Hey so uh, Orban, here’s a thought, you fucking shitass: maybe don’t order your people to literally kidnap Ukrainian government employees and rob them of the better part of $100M, and we wouldn’t need to have this discussion.

That’s very literally what I’m pointing out…

No, because orangeboi is just a useful idiot. The people driving this are much more committed.

Not sure, but iirc Wikipedia also very recently discovered and looked into that, and subsequently banned archive.* from being a source.

I have been a habitual user of archive.* for years now, but be warned that it was recently discovered that they were actually altering archive copies subtly in many cases.

Shutting down the department whose job it is to watch for that sort of thing in the US was such an inspired idea.

/s

Seriously: I’m… honestly both in awe and aghast at how fucking blatant the regime is being about it. They’ve literally shut down the team that is in charge of addressing and categorizing security threats to the US originating from Iran immediately before starting a fucking war with Iran. Like… I just… what the actual fuck. I can’t even.

Between this and the documents leaked about their plans for the election, the intent couldn’t be more obvious if they put it on a fucking billboard. I hate that it comes down to such imbecilically stupid and petty US political bullshit like that, and that it’s killing so many people and fucking up so may other parts of the world… but seriously, I really think that was a massive part of their rationale here. It’s a distraction (operation Epstein fury), combined with creating an extremely obvious opening for an asymmetrical/terroristic threat that will be used as a justification for removing the electoral process. That’s the plan.

Ah yes because that has worked out swimmingly for us in the past

The radars in question are essentially scaled up, next-gen iterations on the stuff that is put into Arleigh Burke DDGs, and there were only about 20 of them worldwide before this started, and they cost between $500M and $1B a pop.

So yeah - turns out that ignoring the threat of Shahed-style drones and the lack of effective response the US and allies currently have to that style of attack is a pretty fucking serious strategic misstep.

This… uh… sounds an awful fucking lot like state sanctioned robbery.

So I actually do think this guy is completely correct.

What everyone needs to understand is that a (for now hypothetical) ground invasion of Iran would go very, very differently from both Iraq and Afghanistan, because of two specific factors: geography and population.

Geography

I’m oversimplifying for brevity, but the terrain is rather akin to Afghanistan. Most of the major population centers are in mountainous terrain.

This would not be like watching armored cavalry blitz through the Iraqi desert. This would be watching armored columns getting snarled up in choke points and taking focused fire and heavy losses. Seriously: it would be way more akin to the showing Russia made in the opening days of the active phase of the Ukraine war (2022) than the opening phases of the Iraq war.

Population

We all saw how difficult it is to fight a dedicated and hardy insurgent force in Afghanistan (twice, really - once before with the Soviets, too).

Now multiply that by ten - or maybe even a hundred. No, I’m not exaggerating. Iran’s raw population (~80m) is larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Their military, by size, is just under a million men, the 9th largest in the world. This number does not include the Basij, which, though “only” composed of militia volunteers, adds between 600,000 and twenty five million (yes, really; no, not a typo) potential combatants/partisans/insurgents/resistance fighters.

And then there’s the discipline and training and fanaticism, which for the first two are likely markedly better than Iraq’s in both the gulf war and the Iraq war (and, you know, they were watching, and so probably adapted their doctrine over the years too), and much closer to Afghan insurgents in terms of fanaticism. So, you’ve got a rather big population, with an absolute shitload of pissed off and motivated militants. And the US and Israel seem to be not caring that much about civilian collateral damage and casualties - definitely not the way to “win hearts and minds”, regardless of how brutal the current/for-now-ongoing Iranian regime is.

Overall

A concerted ground campaign in Iran would be like trying to invade a very large version of Switzerland, in many respects. And I am fairly certain it would rapidly deplete weapon stocks of both the US and Israel, in addition to being extraordinarily bloody - not to mention, the very real prospect of the conflict spiraling out of control into WW3.

And don’t forget: despite their lack of action thus far, Iran is technically still a client state of Russia. And Russia surely wouldn’t appreciate a massive and open-ended “Institute for Peace” (emphasis on an absolutely brutal amount of sarcasm here) that not only takes a primary client state off the board, but also is being done right across their border. And China gets (or got…? Implications are still actively shaking out at this point) a ton of their oil from Iran - remember, Imperial Japan executed Pearl Harbor largely in response to US intransigence around the oil embargo they had put in force in 1940 (technically, an expansion of earlier embargoes, but this was a major geopolitical tipping point that led to war). If this ends up throttling the Chinese economy (or looking like it will) I do not expect the PRC to take that lying down.

This entire shitshow is massively geopolitically destabilizing in the broadest sense of the term.

And that is why I am rather concerned this will, in time, spiral into WW3.

Shutting down the department whose job it is to watch for that sort of thing in the US was such an inspired idea.

/s

Seriously: I’m… honestly both in awe and aghast at how fucking blatant the regime is being about it. They’ve literally shut down the team that is in charge of addressing and categorizing security threats to the US originating from Iran immediately before starting a fucking war with Iran. Like… I just… what the actual fuck. I can’t even.

Between this and the documents leaked about their plans for the election, the intent couldn’t be more obvious if they put it on a fucking billboard. I hate that it comes down to such imbecilically stupid and petty US political bullshit like that, and that it’s killing so many people and fucking up so may other parts of the world… but seriously, I really think that was a massive part of their rationale here. It’s a distraction (operation Epstein fury), combined with creating an extremely obvious opening for an asymmetrical/terroristic threat that will be used as a justification for removing the electoral process. That’s the plan.

Well if I had a nickel for every time I wished this shitshow of a country had a good leader in the course of my adult life, I would have an absolute fuckton of nickels.

Huh, good spot. Per Wikipedia, Kuwait flies legacy hornets (C variants).

Man… I hope they can figure out how to strap Meteors to them.

My point is that I am hoping this doesn’t end up being the nexus of a global conflict (yes, WW3 is what I mean), but I’m a bit worried that it’s going to wind up that way.

It is pretty fucking wild - he literally fires people on Twitter because he’s too chickenshit to do it to their face

It was a lateral “promotion”. She was put in an unimportant box where she can’t really do anything.

Honestly if all those gulf monarchies and autocracies want to just slug it out with each other… I’d just as soon step back and not be involved. Unfortunately, our idiot fucking regime has us involved up to our eyeballs.

Apparently she just gave a press conference and she hadn’t been told she was fired 🤣

technical reason

Technical != financial