ILikePie5

I think Iran is no different that Israel, Saudi Arabia or America. They are trying to push for their interests. They want power and influence in the region, no different than Saudi Arabia or the US. But the Saudi's and the US government want that power for themselves, so they attack Iran. 

I am not denying the possibility. But the US has provided no evidence that this is true. 

I'm saying they are clowns if they think we are going to war. 

I don't think anyone said that all sanctions would be dropped, they would be eased. That is the point of diplomacy, it is a give and take. Trump just wants to extort countries into doing what he tells them. And when they refuse, he resorts to extortion and violence. 

Of course there can. Although with Trump betraying them it is much harder now. They will likely have a very hard time ever trusting america to keep it's word. 

If the choices are do nothing or get dragged into yet another war in the middle east, then YES!!!!. Doing nothing is, by a massive margin, the better option. But I reject those as the only options. There were lots of options available. The trump administration just really wants to attack Iran. 

Yanks kill millions of innocent men, women and children and call others terrorists. Pathetic.

Pie did you have something to do with the no NK?

Drafter vigging was a joke

Mostly upgraded from anti-vehicle fencing. Trump had a Republican House and Senate for two years. Why no wall? Why no e-verify? Why no infrastructure? Thing is, the game was rigged from the start. They don't care about you, or your wages, or your community, or your family. They care about getting their backs patted at AIPAC's next shindig and getting buckets full of money from the oligarchs who benefit from cheap labor. They spend trillions on foreign wars but scream bloody murder about spending a few billion on a wall to defend our own borders. In their mind, the military budget exists to defend the interests of a small, wealthy country in the Levant, not to defend the territorial integrity of the United States.

This isn't escalation, it's the status quo. Escalation means to take a step UP. Iran and we have been engaged in proxy conflicts and skirmishes in the Middle East since before you were born. Neither group has targetted a leader of the other.

Okay snowflake. You're right, not wanting to watch Americans bleed out in some Middle Eastern shithole for a country that manipulates our elections and spies on us makes me a RACIST.

Dumb question. If you're applying an absolute moral standard, all military leaders deserve to die. Soleimani fought a war. In fighting a war, you invite death. He who lives by the sword, you know the rest of the story. Assassination is never about justice, it's about results. The results here are bad, so it shouldn't have been done.

I'll shoot it right back at you: objectively, who deserves to die more? Mohammad bin Salman, or Qasem Soleimani? I'd say as far as atrocities committed, Salman takes the cake and then some. But he's our ally and Soleimani is dead. There's no justice in the world, kid. Just conflicting interests and a lot of blood.

You've said that you predict and endorse avoiding a direct confrontation. How do you propose our Navy prevents the mining of the Strait of Hormuz without direct confrontation which would bring Iran's anti-ship missile batteries into play?

Lol, you clearly didn't look it up. The war game was meant to demonstrate the superiority of US forces against Iran in a direct engagement, and it was supposed to be all about technological superiority. Van Riper, who commanded the Iranian side, used low-tech tactics like motorcycle couriers, brute force missile attacks, and small boat attacks to outmaneuver the US and completely overwhelm our sensor systems. We didn't adapt our tactics or tech to deal with the tactics he used, we re-ran the war game with a new rules which forbade the Iranian side from using those tactics. That's why Van Riper resigned; because he saw that the flaws in the US Naval defences weren't being fixed.

We're doing the same thing that Russian and Japan did: thinking that because we spend a lot of money on our fleets and are more advanced then another nation, we can just keep using the same tactics forever. They both got their asses handed to them by the Japanese because of their arrogance, regardless of how expensive ships like the Repulse were. It took new tactics and strategy, like the Thatch Weave and improvements in reconnaissance and espionage, for us to cripple the Japanese at Midway. Hint: the Japanese forces at midway were better trained and better equipped than our forces. It was a combination of strategy and tactics which won that pivotal battle for the US. Not technological superiority.

The idea that we would use nukes on Iran is too idiotic to entertain.

You have complete myopia here. I agree with the trade war that Trump is waging against China. Why? Because it hurts them more than it hurts us, and they're our chief rival. We should have done this a long time ago. The same logic applies to the Hormuz. China will be hurt by a global economic crash, but we will be hurt more, as the world's largest consumer market. It will also cause more internal unrest in the US, because the people here will blame the leadership who caused it to happen. In China, the collapse can be used to demonize a warmongering US and unite the people, minimizing internal unrest. Russia will be helped by the closing of the Hormuz because it will cause the price of oil to spike. Those are the three powers that really matter. Russia and China will be happy to watch us sweat it out. The other countries are largely aligned with us, and their course of action will be to pressure US to stop, as they don't have strong diplomatic ties to Iran.

How did that work in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria? Whew, that morale sure did melt away!

Of course, it didn't. It stiffened. Because, for some crazy reason, bombing people makes them want to fight you.

killing their general is very provocative. it's a major escalation. i would have did something less provocative. now, they will just get another general. you keep ignoring that iran can just increase its terrorism. they will attack usa interest more. we can do tit for tat like u want to do,, but that just causes more flies to swat. if bees are bothering you, do you attack the queen bee when all the other bees will launch an assault on you, making the problem worse? no, you swat the individual bees who are bothering you. we can't just nuke the hive, or nuke iran, like you stupidly suggested, to stop terrorism. 

you evaded the question. i pointed out that iran can increase its terrorism against us and all we can do is try to manage a worse sitatuion. after i pointed that out, your non response was 'peace through strength'. how does that negate that they could and probably would increase their terrorism against us? 

why would you think iran wouldn't escalate the situation? all they have to do is use their proxies, their funded terrorist groups. we can't just nuke or strong arm our way out of that. we can bomb more motherfuckers, but it's just swatting flies at that point. the thing is, we'd be swatting a bunch more flies. they dont care if they die or lose people. thus, there would be more terrorism going on from iran, and nothing we can do but try to manage a situation made worse by trump

Venezuela has 3x the amount of Saudi reserves. jus sayin.

We are not precisely independent yet as there are certain grades of oils that are cheaper for us to import, but we definitely do not need the Saudis anymore as the sole supplier of that oil.

We can only hope for lemonade at this point.

BTW, we're contemplating wasting trillions on this, but still no wall. Still no infrastructure bill. Still no mandatory e-verify.

There's really no response to that as you clearly don't know what either of those words mean. An attack on an embassy is a provocation. A non-escalatory response would be to deploy troops to defend the embassy or launch some strikes on proxy groups. If taking out a key regional political figure with a drone strike isn't an escalatory response then the term has no meaning.

But he is Obama who'd destabilize an entire region of the Middle East and waste trillions of dollars because Israel yanked on his leash.

They can easily close the strait. You don't need to sit a bunch of ships there standing bravely, flags snapping in the wind. You mine it or resort to asymmetric tactics.

All of those destroyers and cruisers will be blown out of the water by maneuverable, small boat suicide attacks, advancing mines, and ship-killing cruise missiles. We've done wargame simulations against Iran in the Persian Gulf. It ended up with most of the carrier group at the bottom of the sea, and 20,000 dead US personnel. It was such a humiliation that they restarted the simulation with handicaps on the Iranian side, and the US officer who led that side resigned in disgust because they were choosing to prioritize making a flattering report to the Pentagon over actually addressing the weaknesses in the US Navy to asymmetric naval warfare. We've been using our carrier groups as floating artillery for so many years that we're completely unequipped for a real naval engagement. Look up Millennium Challenge 2002.

Being energy independent does absolutely ZERO to offset a global economic collapse. Also, we aren't energy independent. We import about 9 million barrels of crude a day.

Air strikes don't win a war. Iran is extremely mountainous, with notoriously fanatical fighters and arms flowing in from Russian and possible Chinese allies. It would be a nightmare to invade.

Iran has the capability to close the Strait of Hormuz and to harass traffic through the Bab-el-Mandeb through Shi'a proxies. This will cripple global shipping, especially oil traffic, and would trigger a worldwide economic crash. We would have to respond by sending our Navy to the Persian Gulf, a situation which will NOT end well for us.

He already escalated and guaranteed an Iranian response. The killing of Suleimani incenses and unites the PEOPLE of Iran. If the leadership tries to stop escalation, it will undermine their own power at this point. They have no choice.

dont you think escalating the situation will just make things worse?

The default position should be that other countries should be afraid of pissing America off. Not the other way around.

so how do you view the increase in terrorism that his assassination will cause? 

did the embassy get attacked before or after he was assassinated? i dont follow the news enough to know. if this was in response to an embassy attack, i still would not have escalated the situation even more. what do you think of the increased terrorism that his assassination will cause? 

where's the harm in waiting for a small attack or something more immenient?there's too much uncerntainty here such that your obvious bias is showing given how much you defer to trump. given how this plays into iran's hands and will fuel more terrorism, we should be skeptical of trump until he can make a stronger case for why he did what he did. 

My point is not to defend Iran or Hezbollah. My point is that there is blood on the hands of both sides. The only way to stop that blood being shed is by convincing the other side to stop fighting. And you will never do that by bombing them. You are only hardening their resolve to keep fighting. 

The same people defend Hezbollah.

People who think we  are going to war🤡🤡

No one has been in a cold war with Iran for 45 years. They rightfully hate america for trying to keep them oppressed by a tyrannical dictator. From the moment they threw off that dictator america has been nothing buy hostile towards them. They have good reason to hate america, but they had more pressing concerns until America shit all over the place and destabilized the whole region.

The US has engaged in 2 terrorist attacks in the last few weeks in Iraq. Why is iran a "sponsor of terror" when they so the exact same thing the US does?

they also have an effective military. Advanced technology and control of the straights of hormuz. 

What bluff? What does that even mean?

Obama returned 1.4 billion of Iranian money that the US illegally seized and held. He did this as a part of a treaty that prevented Iran getting nuclear weapons. Now that trump has torn it up, they are back working on their nuclear weapons. 

Iran is doing the exact same thing the US is doing. but when they do it is "cancer" that "should be taken out". But when the US does it it is somehow morally justified? This kind of twisted thinking is why the US keeps getting dragged into wars. 

Anyone who thinks we weren't in a cold war with Iran for 45 years doesn't know a goddamn thing about the Middle East.

It's so disgusting western countries bribed Iran to take part in a nuclear deal by allowing Iran to ramp up their proxy armies, and we even funded Iran to do it!

Hezbollah is a fucking wart on the planet and almost 100% funded by Iran.

which the Iranians were abiding by