Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

Iran also has a complicated internal power structure the players in which are not necessarily always in agreement or in full knowledge of each others' actions. It makes it a trickier state to deal with compared to your run-of-the mill unitary dictatorship.

View on HN

Ironically this was very true in imperial Japan. I recently listened to Craig Nelson's "Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness" and this was stressed repeatedly.

The factionalism, not just between the civilian government and the military, but between the Navy and the Army was vast. There was no unitary government, in any sense. Their Navy never thought they could defeat the United States over a protracted war, but the internal factionalism forced their hand.

This is a (correct) view that is frustratingly underreported.

IRI's political dynamics is no way informs its ideological military arm: http://iranprimer.usip.org/resource/revolutionary-guards

Reminds me of when the freshly minted new strong men of china visited india, only to be greeted with " you know your army just marched over some parts of the border?"

It ought to make it easier to divide them in war, and come to a swifter resolution in conflict.

Militarily defeating the Iranian government would be easy no matter what. The hard part is winning the peace. And by “hard” I mean “essentially impossible, and trying to do so will wreck us.”

This is what the assholes who want a war with Iran either fail or refuse to understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

Reply on news.ycombinator.com