(Lack of) US Iran Peace Agreement Part 5

[OnePeppyFatball]

Part 5

I personally think that Israel is still a saner actor than Iran. We also have Israel’s history of not using or even threatening to use its nukes in close to half a century.

Saner than Iran doesn't mean sane. (disclaimer - I don't rate one above the other)
History is meaningless in this context as threats/use will reveal that Israel does have nukes and this will jump-start the race for ME countries and others, to acquire their own nukes.

Your post made me wonder about this, and what does it mean. "experienced military leaders"

And I think it is valid. Because the experience we are talking about is being involved with these table top war game simulations of the sort discussed above. I think Kegsbreath was a Major in the National Guard, so while he is experienced in barking orders on the parade ground ( at the NCOs barking orders), it's unlikely he got involved in this theoretical stuff in detail. Maybe assisting the people at the table, but not working the table. I suspect he looks down on such things. Him putting testosterone levels at the top of his list.

@RedTagAlan @trumpredcard @rainingsnoring Thanks you've all articulated the reason that we are having this discussion about nukes very well.

The reason I posited it was because a lot of the pro war social media accounts have been saying that a "MOAB is not a nuke" over the last few days, almost like they're trying to pre-empt something. That got my spidey senses tingling, as Mario Nawfal, the interviewer with Prof. Kuznick said "It's like me saying, it's like me going to my girlfriend and say, you know, I will never cheat on you randomly. Say, look, I don't know why you're telling me this that should not be on the table."

2 years ago, I would've have been like nah, impossible, but today after the complete disregard of International Law and norms we have seen repeatedly, there is nothing wrong with discussing it.

RedTagAlan he got rid of them as they are actually loyal to the constitution and the law. They've tried to play it off as partisanship, but he has targeted a lot of women and people of colour too.

On Israel and nukes, it's an open secret in America (some initial materials were appropriated from America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_affair). It can't be officially acknowledged as Israel is not a party to the NPT:
"while U.S. nonproliferation laws (such as the Symington and Glenn Amendments) legally require cutting off military and economic aid to non-NPT nuclear-armed states, yet successive U.S. administrations bypass these statutes using a decades-long policy of "nuclear opacity" and presidential workarounds"

I've bookmarked many posts to read the links more closely later. Thank you all.

Two takeaways. South Korea wanting its own nukes now is the perfect example of a 'sane' country desiring a deterrent.

In the video discussion, iirc, the reasons why China would win:
US had x number of nukes, so China manufactured x+, then US upped their stocks to x++ and China did x++ (or more, do we know their exact figures?) But there's the problem of distance. China is closer to Taiwan than the US is to China.
How much can Japan and SK do to hold the fort till the US is able to join. Can the US risk launching nukes?

Japan is now confronting the painful subject of possessing nukes too. I visited Hiroshima two years ago and the thought of it even considering breaking this taboo was never on my bingo card.

The US under Trump is geopolitics for personal profit and aggrandisement. I'm surprised he hasn't announced Antarctica is now called Trump Continent and the US will be mining there soon. And by the way, contracts have already been awarded to companies where Don jr has investments.

@trumpredcard It's crazy the corruption in the Trump administration. Imagine Nixon got removed for doing far far less.

Even crazier is their lack of morality, Trump only stopped the livestreaming of the execution of the murderer Nidal Hasan after public backlash. No one even considered how barbaric it would look and Hegseth was positively salivating at the prospect.

Tucker Carlson said something prescient in a recent monologue about the effect on people who watch:

"There's a long record of what they do to people who watch them. And if you're interested in the topic, it's really worth taking 20 minutes in reading an essay, really a letter to the editor, that Charles Dickens, the one of the most perceptive novelists ever to write in English, wrote in 1849 after seeing a public execution in London.

Without getting boring about the details, was a husband and wife, a pair of murderers who had killed a guy who was actually the wife's boyfriend at one point,
stolen his money, and buried him under
the stones in their kitchen. And they got caught and they were executed and no one really argued that they didn't deserve to be punished, maybe even executed for what they did.

Dickens didn't make that argument. He made instead the argument that doing it in
public brought out something ugly and
dangerous in the people who watched.
It lowered them almost to the level of the people they were watching die. It incited bloodlust in them.

So you will hear the argument made by dumb people and really dumb people are
the only people with power right now, so
it's the argument you're likely to hear, that this will deter crime.

Well, that's true. Do videos of people getting killed deter violence?

Have you ever seen a war movie? People
get killed in the war movie. Is the lesson of the war movie that if you're at war you could be killed? No, of course not. Every person in the audience takes away the same lesson from any war movie, which is it's good to shoot bad guys. They incite an animal instinct in all of us.

And that instinct will never die. We can
either encourage it or we can do our best to suppress it or encourage other people to suppress it within themselves.

But the last instinct you ever want to encourage if you want to keep your society orderly and happy, if you want brotherly love to reign, is bloodlust between citizens.

Now, again, there you can make the case there are plenty of Americans who deserve the death penalty, for sure.

But watching it makes Americans much more likely to hurt each other."

Quote " I'm surprised he hasn't announced Antarctica is now called Trump Continent and the US will be drilling there soon.".

He has. Said it in the last week. The drilling I mean. Said it had started. Billions of bucks worth. Greenland said eh ?

I looked up the agreement by the way. It's just confirming the 1951 treaty, with some promises to use Greenlandic labour to upgrade Thule, and open another one... maybe.

Greenland contradicts Trump’s claim that ‘massive’ oil and gas drilling is about to begin there | CNN Politics

Re China and war. China has a massive problem. The Three Gorges Dam. That is the big reason that China kicks up a stink if any missiles are put in the region. And also, look at the dates for the US bunker buster bombs, and the dates for that dam.

I think that is a big part of warfare. The hidden messages. Because while missiles would not do much to certain massive structures, bunker busters might. And it has to be factored into their use I think. A bomb used in Afghanistan for example, might be nothing to do with the Taliban, but all to with saying "see what we have".

That's why the MOAB confuses me, because it really has no tactical use. It's airburst. Trump likes it because he is a manchild who wants a big boom. Will the US use bunker busters against Pickaxe? I doubt it. Because as I said they don't know if it will work against a mountain. Most likely not. And if they do use it, that is performance data being given away.

Claims made, and capability do not always match up.

And I think MAD initiating events do not need to be nukes. Think about that big concrete thing. That would be a potential MAD event, a non nuke one. Against a nation that has a no first nuke strike policy.

I struggle to get my head around most of this stuff. And it's why I don't really bother with the other CME threads. Because things are not binary. It's not white hat v black hat. At least here we can explore ideas without being accused of being Iranian supporters, or anti Israel... hmm.

Read this in the Independent:

“This is also the context in which Mr Trump seems to be lashing out even more erratically than before, trying to mend the damage done to Republicans’ electoral chances by his disastrous decision to go to war with Iran.
He has compounded that mistake by making another: first agreeing a deal to buy Russian diesel in a doomed attempt to cut prices at American pumps, and now reversing his approval of the law clamping down on the flow of money fuelling Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.
Two days before the law, named after Lindsey Graham, the late South Carolina Republican senator, was due to come into effect, Mr Trump blocked it – siding more emphatically than ever with Mr Putin against the Ukrainian people.
As well as being morally wrong, this is a grievous political error. Doing deals with the Kremlin will do nothing to cut world prices of diesel and therefore will have no effect on American truckers and drivers. Yet American voters, including Republicans, side heavily with Ukraine against Russia and are liable to see Mr Trump’s behaviour as a sign of weakness. ”
“Mr Trump’s desperation is becoming ever more evident. His critics have always been outraged by willingness to break the norms of decent liberal democracy, but until now there has always been method in his unpredictability: his supporters have seen his disdain for rules as a sign of strength. The outrage of his critics has always energised his base.
It may be that we are now, finally, seeing the beginning of the end of the Trump era. Ruining the White House ballroom and mismanaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool have made America look bad rather than “Great Again”.
But it is the cracks in the White House’s organisation that may be signs that the rule of chaos is coming to an end. ”

Excerpt From
“Voices: Donald Trump’s White House is finally falling apart”
Editorial
The Independent
https://apple.news/A0Ev-HPG7Qqea0TbUuvdceg
This material may be protected by copyright.

@RedTagAlan , hahaha, I'd seen the Greenland drilling news. Some abandoned equipment's been there for years and I hear that Halliburton is dying to get a piece of the action.

But Antarctica is at the South Pole where several countries, including China, have 'research stations' and there are agreements with strict restrictions on what activites are allowed. Not that this would mean a thing to Trump.

Which reminds me that he did post an AI cartoon of himself and penguins as part of the proposed Greenland takeover. Twat doesn't know that there are no penguins in ths Arctic.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/trump-posts-bizarre-ai-photo-of-penguins-in-american-flag-sweaters-as-he-teases-greenland-aggression/ar-AA2dAIEU

AI agrees with you on usefulness of MOAB and MOPs
A huge reinforced-concrete dam also presents a different engineering problem from an underground bunker. Penetrating concrete is not the same as causing a dam to fail catastrophically. Neither weapon's stated mission or penetration figures establish that it could destroy the Three Gorges Dam.

and

China has strong, documented reasons to object to nearby US missile deployments, but its stated objections concern broader regional security and military balance

As you say, sending out a message anyway - on strong defense of vital infrastructure.

Oops. Totally missed it was Antarctica you mentioned. Yes, the PRC has a lot of research going on there. I think most of it is for national pride. But they do want the krill from the sea. They have been building a Krill fleet. That is an interesting story in itself. Protein for aquaculture. Similar to Western salmon farms and their demand for sand eels.

I don't know what to think of today's news. Russia's foreign minister is in Tehran - to support a peace deal as well as a gesture of support?
Only Trump appears sympathetic towards Russia in the Ukraine theatre (eg lifting sanctions for supposedly global altruistic reasons) so how will the US respond to this latest show of Russian support for Iran when they are directly at war with Iran.
Is it even possible to have a dual policy towards Russia depending on the war context?

And the Houthis have been on the move again against the Yemeni gov't...

And even more bizarre is Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed a high level trilateral summit between Russia, the United States, and China, totally excluding Ukraine from the talks as reported in the Washington Post. I normally have a guess about what is going on but this is so weird.

It's almost as if Putin is trying to help his mate deflect the news from Iran.

As someone posted here last week, Iran SANK 2 cargo ships last week, and not a peep from Trump. And there were not small ships. Indeed, the graphic I clipped below show how Iran are stepping up their SoH attacks, but tumbleweed from Trump.

Source for graphic.

Two cargo ships sunk in Strait of Hormuz as Iran ramps up attacks in run-up to midterms | CNN

But this has been knocked off the headlines, because now Trump is making them all about Ukraine.

This is the problem when you have a man in charge of the most powerful country in the world who hasn't got a clue what he is doing. Surrounds himself with sycophants who are religious fanatics more interested in bringing about the rapture than international politics. God only knows what he thinks he is doing now. Even someone as feckless as George W Bush must be standing there with his mouth open wondering what is going on. At least the Iranians have got shiny new iPhones and nice smelling French perfumes from the sinking.

Egypt is walking the tightrope of its defense treaty commitments and the need to de-escalate the expanding ME situation.

Regional military power Egypt is ready to provide Saudi Arabia with the support it needs to defend its security and stability, the presidency said on Sunday, potentially raising the stakes in the Middle East war as Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthis intensify their attacks on the kingdom.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi requested an urgent parliament session to authorise the military, one of the Arab world’s largest, to help defend its Gulf Arab ally if the kingdom requested its support.

...
Any Egyptian military backing for Saudi Arabia could mark a major escalation in the wider Iran war, which has threatened global energy supplies and sent oil prices soaring since the US and Israel attacked the Islamic Republic in late February.
Hours after an announcement on further discussions by the parliament, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said in a post on X that he discussed regional developments and the importance of de-escalation during a phone call with his Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan.

https://www.globalvillagespace.com/egypt-pledges-active-support-for-saudi-arabia-as-its-parliament-weighs-military-authorisation/

Interesting. Because Egypt is building a new capital city. Has been for a while. And who is apparently funding it ? This from 2023.

‘Brothers from China’ help Egypt build new landmark skyscraper in new administrative capital - Global Times

And more recently -

Building tomorrow’s cities from blank ground: urban‑development experiments in Xiong’an and Egypt’s New Capital - Global Times

I daresay there will be claims made that Egypt is a proxy for the PRC ?

I do recall the PRC were not happy with the Houthi at all the first time they attacked shipping. Partly because they used some old Chinese made anti ship missiles that they had sold to the official Government, that the Houthi captured. But also because the Party was ridiculed at home ( in a limited way), because instead of sending a carrier to deal with the Houthi, the Party directed it's ships to go the long way round. They lost face over that. Especially since they have a naval base in Djibouti, on the opposite side of the strait.

Yes on the proxy expansion, as there must be all kinds of backroom conversations taking place right now. Given the level of global Chinese soft power infrastructure investment over the past decade or so, it will be interesting to see if the receiving countries fall in behind China's geopolitical stance when future issues arise.

I think they do on UN votes already. I call it vote harvesting.

Edit to add - also mens football games :-)

But the latter does not work, they still lose.

Which then calls into question how unbiased UN voting is. I'm also not comfortable on veto rights but know the UN isn't perfect and it's all we have atm.
Good use of football analogy given the US/Infantino red card fiasco.

With the football, Uncle wants the PRC to host the world cup, and win it, by 2050. So top down system, a lot is thrown at it. Including railways. Ahem... we see you Indonesia :-)

I find it interesting because it highlights the difference in systems. The different thought methods. And there has been a lot in Chinese media about why the national men's team are so bad. ( the women are ok). But the Chinese media are not allowed to say why the team is so bad. Because that would be criticizing the top down system.

And this leads back to the thought process of the Iranians, as we have discussed here before. And that really, is something we don't know.

And of course, Trump has likely sacked anyone who does know. Because Trump has a top down system. But he is an amateur at it compared to the PRC.

I find it fascinatIng that we can fund this, when we are struggling to fund our own defence. And, do the Saudis actually need the RAF or is this just virtue signalling?

RAF jets to protect Saudi Arabia’s skies from Houthi rebels

www.thetimes.com/article/d855f914-aeed-4dd1-8c9d-43d196e5406b?shareToken=a4e52a30600720233b1f0338aa811155

I don't see it in money terms myself, because the jets and the people are there. And the pilots need to fly to keep their flight hours up. There is the cost and stockpile of munitions of course.

However, Saudi Arabia are an absolute theocratic Monarchy, where it seems the Monarchy can, and do, dictate what the religion says. So on that score, I am not happy. But that dictatorship is better than the Houthi version perhaps.

I would hope Burnham is demanding human rights reforms etc in return. Then again, maybe SA said "help us, or we might switch to China". After all, they have a defense deal with Pakistan, and Pakistan are now almost fully in the PRC camp.

But I am sure Trump considered all of this already. He has a brain the size of a planet after all. And he claims to have been sent by God. Technically the same God as the "mad" clerics in Iran claim to be working for.

The PRC do not do Gods of course. But they do like oil. And the Party wants to survive, so I would be pretty surprised if they had not been talking to SA.

The new world order. Brought to us courtesy of Trump.

I see it as a pragmatic minimum show of support by the UK gov't given the levels of SA investment and the benefit to UK owned businesses.

https://www.rconsultancy.co.uk/post/saudi-arabia-s-600-billion-investment-surge-the-uk-business-opportunity-of-a-lifetime

Iran and Russia's foreing ministers met today in Moscow

No doubt they will be discussing stuff at Trump level. Subjects such as re naming lakes and airports, building golf courses and the like /s.

Must be as Trump claimed Russia does very little, if anything in Iran.