What about tens of thousands of peaceful civilians who have been killed by the Iranian regime during past decades? The alternative to this war is allowing the Iranian government to keep doing that, business as usual.
In my opinion bombing people responsible for these atrocities increases the well-being of the world. Most Iranians seem to agree.
I don't see how this is going to work without troops on the ground?
The US had air supremacy, troops on the ground and a friendly regime in Afghanistan and Vietnam, and it did not work. (I am not sure if Iraq was a success, but I am sure that people were super tired of it, and did not want something like that again)
What is just bombing going to do? They just rebuilt their weapons and you have to bomb them again in 1-2 years?
The administration has already suggested sending troops as an option. It does not help that they are just making things up as they go.
You’re right that airpower alone will not change anything. But as you pointed out, putting troops on the ground does not automatically change the outcome either. If there is a lesson from the last few decades it is that the military is good at two things. Killing people and breaking their equipment. What it can do is create opportunities that political or covert efforts have to capitalize on.
Any military campaign needs a clear objective and an achievable end state with contingencies planned. Even then something unexpected will still happen. Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iraq were all very different conflicts and the current situation is different again.
As for rebuilding their capabilities, that is not trivial. Iran is still operating aircraft that we retired decades ago, which says something about their supply constraints.
The outcome also does not have to be installing a perfect government of our choosing. A more realistic result would be a government the United States can work with and one that the Iranian people actually support. That could still include parts of the current system if major and unpopular things changed.
I am sure someone in the current leadership would like to be the person who reduced the influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, loosened the grip of the religious leadership, and ended the country’s pariah status while getting sanctions lifted and money flowing back into the economy.
That would probably be a better outcome than trying to export our model of government to yet another Middle Eastern country.
The issue is that no one is going to defect without protection. That is the reason you put troops there. Democracy building is nice, but that is not the real reason you sent troops.
Defection happens without protection if the regime gets weakened enough, and in addition to that USA is supplying weapons to Iranians so they can take up arms against the regime.
Iran has mandatory military training so if the people gets weapons they can fight for themselves.
Defection within the regime is never going to happen. If there is one thing that will unite a bunch of egos and put their personal grievances aside is a war. Anyone who smells like a traitor is shot. They become more fanatical, not less.
Only option is outside rebellion. But weapons and rebels are not created out of thin air. You need to sent weapons, trainers and troops. Syria 2.0 but worst.
A big difference here is that the Iranian leaders are being blown to bits every day currently, so its a bit different from Syria where the rebels barely had any support.
But at that point the Talibans had Iran supporting them. Now they have no regime supporting them since the Iranian regime is constantly killed and no neighbor supports them. With 90% of the people not supporting such acts and no external country supporting them with weapons such acts quickly fizzle out into something the police can manage, it never completely disappears though.
Trump is at his best point to save face right now. It's now or never, IMO. He killed an entire leadership lineup of Iran. If he pulls out now it is a clear victory for him. If he continues the campaign 2 or 3 more weeks it's tough for me to find another out for him that doesn't involve a lot more risk to the USA.
Given he did take this clear victory and cash in, in Venezuela, there is some hope he'll do the same in Iran.
Sometimes yes, but is there in this specific case?
Because from my vantage point it looks like the choice is, status quo or bomb them. Its not like america can double sanction iran, they are already fully economically sanctioned. What is the middle ground here?
You could relax sanctions in exchange for other priorities. A persistent pain is less effective than an acute one anyway. There’s carrots too in negotiations. But no, we cannot do what a previous president did.
How much of the current situation is a result of that previous deal?
The deal basically stopped iran's nuclear program but allowed the regime to better send money and guns to its proxy network.
The current war is effectively the downstream consequences of Iran's proxy network going off the leash.
Ultimately, negotiations work best with both a carrot and a stick. If its just a carrot, and no deal would be unacceptable to one of the parties, then the logical thing for the other party would be to always hold out.
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In any case, in this specific situation (regardless of how we got here), its hard to imagine that Iran could have made a deal and survived. The regime is very weak at home and its questionable if they could have survived the loss of face to agree to what usa wanted.
This justification for bombing Iran is dumb as fuck. In a few days the number of civilians killed by US-Israeli bombings will surpass the number of civilians killed by the regime in decades.
Iranian official numbers are 3.5k. the OSINT community say at least 15k in the 3 biggest cities (including peo-regime guardias of the revolution), and 'local' journalists (a lot with CIA ties though), not friend of the system say 30k.
I wouldn't trust Iran with a butter knife, so I imagine between 15 and 30k, including 1 to 2k 'guardians'
Let's count. Power consolidation (post-revolution): 10-20k. 100k during the first gulf war, but I think you should put that on the US (and maybe Irak, but it's the US that pushed Irak to attack Iran), then a bit more than 50 execution per year on average for 30 year. 100-300 in 2019/2020, and 15k-35k for the 2025/2026 protests. So even if you take the higher bound, that's 66k max, and if you count the gulf war (which was defensive, against US-led Iraki), 166k. But a reasonable estimate would not count the gulf war, and would be 35k over 40 year.
Weirdly, that's less than the number of saudi Arabia slaves who died in the last 20 years. But most of them are African, so they don't count, if I understand why Saudi Arabia are our allies.
The 15-35k for protestors killed is a complete fabrication. No verifiable sources corroborate that figure. Media has a tendency to report figures based on nothing. Then those figures get established as the truth, which shifts the burden of proof. Thus, unless one can prove that 15-35k protestors wasn't killed the myth lives on.
> This justification for bombing Iran is dumb as fuck. In a few days the number of civilians killed by US-Israeli bombings will surpass the number of civilians killed by the regime in decades.
I was just curious if you had information that I don't have. I suppose not.
But what you describe was not the motivation behind the decision by Washington to bomb Iran. The motivations were Tehran's nuclear program and Tehran's support for groups like Hezbollah and generally Tehran's promotion of violence and instability outside Iran in the Middle East.
Yea, IMO people shouldn't make jobs / professions too big a part of their identity. At some point human programming may be largely gone, but probably there will be increased demand for something else.
It should be government's job to make it as easy as possible for people to retrain, switch jobs and start new careers. Obviously taxation should be reworked too, if AI and robots replace lots of jobs in some sectors. Profits produced by efficiency gains shouldn't be concentrated just among few billionaires.
The end result is, and will always be garbage if there is no "human in the loop" to test whether the result meets the requirements, and telling LLM what to do if it doesn't.
Like somebody else said, there is still a need for QA (and usually for requirements gathering too), that's a part of the development cycle. Developing software that is meant to be used by humans with zero humans involved isn't realistic.
Yeah this is what lots of Western people don't get. The cultural / ideological gap between rulers and those being ruled appears much larger in Iran than in most other Muslim countries.
Many countries have hardcore conservative rulers AND population, but in Iran the problem is mostly just the rulers. With better government, Iran would have so much potential.
Iranian government massacres its own civilians whenever they dare to demand change. Iranians are also largely secular compared to citizens of most Arab states, and hate their government. They're also mostly Shia, which makes it hard for likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda to gain ground there, as Shias are enemies to Sunni extremists.
I believe there's a much better change of democracy / sane regime in Iran, than there ever was in Iraq and other Arab states.
From my point of view as a Finn, the convention is indeed pointless as long as Russia doesn't obey it. No point avoiding land mines in our Eastern border in case of a war, when Russia will mine any territory they capture anyway. Besides, our mines are much more likely to be marked correctly to maps, and probably will have a function that deactivates them after certain time.
I would bet 100% of those people have either Apple or Android phone in their pocket. Android users already have easy access to Gemini, and Apple's Siri is going LLM soon enough as well.
Google and Apple just need to push their AI assistants hard enough, and most of the moat OpenAI has will be gone.
Yeah you'll probably want to turn on airplane mode between the refreshes. That's at least what KUAL "Online screensaver extension" from Mobiread forums does, with it I'm getting several weeks of battery life with refreshes every couple of hours.
Old kindles are a lot of fun. I've turned a couple of them into AI generated paintings that refresh their contents every few hours or so. I can control the prompts via web-ui, through template functions they can include things like weather conditions, random animals, countries, current date & time and even titles of random news articles. Prompt handling and image generation is done completely locally on my home server, using ollama and stable-diffusion-webui.
The only problem I've had is that most news articles from mainstream media are damn depressing, so generating paintings directly from them gets gloomy quick. I had to instruct ollama to try put a positive spin on negative articles. I do love my weather-forecast painting though. Whenever it's raining outside, the painting has rain in it too (or now during winter it's all snowy).
Battery life is really good too, lasts several weeks. I used existing "Online Screensaver extension" from MobileRead forums, with some customizations. It automatically turns on airplane mode after fetching the image and keeps it on until next fetch, which probably explains the improved battery life.
In my opinion bombing people responsible for these atrocities increases the well-being of the world. Most Iranians seem to agree.
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