SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @ SeventyTwoTrillion @hexbear.net

"Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be

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You really don't want your president to be saying that he has no idea what's going on, generally not a good sign

However, provided that the Israeli regime stops its illegal aggression against the Iranian people no later than 4 am Tehran time, we have no intention to continue our response afterwards.

What the fuck is wrong with Iranian politicians? Why would the time at which the attack stops matter more to the response than the casualties and damage you endured during that attack?

You should be in prison for saying this. Purged. Gone.

Let's assume Trump is totally making shit up and trying to will a ceasefire into reality purely based on the power of his own words and it fails - what does that imply? That if Iran is seen "breaking" this totally invented ceasefire that something will happen? Will that "something* be some big escalation, like Israel assassinating Khamenei or something? Will it be the US announcing that they have to step back in again? That this comes right after Al Udeid is suspicious.

If true then Hamas and Ansarallah are shackled to a corpse

If true, then Iran is genuinely fucking insane. I said a week or so ago that I was becoming a China sceptic, and now I'm slingshotting the other direction. Sorry for doubting you President Xi, I can see why you aren't doing much to help a government that changes its entire foreign policy every two weeks.

I'm not gonna toot my own horn and be like "I saw this coming!" (especially because I'll look stupid if a ceasefire doesn't happen or it doesn't last and then Israel and Iran go back to war with each other) but I'll admit that I have had Bad Vibes™ ever since I saw the Iranian statements on the attack on Al Udeid and realized that had the exact same wording as their statements on Israel, y'know, along the lines of "We will severely punish the aggressors, they will regret ever touching us, there will be no aggression on us, we will re-establish deterrence," and I knew that that attack was just kayfabe, I was like, oh god. This is just corporate statement wording but with Iranian military statements.

An Iranian general probably gets insulted by somebody at a cafe or something and then they go "You shall never know peace on this earth, I will begin Operation Unending Justice to crush you and your collaborators, this is a duel to the death..." and then the guy says "Woah, sorry dude," and then the general goes "Ah sure, I forgive you," and then leaves.

I am anxiously waiting and hoping that Iran isn't going to do something incredibly idiotic, but after the last two years I can't instantly dismiss them committing some great error that gets a lot of people killed for no real reason.

if the US doesn't attack Iran after this AND Iran doesn't just immediately sign a ceasefire with Israel and commits to a war of attrition and pressure that forces Israel to stop the genocide, then this was a great strategic play by Iran

if the US does attack Iran after this then Iran has been pretty much objectively outplayed

if Iran decides to make peace with Israel after this then I suppose we'll be waiting for the war to resume in 10-20 years with a few million dead Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians and just hope that China is an unstoppable juggernaut by then and/or Iran has better leadership with fewer comprador moderates

I feel like the last couple weeks have been the exact opposite of this strategy, which is interesting.

The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal."

There was no good deal offered by the US and Israel - Iran merely wanted enrichment for civilian uses, as Iran is a big producer of radiopharmaceuticals and wants nuclear energy. 0% enrichment was untenable.

it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be.

This was inverted by Israel launching an entirely unprovoked attack on Iran during a negotiation period, and every Iranian attack has been in response to an Israeli or US attack. There has been no aggression by Iran.

All this is an environment of watching a genocide committed by Israel is also a massive factor.

honestly the best case scenario for Iran

act like you're totally owned whenever the US strikes an empty site, let Trump go "Nobody can do it better than us! Our bombers, our missiles, our beautiful submarines - they just keep winning! Everybody can see it! Sleepy Biden wouldn't do it, Harris wouldn't do it, only a BRAVE and SMART president like me can do it! IRAN MUST SURRENDER!"

and every day take out some sensitive site in Israel or knock out a power plant

This is basically what I expected given that the base had been evacuated of aircraft days ago.

This sort of "relationship" between the US and Iran is very odd honestly, off the top of my head I can't think of any other two opposing countries that allow each other to conduct largely symbolic strikes with advance warning on each other. The closest situation that comes to mind is India vs China on the border, but that's just because they're both not really using weapons so it doesn't escalate very far.

My version has Chapter 17: Epilogue (2021): The Ending of Super Imperialism

at this point it's a humiliation fetish

all politics is sexual pathology after all

Imperialism Reading Group Ping!

We are at the end of Superimperialism! Here's a few weeks to catch up, rest, and recharge.

@RedDawn@hexbear.net @Cowbee@hexbear.net @kittin@hexbear.net @Sebrof@hexbear.net @TrippyFocus@lemmy.ml @OrionsMask@hexbear.net @0__0@hexbear.net @SummerIsTooWarm@hexbear.net @mbt2402@hexbear.net @BanjoBolshevik@hexbear.net @BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net @NinjaGinga@hexbear.net @Test_Tickles@hexbear.net @luddybuddy@hexbear.net @Coca_Cola_but_Commie@hexbear.net @niph@hexbear.net @redline@lemmygrad.ml @glimmer_twin@hexbear.net @MF_COOM@hexbear.net @MiraculousMM@hexbear.net @StarkWolf@hexbear.net @StillNoLeftLeft@hexbear.net @BGDelirium@hexbear.net @THEPH0NECOMPANY@hexbear.net @devils_dust@hexbear.net @Ehrmantrout@hexbear.net @quarrk@hexbear.net @RaisedFistJoker@hexbear.net @Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net @darkmode@hexbear.net @PaulSmackage@hexbear.net @FunkyStuff@hexbear.net @IceWallowCum@hexbear.net @Babs@hexbear.net @PerryGirl@hexbear.net @Rojo27@hexbear.net @OgdenTO@hexbear.net @iie@hexbear.net @Wertheimer@hexbear.net @Blobber@hexbear.net @MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net @XxFemboy_Stalin_420_69xX@chapo.chat

To start us off, Simplicius.

Now, there's a somewhat common trope, particularly among pro-Russia and pro-Resistance commentators, of the "allowed strike"; that is, a military strike that both sides know is about to happen and mutually agree to happening for some reason (usually to save face or allow some diplomatic objective). Unfortunately for somebody like me, who thinks conspiracies along these lines are a form of cope and are usually conveniently unable to be disproved because neither side will admit to it, there are actually recent confirmed cases of this happening, like an Iranian strike on a US facility after they assassinated Soleimani that allowed Iran to save face, or a 2017 Tomahawk strike on the Syrian Shayrat base that just so happened to miss all the important targets and deal little damage.

You know where I'm going with this - Simplicius posits that the Fordow strike was allowed to occur by the Iranians in order to provide Trump with a way to appease neoconservatives but also exit from a budding forever war. I personally don't think this is the case, but I can't say it's certainly untrue (again, because they do actually sometimes happen). The evidence he suggests:

• Some sources say that Trump informed Iran that he was about to strike Fordow and that the strikes are intended as a "one-off"
• Iran didn't even attempt to engage with the B2 force. It's not even as if they tried to hit it and missed, even the US doesn't say that they bravely battled Iranian fighter jets to reach Fordow - Iran did not do anything at all despite having time to prepare and knowing what the US would strike a week in advance. Yemen, with much, much less air defense than Iran even in its current state, posed a more significant threat to B2 bombing raids than Iran did during this bombing raid. There is still basically no evidence that Israel is able to fly directly over Iranian territory due to Iranian air defense, and yet the US could reach central Iran entirely unmolested.
• It was a relatively small strike, not consisting of enough bunker busters to be sure to destroy the facility.
• Images of the holes left over show that the bunker busters were not stacked up, which many experts expected would have to be the case to breach the facility - essentially a daisy-chain of destruction down to Fordow.
• In the days prior, Iran used a bunch of flatbed trucks to seemingly stack dirt into the entrance tunnels, presumably to provide a degree of reinforcement to stop them caving in if they were struck. This feels a little strange to do in any case, but protecting the entrances to a facility that they claim is evacuated and that the US is claiming they will soon obliterate is weird; why would you need to re-enter it if there's nothing left?

Again, I disagree with the above. I think it's more likely that the US did actually try and destroy Fordow but simply failed, which could have been for a number of reasons, including that they didn't put much real effort into it because they were perhaps aware that Iran had already evacuated the facility of anything important. There are a limited number of these massive bunker busters, after all. No point wasting a dozen of them on empty facilities.

But anyway, regardless of what happened at Fordow, there's not a lot else to report. The same attritional dynamics are at play here and the ball is in Iran's court, so we'll have to see what they do; perhaps they are waiting for the Iranian visit to Moscow to conclude before making any significant moves.

Next thread here!

I'm not saying you don't bring up an interesting point, I'm just imagining the mental image of Iranian (or even Chinese) senior officials watching the Americans use refueling tankers to extend the range of bombing strikes and going "Fuck. Our plans devised over the years didn't consider that they'd use this military technology that we've known about for ages. Absolute trump card. What the fuck do we do now?"

I don't wanna do another "covfefe" thing but it's clear just how rapidly he's mentally declining. Not even just his posts necessarily, he's always made weird comments, but the images and videos too. He's aged a year in a week and it's only gonna get worse

It’s unlikely the fatwa will be publicly lifted until the nuke is ready

Absolutely. The nanosecond that fatwa is rescinded, we're gonna get a dozen articles in the mainstream media like "The Misleading Narrative That Hiroshima and Nagasaki Were Bad" and "The Case For Nuking Population Centers" as they build up consent for Israel to drop a dozen nukes on Iran

There's been a lot of phrases that I've seen over the last week that are just gonna hit so hard in the future book on this conflict. I can just imagine the words on the page:

"While America's initial attempt to destroy the Iranian nuclear program met with failure after dropping six GBU-57s on the already-evacuated Fordow facility, the Nimitz was concurrently expedited to the Middle East in preparation for the war to come. It was due to be decommissioned only a year after the conflict began. It would face its end much sooner."

and

"American media was initially jubilant, hardly waiting for the news from the Fordow facility to proclaim its demise. Bret Stephens of the New York Times wrote "Iran’s hopes of acquiring a nuclear weapon have probably been seriously degraded." These reports were, of course, false. If anything, such a strike galvanized the Iranian leadership towards accelerating towards its first nuclear test on [date], and..."

it's very funny how a few hours after it was hit, the media was unanimously like "Fordow has been obliterated. Annihilated. Wiped off the map. A curse will befall anybody who comes within a mile of it, the destruction is so great. We have salted the earth. The entire Iranian nuclear program was localized entirely inside Fordow and also all their nuclear scientists. Now every single one is dead." and now it's just like "yeah okay nvm turns out we can't destroy it, ah well, ggwp"