8 pointsby Jimmc4145 hours ago1 comment
  • dyauspitr4 hours ago
    I got to say, whatever my opinion of Iran, they’re really leveraging the few advantages they have very well. Between the Shahed drones, the threat to the desalination plants and essentially the complete shut off of oil and natural gas, there is nothing anyone can really do. You can’t defang Iran because those Shaheds are tiny and can be stored and launched from anywhere. You can’t send in an invasive ground force because that will result in tens of thousands of coalition deaths. You can’t bomb their cities because they don’t care about civilian deaths. This might end up actually solidifying the Islamic Republic then if you had just let events run their course.
    • 3eb7988a16633 hours ago
      "The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." -Paul Atreides
      • beardywan hour ago
        A quote from fiction which should continue " ... at the point of destruction, after which there is nothing to control."
    • anovikov3 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • ZeroGravitas2 hours ago
        Some thankless government employee is trying to talk Trump out of commiting this series of war crimes right as we speak.

        I wonder if Iran forsaw that. They've been doing the tit-for-tat thing pretty well so far. What kind of mass scale civilian casualty war crimes could they retaliate with?

        • anovikov2 hours ago
          Well, at this point Iran is well past the peak of what they could do. Now just keep pressing. If their government can't be toppled, then it has to go the hard way by erasing their very nationhood.

          But yes, in order for this to succeed we must accept that entire Middle East is a write-off and plan for no oil from there for the next few years.

          • locallost2 hours ago
            What was said was, you are advocating war crimes. There is a reason why even when these are committed, they are not communicated in this way, and there's a pretense of noble action. You don't want to live in a world where destruction of power plants, reducing societies to loosely connected tribes etc. is casually talked about. You are not that safe.
            • anovikovan hour ago
              Well, Trump is all but certain to lose control of Congress in midterms either way. Past that, he's just a lame duck. And he's 80 years old. Why would he care about any of that?