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megamike

Iran's 10-point plan includes:

1. Guarantee that Iran will not be attacked again

2. Permanent end to the war, not just a ceasefire

3. End to Israeli strikes in Lebanon

4. Lifting of all US sanctions on Iran

5. End to all regional fighting against Iranian allies

6. In return, Iran would open the Strait of Hormuz

7. Iran would impose a Hormuz fee of $2 million per ship

8. Iran would split these fees with Oman

9. Iran to provide rules for safe passage through Hormuz

10. Iran to use Hormuz fees for reconstruction instead of reparations

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Iran's semi-official Mehr News Agency (via China's state news agency Xinhua[0]) claims the 10 points are:

1. U.S. commitment to ensure no further acts of aggression

2. Continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz

3. Acceptance of Iran's nuclear enrichment rights

4. Lifting of all primary sanctions

5. Lifting of all secondary sanctions

6. Termination of all United Nations Security Council resolutions against Iran

7. Termination of all International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors resolutions against Iran

8. Payment of damages to Iran for loss in the war

9. Withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region

10. Cessation of hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon

Which is much different.

[0] https://english.news.cn/20260408/dd8df6148df94252aaa1d3fbb59...

Interesting. I have noticed that news about events in Iran has been markedly different within the US and outside the US for years.

It doesn't seem much different. Both involve guaranteed stop of all hostilities plus payment for what you did plus keep we Strait Of Hormuz. The only difference is how the payment for the attack goes.

Withdrawal of US troops from the region and acceptance of uranium enrichment appears nowhere in the other 10 points.

There are permanent US bases in the region.

Seriously? Those are major differences.

Have the U.S. and Iran agreed the points? Or is this two weeks to hammer them down?

Of course not. It's a framework of a framework of a framework, unilaterally suggested by Iran.

Two weeks of open Strait to nail the final version, yes.

I guess gas prices in US will cool down to pre-war price averages and the pressure not to resume aggression will be huge.

Two weeks of open Strait [1]

[1]: in coordination with the Iranian military [2]

[2]: with preference for Iran's friends[3]

[3]: and fees paid to Iran

No chance. Up like a rocket, down like a feather.

and that's without considering the lost production capacity.

Absolutely not. It will takes months to years to rebuild onshore infrastructure, and shipping companies will be very reluctant to send tankers into the Gulf. Negotiations may collapse and hostilities resume at any moment, especially since Israel does not know the meaning of the word ceasefire.

The Ayatollah Booth is egg on the US's face regardless, but $2M/ship is about $1/barrel for perspective. Spot price is $95/barrel right now.

$2M/ship is $1/barrel for VLCCs, but it's a lot more for smaller ships. Practically, nobody will use a ship smaller than a VLCC with the toolbooth.

VLCCs are already 2/3 the oil traffic, but yeah, rough day to be a small ship with cheap cargo.

Israel is already breaking the ceasefire conditions. Ref: "Netanyahu: Ceasefire doesn’t cover Lebanon" https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-cease...

Territorial expansion was probably always Israel's goal of this, with a bonus of weakening a regional rival.

In the 75 years of their existence it seems like they suck at expansion.

They should take a page from Indonesia’s book for example. Or turkey.

Indonesia?

Takeover of half of Papua New Guinea, now called irian Jaya. Transmigration, that is, moving Java people there and to Borneo (Kalimantan)in order to flood local populations with Malays.

But this did not make the news that much. Not that interesting I guess…

Israel violated the 2024 ceasefire over 10,000 times [0], not counting all the ones since Feb. 28. I guess this time they're not satisfied with having only 50 "freebies" a day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Israel%E2%80%93Lebanon_ce...

Have Israel ever respected a ceasefire?

Has Hamas or Hezbollah?

Textbook whataboutism.

Israel would not be doing this if not for the continuous attacks from those jihadist groups (well funded by Iran). But you know that.

The Nakba was not provoked by jihadist groups, it was provoked by colonial invaders. The victimization narrative never worked.

You seem to be implying Israel is no better than a terrorist group.

Hamas is the (originally elected by the people) government of Gaza. Hezbollah is a partner of and inside Lebanon's government.

In addition, both parties are who Israel was nominally in a ceasefire with. So extremely relevant to the discussion about Israel and ceasefires and not random whataboutism.

You seem to be implying discussion should be waived away if a counter party is both a government and a terrorist organization.

Not sure why you're replying to me?

I'm not the one comparing Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

Though next time I'll put terrorist group in quotes, as everyone has their own opinion.

Not only is it no better, it is significantly worse.

Yes

why is that relevant? Israel is a nation state, the others are 'terrorist groups'. are they equivalent? your response seems to imply that.

Interesting.

Israel is not a nation state but a western colony in Palestine (like Tibet is a Chinese colony, or Algeria was for france).

Hamas is the government in Gaza who the ceasefire was with and whose acts it was contingent on.

Hezbollah is part of the government in Lebanon and who the ceasefire was with and whose acts in was contingent on.

The relevance is pretty obvious.

'why are do you want to include both sides (including the actual governments on both sides) in a discussion about ceasefire' is a wild take.

They have a far better track record. The other side constantly lies and violates every rule.

Less times than Israel, and usually in response.

Israel has done more terrorism than Hamas.

Not only that, but Israel financed Hamas to politically destabilize Palestine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas

Ceasefire include removing Hizballa from Lebanon, but facts doesn't matter for terror supporters

They’ll probably receive most if not all of Iran’s focus now.

Perhaps they'll pro-rate it by size.

Maybe they'll end up with a sliding scale fee based on ship size/capacity

If Iran's 10 points become the basis of the peace, it ratifies Iran's sovereignty over the strait, at which point they can raise the price. It will be years before alternative routes devalue control of the strait, during which time Iran can siphon a lot of money out of passages taxes.

One thing I've not heard much discussion of is alternative routes. In the early days of this war there were discussions i of pipelines but it tapered off pretty fast

Pipelines are expensive and slow to build and notoriously vulnerable. Also you would need many I to match even half of the Hormuz throughput

Pipelines are possible, but they take time to build. The pipeline would have to cross several countries (depending on what route is taken - look at a map) which makes it much harder. Will Oman even be interested in this? Saudi Arabia I guess could build a pipeline to the red sea entirely internally, every other country in the region would have to cross someone else.

Still if Iran does charge the $1/barrel of oil they are proposing expect the countries in the region to look into a pipeline. That is a lot of money and a pipeline could potentially be cheaper in the long run.

The big issue with alternative routes is that they don't really solve the problem. Ports in Oman and Yemen outside the persian gulf are still close enough to Iran to be subject to attack by drones and missiles. Saudi Arabia has invested considerably into pipelines to the Red Sea but Iranian-backed Houthis can strike there. Even if there was a safe port somewhere, the pipelines themselves would be easy targets. There's a reason no alternative route has been pursued over the decades.

The most economical option is to just invest in the military technologies to pass through the Strait. Minesweepers, missile defenses, an appropriate number of escort frigates - an appropriate naval force could most certainly escort ships through. It's just incredibly dumb to start a war with an adversary that has been threatening to close a major waterway for decades immediately after decommissioning your minesweeper fleet and while there are zero frigates in your navy.

Also Iran can drop the price of the Taxes whenever they want to in order to drive the alternatives into a loss.

$2M/ship is $100B/year at pre-war crossing rates.

Nice. I wonder what the costs of reparations would be if the ceasefire were to end the war?

I’m 99% sure that if there is a deal where Iran collects a toll, it’s going to involve counting that toll (and/or sanctions relief, and/or unfreezing Iranian assets) as reparations. I would be very surprised if the US or Israel ever agree to direct payments to the Iranian government.

Truly an Art of the Deal - make countries that didn't choose to attack Iran... Pay for reparations.

With friends like Uncle Sam, who needs enemies?

For reference: This would almost triple their govts funds each year. One must also not forget that they're able to raise tolls in the future, both for monetary investment but also for negotiation purposes.

So we spent a ton of money and a bunch of people died to negotiate a much worse situation.

5D chess!

Making outrageous demands is normal in these negotiations. You can just look at what Hamas demanded during the ceasefires. What usually happens is no strong concessions from either side and hostilities just end. The regimes get to survive just in a badly degraded state.

Most importantly Iran can't afford to keep the strait closed to enforce this. If they block shipping their own will be blocked as well - which hasn't yet happened, they were still allowed to ship oil. Iran was already in terrible financial shape before the war and they aren't negotiating from a strong position of power to take those risks.

Is that an argument for them not being to enforce the ayatollbooth or its price to remain reasonnable ?

> Most importantly Iran can't afford to keep the strait closed to enforce this. If they block shipping their own will be blocked as well - which hasn't yet happened, they were still allowed to ship oil.

Why do you say this? During the war they set up a checkpoint system so their ships and ships they allowed to pass could still pass through.

Of course Iran wouldn't block its own ships at its own checkpoints, but the US is capable of easily interdicting Iranian shipping if it wants to.

this would be a worse crisis than we've just had; it'd put China (if not all of Asia) directly against the USA and would put Australia in a very peculiar spot.

While the crisis would be worse, I am not that sure that China will confront US on this militarily. So far they have stayed out of other's fights.

Iran charging a massive toll would also cause a crisis with the gulf states and they aren't going to tolerate it. This is much bigger than Iran vs US, and the idea they hold the cards for such a claim is mostly propaganda.

Just pointing out that for the volume of these ships, it's not really a massive toll. It's honestly a bargain, paid for in a really easy to stomach way by the people who allowed this to happen: Everyone else.

Doesn't explain why UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrian, and Saudis would tolerate a fee transiting the strait. Let alone why America would agree to that in negotiations given they have little incentive to agree to any large demands.

If that is agreed upon it's going to come with some concessions by Iran which is even less likely.

They'd tolerate it because they all poked a giant in the eye and it didn't go down. It's by far the cheapest route to peace any of them have.

USA could agree to it because it's not particularly dependent on that fuel supply and therefore would only pay the costs indirectly via market forces, which as the thief-in-chief pointed out, does (the parts he cares about of) their economy no harm as a net petroleum-product exporter, and above all else, they are losing the war.

Not quite, since they plan to share the revenue with Oman, or at least that’s what they’re currently claiming.

good for them, hopfeully they will be able to better protect themseves from rogue nations that don't respect international laws.

We‘re still talking about the largest funding nation of terror cells mate

Who enforces "international laws" anyway?

Trump cancelled the Iran deal, replaced it with nothing and now Iran has found an infinite money glitch.

100B/Year

How are they spinning this, that it is not Reparations?

"10. Iran to use Hormuz fees for reconstruction instead of reparations"

What is the splitting of hairs here?

I think reparations could be spent as they see fit. Reconstruction implies the money is going to exactly that.

But I agree it's a weird nitpick at this stage, as it seems almost impossible to verify once in place

No, the point is that instead of the US paying reparations from their own pocket they will allow Iran to tax Gulf countries.

That sentence is just worded badly, I would rewrite it as:

10. Iran to use Hormuz fees for reconstruction instead of demanding reparations from the US.

I think you're right, it's a bracketing ambiguity.

Rather than "Iran to use Hormuz fees for (reconstruction instead of reparations)" it's more likely to mean "Iran to use (Hormuz fees for reconstruction) instead of reparations"

Yeah, I think they want to do it this way, because Iran wants some compensation for damages, but paying reparations directly would be too humiliating for the US, and Trump would never agree to it.

Soon the dubai influencers will flock to Teheran.

Not convinced it will happen. What would prevent Saudi Arabia from retaliating and introducing a special fee on all ships coming from Iran. It's not like intercepting those massive cargo ships in a small sea is of any difficulty for a well funded military.

Geography and missiles? Iran have everything to lose and have been put in a position where they literally have to fight for their existence.

Militarily Iran is a giant and Saudi Arabia is a minnow.

Saudi Arabia has something like twice as many jet fighters than France. Even if you factor incompetence, it's not hard to hit a cargo ship or an oil production facility in absence of any meaningful air defence.

Does Saudi really want to fight an existential battle alone with Iran over 100B? probably not possible politically too.

well "want to" isn't "does not have to"

That would mean Saudi Arabia is starting a war with Iran, which they presumably don’t want to do.

Saudi Arabia has FAR more to lose. Paying $1 or its equivalent in Yuan per barrel is utterly nothing for them. Chump Change.

Unfortunately, I do not believe Israel will stand for peace on this terms, so a false-flag sabotage attack will happen as soon as they are freed from their conquest of Lebanon.

Saudi Arabia needs jet fighters to patrol a very large desert and active threats all around. France doesn't have enemies on all sides, and it has nukes and a navy. There's no pressing need for France to have more planes than Saudi Arabia

Isn't it already happening ?

Rather than $2M per ship, it's €1.7M or 13.7M CNY per ship.

1$/barrel - of barrels they are not producing surely ? That would make them able to levy Saudi Arabian and UAE oil and gas.

The differences in the various 10 point lists have been noticed. I wonder if different lists are being produced to make each side look better to their respective populace?

Still, either way lifting sanctions seems like a win for Iran. Also seems like Iran is going to be allowed to charge a transit fee through the SoH. Trump's going to spin this as a win, but it seems like a big loss. Maybe he's just desperate enough to get out of this that he's going to let it slide?

3. Acceptance of Iran's nuclear enrichment rights

Among many other items this would never be accepted. This momentary cease fire is just regrouping time for everyone involved and that has always been the case for Iran.

There no feasible escalation path for the US. Trump has alienated allies and much of his anti war supporters. A forever war quagmire in a country 3x larger than Iraq is unlikely, as is carpet bombing. So what's left? A JCPOA style agreement with a Maga bumper sticker on it, with heavy concessions to Iran to prevent them from racing to a bomb, which is the best option from their pov at this point.

Carpet bombing would be a waste of munitions. Iran to your point is massive and surface level bombing would mostly take out civilians. The civilians have been through enough. Most of Irans military and religious leaders are in missile cities that are 500 meters+ under mountains of rock, the same places they are creating nuclear material. These bunkers are immune to bunker busters and nukes. That will require ground troops and likely a lot of them. How that plays out specifically I have not a clue. I can only hope that they share body-cam footage and that casualties are kept to a minimum. If there is one thing I can give Iran credit for that is building some amazing and very impressive bunkers using US dollars.

with heavy concessions to Iran to prevent them from racing to a bomb

This game has already been played out many times before. Obama unfroze 1.7 billion, Biden gave them upwards of 6 billion. All together the US has given them upwards of 60 billion to pinky promise they wont build nukes. Never pay a bully, ever. They used that extortion money to build bunkers, pay their proxy soldiers to attack Israel and all the gulf states and to work on their bunkers. There will be no more of that. Shame on anyone that falls for those shenanigans again.

At $2M per ship, assuming an average of 90 ships per day, Iran would bring in roughly $65B a year just in tolls.

Age old story of all choke points of course. I was taught about choke points by a family member that served in WWII and it's funny, thinking back I was in trouble because I could not find the Strait of Hormuz on a world globe that had no writing on it. I mean seriously ... who keeps such a globe just sitting around for such an obscure moment? That lesson stuck with me. It was a strange lesson but it stuck nonetheless.

Was just reading that this is the first time a waterway choke point (other than canals which are man made) has had a toll. The implications are intriguing for their novelty and unknown second order effects.

Also, the comment about the globe reminds me of a quip from The Daily Show that went something like "... something something War, or how Americans learn geography." You are lucky to have prior generations which provide such inter-generational teaching moments.

> Never pay a bully, ever. They used that extortion money to build bunkers

Which bully are we talking about here? I'm guessing Donald Trump, who took millions in "donations" to demolish a 3rd of the white house to build a new bunker with a stupid ballroom on top (which will never get built, but the GOP will just shrug when asked where the money went).

We are talking about Donald Trump, right?

The Iran nuclear agreement was absolutely working for the year or so it lasted. International inspectors finally got to see things. Iran did not have a significant nuclear program during Trump's first term when he killed the agreement.

After Trump killed the agreement, what was Iran supposed to do? If the US can just ignore a diplomatic agreement, there's no reason for Iran to follow it. That means diplomacy is basically off the table. So they built a nuclear weapons industry again.

If Iran just wants to kill kill kill, why did it shut down it's chemical weapon industry? Why no dirty bombs? Why no gas attacks? Why is Iran, fighting an actually existential war, pulling it's punches? Why is it not hitting desalination plants like it can? They demonstrated that they have weapons that could hit Europe.

International inspectors finally got to see things.

Or so we are told. I have my doubts that they had access to all the missile cities. We will never know. Nobody will ever know until ICBM's, SRBM's and SRAM's start rolling out of their bunkers and Iran becomes a nuclear power. I believe this has been the goal of their stalling tactics and bullying. Too many nations trust but never really verify. This is how things went wrong with North Korea.

Give tourists paid access to all the bunkers. I want to ride an e-bike through all of them.

It is acceptable, if only enriched for civilian reactors, not weapon grade what they did - and Iran was about to agree to that condition before their leadership was wiped out. If the new leadership will agree, remains to be seen. But I believe china or russia are also not strongly interested in a nuclear armed Iran.

Either way, it's maximalist aims, not realistic aims. Negotiations will obviously converge closer to US aims since Iran has no leverage.

The president just went from threatening genocide to begging Pakistan to set up a deal that doesn't even have agreed-upon terms. Seems like they have quite a lot of leverage.

> Iran has no leverage.

Patently false. Else there'd be no ceasefire.

> 2. Continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz

> 6. Termination of all United Nations Security Council resolutions against Iran

> 7. Termination of all International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors resolutions against Iran

These seem remarkably outside the USes power to unilaterally agree to.

The first violates international treaties and while I'd be thrilled with the precedent as a Canadian eyeing my countries future revenue streams I doubt the rest of the world's countries are going to be happy to give up freedom of navigation through international waterways.

The second is something that can only be done by the UN security council with a majority vote and none of the permanent members vetoing the termination.

I don't actually know how the IAEA works, but it seems all but certain that that's up to their board of governors not the US.

If the US wants the IAEA to agree to something like this, especially considering the global economic impact of refusing, I imagine the IAEA could be convinced.

The JCPOA came about when the US pushed for it in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal

It’s unlikely that Iran will get it’s demands at least all of them, and further it’s likely that this ceasefire will break no matter what.

The strait is actually not international waters. It’s shared between Oman and Iran remember (deep water shipping lanes does not exists everywhere in it as well). There was reporting of an agreement on both sides to some sort of shared booth.

Only the US would be the permanent party to vote against it which would be against which would be weird if the agree to the conditions in the first place.

IAEA are stooges, they will do what the US tells them and they’ll come up with some legitimate way of doing it.

> The first violates international treaties

Yeah, but USrAel never ratified UNCLOS. Iran is in the same boat.

Although i think they mostly recognize it as customary international law.

Nonetheless international law isn't really worth the paper its written on. The bigger thing is there are a bunch of other countries dependent on the strait that might have something to say about it.

Trump could easily agree to it and consider that “their problem”. (I think Iran realize other countries have a say as well.)

It's interesting that these days any treaty that the US hasn't signed is probably a decent one, especially if hundreds of other countries have signed it.

It's usually the US and a bunch of garbage regimes on these lists, I guess there was a message being sent over time.

Even that is wildly worse than when we started the war. This is a unmitigated loss.

Yeah 0% chance the US agrees to this.

The US doesn't have the cards

Hmm.

"Acceptance of Iran's nuclear enrichment rights" (enrichment to what degree?)

"Termination of all International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors resolutions against Iran" (what does this actually mean, that they tear up previous reports and findings? Ignore undeclared nuclear facilities and unaccounted for uranium?)

I mean, are Iran basically asking that they be allowed build nuclear weapons unchecked? Or is there another way to read this?

Aljazeera is sharing roughly the same list

The whole concept of the ceasefire is absurd - it's like the joke that to combat the rise of suicides, the government made them punishable by death.

There's no enforcement mechanism, only big dog, small dog logic. What happens if one party breaks the ceasefire? The other starts shooting?

Um, yes?

Well we've already found out because Israel broke it. With Gaza they've gotten used to very flexible ceasefires where you can still bomb the other side repeatedly and the ceasefire "holds". Iran has shown that this will not work with them, and they closed the strait again

I’m not sure the terms of negotiation are even worth discussion. Every time this administration has negotiated with anyone on matters pertaining to Israeli interests, it’s only been a ruse to position for another attack.

My guess is that they know good and well all the marine landing craft are going to get smoked and are using a false peace to preposition the ground invasion. The ridiculous James Bond scheme they tried to pull off which resulted in us destroying a dozen of our own aircraft and, quite probably a few of our own operators was a Hail Mary inspired by too much television. That failure leaves the administration with quite the dilemma. Surrender and call it a victory, which Israel will not allow. Or repeat the Syracuse Expedition as farse.

It’s a bit depressing to think about, but my hope is that these catastrophic failures will get false allies out of the decision loop and we proceed as a more peaceful and wiser country.

> false allies

You can just say Israel. I wonder how long it will still take that Netanyahu has not US (or anyone’s at this point, except himself) interest in mind. Even Trump must be able to put two and two together at this point, no?

Oh at this point you should probably wonder not whether he gets it, but what leverage does Israel he have over him, and if it's directly from Epstein files.

What leverage could possibly Israel have that could be worse than this? https://newrepublic.com/post/207508/13-year-old-trump-accuse...

If his support from budge from him assaulting a minor sexually, Israel might have a file proving he is the antichrist, it would not matter. It’s more akin to a death cult than a political party.

How about video of it?

There was some journalist that said he had discussed with Steve Bannon even whether it would have mattered if the now infamous “pss tape” had actually materialised. Bannon said something along the lines of that Trump would have just called it fake and it would not have mattered even slightest to his voters.

> Even Trump must be able to put two and two together at this point, no?

How have you looked at the the last couple of decades of Trump and come to that conclusion? The man's a total idiot and that was even before his mental decline

He is an extremely prickly idiot that has very accute senses when somebody is crossing him over. So does any two-bit hustler. Or maybe he really did start a war just to bury the Epstein files for a brief moment, god only knows at this point.

Trump is probably being black mailed. Epstein must have given them some really heinous footage of Trump on camera.

Yikes, so basically Iran gets everything it wants. It paid a heavy price for it, but it would get so much out of this. At pre war ship rates, that toll would be ~$90B per year ($45B if split half with Oman). Iran's government generates something like $40B in income, so this would be absolutely monumental.

It all sounds great. Which government? Is it a different regime? If not, why would the US concede?

The old government is largely dead. The new one has a carrot and a stick in front of them.

The new government is led by the Ayatollah Khamenei. The son of the last one, younger and out for revenge.

Knocking off Saddam gave us ISIS. These things have a way of going sideways.

This son is reportedly in coma and in no position to rule.

Yay! We cut off two of the hydra’s heads! That always ends well.

Reported by whom?

So who has the authority to claim that Iran has agreed to a ceasefire?!

Knocking off the Taliban gave us the check notes the Taliban

The IRGC is probably more analogous to the Ba’ath party than the Taliban if we’re limiting ourself to regional comparisons

> new government is led by the Ayatollah Khamenei

Let's see. It may be a military dictatorship using Khamenei, who may or may not even be in Iran, as a figurehead.

Not the military, the IRGC. Which is a religiously indoctrinated military.

So it would still be a theocracy, same as before, but now also run by people who are conditioned to believe that more violence is always a solution to any problem.

Unfortunately, it's now theocrat vs. theocrat.

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3miybj6ff622f

> Hegseth: "God deserves all the glory. Tens of thousands of sorties, refuelings, and strikes, carried out under the protection of divine providence. A massive effort with miraculous protection."

The old govt was about to be toppled by people sick of it. The US attack unified those people behind the leaders son, someone they’d not have taken before, and entrenched a new generation against the US. So far the carrot and stick has them openly mocking Trump and the US as Trump makes threat, draws line, folds yet again, repeats.

> why would the US concede?

Because it has no way of achieving its objectives.

I don't think that has stopped anything so far, but I appreciate your optimism.

More accurate to say that the US is not willing to pay the price to achieve its objectives I think (depending on who/when you’re asking what exactly the objectives are of course).

The US has mostly achieved their objectives (as best as I can tell - the strategy isn't exactly coherent) - Iran has much less missiles, and much less ability to produce them.

If there was any outside visible thread of reasoning for this war it was "Iran seems like it could have regime change" and I haven't heard anything saying they're more likely to have a different form of government.

I doubt the revolutionaries sympathizers within Iran liked their children being murdered or infrastructure getting destroyed. All the US has done is a repeat of the same thing they've done for half a century: start a war and immediately get more enemies within the middle east. Perhaps the only change is now the US's allies are distancing themselves faster and further than ever before.

There was a lot more - since mid last summer the US and Iran have been talking. There was some progress on nuclear issues. However Iran refused to discuss their ballistic missile program or funding for the likes of Hezbollah. Just based on that alone it is no surprise that the US got fed up. However you have to pay a little more attention to see that even though it is public.

Sometimes you want someone to do something, but you don't have authority to order them around, and you are bad at persuasion and dealmaking, so you don't get what you want.

If you're not ok with walking away at that point, maybe put a better offer on the table?

I fail to see a better offer. Support for those trying to kill jews is not something I can accept. I don't like any option for dealing with it, but walking away is still evil.

I can't speak for you, but for me, as a jew, killing innocent people just to get what you want is bad, even if they aren't jewish. Support for genocidal wars of conquest (like russia's and israel's) isn't something I can accept.

Additionally: supporting the killing of innocents, war crimes, genocide, etc, just because the perpetrators are jewish, is eviler still. Israel's actions make all jews (like myself) look bad, and puts us at risk around the world.

Maybe try diplomacy instead? And no, diplomacy doesn't mean "take our offer with no changes or we will kill you all". It means recognizing that israel isn't better than other countries, it means treating others as equals, it means you don't get to boss around co-equal countries, and it means giving first if you want to receive.

Because it doesn’t have a choice. There is no path to winning this war, just ways of making larger and more complex versions of the Iraq occupation.

Depends on what you mean by "win". It would be possible to go in, topple the regime and secure the nuclear material. But only at astronomical cost and years of blowback

"Regime Change" has become a modern term for vassalization. We should not be surprised that countries with no reason to be a US vassal, and no long-term ties to the US refuse to remain vassals.

So then what would we achieve? nuclear material is cheap (10s of billions) relative to a multi-decade occupation (single digit trillions). It's undoubtedly true that Iran would revert to it's preferred form of government, geopolitical orientation, and nuclear capability once the US left.

How’d that plan work out in Iraq or Afghanistan, both much smaller, less armed countries? Decades and trillions spent, and what exactly did the US “win”?

The US won the removal of a regime in Iraq that strongly opposed Iran. </sarcasm>

Winning a war means achieving your political goals while preventing the enemy from achieving theirs. Most of the time, you've won the war when the enemy effectively admits they lost.

The lack of will to use sufficient force to win a war is fundamentally no different from not having that force in the first place. Both are equally real constraints on your ability to win the war.

Why would the US start this in the first place? Be assured that however this comes out, a “Truth” will be posted assessing it as the Greatest Deal Ever and a Total Win, end of story.

It’s been repeatedly stated by officials that we fought this war for Israel. We had nothing to gain and much to lose, and lose we did. Thankfully Israel also lost and I think this was their last chance at using the US as their attack dog.

We will see if this is all the chips that Epstein bought

People are looking for conspiracy theories when the truth is simple - trump did it because he thought it would be an easy quick win that will put him in the history books.

It’s not a conspiracy theory if Trump and all parties involved explicitly state this was for Israel. The simplest explanation is that they are telling the truth, which makes sense since the US had nothing to gain from this.

Netanyahu has wanted to do this for decades. If you rob a bank, you don't get to say "oh, well, my crazy friend down the pub has been saying we should rob a bank for ages, and I suddenly decided he was right"; you do have some personal responsibility.

Sidenote; there's this weird thing that people sometimes do wrt to Trump (and I think it's both his supporters and detractors to an extent) where they kind of treat him as if he's without agency, and stuff is just happening to him. I think it might be a kind of subconscious response to him being old and coming across as a bit senile, but it is nonsensical.

a major reason would be that they didnt think iran could selectively close the strait, and the intelligence about how not liking the current government is not the same as supporting the US

> If not, why would the US concede?

Because Trump is already facing a bloodbath in the midterms and his next step is either a ground war or dropping a nuke, and both of those will ensure he not only loses the midterms but has a legitimate shot at seeing the inside of a prison cell.

Because the escalation Trump was talking about would have wrecked the ME with Iran's retaliation on desalination plants, oil infrastructure, power plants, etc. Which would have been a massive shock to the global economy, along with a large humanitarian crisis inside of Iran and it's neighbors.

They also got to keep their new Ayatollah and continue with their religious government. An escalation of the war would have certainly ended with a complete regime change. Which would have been very expensive in life (Iranians) and money (Americans).

There was never going to be a regime change. Continuing the war meant many Americans were going to die (in addition to bankrupting the US). I'm a US citizen and very glad Iran came out on top here.

US is bankrupt to the tune of trillions already.

When you don't the money, you can't go bankrupt.

But, if you had an amazing reputation for paying your debts, and get super low interest rates because of it, and all of a sudden you change your reputation and demand for holding your debt and currency goes down, well, then that's created a massive problem for the currency that reduces everyone's quality of life drastically.

A complete regime change would probably only come with a large scale invasion, bigger than Iraq's. A huge majority of Americans don't want that.

Or with their people rising up, which is I think what the US and Israel were hoping for - though they didn’t seem to plan for a way to actually make it happen.

We will see what happens at the end of this war when people come out of their homes to a crumbling country. They could decide that enough is enough and bring in some change.

Without arms, it is probably impossible for the people to take back their country.

We take the Second Amendment for granted here in the US - but the lack of a similar thing in Iran is what will keep the civilian population under the regime's control - or else another 10k-30k+ massacre.

I was wondering why we aren't considering the Liberator pistol v2.

Getting collectively bombed tends to have a unifying effect. If anything, bombing a populace would decrease the risk of an uprising that supports the bombers.

How would you feel if your city was being bombed by a hostile foreign nation, including a school full of kids? Magnanimous toward the attackers?

Yeah they will come out of their homes and decide that we should acquiesce to Israel because enough is enough. How’d that go with the Palestinians? In the real world, Israel’s abhorrent behavior unites these populations /against/ them. Your logic is in a fantasy realm.

Their new Ayatollah is braindead. It's not over yet.

How much do you think is fair for being attacked by a superpower for no reason in illegal military action with war crimes sprinkled throughout.

Imagine it happened to you.

The US attack on Iran was wrong but don't forget that Iran loves to lob ballistic missiles at Israel civilians.

What? Iran was attacked by israel numerous times, including today. It has the right to defend itself.

If anything, it's israel here that has attacked almost all countries in the area and annexed land from them ("buffer zones").

How does shooting ballistic missiles with cluster warheads at residential areas help defend Iran?

If what you said was true, we'd have seen many, many civilian deaths in Israel over the course of the war - there have, officially, been less than 50 (note that in the same time period Israel - which has targeted civilian infrastructure such as hospitals in Iran - has killed over 3,000 Iranian civilians!).

But what you're saying isn't true - any of it! Iran has been hitting military targets. And they've been using MIRVs, not anti-personell cluster munitions (you know, of the kind Israel has dropped over 1M of over Lebanon). MIRVs split into multiple, independently targetable missiles when high above ground near the target zone. Cluster munitions wait until they are only some meters above ground, and then explode into bomblets.

https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2026/04/iranian-ball...

On April 6, as many as 50 sites were impacted by missiles and their cluster munitions.

“Iranian cluster munitions struck roughly 50 locations across central Israel, wounding at least six, including a seriously wounded woman in Petah Tikva and a moderately wounded man in Ramat Gan,”

Iran has focused on using cluster munitions in its ballistic missile salvos since the first two weeks of the conflict. However, the proportion of these munitions has increased. By March 10, Israel’s Home Front Command said that 50 percent of the Iranian missiles contained cluster munitions.

On April 1, The Times of Israel reported that “12 missiles carrying conventional warheads with hundreds of kilograms of explosives […] struck populated areas in Israel, causing extensive damage. There have also been more than 30 incidents of missiles carrying cluster bomb warheads hitting populated areas, with over 200 separate impact sites.” A ballistic missile attack on April 4, which led to at least 10 impact sites, illustrated how large an area can be affected by one missile with cluster munitions.

Bullshit, they are just calling MIRVs "cluster munitions" - they are not, and naming them as such will not make it so.

lol you are so full of shit its incredible, but muslim lovers will do whatever it can do to come up with bullshit.

The funny thing is that many Sunnis don't consider Shia to actually be Muslims. Shia twelvers are obsessed with the 12th Imam who they think is still alive after 1150+ years while Sunnis don't care about this at all and consider the entire concept blasphemous.

Iran is absolutely not using MIRVs. They are only used with nuclear warheads because they are very expensive. Iran is using good old fashioned cluster warheads where the bomblets are randomly dispersed, which is an evil weapon to use against civilians.

You are wrong[0], see Khorramshahr. Maybe Iran found ways to make them more easily produced. And there are videos where you can see missiles splitting into other missiles, some of which go in different directions.

As before, it's Apartheid Israel that uses cluster bombs (and white phosphorus too).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khorramshahr_(missile)

You are wrong if you think Iran is targeting each sub-munition of the ballistic missiles it is firing at Israel civilians. No country has ever used any ballistic missiles that has conventional MIRVs because it simply doesn't make sense.

Iran is far more of an apartheid state because Jews are considered to be Dhimmis and officially discriminated against. Dhimmi status is not equality. Recognized-minority status under the 1979 constitution comes with hard ceilings: Jews cannot hold senior military, judicial, or executive positions; inheritance law historically favored any family member who converted to Islam (a Jew converting could inherit the entire estate from Jewish relatives, a direct incentive structure against the community); testimony of non-Muslims is weighted less in court; blood money (diyya) was unequal until reforms in the 2000s. The reserved Majles seat is one out of 290, tokenism, not representation.

Israel also gets to pretend it has no nuclear weapons.

> Iran loves to lob ballistic missiles at Israel civilians

Phew and I wonder why that might be!

Yea, I do wonder, why that might be? Why is a country 1500 miles away, that doesn't even share a common border, preoccupied with the destruction of Israel to the point it invested hundreds of billion of dollars in its offensive capabilities and network of proxies on every side of Israel, had a special paramilitary wing (Quds Force) for operations inside Israel, had a public clock counting down the existence of Israel and called for the destruction of Israel on each and every opportunity?

What's the obsession with the destruction of Israel? Could it be related to the fact that an Islamic Republic of (...) could not accept a Jewish rule right in the middle of the great Muslim Ummah?

So you really can't see what the problem is that the Israelis have caused in this region, can you.

In the spirit of this positive community, I'm looking forward to hearing about those problems.

Well, for starters just today they hit cental, civilian areas of Beirut with 100 attacks in just 10 minutes - killing more Lebanese civilians in ten minutes than Iran killed Israeli civilians in months of war. Absolutely vile, with clear genocidal intent, and with the aim of stealing Lebanese land.

That's just today...

That’s unrelated to my question though. The obsession Iran has with Israel spans four decades now. It hasn’t started with any attack today.

That's simply not true - when, in Iran's entire history - has Iran attacked Israel without first being struck by Israel? Not once.

Iran's so called "obsession" is simply their desire to remain a sovereign state.

You are ignoring the elephant in the room: Hezbollah was literally founded in 1982 under IRGC direction; 1,500 Revolutionary Guards deployed to the Bekaa Valley to organize and train it. It is arguably the most successful export of the 1979 revolution's "velayat-e faqih" ideology. So Iran colonized Lebanon.

Hezbollah formally accepts Khamenei as wali al-faqih the supreme juridical authority. That's not alliance, that's religious-political fealty to a foreign head of state.

Iran provides an estimated $700M–$1B/year, plus missiles, drones, training. Without Iran, Hezbollah's strategic arsenal doesn't exist.

It operates as a parallel state inside Lebanon (own military, telecoms, social services, foreign policy), displacing Lebanese sovereignty in the south and Bekaa.

You are ignoring the mammoth on the room: Hezbollah only even exists because of Israeli aggression; murder, rape, land theft, and as we saw yesterday, civilian massacres.

> So Iran colonized Lebanon

They haven't "colonised" anything, and, at best, it's disingenuous to describe training a resistance group as such.

> It operates as a parallel state inside Lebanon (own military, telecoms, social services, foreign policy), displacing Lebanese sovereignty in the south and Bekaa.

To claim the "officially recognised" Lebanese state is sovereign is utterly ridiculous! They are stooges, tasked with sitting back and doing nothing while Israel carries out ethnic cleansing and genocide. An MI6 front (Westminster Foundation for Democracy) even has an office inside the Lebanese parliament.

Turns out that if you take over a country's government and continuously carry out appalling attrocities against it's people for decades, they will resist.

"To claim the "officially recognised" Lebanese state is sovereign is utterly ridiculous"

Wow, this is quite a take. If Hezbollah doesn't have to respect Lebanon sovereignty then why does Israel?

"Turns out that if you take over a country's government and continuously carry out appalling attrocities against it's people for decades, they will resist."

This is just a insane conspiracy theory. Hezbollah is the organization that actually partially took over the Lebanese government with Iranian help.

Hezbollah attacks Israel with absolutely no concern for the damage Israels counterattacks will do to Lebanon.

> This is just a insane conspiracy theory

Absolutely disgusting - look at the massacres Apartheid Israel committed in Lebanon just yesterday.

> Hezbollah attacks Israel with absolutely no concern for the damage Israels counterattacks will do to Lebanon

That's the same logic wife-beaters use... "it's their own fault I hit them!".

I'm not going to engage any further with your genocidal rhetoric.

Israel would not be attacking Hezbollah if Hezbollah wasn't attacking Israel. Israel just wants to exist while Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran all want to destroy it. Don't expect Israel to just passively accept this. Try to imagine how the US would react to a Mexican cartel shooting rockets at El Paso. I couldn't feel sorry for that cartel when the US counterattacked.

Let me ask you a few questions

1) do you think Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran can defeat Israel with force?

2) do you want them to?

Israel's first ally in the Middle East was the secular Iran government under Mossadegh.....

Because they have a very deep and irrational hatred of Jews that stems directly from the way the koran talks about them.

Here's a comment to the contrary from another poster which I found illuminating: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47605903

The US and Israel have killed over 3,000 civilians in this war, mostly in Iran and Jordan. Iran has killed like 30. Their attacks are literally a hundredth of what they got and we're still trying to portray them as the bad guys. Don't get me wrong, Iran sucks, but not because of this

Iran has killed thousands of its civilians. The only reason it has only killed a few Israelis (excluding Oct 7) is because they can't easily get past Israeli defenses.

The Shia Theocracy controlling Iran has killed thousands of civilians protesting their oppressive regime.

Jordan is a US ally, I think you are confusing it with some other country

It depends. If it later comes out that their nuclear material was secured by the US, this is much more acceptable - it would seriously incentivize pipeline construction by making passage through the Strait more expensive. Given that closing it is really the only lever Iran has that can put pressure on the US at all, this attenuates that a great deal.

It’s not acceptable on its face, but there’s a lot going on in this conflict that isn’t making the news.

Iran has also been freely bombing Israel and US assets around the Middle East. The Zionists bit off more than they could chew and now Iran is better positioned than ever before. Not only that Iran has earned a lot of respect globally and Israel/the US has lost what little they had left.

A pipeline will circumvent Iranian tolls, but would be vulnerable to Iranian strikes in a war.

Probably a risk worth taking; defending a pipeline is much easier than escorting huge, slow-moving ships through a 24km-wide Strait laced with mines and peppered by artillery and missiles.

As opposed to a single continuous structure in a well known location, full of flammable liquids?

Pipelines can be protected. Just putting it in the ground for example. Or you build a "bomb" proof shelter over it - Iran's missiles are not bunker busters, we know how powerful they are and can design for that. Air defense systems are getting better too.

The US did not secure nuclear material. No one has even made that claim and it was logistically impossible.

No one has agreed to the Iran's 10 point plan, and they're not going to get all of it.

The provisional ceasefire actually goes against the Iranian proposition. Point 2 explicitly is "permanent end to the war, not a ceasefire".

Iran backed down a bit here from their maximalist aims (which is what the 10 point is).

Trump literally said he would bomb them to the stone age. It doesn’t get more maximalist than that and it was the US that backed down.

I mean, neither one did what they said they would do, if they had both done what they said they'd do, I guess we'd have nuclear war, so. (To the extent that you can't get anything consistent out of what Trump says he will do it's literally not possible, because he constantly contradicts himself.)

A ceasefire agreement isn't an end of war agreement.

Typically that means backing down on objectives/demands otherwise that would be the end of it.

Stone age is old news. The latest threat is that an entire civilization will die. And yes, US backed down -- TACO Trump shows up again.

TACO enjoyers always come out on top.

How is it backing down when his threat was we’d do it if they didn’t agree to open up the strait, which is now open?

I don’t like the way he does things but we’ve seen Trump’s playbook enough to see what he does. Big threat, followed by the US getting some sort of capitulation from it. He then doesn’t follow through with the threat.

That’s not chickening out. That’s just negotiating with a big stick.

The strait is not open, Trump is pretending it is, to save face. Iran is charging $2M per ship, which will net them $90B and that is significantly higher than their oil revenue ($60B). Plus they get to keep their enriched uranium. Yes they lost some buildings and bridges but the strait fee is enough to rebuild. Iran is in a stronger position now than when the war started. TACO Trump lost the war.

> Iran is charging $2M per ship,

Iran wants to charge $2M per ship as part of it's ceasefire conditions - which will almost certainly be rejected since that would impact every ship/nation traversing these waters. Waters that are not owned by Iran.

> Plus they get to keep their enriched uranium.

There's 0% chance of that happening.

> Iran is in a stronger position now than when the war started.

All of Iran's senior leadership are dead. Most or all of the "second-string" leadership is dead. All but their ground-force military is destroyed.

So we go back to all out war and a closed straight when no agreement is made.

The leadership clearly doesn't matter as neither the regime has collapsed nor have moderates emerged.

Claims of destruction of "all" military are continually invalidated by the ongoing drone and missile strikes.

Big stick?! More like whacking himself with a big stick.

Read up on his ‘playbook’ with russia, north korea, china etc ..

> which is now open?

Is it? Iran seems to be under the impression it is subject to their control.

> US backed down -- TACO Trump shows up again.

It's stunning to me, that people still do not understand Trump's one-and-only playbook. He literally published a book about his one-and-only strategy all the way back in 1987 - yet people still freak out when he makes big demands then settles for more realistic options. The guy literally has used the same strategy over and over, and everyone acts like it's the first time every time.

It's also stunning to me the very same people that were losing their minds about threatened events immediately switch into "TACO" mode when those events don't happen.

In this situation, Trump made wild threats and demands if Iran didn't agree to a ceasefire. Iran initially rejected but then some 6 hours later accepted. The one-and-only playbook strikes again.

He did it with Xi Jinping but the Chinese immediately responded in kind.

Bullying only works against the weak.

What is stunning here is that some people think Trump has a reasonable strategy. What works in the business world is not the appropriate approach when working with other nations. When you threaten to kill an entire civilization, that damages US's reputation, regardless of what that threat accomplishes. Today the Pope is admonishing us and our closest partners such as UK is shunning us. US is now seen as a shit country on the level of North Korea. TACO Trump needs to be removed from office ASAP.

Even as Trump was threatening to wipe out Iran’s civilization unless Tehran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, he was actively looking for a way out of the crisis. Trump then got Pakistan to post a fake plea to himself on X [1]. A few hours later Trump accepted the fake plea.

How pathetic is this!

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/world/middleeast/trump-pa...

Nothing has been agreed yet except a 2 week ceasefire.

Posts like this from the HN community are almost surreal. Any review of the actual deal would show a two week ceasefire in exchange for the strait being open and safe while negotiations continue. This 10 point plan is just a place to start talking, no country has agreed to anything on it. How is this missed on the community here?

Who knew tech employees weren't exactly across international politics.

No it would be trivial to gain a thorough understanding of Middle East politics and the oil market for an enlightened people who were able to become foremost experts in epidemiology, molecular biology, global supply chain logistics, the war in Ukraine, semiconductor manufacturing, and many other fields entirely self-taught simply by obsessively reading social media and wikipedia.

That's why people come here, they learn these things in the comments.

It's not the people who just come to learn though.

"Infotainment" is the term I've heard to describe Reddit and other talking websites. People are looking to "win" like they do in sports or other recreational activities. It's a kind of fun that disguises itself as learning-- minus, of course, the actual work.

Team sports for the higher class

Nobody knows what "the actual deal" is because we have pathological liars on both sides (well, especially pathological on one side, most just utilitarian on the other)

Iran's version of events includes the Iranian military controlling the Strait and incurring fees.

AP is reporting Iran's version as the true one.

The community is not as sophisticated as you may perceive it to be.

I understand this perspective a lot more. I assume they're going to haggle and work on a few items, and adjust pieces here and there. What if they at least get sanctions lifted, that would be huge, no? Going to be an interesting couple of weeks.

> This 10 point plan is just a place to start talking

Its probably not even that. PR statements for public consumption rarely reflect bargaining positions behind closed doors.

Welcome to HN where users with little domain knowledge make comments of utter certainty about any topic under the sun.

Yeah. Exhibit A: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688395

Safe but not open. The agreement Trump tweeted says ships must "coordinate" with IRGC.

Change this line from : "so basically Iran gets everything it wants"

to "so basically Iran would get everything it wants under this plan".

I'm not so dumb to understand that this will be the final plan, just commenting that this is incredibly bad for the US as is laid out.

> Any review of the actual deal would show a two week ceasefire in exchange for the strait being open and safe while negotiations continue.

Speaking of this community being kinda dumb - do you really think this ceasefire is enough for all ships to go on their merry way? Deals mentioned over social media are not enough to convince insurance companies that all is safe. And 12 hours later we now have evidence of this - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/strait-hormuz-sh...

Also, my original point is that there is nothing in that deal that is a better long-term outcome than what we had before the war. Maybe that will change in the final deal, but the fact that the starting point of the negotiation is 100% on Iran's side is not where you want to be.

Sadly they have dropped requirements that Netanyahu be turned over to the ICC, but it's important to recognize that this ceasefire is between Iran and the US only and not necessarily a deal between Iran and Israel.

>> 1. Guarantee that Iran will not be attacked again

Hard for the Iranians to take anything the US says seriously. US launched attacks in the middle of the last two negotiations.

Yeah, it would be ridiculous that the IRGC terrorist regime, which fired super-inexact ballistic missiles that split to cluster bombs that spread in 70 parts on a 3 miles radius in residential areas, for a whole month, on a daily basis, would ask that someone _else_ will be held go to the ICC tribunal...

Do you have a source for this being the 10 points which form the basis of negotiations, rather than something released to the media to shape those negotiations?

This is not the deal. Iran had published this earlier as their list of demands, just like the US did. The reality is something in the middle of that.

I can’t accept the theocratic tyrants who implement terrorism, execute their own people and slaughter them as they protest remain in charge. They should be forced out of power.

I wonder if the US had struck when momentum was high during the popular uprising, it could have being self sustaining, with arms and logistics setup to feed the resistance advance.

The delusional idea that one can affect regime change through bombing is the cause of quite a bit death and destruction throughout the world.

Maybe the problem wasn't the timing, but the fact that thousands of people were killed and millions lived in fear for the future for the past month? That's enough to cause most people to stand behind their government, no matter how reviled they might be.

The second day of the war Israel gave everyone in Tehran a day-long oil shower. Imagine cleaning that out of your kid's hair, you're not going to overthrow the government that's shooting back.

I guess you’re right. I was thinking a peoples army, armed by US logistics and calling in US air support.

But i guess you know more than i do

Regime change with air invasion is unlikely.

The civilian casualties of the war is still significantly lower than the number killed by the regime (according to Amnesty International with conservative number). So while I agree that people don’t want bombing, I highly doubt that the war makes them like their oppressors. They love their country and Iran and islamic regime are not the same exactly.

The idea there was bombing to support the popular uprising that does the actual work. I think that might have been the fantasy here, too, but it seems like the window closed.

I'm not arguing that Iran has been executed well, but military force has topled MANY regimes. If you're arguing "bombs" specifically and only, the U.S. won the war with Japan by dropping just two big ones. If you'd like a more contemporary example: Libya, 2011. NATO’s campaign relied overwhelmingly on air and missile strikes, and NATO officially did not deploy a conventional foreign ground force. The regime was finished by Libyan rebel forces on the ground. This is likely the scenario Trump was hoping for.

Japan was on its last legs was and the US had already gone all-in with a war machine unlike anything seen before. At that point no one was going to lose elections about lost lives while invading Japan. The bombs were a time and life saving device. And the US army still had to actually occupy Japan after that (much smaller than Iran)

You may be right about the political challenges (and I'm neither arguing for or against them), I'm simply pointing out that the war was won with two bombs. Perhaps it was wise to station troops in Japan after victory, but I don't think it was necessary. Even if it were, the peacekeeping forces were far smaller and there was almost zero violence. This would be politically palatable to Americans.

Sorry I should have been more nuanced. Bombing can win conflicts but one thing is does not do is regime change.

I'd argue the occupation was necessary: The political system that led to militarism was still intact and there were still factions against surrender until the very end. It was regime change per se but a regime transformation and I don't think it would have been possible without an occupation.

I think that's fair. The leadership remained in power. However I would argue that in the case of Iran, Trump doesn't care if leaders remain in power, as long as they do what he wants. Specifically on uranium enrichment. I think he wanted to follow the Venezuela example, but this is not that.

Hirohito was King of Japan from 1926 to 1989.

Kangaroo Suzuki was PM from 1868 until his death in 1948.

So arguing that the atomic bomb having toppled the regime is factually wrong.

I strongly disagree. Toppling regimes doesn't only mean the nation becomes democratic. It also means obeisance to the invading force.

You can't just change the definition when it suits you Nothing was toppled. You're wrong and just too childish to accept it.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/toppling

This definition is perfectly congruent with a regime losing all autonomous power and becoming subservient to a foreign power. I would argue the U.S. "toppled" Venezuela's regime despite the existing party remaining in power. They do as they are told now.

Keep believing it buddy

There was, and still is, no scenario in which US and/or Israel attacks Iran and effects regime change. Come on, we've been over this multiple times over the past few decades.

Any direct military action will galvanize population against the existential threat, not against the tyrant who's still your countryman, no matter how rotten.

If they wanted true change, grassroots support was the only way. Was, because at this point more than likely any revolution has been pushed back by a few years at least, probably decades.

I see your point. You don’t think most Iranians want freedom from tyrants? I see 90% dislike the tyrants, and 80% want Trump to eradicate them. Leveling the field for the popular revolution I hope takes over.

Would you want Americans to take Trump down yourselves, or would rather China come and take him down for you? Iranians have as much agency as Americans do. Denying them that never ends well.

Iranians are not armed tho

This is a very naive view. Things do not happen like that, especially in the Middle East, where killing a tinpot dictator just causes two more radical ones spring to usurp his place. We've been over this where US military interventions in this century alone caused ISIS to spread like wildfire, and make things worse long term in many of the countries affected.

I think some Iranians, perhaps even a vast majority of them, would like freedom from Khomenei, but the westerners have just conducted massive bombing operations, killing many innocent civilians at the behest of their mortal enemy Israel, so any freedom movements are at the very least very unpopular now, with people becoming radicalized by deaths of their loved ones, especially their children, pushing them into the arms of those in power, who can justifiably point and say "see? They are the enemy, not us!". One almost wonders if that wasn't also one of the goals of the invasion, preventing the formation of a secularized and stable Iran.

That’s OK, you may be right. And all my comments here on the Iranian situation may be wrong. Which is also perfectly okay because I don’t have to make any decisions affecting the Persian people.

Iranian here, no we don't want Israel and United States to bomb our children to "free us".

We already have 90M intelligent people in the country and can figure it out eventually.

We still has ways to go to develop, IRAN lacks some women's rights (however it's not as bad as people make it to be) and freedom of speech (similar to other Gulf nations). Most people have major grievances regarding the economy.

After the uprising of "Woman, Life, Freedom" in 2022, followed by the Mahsa uprising, the government started to loosen the Hijab laws for example. They stopped enforcing it severely (though they can change it at any time), the clerics have realized that theocratic laws will backfire with young people. I think the future of Iran is going to look like other nations, where religion becomes a "cultural thing".

The biggest blockers at the moment are sanctions and the ongoing issues with Israel.

We've survived for 3,000 years, we can survive for another 3,000 years without the help of US.

Murdering tens of thousands of protesters couple months ago, tho?

How are you commenting? I thought the internet was turned off in Iran.

90m imbecilles that rather have sharia law and complete utter opression and deconstruction of the persian DNA. you are so full of shit its incredible, any iranian that took refugee in europe can contest your so full of propaganda shit.

Go die for allah that is what you love and 90m of your fellow brothers.

I think the people in Gaza want freedom from tyrants.

Your post is ambiguous until the second part, FYI. In this conflict, it's a good idea to be clear on which nation you are talking about from the start.

Lol

Iran's 10-point plan (that no one else has agreed to)

Exactly, but Hacker News is upvoting this because it wants the US to be seen as the loser of this conflict.

Both sides in a conflict (or any negotiation) make demands that they know the other will not accept. You can't just take someone's list like that and assume that'll be the exact outcome.

Oftentimes ceasefires have agreed-upon terms.

As does this one. The 10 points aren't the agreed-upon terms, though. The agreed-upon terms are: stop bombing for two weeks, and open the straits for two weeks.

Does Iran acknowledge the second one or do they believe they are the toll takers of the strait?

Good question! And I don't know the answer. "Reopen the strait", but I haven't noted whether it's with or without toll for the two weeks.

hackers are often leftwing sweaty tryhards, obviously not all of them ;) but whatever, let them suck on those circumsized penis while the local paki rape gangs rule the streets of europe.

Contrast it with the JCPOA by Obama

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/joint-comprehensive-p...

Key Aspects of the JCPOA: Enrichment Limits: Iran capped uranium enrichment at 3.67% for 15 years.

Centrifuge Restrictions: Reduced operating centrifuges to 5,060 IR-1 machines for 10 years.

Stockpile Restrictions: Limited enriched uranium stockpile to 300 kg for 15 years.

Facility Redesign: Redesigned the Arak heavy water reactor to prevent plutonium production and converted Fordow into a research center.

Monitoring: The IAEA receives enhanced access and monitoring capabilities.

Sanctions Relief: UN, EU, and US nuclear-related sanctions were lifted, restoring Iranian oil sales and banking access.

While since Trump dropped that deal, Iran had enriched around 440kg to 60%. Nobody knows for sure where any of that is.

yep, the US fucked up by not properly ratifying the JCPOA

tearing it up and pissing all over it led directly to this quagmire

So much winning.

What an awful failure that agreement was. Iran accepted the sanctions relief and ignored the terms of the agreement.

They didn't, they followed it with very minor discrepancies ,until US left it and applied sanctions.

What about the other Middle East countries involved such as the UAE and what about Europe?

Europe, thankfully, stayed out of this mess. Some countries even rejected to even give logistical support to the US.

I wonder if uninvolved nations will also be required to pay the safe passage fees.

Aside from Iranian allies, it seems likely.

So this would have the downstream effect of further degrading international sentiment towards US military operations in the future.

> wonder if uninvolved nations will also be required to pay the safe passage fees

If Iran is smart (and Iran gets the fees, which remains a big if) they would exempt Spain.

Not really practical to exempt Spain even if they wanted to, with Spain being within the EU and therefore able to freely move goods and services to other EU nations.

> with Spain being within the EU and therefore able to freely move goods and services to other EU nations

Fair enough. Spain gets N free tankers a month, with N calibrated to Spanish consumption.

and some (most?) countries offered support...?

Spain has held a firm line, but even others such as UK/FR have allowed use of facilities or engaged their air craft carriers or facilitated US movements.

> Europe, thankfully, stayed out of this mess

Cyprus/UK [0] faced attempted strikes; the UK is running defensive sorties for the UAE [1], Qatar [2], and Iraq [3]; and British bases in Oman and the UAE were struck [4]. France has done similar actions as well [5]. The UK and France have mutual defense pacts across the Gulf as well which they need to maintain.

Additionally, Ukraine has now begun providing defensive capabilities to the Gulf States, which Iran argues makes it an active combatant [6]. By this precedent the UK and France are also active combatants against Iran.

The reality is, the Iran War and the Ukraine War are tied to the hip. If defending Ukraine against Russian drone strikes conducted by Iranian ground troops [7] and using Iranian technology [8] is critical to European security, then ending Iran's tactical support is critical as well.

Ironically, this is probably great news for Ukraine. Russia's geoint support for Iran [9] has made it easier for my peers still on the Hill to make a case to double down and enhance American support for Ukraine, as well as pulling Gulf States who were previously neutral to supporting Ukraine as well [10].

This is also why Ukraine is calling out Russian disinfo ops about the war [11]. Iran has doubled down on similar information warfare [12] and hybrid [13] operations in the UK and Mainland Europe

Frankly, we need to call a spade a spade - the Ukraine War and Iran War have merged into a single transnational war.

If you support Ukraine you cannot support Iran, and this is Ukraine's stance as well [14][15][16][17][18].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_drone_strikes_on_Akrotiri...

[1] - https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/uk-warplanes-do...

[2] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/article/is-uk-war-iran-n...

[3] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/trump-starmer-s...

[4] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/article/will-could-uk-go...

[5] - https://www.politico.eu/article/france-sends-anti-missile-an...

[6] - https://www.kyivpost.com/post/72965

[7] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/24/iranian-milita...

[8] - https://jamestown.org/dirty-business-the-russian-iranian-str...

[9] - https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2040716892650803610

[10] - https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-deepens-gulf-securit...

[11] - https://english.nv.ua/nation/moscow-panics-as-ukraine-signs-...

[12] - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/social-media/article/iran-war-fa...

[13] - https://www.ft.com/content/adc3e954-5928-471b-b7f2-e4385bbca...

[14] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/01/10/8015528/

[15] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2025/06/15/7517248/

[16] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/12/20/7381481/

[17] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/11/06/7375231/

[18] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/05/24/7403733/

---

Edit: can't reply

> There is no particular reason to assume that the side you take in one conflict should have an impact on your stance toward another conflict

What you are describing is compartmentalization - something which you posited is false [0]

If Qatar and UAE's dual use infrastructure is within the rights of Iran to strike despite both having dealings with both Iran and the US and if Ukraine can be treated as a combatant by Iran [1], then this precedent holds for all of Iran given how they have aided and abetted Russia in Ukraine.

With the precedent Iran set against Qatar, compartmentalization no longer holds. And Ukraine's stance is that Iran is a terror state and an enemy of Ukraine [2], so frankly if you stand with Ukraine you also have to stand against Iran.

> Surely that has to be the default position. They all have a right to defend themselves and a valid claim for reparations.

Iran has been providing Russia ballistic missiles [3], drones [4], artillery [5], boots on the ground [6], ammunition [7], and other support against Ukraine.

If Iran deserves reparations from the US, then Ukraine deserves reparations from Iran. Yet Iran has doubled down in opposing Ukraine [1].

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47623496

[1] - https://english.nv.ua/amp/iran-threatens-ukraine-after-accus...

[2] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/12/20/7381481/

[3] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/11/07/7375314/

[4] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/11/03/7374835/

[5] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/03/08/7392485/

[6] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/17/7389742/

[7] - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/05/7405318/

The UK's involvement is minimal and we do not see ourselves part of this war / nor want to be part of it.

And FYI I live in the UK, so I'm better placed to comment than you listing a bunch of links.

It doesn't matter what you think.

The RAF is still conducting defensive military operations in the Gulf [0][1] which Iran now treats as active combat against Iran.

[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdrmg6x2rgxo

[1] - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/raf-personnel-become-firs...

This is was a really insightful read, thank you! Also, what are ya'll thoughts about Canada and their refusal to engage in the Middle East?

Frankly, Canada does not have the power projection capabilities needed for West Asia.

That said, Canada is best served protecting the Arctic, North Atlantic, and the North Pacific, all of which now face increased pressure from Russia and China, and threaten much of North America, Northern Europe, and Northern Asia.

This is also the stance of the Government of Canada [0][1]

[0] - https://international.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/corporate/...

[1] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-arctic-military-exerci...

Also, another question: Do you think that World War III or something close to a global conflict will start as you mentioned that the Ukrainian-Russo War and the Iran War "have merged into a single transnational war"?

My stance is the same as Fiona Hill (former Senior Director for Europe and Russia in the US NSC and now a Defence Advisor for the Starmer administration) [0] as well as Zelensky [1].

[0] - https://xcancel.com/FrankRGardner/status/2027098560647348410

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgj9p15y87o

Look, if you continue down that road to GCC countries engaging Iran, then you have a multiparty nuclear armed conflict with combatants stretching from Europe to the Chinese border.

At that point it really does sound like ww3 started from the same causes as ww1 - nobody will win, nobody will know why they are fighting, and most of the fighting will be drones being slung over trenches.

> At that point it really does sound like ww3 started from the same causes as ww1

My stance on this is the same as Fiona Hill's [0] and Zelensky's [1].

I'd argue the date this began was 24th February 2022 [2]

[0] - https://xcancel.com/FrankRGardner/status/2027098560647348410

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgj9p15y87o

[2] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60503037

> At that point it really does sound like ww3 started from the same causes as ww1 - nobody will win, nobody will no why they are fighting, and most of the fighting will be drones being slung over trenches.

Name me one war of aggression that ended up being a long term win for the aggressor.

Us revolutionary war. China taking Tibet. US Mexican war.

> If you support Ukraine you cannot support Iran, and this is Ukraine's stance as well

The three countries that have been attacked, including civilian infrastructure, are Ukraine, Lebanon and Iran

Surely that has to be the default position. They all have a right to defend themselves and a valid claim for reparations.

The first time I saw a graph describing relationships between various factions in the Middle East was probably in the late 90s. I remember being amused by it. It turns out that if you are a region full of conflicts, the ally of your ally is often your enemy.

On the other hand, it should have been obvious. Real-world relationships are not transitive.

There is no particular reason to assume that the side you take in one conflict should have an impact on your stance toward another conflict. At least if you are not some kind of a rationalist who values logical consistency over practical implications.

Lifting of all US sanctions on Iran

I do not see that happening.

Did we get "The Art of the Deal"'ed?

Someone is experiencing materiel gain, that's for sure.

I don't think he read that book. He certainly didn't write it.

Where did you get those points from? Do you have a source? The 10 points I've read in the media are different, e.g. https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/us/2026/04/08/what-is-i...

Trump ensured that there is absolutely no reason for any nation, not just Iran, to believe what USA says in the future. No agreements/treaties with the USA can be trusted. And not just with Trump administration, since he demonstrated clearly that he can tear any treaty/agreement that was made under different administrations as well. The United States demonstrated that it has very, very limited control over the actions of an elected president.

So basically complete American surrender. And America accepted this deal.

Why would the US accept these terms? They could just keep crippling Iran’s infrastructure and fuel supply and more until their new leadership fractures. Is this entirely about midterm elections?

We could have done that, but Donny Two-Scoops had to go and threaten them with total destruction. That limited his options greatly.

Does it include a end to Hezbollah strikes on Israel from Lebannon, Hoothi strikes on Israel? Sounds like the us just surrendered?

Congratulations, Iran has won the ability to fund its politics many times over in this way and they've lost little else.

Their entire leadership, navy, airforce, petrochemical and steel industries as well as the entire supply chain for the ballistic and drones industries which is also a lucrative export to Russia.

I am not sure they "lost a little else". When looking at what the US lost, it's pretty small in comparison

Russia and China would likely disagree as they count their gains: - yet another massive blow to their trust and reputation among allies - again massively undermining NATO thereby fostering global instability - weakened credibility vis a vis defending Taiwan

It's not a complete US success, but what the OP said was a huge understatement. Iran situation had gotten much worse during this war.

Regarding NATO, this is a European effort of undermining the alliance no more than it is the US.

Europe is rightfully saying that Ukraine is our, the entire western world, war.

However, when the US bombs the very factories that manufacture these drones used in Ukraine, and the nation that quite frequently kidnaps european citizens as political chips, the europeans say "this is not our war".

> Regarding NATO, this is a European effort of undermining the alliance no more than it is the US.

> [...]

> when the US bombs the very factories that manufacture these drones used in Ukraine, and the nation that quite frequently kidnaps european citizens as political chips

That's a US decision. The United States never invoked Article 4 over Iran, and neither did Europe. NATO has nothing to do with it.

That's just anchoring.

Ok, so that won’t happen right? Israel won’t agree to #3

So this 10 point plan that was “not good enough” according to Trump on Monday 6th April, now as the deadline looms, it’s suddenly “a workable basis” for negotiations?

Frankly if Iran get nothing more than a complete lifting of sanctions this would be a massive climb down for the US.

Right.

Trump's rhetoric was all bluster, he actually had no leverage and was unwilling to pay the cost to continue the war (mostly in terms of cost to himself). He needed an offramp and this was it.

Can you please cite the source of these ten points?

Are this points for discussion or demands by Iran?

To summarize: a far worse deal than what Obama had and Trump ripped up, and worse than the status quo that existed before Trump started illegally bombing Iran.

There is a reason Trump had to be saved over and over during his 'career'. Extreme incompetence + clinical narcissism = "I am a winner". This conman and more importantly the powers that prop him up have been very costly for the world, including the USA, and it is about time to hand the bill to MAGA.

Rednecks gonna redneck, the USA clown show has some very determined sponsors, so I don't count on any improvement, but I prefer they at least enjoy their party indoors.

Seems reasonable given their advantageous position.

> Iran would split these fees with Oman

Hard to imagine Trump splitting any fees if he was the leader of Iran.

Source please. I think we should all get the source of these 10 points from somewhere.

Source please. Please provide the source for that plan.

Iran if they have any sense should be prepared for a massive self defense and counter attack. "Talks" from the USA and Israel have a precedent of being attacks and invasions.

If there's one thing that's pretty clear, it's that the Iranian government is quite aware of this and of how the US acts. The US government, on the other hand, seems oblivious to anything about how the Iranian government acts.

I am honestly surprised and shocked to admit but Iran is the sanest and least immoral side in this conflict and it's not because my views of Iran improved or changed much. I couldn't imagine I'd be saying such a thing a few years ago.

The US government seems to be pretty oblivious to how it itself acts, expecting them to understand another country's motivations is so many steps beyond that.

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