One thing I noticed in the videos on Twitter of quadcopter type drones being flown into US bases in Iraq, is there doesn't seem to be any current defense. They were flying around with impunity, taking their time looking for a target. It's definitely scary.
It could be either unused base (Camp Victory in Iraq) or fiber optic drones, which are effectively invisible for current systems because you need to have good enough radar to see them thanks to their size and used material and they are not having any RF emissions like usual FPV drone would have
my thesis is that the IRGC has successfully established deterrence by demonstrating relative resilience against US attacks (still have boats and missiles), ability to meaningfully strike US bases and its Allies, and willingness to sacrifice a lot of Irans civilian infrastructure. its hard to sift through the propaganda on both sides, but I haven't yet seen anything to disprove this convincingly. anyone else?
I also believe they have the upper hand as they are willing to play the long game. It's like when Russia attacked Ukraine, they gambled on taking Kiev with paratroopers on the first few days. Didn't work and they got stuck.
It will be ironic if Iran gets a stronger position than they had before the war as a consequence of a peace treaty.
This has massive strategic implications for the US. The US couldn't protect its bases in the middle east from a middle power like Iran and in fact its bases were the reason that its "allies" in the gulf were attacked. Iran would have no reason to attack those allies otherwise. The US has also shown that Israel is the only ally that it really cares about.
Japan, South Korea, Philippines and Australia are taking notes. Prediction: there is not going to be a war over Taiwan - Taiwan will gradually come to a Hong Kong like agreement with China.
Nah. Seeing how China reneged on the "one country, two systems" promise and wrecked Hong Kong has turned the Taiwanese people more firmly against reunification.
Iran would be attacking other nearby states regardless of whether they host US military bases. Iran has a long history of aggression, including sponsoring terrorist groups. Personally I favor a less interventionist US foreign policy but even if we completely disengaged from the Middle East it would still be a violent neighborhood — probably even more so.
During the Iran–Iraq War, which began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran on 22 September 1980,[1] the United States adopted a policy of providing support to Iraq in the form of several billion dollars' worth of economic aid, dual-use technology, intelligence sharing (e.g., IMINT), and special operations training.[2] This U.S. support, along with support from most of the Arab world, proved vital in helping Iraq sustain military operations against Iran.[3] The documented sale of dual-use technology, with one notable example being Iraq's acquisition of 45 Bell helicopters in 1985,[4][5] was effectively a workaround for a ban on direct arms transfers; U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East dictated that Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism because of the Iraqi government's historical ties with groups like the Palestinian Liberation Front and the Abu Nidal Organization, among others.[6] However, this designation was removed in 1982 to facilitate broader support for the Iraqis as the conflict dragged on in Iran's favour.
Taiwan is culturally and historically tied to the mainland, and China is ascendant economically and geopolitically. I can more easily understand why a Taiwanese citizen would chose to be under Chinese sphere of influence over US.
trump did literally everything backwards. he should have started with the blockade and increased the pressure over time, with decapitation strikes at the end if needed. also..help arm the people of iran before doing anything else. that would have made iran look like the aggressor when they eventually bombed their region.
instead the islamic republic's "strategic patience" fully paid off and now most rational people sees them as victims.
what trump's doing is like trying to cure multi-drug resistant bacterial infection with whatever random antibiotics are on hand - the very thing that created resistance.
I think that’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight, but it seems to me that if the Iranians actually claimed they were 11 days away from a nuclear bomb during the prewar negotiations, it’s likely that the blockade first would not have been the right leading move.
Plus I believe that if you took the “11 days away” claim off the table I don’t think you accurately say that a blockade without the military campaign first would have been successful. Seems like we are in a “what came first the chicken or the egg” moment.
There is no doubt in my mind that a blockade with an intact Iranian navy would not necessarily look like this one.
The primary goal of the attacks was to degrade the Iranian nuclear weapons program. We can argue about whether that was a sensible goal, but a naval blockade certainly wouldn't have achieved it.
exactly this... this has been strategic disaster from US perspective. a blockade plus covert ops could have split IRGC leadership - instead public decapitation caused rally round the flag effect and gave immediate legitimacy to khamenei heir. completely idiotic
An AWACS was picked off sitting on the ground, that's a bad look. It took Russia years to get to that stage in the war.
One has to wonder how much of the bad US performance is due to deep, systemic problems and how much is due to a rushed and unplanned military operation.
internet archive, although more easily archive.today, should make a firefox extension to archive paywalled articles from people who have subscriptions and release them in the future (5, 10 years)
Unfortunately, archive.today can never be trusted to have a safe Firefox extension. It is difficult enough to trust the site anymore after it was found that it was engaging in a DDoS attack against a different site. Imagine the hazard from an extension.
In the same spirit, however, it would help to have an extension that auto-archives unpaywalled versions of paywalled articles, and makes them auto-available to users subject to the paywall. The issue then would be that Firefox makes the installed extension identifiers available to each website, so the paywalling site could just block the article for users with the extension.
Which one? There’s no proof that any of Israel’s claims were ever true. It’s on them to provide proof, which they of course have not. If you want to see Tel Aviv or US bases getting hit, go search Twitter. There are thousands of videos. While you’re their look at the tens of thousands of videos of the IDF committing war crimes.
It is hard to understand why the U.S. cares about a random Middle Eastern country called Israel this much. Why not Zimbabwe or Thailand, but Israel? Weird stuff. I hope America comes back to its senses and stops dealing with these people.
In essence it's not about Israel itself, but rather that the US wants an ally in the region that they can use to project power in the middle east. Of course nowadays there's mutual interests and lobbying, so the choice for Israel is very much set in stone, but in another universe it could have been a different country.
It kind of made sense (strategic, if not moral) when we were a booming country very dependent on Middle Eastern oil in the last half of the 20th century and wanted to have a strong ally in the region. Makes less sense recently though.
Then perhaps Israel has surmised that the US might not be interested in sticking around and decided to make their play while they had an ally in the White House.
>It is hard to understand why the U.S. cares about a random Middle Eastern country called Israel this much.
Study the links between the American military industrial complex and Evangelical Christianity, in particularly the latter's view of Israel's role in end-times prophecy, and you'll get your answer.
You are getting downvoted, but you are correct. USA is failing in separation of church and the state and now it is going to have a war because ancient book said so.
Yeah. I think the instinct is "But that's batshit!" and like, yeah, that's exactly the problem.
To be fair to the ancient book, at that time it would have been understood by intellectuals that it's not a prediction of future events, it's a message to them about their past and present, not a message to us about our future. So us blaming the book, not the crazy people is the same mistake as if we were screaming at the author of "Don't Create the Torment Nexus". The author was writing fiction, the critics knew it was fiction, most of the readers knew it was fiction, the problem is that billionaire tech bro who thought it was a message from God telling them they need to spend $100Bn to create a Torment Nexus.
The Secretary of War, a Christian nationalist and white supremacist, has framed the war in Iran as a holy war to bring about the End Times. Many people in the government have said they consider America's military support of Israel to be an absolute Christian obligation. JD Vance and the President want to create a new Catholicism with blackjack and hookers and holy Zionist warfare because the Pope disagrees with them.
Excellent propaganda and god knows how much blackmail. Just look at the US cities lighting up monuments etc. to celebrate Israeli independence day. And this during a war the majority of US citizens don't support.
The American people are well on their way to this realization. The problem is in our government, media and executive class, which are fully Zionist occupied.
Not surprising. In years to come I'm sure we'll find the USG has lied as much to the public during this war as Russia and North Korea would to their citizens. The "laundry fire". The pilot "rescue". The lack of transparency on injuries and casualties. Look at Netanyahu's recent health issues. He didn't lie - he 'delayed the report'.
I think they just have a different strategy and goals than we in the West expect. We seem to think if we just kill a lot more of their guys that victory is certain but that's not the case.
I would expect more of this. Most of Iran's military infrastructure is deep under 500 to 800 meters of hard rock, heavily funded by US tax dollars bully lunch money and the oil industry. Most everyone else's military infrastructure is mostly on the surface just begging for attention.
My personal preference would have been that the US had built it's bases in the same manor is Iran or better. At least I think we could have possibly done better. Keeping most infrastructure under ground means less dependency on power for cooling, more surface land for other functions. Maybe put some earth-bermed greenhouses on the surface and grow some produce for the locals.
For sure no fast FOB but they can store planes underground and they can be towed out and prepped fast just as they are doing with their missiles today. The wings come off rather easily. My remote site ordered one by mistake from the old CAMS system. The driver was just as confused as we were.
I should add that one way to think of it is that Iran built those amazing underground missile cities just for the US to take over. It won't be easy and there will be mass casualties but I think that since we paid for them we should annex them. Some countries in northern Europe have similar underground bases. I would love to visit them. The closest to that I have been inside was NORAD.
One thing I noticed in the videos on Twitter of quadcopter type drones being flown into US bases in Iraq, is there doesn't seem to be any current defense. They were flying around with impunity, taking their time looking for a target. It's definitely scary.
Those are not US bases, those were Iraqi Armed Forced bases.
It could be either unused base (Camp Victory in Iraq) or fiber optic drones, which are effectively invisible for current systems because you need to have good enough radar to see them thanks to their size and used material and they are not having any RF emissions like usual FPV drone would have
my thesis is that the IRGC has successfully established deterrence by demonstrating relative resilience against US attacks (still have boats and missiles), ability to meaningfully strike US bases and its Allies, and willingness to sacrifice a lot of Irans civilian infrastructure. its hard to sift through the propaganda on both sides, but I haven't yet seen anything to disprove this convincingly. anyone else?
I also believe they have the upper hand as they are willing to play the long game. It's like when Russia attacked Ukraine, they gambled on taking Kiev with paratroopers on the first few days. Didn't work and they got stuck.
It will be ironic if Iran gets a stronger position than they had before the war as a consequence of a peace treaty.
This has massive strategic implications for the US. The US couldn't protect its bases in the middle east from a middle power like Iran and in fact its bases were the reason that its "allies" in the gulf were attacked. Iran would have no reason to attack those allies otherwise. The US has also shown that Israel is the only ally that it really cares about.
Japan, South Korea, Philippines and Australia are taking notes. Prediction: there is not going to be a war over Taiwan - Taiwan will gradually come to a Hong Kong like agreement with China.
Nah. Seeing how China reneged on the "one country, two systems" promise and wrecked Hong Kong has turned the Taiwanese people more firmly against reunification.
Iran would be attacking other nearby states regardless of whether they host US military bases. Iran has a long history of aggression, including sponsoring terrorist groups. Personally I favor a less interventionist US foreign policy but even if we completely disengaged from the Middle East it would still be a violent neighborhood — probably even more so.
> Iran has a long history of aggression, including sponsoring terrorist groups
The US has a longer history of aggression and sponsoring terrorist groups:
Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-pro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...> turned the Taiwanese people more firmly against reunification.
I think this is Western-filtered copium.
The leader of Taiwan's largest opposition part just concluded a fairly conciliatory visit with Xi Jinping.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/what-the-taiwanes...
Taiwan is culturally and historically tied to the mainland, and China is ascendant economically and geopolitically. I can more easily understand why a Taiwanese citizen would chose to be under Chinese sphere of influence over US.
That's a pretty wild prediction - Taiwan is also a middle power and could beef up if it wants to.
[dead]
trump did literally everything backwards. he should have started with the blockade and increased the pressure over time, with decapitation strikes at the end if needed. also..help arm the people of iran before doing anything else. that would have made iran look like the aggressor when they eventually bombed their region.
instead the islamic republic's "strategic patience" fully paid off and now most rational people sees them as victims.
what trump's doing is like trying to cure multi-drug resistant bacterial infection with whatever random antibiotics are on hand - the very thing that created resistance.
I think that’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight, but it seems to me that if the Iranians actually claimed they were 11 days away from a nuclear bomb during the prewar negotiations, it’s likely that the blockade first would not have been the right leading move.
Plus I believe that if you took the “11 days away” claim off the table I don’t think you accurately say that a blockade without the military campaign first would have been successful. Seems like we are in a “what came first the chicken or the egg” moment.
There is no doubt in my mind that a blockade with an intact Iranian navy would not necessarily look like this one.
The primary goal of the attacks was to degrade the Iranian nuclear weapons program. We can argue about whether that was a sensible goal, but a naval blockade certainly wouldn't have achieved it.
If we are on the topic of what he should have done, I think the first on that list is not go to war with Iran at all.
exactly this... this has been strategic disaster from US perspective. a blockade plus covert ops could have split IRGC leadership - instead public decapitation caused rally round the flag effect and gave immediate legitimacy to khamenei heir. completely idiotic
An AWACS was picked off sitting on the ground, that's a bad look. It took Russia years to get to that stage in the war.
One has to wonder how much of the bad US performance is due to deep, systemic problems and how much is due to a rushed and unplanned military operation.
Article doesn't fully load. It says "Just a moment. We are getting your experience ready." and is stuck there.
And Archive.Today can't seem to bypass that paywall:
<https://archive.is/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fworld%2Fi...>
(All current copies have the same issue.)
internet archive, although more easily archive.today, should make a firefox extension to archive paywalled articles from people who have subscriptions and release them in the future (5, 10 years)
Unfortunately, archive.today can never be trusted to have a safe Firefox extension. It is difficult enough to trust the site anymore after it was found that it was engaging in a DDoS attack against a different site. Imagine the hazard from an extension.
In the same spirit, however, it would help to have an extension that auto-archives unpaywalled versions of paywalled articles, and makes them auto-available to users subject to the paywall. The issue then would be that Firefox makes the installed extension identifiers available to each website, so the paywalling site could just block the article for users with the extension.
Don't forget the emotional damage.
Their war propaganda is so much better than that of the US military.
Lego Trump, soul-crushing tweets, with Trump it is like taking candy from a toddler but still…
I’m glad the US is winning so hard they don’t know what to do about it.
Otherwise, they would look blatantly incompetent on a Russian army 3-day special operation level.
I am seriously no longer concerned about Greenland.
[dead]
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Can you please provide sources for your claims.
Which one? There’s no proof that any of Israel’s claims were ever true. It’s on them to provide proof, which they of course have not. If you want to see Tel Aviv or US bases getting hit, go search Twitter. There are thousands of videos. While you’re their look at the tens of thousands of videos of the IDF committing war crimes.
How many protestors were killed?
None? They killed a bunch of Zionist infiltrators but certainly not 50,000 in a few days, producing zero proof.
https://thegrayzone.com/2026/02/01/guardian-iranian-death-to...
https://thegrayzone.com/2026/01/12/western-media-riots-iran-...
[flagged]
[flagged]
It is hard to understand why the U.S. cares about a random Middle Eastern country called Israel this much. Why not Zimbabwe or Thailand, but Israel? Weird stuff. I hope America comes back to its senses and stops dealing with these people.
In essence it's not about Israel itself, but rather that the US wants an ally in the region that they can use to project power in the middle east. Of course nowadays there's mutual interests and lobbying, so the choice for Israel is very much set in stone, but in another universe it could have been a different country.
It kind of made sense (strategic, if not moral) when we were a booming country very dependent on Middle Eastern oil in the last half of the 20th century and wanted to have a strong ally in the region. Makes less sense recently though.
Then perhaps Israel has surmised that the US might not be interested in sticking around and decided to make their play while they had an ally in the White House.
Israel is "western" outpost in the Middle East. It's not a random country. It's a colonial power with a geopolitical mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism
>It is hard to understand why the U.S. cares about a random Middle Eastern country called Israel this much.
Study the links between the American military industrial complex and Evangelical Christianity, in particularly the latter's view of Israel's role in end-times prophecy, and you'll get your answer.
You are getting downvoted, but you are correct. USA is failing in separation of church and the state and now it is going to have a war because ancient book said so.
Yeah. I think the instinct is "But that's batshit!" and like, yeah, that's exactly the problem.
To be fair to the ancient book, at that time it would have been understood by intellectuals that it's not a prediction of future events, it's a message to them about their past and present, not a message to us about our future. So us blaming the book, not the crazy people is the same mistake as if we were screaming at the author of "Don't Create the Torment Nexus". The author was writing fiction, the critics knew it was fiction, most of the readers knew it was fiction, the problem is that billionaire tech bro who thought it was a message from God telling them they need to spend $100Bn to create a Torment Nexus.
The Secretary of War, a Christian nationalist and white supremacist, has framed the war in Iran as a holy war to bring about the End Times. Many people in the government have said they consider America's military support of Israel to be an absolute Christian obligation. JD Vance and the President want to create a new Catholicism with blackjack and hookers and holy Zionist warfare because the Pope disagrees with them.
We live in batshit times.
Excellent propaganda and god knows how much blackmail. Just look at the US cities lighting up monuments etc. to celebrate Israeli independence day. And this during a war the majority of US citizens don't support.
[dead]
The American people are well on their way to this realization. The problem is in our government, media and executive class, which are fully Zionist occupied.
... government, media and executive class and a huge chunk of voters all in on Holy War.
Not surprising. In years to come I'm sure we'll find the USG has lied as much to the public during this war as Russia and North Korea would to their citizens. The "laundry fire". The pilot "rescue". The lack of transparency on injuries and casualties. Look at Netanyahu's recent health issues. He didn't lie - he 'delayed the report'.
I think they just have a different strategy and goals than we in the West expect. We seem to think if we just kill a lot more of their guys that victory is certain but that's not the case.
I would expect more of this. Most of Iran's military infrastructure is deep under 500 to 800 meters of hard rock, heavily funded by US tax dollars bully lunch money and the oil industry. Most everyone else's military infrastructure is mostly on the surface just begging for attention.
My personal preference would have been that the US had built it's bases in the same manor is Iran or better. At least I think we could have possibly done better. Keeping most infrastructure under ground means less dependency on power for cooling, more surface land for other functions. Maybe put some earth-bermed greenhouses on the surface and grow some produce for the locals.
You can't rapidly scale up an FOB under 800m of rock and you can't land planes underground.
For sure no fast FOB but they can store planes underground and they can be towed out and prepped fast just as they are doing with their missiles today. The wings come off rather easily. My remote site ordered one by mistake from the old CAMS system. The driver was just as confused as we were.
I should add that one way to think of it is that Iran built those amazing underground missile cities just for the US to take over. It won't be easy and there will be mass casualties but I think that since we paid for them we should annex them. Some countries in northern Europe have similar underground bases. I would love to visit them. The closest to that I have been inside was NORAD.
So you are ready to sacrifice thousands of lives for that?