U.S. airstrike kills top Iran general Qassim Suleimani | Hacker News Reader

U.S. airstrike kills top Iran general Qassim Suleimani

nbcnews.com

69 pointssavorypiano40 comments

It's a terrible sign this can't stay on the front page of Hacker News. In theory this should be a smarter than average group of people.

Short term, your gas price went up 4% starting tomorrow and we are going to see how resilient our computing infrastructure is to an actual cyber offensive with destructive intent (rather than simple information theft or monetary theft/ransom). Medium term the odds of a war with substantial US casualties has increased substantially. Long term it's possible this will be seen as the tipping point for PRC as the dominant global power. This is a historic event and not in a good way.

PRC (and many other countries, western allies included) depends on Hormuz security for oil, US doesn't need ME oil anymore thanks to domestic shale. This maybe hobble China in the short-term, but it will take the rest of the world with it.

The US is an enormous importer of oil. We import 8 million barrels every day. And that is priced internationally. Do you think CCI and Mayan priced markets aren't going to sell us crude at a discount.

US is the largest oil producer as of last year, they're on the way to being net exporter, they mostly import and finish Canadian oil. US is energy secure as of last year, which is why they've been so emboldened in ME. I do agree that cyber attacks and other costly blowback is on the horizon. This is certainly extremely troubling development.

E: Sorry account seems to be rate-limited?

US net exported crude and other petroleum in September and is projected to be sustained net exporter in the next year. I'm not suggesting they are completely inoculated against global energy market shift, but they have nominal guaranteed energy security because USNavy can protect all those transit routes. Whereas China, Japan, Korea, most of Europe with limited blue water projection capabilities would struggle very hard to maintain ME oil access if Iran decides to start tanker wars in the Hormuz.

This US is nowhere close to net crude export. We export refined products and NGL. We have reduced dependency on ME crude, yes, but Mexican and Canadian market are priced internationally and are not captive sellers.

edit: to discourage deep threading they don't show the reply button in a thread for a cooling off period.

edit 2: the "US net exported crude and other petroleum [products] in September" statement does not appreciate "other petroleum products" part. The US imports lots of crude from Mexico and Canada (and the ME), and export the refined products because of the US's very large refining capacity and pipeline/terminal infrastructure. We also create NGL as a fracking byproduct since the lighter fractions don't have the domestic demand but can be collected and shipped in economically. This isn't even getting into the tail production economics of a fracking well and if it is viable long-term. In any case, the September news isn't as positive as it sounds.

Canada is fairly captive...

smart != wise

It's important to note that this guy isn't just a top general: He's basically the guy responsible for Iran's foreign policy. It would be like an Iranian airstrike taking out the likes of Dick Cheney during the Bush years.

I wonder if anyone knows we are now at war with Iran. I honestly don't know what will happen. This is really, really bad. There could be tens of thousands of casualties by the weekend.

Just Iran? If he was at Baghdad Airport then he's presumably a guest of their country and this is an act of war against Iraq as well.

He wasn't at the airport, he was in a convoy near the airport.

I read that Iraqis died during the strike as well.

You could argue that a state of war has existed since the Iranian Revolutionary Council approved the invasion of the US Embassy in Tehran, the murder of workers, and the taking of hostages.

For anyone who wants more background on Suleimani, this New Yorker piece [0] about him from 2013 is detailed and interesting.

A quick excerpt, if you don't have time for it all:

Suleimani took command of the Quds Force fifteen years ago, and in that time he has sought to reshape the Middle East in Iran’s favor, working as a power broker and as a military force: assassinating rivals, arming allies, and, for most of a decade, directing a network of militant groups that killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned Suleimani for his role in supporting the Assad regime, and for abetting terrorism. And yet he has remained mostly invisible to the outside world, even as he runs agents and directs operations. “Suleimani is the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today,” John Maguire, a former C.I.A. officer in Iraq, told me, “and no one’s ever heard of him.”

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/the-shadow-com...

Thanks. Just the sort of thing I was looking for, but did not realize.

Glad to be of service :-)

Going from history there’s going to be a lot of democrats hand wringing about “process” but the Democrats and the media will still fall in behind an escalation to war. They’re already doing it. Media are already unquestionably repeating claims of the pentagon that Suleimani was planning attacks. Calls against war will be called unpatriotic and largely silenced. This feels quite scary. I was hoping for an eventual end to war.

>I was hoping for an eventual end to war.

No US President has ever lost a run for re-election during wartime. I think we all knew a new war was coming this year.

This is such a infuriatingly off the mark comment. This isn't domestic politics. This is a regional power in the most geopolitically important location in the world. The can strike the oilfields of the entire Person Gulf. The can close the Strait of Hormuz. They have a large modern military, large on-the-ground intelligence service in the region, and advanced offensive military cyber capabilities. This is profoundly bigger than the US Presidential election. It is a bad sign that this is so many peoples' take.

This is real war, the likes of which we haven't seen since Vietnam or the Korean peninsula. Professionals have dreaded this for a long time, and that was with extraordinarily more competent executive function.

What I'm suggesting is that had this flashpoint not occurred, your commander in chief would have found another.

> This isn't domestic politics... It is a bad sign that this is so many peoples' take.

This was an active choice to execute a foreign non-combatant on third-party soil. It doesn't get much more political than that.

Your comment would suggest that Trump has no horse in this race but GP isn't incorrect that this choice he made pulls a lot of oxygen from the trash fires at the other parts of his administration.

Sure, and many will use this false quivalence to excuse voting for Republicans. When they are now (again) starting a war in the middle east.

In between, the Obama administration managed to sign a deal that effectively ended the nuclear program and markedly reduced Iran's aggressiveness in the region.

But sure, the everyone-is-bad shtick gets so many points for contrarianism it easily compensates for the lack of truth.

(Indictment-of-the-public-sphere-aside: It's quite funny (but potentially deadly) that this cynical worldview has long gained the upper hand. Everyone still pretend to have heard it for the tenth time that day because they also like to see themselves as the rebel with thier own brain.)

Unfortunately, Warren, oder Sanders, or AOC, or whoever will be the next democratic President won't have the option of a negotiated settlement anymore: 200 years of the US' word having meaning beyond the duration of the administration giving it are gone. Lost the world's trust, and thereby access to such transactions, all for what? Because that plan that was essentially what Trump says he wants now just happened to be associated with the wrong guy.

Iraq and Iran are natural allies. Could we fight both? What if NK decides to make an offensive? Sure we could nuke them back but what if they storm SK and then launch? There are games they can play.

Didn't they have a very long war in the 80s?

Iraq in the 80's was run by Sunni tribal groups from central Iraq related to Saddam Hussein. Iraq after 2003 is run by Shiite tribal groups from Southern Iraq.

Well, Iran is after all the last of the Wes Clark Seven.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw

Aren't we supposed to need congressional approval to start a war?

So many things I was taught in civics class turned out to be complete fiction.

> Aren't we supposed to need congressional approval to start a war?

Not for the last few decades, no.

US executive doesn't need congress approval to kill heads of US designated terror groups (IRGC). At least it doesn't seems so.

(I guess it already has it)

It's disheartening to see parent downvoted, but executive overreach and emergency powers have been normalized for a while now. Republicans are a lost cause here too, but Democrats despite constant screeching about "constitutional norms" seemingly don't care about war powers either (perhaps the most important constitutional power).

good news for electric vehicles

May we live in interesting times.

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