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That would have mattered had most of those commanders not been paid to stand down by US intel (which was very smart btw).

That was in 2003, 21 years ago. Iran is vastly larger and has a fleet of ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as drones, that Iraq never had. Even so, the OIF buildup took 6 months for an undersized force too small to control Iraq- and the US can no longer even project the kind of ground force...

Israel is 1,000 miles from Iran. Which bases could our planes sortie out of that would be immune to missile bombardment? What's the range of a carrier launched F-35? How many Tomahawks can the navy shoot before it has to go reload? How many can be made per year? Where is the closest safe base to...

Sure, pummeling could be done. But there are many US bases well within range of Iran's ballistic and cruise missiles now. In order to do a serious, long air campaign (instead of just damaging stuff, calling it a win, and leaving) you need to move a ton of logistics very close. It should be...

The issue is that the US cannot make these things quickly or cheaply enough. Outside of a big reindustrialization effort, the obvious play would be to outsource patriot interceptor production to somewhere that can make them fast and cheap. I've read that they subbed out the new Patriot...

Yeah its not gonna happen.

That's just not true anymore. The US can't base aircraft close enough to Iran to start any serious bombardment without being under constant missile and drone attack themselves. Every base we would use could come under constant debilitating missile and drone attack. Even the carriers can't reach...

You think Israel could "crush" Iran? Where would they base from?

This really isn't the case any longer.

😅

You are right, this is a persistent problem; non western people have agency as well. And if one uses the imagination, to imagine being an Israeli politician, you start to realize there just aren't a lot of great choices.

Yeah almost all the reports are pure propaganda on both sides. No one even mentions the AFU's "kill talley" either because after awhile it got so farcical. If Russia lost those numbers they simply couldn't replace troops or hold any line. If 500k Ukrainian troops had been killed like the RU MOD...

Islam has no ethnic content.

In the general sense yes, but not in the legal sense of idolaters subject to eternal war. But at this point it doesn't really matter; the Arabs revolted and fought the Sunni Muslim Turks as well. Sure religion is yet another boundary distinguishing us versus them, and potentially a very...

Jews are not considered kafirun in Islamic law.

It's not that, it's just that the care is about different things.

I agree. There is no win-win deal here without some sort of paradigm shift in either camp. Which is very unlikely to happen. Some movies simply have no happy ending.

Yeah there is still plenty of manpower, at least a million or so men. It looks to me like a real draft is very unpopular though which is why the ukranian parliament is stalling. You'd think in a full blown land invasion the public would understand the need for a general draft.

I don't think this is a Republican thing or a Mike Johnson thing. I think the ask was big on purpose by the Biden administration, in order to give a plausible reason for the Rs to hold it up. I think it is a bipartisan attempt to put pressure on Ukraine to end the war.

The ruble would be worthless except you can buy oil with it now. America created that neat trick, but its probably the only thing keeping RU currency stable. They also do settle a decent amount of grey market transactions in gold internationally. Russia mines a fair amount of gold and has been...