Iran Conflict 2019 - ??

[Zidane98]

Is this a joke? I'm sure you've heard of Chelsea Manning before.

I didn't realise Chelsea Manning create a film on her cellphone in a public place and got arrested for it. So in reality the US do not do what the Iranians did. Any examples of the US govt gunning down large groups of protestors on home soil?

 

[Mofra]

I didn't realise Chelsea Manning create a film on her cellphone in a public place and got arrested for it. So in reality the US do not do what the Iranians did. Any examples of the US govt gunning down large groups of protestors on home soil?

That's not what the post was about.
It was about arresting someone for 'breaching national security'.

 

[Thrawn]

I didn't realise Chelsea Manning create a film on her cellphone in a public place and got arrested for it. So in reality the US do not do what the Iranians did. Any examples of the US govt gunning down large groups of protestors on home soil?

She leaked the infamous "Collateral Damage" video that Wikileaks published and got arrested for it.

Point is that the US arrests people for leaking classified info that shows the military doing warcrimes, so they can't exactly sit on their high horse.

As for gunning down large groups of protesters, is that even true or is that US propaganda? Hard to tell in today's climate given how s**t news media is right now when it comes to geopolitical affairs. But anyway, that's not even what we're discussing here.

 

[Zidane98]

She leaked the infamous "Collateral Damage" video that Wikileaks published and got arrested for it.

Point is that the US arrests people for leaking classified info that shows the military doing warcrimes, so they can't exactly sit on their high horse.

As for gunning down large groups of protesters, is that even true or is that US propaganda? Hard to tell in today's climate given how s**t news media is right now when it comes to geopolitical affairs. But anyway, that's not even what we're discussing here.

Someone filming on their mobile phone in a public space is not filiming a military operation.

The two scenarios are not comparable.

 

[Father Jack]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the 57 Canadians killed when Iran shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 would be alive if not for recent escalations in tensions in the region.

If there were no tensions, if there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families,” said Trudeau

Seems he does Jack, love those cuddly supporters of terrorism.

You stated that Trudeau claimed that the US was solely responsible. He did not, he merely said that there was an escalation in tensions in the area that contributed to the tragedy. So your evidence proves that I was correct in my statement.

So it is quite clear that what you said was blatantly false, and Trudeau is not a 'cuddly supporter of terrorism'. I look forward to your apology.

 

[Thegibbsgamble]

According to a man that I admire, Niall Ferguson we have nothing to worry about:


Iran is too weak to start a world war
Niall Ferguson
Contributed to The Globe and Mail


My response to the news that US forces had assassinated Iran’s paramilitary foreign intelligence chief Major General Qassim Soleimani on Thursday was, “Good riddance. Now what?”

No tears should be shed for Soleimani. As the mastermind of Iran’s multiple proxy wars beyond the Islamic Republic’s borders, he had the blood of countless people on his hands, including hundreds of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Syria by the Shia militias he helped to train and finance. Second only to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in terms of his personal power, Soleimani had come to personify the ruthless, bloodthirsty spirit of the regime in Tehran.

But what will the consequences be of his assassination? Let us begin by dismissing that hardy perennial, “Oh no! Reckless Trump has lit the fuse for World War III.” At a time like this, commentators in need of a facile historical analogy inevitably reach for the murder of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, generally regarded as the catalyst for World War I.

But Soleimani was no Franz Ferdinand. First, it was Bosnian Serb terrorists backed by Serbian military intelligence who carried out the hit on the legitimate heir to the august Austro-Hungarian imperial throne. Soleimani’s career as a sponsor of terrorism puts him closer to the Sarajevo assassin, Gavrilo Princip, than to his victim.

Second, the Middle East in January 2020 is not Europe in June 1914. The great powers then were quite evenly matched; each made the mistake of thinking that it might gain from a full-scale European war. Today, Iran’s leaders are under no illusions. They cannot risk a war with the vastly superior United States, which numbers among its allies both the richest state in the region (Saudi Arabia) and the most technologically advanced (Israel).

President Trump and his advisers knew when they took the decision to drop a bomb on Soleimani that there would be reprisals. There will be. On Friday, Ayatollah Khameini tweeted the hashtag #SevereRevenge. Stand by for attacks by Iranian forces and their Shia proxies on US personnel, as well as against US allies, all over the Middle East. The question is: will the benefits of executing Soleimani outweigh those costs, which will bring agony to who knows how many families?
Advertisement

Benjamin Disraeli, England’s first Jewish prime minister, famously observed, in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s murder, that “assassination has never changed the history of the world.” He was wrong. As Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken show in my favorite economics paper on this subject — which covers all 298 assassination attempts on national leaders from 1875 to 2004 — successful assassinations tend to increase the intensity of small-scale conflicts. However, when an autocrat is killed, the probability of a transition to democracy rises.

The downside of killing Soleimani is that Iraq will now blow up. Whereas Czechoslovakia had been partitioned and subordinated to Nazi rule, Iraq today is in a kind of limbo. Freed from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny by the 2003 US invasion, it is a democracy with only limited US security support. However, Iranian penetration of Shia militias and political parties means that it is dangerously close to becoming a vassal of Tehran. Significantly, the Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, has condemned the US strike against Soleimani. The danger is a return to civil war.

This assassination does nothing to solve the problem that was created by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, when he decided to liquidate the US presence in Iraq in excessive haste, squandering all that had been achieved in the “surge” that ended the last Iraqi civil war. The upside of killing Soleimani is that the Iran regime’s bluff has been called and its vulnerability exposed for everyone in the region to see.

Iran is in dire economic straits, largely thanks to US sanctions, which the Trump administration tightened last year. Oil production is down by close to half since April 2018. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the Iranian economy shrank by 9.5 percent in 2019. The Statistical Center for Iran puts the inflation rate at 47.2 percent.

A 200 percent fuel price hike on Nov. 15 triggered mass protests in two-thirds of Iran’s provinces. Approximately 1,000 protesters and 200 security personnel were killed. The regime was forced to shut down the Internet twice to maintain control.

The country’s beleaguered rulers gambled that they could force the United States to relax sanctions by exerting force, in the belief that Trump would not risk war in an election year. Wrong.

The United States may now face pandemonium in Iraq, but Iran will not necessarily be the beneficiary. There is a good deal of anti-Iranian sentiment in the country; indeed, there have been numerous anti-Iranian protests since October, and many Iraqis celebrated Soleimani’s death last week.

Aside from Qatar, the Arab states are uniformly hostile to Tehran. Not only are the Saudis still smarting from Iran’s attack on their oil facilities in September; they also bitterly resent Iranian support for the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

As for the other major players in the region — Russia and Turkey — they are increasingly antagonistic toward Iran. With the Syrian civil war all but over, Moscow is intent on squeezing out the Iranians.

Civil war in Iraq? Quite possibly. World War III? Forget about it. The unanswered question is what, if anything, can be done to reverse the biggest trend of the past decade, which has been for Russia — not Iran — to take over from the United States as the Middle East’s powerbroker. The assassination of Qassem Soleimani changes many things. It doesn’t change that.

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

That's pretty much 90 percent fake news..

 

[Thegibbsgamble]

Trudeau solely laid the cause of the plane being shot down at the yanks again last night.
Really has a lot of self hate for the west and love for one of the biggest supporters of terrorism. Wonder if he cares about the protesters?

Its amazing what you brainwashed sheep come up with. The creativity inside that mental prison of yours, astounding.

Theres a few facts in the way of the s**t your dribbling here.

Canada criticised heavily for it backing America Britain Australia and Saudi Arabia militias in Syria. These very terrorists you speak of, the very west you speak........ Of.

This is reality, but carry on with your fantasies...

 

[Thegibbsgamble]

Bingo! Some folk suffer from convenient memory loss.

The US and its acolytes are all over Iran for their act of horror but conveniently forget the Yanks have been guilty of the same horror.

The US has been tormenting, destabilising and attacking Iran for ages, egged on by an aggressive neighbour or two.

They are world leaders in boycotting, applying some of the harshest boycotts on Iran. Yet when boycotts of Israel for its continued tormenting, destabilising, annexation and brutality of Palestinians comes into play, as a peaceful means of attempting to bring the conflict to an end, the Yanks move to make that illegal. Land of the free my arse.

The Iraqis building a big statue of the dead general. Right where he got it

And they're kicking the Americans and us out next Afghanistan...
.
Poor isreal..

 

[Jibroni]

That's pretty much 90 percent fake news..

And why exactly?

 

[Thegibbsgamble]

And why exactly?

And why exactly?

Because it is. You can lead a white Male Christian pig to water, but you can't make it drink.

I've never read so much fantasy in my life

That bit where it says the general trained Shia militias in Syria who killed Americans lol.. And he deserved to die for it

He was fighting isis an Al Queada. And the Christians in aleppo see him as thier hero for doing so... .

If someone has access to the Internet and choosers to still read that pig and his ramblings, God help us.

 

[Northalives]

He wasn’t popular, he was reviled by the religious.

He was very popular with the vast majority of Iranians but just as in all democracies, there are religious zealots eg. Morrison's Pentecostals, USA's Pentecostals, Israel's Ultra Orthodox, etc and these are kept fairly well in check when democracy is allowed to work.

The rise of the Theocracy in Iran was as a direct consequence of the extremely violent and oppressive regime that was installed in Iran by the USA and the UK. The overthrow and what came after the Shah was ousted, was directly proportional to the Shah's regime because the threat of counter-revolution was immense and so it proved to be, when Uncle Sam's great mate, Saddam Hussein, financed, trained and outfitted by the US and Britain, invaded Iran to "win it back" for The US and Britain.

 

[its free real estate]

He was very popular with the vast majority of Iranians

No, he wasn't. He suspended an election because it was going to see him booted out.

 

[Northalives]

No, he wasn't. He suspended an election because it was going to see him booted out.

Mosaddegh stopped the voting process in 1952 when he had enough for a quorum in Parliament and to stop the CIA from undermining him in Parliament. The political machinations in that part of the globe are not all black and white and don't conform to what we lucky bastards over here in the west take as "normal".

 

[its free real estate]

Mosaddegh stopped the voting process in 1952 when he had enough for a quorum in Parliament and to stop the CIA from undermining him in Parliament. The political machinations in that part of the globe are not all black and white and don't conform to what we lucky bastards over here in the west take as "normal".

Nonsense.

 

[Northalives]

Nonsense.

The only nonsense is when we over here in the "west" , for want of a better description, apply our "template" to a part of the world which is completely different to ours. Not only are the centuries old inter and intra tribal relationships and obligations completely foreign to us, the geo-political situations that appear in that region are complex and the reactions to foreign interference are as varied, as the destabilising tactics used by any number of "intelligence" agencies to get the outcome they desire.

 

[Bomberboyokay]

 

[Baltimore Jack]

Pentagon says 34 US troops were diagnosed with brain injuries after missile attack

Pentagon says 34 US troops were diagnosed with brain injuries after missile attack

The Pentagon says that 34 US service members were diagnosed with varying degrees of brain injuries after an Iranian ballistic missile attack in Iraq this month.

www.theage.com.au