- President Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing an American surveillance drone, but pulled back from launching them on Thursday night after a day of escalating tensions.
As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president’s top national security officials and congressional leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.
It was not clear whether Mr. Trump simply changed his mind on the strikes or whether the administration altered course because of logistics or strategy. It was also not clear whether the attacks might still go forward.
I, for one, am shocked - shocked - that John Bolton was the administration official pushing for military action against Iran. Those dang Pentagon loons don't know the first thing about the military.
Jokes aside, this is terrifying. I'm terrified of how close we came to war with Iran, a war that would kill millions of Americans and Iranians. If Trump had never pulled out of the nuclear pact with Iran, I can't imagine this would be happening. In my view, his resentment for Obama has contributed greatly to this.
I don't think a missle attack would mean war though, we've launched missiles into many countries and didn't send troops in, heck Obama did it. More reports have come out though and it seems as though they were considering it but decided against since it would costs almost 200 lives where the drone that was shot was unmanned. That said I'm very happy that we didn't attack them, I don't want any more involvement than necessary
President Trump said Friday that he called off the strike when he was told 150 people would die. :/
I wonder what the repercussions of US starting an all-out war with Iran would be. All the newspaper/magazine articles analysing a potential US-Iran war I've seen have been in either American or Israeli media, and they don't seem to be very objective to say the least. Many acknowledge that Iran would not want to fight a symmetrical war, but all of them have concluded that the US would have "no trouble" winning any conflict with Iran. Considering that the US is still stuck in the omnifucks that are the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and how much less developed they are when compared to Iran, I'm not exactly convinced. Has anyone here run into any honest analyses? I'd love ("love") to read some.
- Beirut barracks bombing of 1982 - Kidnapping of CIA station chief William Buckley - Proliferation of Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian-funded proxies throughout south Asia People ask "what's our beef with Iran anyway" and the answer is that as soon as they decided they were independent and kicked the British out, we installed a puppet regime. And then when the Iranians kicked out that puppet regime, they took advantage of our lack of useful intelligence in the region to kick our asses in proxy battles for about a decade and a half. And while the US is great at flying drones overhead 24-7 and pissing off the populace of entire nations at a time, Iran is great at giving those pissed-off populaces a mission and enough money and weapons to carry it out.I wonder what the repercussions of US starting an all-out war with Iran would be
A few years back, during the early days of Trump's presidency, the issue came up and the general sentiment was that Iran was too big geographically, too rich, and too well armed to make things easy. So I'd pretty much doubt anyone saying that a conflict with them would be a cinch. The same repercussions for any war. Death, for starters. Also, the destruction of infrastructure and the ruining of a regional economy, as well as the risk of further destabilizing an already unstable part of the world. There's the disruption of lives through the creation of poverty, displacement, and social distress. Hunger and disease will spread, as will fear, resentment, and hatred. People will suffer and that suffering will linger, sometimes for lifetimes, and it will take significantly more effort to set things right again than it would ever take to keep things from going sideways to begin with and we'll all have to live with the fact that some damage caused can never, ever be undone. The first question we should always ask when it comes to war is "What do we know, without any doubt, what will happen if we let war breakout?" The answer always is, "Guaranteed misery."Has anyone here run into any honest analyses?
I wonder what the repercussions of US starting an all-out war with Iran would be.
My guess is that a war with the sovereign nation of Iran would be different than a war against guerilla fighters. It feels like having clear military targets would, at the very least, compress the timeline a bit compared to wars against the Taliban/Al Queda/ISIS. I'm obviously no expert, but a clear goal of "Get this nation's government to capitulate" would probably be more doable. Who knows, though