Burning Tankers, the Strait of Hormuz situation 6/2019

localizer said:

The US has to respond to this. The best way to show the world, and especially China, that it's the boss is a total domination victory over Iran. The new toys need to be tried out.

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asif iqbal said:

it was a unmanned drone basically a robot no one was killed

are humans going to kill each other over robot ? the irony

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Anlsvrthng said:

USA can't won a war against Iran.

Usa fight for money, Iran fight for life.

The end of that war wold be like Vietnam on steroids.

No one in the USA has an idea how a war looks like .

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At the last possible minute President Trump did something smart on Iran Thursday night: He pulled back strikes on three Iranian targets that could have killed as many as 150 people

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it wasn't a "proportionate" response to Iran bringing down an unarmed US drone.
Indeed, that is a good reason.
There are also other good reasons. First, it is Congress that is supposed to authorize American wars. Such a potentially lethal strike surely would need, at an absolute minimum, congressional buy-in, and more properly it would need an actual congressional resolution for the use of force. US presidents have sometimes disputed Congress's authority over military strikes, but congressional approval first is how things should work, according to the congressionally asserted but never presidentially signed War Powers Resolution of 1973.
Second, an escalatory strike of this scale could pose serious risks to Americans in the Middle East. Unlike the Syrian regime against which Trump launched air strikes in 2017 and 2918, Iran has the capacity to launch significant retaliatory operations across the Middle East. Iran and its proxies have major presences in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

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thousands of missiles with ranges of up to 1,500 miles that can hit targets around the region, including Israel, and can reach as far as southeastern Europe.
The more hardline elements in Iran could easily unleash their forces or proxies against American troops in both Iraq and Syria or against American commercial targets around the Middle East.
There was a sneak preview of this potential approach on Wednesday

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at the headquarters of American oil giant ExxonMobil in southern Iraq. Although it's not clear who launched the rocket, it is reasonable to assume it was the work of a Shia militia aligned with Iran.
Third, Iran also i

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where Trump launched strikes in 2017 and 2018 after the Syrian regime allegedly used chemical weapons against its own people. Those strikes enforced a significant international norm against the use of chemical weapons and had considerable support around the world. Indeed, the British and the French both participated in the 2018 strikes.
There would have been scant support for strikes against Iran by America's European allies, who supported the Iran nuclear deal, because the Iranians have been sticking to the terms of the agreement.
Trump largely created the crisis with Iran by pulling out of the nuclear deal last year and imposing tough new sanctions on the Iranians with no real Plan B for what would come next, once the Iranians started pushing back against the sanctions that are crippling their economy.
That said, even though Trump's war cabinet is now led by two hardliners on Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, to his great credit Trump has now walked back potential strikes that would have significantly escalated the Iran crisis. Trump insisted to CNN today that "nothing was greenlighted," though he tweeted this morning that "10 minutes before the strike I stopped it."
It's not quite John F. Kennedy adeptly managing the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it's one of the better moments of Trump's presidency.

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Jura said:

the CNN story of
Trump's smart call on Iran

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:

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Jura said:

had Iran had the debris, the Pentagon still could've claimed the drone was falling towards Iran

(now the story is "“At the time of the intercept, the RQ-4 was operating at high-altitude approximately 34 kilometers from the nearest point of land on the Iranian coast.: etc.

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),

but such a claim would then require a willing suspension of disbelief

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Jura said:

Thursday at 9:38 PM
and now there're these inside
Here's Everything We Know About The U.S. Strikes On Iran That Never Came

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:

IRIB screencapture

IRIB screencapture

IRIB screencapture

IRIB screencapture

IRIB screencapture

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localizer said:

If the F35 is as good as claimed, then it should wipe the floor with Iran.

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