Political Posts

[cubsfan]

12 minutes ago, Parsad said:

 

Like this guy?  Kristi Noem's husband...

 

 

Maybe she should shoot those puppies!    Cheers!

 

You have a point there!

 

[Spekulatius]

1 hour ago, RichardGibbons said:

 

I'm curious why you say this.  At the time there were large protests against the regime, and the regime there is bad for both the Iranian people and the rest of the world.

 

To my way of thinking at the time, there was maybe a 50% chance of the Iranian people enacting their own regime change, and it was also unclear if Iran could potentially close the strait against the USA's military might. And, it distracted Trump, preventing him from attacking his allies.  So to me, it looked like a reasonable bet at the time.

 

What, at the time, made you think that it was an obvious foolish thing to do?  Did you just have a different estimate of the probability of positive regime change, or were more confident than me about Iran's ability to control the strait?

The protest were already over 2 month when the war started. the Iranian regime is very good st suppressing protest and they had similar ones several times before. Also, the regime had more popular support than most in the west believe. Even those that don’t exactly like the regime because of corruption likely want to keep an Islamic state rather rather than a western style secular democracy. You can see that on how people vote in surrounding states.

[RichardGibbons]

1 hour ago, changegonnacome said:

I think the fragility of the Iranian regime thesis that was out there turned out to be more Israeli propaganda than reality. Something that JD Vance, Rubio & the Director of the CIA told Trump prior to Epic Fury….i believe the word used by Trump’s senior most advisors on that idea was “bullshit”.

 

At the time I remember being somewhat in your camp assuming that Trump must have been told by his own intelligence agencies that the regime was at a tipping point and just needed a nudge….in that world I had a “worth a shot” opinion too….the subsequent reporting however on the decision timeline for Epic Fury shows the lack of credible US intelligence, only overblown self serving Israeli Iran fragility stories, Bibi’s pitch book and a receptive President interested in glory hunting versus managing risk/reward.

 

In short the judgement of Epic Fury as an ill advised boondoggle is not some after the fact exercise….there is extensive evidence now that prior to Epic Fury the President was ably advised about how ill advised it was and how likely to fail it was!

 

Ah, ok, this makes sense to me, and what @Spekulatius says.  Essentially, my probability estimate was way off, which explains the discrepancy in our views.