re: Official US/Israel vs Iran war thread

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I've gotten a lot of very uninformed replies today about how the U.S. cannot do this because Iran will X, Y, Z.

This is childishly ignorant.

Iran has been attacking the Saudi oil industry with drones, rockets, and ballistic missiles for years. They've barely made a dent.

Iran has been committing piracy against oil vessels in the Gulf, Strait, and Red Sea for years. There were similar surges in 2020, 2023, and 2024.

The recent slow in OPEC production is because storage capacity is filling up. Its filling up because the ships won't move. The ships won't move because they are scared.

None of this is actually because of damage Iran can or has caused. The fear of the thing is worse than the thing itself.

Estimates are that Iran has placed less than two dozen mines in the Strait. Hazardous, sure, but not impassible. The ships are waiting because they are enormously expensive and so is insurance.

We're subsidizing insurance and have offered escorts, but risk assessment is up to the Captains, ultimately, and they've mostly decided to try to wait. They will move once a clearing operation can proceed; that clearing operation is probably on hold while some more littoral defenses are destroyed.

(By the way, if the Captains were worried about this becoming a protracted conflict, they wouldn't be staying in the Gulf. They'd have taken the offer for an escort and hauled arse. They're sitting tight because they expect this to be over soon.)

Yes, even the damage at GCC oil facilities is essentially superficial. None of it is actually substantively reducing their output capacities.

Iran is not "holding back." They are firing everything they can. This is what they can muster. They failed to mine the Strait in time because Khamenei was too committed to his chihuahua act to pull the trigger—if he had done so, it would have guaranteed destruction of his governmental system. By the time it became apparent that was the actual objective, he was dead and no one was around to give the order.

Now the IRGC's Navy is either in port, in tunnels underground, or at the bottom of the Gulf. They may be rationing drones and missiles, but they aren't holding back some massive barrage when we cross a red line or something.

We killed the Supreme Leader. We killed the Assembly of Experts. We killed their commanders. We've sunk their ships, destroyed their planes, and allegedly even blew up a school—they aren't holding back. There is no greater escalation on their part. There is no red line that we have not crossed.

I seriously implore you to have some measure of self-reflection and awareness to know that you don't know what you're talking about on this subject. For the sake of your own dignity, at least.

The only thing restraining the United States from returning Persia to a 19th Century state is our own objectives and interests. There are reasons we may not want to do this, but they are our own; not something imposed by the effectively non-existent resistance of the Iranian state.

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This sounds like classic Trump hyperbole and bluster, but no. He's actually being quite literal here.

Strikes so far have been limited to the pillars of Velayat control. The pillars of state and civilization themselves are still very much available and very easy to reach.

Power plants and electrical grids, for example, are very easily destroyed. A simple power distribution system would take 3-7 years to rebuild; a full electrical system with redundancies and a capacity equal to that of today—that would take over a decade.

There are about 400 power generation units in Iran—the battle group in the Gulf can legitimately destroy this in about an hour. I'd estimate they can output that many TLAMs alone in that time.

Iran has ~10 oil refineries. Refineries are extremely hard and expensive to build, but relatively easy to destroy; that's what makes them such prime military targets. The battlegroup can absolutely destroy all of these in under an hour. Absent any interruption of power, it would take Iran more than a decade to restore to current throughout. Absent power, considerably longer.

Trump isn't exaggerating. The United States still has many arrows in its quiver that can genuinely set Iran back decades in less than an hour.

And that's only looking at oil refinement and electrical grids.

I get the impression that most of the public genuinely has no idea how much damage a single Carrier Strike Group can do.

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JUST IN: President Trump says he has the capability to make it nearly IMPOSSIBLE for Iran to rebuild...

...and all of that can be done by the US military within *one hour*

"It's just a question of when. When do we stop?"

"The main thing is we have to win this thing, win it quickly, but win it!"

"And there are many people, I'm just watching some of the news, most people say it's already been WON."

"We don't want to let it re-grow. And ideally, we'd like to see somebody in there that knows what they're doing."

"In other words, they can build a country."

"Now, one other thing, we can hit sections of Tehran and other places that if you do it, it'll be almost impossible for them to rebuild their country. And we don't want that."

"But we can hit electric. We could take apart their electric capacity within one hour. And it would take them 25 years to rebuild it. So ideally, we're not going to be doing that. Thank you very much."

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IMHO the USA should insist on a "De-Nazification" kind of post-war structure for Iran in which a Military Occupation Government would act to hunt down and bring to justice all of the "Nazi" fanatics of this Islamic Iranian Terror regime.

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IMHO the USA should insist on a "De-Nazification" kind of post-war structure for Iran in which a Military Occupation Government would act to hunt down and bring to justice all of the "Nazi" fanatics of this Islamic Iranian Terror regime.

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The US is in absolutely no seat to dictate terms at this point. They are literally calling the Russians to try to broker a deal with Iran because they are going to crash the entire world economy, but most importantly, the US economy, and have almost nothing else to lose. They are in total control of the negotiations at this point, because they can't lose right now.

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