Well when it comes to foreign actions have they ever took action themselves directly rather than employing their numerous proxies?
US kills Iran's General Soleimani
- Thread starter Malevolence
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Well when it comes to foreign actions have they ever took action themselves directly rather than employing their numerous proxies?
That may be harder now that their Conduit-in-chief is now no more.
Well - would you expect a branch of any US/British army to suddenly become disorganised if one of their top brass was killed? Their is always chains-of-command and besides I expect the actual groups they fund & train are pretty much autonomous when it comes to orders. Just guidelines but I'm pretty sure the the 'revenge' rhetoric pretty much gave them the go-ahead to start planning their attacks.
This incident has greatly increased my respect for Trump. Finally someone with balls to actually do what should have been done years ago. The ME is basically Terrorism Central, about time a few of them are wiped out. Just need to topple their dictatorships then the world will finally be a better place.
Dictators we put there or helped to keep in place (by-and-large, not always true tbf)... and we've already tried 'toppling them', it didn't work and will never work. So are you happy sending British people to die for a pointless errand boy task just for some temporary chest thumping?
The only solution is to leave or commit genocide, so what is it?
While a generalisation often these more milita style organisations, etc. depend on the vision and leadership of individuals to perform effectively much more so than the US and UK, etc. that have a more built in institutional command structure type organisation and individuals are less likely to step up and fill the shoes of the likes of Soleimani when they know there is a reasonable chance of ending up the same way.
They don't operate like we do. In dictatorships there are a few key figures pulling all the strings.
I have heard it said that in the case of the British forces anyway, if any unit is wiped out to the extent that only two ordinary Men remain, there are rules in place that will establish which one is in command of the other.
This was demonstrated in the film Zulu (Do not know offhand if historical or dramatic license) where Chard and Bromhead are of equal rank and seniority was down to who was commissioned first.
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I don't even know where to begin with this
Caporegime
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Does he?
My Uncle thinks it would be perfectly ok to nuke the 250 odd million people in the middle east...most of whom are just innocent citizens.
My Uncle thinks it would be perfectly ok to nuke the 250 odd million people in the middle east...most of whom are just innocent citizens.
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It's nowhere near that simple. In fact, what you think is the solution is part of the cause. The area is deeply messed up and has been for a very long time. It's profoundly divided in multiple ways in multiple areas - ethnic, cultural, religious, national, basically every possible way - and has a hyperabundance of internal conflicts and blood feuds. It's often referred to as a single area ("the middle east") but it so very, very much isn't. Even the countries there are divided, in large part because they only exist with their current borders due to conquest and division (sometimes imposed from outside, sometime imposed by the success of a local dictator). Then there's the brutalising effect of it all, which makes more brutality inevitable, and the fact that the whole area is the birthplace of and is dominated by an extremely authoritarian ideology specifically created for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining power by violence and oppression and which lays claim to vastly superhuman authority to do so.
The dictatorships are the only things imposing any sort of unification and stability. When they're removed by external force, the most likely result is unification against that external force followed by insurgency and sooner or later a new dictatorship even worse than the previous one. It might, just might, have been possible to fix things that way before the invention of explosives (i.e. when inusrgency was far harder for a minority to do) but it sure isn't possible now. To stabilise an area that way requires occupation with such overwhelming force that insurgency is impossible while simultaneously ruling the occupied territory extremely nicely, so nicely that almost everyone in the occupied area thinks "actually, life is good under this occupation and we're better off this way". Good luck with making that work. Maybe it has worked somewhere, sometime. Maybe. Another potential option is a bona fide conquest, i.e. a cultural and political change. Invasion and occupation aren't conquest - they're one possible method of obtaining and maintaining enough power to make a conquest. That does have many examples of it working. England is the one that comes to my mind first, since I'm English.
The idea that all that's required is an external force removing the dictatorships in the area is...wildly optimistic, to be extremely polite. I see no reason to think it wouldn't make things even worse for even longer.
If it chose to do so, The US, using air power alone, could pull Iran to pieces like pulling the wings off a butterfly and there would be absolutely nothing the Iranians could do to stop them.
Whether or not this would be a good policy or what the global consequences of utterly destroying Iran's military and civilian infrastructure would be is a matter for further consideration. :/
Not sure they care. Iran is... over there somewhere, what happens to them is inconsequential to the big powers.
Countries which only live off oil (like Iran) and don't offer anything else are going to collapse anyway in the next 20-30 years.
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Yes, because that worked wonders in Iraq and Libya.
I'm guessing Iran's tactics would be to use their proxy forces and missile arsenal tit for tat style - US hits somewhere from the air, Iran launches a barrage of missiles at US interests and/or Israel.
Ultimately Iran air-force wise might as well not bother as they'd be destroyed from stand off range but their air defences would probably hold out for awhile especially as they present somewhat of an unknown as many are domestic built or modified with mixed capabilities - but they simply couldn't win the war of attrition.
And without invading, Iran will just regroup and continue what they've been doing since 1979, IE the US doesn't win anything and wastes a lot of resources on something that achieves nothing, while morale plummets for continued Middle East occupation/presence.
If the US invades, then Iranian military policy is to run insurgencies and make it impossible to hold Iran by using the native terrain/civilian populace to their advantage. They aren't stupid, they know what works against a larger, more advanced force as there are many examples by now for which to call upon as evidence.
Without total collapse of the Iranian establishment, any conflict is irrelevant and anyone wishing there to be one better realise the cost involved in achieving that. Only a bloody, multi-decade occupation is viable (and even then...), is the West willing to do that?
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These assumptions are wrong on their military capabilities, Iran missile defence is the biggest in the region with many modern toys that are decent enough to knock american aircraft down.
The landscape of the country also doesn't help, it's a fortress of mountains where they can hide their weapons pretty easy and striking them from the air isn't as easy as you think it is.
USAF is going to have a bloody time, not that they won't complete the job, but it's not going to be Iraq 2.