Zorost: I'll take a crack (or, I'm smoking it). What does winning look like? The US takes Kharg Island, largely intact. The Republican Guard's rank and file decide the Mullahs are not worth dying for at the hands of Iran's own angry people. The Gulf States come begging at the White House for peace and quiet, and won't get it unless they fully recognize Israel, round up the Muslim Brotherhood, boot Hamas, re-settle the Arabs living in Gaza and join the 21st Century.
Have you? I really, really don't think you have. The idea that the Strait cannot be opened so long as Iran exists is provably, objectively false and historically illiterate on a grand scale. Is it EASY? Usually no (though sometimes it has been). Will it be harder now in this age of Shaheed Drone Spam and air dropping naval mines? Probably. Will it be undoable? Certainly not. Indeed frankly the bigger cost so far in transiting the strait has been dealing with insurer panic cranking up premiums so much that most skippers can't afford, not the Iranians interdicting it.
And the kicker is that you unthinkingly keep making barely veiled allusions to the Iran-Iraq War and all that Iran went through in that war (which is a fair point) while UTTERLY IGNORING THE MOST RELEVANT PART OF IT that was the Tanker War and particularly the US reprisal that was Operation Praying Mantis to punish the Mullahcracy for damaging one of our ships and to ensure they could not close the Straits.
To some people that may sound smart or profound. To others like me that have a historical memory that goes back before 1990 and isn't limited to hot take highlights, it's... something else.
"They lost far more people in the Iran/ Iraq war than we could kill short of boots on the ground or WMDs, and still didn't give up or revolt."
This is where I'd do a slow clap and say 'congratulations, you have shown the ability to look on Wikipedia's page for the Iran-Iraq War, now can we talk about the actually relevant comparisons?'
But frankly that's not even appropriate for the reasons I'll mention.
A: Contra to what you said, Iranians DID Revolt during the Iran-Iraq War. It's just that so few did (for reasons I'm going to go through). If you bother actually looking at the Wikipedia article on the Iran-Iraq War, you will quite literally see that below Iraq's infobar you will have a whole lot of rebel groups in Iran, ranging from Saddam's Arab Separatist Astroturf "DRFLA" to the actually existing and more serious MEK/Peoples' Mujahadeen and the NCRI and the Kurdish (yea, Kurds fighting alongside Saddam....) Salvation Force and PDKI. These groups fielded dozens of thousands of fighters (probably at least 50,000 in total). And indeed one of the last major battles of the conflict was the Iranian regime stomping on the MEK's last ditch offensive in Operation Eternal Light.
What mattered is that for reasons we'll get into soon, *Not ENOUGH Iranians* revolted against the regime or gave up in favor of Saddam. There are a lot of reasons for that, but most of them boil down to a mixture of the truly ancient hatreds - Sunni versus Shiite, Arab versus Persian, and Mesopotamians versus Iranics - as well as Saddam's own tender, loving doctrine towards hearts and minds in Iran (for the record that's DEEP Sarcasm), his lacking military capacity, and the nature of his regime seeking to dismember Iran first and maybe topple the Mullahs sometime later.
B: As I've mentioned before, Saddam's War Aims were fundamentally about dismembering Iran by annexing at least Khuzestan on behalf of his particular flavor of Fascist-Communist-Arab Socialist Cosplay dystopia and the supremacy of Sunni Islam. This would be unappealing enough even before you factor in the literal genocidal brutality of Baathist era Iraqi doctrine and "war" fighting, or the fact that the limitations in WarPac export doctrine and capabilities as well as Baathist indifference meant they preferred deep strikes on Iranian urban centers with basically zero discernment. But what made it worse was that Saddam in his LARPing about how he was the new Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar intentionally leaned on some of the oldest hatreds in world history by positioning himself as the New Babylonian Champion of Mesopotamian Civilization against the "Barbaric" Gutians that lived in the Zagros and parts of the Iranian Plateau. The results were unsurprising.
All of this helped contribute to a Rally Around the Flag Effect (as well as the Mullahcracy being less openly deranged and apocalyptic at the time and it being more possible to believe something good would come of it, as well as the decision by the Ayatollahs to lean off of some of their more radical purges or policies - people "forget" Israel was aligned with Iran at the time while the US was sponsoring Saddam's Iraq)).
The US and Israel and co are not trying to do the same thing Saddam did, or "Destroy Iran." They are trying to destroy the Iranian regime's centers of gravity and ability to project force, and secondarily try to get Iranians to destroy the regime itself. There has been zero talk of territorial concessions of any kind or some kind of crusade against "Gutians" or Shiite Islam or what have you.
This is very different from what Saddam tried to do. Helped by the fact that the US and Israel have shown themselves to be vastly more competent and discerning than Saddam, such as how the Iranian Air Force and Navy maintained Aerial dominance and naval dominance for most of the conflict. That's.... NOT the case here.
Does that mean it will work? No.
But it does mean that pretending the US will need to fight large scale trench battles against the Iranian Military while deploying secret police like Saddam's Mukhabarat to torture and kill people in the hundreds of thousands in order to convince Iranians they really want to join the Greater Neo-Babylonian Arab Reich is daft.
"Most of the population seems to like living in a theocracy, "
I am sorry, but literally Wut?
Wut?
Where the devil are you getting this idea?
The Iranian Clergy has NEVER, EVER Had the primary loyalty of a majority of the Iranian population in its entire several thousand year history. That goes particularly for the Shiite Clergy of recent centuries. Starting with the fact that they had to try and assassinate their former champion Ismail after doctrinal disputes only to get stomped on. In 1978 they took power after the Shah left in concert with various mostly leftist dissident groups, before moving quickly to dominate military and paramilitary groups and crush them in a coup later that year. They have faced regular rebel groups (see what I mentioned bout them) and protests ever since, only growing more frequent and popular in recent decades. Hence the need to use butchers like the Solemanis to imprison, rape, and murder their own people by the hundreds of thousands in order to keep power.
Theocracy is not an integral part of the Iranian character or culture, and indeed it is DEEPLY unpopular. The recent regime has generally held power by getting the at best passive acceptance or support of the public as a better alternative to the likes of the Shah or Saddam's Iraq (and even that's dubious now that they have so mismanaged the country), and usually by terrorized submission. Terror that is going by the wayside with the very public disintegration of many of their leaders and much of the apparatus of control. The Iranian clergy have been at their most influential when they have been on the sidelines acting as a parallel center of power and charity able to stir public support by heckling the Shah/Prime Minister/etc. Actually holding power though has proven to be a debacle for htem.
And we're seeing that play out.
"CIA instigated photo ops for CNN not withstanding."
I don't like giving much credit to the CIA but if they were doing this for a "photo op" for "CNN" they are dumber than even your claims. But I don't think that is so. They're at worst photo ops for the rest of the Middle East and the Iranian public.
"Recognize Israel? They are the ones who started this mess."
Ahhh, there it is. That flavor of retarded Israel hatred.
No, no Israel didn't "Start this mess." Indeed, if you actually studied the Iran-Iraq War, you would KNOW that Israel supported the Iranian Mullahcracy during that time against Iraq, and that indeed the Mullahs had a longer history of hating on the US than they did Israel. There's a reason for that.
So what we're seeing now is a convergence of interests. The Mullahcracy hates both the US and Israel because we are the "Great and Little Satans" for the crimes of being Infidels that are not their particular flavor of apocalyptic Twelver Shiite Death Cult. We hate them because they took power from an ally and proceeded to launch decades of terrorism and war against us and other countries (see: the Buenos Aires bombing) starting with the Embassy Hijacking, and apparently bragged to us about how they would not give up nuclear weapons. Israel hates them because they have tried to genocide them and Jews out of existence. So while there is an unsurprising convergence of interests, we came at this from different angles and for different reasons.
But the people who started this were the Iranian regime.
And if you DARE try to lecture me about Operation Ajax or St. Mossadegh the Coup Plotter or something about Anglo-Iranian Oil as the "Weaaal" start of this, I am going to mock you heartily. Then I will point out the basic fact that the Iranian Clergy SUPPORTED THE SAME SIDE AS WE DID in those conflicts and that the Mullahcracy's love for St. Mossadegh the Useful Idjiot was very, VERY newly discovered and almost exclusively for external consumption.
"The fact that your win conditions reads like a fantasy should tell you something about how likely we are to win."
Well I spoke about my own win conditions, and they are hardly a fantasy. Indeed, they are far less extensive than many actually realized Western operations in Iran in the last century. (Admittedly 1941 is kind of cheating but still).
And it's definitely less fantasy than claiming the Strait of Hormuz cannot be opened because of the Iranian Hive Mind's Warhammer 40k Level Krieg devotion to a theocracy that they by and large hate.
Oh yeah I agree, and it also might prompt a rally around the flag effect (even if grudgingly) that benefits the regime, sort of like how even English lords or towns favorable to the Empress/Queen that the King of Scotland invaded Northern England on behalf of wound up supporting the army in the name of her enemy at the Battle of the Standard. It also might prompt Erdogan to support the regime more.
Big issue I suppose is the degree to which Azeri or Kurdish forces can appear "inoffensive" or be linked in to a wider Iranian rebellion.
But all of this is inside baseball on a level far beyond what this apparently Neo-Nazi Jew Baiting Idiot (you can check some of their other comments or those they like or "retweet") is capable of comprehending. Someone trying to claim that the Strait of Hormuz cannot be opened while Iran exists in spite of ignoring how Saddam's Iraq managed it both with and without US support is egregiously ignorant, as is someone claiming Churchill is a "Jewish Golem."
The Iranian military is not like the US Army. The rank and file are religious zealots; the best analogy to Iran's army would be Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army.
Tell me you haven't studied the Iranian military without telling me you haven't studied the Iranian Military.
"The Iranian military is not like the US Army. The rank and file are religious zealots; the best analogy to Iran's army would be Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army."
There's so much wrong with this it isn't even funny, and even if this comparison had been fitting it REALLY Doesn't say what you want to pretend it does.
So let's go through this.
1: "The Iranian military...rank and file are religious zealots."
No, no they aren't, certainly not in total or as a whole. Are there religious zealots in the regular Iranian military? Sure.
But A: This does not mean the military as a whole are religious zealots.
B: This does not mean a given religious zealot is actually a religious zealot ON BEHALF OF THE MULLAHCRACY or supportive of it.
C: This does not mean the military would have to go along with said religious zealots.
But any cursory look at the history of the Iran-Iraq War or the differences between Iran's military and other outfits like the IRGC show how the regime very much does NOT expect or treat its regular military as being composed of religious zealots, and indeed has established parallel organs like the IRGC precisely as a check to the more secular, less "reliable" (at least as perception regular military. With the IRGC serving a comparable role to the SS or to the NKVD during Beria's apogee. And even there we're seeing desertions and defections, as well as more than a few real or alleged spies.
2. "The best analogy to Iran's army would be Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army."
The fact that you think this is a good analogy is an unintentional self-own.
The New Model Army as a whole was just that: an army raised on new models to reform the existing Parliamentary Army, and used in parallel with existing Parliamentary militias and association armies. It was not some kind of Anglican or Puritan Jihadi Organization, and while the rank and file were probably religiously devout (and arguably religious zealots by our standards) very few of them like Cromwell's Regiments of Horse were actually organized along those lines.
Moreover, the New Model Army was riven by conspiracies, political and religious dissent, and a host of others.
And of course most famously, the New Model Army had several of its units bring down the Cromwellian Government and organize the royal Restoration for Charles II. There's a reason the Coldstream Guards are the oldest continuous British Army unit.
The closest thing you'd get to the New Model Army in an Iranian Context were if the Pasardan/IRGC Conventional Forces were organized as a fully conventional, conscript fed military force. And even that wouldn't be fully comparable given the differences in chain of command between the New Model Army going through the pre-existing commands to Parliament or later the Cromwells as Lord Protectors versus the Pasardan having a parallel chain of command from the regular military by dint of the IRGC's existence.
Err...what? Cromwell's boys were religious, sure, but in those days most everybody was, to one degree or another. If you want to argue that they were more religious than their Royalist counterparts, sure, but their fervor was as much revolutionary as religious.
Also, the strength of the New Model Army was based less on its religion than its discipline. One of Cromwell's greatest strengths was his ability to get his cavalry back under control once it had routed its opponents and then use it against the rest of the opposing army rather than pursuing the fleeing foe or plundering the enemy camp.
Nor were the "Puritans" known for being a single religion outside of the (viewed as weirdos even at the time) New England settlement, and those ultimately still had dissent and splinters like those that helped force Halfway Covenants.
But again, like I said this is why Yardley is a midwit and intellectual pedophile who probably has never, ever studied the New Model Army worth a goddamn and does not understand what it was. And who I know for a fact cannot articulate why the Iranian militaries are structured like they are or the endemic paranoia and persecution of people in the professional military in witch hunts.
The "Puritan Religion" (which in reality was more like a cluster of half a dozen different "religious sects' plus a few tendencies in others) was never anything, anything like a majority in the "New Model Army" like what you're implying. Oliver Cromwell was viewed as something of an oddity even within his own movement and army for a reason, and famously grew irritated with the "Model Parliament" he helped convene because of how many people in it were supposedly corrupt or irreligious. f you asked a majority of the Parliamentarians if they were interested in pursuing a purification of the Church of England from "Popery" or Catholic Elements, you'd probably get an absolute majority to say Yes.
But if you tried to tell them that this made them comparable to the likes of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's Governing Body, that would probably have gotten you either roundly mocked or even challenged to a duel.
And again, in any case "Puritan Religion" was not enough to prevent significant chunks of the New Model Army from mutinying or conspiring or ultimately aiding in the Restoration.
This is in sharp contrast to the Taliban, who originated from a single totalitarian religious reform group that was helped birthed in Pakistani Madrassas even if it did have deviations due to loyalties or regional groups (and even then I'm pretty sure you won't find many veterans of Afghanistan that would speak highly of the Taliban's conventional combat performance, that was never their strength).
This is what happens when you don't actually know the history involved and probably got most of your "knowledge" from just taking in Restoration era Vibes from pop culture.
A few viable options, but I imagine the sort of minimal viable product is the Iranian regime’s WMD and especially nuclear facilities destroyed, a turnover of its weapons grade uranium, some kind of weapons inspections to make sure they do not try something like that again, some kind of amnesty and prisoner release for dissidents, and the regime as is making some mealy mouthed questionably sincere commitment to peace with the US and Israel.
More ideal would be regime change in favor of a pro-Western government.
“Opening the straight is impossible as long as Iran exists,”
This is wrong on two levels
Firstly: it’s “the strait” not “the straight.” Straits are bodies of water between two land regions, Straights are what Nick Fuentes pretends to be or certain kind of golf courses.
That pedantry aside…
Secondly: the idea that the strait cannot be opened so long as Iran exists is stupid. For one, the main obstacle for ships transiting now has been insurance premiums from the likes of Lloyds of London rather than Iranian regime action, and indeed we have seen multiple ships get through the straits since this conflict began, largely by temporarily turning off transponders and running the gauntlet.
For two, multiple nations can and have held the straits open in the face of Iranian attempts to close them. Indeed not that long ago on the grand scale of things the USN did it in Operation Praying Mantis and the wider Gulf Tanker War in Iran-Iraq War. The Portuguese managed to do it in the Age of Sail until British and Dutch ships came to help out the Iranians, and modern Kuwait largely developed the way it did by being able to be the Asshole Venice of the Persian Gulf undermining Ottoman and Iranian attempts to dominate the straits.
Oh yeah. And then there was 1856 and WWI and 1941 where Iran got its clock cleaned by the British.
‘But but that was then! But but dronnneees’
Yeah yeah yeah, the world has changed and drones came in. But things haven’t changed THAT much, especially since there are ways to counter the new or old threats and the US and Israel are among the best positioned to do that. In particular the Iranian Navy (and its IRGC shadow) and Air Force have proven to be paltry compared to what they were in the 1980s.
“and we cannot destroy Iran without a few million boots on the ground.”
Who the absolute fuck said anything about “destroying Iran” and how much brain damage did they suffer from huffing admixtures of glue, crystal meth, and concentrated CO2?
This was never about “destroying Iran”, this was about crippling or destroying the regime and its ability to make and use weapons on the US and Israel. If anything Trump and Netanyahu want to help trigger an Iranian national revolution against the Mullahs and restart a major street movement.
That’s different from what our old friend Saddam tried to do. Saddam wanted to at a minimum mutilate Iran with territorial annexations, and he positioned himself as a New Nebuchadnezzar conquering a Babylon from the Gutians, and “enlightened” “secular” Fascist-Communist cosplay bulwark against the Theocrats, and an Arab Sunni Nationalist against the Persian Shiites. He also had a WarPac style army with brutal and tin eared approaches to “hearts and minds” and an open question on whether he lacked more capacity to hit targets below city size with his SCUDs or lacked the capacity to care about that more. All while touching on truly ancient hatred’s between Mesopotamians and the peoples of the Iranian mountains that were thousands of years old when a certain carpenter was born in Bethlehem.
All of this couple with the fact that the revolution was more recent and it was more possible to believe it would not be as hideously evil, apocalyptic, and corrupt as it would be meant that Saddam drove almost all the Iranian population to support the Mullahcracy as the lesser evil.
We are not doing that. Indeed we are very much taking the opposite approach. That does not mean we will win, but absolutely no Western government in the history of Ever - including Alexander the Great, who conquered it and sought to make it the center of his empire - EVER has been interested in destroying Iran.
That does not mean things will work, but it does mean that anybody trying to graph Saddam’s behavior and the resistance he faced onto us while simultaneously ignoring Operation Praying Mantis is a fool.
“We also can't make a deal as the last time we tried to make a deal with them it was only to hide a sneak attack.
They know nothing we put on paper is worth the ink it’s printed with.”
God give me strength dealing with this kind of hypocritical horseshit…
Because why the absolute fuck do people write some of this while conveniently ignoring the many times the current Iranian regime made deals with us or other powers only to sponsor terrorism and sneak attacks on us, while the pearl clenches conveniently do not treat that as an impediment to a deal or talks in spite of how they wish to do so when it is done by the Allies?
In spite of how unlike said allies the Iranian regime’s teleology explicitly supports perfidy and breaking peace’s with infidels?
The truth is, even at the absolute least generous interpretation of US and Israeli actions possible, this was a sneak attack during negotiations made well after the Iranian regime did similar actions up to and trying to sponsor a genocide of Israel and the murder of a POTUS while also promising to stop murdering their own people only to continue doing so. So this is paying them back in similar but less severe coin. And moreover nations can and have gotten over previous hangovers before. The Japanese literally launched a sneak attack on Russia in 1904 and yet the two still worked together through WWI.
But the most relevant thing here is we are not going to bother trying to make a deal with the “they” you mention, because said “they” have proven to be perfidious assholes who dragged their country to hell in the hopes of creating an existential threat to the West, and whose prior track record shows they cannot be trusted. So we are either trying to kill or capture said “they” and hope they are replaced by middle management with more sense, or hope the entire “they” is removed by revolution and a new Iranian government we can do business with.
“So again...
What does winning look like?”
See above where I started this.
Also try seeing some history about blockade ops in the Strait of Hormuz and the wider history.
That would be my hope too, similar to how I would hope to see Delcy-Rodriguez and co with their heads on pikes. But practically speaking there are a lot of other win conditions short of that.
What is worse is that Netanyahu is murdering anybody who could cut a deal with Trump. Ali Larijani was taken out because he could have found a path to peace.
Larijani was basically the Iranian Eichmann, rational sure but ideologically zealous and not interested in a path to actual peace since he was still committed to existential Jihad, the nuclear weapons program, and terrorism. He was also probably prime operational mover in the recent attempts to assassinate Trump and a significant role in the October 7 attack planning. He was willing and able to do a lot of horse trading and strange bedfellows and was a truly ice blooded man, but the same things applied to Lenin and I don’t think many would claim he was interested in a path to peace.
Killing him (and no that is not murder) was probably necessary in order to get someone actually willing to bury the hatchet and abandon terrorism and the nuke weapons program from within the regime, let alone replacing it with something better.
Being more “moderate” or “pragmatic” or “calm” than the likes of Ahmadinijad is hardly a ringing endorsement.
Your second paragraph is precisely what is being suggested here. If the Euros do nothing but keep the Gulf open, that allows the US to focus on blowing the mullahs away.
Also, while the Danish and Estonian navies are small, they would be helpful. The Danes have nine frigates and six minesweepers, and the Estonians have three minesweepers. Even if they only deployed half of those to keep the strait clear of mines and Iranian miscreants, it would be a great boon.
The 3 x Iver Huitfeldt Class....which they categorically will not deploy as there are issues with the Combat System that make them a liability....they're seeking to replace urgently despite the fact that they're 15 years old...the issues became apparent in the Red Sea combat against the Houthis...
They also have the Absalon Class, these are multirole vessels that they're attempting to reclassify as ASW frigates, despite the fact they are ruinously noisy for want of anything else....Absalons are designed for low threat areas only...
The other 4 'Frigates' are the Thetis Class...these are in fact not Frigates, they are large ice strengthened OPV's...all they have is a 76mm gun and 2 MG's. And oddly enough they're rather busy....their job is patrolling around Greenland....a mission that the Danes are unlikely to abandon any time soon...for obvious reasons...
Their minehunters are small harbour MCM vessels designed to operate in the Kattegat...
As for the Estonian's they operate 3 ex Royal Navy Sandown Class Minehunters which the RN gifted them...they're not bad minehunters, but were retired by the RN as they didn't have the size and space to operate unmanned systems like the Hunt Class do...if the Estonian's sent one I'd be amazed, they've got a revanchist Russia to worry about...and a Sandown sailing to the Gulf from the Baltic will take a month+...
Seriously don't get your hopes up...no-one is riding to the rescue...
Its not as simple as the software, its the CMS, radar and other sensors integration. I doubt its insurmountable...but might be in terms of cost, time and the ultimate capability that it will deliver at the end. Sometimes its just not worth the candle...sunk cost fallacy and all that.
If we are overthrowing them I'd be dumping small arms out of C-17s exactly where the opposition needs it. I'd also be controlling the flow of oil and the associated revenue. Right now we seem to be helping everyone who is not our ally.
"At least for the first decade of the war, if you saw GBR, AUS, NLD, EST, DNK on that CJSOR line, you could take a bit of a breath as you knew there would be very few national caveats that would make their utility much different than a U.S. unit. "
Agree. And, I would add Poland and Czech, whose niche capabilities were key. One of the best commanders of ISAF was a Canadian, Rick Hillier, who made the signal contribution of excoriating the Brunssum bureaucracy in his detaching report, and releasing it before submitting it to Brunssum.
Another case of the cart before the horse. We start a war and then expect our allies to follow regardless of the consequences. I’d expect nato assistance after a ceasefire and not before. In any event Israel is not going to allow transit in the straits until their objectives are met
Agree with your first two sentences. The third needs to be tempered by the fact that the Strait of Hormuz effectively being shut down gores their ox more than ours. It is in the European nations’ interest to get it open again, regardless of the reason for closure. Israel doesn’t command the Strait, so your last statement does not compute.
You base this on the attack on the LNG facility yesterday? Aside from destroying production, what exactly has Israel done to stop transiting the strait in Iran's favor?
Why not? They dove headfirst into Ukraine and dragged us in after. If anything, this would've been a real sweet time for them to practice that 'diplomacy' they're so fond of, where they could've offered a tit-for-tat where we aid Ukraine more and they reopen the strait.
Also, they were well aware of the repercussions of Iran getting the bomb and well aware of the fact that this thing was going to go kinetic, so the 'we were surprised' is a bit disingenuous.
Zelensky was offered a ticket out of Ukraine by the Biden Administration. Yes, that's a surrender, but Ukraine isn't really our problem. It's NOT a NATO ally. Poland jumped in. The Baltics jumped in. Then Western Europe reluctantly jumped in, with Germany playing both sides and the UK basically throwing weapons at the Ukrainians. It was only after half of NATO was involved that we even started thinking about providing weapons to the Ukrainians. You may dislike the way it was handled, but they basically put themselves in a precarious position and then asked us to bail them out.
Does the entire planet and everyone on it *truly* have to be our circus and our monkeys? I admit, in the case of Ukraine... I feel a *bit* of moral culpability there on the part of the US, given how long US policy there had been a game of "I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU!" with the Russians.
I dunno, I *still* think we should offer Vicky Nuland up to Putin and see if he'll back off in exchange. Maybe a couple of the other folks who kept poking the badger with a spoon as well.
Not really. We may not have been at war with Iran, but Iran has been at war with "The Great Satan" since 1979. Taking a longer view, Iran's hostility towards us is just a continuation of Islam's general hostility towards what used to be called "Christendom", which has been an on-and-off thing for about 1500 years. Like Marxism, the ultimate goal of Islam is world domination, peacefully or otherwise.
Our old reductionist tool of "Threat = Capability times intent" if modified to "Value = Capability times intent" provides insight here...perhaps. While the strains of "The way we were" play in the background, in the cold light of day the actual capability of the UK, Canada, Germany and the like provides a brutal reality check on what the U.S. and NATO can field today. We notified but did not (apparently) consult with our "allies" before acting. Given their actual capability (UK, Germany, Canada) and willingness to participate (France) it's clear why we didn't.
People throughout the West have spent the past 47 years being unable to agree about the mullahs’ intent, so they have not been able to agree on a single conclusion to “Threat = Capability times intent". Of course, the reason for this is that some conclusions on the threat equation require immediate action, and some of us prefer inaction.
The U.S. has been firmly in the "inaction" column more often than not. Our foreign policy establishment and Military Industrial complex was highly supportive of that position most of the time. There's not as much profit to be made in short, violent, "war is hell" actions as there is in "nation building" efforts that last decades and leave things in worse shape than before. At least, one could reach that conclusion based upon U.S. military interventions since WWII. Will this be different? We'll see...
Kudos to Denmark and Estonia, indeed. "Mensch" comes to mind.
uhmmm.......all the hardware and kit being used by us in the current conflict re: Iran......did not blossom full-blown in theater overnight. Took a lot of very obvious movement, over considerable time....time enough for true allies to get with the program.
They KNEW it was coming; they know their own proximate dangers.
I honestly don't think the Europeans will show up for this one. They have become like the other animals in the child's "Little Red Hen" story, where the Hen does all the work and other animals just want to subsist off her efforts. I hope Sal is right, but I remain very skeptical for now.
What I'm hoping Trump can do is persuade them that helping to keep the Straits open is in their own interest. Iranian oil and gas on the open market, and priced in dollars, could go a long way towards reducing Europe's dependency on Russian gas. We can make that happen if they will provide aid.
I don't think they'll be reliable even if they did provide some aid. The UK and EU are in the hands of the muzzies now. Think like an Islamic and I suspect you'll better guess what actual the response will be.
There is. The little "..." link on the upper right hand corner of your comment, on the same line as your name, but right justified.
I was gonna try and include a screenshot, but my image program keeps crashing and now my computer wants to restart, so I'm just going to post this. Maybe I'll come back after the reboot and edit my comment and include the screenshot from that, if I can get the GIMP to actually run... 🤣
Nations that are not invested in reopening the straits (GB, FR, GE, China, S. Korea, Japan) should go to the back of the line (or further back) in gaining benefits from having it reopened by the US, Poland, Argentina (??), etc.
If we made it our business to grab and control dark fleet tankers and/or the Iranian flagged fleet, we could be in a better position to act like that might be what we do.
I'm not sure that's really physically possible given the economics of the energy market. Oil is *very* fungible. An increase in supply will alter prices for everyone *relatively* uniformly. Not entirely, as there are differences in quality of various crudes and their contaminants that need dealing with, and that does somewhat affect which refineries can deal with which crudes, but for the most part, a decrease or increase in the price of gasoline or diesel will have effects everywhere.
> The US is a next exporter. We don't NEED to buy foreign.
Which is only marginally relevant to the position I was trying (and perhaps failed) to express. I will try to clarify my point.
If oil were not a global market commodity where the worldwide price alters domestic conditions, for all of the possible values of "domestic" (i.e.: In the US, UK, EU, China, etc), then the situation in the Strait of Hormuz wouldn't affect *our* domestic gasoline prices at all. But when the dollar value of a barrel of oil produced in the US goes up because the global supply drops due to something like the situation in the Strait, clearly our domestic gasoline prices *do* go up. It's fundamental supply-and-demand market economics, and oil is essentially the nearly perfect commodity to demonstrate those forces with simply because it *is* so almost ideally fungible.
So, when the Strait reopens, even assuming the US then gains total control over it (which seems like something the locals who are currently somewhat less hostile towards us would object to) and oil starts moving out into the market again through that channel, the global supply will rise again, and the dollar value of a barrel of oil will go down, and prices will drop.
That's just how the economics works, unless you are suggesting that we embargo all oil sales from anyone anywhere, to anyone who didn't help us clear the Strait.
The US is in a position to be a near monopoly now in oil...The US oil production, we effectively control Iran's oil production, we can control the rest of the exports from the ME through the Strait of Hormuz.
That leaves.....the north sea? A little bit from the south China sea?
Umm, I seem to remember the Vikings doing this well over a 1000 years ago. And I bet there is a large percentage of the population of Europe the would get after the Muslim world. Just need to practice on their “ ruling classless first.
Agree in part. Have to note that in some countries (UK, perhaps GE, FR bad trend) that "ship may already have sailed". In a number of others, the "last call before departure" horn is sounding. Some of those countries possess nukes, making the religious leanings of their governments quite important. Might complicate non-proliferation strategies at the very least beyond the usual Pakistan concerns...
At this point its really moot anywhy. Iran has real time control over the Hormuz at this point. Its a kill box for anything NATO and the political will to take loses needed for sucess I do not see. The Danes are making the noises but its just to late to make a real impact now...
No, Iran does not have real time control over the straits. We have unarmed oil tankers running the straits through the magic of temporarily turning off their transponders, meaning that if the Mullahcracy is not literally handed cheat codes including a real time address on ships to bomb it can’t interdict. Allied warships continue operating in the straits freely and the main obstacle to getting more merchant shipping going is largely insurance costs, which we are trying to work.
The Iranian regime has lost most of its Air Force and navy for sure and suffered major losses to its rocketry force, and apparently decides it will get more practical benefit from what it has left launching them at far away or neutral targets like Diego Garcia or Qatar than trying to use them to hit soft targets in its own front porch like they threatened and flaunted as one of their great advantages and that they had modest initial success doing in the Iran-Iraq Tanker War before Praying Mantis and now they are desperately offering nations free passage if they will evict US and Israeli diplomats, probably as a desperate attempt to shorten an unworkable kill list without blatantly losing face or stepping down further.
None of these indicate Iran as control over the straits, none of these indicate it even has workable surveillance or eyes on the straits.
Nothing of consiquence passes through the strait without Iranian approval, thats just a reality. The Iranians dont need surveillence, the Chinese and Russians provide that. All the Iranians need are speed boats and binoculars.
Iran does not need a navy or air force either, thats what their growing stocks of hypersonic missiles are for. The iranians have enough now they only use the ones with one ton warheads...
“ Nothing of consiquence passes through the strait without Iranian approval, thats just a reality. ”
So the Iranian regime approved our navy sailing in and blowing up a lot of their positions while threatening to strike and or take targets like Kharg, thus revisiting some of the great historic nightmares in Iranian History like the British landings at Busher. In 1856 and 1915, and the conquest of Abadan in 1941?
And it also approved ships like the Karachi and Pine Gas making them look like absolute idiots by turning off their transponders and running the gauntlet quickly and rather safely, resulting in significant market shifts and a turn on Iranian rhetoric to their farcical “pls expel Israeli and US diplomats and we let you pass”? (An offer not even taken up by their greatest allies like Pakistan, Russia, the PRC, or DPRK)?
Yeah ok. Gonna press D to Doubt. Because if this is really stuff they approved, it sounds like whoever is running the Mullahcracy approved a really stupid strategic posture that just makes their credibility degrade
We still have dozens of ships going through the straits day by day, a fraction of the pre conflict number and a major glut but still a significant proportion.
“ The Iranians dont need surveillence, the Chinese and Russians provide that.”
Assuming we do not interfere with PRC and Ru attempts to do so, and assuming they can network to give the Iranians a window to actually strike. Which looks like they are not doing so well at. In part since they don’t want to have the Iranians sinking their own ships as theIRGC threatened to do.
So the recon they are giving is mostly on other stuff like our military movements, not on the convoys.
“All the Iranians need are speed boats and binoculars.”
And the ability to get them in far enough without being destroyed like we do to them in Praying Mantis. And so far they have show themselves to significantly lack said capacity. Especially since speedboats usually requires some kind of port facilities and we have eyes on them.
The fact that they are mostly limited to regurgitating kills from the 1980s and to periodic nonlethal hits like on the Prima indicates they are not doing a decisive job and that dozens of ships are going through the straits without Iranian approval every single day.
“Iran does not need a navy or air force either, thats what their growing stocks of hypersonic missiles are for. “
Again, why are they not making good use of them? And we know they aren’t because their real and confirmed hit numbers are dismal.
And that is ignoring how we have had great success crippling their amount of fire by going after the platforms that launch them.
“The iranians have enough now they only use the ones with one ton warheads...”
So then they need to use them because right now they look like impotent idiots. As do most of the people claiming nothing gets through the straits without Iran’s say so because they clearly have not studied things like the Tanker War of the 1980s, where the Mullahcracy still failed to close the straits for most of it but do much more significant, decisive damage than we’re seeing.
The USN sails nowhere near the Gulf at this point. Any strikes are stand off and often require vulnerable refueling. Iranian weapons can reach Ny part of the Gulf. Thats control and its not changing. Tankers will move when Iran lets them move.If you are Russian or Chinese flaged you have no issues...
"The USN sails nowhere near the Gulf at this point."
I'm not sure where you are getting this info, because while yes the main body of the involved forces are well away from the Gulf and the Strait, we still do send ships in rather frequently, and that goes double for the Arab allies nearby like the UAE.
We do prefer bombing their mosquito fleet and other targets from the air or with standoff strikes like cruise missiles, but we can and do send surface ships in and through the Straits. Other navies like the Indian Navy are even bolder and have forces outright centered around the Gulf of Oman loitering and conducting almost full rotations in and out.
"Tankers will move when Iran lets them move."
Which again raises the cases of the Karachi and how the vast majority of the tankers getting through made absolutely no effort to negotiate with Iran and made it look stupid.
"If you are Russian or Chinese flaged you have no issues..."
That is blatantly not true, hence why the volume of PRC and Russian shipping faces similar schedules and get through as others. Namely, progress is slowed and about a sixth of what it usually is, but they still get through.
Which again points to how the Iranian regime does not control the straits and has failed to get even its allies to agree to the terms it demanded.
Lloyds of London attested to how we have more than 50 ships crossing the straits day in and day out, almost entirely without Iranian approval, and with less than half a dozen hit so far. That is a hit rate of between 5%-10%, which is not sufficient for purpose and will probably get lower as we go on.
"More then 20 countries are now negotiating with Iran for passage through the straits."
A: NegotiatING, as in not accepting Iranian terms aka "Evict US and Israeli diplomats and we let you pass." So not benefitting your actual argument that Iran can impose terms on others and force them toa bide by it.
B: Ok, name the countries. Go on.
Because for now the main "more than 20 countries" thing relevant are a 22 nation alliance pledging to keep the straits open and threatening Iran with greater violence if it keeps FAing.
"When you can collect tolls you have control of the road..."
Except Iran shows no indication it can control the road or extract tolls. Dumping mines in the strait is not an indication of toll collecting or control, it's an indication of trying to piss in the other guy's cereal because you can't outright have the cereal yourself.
But leaving that aside...
If you can control the road you can collect tolls until you get a bunch of people angry enough to rally together, burn down your castle, and hang you. As the original Robber Barons of the Rhine found out.
Russian and Chinese flagged shipping passes without issue, ours not so much. Iran can demand what they want because their mines and missles control the mouth of the Gulf. Any money collected or Iranian oil sold will not be in dollars either so banking not a problem.
Iran now controls the tempo of this regional conflict. They hit US bases and Israel several times a day at will. These are real military assets while we strike girls schools and clearly market hospitals. They have now shown they can hit Diego Garcia when they wish as well. I guess those B-2's will have to be moved to...continental United States ?
CDR Salamander wins todays "George Orwell ""Did I call it or what"" award! Again! European Countries and Japan to Help Secure Strait of Hormuz to Stabilize Energy Markets Moral high ground or enlightened self interest? He asks, you decide!
Denmark is a rich country but chooses to spend their wealth on a welfare state. I don't see this changing. When I saw the headline, I thought about Norway. Norway, unlike the rest of Europe has a superabundance of hydropower. The rest of Europe is stealing that resource through the common grid which is causing unrest in Norway as they get hit with rate increases. Also Norway, unlike the UK, still has their North Sea oil production intact. So they get higher prices as long as Hormuz stays closed. Norway also has the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, fueled oil revenues. It owns about 1.5% of global wealth.
Denmark is deeply capitalist. Their very high standard of living is buttressed by the fact that one does not lose everything when you catch a dose of the cancer. What you call welfare, I call a rational national response to the unpredictability of medical events.
The USA spends more on per capita healthcare than Denmark with much worse outcomes. They also have created some enormously profitable heath-care manufacturing companies.
I suppose you think free public education is welfare. The Danish educational system is better than ours.
Zorost: I'll take a crack (or, I'm smoking it). What does winning look like? The US takes Kharg Island, largely intact. The Republican Guard's rank and file decide the Mullahs are not worth dying for at the hands of Iran's own angry people. The Gulf States come begging at the White House for peace and quiet, and won't get it unless they fully recognize Israel, round up the Muslim Brotherhood, boot Hamas, re-settle the Arabs living in Gaza and join the 21st Century.
"Have you looked up the history of Iran?"
Have you? I really, really don't think you have. The idea that the Strait cannot be opened so long as Iran exists is provably, objectively false and historically illiterate on a grand scale. Is it EASY? Usually no (though sometimes it has been). Will it be harder now in this age of Shaheed Drone Spam and air dropping naval mines? Probably. Will it be undoable? Certainly not. Indeed frankly the bigger cost so far in transiting the strait has been dealing with insurer panic cranking up premiums so much that most skippers can't afford, not the Iranians interdicting it.
And the kicker is that you unthinkingly keep making barely veiled allusions to the Iran-Iraq War and all that Iran went through in that war (which is a fair point) while UTTERLY IGNORING THE MOST RELEVANT PART OF IT that was the Tanker War and particularly the US reprisal that was Operation Praying Mantis to punish the Mullahcracy for damaging one of our ships and to ensure they could not close the Straits.
To some people that may sound smart or profound. To others like me that have a historical memory that goes back before 1990 and isn't limited to hot take highlights, it's... something else.
"They lost far more people in the Iran/ Iraq war than we could kill short of boots on the ground or WMDs, and still didn't give up or revolt."
This is where I'd do a slow clap and say 'congratulations, you have shown the ability to look on Wikipedia's page for the Iran-Iraq War, now can we talk about the actually relevant comparisons?'
But frankly that's not even appropriate for the reasons I'll mention.
A: Contra to what you said, Iranians DID Revolt during the Iran-Iraq War. It's just that so few did (for reasons I'm going to go through). If you bother actually looking at the Wikipedia article on the Iran-Iraq War, you will quite literally see that below Iraq's infobar you will have a whole lot of rebel groups in Iran, ranging from Saddam's Arab Separatist Astroturf "DRFLA" to the actually existing and more serious MEK/Peoples' Mujahadeen and the NCRI and the Kurdish (yea, Kurds fighting alongside Saddam....) Salvation Force and PDKI. These groups fielded dozens of thousands of fighters (probably at least 50,000 in total). And indeed one of the last major battles of the conflict was the Iranian regime stomping on the MEK's last ditch offensive in Operation Eternal Light.
What mattered is that for reasons we'll get into soon, *Not ENOUGH Iranians* revolted against the regime or gave up in favor of Saddam. There are a lot of reasons for that, but most of them boil down to a mixture of the truly ancient hatreds - Sunni versus Shiite, Arab versus Persian, and Mesopotamians versus Iranics - as well as Saddam's own tender, loving doctrine towards hearts and minds in Iran (for the record that's DEEP Sarcasm), his lacking military capacity, and the nature of his regime seeking to dismember Iran first and maybe topple the Mullahs sometime later.
B: As I've mentioned before, Saddam's War Aims were fundamentally about dismembering Iran by annexing at least Khuzestan on behalf of his particular flavor of Fascist-Communist-Arab Socialist Cosplay dystopia and the supremacy of Sunni Islam. This would be unappealing enough even before you factor in the literal genocidal brutality of Baathist era Iraqi doctrine and "war" fighting, or the fact that the limitations in WarPac export doctrine and capabilities as well as Baathist indifference meant they preferred deep strikes on Iranian urban centers with basically zero discernment. But what made it worse was that Saddam in his LARPing about how he was the new Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar intentionally leaned on some of the oldest hatreds in world history by positioning himself as the New Babylonian Champion of Mesopotamian Civilization against the "Barbaric" Gutians that lived in the Zagros and parts of the Iranian Plateau. The results were unsurprising.
All of this helped contribute to a Rally Around the Flag Effect (as well as the Mullahcracy being less openly deranged and apocalyptic at the time and it being more possible to believe something good would come of it, as well as the decision by the Ayatollahs to lean off of some of their more radical purges or policies - people "forget" Israel was aligned with Iran at the time while the US was sponsoring Saddam's Iraq)).
The US and Israel and co are not trying to do the same thing Saddam did, or "Destroy Iran." They are trying to destroy the Iranian regime's centers of gravity and ability to project force, and secondarily try to get Iranians to destroy the regime itself. There has been zero talk of territorial concessions of any kind or some kind of crusade against "Gutians" or Shiite Islam or what have you.
This is very different from what Saddam tried to do. Helped by the fact that the US and Israel have shown themselves to be vastly more competent and discerning than Saddam, such as how the Iranian Air Force and Navy maintained Aerial dominance and naval dominance for most of the conflict. That's.... NOT the case here.
Does that mean it will work? No.
But it does mean that pretending the US will need to fight large scale trench battles against the Iranian Military while deploying secret police like Saddam's Mukhabarat to torture and kill people in the hundreds of thousands in order to convince Iranians they really want to join the Greater Neo-Babylonian Arab Reich is daft.
"Most of the population seems to like living in a theocracy, "
I am sorry, but literally Wut?
Wut?
Where the devil are you getting this idea?
The Iranian Clergy has NEVER, EVER Had the primary loyalty of a majority of the Iranian population in its entire several thousand year history. That goes particularly for the Shiite Clergy of recent centuries. Starting with the fact that they had to try and assassinate their former champion Ismail after doctrinal disputes only to get stomped on. In 1978 they took power after the Shah left in concert with various mostly leftist dissident groups, before moving quickly to dominate military and paramilitary groups and crush them in a coup later that year. They have faced regular rebel groups (see what I mentioned bout them) and protests ever since, only growing more frequent and popular in recent decades. Hence the need to use butchers like the Solemanis to imprison, rape, and murder their own people by the hundreds of thousands in order to keep power.
Theocracy is not an integral part of the Iranian character or culture, and indeed it is DEEPLY unpopular. The recent regime has generally held power by getting the at best passive acceptance or support of the public as a better alternative to the likes of the Shah or Saddam's Iraq (and even that's dubious now that they have so mismanaged the country), and usually by terrorized submission. Terror that is going by the wayside with the very public disintegration of many of their leaders and much of the apparatus of control. The Iranian clergy have been at their most influential when they have been on the sidelines acting as a parallel center of power and charity able to stir public support by heckling the Shah/Prime Minister/etc. Actually holding power though has proven to be a debacle for htem.
And we're seeing that play out.
"CIA instigated photo ops for CNN not withstanding."
I don't like giving much credit to the CIA but if they were doing this for a "photo op" for "CNN" they are dumber than even your claims. But I don't think that is so. They're at worst photo ops for the rest of the Middle East and the Iranian public.
"Recognize Israel? They are the ones who started this mess."
Ahhh, there it is. That flavor of retarded Israel hatred.
No, no Israel didn't "Start this mess." Indeed, if you actually studied the Iran-Iraq War, you would KNOW that Israel supported the Iranian Mullahcracy during that time against Iraq, and that indeed the Mullahs had a longer history of hating on the US than they did Israel. There's a reason for that.
So what we're seeing now is a convergence of interests. The Mullahcracy hates both the US and Israel because we are the "Great and Little Satans" for the crimes of being Infidels that are not their particular flavor of apocalyptic Twelver Shiite Death Cult. We hate them because they took power from an ally and proceeded to launch decades of terrorism and war against us and other countries (see: the Buenos Aires bombing) starting with the Embassy Hijacking, and apparently bragged to us about how they would not give up nuclear weapons. Israel hates them because they have tried to genocide them and Jews out of existence. So while there is an unsurprising convergence of interests, we came at this from different angles and for different reasons.
But the people who started this were the Iranian regime.
And if you DARE try to lecture me about Operation Ajax or St. Mossadegh the Coup Plotter or something about Anglo-Iranian Oil as the "Weaaal" start of this, I am going to mock you heartily. Then I will point out the basic fact that the Iranian Clergy SUPPORTED THE SAME SIDE AS WE DID in those conflicts and that the Mullahcracy's love for St. Mossadegh the Useful Idjiot was very, VERY newly discovered and almost exclusively for external consumption.
"The fact that your win conditions reads like a fantasy should tell you something about how likely we are to win."
Well I spoke about my own win conditions, and they are hardly a fantasy. Indeed, they are far less extensive than many actually realized Western operations in Iran in the last century. (Admittedly 1941 is kind of cheating but still).
And it's definitely less fantasy than claiming the Strait of Hormuz cannot be opened because of the Iranian Hive Mind's Warhammer 40k Level Krieg devotion to a theocracy that they by and large hate.
One minor quibble: if, say, the Kurds and Azeris get involved, they might want the parts of Iran that are majority their people.
I don't know how peeved the Persian Iranians would be over that, but I can't imagine them being enthused.
Oh yeah I agree, and it also might prompt a rally around the flag effect (even if grudgingly) that benefits the regime, sort of like how even English lords or towns favorable to the Empress/Queen that the King of Scotland invaded Northern England on behalf of wound up supporting the army in the name of her enemy at the Battle of the Standard. It also might prompt Erdogan to support the regime more.
Big issue I suppose is the degree to which Azeri or Kurdish forces can appear "inoffensive" or be linked in to a wider Iranian rebellion.
But all of this is inside baseball on a level far beyond what this apparently Neo-Nazi Jew Baiting Idiot (you can check some of their other comments or those they like or "retweet") is capable of comprehending. Someone trying to claim that the Strait of Hormuz cannot be opened while Iran exists in spite of ignoring how Saddam's Iraq managed it both with and without US support is egregiously ignorant, as is someone claiming Churchill is a "Jewish Golem."
That is a tall order.
With all possible respect and wish for your dream, I think all of that will happen some time after the Second Coming.
Alan: My full-time employment as a prophet ran out some time ago, so, I'm just freelancing, now.
👍 Fair enough. My authority for that position is limited to me and my immediate family.
The Iranian military is not like the US Army. The rank and file are religious zealots; the best analogy to Iran's army would be Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army.
Tell me you haven't studied the Iranian military without telling me you haven't studied the Iranian Military.
"The Iranian military is not like the US Army. The rank and file are religious zealots; the best analogy to Iran's army would be Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army."
There's so much wrong with this it isn't even funny, and even if this comparison had been fitting it REALLY Doesn't say what you want to pretend it does.
So let's go through this.
1: "The Iranian military...rank and file are religious zealots."
No, no they aren't, certainly not in total or as a whole. Are there religious zealots in the regular Iranian military? Sure.
But A: This does not mean the military as a whole are religious zealots.
B: This does not mean a given religious zealot is actually a religious zealot ON BEHALF OF THE MULLAHCRACY or supportive of it.
C: This does not mean the military would have to go along with said religious zealots.
But any cursory look at the history of the Iran-Iraq War or the differences between Iran's military and other outfits like the IRGC show how the regime very much does NOT expect or treat its regular military as being composed of religious zealots, and indeed has established parallel organs like the IRGC precisely as a check to the more secular, less "reliable" (at least as perception regular military. With the IRGC serving a comparable role to the SS or to the NKVD during Beria's apogee. And even there we're seeing desertions and defections, as well as more than a few real or alleged spies.
2. "The best analogy to Iran's army would be Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army."
The fact that you think this is a good analogy is an unintentional self-own.
The New Model Army as a whole was just that: an army raised on new models to reform the existing Parliamentary Army, and used in parallel with existing Parliamentary militias and association armies. It was not some kind of Anglican or Puritan Jihadi Organization, and while the rank and file were probably religiously devout (and arguably religious zealots by our standards) very few of them like Cromwell's Regiments of Horse were actually organized along those lines.
Moreover, the New Model Army was riven by conspiracies, political and religious dissent, and a host of others.
And of course most famously, the New Model Army had several of its units bring down the Cromwellian Government and organize the royal Restoration for Charles II. There's a reason the Coldstream Guards are the oldest continuous British Army unit.
The closest thing you'd get to the New Model Army in an Iranian Context were if the Pasardan/IRGC Conventional Forces were organized as a fully conventional, conscript fed military force. And even that wouldn't be fully comparable given the differences in chain of command between the New Model Army going through the pre-existing commands to Parliament or later the Cromwells as Lord Protectors versus the Pasardan having a parallel chain of command from the regular military by dint of the IRGC's existence.
Err...what? Cromwell's boys were religious, sure, but in those days most everybody was, to one degree or another. If you want to argue that they were more religious than their Royalist counterparts, sure, but their fervor was as much revolutionary as religious.
Also, the strength of the New Model Army was based less on its religion than its discipline. One of Cromwell's greatest strengths was his ability to get his cavalry back under control once it had routed its opponents and then use it against the rest of the opposing army rather than pursuing the fleeing foe or plundering the enemy camp.
The puritan religion was disciplined; extraordinarily disciplined. Like the Taliban, obedience and discipline were part of the religion.
The Taliban have not been known for being extremely disciplined and controlled on the battlefield.
Nor were the "Puritans" known for being a single religion outside of the (viewed as weirdos even at the time) New England settlement, and those ultimately still had dissent and splinters like those that helped force Halfway Covenants.
But again, like I said this is why Yardley is a midwit and intellectual pedophile who probably has never, ever studied the New Model Army worth a goddamn and does not understand what it was. And who I know for a fact cannot articulate why the Iranian militaries are structured like they are or the endemic paranoia and persecution of people in the professional military in witch hunts.
The "Puritan Religion" (which in reality was more like a cluster of half a dozen different "religious sects' plus a few tendencies in others) was never anything, anything like a majority in the "New Model Army" like what you're implying. Oliver Cromwell was viewed as something of an oddity even within his own movement and army for a reason, and famously grew irritated with the "Model Parliament" he helped convene because of how many people in it were supposedly corrupt or irreligious. f you asked a majority of the Parliamentarians if they were interested in pursuing a purification of the Church of England from "Popery" or Catholic Elements, you'd probably get an absolute majority to say Yes.
But if you tried to tell them that this made them comparable to the likes of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's Governing Body, that would probably have gotten you either roundly mocked or even challenged to a duel.
And again, in any case "Puritan Religion" was not enough to prevent significant chunks of the New Model Army from mutinying or conspiring or ultimately aiding in the Restoration.
This is in sharp contrast to the Taliban, who originated from a single totalitarian religious reform group that was helped birthed in Pakistani Madrassas even if it did have deviations due to loyalties or regional groups (and even then I'm pretty sure you won't find many veterans of Afghanistan that would speak highly of the Taliban's conventional combat performance, that was never their strength).
This is what happens when you don't actually know the history involved and probably got most of your "knowledge" from just taking in Restoration era Vibes from pop culture.
“What exactly does winning look like here?”
A few viable options, but I imagine the sort of minimal viable product is the Iranian regime’s WMD and especially nuclear facilities destroyed, a turnover of its weapons grade uranium, some kind of weapons inspections to make sure they do not try something like that again, some kind of amnesty and prisoner release for dissidents, and the regime as is making some mealy mouthed questionably sincere commitment to peace with the US and Israel.
More ideal would be regime change in favor of a pro-Western government.
“Opening the straight is impossible as long as Iran exists,”
This is wrong on two levels
Firstly: it’s “the strait” not “the straight.” Straits are bodies of water between two land regions, Straights are what Nick Fuentes pretends to be or certain kind of golf courses.
That pedantry aside…
Secondly: the idea that the strait cannot be opened so long as Iran exists is stupid. For one, the main obstacle for ships transiting now has been insurance premiums from the likes of Lloyds of London rather than Iranian regime action, and indeed we have seen multiple ships get through the straits since this conflict began, largely by temporarily turning off transponders and running the gauntlet.
For two, multiple nations can and have held the straits open in the face of Iranian attempts to close them. Indeed not that long ago on the grand scale of things the USN did it in Operation Praying Mantis and the wider Gulf Tanker War in Iran-Iraq War. The Portuguese managed to do it in the Age of Sail until British and Dutch ships came to help out the Iranians, and modern Kuwait largely developed the way it did by being able to be the Asshole Venice of the Persian Gulf undermining Ottoman and Iranian attempts to dominate the straits.
Oh yeah. And then there was 1856 and WWI and 1941 where Iran got its clock cleaned by the British.
‘But but that was then! But but dronnneees’
Yeah yeah yeah, the world has changed and drones came in. But things haven’t changed THAT much, especially since there are ways to counter the new or old threats and the US and Israel are among the best positioned to do that. In particular the Iranian Navy (and its IRGC shadow) and Air Force have proven to be paltry compared to what they were in the 1980s.
“and we cannot destroy Iran without a few million boots on the ground.”
Who the absolute fuck said anything about “destroying Iran” and how much brain damage did they suffer from huffing admixtures of glue, crystal meth, and concentrated CO2?
This was never about “destroying Iran”, this was about crippling or destroying the regime and its ability to make and use weapons on the US and Israel. If anything Trump and Netanyahu want to help trigger an Iranian national revolution against the Mullahs and restart a major street movement.
That’s different from what our old friend Saddam tried to do. Saddam wanted to at a minimum mutilate Iran with territorial annexations, and he positioned himself as a New Nebuchadnezzar conquering a Babylon from the Gutians, and “enlightened” “secular” Fascist-Communist cosplay bulwark against the Theocrats, and an Arab Sunni Nationalist against the Persian Shiites. He also had a WarPac style army with brutal and tin eared approaches to “hearts and minds” and an open question on whether he lacked more capacity to hit targets below city size with his SCUDs or lacked the capacity to care about that more. All while touching on truly ancient hatred’s between Mesopotamians and the peoples of the Iranian mountains that were thousands of years old when a certain carpenter was born in Bethlehem.
All of this couple with the fact that the revolution was more recent and it was more possible to believe it would not be as hideously evil, apocalyptic, and corrupt as it would be meant that Saddam drove almost all the Iranian population to support the Mullahcracy as the lesser evil.
We are not doing that. Indeed we are very much taking the opposite approach. That does not mean we will win, but absolutely no Western government in the history of Ever - including Alexander the Great, who conquered it and sought to make it the center of his empire - EVER has been interested in destroying Iran.
That does not mean things will work, but it does mean that anybody trying to graph Saddam’s behavior and the resistance he faced onto us while simultaneously ignoring Operation Praying Mantis is a fool.
“We also can't make a deal as the last time we tried to make a deal with them it was only to hide a sneak attack.
They know nothing we put on paper is worth the ink it’s printed with.”
God give me strength dealing with this kind of hypocritical horseshit…
Because why the absolute fuck do people write some of this while conveniently ignoring the many times the current Iranian regime made deals with us or other powers only to sponsor terrorism and sneak attacks on us, while the pearl clenches conveniently do not treat that as an impediment to a deal or talks in spite of how they wish to do so when it is done by the Allies?
In spite of how unlike said allies the Iranian regime’s teleology explicitly supports perfidy and breaking peace’s with infidels?
The truth is, even at the absolute least generous interpretation of US and Israeli actions possible, this was a sneak attack during negotiations made well after the Iranian regime did similar actions up to and trying to sponsor a genocide of Israel and the murder of a POTUS while also promising to stop murdering their own people only to continue doing so. So this is paying them back in similar but less severe coin. And moreover nations can and have gotten over previous hangovers before. The Japanese literally launched a sneak attack on Russia in 1904 and yet the two still worked together through WWI.
But the most relevant thing here is we are not going to bother trying to make a deal with the “they” you mention, because said “they” have proven to be perfidious assholes who dragged their country to hell in the hopes of creating an existential threat to the West, and whose prior track record shows they cannot be trusted. So we are either trying to kill or capture said “they” and hope they are replaced by middle management with more sense, or hope the entire “they” is removed by revolution and a new Iranian government we can do business with.
“So again...
What does winning look like?”
See above where I started this.
Also try seeing some history about blockade ops in the Strait of Hormuz and the wider history.
Winning in Iran?
Total regime annihilation.
Nothing more is expected. Nothing less is acceptable.
That would be my hope too, similar to how I would hope to see Delcy-Rodriguez and co with their heads on pikes. But practically speaking there are a lot of other win conditions short of that.
What is worse is that Netanyahu is murdering anybody who could cut a deal with Trump. Ali Larijani was taken out because he could have found a path to peace.
Larijani was basically the Iranian Eichmann, rational sure but ideologically zealous and not interested in a path to actual peace since he was still committed to existential Jihad, the nuclear weapons program, and terrorism. He was also probably prime operational mover in the recent attempts to assassinate Trump and a significant role in the October 7 attack planning. He was willing and able to do a lot of horse trading and strange bedfellows and was a truly ice blooded man, but the same things applied to Lenin and I don’t think many would claim he was interested in a path to peace.
Killing him (and no that is not murder) was probably necessary in order to get someone actually willing to bury the hatchet and abandon terrorism and the nuke weapons program from within the regime, let alone replacing it with something better.
Being more “moderate” or “pragmatic” or “calm” than the likes of Ahmadinijad is hardly a ringing endorsement.
Iran has assiduously avoided any "path to peace" since 1979.
Denmark? Estonia? Seriously? Was the Duchy of Grand Fenwick not available?
NATO and our European allies are completely worthless.
Our focus should be on overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Let the other nations who depend on gulf oil patrol the area.
Your second paragraph is precisely what is being suggested here. If the Euros do nothing but keep the Gulf open, that allows the US to focus on blowing the mullahs away.
Also, while the Danish and Estonian navies are small, they would be helpful. The Danes have nine frigates and six minesweepers, and the Estonians have three minesweepers. Even if they only deployed half of those to keep the strait clear of mines and Iranian miscreants, it would be a great boon.
The Danish Navy has 3 frigates...
The 3 x Iver Huitfeldt Class....which they categorically will not deploy as there are issues with the Combat System that make them a liability....they're seeking to replace urgently despite the fact that they're 15 years old...the issues became apparent in the Red Sea combat against the Houthis...
They also have the Absalon Class, these are multirole vessels that they're attempting to reclassify as ASW frigates, despite the fact they are ruinously noisy for want of anything else....Absalons are designed for low threat areas only...
The other 4 'Frigates' are the Thetis Class...these are in fact not Frigates, they are large ice strengthened OPV's...all they have is a 76mm gun and 2 MG's. And oddly enough they're rather busy....their job is patrolling around Greenland....a mission that the Danes are unlikely to abandon any time soon...for obvious reasons...
Their minehunters are small harbour MCM vessels designed to operate in the Kattegat...
As for the Estonian's they operate 3 ex Royal Navy Sandown Class Minehunters which the RN gifted them...they're not bad minehunters, but were retired by the RN as they didn't have the size and space to operate unmanned systems like the Hunt Class do...if the Estonian's sent one I'd be amazed, they've got a revanchist Russia to worry about...and a Sandown sailing to the Gulf from the Baltic will take a month+...
Seriously don't get your hopes up...no-one is riding to the rescue...
I would be interested in your analysis of why the Huitfeldt Class can't be repaired.
Here's the Head of the Danish Navy...
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/06/danish-chief-of-defence-recommends-abandoning-frigate-upgrade/
That's troubling. The softwear has glitches so you scrap the vessel? The Germans and the Dutch use the same system. You can't use their softwear?
Its not as simple as the software, its the CMS, radar and other sensors integration. I doubt its insurmountable...but might be in terms of cost, time and the ultimate capability that it will deliver at the end. Sometimes its just not worth the candle...sunk cost fallacy and all that.
One can but hope!
I agree, those minesweeper would be a great help and with Nine Frigates to defend them it would get done quick!
If we are overthrowing them I'd be dumping small arms out of C-17s exactly where the opposition needs it. I'd also be controlling the flow of oil and the associated revenue. Right now we seem to be helping everyone who is not our ally.
That may be happening already. The news we get is often wrong or incomplete.
Let's hope.
Let them buy our oil.
I think you missed one here:
"At least for the first decade of the war, if you saw GBR, AUS, NLD, EST, DNK on that CJSOR line, you could take a bit of a breath as you knew there would be very few national caveats that would make their utility much different than a U.S. unit. "
Canada
Agree. And, I would add Poland and Czech, whose niche capabilities were key. One of the best commanders of ISAF was a Canadian, Rick Hillier, who made the signal contribution of excoriating the Brunssum bureaucracy in his detaching report, and releasing it before submitting it to Brunssum.
You're correct. Unintentional oversight. Mefixie.
It's OK, I don't really think of Canadians as foreigners either. 🤣🤣🤣
Another case of the cart before the horse. We start a war and then expect our allies to follow regardless of the consequences. I’d expect nato assistance after a ceasefire and not before. In any event Israel is not going to allow transit in the straits until their objectives are met
Agree with your first two sentences. The third needs to be tempered by the fact that the Strait of Hormuz effectively being shut down gores their ox more than ours. It is in the European nations’ interest to get it open again, regardless of the reason for closure. Israel doesn’t command the Strait, so your last statement does not compute.
You base this on the attack on the LNG facility yesterday? Aside from destroying production, what exactly has Israel done to stop transiting the strait in Iran's favor?
Why not? They dove headfirst into Ukraine and dragged us in after. If anything, this would've been a real sweet time for them to practice that 'diplomacy' they're so fond of, where they could've offered a tit-for-tat where we aid Ukraine more and they reopen the strait.
Also, they were well aware of the repercussions of Iran getting the bomb and well aware of the fact that this thing was going to go kinetic, so the 'we were surprised' is a bit disingenuous.
How did Europe 'dive first into Ukraine and drag you in after' exactly?
US was a signatory of the Budapest Agreement...US also provided lethal aid long before most, if not all European states....
Zelensky was offered a ticket out of Ukraine by the Biden Administration. Yes, that's a surrender, but Ukraine isn't really our problem. It's NOT a NATO ally. Poland jumped in. The Baltics jumped in. Then Western Europe reluctantly jumped in, with Germany playing both sides and the UK basically throwing weapons at the Ukrainians. It was only after half of NATO was involved that we even started thinking about providing weapons to the Ukrainians. You may dislike the way it was handled, but they basically put themselves in a precarious position and then asked us to bail them out.
The US sent Javelins into Ukraine way ahead of anyone, including the large UK NLAW shipments prior to the invasion....
Suggest you do a little research...
One does not need research when regurgitating talking points.
It is jarring to see a response to an invasion as "diving in."
Apparently the MAGA policy is just to surrender immediately...
Does the entire planet and everyone on it *truly* have to be our circus and our monkeys? I admit, in the case of Ukraine... I feel a *bit* of moral culpability there on the part of the US, given how long US policy there had been a game of "I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU!" with the Russians.
I dunno, I *still* think we should offer Vicky Nuland up to Putin and see if he'll back off in exchange. Maybe a couple of the other folks who kept poking the badger with a spoon as well.
*sigh*
"We start a war and then expect our allies to follow"
Who do we think we are, Israel?
"We start a war "
Not really. We may not have been at war with Iran, but Iran has been at war with "The Great Satan" since 1979. Taking a longer view, Iran's hostility towards us is just a continuation of Islam's general hostility towards what used to be called "Christendom", which has been an on-and-off thing for about 1500 years. Like Marxism, the ultimate goal of Islam is world domination, peacefully or otherwise.
Our old reductionist tool of "Threat = Capability times intent" if modified to "Value = Capability times intent" provides insight here...perhaps. While the strains of "The way we were" play in the background, in the cold light of day the actual capability of the UK, Canada, Germany and the like provides a brutal reality check on what the U.S. and NATO can field today. We notified but did not (apparently) consult with our "allies" before acting. Given their actual capability (UK, Germany, Canada) and willingness to participate (France) it's clear why we didn't.
People throughout the West have spent the past 47 years being unable to agree about the mullahs’ intent, so they have not been able to agree on a single conclusion to “Threat = Capability times intent". Of course, the reason for this is that some conclusions on the threat equation require immediate action, and some of us prefer inaction.
The U.S. has been firmly in the "inaction" column more often than not. Our foreign policy establishment and Military Industrial complex was highly supportive of that position most of the time. There's not as much profit to be made in short, violent, "war is hell" actions as there is in "nation building" efforts that last decades and leave things in worse shape than before. At least, one could reach that conclusion based upon U.S. military interventions since WWII. Will this be different? We'll see...
We were also, IIRC, a bit busy maintaining things against the Warsaw Pact at the time.
However, they still had a very substantial force in Europe at the time, and there were concerns that they might try for a short victorious war.
"People throughout the West have spent the past 47 years being unable to agree about the mullahs’ intent"
Some call it "willful ignorance".
Including me
Kudos to Denmark and Estonia, indeed. "Mensch" comes to mind.
uhmmm.......all the hardware and kit being used by us in the current conflict re: Iran......did not blossom full-blown in theater overnight. Took a lot of very obvious movement, over considerable time....time enough for true allies to get with the program.
They KNEW it was coming; they know their own proximate dangers.
Is that the entire eu army standing behind rutte in that video?
I honestly don't think the Europeans will show up for this one. They have become like the other animals in the child's "Little Red Hen" story, where the Hen does all the work and other animals just want to subsist off her efforts. I hope Sal is right, but I remain very skeptical for now.
You must read Don Surber's blog..... :- )
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/not-i-said-the-nato-nations
What I'm hoping Trump can do is persuade them that helping to keep the Straits open is in their own interest. Iranian oil and gas on the open market, and priced in dollars, could go a long way towards reducing Europe's dependency on Russian gas. We can make that happen if they will provide aid.
I don't think they'll be reliable even if they did provide some aid. The UK and EU are in the hands of the muzzies now. Think like an Islamic and I suspect you'll better guess what actual the response will be.
Ugh. No edit capability.
There is. The little "..." link on the upper right hand corner of your comment, on the same line as your name, but right justified.
I was gonna try and include a screenshot, but my image program keeps crashing and now my computer wants to restart, so I'm just going to post this. Maybe I'll come back after the reboot and edit my comment and include the screenshot from that, if I can get the GIMP to actually run... 🤣
Edit:
Here: https://i.ibb.co/9mGDHXZ1/Screenshot-2026-03-20-06-35-42.png
More edits:
Hrm. Darnit. The screenshot didn't actually capture the mouse pointer hovering over the link I wanted to point out...
Still more edits:
OK, circled the link in green, with an arrow pointing at it, rehosted screenshot again, changed link. SO MUCH EFFORT JUST TO BE HELPFUL, YEESH!!! 🤣
Nations that are not invested in reopening the straits (GB, FR, GE, China, S. Korea, Japan) should go to the back of the line (or further back) in gaining benefits from having it reopened by the US, Poland, Argentina (??), etc.
If we made it our business to grab and control dark fleet tankers and/or the Iranian flagged fleet, we could be in a better position to act like that might be what we do.
When The Other Sal is stating publicly on his YouTube channel that the US should seize Iranian tankers, it's kind of embarrassing we're not.
I'm not sure that's really physically possible given the economics of the energy market. Oil is *very* fungible. An increase in supply will alter prices for everyone *relatively* uniformly. Not entirely, as there are differences in quality of various crudes and their contaminants that need dealing with, and that does somewhat affect which refineries can deal with which crudes, but for the most part, a decrease or increase in the price of gasoline or diesel will have effects everywhere.
Those who have positioned themselves as not our allies simply don't get to buy any at the wellhead.
And if we control the tanker fleet - they may get away with diverting one load, but then that ship is banned. Now what?
The US is a next exporter. We don't NEED to buy foreign.
> The US is a next exporter. We don't NEED to buy foreign.
Which is only marginally relevant to the position I was trying (and perhaps failed) to express. I will try to clarify my point.
If oil were not a global market commodity where the worldwide price alters domestic conditions, for all of the possible values of "domestic" (i.e.: In the US, UK, EU, China, etc), then the situation in the Strait of Hormuz wouldn't affect *our* domestic gasoline prices at all. But when the dollar value of a barrel of oil produced in the US goes up because the global supply drops due to something like the situation in the Strait, clearly our domestic gasoline prices *do* go up. It's fundamental supply-and-demand market economics, and oil is essentially the nearly perfect commodity to demonstrate those forces with simply because it *is* so almost ideally fungible.
So, when the Strait reopens, even assuming the US then gains total control over it (which seems like something the locals who are currently somewhat less hostile towards us would object to) and oil starts moving out into the market again through that channel, the global supply will rise again, and the dollar value of a barrel of oil will go down, and prices will drop.
That's just how the economics works, unless you are suggesting that we embargo all oil sales from anyone anywhere, to anyone who didn't help us clear the Strait.
The US is in a position to be a near monopoly now in oil...The US oil production, we effectively control Iran's oil production, we can control the rest of the exports from the ME through the Strait of Hormuz.
That leaves.....the north sea? A little bit from the south China sea?
Pax Americana - an idea who's time has come.
OK, I understand your suggestion now.
This serves to reinforce my position that NATO and the EU can't coexist. You can be one or the other, but not both.
Harry W: The EU is the problem. NATO can be fixed.
Save the US, it is the same people. Canada and UK are de facto EU.
Surely, this Dixie cup of water will douse the raging fire.
Umm, I seem to remember the Vikings doing this well over a 1000 years ago. And I bet there is a large percentage of the population of Europe the would get after the Muslim world. Just need to practice on their “ ruling classless first.
Agree in part. Have to note that in some countries (UK, perhaps GE, FR bad trend) that "ship may already have sailed". In a number of others, the "last call before departure" horn is sounding. Some of those countries possess nukes, making the religious leanings of their governments quite important. Might complicate non-proliferation strategies at the very least beyond the usual Pakistan concerns...
Sigh. They are merely trying to gain favors by public declaration with no actual value.
At this point its really moot anywhy. Iran has real time control over the Hormuz at this point. Its a kill box for anything NATO and the political will to take loses needed for sucess I do not see. The Danes are making the noises but its just to late to make a real impact now...
No, Iran does not have real time control over the straits. We have unarmed oil tankers running the straits through the magic of temporarily turning off their transponders, meaning that if the Mullahcracy is not literally handed cheat codes including a real time address on ships to bomb it can’t interdict. Allied warships continue operating in the straits freely and the main obstacle to getting more merchant shipping going is largely insurance costs, which we are trying to work.
The Iranian regime has lost most of its Air Force and navy for sure and suffered major losses to its rocketry force, and apparently decides it will get more practical benefit from what it has left launching them at far away or neutral targets like Diego Garcia or Qatar than trying to use them to hit soft targets in its own front porch like they threatened and flaunted as one of their great advantages and that they had modest initial success doing in the Iran-Iraq Tanker War before Praying Mantis and now they are desperately offering nations free passage if they will evict US and Israeli diplomats, probably as a desperate attempt to shorten an unworkable kill list without blatantly losing face or stepping down further.
None of these indicate Iran as control over the straits, none of these indicate it even has workable surveillance or eyes on the straits.
Nothing of consiquence passes through the strait without Iranian approval, thats just a reality. The Iranians dont need surveillence, the Chinese and Russians provide that. All the Iranians need are speed boats and binoculars.
Iran does not need a navy or air force either, thats what their growing stocks of hypersonic missiles are for. The iranians have enough now they only use the ones with one ton warheads...
“ Nothing of consiquence passes through the strait without Iranian approval, thats just a reality. ”
So the Iranian regime approved our navy sailing in and blowing up a lot of their positions while threatening to strike and or take targets like Kharg, thus revisiting some of the great historic nightmares in Iranian History like the British landings at Busher. In 1856 and 1915, and the conquest of Abadan in 1941?
And it also approved ships like the Karachi and Pine Gas making them look like absolute idiots by turning off their transponders and running the gauntlet quickly and rather safely, resulting in significant market shifts and a turn on Iranian rhetoric to their farcical “pls expel Israeli and US diplomats and we let you pass”? (An offer not even taken up by their greatest allies like Pakistan, Russia, the PRC, or DPRK)?
Yeah ok. Gonna press D to Doubt. Because if this is really stuff they approved, it sounds like whoever is running the Mullahcracy approved a really stupid strategic posture that just makes their credibility degrade
We still have dozens of ships going through the straits day by day, a fraction of the pre conflict number and a major glut but still a significant proportion.
“ The Iranians dont need surveillence, the Chinese and Russians provide that.”
Assuming we do not interfere with PRC and Ru attempts to do so, and assuming they can network to give the Iranians a window to actually strike. Which looks like they are not doing so well at. In part since they don’t want to have the Iranians sinking their own ships as theIRGC threatened to do.
So the recon they are giving is mostly on other stuff like our military movements, not on the convoys.
“All the Iranians need are speed boats and binoculars.”
And the ability to get them in far enough without being destroyed like we do to them in Praying Mantis. And so far they have show themselves to significantly lack said capacity. Especially since speedboats usually requires some kind of port facilities and we have eyes on them.
The fact that they are mostly limited to regurgitating kills from the 1980s and to periodic nonlethal hits like on the Prima indicates they are not doing a decisive job and that dozens of ships are going through the straits without Iranian approval every single day.
“Iran does not need a navy or air force either, thats what their growing stocks of hypersonic missiles are for. “
Again, why are they not making good use of them? And we know they aren’t because their real and confirmed hit numbers are dismal.
And that is ignoring how we have had great success crippling their amount of fire by going after the platforms that launch them.
“The iranians have enough now they only use the ones with one ton warheads...”
So then they need to use them because right now they look like impotent idiots. As do most of the people claiming nothing gets through the straits without Iran’s say so because they clearly have not studied things like the Tanker War of the 1980s, where the Mullahcracy still failed to close the straits for most of it but do much more significant, decisive damage than we’re seeing.
The USN sails nowhere near the Gulf at this point. Any strikes are stand off and often require vulnerable refueling. Iranian weapons can reach Ny part of the Gulf. Thats control and its not changing. Tankers will move when Iran lets them move.If you are Russian or Chinese flaged you have no issues...
"The USN sails nowhere near the Gulf at this point."
I'm not sure where you are getting this info, because while yes the main body of the involved forces are well away from the Gulf and the Strait, we still do send ships in rather frequently, and that goes double for the Arab allies nearby like the UAE.
We do prefer bombing their mosquito fleet and other targets from the air or with standoff strikes like cruise missiles, but we can and do send surface ships in and through the Straits. Other navies like the Indian Navy are even bolder and have forces outright centered around the Gulf of Oman loitering and conducting almost full rotations in and out.
"Tankers will move when Iran lets them move."
Which again raises the cases of the Karachi and how the vast majority of the tankers getting through made absolutely no effort to negotiate with Iran and made it look stupid.
"If you are Russian or Chinese flaged you have no issues..."
That is blatantly not true, hence why the volume of PRC and Russian shipping faces similar schedules and get through as others. Namely, progress is slowed and about a sixth of what it usually is, but they still get through.
Which again points to how the Iranian regime does not control the straits and has failed to get even its allies to agree to the terms it demanded.
Lloyds of London attested to how we have more than 50 ships crossing the straits day in and day out, almost entirely without Iranian approval, and with less than half a dozen hit so far. That is a hit rate of between 5%-10%, which is not sufficient for purpose and will probably get lower as we go on.
More then 20 countries are now negotiating with Iran for passage through the straits. When you can collect tolls you have control of the road...
"More then 20 countries are now negotiating with Iran for passage through the straits."
A: NegotiatING, as in not accepting Iranian terms aka "Evict US and Israeli diplomats and we let you pass." So not benefitting your actual argument that Iran can impose terms on others and force them toa bide by it.
B: Ok, name the countries. Go on.
Because for now the main "more than 20 countries" thing relevant are a 22 nation alliance pledging to keep the straits open and threatening Iran with greater violence if it keeps FAing.
https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10700051
"When you can collect tolls you have control of the road..."
Except Iran shows no indication it can control the road or extract tolls. Dumping mines in the strait is not an indication of toll collecting or control, it's an indication of trying to piss in the other guy's cereal because you can't outright have the cereal yourself.
But leaving that aside...
If you can control the road you can collect tolls until you get a bunch of people angry enough to rally together, burn down your castle, and hang you. As the original Robber Barons of the Rhine found out.
Russian and Chinese flagged shipping passes without issue, ours not so much. Iran can demand what they want because their mines and missles control the mouth of the Gulf. Any money collected or Iranian oil sold will not be in dollars either so banking not a problem.
Iran now controls the tempo of this regional conflict. They hit US bases and Israel several times a day at will. These are real military assets while we strike girls schools and clearly market hospitals. They have now shown they can hit Diego Garcia when they wish as well. I guess those B-2's will have to be moved to...continental United States ?
CDR Salamander wins todays "George Orwell ""Did I call it or what"" award! Again! European Countries and Japan to Help Secure Strait of Hormuz to Stabilize Energy Markets Moral high ground or enlightened self interest? He asks, you decide!
Yes.
Denmark is a rich country but chooses to spend their wealth on a welfare state. I don't see this changing. When I saw the headline, I thought about Norway. Norway, unlike the rest of Europe has a superabundance of hydropower. The rest of Europe is stealing that resource through the common grid which is causing unrest in Norway as they get hit with rate increases. Also Norway, unlike the UK, still has their North Sea oil production intact. So they get higher prices as long as Hormuz stays closed. Norway also has the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, fueled oil revenues. It owns about 1.5% of global wealth.
Denmark is deeply capitalist. Their very high standard of living is buttressed by the fact that one does not lose everything when you catch a dose of the cancer. What you call welfare, I call a rational national response to the unpredictability of medical events.
The USA spends more on per capita healthcare than Denmark with much worse outcomes. They also have created some enormously profitable heath-care manufacturing companies.
I suppose you think free public education is welfare. The Danish educational system is better than ours.
"I suppose you think free public education is welfare. "
More like child care these days. Precious little education seems to be involved.