Welcome again to everybody, and happy anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Vietnam . Make yourself at home and pay your respects to Ho Chi Minh. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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It is not about Maduro. It is about the fact that they did the symbolic strike thing in June and then usa just came back again. Iran let usa and israel off easy in the 12 day war but here they are starting shit again. Iran is more prepared this time and they want to be sure that this is the last time.
They aren’t doing this because they see usa as a major threat just the opposite. Iran knows exactly how tough american/israeli air defenses are. Iran has patched all the damage and filled the positions from the assassinations in the 12 day war, They replaced all the missiles they used. They likely are hours or days from being able to assemble a nuclear bomb and nobody knows where their enriched uranium is. Meanwhile usa hasn’t refilled its air defense stocks even a little. usa fucked up the timing on its 5th column, pulling the rip cord on a color revolution before they had their boats in place. That color revolution did almost no damage, And to top it off usa are begging for Iran to give them a way to walk away while looking tough. You only ask for that if you aren’t actually tough.
Iran sees that balance of power is more their favor than it ever has been.
The US and Iran have been doing this dance of negotiated symbolic strikes and retaliations for at least 10 years now. It’s a testament to Iran’s security that they have never considered those strikes an existential threat until now. They could let the US walk away with some domestic PR victory while securing their diplomatic goals like they’ve done every time. The fact that they’re not doing that indicates that it no longer seems like a safe bet, and I think it’s fair to assume the very recent example of Maduro being kidnapped mid-negotiation is a really bad look for the US foreign delegation.
Those two claims are dubious, there’s lots of satellite imagery of the facilities for both enrichment and stockpiling, and there’s no evidence that they’re actually that close to nuclear warheads, which aren’t even a red line in their negotiations.
It caused the death of some 3000 people according to Iran’s official lists and forced them to turn off the internet in many large cities across the country. I wouldn’t call that almost no damage.
Edit:
Image of the enrichment sites, in case anyone wants them for whatever reason.