Iran has nobody in charge to lead any sort of negotiations or to order stand down. Now it really is guerrilla war. The type that never ends.
If someone backstabbed me twice while we were in negotiations, I would not give them 3rd chance for negotiations, US and Israel really f....d their reputation after 2 attacks while in negotiations
"The fact is that we don’t have any positive experience of negotiating with the United States. You know, especially with this administration. We negotiated twice last year and this year, and then in the middle of negotiations, they attacked us," Araghchi said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-foreign-minister-int...
To add insult to injury, the US also sent two clowns, Witkoff and Kushner, to negotiate, so it was quite obvious the negotiations would fail.
But here is what we know:
* US acted in bad faith - because it planned attack in around December 2025
* Oman, mediator of negotiations told they were almost there with negotiations and Iran mostly agreed to conditions and boom, next day it got bombed: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/peace-within-reach-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...
We'll see if that works or wether another jihadist regime rises from their ashes.
Comes dumbo and rips that off, goes back to "deal making" without any diplomacy, bomb them twice during the negotiation process after ripping off the previous deal.
Seems like the whole new negotiations from Trump's admin was just putting up an act after all... Quite disgusting.
Venezuela is also run by the same security apparatus and government as it was before. We didn't attempt to turn over the entire government.
Takes Ukrainians 4 months to kill that amount. What you are saying winning is quite doable.
First, Russians are generally on the offensive, which means pushing into Ukrainian controlled territory.
Often, they are pushing into defensive lines that have had years of fortification.
Second, there are a lot more Russians in Ukraine. To kill 125k people, you have to find 125k people. It's a lot easier to find a Russian in Ukraine that it will be to find an IRGC soldier in Iran if there's an invasion and guerilla operations in response.
In Iraq after the conventional military phase, the US killed ~26k insurgents over the course of a decade (and also captured ~120k).
Iran is bigger than Iraq, has far more people than Iraq, and has much bigger logistical burdens for an invasion.
I could believe that the US Military is quite capable of running some small scale targeted operations within Iran successfully. We can probably pull off operations to do things like attempt to seize and secure uranium stockpiles if we know where they are (though such an operation could also go catastrophically badly, too).
I think the US Military could invade Iran and topple the regime, but it would be an enormous lift, and I think there's almost no chance we would have the political will to sustain the costs and casualties that a total invasion would entail.
MAGA is modern Nazism and Christian Nationalism, it was bread out of the Conservative and Republican party of the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, and has been fully embraced by and has enveloped by both.
Rejecting hate, racism, indoctrination, and cultism is not "experiencing a religious awakening" it's quite the opposite.
Progressives have elevated cultural relativism to a core religious principle. They can’t even articulate why it’s desirable for immigrants to “assimilate,” because in their world view it must be taken as axiomatic that America wouldn’t be substantively less successful if it was culturally more like Guatemala or India.
You could put that in a dictionary as the definition for "cultural relativism." I mean, you just referred to "forced civic integration" like that's a bad thing! That's not Clinton Democrats believed in the 1990s. They believed in the "melting pot," which meant cultural homogenization. More specifically, it meant immigrants adopting Anglo-American culture, like German immigrants.
But progressives rejected the "melting pot," and now think we have a "salad bowl." This fight over the "salad bowl" is completely different than what the fight was about in the 1990s. Bill Clinton wasn't a cultural relativist--he never talked about a "salad bowl" multi-cultural America.
That’s almost exactly what Bill Clinton advocated
> Can we be one America respecting, even celebrating, our differences, but embracing even more what we have in common? …Can we define what it means to be an American …in terms of our primary allegiance to the values America stands for and values we really live by?
> And more than ever, we understand the benefits of our racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity in a global society
> When young people sit side by side with people of many different backgrounds, they do learn something that they can take out into the world. And they will be more effective citizens.
> we must demand responsibility from every American. Our strength as a society depends upon both—upon people taking responsibility for themselves and their families, teaching their children good values, working hard and obeying the law, and giving back to those around us… No responsibility is more fundamental than obeying the law.
Additionally, Clinton may not have used the “salad bowl” metaphor, but frequently used metaphors like “mosaic” and “tapestry woven from different colored threads”.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/commencement-addre...
It’s a lot harder to find decent evidence on the prevalence of religious belief in Iran, obviously, but I’d be willing to believe anything in the 70-90% range based on the commentary below. (Obviously this source is biased, but they at least cite their references adequately.) Large confidence intervals evince a lack of confidence.
https://muslimskeptic.com/2025/01/29/iranians-atheists/#Stat...
So yeah, it seems reasonable to claim that white Republicans are roughly as religious as Iranians overall.
This probably underestimates religious belief of those aligned with the government, however, since we can’t segment them out by political affiliation and the opposition is likely more secular in proportion.
Obviously Democrats in the 1990s weren’t theocrats. Maybe your point is that it’s not about religious attendance per se that makes for a theocracy, but the content of the religious beliefs?
Which means now Venezuela is still a chavist regime, but not under US embargo anymore. This will improve their economy a great deal, and if the regime doesn't capture all the profits for itself, will also improve the QOL of all Venezuelians, hopefully.
It has little in common with Iran, which is more like the 2003 Iraq war (but, so far, without committing ground troops, but there is no way to maintain that with Trump’s stated goal of “unconditional surrender”; that’s going to require a ground forces occupation at a minimum, and probably a ground forces invasion to acheive it) than it is like the recent intervention in Venezuela.
Even if they are not particular fond of the regime that is in the process of being destroyed, the Iranian people are likely to resist that, just as occurred in Iraq (with the most significant resistance there coming from forces that were opposed to Saddam’s regime and which had been actively suppressed by it while it was in power.)