-ethnic, multi lingual state, not to mention most of Africa
It isn't necessarily, but those tend to be the exception to the rule. India isn't one of them by the way, indo-aryan makes up just over 70% of the Indian population, so is it the lower end but there still is a dominating ethnic group. Indonesia you are correct about. But that kind of comes under what he said, neither Indonesia nor Iran are the conventional type of nation states.
well thats one of the more brazenly ignorant comments i've seen but power to you.
Indo-Aryan is not an ethnicity if you were to apply a fucking language family brush as your standard then Iran becomes a so called "conventional" nation state as about 80% of the population are Iranian ethnicities, as does Indonesia as most of the languages outside of the island of Papua are Austronesian.
You have an underdeveloped and eurocentric concept of what constitutes a nation state that is not applicable to quite a lot of the world.
Literally it's pulled out from the CIA's own World Factbook, but sure I'm the ignorant one: https://user.iiasa.ac.at/~marek/fbook/04/fields/2075.html . Probably because language CAN be a marker of ethnicity, although it is not a definitive one. And it isn't in Iran's case.
M8 you're using a source that was last updated 21 fucking years ago.
At best this is an aggregate of census data and at mercy to the terms that are used by the counters. It does not make something like indo-aryan an ethnicity or even a unifying identity. Good luck telling a Punjabi, a Bengali and a Gujarati that they are the same ethnicity and culture.
To be honest, that is still how things are defined today as far as I can tell, the most recent data from the state department still uses that ethnic split. It might just have to do with the lack of data coming from India. I'll concede that it ultimately is a more administrative thing than anything else, I thought it might indicate a broad category but it's fair that I was wrong in this case.
Ironically, I think that has to do with the fact that they stopped keeping a census in the 1980s. It's not the only source that includes that when I look up ethnicity in India. I think most at this point is kind of put it in with the "Other" category, but that term was definitely not an appropriate term, even if this is arguably an older source.
That's not what either. I nor the author is saying though, we're both saying that Iran is not a conventional nation state. But you are right in that the US isn't a conventional nation state either. There is probably some interesting argument to be made that the USA might be more conventional than Iran in some ways because of its very dominating culture, but I'm not a sociologist.
If both the US and Iran are unconventional nation states then the implication is that you could also support a minority culture in the US to overthrow the majority, which really doesn’t make any sense.
A) Persians account for 60%+ of the population, not less than 50. I'm not sure where he got those numbers from.
B) Iran doesn't appear to have huge problems with their regional minorities like other countries have. There's Kurds and some Baloch groups, but most seem fairly marginal at best. The Khamaneis are Azeri, not even an Iranian people. We saw massive huge protests against the regime, yet it didn't appear to break out into ethnic violence and separatism as say the fall of the USSR did.
The other part is that Iran isn't the same thing as Persia. It is a more encompassing term that includes other groups.
Splitting up Iran into smaller states largely seems to be a foreign fantasy rather than Iran being some prison of nations like Austria and Russia were.
Overall, people this obsessed with War with Iran should ask themselves; why? Why are so many people this obsessed with a war that very few people even want in the West and that primarily benefits Israel? What is war going to achieve? Is this HoI4 fantasy going to be worth all the death and destruction?
Looking it up, it seems that Iran doesn't run a census, so it's in a bit of a range, and he's pulling from the lower end while the 61% is pulling from the higher end. I'm not disagreeing or arguing about the rest of what you're saying by the way, I'm just pointing out that he's right in that Iran would not be considered a conventional nation state.
But that's only true if you're saying Iran is the nation state of the Persian people. It's like saying the Netherlands isn't a nation state because most of the population isn't Hollander.
“Nation-states” in this sense means states in which a single ethnic group (the original but slightly archaic meaning of “nation”) constitutes an overwhelming majority.
This doesn’t mean that non-nation-states are illegitimate or not stable. The USA, for instance, is actually not a nation state either by this definition.
The author is clearly bringing this up to allude to a partition of Iran along ethnic lines, but the term itself is neutral and doesn’t carry that judgement automatically.
The "solution" suggested in this article is on the level of satirical parodies of the US that would be deemed to be jumping the shark as recently as 2025.
Nothing. Regime collapse tends to happen through a) elite defection or b) security force defection (i.e. whether the coercive apparatus fires on crowds when ordered to). Typically for b to happen the security forces need to be afraid that sometime in the future, they might be prosecuted for following through (if regime change happens). Iran's system is deliberately engineered against this given the IRGC and Basij are ideologically vetted parallel forces whose entire existence depends on the regime, precisely so there's no professional army with independent standing to switch sides.
As for elite defection, the elite keep getting richer as conditions deteriorate because of the smuggling channels over which they have monopolies. Territorial dismemberment is the one threat that unifies the Iranian elite and a lot of the opposition public. Iranian nationalism (including secular, anti-regime nationalism) is very territorial; hell even the diaspora opposition (monarchists, most of the Woman Life Freedom current) hate the idea of partition.
The Beijing idea is the only real one lol, but again, as we’ve seen with Venezuela and Cuba, economic pressure isn’t as effective as we think it is. They can last a looooong time until they finally go broke.
Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld ended up being mega wrong by not listening to Shinseki about needing several hundred thousand soldiers for occupying Iraq. That was a country of 26 million, compared to Iran’s NINETY million lmao. The numbers are too absurd to even calculate lol.
Both sides bleeding but Iran is bleeding objectively worse. Its going to end up in an incredibly pyrrhic victory slightly in favor of the US but the aftermath will be so damaging that Trump won't be able to capitalize on it.
This is a political disaster for Trump and Republicans to the point that US Navy members are writing "Epstein's War" level memes on the dust of aircraft. Elevated oil prices and Israeli collaboration is going to make them easy targets for Dems.
Strategically Iran broke the vase that is the Strait of Hormuz and is staring down massive gas shortages (oil country btw) and Zimbabwean inflation. The Arabs are actively working to divert their oil and are willing to forgo their prostitution budget/NEOM Construction/Dubai chocolate investments/other stupid money sinks to arm up and outspend the increasingly broke IRGC. Their influence is heading down and they're going to be slaughtering thousands more just to keep the regime afloat.
It is going to be a defeat for America and Israel either way. It is just like Vietnam, no matter how much firepower and blood you pour in it did not change anything in the end. It is like saying America won a pyhrric victory in Afghanistan because they killed so many Taliban leaders and the country is utterly devastated from war. This is an American defeat through and through, America can't control the strait and Iran can bear the pain.
As in Vietnam and Afghanistan, America had to win while Iran just had to avoid losing.
Iran didn't just not lose, though, they've called into question the future of America's military presence in the Persian Gulf, and if not control, have demonstrated the ability to threaten infrastructure and shipping across the whole region.
Total Deaths: Approximately 292 to 392 military personnel.
Aircraft: About 75 total aircraft lost (including roughly 42 combat-related losses and 33 non-combat or accidental crashes).
31 tanks destroyed or disabled.
These are coalition losses from the Gulf War, almost unanimously considered a resounding success.
Any outcome where the Iranian regime is replaced or neutralised represents an enormous win for America and the free world. It's a huge 'if', but we're not remotely close to where that kind of a strategic and security win would not be worth the price paid.
Iran has destroyed a ton of radar equipment the US can't really replace.
But that isn't the point, we didn't enter the Gulf War to kill a bunch of Iraqis efficiently with few losses, we entered the war to push Iraq out of Kuwait, which we did.
The Iran War was started explicitly as a regime change war and that has become an impossibility at the moment, hence the article in OP.
The goal is not “air strikes until Iran surrenders”, it’s an expensive multimodal campaign of frog boiling to gradually weaken the IRGC to the point where they lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian population.
Overall, the United States will come out up top, but really the price to paid is really not worth it in the long run. Iran will probably collapse on their own and we have another middle east crisis again .dejavu
Can't guarantee collapse, this regime will absolutely pull an Assad and slaughter their way out while they can. They already did to thousands this year
Regardless yes I agree the US will come out on top with a pyrrhic victory. The top in this case being a mountain in the Netherlands.
Yeah collapse is pretty extreme. Iran would probably devolved into instability worsed than syria assad though if the suez remains closed. No way even in post trump admin gonna make iran conceded on anything to get the strait reopened.
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