Pooter

Googles: When did the chips act start being drafted? June 2020 When did Russia invade Ukraine February 2022. But sure it was probably Covid.. because everyone’s prime concern during Covid was the microchip supply. Couldn’t possibly be that a democrat admin did a proactive domestic thing in alignment with their foreign policy. We’ve already established it’s impossible for anything smart to happen without first punching oneself in the face. More broadly speaking though, I don’t want you to get frustrated with me. I’m asking genuine questions and soaking in your points and calling out the parts I think are silly. I’m here for a friendly and lively debate and yes enjoy being the contrarian in a den of mostly aligned war hawks. I will give you your ideas have a unique flavor and honesty here and it’s not just the predictable Fox News word vomit. I admit I definitely have never heard the #GETHARD (David Goggins ™️) strategy of foreign policy strength through self-sabotage before. Regardless I look forward to monitoring the situation and debating more with you dudes

lol so in order to make smart choices we have to intervene in the hard/soft cycle by intentionally making hard times for ourselves 😂 So just to be clear we have to Intentionally be dumb in the near term to make hard times because we’re just such sober realists we’ll never make a smart choice unless absolutely forced. I’m curious, how far can we take this principle.. does it work like the dumber we are now, the harder the times we’ll create, and therefore we’ll emerge from those even harder men? Then what’s stopping us from being as dumb as possible right now? Why not nuke Kharg island, or Tehran? Why not nuke ourselves? If the goal is creating the hardest times possible so we get SUPER HARD (giggity) I can think of a lot of ways we could do that more severe and immediate than some pinpoint strikes on the other side of the world.. You can pretend we’re all naive idealists but this line of thinking is just plain dumb and falls apart when subjected the most basic critical thought. We didn’t need a global calamity to pass the chips act to revamp domestic chip manufacturing. We didn’t need global calamity for Reagan to build up the military and bankrupt the Soviet Union. In your personal life you don’t need to experience calamity to know you need to make smart decisions and plan for the future. Turns out avoiding calamity is actually a really good incentive too. We can and should expect our government to be proactive and do things that make sense without needing to shoot ourselves in the dick first.

… uh what? yes it absolutely does. What is this argument? If you piss away your stockpile which will take years to replace, you are measurably weaker, right now. Can’t believe I have to actually spell this out, but your current inventory and your ability to produce more… both matter. If current inventory was irrelevant how can we maintain a nuclear deterrent even though we haven’t built a new ICBM since 1978 and we haven’t manufactured a new nuke since 1992. We can literally do all of this without needing to bomb Kharg island 😂 idk why common sense national defense/fiscal policy and bombing Kharg island are suddenly and inextricably linked in your mind. And as I’ve said many times before, I don’t know why you do this weird thing where you say “well if you’re so smart why don’t you run for office and fix everything.” We’re debating in a forum. The onus isn’t on either of us to fix the whole world. But if you do want my policy prescription that badly it’s basically: do all the smart stuff you listed in your comment but don’t do all the really stupid parts.

One saved round: Remember that time I said we were heading down the road of irreversible stupid escalations and everyone called me a TDS libtard pussy? Well now here we are talking about how we need to bomb Kharg island so that WW3 starts on our terms 🤷🏻‍♂️ Can’t make this shit up

Apologies I was not tracking you’ve been advocating for this very very bad idea for as long and as consistently as you have been. Still you haven’t explained one key part. How, in an inevitable total war with a competing power that can out-produce us, is it a good plan to waste munitions on a middle eastern sideshow and then intentionally provoke that power while you are most vulnerable in their region of influence? You’re convinced an inevitable global total war is coming. Sure I guess if we want to pretend mutually assured destruction doctrine just magically stopped existing then yeah I guess we’re gonna go to total war with China at some point. But you just said if you had your way you’d push it off 10-15 years.. so shouldn’t that mean we dont bomb Kharg island right now, since that could possibly set off the exact chain of events you want to delay? Seriously, none of this makes any sense. This is turning into you trying to out-realist everybody with apocalypse fantasies, but the arguments fall flat for two main reasons: No one other than you conceives of this war in this way. Europe isn’t going to magically start producing oil again if we blow up Kharg island. They’re just going to be further weakened. If you do think WW3 is coming, you can just say that and prep for it. Idk why it requires us to step on our own dick first

I’m referring to your assertion that we need to bomb Kharg island to intentionally set off a global energy crisis which will somehow be a good thing in the long run. I don’t remember this war ever being pitched that way (fair enough, you didn’t pitch it) but I also don’t remember you ever making this point before. It seems a lot like you’re starting with your conclusion (we just need to keep bombing and escalating) and working backward from there each week with whatever the new neocon strategy du jour is. This is just a blatant straw man. No one here has ever claimed we figured out eternal world peace or that other countries around the world don’t act aggressively. Quite the opposite actually.. my argument is if we’re serious about deterring Russia and China this war has severely hampered that. We don’t have infinite money or resources and this stupid boondoggle on behalf of a foreign country pulled valuable assets away from other AORs that will take significant time to reconstitute. Rebuilding U.S. Missile Inventory: A Multiyear ProjectHigh expenditure of key munitions in Operation Epic Fury has created a window of vulnerability until inventories return to pre-war levels and then reach levels that war planners desire.Article says TLAM THAAD and Patriot stockpiles will be reconstituted by sometime between 2029 and 2031. We retasked 2 carrier strike groups from PACOM to the Middle East. Bomber task forces to anywhere other than CENTCOM are nonexistent right now. 69% of our tanker fleet is sitting at BG/PSAB. But yeah it’s probably a good idea to bomb Kharg island and risk a possible China confrontation at the exact moment our force posture in PACOM is more on the back foot than at any point in the last decade 👌

.. so we need to escalate in order to.. encourage Europe to recapitalize their energy independence, so that in some future hypothetical war that’s a foregone conclusion (in your head) our allies will be stronger? Guys these justifications are getting more and more convoluted and nonsensical. Talk about a goalpost shift.. I thought this was about an “imminent nuclear threat” to the US homeland

So I guess the obvious follow up question here is.. is Iran such an existential threat to the US that we need to bomb Kharg island, setting off a global economic crisis and potential war with China? You just listed some pretty gnarly side effects of your silver bullet solution to this war so I’m just wondering.. is a world where Kharg island is blown up but now we have a global depression/energy crisis and China wants to go to war with us somehow better?

It’s funny you guys always act like just a little bit more bombing will do the trick without any source to support it whatsoever.. You talk like we tripped 100 yards from the end of a marathon, and we have to just get up and finish the job. Come on guys it’ll be so easy. We’re sooo close. Just finish the job. Cmon bro. Trust me bro. Except you have no idea how close or far we are from the finish line. I saw zero credible intel at any point that the IRGC was about to collapse or some other moderating force was about to take over. We’re not 100 yards from the finish line.. we’ve run a 5k and we don’t even know how long the race is. If I had to bet, the admin probably didn’t think we were close to the finish line either. That’s why they took a ceasefire and are now eating Iranian dick on the global stage. Trump already launched the war.. you think if it was as simple as a few more targets and this thing is game over he wouldn’t have done it? Midnight hammer obliterated them but then we just needed a little more. Then epic fury obliterated them but we just needed a little more. Then the blockade of their blockade was totally gonna bring them down but we just need a little more. And shocker, all of the Israel first neocon war hawks agree! Always just a little bit more

Maybe I’m old fashioned or just naive on the wonders of AI, but the side getting strategic wins here is the one with the massive TBM stockpile and control over a critical global trade route, while the side with all the fancy AI tools is getting humiliated on the global stage. Although.. a slightly smarter version of grok could’ve advised us this war of choice was a shit idea to begin with, in which case I’m all for embracing our robot overlords

Short of a dropping nukes or a full ground invasion, I think this conflict has proven we don’t have the firepower needed for Iran to capitulate. It’s not about what the public will or won’t support, because we already proved we’ll go ahead and launch a super unpopular war. I’m talking about the real world limits of our military power. This might be a tough pill to swallow but we had 3x the fighter squadrons we do now when we took down the far smaller country of Iraq in 1990. And in desert storm, airpower was paired with a ground invasion. The notion that we can ramp up to some previously unseen level of air power just isn’t reality. Almost the entire tanker community is deployed already and run ragged with crew rest waivers. We redirected more carriers to the region than at any point in the last 30 years and one of the CSG’s retasked for this thing just completed the longest carrier deployment since WW2. Idk if you guys follow the meme pages but one of the running jokes right now is that big blue basically took the entire AFFORGEN model and threw it in the trash when this kicked off. They just said fuck it and deployed everybody. Now folks are tired and ready to be done with it. There’s no world where we turn this back up to early March levels of strikes, let alone exceed that intensity. We shot our shot, and it didn’t work. And now we’re taking a crap deal to get out of a crap situation. I think this is a super valuable lesson to learn after Venezuela folding like an house of cards got us high on our own supply. If we’re serious about deterring China we need to learn the actual lesson here: we aren’t all powerful anymore. If you want to sustain operations against a determined opponent, you need volume, and a deep bench. We’ve become insanely good at lighting people up night 1 with all the shiniest most expensive toys. But we’ve become terrible at sustaining that pressure over time.

Well now that we have the text of the MOU and know that it’s garbage, the obvious follow up question to ask is.. why? Why, if Iran was backed into a corner and we had all the leverage, did we just sign an agreement that so heavily favors Iran? A few possible explanations: Our position of leverage was greatly overblown by cheerleaders of this war We are in a position of leverage and our negotiators are just straight up retarded We’re using the MOU as a cover for more surprise attacks We’re taking a temporary L to preserve the midterms and then gonna get down to business for real after that Trump just wants out of this completely and will accept any terms necessary to do so I think it’s a combo of #1 and #5 but would be happy to discuss. At the very least I think this MOU should give pause to anyone who was previously glazing our strategic positioning in this war. Pretty unusual to totally wreck somebody and then sign a deal capitulating to their terms..

we had FON in the strait before the war started our own DNI threat assessment said they weren’t pursuing a nuke before the war started It’s pretty wild to see some of you guys cheerlead the admin talking points verbatim and then say I’m the one blinded by political bias.. Two thirds of your list of “clear war objectives” are this admin claiming the win based on getting back to the status quo we already had. This is like intentionally starting a war with Cuba and then patting yourself on the back for achieving freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Mexico.. like wtf are we even talking about. If I want to hear the admin party line bullshit I can just go listen to the press secretary, why not try presenting an independent thought that actually makes sense

A few thoughts: This deal is going to be ass, but any deal no matter how bad is better than continuing the incoherence we’ve witnessed over the last few months. Any amount of cash given to the Iranians, be it pallets on a c-17 or sanctions relief or a $300B tip option on a square reader, is pennies on the dollar compared to the economic damage this thing was going to cause if we continued through the summer and ran our strategic reserve dry. I am happy to let Trump claim the win if it means we get to stop the abject retardation and putting our folks in danger for little to no strategic gain. The “biggest state sponsor of terror” line is so tired and silly. First of all, with the materiel we left the Taliban, there’s zero chance we aren’t the biggest state sponsor or terror on an absolute monetary level. You can say it wasn’t intentional or it’s all biden’s fault but over the years our blunders and failed interventions have financed and engendered more terrorism than anyone else.. by far. But more generally i just dispute this framing. “#1 state sponsor of terror” implies there have been countless Iranian backed terrorist attacks in our homeland. Except the reality is WE are the occupying force in the Middle East and the Iranians have financed groups that have attacked our troops in THEIR hemisphere. Still fuck Iran and every American service member killed is a tragedy but I think we can be more accurate/mature with our language and say “Iran acts against our interests in the region.” Their sponsorship of militant groups that attack our troops is no different than us attempting to arm Kurds to overthrow them. Just be honest and admit we have opposing interests and neither of us really consider morals when we are deciding who to finance to fuck over the other side. I know this point is bound to get a bunch of pearl clutching over “moral equivalence” but I think it’s more productive to acknowledge that our countries operate in our own (or Israel’s) interest with very little regard for what is morally “right.” Ultimately we’ll have a lot more to discuss once the text of the MOU and the eventual deal go public. Because we can’t be sure what’s in it. But what we can be sure of is the reaction: The left will hate it because it’s just JCPOA but with more money and more steps The zionists and neocons will hate it because it isn’t total war with Iran And the maga loyalists will love it and see our president’s months of unhinged waffling as completely vindicated and a totally brilliant negotiating strategy.

.. looks like we might actually have a deal. Credit where credit is due, Trump seems to be *slightly* less completely controlled by Israel than I previously thought. The jury is still out on if any of this holds. I have a sneaking suspicion Israel is going to start leveling Lebanon or maybe just directly attack Iran again in an effort to spoil this whole thing, but this is at least progress in the right direction. It will also be fun to watch the inevitable Levin/Shapiro/Neocon meltdown. A few weeks back they were telling us what a staggering success this all was, and now you can already see the pivot to the “we need to go back in and finish the job” narrative. I said weeks/months ago I would be happy to be proven wrong if this doesn’t turn into a multi year boondoggle. And at least for the moment it appears I was wrong, and I’m quite happy about that. I’ll still maintain this accomplished virtually nothing of strategic value and even did massive strategic harm by proving to the world Iran can gain huge negotiating power through their ability to close the strait. But at least some progress! Maybe some of our dudes will even get to start coming home.