100 Marines to Baghdad (Iran conflict discussion)(Reopened & Merged) (3 Viewers)

[superchuck500]

We’re gonna try to stay on point in this one - .

After the Iranian admission of shooting down the Ukrainian 737, which was carrying 82 Iranian passengers, protests against the Supreme Leader have broken out.

The UK ambassador to Iran has been arrested for talking photos of the protests. President Trump has tweeted support for the protesters in English and Farsi.

 

[MT15]

This is an interesting article on the current topic from outside the US.

Mideast braces for Iran’s response to U.S. drone strike on key military commander

In Tehran, the assassination of Quds Force chief Soleimani is seen as close to a formal declaration of war

www.theglobeandmail.com

“Ayatollah Khamenei visited Gen. Soleimani’s family home on Friday and declared three days of public mourning. He vowed “severe revenge” for the assassination, and Iranian state television called the assassination the “biggest miscalculation” the U.S. had made since the Second World War.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said in a statement reported by the Associated Press on Friday that it had held a special session and made “appropriate decisions” on how to respond, though it didn’t reveal them.

In an interview with CNN, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Majid Takht Ravanchi, said the attack on Gen. Soleimani "was an act of war on the part of the United States against the Iranian people ... The response for a military action is a military action.”

James Worrall, an associate professor of international relations and Middle East studies at the University of Leeds, said: “The assassination is probably the most significant escalation that Washington could make short of bombing Iran. Retaliation could come in pretty well any form [and] near enough anywhere.” “

I guess we’ll find out if this is a tempered response.

 

[Nebaghead]

Waiting for this guy to enlist.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jacob...trump-attacks-iran?source=twitter&via=desktop

 

[Eeyore]

Waiting for this guy to enlist.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jacob...trump-attacks-iran?source=twitter&via=desktop

Would that help get the felony charge dropped?

 

[Devildog]

Would that help get the felony charge dropped?

He can say crap like that because he knows he'll be disqualified from military service. Then he can come back and say that he tried.

He wouldn't last a minute in actual combat before crapping himself.

 

[Heathen]

It's almost like we've seen this before


*shrugs*

 

[Zardnok]

Waggin the Dog!
Waggin the Dog!

 

[wardorican]

It's almost like we've seen this before


*shrugs*

I dont know if either was really wagging the dog. Personally, I think that idea is the least important part of what is going on. It would just add to the motivations of why we did this. But, our embassy was attacked.

Do we have confirmation on who attacked the embassy? Was it correct to go after Iran?

 

[wardorican]

Street theater is a well-orchestrated Middle Eastern custom.
You want a thousand mourners, wailing a lament and shouting Death to America?
You can custom order your protest and there are folks who will make it happen!

To be clear, the drone strike was against Iranians who were in Baghdad, Iraq, during the same week that our embassy was attacked.
That's not a coincidence.
The fact that the strike did not take place on Iranian soil tends to temper the Iranian response.
They shouldn't have been in Iraq in the first place and they know it.

I don't think the location will temper the response, based on the target.

If a country killed our secretary of state in the US or while visiting Ukraine, do you think our response would be tempered for one vs the other?

 

[Dadsdream]

I dont know if either was really wagging the dog. Personally, I think that idea is the least important part of what is going on. It would just add to the motivations of why we did this. But, our embassy was attacked.

Do we have confirmation on who attacked the embassy? Was it correct to go after Iran?

It was branch of Iran's Hezbollah.

Earlier, the mob shouted “Down, Down USA!” as the crowd tried to push inside the embassy grounds, hurling water and stones over its walls. They raised yellow militia flags and taunted the embassy's security staff who remained behind the glass windows in the gates' reception area and also sprayed graffiti on the wall and windows. The graffiti, in red in support of the Kataeb Hezbollah, read: “Closed in the name of the resistance.”

Iraqi supporters of Iran-backed militia attack US Embassy

The embassy attack followed deadly U.S. airstrikes on Sunday that killed 25 fighters of the Iran-backed militia in Iraq, the Kataeb Hezbollah.

www.militarytimes.com

 

[N.O.Bronco]

Street theater is a well-orchestrated Middle Eastern custom.
You want a thousand mourners, wailing a lament and shouting Death to America?
You can custom order your protest and there are folks who will make it happen!

To be clear, the drone strike was against Iranians who were in Baghdad, Iraq, during the same week that our embassy was attacked.
That's not a coincidence.
The fact that the strike did not take place on Iranian soil tends to temper the Iranian response.
They shouldn't have been in Iraq in the first place and they know it.

They had every right to be there. They were okayed by the Iraqi government and arrived in official capacity.

And instead of evoking conspiracies you have zero evidence for, why don’t we just stick to common facts shall we? Ones that much more likely explain what is going on and why we saw mixed feelings through the anecdotal reports out of Iraq.

Iraq is a complex country.

It is predominately Shiite with a minority of Kurds and Sunnis(60% Shia, 30% Sunni where 98% of Kurds claim Sunni). The later tend to not like the Iranian presence, the former is mixed, while a vast majority hate ours(understandable why). However, Soleimani and a number of his militias are heavily responsible for fighting isis. Which helped strengthen their relationship with the government. So there is some mixed feelings even amongst Sunni groups for his contributions there. He also is of course responsible for training a number of militias that at times have been involved in pro-Iranian sides of conflicts and in conducting statecraft to ally the nation to their interests that even Shia’s have questioned. As seen by occasional protests directed at Iran backed parties.

So it is pretty obvious when you just have a modicum of understanding and don’t just pull for assumptions/conspiracies why there are mixed reactions in Iraq. Even amongst individual people when asked.

But looking at opinion polls(though not even that in this case, just simply cherry picking and filling voids with assumptions/conspiracies) is also a really lazy way to look at any action of foreign policy, and that seems to be one of the early ways the Fox News crowd is trying to justify this action(right behind the tried and true Iraq War justification of “well, he was a bad guy, what’s your problem libs! You just hate Bush).

But we have been told for years now from the administration is that the reason they had to heighten our short-term security risk and risk ally relationships by unilaterally and without cause tearing up the Iran agreement was because they had a swift plan to bring Iran to its knees through sustained pressure to either break the regime and have it overthrown internally or force them into a much better and comprehensive diplomatic deal from a capitulatory position. Which is based on the presumption that you could in fact break Iran without having to deeply escalate into active or direct conflict(though I suspect many knew this to be untrue and just went along because they know it provided the best opportunity to force us toward their goal of regime change).

That assumption is clearly not correct and what has instead transpired is increasingly a vicious cycle of escalatory attacks that threaten to pull us into a protracted conflict once again. With many in the administration actively rooting for that. With a president that clearly has no clue how to maneuver this balancing act and seems posed to just go along with this vicious cycle to make himself appear strong. And a set of followers who once again do not seem capable of thinking in the sort of broader strategic and moral terms needed to stave off backing another protracted war.

 

[Farb]

They had every right to be there. They were okayed by the Iraqi government and arrived in official capacity.

And instead of evoking conspiracies you have zero evidence for, why don’t we just stick to common facts shall we? Ones that much more likely explain what is going on and why we saw mixed feelings through the anecdotal reports out of Iraq.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...ani-to-attack-us-forces-in-iraq-idUSKBN1Z301Z

This might help in shining a light on all these wacky conspiracy theories the US used in killing a thoughtful poet and austere religious scholar.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...e-high-tech-ieds-that-haunted-us-troops-iraq/

I am sure he was there to discuss peace, this dude was all about peace.

 

[N.O.Bronco]

I dont know if either was really wagging the dog. Personally, I think that idea is the least important part of what is going on. It would just add to the motivations of why we did this. But, our embassy was attacked.

Do we have confirmation on who attacked the embassy? Was it correct to go after Iran?

The more important question to me is what cycle led to the protests? And even more importantly, what has to happen to break it?

To me, compartmentalizing or looking at this in isolation and not recognizing the larger machinations at work is a recipe for simply blindly waking head first into an ever escalating tit for tat that could easily push us into protracted conflict and open war. And increasingly it seems like Trump is playing right into that mindset.

We unilaterally and without cause abandoned the Iran nuclear deal, ramped up rhetoric and sanctions and began crippling the Iranian people and their economic output in the hopes it would topple the regime or force them to crawl to the negotiating table. It did not. As a response, likely with the encouragement of Iranian proxies, protests and rockets were fired at US embassies. Killing one American and some allies. Our response eventually was a bombing attack that killed 25 people. There response was another protest that did not result in any deaths. Our response has been to assassinate their senior military commander. Now Iranians are vowing revenge and it definitely seems like we have escalated to a point that I do not know clearly how we get out?

If Iran retaliates, which they seem likely to do, it seems even more likely that in wanting to avoid looking weak going into an election, Trump will simply escalate further as well.

 

[N.O.Bronco]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...ani-to-attack-us-forces-in-iraq-idUSKBN1Z301Z

This might help in shining a light on all these wacky conspiracy theories the US used in killing a thoughtful poet and austere religious scholar.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...e-high-tech-ieds-that-haunted-us-troops-iraq/

I am sure he was there to discuss peace, this dude was all about peace.

No one thinks this is a good guy anymore than anyone thought Saddam was a good guy. Anymore than I think Xi or Un is a good guy.

But if your entire rationale for justifying the use of hard power is your emotional reaction to activity of bad people(one you are going to have to acknowledge your own countries immorality, see Yemen as a recent example), you are simply falling into the same trap people like you fell into in justifying the Iraq War and other needles conflicts.

Soleimani being a bad guy and killing him neither achieves much strategically and is not enough to risk the escalation, all of which creates a net loss for American security and regional stability. The last two administrations knew this and that is why they rightfully recognized this is a high risk, low reward venture that they would not put into motion even though they could have. And the evidence so far that he posed a major imminent threat and that is why channels were ignored and the strike conducted hastily has been steadily crumbling before it even got circulated through the propaganda networks.

 

[N.O.Bronco]

Thread is worth following, looks like the Trump administration took a set of logical leaps to justify their claim of an imminent threat, and, I suspect, as that crumbles we are going to get the same people from early aughts evoking rationalizations that have an eerie similarity to the ridiculous Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes wrapped around a broken logic of claiming the possibility of a possible future imminent threat. Yeah, nonsense.

The thread also touches on how haphazardly this came about, leaks about intercepted communications from Iranians suggesting they are very much keen on retaliating in far reaching and broad ways, and how this is weakening our position in fighting ISIS.

 

[Archies Ghost]

It's almost like we've seen this before


*shrugs*

Pelosi is the one delaying the impeachment trial. Did she somehow order the strike to justify the delay in sending the articles over?

 

[Joe Okc]

That's the Iraqi's.... Baghdad is in Iraq.

great catch. And lol.

My point is not everyone in the Middle east is over there unhappy about it... as so many on the left seem to be saying... and I also imagine that if Iran wasn't such a totalitarian regime that you get your head chopped off at the slightest whim... That a bunch of them would be dancing in the street as well...

Iran is believed to execute the most people per capita.

Capital punishment in Iran - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[N.O.Bronco]

Every commentator I have come across acknowledges the complex relationship Soleimani had with people in Iraq and Iran. So maybe get some better twitter follows or sources? IDK. I would bet if you could do a poll in either country, more would be against this then for, and by an overwhelmingly larger margin in Iran, but just like in the US, people have different opinions and many are clearly going to invite his death as a positive.

However, what is likely very true, is that most will be deeply concerned with how this is going to escalate tensions in the region and risk their safety, and most Iranians hate the US government far more than they hate Soleimani(and after all even the opposing party would likely not be ok with a foreign country assassinating one of our heads of state). So this has likely boosted the nationalists in the country and will serve to strengthen the regime’s legitimacy and resolve.

 

[wardorican]

My point is not everyone in the Middle east is over there unhappy about it... as so many on the left seem to be saying... and I also imagine that if Iran wasn't such a totalitarian regime that you get your head chopped off at the slightest whim... That a bunch of them would be dancing in the street as well...

Capital punishment in Iran - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

You know, it is ok to admit when you made a mistake. A lot of us do it.

I don't think anyone was arguing that. We are mostly talking about the Iranian response.

I'd imagine Iraqis and Syrians (and Saudis) would be happy, because it may push Iran out of their political affairs. But since a lot of these countries have cultural / religious sect issues, none of them will be monolithic in their response.