Iran Catch-All | IRAN WAR

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finesse said:
Since Vietnam, it's mostly been a Republican thing and mostly been ill advised or badly mismanaged.
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Mostly. Democrats were mostly smart enough to keep it an air war but they got us into some conflicts. And Obama wasn't able to get us out of Afghanistan knowing full well how useless the effort was.

Agreed. Give me the Democrat record post Vietnam versus the Republican record.
 
CNN --

Multiple nations have been passing messages between the United States and Iran over the last several days in an attempt to de-escalate the mounting tensions around energy sites and power plants, people familiar with the discussions said.

Turkey and Egypt have both conveyed messages as part of the effort, the people said. President Donald Trump’s foreign envoy Steve Witkoff, meanwhile, has heard from several officials in the region warning that Trump’s threat to target Iranian power plants would cause massive retaliation, including on American allies in the Gulf.

Regional officials have also been in contact with Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi.

Despite the flurry of communication, it wasn’t clear how far along the sides were in discussing how to reach a “complete and total resolution” to the war, as Trump put it in his Truth Social post Monday.

And Iran has denied any communication with the US, either direct or indirect.

Trump told Fox Business, meanwhile, that the latest talks with Iran occurred Sunday night with US envoys Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

__________________________________________________

In other words, nobody knows what the hell is happening, but Trump is almost certainly lying.
 
Ddseddse said:
No. Critical point to make here.

If by "we" you mean the the people who knew what they were talking about (e.g. career officials at the Department of Defense and Department of State, ect.), then they knew exactly how complicated this was going to be and how much damage Iran could do.

There's a reason that over the last 20 years whenever you had cable news on and they had an actual credible analyst on in the talking head slot you heard "Iran is not Iraq, they have a lot more capabilities and a lot more options, a US war with Iran would be a terrible idea" as the single consistent refrain.

The long and the short of it is none of us are sitting the Iran desk at State. We sinply do not have the time to be experts in Iranian warfighting and strategic capabilites (along with being vaccine experts, constutiuonal scholars, and literally every other specialized knowedge profession covering the entire sum of human knowedge).

The single most importnat survival skill in our modern world is for all of us to put aside our pride and admit "I don't have a fucking clue what I'm talking about here", and then add "But there are people who do this for a living, I should listen to the consensus of those people (and not cherry pick the onles I'm predisposed to agree with) and I'm going to butt out and let them do thier fucking jobs".

Listen. I HAD NO IDEA WHY ATTACKING IRAN WAS A BAD IDEA. But citically importantly, I DIDN'T NEED TO! I've been convinced that attacking Iran was a bad idea for 20 years.All without knowing any more than "The poeple who know what they are taking about say it's a terrible idea." OK, great, good enough for me, we shouldn't attack Iran. The people who knew what they were talking about were telling me it was a bad Idea. I didn't need the details.

If we want to survive the next 50 years. Were all going to need to relearn how to trust the experts and all stop pretending to be experts ourselves.
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I agree completely, and by "we" I certainly did not mean the people you are talking about. I should have phrased it differently, but by "we" I meant the non-experts who are actually calling the shots and running this administration - the Trumps, Hegseths, Patels, etc. I made another post shortly after this one in which I specifically mention that fact. I couldn't agree more that we need to trust and rely on the experts and not on the kinds of people running this administration - reality show stars, Fox News blowhards with no administrative experience, conspiracy quacks and loons, etc. In one sense the whole MAGA phenomenon is a large-scale revolt against expertise and experts and the professional classes. So by "we" I definitely did not mean the people you are referring to. To the contrary, I completely agree that I would much rather trust a professional than the kinds of people running this shitshow that we have now.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
I agree completely, and by "we" I certainly did not mean the people you are talking about. I should have phrased it differently, but by "we" I meant the non-experts who are actually calling the shots and running this administration - the Trumps, Hegseths, Patels, etc. I made another post shortly after this one in which I specifically mention that fact. I couldn't agree more that we need to trust and rely on the experts and not on the kinds of people running this administration - reality show stars, Fox News blowhards with no administrative experience, conspiracy quacks and loons, etc. In one sense the whole MAGA phenomenon is a large-scale revolt against expertise and experts and the professional classes. So by "we" I definitely did not mean the people you are referring to. To the contrary, I completely agree that I would much rather trust a professional than the kinds of people running this shitshow that we have now.
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Yeah, sorry, I wasn't coming at you at all.

I mostly used your post as a launch point for my tirade.

And here I go again! ;)

My main point is that we all need to learn to resist the seduction of "I just need to get a level deeper so I understand enought to make an informed decision about this".

NO!

NO WE DO NOT!

You're not going to get there. Not with one level deeper. Not with ten levels deeper. If you don't have a 20 year history of recieving a paycheck for providing your expert analysis, then you're not going to do better than the people who have. You're just not.

BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF! What you are REALLY saying is "I want to know just enough about this subject so I can grasp at some ignorant flimsy "whatta aboutism" so I can ignore the consensus of experts and reinforce my preconcieved notions I borught to this 'debate' in the first place."

We as a society need to (re)learn to be comfortable with. "Yeah, I don't really know shit about all that, but I'm glad that people exisit who will form an expert consenus about that. Thanks! You just saved me from having to get 3,500 advanced degrees and tens of thousands of lifetimes of real world work experince."
 
It is worth noting that Trump’s five day extension aligns with the time it will take to assemble ground troops in the region.
 
www.foreignaffairs.com

America Has No Good Options in Iran

Trump needs an off-ramp.
www.foreignaffairs.com www.foreignaffairs.com

Great analysis of the situation in Iran. It’s hard to imagine the president seeing the situation clearly, but here’s to the hope that he can TACO his way out of this mess.

“The Iran war was a choice—one made without a clear plan for what would follow. The consequences of that decision are now becoming apparent. The task ahead is not to rescue an elusive victory but to limit the damage to U.S. interests, to regional stability, and to the lives of civilians across the Middle East.

That will require accepting an uncomfortable truth. In wars such as this one, the most responsible course is not to press forward in search of a win but to recognize when the costs outweigh the gains—and to step back before a limited conflict becomes an engulfing quagmire.”
 
Calheel said:
It was a man on the street interview at a gas station in Millersburg, PA, which is about 20 minutes north of Harrisburg. She talks with a somewhat lower class accent. She is white. The odds are that the vast majority of people in her particular demographic voted for Trump.

Here is the original story.
www.nbcnews.com

Voters in a key Pennsylvania swing district weigh in on Trump, gas prices and Iran war

NBC News spoke to voters at a gas station in the 10th District, the type of area that will be key for Republicans to win in the midterms if they hope to retain control of the House majority.
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com
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Oh, I didn't realize it was NBC News. I thought it was an amateur style video.

As I said, don't trust anything on the internet wtihout verification, unless it's a trusted source. While NBC news isn't necessarily trust worthy top to bottom, they are unlikely to fake this, I would think.
 
superrific said:
Oh, I didn't realize it was NBC News. I thought it was an amateur style video.

As I said, don't trust anything on the internet wtihout verification, unless it's a trusted source. While NBC news isn't necessarily trust worthy top to bottom, they are unlikely to fake this, I would think.
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My sister-in-law's husband is like her. Born near the Pitt - spent a couple of years at Penn State.
 
Duke Mu said:
My sister-in-law's husband is like her. Born near the Pitt - spent a couple of years at Penn State.
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My parents are also kind of like that. Didn’t vote for Trump in 2020 or 2024 but would also never vote for a Democrat. But you should hear the way my mom talks about him now.
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