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Comment by pphysch | Hacker News Reader

And what does Iran get in return for America butchering 160 innocent kids, or assassinating their leader? Or does "fairness" only flow in one direction?

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You think war should be “fair?”

There is no fighting in the War Room!

I did not first bring up fairness in this thread.

What do the Americans get for their relatives murdered by IRGC throughout the years?

Let's do it fairly.

Like 100s (?) of Americans killed by Iran ever.

Compare to Iranians: Affected by the aftermath of the American coup of Mosaddegh (ultimately leading to IRGC's existence), providing weapons to Iraq for the Iran-Iraq War (200K deaths), etc. + decades of stupid policy trying to take their oil in the name of "regional security" (for "our" oil).

~250 alone on one day in 1983. 300-400 total from their terrorist networks. Thousands of casualties (wounded and killed) in Iraq that are directly attributed to Iran.

> Let's do it fairly.

How would it work? Do you expect a 1:1 casualty list? 1:1 list of events? Should the US citizens allow for a coup on US soil carried out by the IRGC?

I do so wish everyone espousing 1:1 casualty ratios as necessary & fair, and that anything else is immoral, would take stock of where they live and specifically how those countries avoided falling to the axis powers in WW2…

And, courage of their convictions, if their own people are so inherently evil for making “the other bastard die for his” they should be renouncing citizenship, yielding their ill-gotten wealth, and self-immolating for their nations eternal shame.

Categorical reasoning as applied to war does not yield a tit for tat, its category versus category. All of column B to preserve any column A. “Not worth the bones of a single British Grenadier”.

What do the Iranians get for us overthrowing their government in the 50s? (we are not the good guys here)

There is a difference between overthrowing the government and blowing up civilian targets.

installing a brutal puppet dictator to torture and murder civilians counts as what exactly?

and protecting them from being tried criminally after theyve been deposed?

the US continues to blow up civilian infrastructure, and those WMDs that sadam was supposed to have were american made, for the purposes of using on iranian civilians.

The US didn’t install the shah to torture and murder civilians. It was shahs choice to do so.

To blow up civilian target is a choice.

I know nuance is unpopular nowadays but I do see a difference between bad decisions with unintended consequences and bad decisions with intended terrible results.

You are saying this in a thread about an impact of a war we just made up and did not do in any sane way.

If we're being perfectly fair, they would have to get the same thing Hamas gets

At some point, as an American, we must accept the consequences for being warmongers. If we want less harm, we should stop causing it all around the world for no objective gain (prove me wrong, I see no gains, only trillions of dollars incinerated and countless lives lost). But the US keeps lobbing stones expecting no consequences for doing so. Something about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

“Just one more conflict bro” as the kids would say.

You can say the same thing about Iran. They can mind their own business, but they chose not to.

Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe, so what’s happening now is expected.

> They can mind their own business, but they chose not to.

Neither the US nor Iran can do that. Iran and the US are in very different positions:

The US is the status quo power; they and their allies dominate the Mideast and Persian Gulf, and are hostile to Iran for geopolitical (control of region), economic (oil), and religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons. There is a long history demonstrating that - Iran would be crazy to trust otherwise. If Iran does nothing, US and allies would control all of the Mideast (including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq) and Iran would be helpless to protect itself or exercise its own will on any matter, legitimate or not, and risk getting overthrown and replaced with a US/allied proxy. That happened in the 1950s, and the proxy, the Shah and their heir, brutally ruled Iran until 1979 when the current were part of the Shah's overthrow and took power. Part of their raison d'être is to make sure US and allies never control Iran again. Iran cannot survive by 'minding their own business'.

Iran is the revisionist power; they would like to change the power structure so they are the dominant power, or at least they need to establish independence from the status quo power. They are a much lesser threat to the US than the US is to them, for obvious reasons: Iran doesn't have aircraft carriers and bases off the US coast, complete air superiority in US skies, isn't bombing the US, didn't kill the president, and lacks the power to impose crippling economic sanctions. But they are still a threat with ambitions that the US can't ignore.

The status quo power sets the rules and wants peace on their terms - with them still in power - so of course any challenger is violating the rules and appears to be an enemy of peace without being aware of the dynamic.

> Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe

The US also carries out ops, including those that kill civilians, all over the globe (e.g., bombing speedboats in international waters), as do others. Some US ops are covert but with leadership of the international power structure and the power to act sometimes with impunity (e.g., removing Venezuala's government), they don't have always do it covertly. Iran can't fly bombers everywhere on Earth; they only have covert or insurgent operators for many purposes.

I don't understand what it means to say that the US is hostile to Iran because of "religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons". Are you saying that the US backs one of the two major Islamic branches?

I was a little imprecise, sorry. One reason that the predominantly Sunni countries, such as Saudi Arabia, have conflict with Iran is because Iran is predominantly Shiite and the center of the Shiite world (as I understand it; I don't know a lot about it). For other reasons mentioned, the US is allied with many of the predominantly Sunni countries in the Persian Gulf; I doubt the US has any direct interest in Shiite or Sunni.

You can say the same, neither Iran nor the US is the good guy. It’s about as sane as the Star Trek episode where deaths are mandated by simulation outcome. It is what it is until political turnover provides an opportunity, but not a guarantee, of change.

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

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/18/g-s1-134037/why-is-it-so-hard... (“… the U.S. has been acting like an empire without wanting to be an empire.”)

I would say that as the form of government and the legal landscape of a country as a whole US fares much better than the Islamic Republic.

My children will avoid any form of participation in US military operations, and I legally avoid paying as much US federal tax as possible ("how many of my tax dollars have contributed to killing innocent people?"), so I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic beyond as a scholar of history and predicting the future. Old men sending young innocent people to die is a tale as old as time, and I expect it to continue long after I’m gone (regardless of nations, boundaries, etc, which are also fluid over time), so the best one can do is manage your personal risk accordingly. We must assume it to be a constant of some sort until change occurs where that assumption would change. If tail risk catches you (“wrong place at the wrong time” through no fault of your own), c'est la vie.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30908249

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-military-deaths-chang...

Iran gets to learn "you break it, you buy it," with their own money. The remaining government officials still running their mouths on X and elsewhere should also be grateful they are still alive.

The US started the war though and have very recently been targeting civilian infrastructure as well. So by your logic should be replacing it.

If Iran had the capability to drop a bomb on Mar a Lago, I imagine they'd have done it by now. And the world might be a better place for it.

So far the Iranian response has been very strategic and calculated. So much so, that the majority of the west especially the Trump administration is not even capable of understanding their strategy.

I don't think it serves a strategic purpose to bomb Mar a Lago at this stage in the game.

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