Whether or not it was a good idea kinda depends on whether or not the nuclear program has been set back by at least a few years. I am not getting the warm and fuzzies from the US government on this, which is either leaking low confidence reports that it's been delayed a couple of months or is just publicly saying without any evidence that of course it's destroyed you stupid reporter how dare you ask, what part of 30,000 lb bomb go boom did you not understand?
From Trump's perspective, I think he thought the Israeli operation was cool and wanted in, but on his terms - he does one super cool mission and because he doesn't like getting stuck in things, the war has to end like the next day. The downside of this is that if the job wasn't actually finished as a result of the super cool mission, he won't finish the job - and his ego won't let Israel finish the job either (that would imply the super cool mission didn't work and he already said it did work, moron), and Israel has already sacrificed so much, so there's going to be tremendous pressure in Israel to come to the conclusion that, b'hechrech, the job must have been finished, even if it wasn't.
Now, maybe Iran and the US can work out a deal but I doubt it. Fundamentally the problem with negotiating a deal with the US now on anything is that one of the US's two political parties doesn't think it's bound by agreements.
1. CNN is reporting that the DIA initial assessment is that little to no enriched uranium or centrifuges were damaged. Combine that with the strong possibility that Iran will now significantly pair back its cooperation with the IAEA, even under the most optimistic estimates Iran is only set back a month or 2 on it's nuclear program. As I said in the subscriber chat, the JCPOA was a far better option and both Trump and Netanyahu opposed it. Iran's nuclear program is still way ahead of where it was when Trump took office in 2017.
2. I have no opinion on their ballistic missile capacity. I trust neither Israel's line that they destroyed the majority of their launchers or Iran's insistence that they are as strong as ever.
3. Both the US and Israel have lost a lot of diplomatic credibility. Assassinating the chief negotiator doesn't show much interest in actual diplomacy, and Trump's insistence on no enrichment doesn't give the impression that they really wanted a deal. but to be honest as long as no one has the capacity and will to do anything about it it doesn't matter.
4. The best thing Mossad could do now is a large scale assassination program for the neocons in the US, starting with Mark Levin. They're speed running the collapse of support for Israel among anyone here that's under 50. A poll a couple months back showed that 50% of GOP voters (and something like 70% of Democrats) under 50 had a negative view of Israel, and the last 2 weeks are not going to improve that.
5. Iran is certainly weaker than they were 2 weeks ago, but there are no serious cracks in the regime.
Israel's interests and that of most of the regional states is that Iran doesn't get to have either (a) a nuclear weapon or (b) a free hand to fund proxy militias in the region. The JCPOA achieved (a) while giving up on (b). All things considered, I think if you have to choose only one it's (a) that is less bad, but it makes sense to at least try to achieve both.
The JCPOA didn't give up on b. It didn't remove all sanctions, and the goal was to use the JCPOA as a springboard to negotiate b. If the goal was to make a grand deal on the nuclear program and funding of Hamas/Hezbollah, it almost certainly would have failed. You might have an argument if the JCPOA completely normalized relations with Iran, but it didn't.
Edit: This is why the Trump negotiating style doesn't really work in practice. Case in point was his negotiations with North Korea, which demanded that all outstanding issues including a complete denuclearization be accomplished in one agreement. Unless you have one side completely over a barrel like the Entente in WW1 did over Germany, that's not possible. The US negotiated arms control with the USSR/Russia over several treaties, and that's just one issue.
Well, they basically took control over Lebanon and most of Yemen, defeating multiple US allies in the process, and also turned Syria into a puppet state, so this would seem to have been a legitimate concern.
"Syria has been done a favour by finally putting an end to more than a decade of civil war and getting the chance to give neoliberal Islamism a crack."
Turkish sponsored Al Queda genocide gangs are supposed to be an improvement? I can only imagine what awful things they'll get up to and terrorism they'll start doing in a decade.
I think there is a very strong risk of Trump and America being pulled into a large scale intervention against Iran, because Iran still exists and still could build nuclear weapons in the future. They might be able to do so very quickly if the mountain site was not damaged. Whatever Elite Human Capital advisors wanted this strike would also insist on regime change if Iran continued working on nukes.
For good and ill, the US couldn't actually invade Iran, at least in any reasonable time frame. Where would we stage, what route would we take to Tehran? The most interventionist I can see is a 1990's Iraq style bombing campaign. But even there Iran has the capability of hitting our bases in the region.
It's more than planning. They would actually have to start setting up the infrastructure in Iraq or Azerbaijan now to invade next year. The US had far more state capacity in WW2 and it still took them almost a year to enter the European theatre.
I must say that you underestimate how much Israel has benefited from winning all of the wars. Look at the shekel vs USD, the TA-35, and the TA-125. They are way up.
Hey will you ever write an article The end of liberal jews Now liberal jews The people they imported black's arabs and others openly hate them and think they're the same as white supremacists , My main question is , do you think liberal jew Stick.
To their guns and bee liberals or abandoned liberalism when we come conservatives
One question for the author: what's the median Israelis views on the West Bank settlements? In the US the liberal Zionists are generally against them, and the Zionists on the right are basically in lockstep with whatever Likud's position is.
Before the war, the median view is that settlements inside the 'settlement blocks' is fine because these will be part of Israel under any agreement, and there are too many people in them to be evacuated anyway, but that settlements outside the blocks should be restrained. Right now, I'm not really sure. Probably the same, but I'd wait for data to be sure.
I always thought there is no way these attacks eliminated Iran's nuclear program to any significant extent. It's 80 yr old technology, you don't need "top scientists" to figure it out. Even North Korea did. And Iran having a nuclear weapon was never such a threat in the first place because of MAD. The leaders of North Korea are far more insane than Iran's, even they aren't using their nuclear weapons.
While I think this is somewhat true, North Korea has a probable average IQ of something like 104 (few points knocked off the South Korean average because of lower economic development), whereas Iran is around 85. And Iran has had maybe the worst brain drain of any country.
I guess I would push back on this on two dimensions.
One is, sometimes regimes do things that, in hindsight (or even to contemporayr observers in foresight) appear insane. For example, a lot of people thought Russia would never invade Ukraine because it was an insane thing to do. A lot of pro-Russia people were swearing up and down that the Democrats were making it up because of their irrational hatred of Russia up until the point the tanks crossed the border at which point they switched to saying that of course Russia would invade because the US refused to rule out Ukraine entering NATO at some point and what else would Russia do? And more recently with Hamas, everybody with two brain cells to rub together could tell that Gaza/Hamas were going to be absolutely levelled because of October 7 but you also had lots of people who predicted it would be the end of Israel and were also simultaneously shocked at the violent response of a regime they called genocidal for years prior.
Two, is what if Iran shares the bomb with one of their insane religious proxies? Would the Houthis refuse to use it because of MAD? Would Hamas? Who can say? The price for guessing wrong is very high.
I don't think the problem of the Iranian nuclear program has been solved, and in the long term there could be significant geopolitical repercussions (Iran getting serious about building a Pakistani pipeline on China's dime). But none of that matters to most people because most people don't care about the long term effects of anything.
The optics right now are great for Trump and great for Israel. I'm cynical long term, but I don't think this could have gone any better short-term. My dually-loyal heart cannot help but swell with the pride as Trump satisfies all sides: Iran is bombed and Israel is chastised at the same time. A schizophrenic president for a schizophrenic nation.
I don't think a certain amount of precautionary protest over US ground troops in Iran was irrational given the exceedingly high cost associated with that potential outcome. (Regime change is still a desired goal here, ain't it?)
I don't have any love for the mullahs, and if lending Israel a few bunker busters was the extent of the favour required I wouldn't object, but I'll feel better once Iran has exited the news cycle.
"Doing Syria a favour" is also debatable, given Assad at least stuck up for Christian minorities in the region, and how long al-Julani will stay neoliberal is anyone's guess.
It's debatable until the data that is in, but my view is that whatever you can say in vindication of Assad's regime is moot because he wasn't able to assert control over the whole country and the level of repression he needed to exert in the parts he did control was unsustainable. Thus, for the same reason it's bad the civil war started in the first place, it's good that it ended in the only way it actually could end.
I don't think the prior instability of Syria can be entirely divorced from indirect US intervention in the region on behalf of Turkey and al-Julani, so whether Assad's regime was unsustainable is another open question. Things might have gone very differently if the US had backed Assad in exchange for a peace deal with Israel, for example.
I'm not terribly enthusiastic about autocratic governance in general and to whatever extent this protected local minorities it's not obvious why Assad *had* to maintain a nominal war posture toward Israel in order to stay in power- unless the bulk of his own client groups also wanted Israel destroyed, in which case I'm not sure what DR tradcaths were expecting here, precisely. But an outcome similar to Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam's execution doesn't seem outlandish to me.
On a slight tangent: I also think a large swathe of the online right- not least Orange Man himself- are distinctly irritated that Israel tried to torpedo the peace process with Iran both before and after Iran's nuclear facilities were destroyed.
I can see the logic, from the PoV of a machiavellian Israeli statesman witnessing the slow disengagement of the US from the middle-east, of trying to force a US intervention in Iran before the yanks are gone entirely. But I gather Bibi is also worried about going to prison on corruption (or war-crime?) charges and may just be trying to prolong the war/s simply to avoid personal prosecution. Neither explanation is great, but if the latter is true, then the man needs to be keelhauled.
"I don't think the prior instability of Syria can be entirely divorced from indirect US intervention in the region on behalf of Turkey and al-Julani, so whether Assad's regime was unsustainable is another open question."
OK, so don't divorce it. In the world we live in, the quickest way to end the war and have a regime with some kind of chance of governing the country in a constructive manner, was to kick stool from under Assad by taking out HizbAllah.
Obviously Israel didn't have realistic alternatives to decimating Hezbollah. I don't think that changes the point I made that the US could have entered into patronage with Assad's Syria rather than trying to unseat him, as they did with Egypt and Jordan. I don't know to what extent AIPAC influenced that decision.
I don't think the comparison to Jordan (97% Sunni) or Egypt (90% Sunni) is very relevant to Assad's Coalition of the Fringes government propped up by obsolete anti-colonial socialism and relentless brutality against the majority population. Indeed, under the Assads, Ba'athism degenerated from a real coalition of the fringes to basically just Alawites against everyone propped up by Iran. Almost the whole region wanted Assad out, and it's really remarkable he hung on as long as he did.
Come back to England, I will buy you a sandwich in return for 2 hours of your schizorambling about how I can fix it here
Whether or not it was a good idea kinda depends on whether or not the nuclear program has been set back by at least a few years. I am not getting the warm and fuzzies from the US government on this, which is either leaking low confidence reports that it's been delayed a couple of months or is just publicly saying without any evidence that of course it's destroyed you stupid reporter how dare you ask, what part of 30,000 lb bomb go boom did you not understand?
From Trump's perspective, I think he thought the Israeli operation was cool and wanted in, but on his terms - he does one super cool mission and because he doesn't like getting stuck in things, the war has to end like the next day. The downside of this is that if the job wasn't actually finished as a result of the super cool mission, he won't finish the job - and his ego won't let Israel finish the job either (that would imply the super cool mission didn't work and he already said it did work, moron), and Israel has already sacrificed so much, so there's going to be tremendous pressure in Israel to come to the conclusion that, b'hechrech, the job must have been finished, even if it wasn't.
Now, maybe Iran and the US can work out a deal but I doubt it. Fundamentally the problem with negotiating a deal with the US now on anything is that one of the US's two political parties doesn't think it's bound by agreements.
1. CNN is reporting that the DIA initial assessment is that little to no enriched uranium or centrifuges were damaged. Combine that with the strong possibility that Iran will now significantly pair back its cooperation with the IAEA, even under the most optimistic estimates Iran is only set back a month or 2 on it's nuclear program. As I said in the subscriber chat, the JCPOA was a far better option and both Trump and Netanyahu opposed it. Iran's nuclear program is still way ahead of where it was when Trump took office in 2017.
2. I have no opinion on their ballistic missile capacity. I trust neither Israel's line that they destroyed the majority of their launchers or Iran's insistence that they are as strong as ever.
3. Both the US and Israel have lost a lot of diplomatic credibility. Assassinating the chief negotiator doesn't show much interest in actual diplomacy, and Trump's insistence on no enrichment doesn't give the impression that they really wanted a deal. but to be honest as long as no one has the capacity and will to do anything about it it doesn't matter.
4. The best thing Mossad could do now is a large scale assassination program for the neocons in the US, starting with Mark Levin. They're speed running the collapse of support for Israel among anyone here that's under 50. A poll a couple months back showed that 50% of GOP voters (and something like 70% of Democrats) under 50 had a negative view of Israel, and the last 2 weeks are not going to improve that.
5. Iran is certainly weaker than they were 2 weeks ago, but there are no serious cracks in the regime.
Israel's interests and that of most of the regional states is that Iran doesn't get to have either (a) a nuclear weapon or (b) a free hand to fund proxy militias in the region. The JCPOA achieved (a) while giving up on (b). All things considered, I think if you have to choose only one it's (a) that is less bad, but it makes sense to at least try to achieve both.
If they get (a), doesn't (b) become a lot easier in some regards?
The JCPOA didn't give up on b. It didn't remove all sanctions, and the goal was to use the JCPOA as a springboard to negotiate b. If the goal was to make a grand deal on the nuclear program and funding of Hamas/Hezbollah, it almost certainly would have failed. You might have an argument if the JCPOA completely normalized relations with Iran, but it didn't.
Edit: This is why the Trump negotiating style doesn't really work in practice. Case in point was his negotiations with North Korea, which demanded that all outstanding issues including a complete denuclearization be accomplished in one agreement. Unless you have one side completely over a barrel like the Entente in WW1 did over Germany, that's not possible. The US negotiated arms control with the USSR/Russia over several treaties, and that's just one issue.
Well, they basically took control over Lebanon and most of Yemen, defeating multiple US allies in the process, and also turned Syria into a puppet state, so this would seem to have been a legitimate concern.
"Syria has been done a favour by finally putting an end to more than a decade of civil war and getting the chance to give neoliberal Islamism a crack."
Turkish sponsored Al Queda genocide gangs are supposed to be an improvement? I can only imagine what awful things they'll get up to and terrorism they'll start doing in a decade.
I think there is a very strong risk of Trump and America being pulled into a large scale intervention against Iran, because Iran still exists and still could build nuclear weapons in the future. They might be able to do so very quickly if the mountain site was not damaged. Whatever Elite Human Capital advisors wanted this strike would also insist on regime change if Iran continued working on nukes.
For good and ill, the US couldn't actually invade Iran, at least in any reasonable time frame. Where would we stage, what route would we take to Tehran? The most interventionist I can see is a 1990's Iraq style bombing campaign. But even there Iran has the capability of hitting our bases in the region.
I'm sure it would take some planning. But I don't want them to start planning it now so they can do it later.
It's more than planning. They would actually have to start setting up the infrastructure in Iraq or Azerbaijan now to invade next year. The US had far more state capacity in WW2 and it still took them almost a year to enter the European theatre.
I must say that you underestimate how much Israel has benefited from winning all of the wars. Look at the shekel vs USD, the TA-35, and the TA-125. They are way up.
Relative to not winning them, sure.
Yeah, the macro-strategy was pretty good here, actually.
And yet half the comments here are coping pretending that Israel is no better off than before the war.
Fair and balanced.
Hey will you ever write an article The end of liberal jews Now liberal jews The people they imported black's arabs and others openly hate them and think they're the same as white supremacists , My main question is , do you think liberal jew Stick.
To their guns and bee liberals or abandoned liberalism when we come conservatives
One question for the author: what's the median Israelis views on the West Bank settlements? In the US the liberal Zionists are generally against them, and the Zionists on the right are basically in lockstep with whatever Likud's position is.
Before the war, the median view is that settlements inside the 'settlement blocks' is fine because these will be part of Israel under any agreement, and there are too many people in them to be evacuated anyway, but that settlements outside the blocks should be restrained. Right now, I'm not really sure. Probably the same, but I'd wait for data to be sure.
I always thought there is no way these attacks eliminated Iran's nuclear program to any significant extent. It's 80 yr old technology, you don't need "top scientists" to figure it out. Even North Korea did. And Iran having a nuclear weapon was never such a threat in the first place because of MAD. The leaders of North Korea are far more insane than Iran's, even they aren't using their nuclear weapons.
While I think this is somewhat true, North Korea has a probable average IQ of something like 104 (few points knocked off the South Korean average because of lower economic development), whereas Iran is around 85. And Iran has had maybe the worst brain drain of any country.
I guess I would push back on this on two dimensions.
One is, sometimes regimes do things that, in hindsight (or even to contemporayr observers in foresight) appear insane. For example, a lot of people thought Russia would never invade Ukraine because it was an insane thing to do. A lot of pro-Russia people were swearing up and down that the Democrats were making it up because of their irrational hatred of Russia up until the point the tanks crossed the border at which point they switched to saying that of course Russia would invade because the US refused to rule out Ukraine entering NATO at some point and what else would Russia do? And more recently with Hamas, everybody with two brain cells to rub together could tell that Gaza/Hamas were going to be absolutely levelled because of October 7 but you also had lots of people who predicted it would be the end of Israel and were also simultaneously shocked at the violent response of a regime they called genocidal for years prior.
Two, is what if Iran shares the bomb with one of their insane religious proxies? Would the Houthis refuse to use it because of MAD? Would Hamas? Who can say? The price for guessing wrong is very high.
I don't think the problem of the Iranian nuclear program has been solved, and in the long term there could be significant geopolitical repercussions (Iran getting serious about building a Pakistani pipeline on China's dime). But none of that matters to most people because most people don't care about the long term effects of anything.
The optics right now are great for Trump and great for Israel. I'm cynical long term, but I don't think this could have gone any better short-term. My dually-loyal heart cannot help but swell with the pride as Trump satisfies all sides: Iran is bombed and Israel is chastised at the same time. A schizophrenic president for a schizophrenic nation.
>Iran getting serious about building a Pakistani pipeline on China's dime
Why?
why would china fund it or why would iran want a way to control Hormuz without committing economic suicide?
I'm just generally unfamiliar with this pipeline idea. Is there a writeup somewhere?
Search Gwadar port. There’s no active plan for a pipeline — I’m saying that Iran should be working on this if it wants control of Hormuz.
https://www.mei.edu/publications/gcc-countries-and-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-bri-curbing-their-enthusiasm
This one was more decent than infuriating. 60/40. Lacks ahavas Yisrael though.
I do love you though Rafi.
I don't think a certain amount of precautionary protest over US ground troops in Iran was irrational given the exceedingly high cost associated with that potential outcome. (Regime change is still a desired goal here, ain't it?)
I don't have any love for the mullahs, and if lending Israel a few bunker busters was the extent of the favour required I wouldn't object, but I'll feel better once Iran has exited the news cycle.
"Doing Syria a favour" is also debatable, given Assad at least stuck up for Christian minorities in the region, and how long al-Julani will stay neoliberal is anyone's guess.
It's debatable until the data that is in, but my view is that whatever you can say in vindication of Assad's regime is moot because he wasn't able to assert control over the whole country and the level of repression he needed to exert in the parts he did control was unsustainable. Thus, for the same reason it's bad the civil war started in the first place, it's good that it ended in the only way it actually could end.
I don't think the prior instability of Syria can be entirely divorced from indirect US intervention in the region on behalf of Turkey and al-Julani, so whether Assad's regime was unsustainable is another open question. Things might have gone very differently if the US had backed Assad in exchange for a peace deal with Israel, for example.
I'm not terribly enthusiastic about autocratic governance in general and to whatever extent this protected local minorities it's not obvious why Assad *had* to maintain a nominal war posture toward Israel in order to stay in power- unless the bulk of his own client groups also wanted Israel destroyed, in which case I'm not sure what DR tradcaths were expecting here, precisely. But an outcome similar to Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam's execution doesn't seem outlandish to me.
On a slight tangent: I also think a large swathe of the online right- not least Orange Man himself- are distinctly irritated that Israel tried to torpedo the peace process with Iran both before and after Iran's nuclear facilities were destroyed.
I can see the logic, from the PoV of a machiavellian Israeli statesman witnessing the slow disengagement of the US from the middle-east, of trying to force a US intervention in Iran before the yanks are gone entirely. But I gather Bibi is also worried about going to prison on corruption (or war-crime?) charges and may just be trying to prolong the war/s simply to avoid personal prosecution. Neither explanation is great, but if the latter is true, then the man needs to be keelhauled.
"I don't think the prior instability of Syria can be entirely divorced from indirect US intervention in the region on behalf of Turkey and al-Julani, so whether Assad's regime was unsustainable is another open question."
OK, so don't divorce it. In the world we live in, the quickest way to end the war and have a regime with some kind of chance of governing the country in a constructive manner, was to kick stool from under Assad by taking out HizbAllah.
Obviously Israel didn't have realistic alternatives to decimating Hezbollah. I don't think that changes the point I made that the US could have entered into patronage with Assad's Syria rather than trying to unseat him, as they did with Egypt and Jordan. I don't know to what extent AIPAC influenced that decision.
I don't think the comparison to Jordan (97% Sunni) or Egypt (90% Sunni) is very relevant to Assad's Coalition of the Fringes government propped up by obsolete anti-colonial socialism and relentless brutality against the majority population. Indeed, under the Assads, Ba'athism degenerated from a real coalition of the fringes to basically just Alawites against everyone propped up by Iran. Almost the whole region wanted Assad out, and it's really remarkable he hung on as long as he did.
I suppose that's fair. We'll have to see if al-Julani is an improvement, I guess.