I’m not that arsed but you should probably cite the source of whatever you’re quoting, unless of course this is all your own work.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if the people making the decisions ended up on this plane but surely the president would be on his Qatari one, which is betterer because it has gold-plated toilets and special equipment for cooking Big Macs. Anyway, you wouldn’t want all your eggs in one basket would you ?
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Another 20 year quagmire.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Halliburton and a host of others say “thanks”
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Salman Rushdie comes to mind, some countries wait and serve revenge cold, regardless of how long it takes. Donald and his sycophants must surely be on such a list.
Watching the orange ego giving his speech, he’s crowing and preening himself in public at such a grave time. Truly a superficial odious shithouse.
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I can’t bear to watch/listen to him, the tv is in serious danger of having a bottle chucked at it if I can’t find the remote quickly enough to change the channel when he appears on it.
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When these wankers come on TV telling us how wonderful they are. …maybe the TV stations should run a rolling vid in the top corner of the screen with scenes like …
Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from her bombed village complete with severe burns …vids of the maimed kids …all races ..religions … just so folk can just get things onto context …
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That’s the kind of imagery that Trump voters wank to.
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Edit to read “humans” instead of “folk”
Curious how rival superpowers have nukes & it’s a good thing as it stops them from attacking each other. For some reason that doesn’t apply to Iran and Israel. Israel has between 90 & 400 and no one bats an eye or even asks them to join in and be regulated. Yet Iran, who Netanyahu has being claiming are days away from having a functional system for over 30 years now, don’t have these weapons and still get punished.
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I fear the whole idea of attacking Iran is precisely because they don’t have nukes. a) It means an attack won’t provoke an unacceptable response and b) you hope to stop them ever being able to deter you. Once the cat’s out of the bag (N Korea, Pakistan, perhaps a few other places) you have no choice but to treat them more cautiously.
To be fair, Iran is close enough that the Israelis and Americans will presumably be being fairly careful. They certainly have the material for a dirty bomb and one of those going off in Haifa or Palm Beach would ruin the locals’ whole day.
TBH I’ve always been worried about the possibility of a number of dirty bombs being smuggled into Isreal mostly and other American and European locations.
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But then I don’t think there would be any wish for Iran to turn those areas in to an uninhabitable wasteland given the inherent desire to have them back under full Palestinian control at some point in the future.
On a separate note, I think the US is completely misunderstanding the thoughts of the Iranian public. MrsKettle has worked with some people with family there and the shadow of the revolution and the Iran/Iraq war still has a big impact. Every family lost someone in one of those pretty much, so there is really no desire for any change that would result in serious internal fighting. It is why the Arab Spring really didn’t take off there, so expecting the current bombing to result in a popular uprising is wishful thinking at best.
Very true (although they’d care less about Florida). Maybe it’s notable that both Israel and the US are saying very firmly that they are only bombing nuclear sites and that they’re not aiming for regime change. Someone was suggesting that if the Fordo site goes very deep then the only way of completely disrupting it would be with special forces. I can’t see the Americans ever putting boots on the ground and I’d be surprised if the Israelis would risk it either. Gaza has hardly been easy and they control the terrain and the air there and have spent years softening it up (or so they thought).
I guess my point about a dirty bomb is that Israel and the US are working to stop Iran having a proper nuke. Well, they already have something that would make quite a mess so if you’re scared about the possibility then you should also be scared about the actuality.
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Open season in the Red Sea… Houthis went after a US ship a couple of months ago and before bombs were dropped on Iran, said that would escalate that if the US joined Israel with air strikes.
I think an element of what they’re doing is trying to back away from certain key words (Vance was very much trying to claim they weren’t at war with Iran for example), because for the US to actually declare war requires an act of congress, which they definitely didn’t have. And whilst anything in front of the ICC is never going to happen, if they don’t control both houses after the mid-terms, impeachment is a possibility, and it would be a very hard pre-text for even some of the GOP to ignore (although fuck knows at this stage with that lot).
I would have thought that Iran would have been fairly well prepared for the possibility of the US bombing the nuclear sites, and would have extracted at least some nuclear material for insurance/retaliatory purposes, even if that’s as a dirty bomb rather than a full on nuke.
They’d only use it as an absolute last resort. They’re grown-up enough to know that it would be the end for them, which is how MAD works of course (pace Buck Turgidson). I wondered if they might even have moved some material abroad, to a ‘safer’ place. But off the top of my head I couldn’t think of anywhere crazy enough to accept it but reliable enough that you’d trust them to take care of it for when you might need it.
I suspect it would be a last resort, but a dying regime, especially one with a strong religious focus, is not something I’d feel comfortable about on that front.
I could imagine there’s a system in place akin to the letter the PM writes for submarine commanders for if all contact is lost with military command, but in this case for if the Ayatollah dies.