Surely airlifting supplies to a carrier in a war zone is not totally comparable to airlifting supplies to a base in a US territory?
The Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain got flattened.
But at the same time, it's not like that came out of nowhere. If you attack a country, that country shooting back at any military installations in missile range has to be one of the expected outcomes. Given the US had all the initiative in starting the conflict I would have hoped there was a logistics plan that involved not relying on those bases to continue to exist
Anyone with the capability to plan for the Iran war never would have started it because the costs would have been obvious. In other words the only way to start a war with Iran is to have no plan for it.
Not only that, but it was already that way for ~40 years, where past presidencies all knew and documented why it was a stupid idea, didn't press the stupidity-button, and mostly worked towards better options.
All Trump needs is a little dangling of glory and publicity and he'd oink like a pig if he thought it'd earn it. Pathetic creature.
Netanyahu tried the same schtick he's done for 30 years of POTUS's, just now we have someone retarded enough to fall for it and a party that allowed him to be surrounded by sycophants.
You should just admit you voted for a retard and pay your penance to your countrymen and species.
Gosh, if only they could've stopped it!
> Foreign influence and realized threats of assasination seem to be a factor.
The only head of state assassinated in this conflict was Iran's.
Have you seen the people responsible for planning right now? They're more concerned with posting AI generated memes on twitter and scoring bigotry points than managing a foreign conflict.
No, it doesn't. It's now in Thailand for R&R, then back to base in the US, because of this issue.
https://apnews.com/article/thailand-singapore-us-aircraft-ca...
> What's causing us to lose is failure to achieve victory due to the means employed…
Right. We're being too restrained. That's some Vietnam War era cope you're huffing.
Yes, that is the point everyone has been trying to make.
Also, to be clear, a land invasion isn't "too costly". It's suicidal because we're talking about a massive country that has been preparing for decades, has a terrain advantage and literally more than a million fanatics ready to die for the regime. You'd need millions of soldiers deployed, and are looking at some Operation Downfall level expected losses.
Also... a million fanatics ready to die for the regime? Maybe. Maybe some of them value their lives.
We've dealt with fanatics multiple times whether that's Japanese willing to die for the emperor or Muslim extremists throughout the Middle East trying to get their 72 virgins. Nobody in the US is scared of dealing with fanatics. Been there, done that. Iran is more mountainous and the terrain is a challenge but the major population centers aren't hidden in bunkers in the hills. Iran is also not landlocked, and unlike, for example, Afghanistan, we would be dealing with a population that has familiarity with the modern world and has at times even protested en masse against the current government of Iran.
Again, none of that is to suggest we should or politically could "invade Iran", and of course I don't think it's necessary to achieve any of our goals, but let's not put Iran on a pedestal either.
The Basij militia has more than a million men in it alone (officially it has 20+ million but more neutral sources pin the number around a million), and this is the organisation that was doing unarmed human wave attacks against Iraq to defend the Iranian revolution. It's also a theocracy with a religion that has martyrdom as a thing.
If anything, a million fanatics ready to die for the regime is probably an understatement.
> We've dealt with fanatics multiple times whether that's Japanese willing to die for the emperor or Muslim extremists throughout the Middle East trying to get their 72 virgins. Nobody in the US is scared of dealing with fanatics
And Japan surrendered because the Emperor said so. If Operation Downfall had to be done instead, you'd have millions of American and Allied casualties.
If you're not scared of this, you aren't paying attention.
> Iran is more mountainous and the terrain is a challenge but the major population centers aren't hidden in bunkers in the hills
Bombing population centres has never resulted in military victory. It has occasionally, alongside military reversals, contributed to political leaders deciding they can't continue (Hirohito, Milosevic), but it would be delusional to hope that Iran's Supreme Leader, sone of the previous one who got bombed out of existence, and again, is a religious leader part of a religion with martyrdom, would be impressed by the US bombing "his" people.
The public being against the war is just about where the comparison between the war in Iran and Vietnam loses meaning.
The United States doesn't need to depose the current Iranian government on its own. An economic blockade could do that, or at worst simply deprive the Iranian government of the means to financially carry out war. As Iran is now finding out, the Strait wasn't quite the leverage that they, and pundits and internet commentators thought it was, and now the US isn't even interested in negotiating which is causing Iran to lash out. It'll be a slow, but certain death to the economy and such an event and blame rests squarely on the shoulders of those in charge of Iran and their idiotic and undemocratic beliefs. The world can't be held hostage and won't be. Though of course the fact that the United States yet again has to go police the world is a bit like a reservoir that slowly refills. There's only so much we're going to be able to do and we're seeing ongoing populist MAGA and DSA backlash against the war. The next crises the US may not be able to respond to politically and then we're in relationship trouble.
This sounds like the sort of "quasi-religious point of view" you're slamming, considering it's been tried repeatedly already without great success.
We haven't ever tried this level of economic isolation with Iran. The closest would be North Korea. If you wanted to attempt to make it sound as though I was parroting a quasi-religious point of view, you would want to argue (which I haven't because it's incorrect) that I'm looking at what happened with North Korea (a regime that exists to terrorize the world thanks to communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union) and that I'm saying all blockades or economic sanctions will work just like that, which is, of course, nonsense, just as comparing Iran to Vietnam today is.
This is your best example? The now nuclear power that's resisted the approach you advocate since the 1950s?
See? Quasi-religious.
I'd encourage you to re-read my comment to see how I drew that distinction.
??
What does this even mean? It seems to come out of nowhere. Is it a reference to some event??
We can all agree on your opening.
Americans make war on other people, other people don't make war on Americans. It's one of the reasons why they are so eager to do so. 'The other guys might hit back' doesn't even register in the cultural psyche.
Eg who armed the Mujahideen?
But the US won and have and have a peace agreement. Several times.