Middle East ......

tempo_n_groove

mrussel1 said:

tempo_n_groove said:

mrussel1 said:

tempo_n_groove said:

mickeyrat said:

tempo_n_groove said:

mrussel1 said:

tempo_n_groove said:

mickeyrat said:

think its important to revisit the jcpoa.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-iran-nuclear-deal

Reading that deal it was crap.  After 10 years they could do whatever they wanted.  When we pulled out they ramped up everything and wouldn't let the watchdogs in anywhere.

If we do a new deal it has to not have a time expiration.

No, after 10 years you re-negotiate.  In what world do geopolitical deals have evergreen clauses?  

Japan, Germany both off the top of my head.

surrender agreements to end declared wars are a whole different animal, especially in light of germany being  the cause of borh world wars in the span of 20 years.

not a worthy comparison.

The question was when has it ever happened and this is when.

Cute.  You know that wasn't the point.  If there is an end date to the cease of hostilities, that's called a cease-fire, not a treaty.  There are numerous Japanese agreements and to my knowledge they all had expirations, typically ten years.  But one party needs to launch the abrogation.  

Treaty of San Francisco still has some without expirations.  Its still ongoing... So it has happened or it's just not a good enough example?

Also a war treaty, but forget it.  The point is that having a ten expiration on non-proliferation or similar issues is not a failure in negotiation or any other criticism of either party.  It's fairly common.  Of course Iran would seek to limit it.  The JCPOA was working.  Even the inspectors said they were not enriching.  But here's the thing, even our DNI said they were not enriching TWO WEEKS AGO.  But Trump said he didn't believe our own experts.  Instead he went with the Israelis who claimed in 1988, 2009, 2013 and more years that Iran was "weeks away" from having a nuclear warhead.  They have been weeks away for almost 40 years.  I am not exaggerating.  

I was curious about the Israeli claims.  You are 100% correct.
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions

mrussel1

I guess the silver lining of this, with a touch of grey of course, is that maybe Trump will somehow recognize that Iran's ally Russia, is not our ally.  

Tim Simmons

thats a great point.

static111

tempo_n_groove said:

static111 said:

tempo_n_groove said:

static111 said:

tempo_n_groove said:

static111 said:

tempo_n_groove said:

static111 said:

Have people completely forgot about WMDs and Mission Accomplished and you're either with us or you're with the terrorists etc?  I get that some people don't want to read history books, but come on this shit happened 20 years ago and created a disaster. Usually history takes much longer to repeat.

Difference is we do know what they are doing.

I mean trumps top intelligence officials said that there was no creditable threat that Iran was capable of making nukes.  Which even if they were is not necessarily reason for a preemptive military strike that could draw us into another endless war.

What do you know that Iran is doing?  

60% enrichment where they only need 20% to run nuclear power.  The amount of centrifuges they have in light of what they need was 20x over what they needed.  If the reporting is right.

That alone is not proof that they were capable of making a nuke.  Who can say what other research may have been ongoing. And to bring it back to the old days, Obama had an agreement that was being adhered to until trump threw it out.  All of which is pointless and still doesn't justify the potential of pulling the US into another world police forever war.

I am going to disagree.  Writing is on the wall that they are trying to do something other than run a power plant.  

Even when we had first agreed to the deal I thought it was dumb.  The last country i'd like to have nuclear capabilities was Iran.  I didn't think they'd ever agree to the rules they were given either.  I know they went sideways after we pulled out of it but to me that shows they had the intention of going rogue anyways.

And the writing was on the wall that Iraq had WMDs until it wasn't. And here we are again.

The difference is the writing on the wall.  Iran did in fact do the things I mentioned.  Iraq was believed to have WMD in which they did not. Has Iran explained why they enriched uranium to 60% or why they increased the amount of stockpiled centrifuges?

And what international law that allows for the bombing of a sovereign country if they enrich uranium to a level lower than what is needed for a nuclear weapon. No law or treaty was broken. Of course its not exactly the same as Iraq. The loose justification for bombing and the rush to justification is exactly the same.  Iran is "evil" "supporters of terror", " hate us" etc.  There is no justification and this has the potential to lead to as big if not a worse middle east forever war than previous admins.

static111

mrussel1 said:

I guess the silver lining of this, with a touch of grey of course, is that maybe Trump will somehow recognize that Iran's ally Russia, is not our ally.  

Doubt it, he wishes we all had pictures of him like they do of the supreme leader in Iran.  The guy probably looks up to the Ayatollah.

mickeyrat

tempo_n_groove said:

mickeyrat said:

tempo_n_groove said:

mickeyrat said:

tempo_n_groove said:

mrussel1 said:

tempo_n_groove said:

mickeyrat said:

think its important to revisit the jcpoa.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-iran-nuclear-deal

Reading that deal it was crap.  After 10 years they could do whatever they wanted.  When we pulled out they ramped up everything and wouldn't let the watchdogs in anywhere.

If we do a new deal it has to not have a time expiration.

No, after 10 years you re-negotiate.  In what world do geopolitical deals have evergreen clauses?  

Japan, Germany both off the top of my head.

surrender agreements to end declared wars are a whole different animal, especially in light of germany being  the cause of borh world wars in the span of 20 years.

not a worthy comparison.

The question was when has it ever happened and this is when.

ending a war is not a diplomatic endeavor. jcpoa was just that. 

the comparison does not fit. 

What? I can't think of what Japan and Germany agreed to anything other than diplomacy. Signing a treaty is diplomacy, no?

when its conducted between the leading figures of the respective militaries , no it most certainly is not. 

diplomacy occurs BEFORE armed conflict.

Halifax2TheMax

gimmesometruth27

so were the targets obliterated or not?

trump says they were. 

iran says the uranium was moved ahead of time.

trump's cabinet does not know.

trump's generals do not know the extent of the damage.

who is in charge here?

gimmesometruth27

also its going to be really funny when iran gets a real nuke from another country.

trump tore up the deal. attacked on behalf of israel. talks all tough like cowboy bush. and then iran gets a real nuke.

well played, dumb shit.

Gern Blansten

gimmesometruth27 said:

also its going to be really funny when iran gets a real nuke from another country.

trump tore up the deal. attacked on behalf of israel. talks all tough like cowboy bush. and then iran gets a real nuke.

well played, dumb shit.

yeah I was wondering if he's going to go after North Korea...they already have a nuke and have threatened to use it

lots of saber rattling over taking out the new guy....what about the old guy?

gimmesometruth27

Gern Blansten said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

also its going to be really funny when iran gets a real nuke from another country.

trump tore up the deal. attacked on behalf of israel. talks all tough like cowboy bush. and then iran gets a real nuke.

well played, dumb shit.

yeah I was wondering if he's going to go after North Korea...they already have a nuke and have threatened to use it

lots of saber rattling over taking out the new guy....what about the old guy?

he is a coward. remember the mantra is "iran must never get a nuke!!"

he said nothing of any other country.

i'd laugh if north korea gave some to iran.

igotid88

So apparently he says Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire. Iran denies it. Why are we even taking a known liar's word for it? Even if it's true. Wait for others to confirm. Or at least put in "allegedly"

Lerxst1992

Known liars? Is that a reference to those who told us Biden was healthy? 

Keep on ignoring this, and watch the Rs rub the floor with Dems next GE.

gimmesometruth27

igotid88 said:

So apparently he says Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire. Iran denies it. Why are we even taking a known liars word for it? Even if it's true. Wait for others to confirm. Or at least put in "allegedly"

why is trump the one announcing this anyway? it's not his responsibility to speak on behalf of either of those countries.

gimmesometruth27

gimmesometruth27 said:

igotid88 said:

So apparently he says Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire. Iran denies it. Why are we even taking a known liars word for it? Even if it's true. Wait for others to confirm. Or at least put in "allegedly"

why is trump the one announcing this anyway? it's not his responsibility to speak on behalf of either of those countries.

it must be trump's way of saying he is worthy of the nobel peace prize.

gimmesometruth27

according to a few people on here, this peace "deal" is the fault of the democrats.

Halifax2TheMax

gimmesometruth27 said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

igotid88 said:

So apparently he says Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire. Iran denies it. Why are we even taking a known liars word for it? Even if it's true. Wait for others to confirm. Or at least put in "allegedly"

why is trump the one announcing this anyway? it's not his responsibility to speak on behalf of either of those countries.

it must be trump's way of saying he is worthy of the nobel peace prize.

Because he was nominated by Pakistan. You know, the same Pakistan that harboured Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda for decades.

brianlux

igotid88 said:

So apparently he says Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire. Iran denies it. Why are we even taking a known liars word for it? Even if it's true. Wait for others to confirm. Or at least put in "allegedly"

It's all distraction.  "My birthday party tanked so I'll bomb the shit out of someone so y'all will forget about that."

brianlux

From Dan Rather.  (If you have been or well know someone who has been to war, you will know Rather's last statement is very true.)

"Steady is free, but to support my team’s efforts to protect our democracy through the power of independent journalism, we’d appreciate it if you would consider joining as a paid subscriber. It keeps Steady sustainable and accessible for all. If you are not able to upgrade, we understand."

I am a paying subscriber. 

When Incompetence Goes to War Bombing was the easy part Dan Rather and Team Steady

Watching Donald Trump deliver the news of an American attack on Iran Saturday night, I wondered how many viewers had the same reaction I did: How can the United States be going to war — and that’s exactly what it is — with advisers whose collective experience managing international conflict is see-through thin?

There was Trump, a draft dodger who has long derided the military, surrounded by his war cabinet of second-rate choices, who owe their professional and political souls to him. Will any of them ever question Trump’s decisions? We know the answer to that.

Trump did not have solid evidence Iran was building a nuclear bomb. Nearing the time when they might be able to build one is the best that can be said. Similar, although not identical, to the situation when George W. Bush didn’t have hard evidence that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction. Bad intel back then led to a war that lasted eight years and killed nearly 5,000 Americans and reportedly 200,000 Iraqis. No WMDs were ever found.

Lessons learned? Hardly. Bombing Iran was easy enough. Did anyone at the White House think about what would happen on Day 2?

Forty-eight hours after the United States launched bunker-busting bombs and dozens of cruise missiles at Iran, the Iranian regime retaliated. Iran launched missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. The Defense Department said there were no injuries because Qatari air defenses were able to intercept the Iranian attack. Also, the Iranians gave advance warning to minimize casualties.

No one should be surprised by this escalation. And no one should think this is the end of hostilities. Forty thousand U.S. troops are stationed in the region.

It is a consequence of going to war, which is exactly what Donald Trump did when he called for strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites. Even if Vice President JD Vance says otherwise. “We’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program,” he said on “Meet the Press” Sunday. The Iranian people likely quibble with Vance’s semantics.

Iran has other retaliatory options from which to choose.

In an internal FBI email obtained by The New York Times, American officials warn that Iran and its allies have “historically targeted U.S. interests in response to geopolitical events, and they are likely to increase their efforts in the near term.”

The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow strip of water between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, is one of the world’s most important strategic choke points. And Iran controls the north side of it. The 20 million barrels of oil produced daily in the region — a fifth of global output — must travel through the strait.

Some influential Iranians are calling for Hormuz to be closed, including Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor-in-chief of a popular hard-line Iranian newspaper, who has the ear of the supreme leader.

“It is now our turn to act without delay. As a first step, we must launch a missile strike on the US naval fleet in Bahrain and simultaneously close the Strait of Hormuz to American, British, German, and French ships,” Shariatmadari wrote in his newspaper.

Mohammad Ali Shabani, an expert on Iran, told CNN that Iran’s control of global shipping lanes gives the government the “capacity to cause a shock in oil markets, drive up oil prices, drive inflation, [and] collapse Trump’s economic agenda.”

If Hormuz is closed, oil prices will skyrocket. But perhaps the ayatollah will put his pocketbook before payback. China is the No. 1 buyer of Iranian oil. The money Iran earns from Chinese oil sales accounts for 50% of government spending, according to The Times. It has allowed the Iranian regime to fund terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

By the way, need we remind ourselves that China, not Iran, is the most potent foreign threat to American security? Also that Iran, along with China and Russia, has the ability to launch destructive cyber attacks.

But now back to the strikes themselves. Trump claimed victory, saying the U.S. bombings “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. No evidence has been given, and a bomb damage assessment has yet to be released. This administration is not known for truth-telling, so a wait-and-see approach is justified.

Using satellite imagery, the Israeli military’s initial assessment is that Fordo, the main nuclear site, where the U.S. dropped at least six bunker busters, was damaged but not destroyed. Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved equipment and uranium from the site prior to the bombing.

All this means that Saturday’s attack was not a one-and-done as the president would have us believe. Add to that Trump’s changing tune on regime change. Initially he said the goal of the bombing was “destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity.”

Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio were reading from the same script as they made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows. The administration’s view “has been very clear that we don’t want a regime change,” Vance said.

Perhaps the president didn’t get a copy of the talking points. Not four hours later, Trump took to social media. “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!” he posted.

No one thinks the Iranian government is made up of good guys. It has an abysmal human rights record and is the poster child for state-sponsored terrorism. These leaders have a long record of hating America and all for which we stand. They have been known to subvert our Arab allies in the region. But regime change seldom if ever works out the way the changers intend. See: Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

But calling for regime change versus seeking to destroy a country’s nuclear capabilities — no matter how spurious the intelligence — are very different goals with very different long-term prospects.

It’s been widely reported that the U.S. defense secretary was not included in planning the Iran mission. Perhaps Hegseth’s Signalgate scandal has finally caught up with him. At least he was by Trump’s side as the president delivered his version of the war news.

Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been put on ice by Trump for testifying to Congress — in March — that the intelligence community did not believe Iran was close to building a nuclear weapon.

So Trump needs advisers who will guide him by telling him the truth, rather than what he wants to hear; because they are beholden to him for jobs they aren’t qualified for, they never will. Trump learned from his first administration: Don’t hire the smart people, elevate the sycophants.

A few closing notes from your reporter, who has spent a fair portion of his life covering wars:

• Truth IS the first casualty of war.

• The first things you hear often are untrue, and so are many of the things you hear later.

• Wars are by their very nature chaotic and unpredictable. What you most expect frequently does not happen; what you least expect often does.

• Up close and personal, wars are almost unbelievably savage. The television screen and the printed word do not come close to conveying their harsh realities.

static111

From Chris Hedges
War Deja VU

There are few differences between the lies told to ignite the war with Iraq and the lies told to ignite a war with Iran. The assessments of our intelligence agencies and international bodies are, as they were during the calls to invade Iraq, airily dismissed for hallucinations.

All the old tropes have been resurrected to entice us into another military fiasco. A country that poses no threat to us, or to its neighbors, is on the verge of acquiring a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that imperils our existence. The country and its leaders embody pure evil. Freedom and democracy are at stake. If we do not act now the next smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud. Our military superiority assures victory. We are the saviors of the world. Massive bombing, an updated version of Shock and Awe, will bring peace and harmony.

We heard these canards leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq. Twenty-two years later they have been resurrected. Anyone who advocates for negotiations, for diplomacy and peace, is a stooge for terrorists.

Did we learn any lessons from the fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, not to mention Ukraine?

All the ghouls who sold us these past wars on false pretenses, such as conservative talk show host Mark Levin, Max Boot — who writes, “that strategic imperative argues for bombing Fordow,” where Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is buried underground — David Frum, John Bolton, Gen. Jack Keane, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity and Thomas Friedman, have returned to saturate the airwaves with breathless fearmongering.

Never mind that their grand plan to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan and then invade and replace the regimes in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia — and finally in Iran — blew up in their faces. Never mind that their lust for war left hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions dead and drained trillions from the U.S. Treasury. Never mind the sheer idiocy of their arguments. Their megaphones are secure. They are dutiful shills for the war industry, brain dead neoconservatives and genocidal Zionists, who believe in the magical regeneration of the world through violence, ignoring catastrophe after catstrophe.

Forget the intelligence community’s Annual Threat Assessment that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” something reiterated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi this week. Forget that Benjamin Netanyahu, for almost three decades, has been breathlessly warning that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Forget that the preemptive attack on Iran by Israel is a war crime, not to mention the bombings of a hospital, ambulance and journalists. Forget the hundreds of Iranian civilians Israel has slaughtered in its waves of airstrikes. Forget that Israel launched its attack on Iran as the sixth round of negotiations on nuclear enrichment between the U.S. and Iran were set to take place in Oman. Forget that it is the Israeli Prime Minister, not the leader of Iran, who is subject to an arrest warrant, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Forget that Israel, in the midst of carrying out a campaign of genocide against the Palestinians, possesses at least 90 nuclear weapons — built in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — and blocks inspections by the IAEA. Forget that Donald Trump ripped up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program, which Iran was abiding by. Forget that Washington and London orchestrated the1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the region, and installed the compliant Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into power. Forget that the U.S., along with Israel, trained and equipped the SAVAK, the Shah’s savage secret police.

Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!

(Continued in next post)