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Comment by bettercallsalad | Hacker News Reader

Not an American but live here.

But I don’t understand the fixation of US in middle east theatre. With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution, presumably US doesn’t need to police the Middle East. The president himself said US doesn’t need their oil.

So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the extent campaign finding from Israel lobby as they say dictated much of the foreign policy than national interest?

It’s just baffling and public seems largely fine with this with the lack of widespread protest that this should have caused (vaguely remember living across the bridge from Michigan all the protests there post Iraq war).

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The Occam's razor explanation is that it's all about Israel.

They're the only country that actually benefits from all these misguided Middle Eastern adventures, and it's not like it's just one, there's a pattern and it's always the same

Saudi Arabia benefits just as much, if not more, from a diminished Iran.

Not just Saudi Arabia but the UAE, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, and Gaza.

Iran has funded terrorism and religious extremism in the region leading to massive death tolls in many of them. Not to mention Iranians themselves.

[flagged]

> Tell me who funded ISIS.

Oil funds predominantly along with theft and ransoms according to the EU near ISIS's peak [1]. This was while the US was still directly fighting ISIS in Afghanistan and Iraq.

1: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2017/6038...

Iran was fighting them though, the Shia leadership of Iran have absolutely no time for Salafism.

You need to be a bit more specific with exactly what you mean by “religious” extremism, you seem to be conflating things that are in many ways opposite

I would speculate that it’s more about Israel interests. Iran produces 5% of the global oil but more importantly, it represents 20% of their gov income and the major engine of economic growth in the country. So .. you control their oil, you control the government.. and with it, the major antagonist to us interests in the region. Every other country in the region is aligned with the US or just too poor to be relevant. So it’d be a big win for the global geopolitics board.

It’s because Israel has captured the US government through a combination of lobbying and probably blackmail. The endless wars in the Middle East are to bolster them as a regional and then global superpower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_...

The TikTok deal happened because too many young people were being exposed to anti Zionist content. It’s illegal to criticize Israel in many regions of the US, but not illegal to criticize the US. It’s illegal to boycott Israeli companies in many states, but not US companies. This war on Iran hurts everybody because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, except for Israel who now has a severely diminished adversary to their regional dominance. It’s not even a secret, Israeli’s boast about this on social media and have a whole hit list of countries they want the US to attack. Turkey is next on the list so expect to start seeing more seemingly random antagonistic rhetoric from the US about Turkey.

And don’t buy into this BS they’re feeding everyone about terrorism and nuclear weapons. Here’s a Wikipedia excerpt about the main author of the Clean Break document and architect of the Iraq war.

In 2004, the FBI investigated Chalabi after U.S. intelligence sources revealed that he was working as a double agent for Iran.[2] Perle was also involved in efforts to develop alternative intelligence estimates to help justify the decision to go to war in Iraq. He and other neoconservative leaders claimed that the intelligence community had grossly underestimated threats to the national security of the U.S.[2] Thus, they established two secret offices in the Pentagon after September 11 – the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans.[2] Nonetheless, Perle helped manage and hire neoconservative affiliated staff for both these organizations that created their own policies and intelligence reports by dodging existing government entities.[2] Perle's reasoning for implementing the Office of Special Plans was essentially to "bring in people with fresh eyes to review the intelligence that the CIA and other agencies had collected."[2] In an interview with CNN on September 16, 2001, Perle announced "Even if we cannot prove to the standards that we enjoy in our own civil society that they were involved, we do know, for example, that Saddam Hussein has ties to Osama Bin Laden ..."[17] Flynt Leverett, a senior staff member of the Bush National Security Council states: "There were constant efforts to pressure the intelligence community to provide assessments that would support their views. If they couldn't get what they wanted out of the intelligence community, they simply created their own intelligence."[2] Moreover, Perle allegedly gave several speeches and talks throughout Europe trying to promote the war effort abroad. He allegedly told the British House of Commons that the U.S. would attack Iraq even if UN weapons inspectors didn't find anything.[2] Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that Perle was "making remarks as if he were an official inside the U.S. government."[2] In countries like Germany, France, Britain, and Japan, people perceived him as a government authority whose knowledge and clout on U.S. policy appeared legitimate.[2]

It’s simple. Oil is traded in USD. A large share of the oil is produced in the Middle East. If oil stopped trading in USD the value of our currency would plummet. So we have a strong interest in all oil exporters.

There's also the petroyuan [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroyuan

Yes, which the USA is strengthening with all these blockades, presumably because the current guy in charge doesn't understand this.

What’s even more puzzling is that line of reasoning was one reason why trump was elected in the first place: increase domestic oil supply and get out of foreign wars

It stops being puzzling when you recall that Trump is a con man. This whole thing was never about making America great again, it was about lining Trump and his family's pockets. By every metric which matters to Trump, things are going exactly according to plan.

And when will Trump supporters realize this?

At this point, they simply cannot let themselves. Admit all their bloviating at family reunions was bullshit? Admit that annoying socialist nephew was right all along?

They simply can't admit to themselves what they did, the guilt alone would be paralyzing.

I've linked this article several times on HN. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [1].

You have to understand that the US is an arms dealer empire. We now spend >$1T/year on the military and a huge chunk of it is basically looting government coffers. Pretty much all post-WW2 moves by the US can be boiled down to selling weapons to somebody, sometimes both sides.

There is no pie anywhere in the world that the US doesn't have a finger in in some way unless they can't (eg China can't be bullied in this way). Global trade is a complex web. And even though the US is a net energy exporter now, there are second-order effects if, in the mind of US administrations, other countries start denying oil to allies, for example.

[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...

They literally told us it was about Israel. There's no mystery.

AIPAC is the single most influential special interest group in US politics. If you don't do what AIPAC says to advance their foreign policy goals, they will remove you from office at the next election. They do this on a regular basis and even publicly brag about it.

> If you don't do what AIPAC says to advance their foreign policy goals, they will try their darnedest to remove you from office at the next election.

FTFY. Times are changin'

Both the reasons (AIPAC + pricing Oil in USD helps finance our deficits) are why we were there. But both of those reasons have been severely weakened, to the point of probably being eliminated anyways:

1. After the midterms, we'll get a read on how much AIPAC is still able to buy congressmen.

2. Before Trump obeyed Israel and bombed Iran, we had the illusion of being invincible. But now, we are faced with the brut reality that we cannot guarantee the flow of oil through the Hormuz straight, nor almost anywhere else in that whole hemisphere. Even to Europe: Ask Putin how much drones have changed the game.

This really eliminates any remaining motivations to keep pricing oil in USD. Which removes most of the motivations for the world to keep financing our deficit.

At this point our best option is to just leave the region, and try to transition to renewables absolutely as fast as we can. Oh, and raise taxes on everybody, because demand for our bonds is going to crater.

>So what is this conflict all about?

The evangelical Christians who are among the largest of the Republican Party's voting blocs believe that the biblical "end times" are nigh, but Jesus Christ won't return to bring peace and prosperity until the middle east is destroyed by war[0][2][3] (often called armageddon[1]).

And, as Peter Medawar (quite correctly) observed[4] some years ago:

   The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and 
   religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from 
   the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more 
   bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together.

I'd suggest drawing your own conclusions (as the above is only part of the story -- fossil fuels, islamophobia and good old-fashioned bigotry fill things out somewhat -- and not the entirety of it) based on the enormous amount of information you can glean from public sources.

[0] https://www.tomorrowsworld.org/booklets/the-middle-east-in-p...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon

[2] https://harvest.org/resources/gregs-blog/post/israel-iran-bi...

[3] https://theconversation.com/as-iran-war-expands-some-conserv...

[4] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1064507

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxptRmMBIrE + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54if9r6yiQ8 + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DDbYSg0Alw taken in concert. It's a bit complicated, but all 3 together will give you a pretty holistic picture.

Absolutely not defending anything the US gov is doing now or for the past years, and in general agreement (Iran is targeted for totally stupid reasons), just to point out:

> With the abundance of onshore oil through fracking revolution

Fracking isn't free of consequences, and while the current US gov doesn't care about them, people are directly affected and are rightfully pissed about it.

Bombing/invading foreign countries to get the oil is obviously not the right approach, but relying on fracking isn't a clean solution either.

There is only ONE country in the Middle-East whose borders are, continuously growing...for the last 78 years ;-) Something about a promise from God...

My understanding is that the point is not to hit iran, but the oil market.

The US has stocks and production, but EU and china, trumps favorite economical targets, do not.

No proof to offer, but it fits with his other move when it come to economy.

China has Russia as a captive supplier.

One reason among several is that middle east states fund the US fiscal deficit by buying treasuries with their oil revenues. If the US loses that source of financing then the US fiscal situation gets worse

This. Since it has been demonstrated that we can no longer guarantee the shipping of oil through the straight of Hormuz, nobody has any reasons to price oil in USD or to finance our deficits.

Get ready for the mother of all tax increases.

The US doesn't need more oil, but if Iran were to cut off oil supply from the Persian Gulf it would make oil prices significantly more expensive by reducing total available worldwide supply. The US economy, for the better or worse of it, depends on cheap oil to supply energy for commerce and transportation, and if that becomes more expensive, people stop traveling, trucks stop shipping, energy stops being produced and millions of US jobs are at risk.

The whole "Death to America" and USA is the "Great Satan" make them a much more morally easy target given they have practically no ability to fight back.

I don’t know, the US is the world‘s largest oil producer, and there’s a lot of people in America who are very happy about the high oil prices. Doesn’t exactly trickle down to the average American though. But there are many other industries is that matter a whole lot more to the US economy, for example, if Taiwan stop selling chips to the US, we would be really screwed.

Oil can't be the whole story, can it? If it was, we'd be more heavily investing in moving away from oil.

From what I can tell, it's as much extremism of "democracy", religion, and a version of "manifest destiny" as anything else

The US benefits from causing instability as it prevents a true rival peer power from forming.

It's the same technique China has been using economically and Russia politically for decades against the US.

MICE - Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego.

I think at least three might be at play here.

Guess who I'm talking about.

Israeli hegemonic ambition. Zionist funding of Trump's campaign. Corrupt profiteering from market manipulation. Distraction from the Epstein files. Gullibility of a large fraction of the US public. Trump's ego and stupidity. And when a nuclear superpower starts a war like this, there's not much anyone else can do to stop it. The result: a massive strategic blunder for the US, the true cost of which may not be fully understood for many years.

> So what is this conflict all about? Is there bigger geopolitical price tag attached to victory in Iran? Or US is just besieged by corruption to the extent campaign finding from Israel lobby as they say dictated much of the foreign policy than national interest?

An optimist would say:

America doesn't like Iran because it's a theocratic dictatorship that funds terrorist groups throughout the region, supplies drones to Russia, fires missiles at the only democracy in the region (Israel) and is pursuing nuclear weapons.

As energy markets are global, middle east politics impacts America's vital national interests, and prices consumers pay at the pump, even if America is a net exporter of oil.

Iran had a series of nationwide protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iranian_prot... indicating there was widespread popular support for a new, less theocratic government.

Trump thought they could go in with a surgical strike, knock out the theocratic leaders and the nuclear facilities, enabling the protesters to overthrow the remains of the government, while the army steps back like we saw in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Then they'd turn into a peace-loving democracy, and Trump would go down in history as having defeated one of America's long-term antagonists, making him a winner and a tough guy, and really showing Obama how it's done.

A cynic would say:

Trump wanted a distraction from the Epstein files (which this war has 100% delivered) and/or a country that wanted this war to happen has the Epstein evidence to blackmail him with.

Having deliberately installed loyal incompetents in leadership positions, even though military planners were 100% aware the Strait of Hormuz would get closed, and that their drones are an order of magnitude cheaper than our drone interceptors, that knowledge was dismissed by the executive.

Being able to make oil prices rise and fall by tweeting is an easy way to make money if you're exempt from the justice system.

Having the war drag on might not be good for Republican performance in the midterm elections - but Trump can't run for a third term, so he doesn't much care if the party is left in a shambles.

Empire

It's about communism, World War 3, Israel _and_ Iraq _and_ Saudi Arabia _and_ UAE and other Middle-Eastern countries, it's about nuclear proliferation, it's about oil trade outside of the USD system, it's about China sanction proofing, it's about Taiwan, it's about terrorism, it's about Russia and many other things.

We usually don't act until the number of reasons to act reaches a threshold. We were slow to get into World War 2 as well. We wanted to act against Iran, but it was never the right time. Now with Russia, China, Venezuela and Cuba threatening war with their neighbors, the cost of not acting is too great if this network solidifies their cooperation against the US. Communists have been getting propped up all over the place, which is what we were seeing before World War 2, as communists believed they needed to achieve total global domination since they could not coexist with capitalism.

Iran has attempted to assassinate the US president multiple times as well as Netanyahu and carried out many assassinations around the world which it denied even when caught undeniably.

Russia got nukes, China got nukes, North Korea got nukes. There was every indication that Iran was aiming for nukes as well. You can't treat them like other countries that have nuclear programs, because most of those countries don't comingle with such bad actors. Similar to the communist party that wanted to control the world, Iran also has a radical group that wants to bring about the apocalypse to resurrect their prophet.

Russia also attacked Ukraine, Iran attacked Israel, but Venezuela was also going to attack its neighbor and Cuba was expanding its interference inside the US. You don't hear much about it, but it was important. It lines up with one of China's strategies to soak up US attention with crises to open up a window to take Taiwan.

If you are asking what actual information the US is acting on and what the underlying reasoning is, THIS is actually the reason. The details are vast and this is a massive abbreviation and some I haven't even mentioned even though they're relevant. People will link you to random junk, but every country has thinktanks and policymakers who get together and decide what is important for the country to act on. Who decide what the threats are and where a country's energies are best spent. These are the actual reasons. It's not simply "Israel" this or "Israel" that.

> The details are vast and this is a massive abbreviation and some I haven't even mentioned even though they're relevant.

Indeed, you left out the time cube.

Maybe I’m missing the subtler geopolitical point here, but I don’t think it’s about oil. It’s about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons and threatening the region via their missiles, drones, and proxies.

Whether they succeed at it or not is an open question, but it seems clear that’s what it was about. Take operation midnight hammer last July. That was clearly only about the nuclear issue.

How many of these tiger deterring rocks can I put you down for? They're $1T each but we've got a 3-for-2 offer going. You may think you're not often attacked by tigers now, but can you afford not to own one of these rocks to keep that record?

Trump doesn't give a flying flip about Iran having Nuclear weapons. If he cared at all, in the slightest, he wouldn't have unilaterally broken our treaty with them.

Well Trump claimed Iran's nuclear threat was completely obliterated after Operation Midnight Hammer. Then when decapitating the Iranian regime in coordination with Israel failed to produce regime change this year, all of a sudden Iran was "two weeks away" from making a nuke.

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