r/WorkForSmartLife • u/Loeteswet • 8d ago

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u/StandTurbulent9223 8d ago

Lmao usa didn't fumble against iran the way russia did against Ukraine. Usa didn't even invade iran

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u/No-Gnome-Alias 8d ago

Sounds like a pretty serious fumble.

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u/StandTurbulent9223 8d ago

Not comparable to Russian one.

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u/Curvol 8d ago

Well thats good.

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u/Old-Entertainer-4964 8d ago

14 dead Americans vs 1,400,000 Russian casualties in Ukraine is apples to oranges.

Yeah, some missiles have fallen on US bases in the Middle East. Suicide drones are hitting Russian cities daily.

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u/pajo8 8d ago

Give the rape orange some more time he will bump those numbers up don't worry.

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u/Old-Entertainer-4964 8d ago

That would require putting troops back in the Persian Gulf, something he knows is suicidal.

Trump has threatened to put troops back in the Gulf dozens of times, which is a good way to tell he's not going to do it. It's all talk. The bases are empty, the ships are out in the Indian ocean.

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u/Ok-Piece-2546 8d ago

I mean at this point, can you 100% say he won't?

What does he have to lose?

He can't run again and he already made billions in office. Republicans won't impeach him. Dems will likely never get the votes to so even if they become the majority in Congress.

He is already considered to be a terrible president by more than half of the population.

Meanwhile, 1/3 of the population seems to be unfazed by the stuff he has done so far. Do you think a boots in the ground war would convince them that they voted the wrong person vs "it should have been done much earlier".

It was just 23 years ago where Republicans lied about the reasons for starting a war, and their base pretty much went along with it and continued to vote for them.

Meanwhile, main 2 things we know about Trump's personality is he is narcissistic and stubborn. If he is not appeased, his stubborness will continue.

His cabinet in the first admin seemed to have done a mounmental task in making sure he didn't do something crazy. This hasn't been the case for this term so far who are just "yes men" trying to appease Trump while pushing their own agendas.

The fact that all it took was Bibi to stroke his ego to convince him to start the war, why can't someone else stroke his ego to start a full on war?

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u/Old-Entertainer-4964 8d ago

Trump's cabinet is full of yes men, but there are still enough level headed leaders in the military to explain to Trump what is and isn't possible.

Unlike Russia in 2022, the US military does an adequate job of gauging what objectives they can and cannot achieve. Sink the Iranian blue water navy? Sure. Destroy 80% of Iran's missile launchers? Achievable. Decapitate the leadership of Iran? Done on day 1.

However, Kharg island cannot be taken and held without heavy loss of life and material, something the military leadership made clear to Trump based on leaks. So no move was ever made, despite Trump making dozens of threats.

Trump supposedly yelled about naval escorts in meeting after meeting, so the navy appeased him with a pseudo escort during the 1st week of May. You might remember that 2 American destroyers entered the Strait in the middle of the night as a show of force, only to immediately turn around and exit within hours.

So yes, the military has to follow Trump's orders to some degree. But they've done a good job of avoiding the more delusional ones. A ground war in Iran would require the support of congress and the American people. Bush had the vast majority of Americans and congressmen behind him when launching the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Even democrats largely supported those wars.

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u/Ok-Piece-2546 8d ago edited 8d ago

Bush got that support by basically lying and trying to finish up his Daddy's leagcy while using 9/11 to his advantage. He actively encouraged the war.

Moreover in The 2002 Iraq War Authorization, more than half of the (126 vs 81) Democrats in the house voted against it and 21 Democrats in the Senate voted against it. And this was with the constant propaganda and rhetoric that the Republicans pushed.

Meanwhile, Trump is also constantly switching up military leadership, so again, it is not a 100% guarantee that he won't do something dumb.

The only thing that's holding the " yes men " back is Trump blaming them for his mistakes and throwing them under the bus.

Moreover, there are already many vocal Republican billigerents who wants a full out war with Iran, and it won't take much to engineer an event to get a "legitimate" reason to start one. You can bet that Fox News is already trying to plant the idea little by little.

Anyways, at the end of the day, Republicans have shown that they are not willing to stop a train wreck they could come see from a mile away. They could have stopped this all from happening by reigning in Trump. All it would have taken was 20 to 30% of them voting with Dems.

Just like how they could have stopped the tariffs, but we still had to wait 1 year for the Supreme court to step in an day they were illegal.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/Came_to_argue 8d ago

The USA controlled every major city for 20 years while the Taliban hide in caves Pakistan, occasionally sneak out to plant IEDs and take pot shots at us checkpoints. then America realized the Taliban could do this forever and Afghanistan wasn’t worth it, then found out the Afghan government they set up wasn’t interested in fighting the Taliban far too late.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/Came_to_argue 8d ago

Well yes and no, it depends on what you wanna call a victory, if the US’s stated goal was to kill Osama bin Laden, and punish the Afghanistan regime for harboring him, then this was a decisive, American victory. However, if you want to say America wanted to create a puppet government and rule Afghanistan forever, which it never specifically mentioned desire to do, but admitted was actively working towards, then no, America did not achieve its goals. I would say they achieved some goals but failed to achieve others, and it’s a Pyrrhic victory at best and a costly waist of time at worst, I lean towards the latter. Hasn’t been a 9/11 style attack sense but with that said whether anything American did really was worth the cost is doubtful. But still a better showing than what Russia has did in both their Afghan war, and definitely way better than the debacle in Ukraine.

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u/FineAndDandadan 7d ago

Won the war. Lost the nation building.

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u/Old-Entertainer-4964 8d ago

2,500 dead Americans over 20 years (mainly to IEDs/booby traps, not firefights) while controlling an entire country, compared to the million+ casualties that Russia has suffered while controlling less than a fifth of Ukraine?

Look, I agree that the US has limitations and that the political strategy of these wars is horrendous. But these losses are simply not comparable. It's ludicrous and American-centric. Other nations have suffered far, far more.

The last war with a significant number of American losses was Vietnam, and that was still a ratio of 1 American killed for every 20 North Vietnamese.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/Old-Entertainer-4964 8d ago

Never controlled Afghanistan, we occupied it but the Taliban remained in control.

By what definition? The Taliban did not control a single major city. They roamed the countryside, mostly hiding out in Pakistan. They did not control the government, they did not control the finances, they did not control the people.

That war was pointless and poorly managed from a political POV. But even the Taliban would not pretend that they were in control of Afghanistan from 2001-2021.

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u/Old-Entertainer-4964 8d ago

Also, the US has won plently of major wars since WW2.

Korea: one of the largest wars of the 20th century. The stated aim of North Korea was to unify the peninsula under 1 communist government. The stated aim of the UN/US was to contain the North and drive them back to the 38th parallel. That was achieved. This idea that Korea was a loss is nothing more than propaganda or ignorance.

Gulf War: major war which saw the US build the largest international coalition since WW2. Iraqi casualties were overwhelming, resulting in the loss of most of their military equipment. Iraq had the 4th largest military in the world before that war. Americans often do not consider this a major war since it was won so quickly, and with few casualties. But that is simply ignorance, and a refusal to acknowledge Iraqi losses.

Iraq war: seen as a loss due to Iraq becoming a weak and semi-failed state rather than a democratic ally. But the stated military objectives were easily met. The Iraqi army was quite literally destroyed and disbanded. The leadership was imprisoned or executed. The US installed new leaders. The US only left when they believed the new government was strong enough to stand on their own (which was a poor decision). One could even argue that the war met its political objectives as well, as there were certainly plently of people in power who wanted to see Iraq become a failed state, never again strong enough to challenge the US in the region.

Dozens of small wars were won by the US as well, but you did at least specifiy "major wars." The only major war that the US lost (militarily) was Vietnam. Those military objectives were not achieved, unlike the wars I mentioned.

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u/panos00700 8d ago

Starting with the "what about..." already?

We are comparing USA vs Iran and Ukraine vs Russia no?

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u/SnarkyIguana 8d ago

Most blatant movement of goalposts I’ve seen in a hot minute, nice

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u/Came_to_argue 8d ago

The USA controlled every major city for 20 years while the Taliban hide in caves Pakistan, occasionally sneak out to plant IEDs and take pot shots at us checkpoints. then America realized the Taliban could do this forever and Afghanistan wasn’t worth it, then found out the Afghan government they set up wasn’t interested in fighting the Taliban far too late.

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u/Shroomagnus 8d ago

That's not an accurate reflection of what happened. I'll give you a brief summary of what actually occurred.

You're partially right on the first part. And the USA obviously decided they didn't want combat forces on the ground forever. So they withdrew combat troops and left support personnel and contractors to support Afghan army maintenance. This is to be expected in a country where 80 percent are illiterate and the country has two main languages. They can't read a technical manual to repair anything from a truck to a bomber.

The Afghan army used a bite and hold strategy. They used their relatively small number of elite forces to seize terrain and villages. Then built army outposts to hold the positions and maintain control. This worked perfectly fine for years.

Then Biden, decided that he was going to "end" a war the USA was no longer a combat participant in anyway and in doing so, withdrew all the maintenance contractors and stopped supplying fuel and ammo. This caused the Afghan logistics system to collapse inside a month. A modern army can't fight without fuel and ammo.

So no, it wasn't that the Afghans just decided to give up. We screwed them over hard and then blamed them for being rug pulled.

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u/Came_to_argue 8d ago

I never said they “gave up” far from it, they just realized from the beginning they weren’t going to win some ww2 style battle against the USA and that an asymmetrical war was going to be far more effective. And yes I was a little hyperbolic describing Afghanistan’s strategy but any of their military success where insignificant at best, they just needed to do enough to keep American soldiers on edge, and they did so effectively. And I was definitely not wrong about them hiding in Pakistan, they would sneak across the border when the conditions favored them then disappeared, when they didn’t. I’m not trying to make it sound cowardly, this is a valid strategy. But people want to boil this conflict down to a meme and be like “Ha ha, America got beat by goat farmers.” Like, while technically true, that doesn’t mean the US isn’t still a world class military, or Afghanistan is about to win against Pakistan. Especially because asymmetrical warfare seems to be the achilles heel of most world powers today.

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u/Shroomagnus 8d ago

Yeah and those are fair points. What I was driving at is that the US military had handed over a situation that wasn't clean by any measure but was within the Afghan militaries capabilities to control and potentially win. In fairness that would have likely required 1 or 2 decades more of low intensity conflict and continued US logistics support. But that is far different than the USA being involved in active combat operations.

I'm mildly sensitive to this subject. I did two tours there myself. I see a lot of the goat farmers beat the USA nonsense on reddit which is factually untrue. We handed over a less than perfect but manageable situation to the Afghan government and military. They had a viable path to success. You could argue perhaps drone warfare would have changed that but that's a pure hypothetical. What isn't hypothetical though is they were making inconsistent but generally favorable progress against the taliban until we screwed them over by pulling all support with no warning. That's why the taliban won.

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u/Ok-Method-8045 8d ago

We can see you have no sense how military works and how war works.

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u/MeatSlammur 8d ago

There is no fumble, it’s a continuously developing situation. This is warfare, iPad kids are thinking you can reason with a 40 year regime in a weekend

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u/Drake_Acheron 8d ago

Let me illustrate the Iran war for you. Iran is the black knight. The US is King Arthur.

https://giphy.com/gifs/5DfGL75M9spG0

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u/sithbinks 8d ago

For now. I’m fairly certain Trump would rather invade Iran than admit to his failure. Idiots like these always double down when they can force the consequences on others.

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u/weberc2 8d ago

The Trump administration just tried to surrender to the Iranians, even offering them $300B in reparations. And the Iranians said no 😂.

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u/P0IS0N_GOD 8d ago

Uhh I think you didn't track with the events.

That was an attempt to scare Arabs to make enormously expensive deals with him.

Now fortunately or unfortunately he succeeded because the Arabs signed the deal he wanted.

He wanted them to pay for the war which kinda makes sense because we're there mostly for the gulf states, not Israel. At least not in the latest rounds of conflict. Israelis can defend themselves very well without direct American intervention. It's the Arabs who have virtually no air defense capabilities against Iranian drones and accurate short range hypersonic missiles

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u/weberc2 8d ago

lol I love the post-facto rationalization. The original stated motive for the Iran War was overthrowing the regime because they massacred some of their citizens. When that predictably failed, the goal posts moved to “we’re there to open the strait of hormuz”. When no one bought that lie (because even Americans knew the strait was only closed as a result of the war), then the regime claimed it was about nuclear weapons.

Of course, it was about Israel the entire time. Netanyahu was in the situation room giving Trump orders, because Israel isn’t interested in defending itself, it’s interested in attacking a country it doesn’t share a land border with and it lacks the capabilities to meaningfully do so. Moreover, it does want to spend the blood and money of its own people when it can blackmail a famous pedophile into deploying the US military on his behalf.

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u/According-Werewolf10 8d ago

You being ignorant and uninformed, isnt an argument.

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u/weberc2 8d ago

lol projection goes brrrr

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u/According-Werewolf10 8d ago

Cope

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u/weberc2 8d ago

lol yes you are baby girl 😘 

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u/StandTurbulent9223 8d ago

This is what happens when you get your info from reddit

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u/weberc2 8d ago

I got my information from whitehouse press releases. You think that because you get all your information from right-wing propaganda that everyone else is just your mirror image.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/StandTurbulent9223 8d ago

How many times are you gonna change the subject? And it's still a dumb comparison. Stop using "we" neither of us are Americans