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> Last year, the daily cost of hiring an oil supertanker (known as a Very Large Crude Carrier, or VLCC) to sail from the Persian Gulf to China was just $65,000, according to Clarksons, a London-based research firm.
> Now? It costs $1.6 million per day to hire a VLCC for that route, according to Clarksons.
Iran's leadership was replaced with more extreme leadership and America has spent countless billions.
Nothing is better.
Only a hyperpartisan brain could refer to that as any sort of victory.
Getting the oil supply back to prewar levels isn’t winning by itself, and I didn’t say it was. But it does open a path to winning, because holding the oil hostage is the only leverage the Iranian regime has.
Can the hyperpartisan brain not count past 113?
Please support this statement.
Imagine that your country - whose rulers you do not agree with - is attacked by two states unprovoked in the middle of negotiations, not once, but twice in a single year.
And how do they initiate this attack? They strike a number of targets, one of which the compound your head of state is living in along with members of his family, including a child (his granddaughter). Mind you, your head of state was not in a bunker, but was an 87 year old man living his life as normal. After executing this amazing operation, these two states then call on your people to rise up and overthrow the government.
What would you do?
Saddam, Maduro, Gaddafi, Assad—all those guys were mostly terrorizing their own people and shouldn’t have been taken out. I don’t think Khamenei should’ve been taken out either, but boy did he deserve it more than any of the others.
As for Khamanei, at the end of the day, he was a head of state. There are international systems in place for punishing people in power across state boundaries, which were setup because otherwise our world devolves into assassination and war.
Are you defining "attack by Iran" to exclude attacks by proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah that Iran funds to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year?
What's insane to me is that nobody actually has a beef with Iran. Tel Aviv is a thousand miles away from Tehran. The Arab countries don't like Iran, nor does Iran like any of the Arab countries. There's no conflict over land or resources. Iran is doing this shit purely for love of the game.
There's a perfectly plausible counterfactual history where Iran chooses to focus on economic development instead of antagonizing Israel and you end up with two technologically advanced developed countries in the region.
A provocation might have been Iran waking up one day and deciding to hammer Israel or US bases with missiles. Even then, targeting a head of state might be going too far. You would think Iran would have done this based on all the demonization targeted towards it, but instead it was the accusers who did just that :)
Iran has a “beef” with Israel because of Palestine. As for groups it cooperates with such as Hezbollah or Ansarallah, that is simply power projection and a way for them to gain influence, which partly is due to them existing in a region where Sunnis outnumber Shias.
And btw, it has been a while since Hamas was funded by Iran. But I think funding Hamas was a popular move and helped bolster Iran’s image both domestically and across the region.
That's what happened! Iran is just adding a layer of indirection by funneling money and missiles to Hamas and Hezbollah, who in turn launch the attacks. They don't even try to hide it. Why should acting through a middle-man insulated them from culpability?
> Even then, targeting a head of state might be going too far.
I actually agree with you on that. But I don't think it's fair to downplay the "fucking around" that Iran did before they "found out."
> Iran has a “beef” with Israel because of Palestine.
Which makes no sense geopolitically. Iran has no dog in that fight. Iran has no sympathy to Palestinians--they host millions of Afghan refugees, but nobody from Palestine. The Arabs hate Iran too. If Israel wasn't there, Iran would be the primary focus of Arab antagonism. Israel and Iran had good relations with each other between 1950 and 1979, and that made logical sense from the perspective of what was most beneficial to the people of both countries.
I view Iran as a real tragedy. Not because of "human rights and democracy blah blah blah." I have no problem with Iranians having a theocracy if that's what they want. What blows my mind is that Iran has the potential to be a highly functional country, but simply chooses to waste it's money and political capital on irrationally antagonizing countries that it could have been allied with instead.
Iran does have a geopolitical, ideological, religious, and humanitarian interest in Palestine. If you don’t get it, I would recommend you do more reading.
Ukraine is essentially a proxy of the US and EU due to arms, funding, and support. Ukraine is attacking targets in Russia. Suppose Russia woke up one day and decided to fire an ICBM at the US or a major EU capital. Would that be an appropriate response?
It's detrimental to America and the cause of peace on numerous dimensions.
Trust me, by almost any metric you can think of, this was a strategic defeat for the US.