The New Iran Treaty

[Guap]

I tihnk once Iran shows capability for a nuclear bomb the US will immediately invade. They won’t tolerate it and will strike before Iran can hit the US with anything.

Nukes are super good at taking out carrier groups heading your way. Or large armies. Thus they are great deterrents to invasion.

[Alstein]

Iran would only have 1 at most when the US would fully attack.

Another reason it might provoke a full attack would be Iran’s proxy capability being so good. The one check on that is provoking open warfare.

[Perky_Goth]

here in europe we don’t have a gun culture, so terrorist have to rely to things like drive a truck trough people

if you want to do a terrorist attack, theres nothing that can really stop it

And yet, no one has done that on any of the numerous security check lines, where the effect would be the most disrupting thing I can imagine. Most of the response was always just a security theater, and this is probably just another chapter.

[Guap]

Iran would only have 1 at most when the US would fully attack.

All you need is 1. It’s a fission bomb.

[KevinC]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/09/gop-senator-who-erupted-over-iran-briefing-shares-awful-new-details/

MARTIN: What kind of hypotheticals were you putting to them in hopes of understanding when the administration sees a need for Congressional authority?

LEE: As I recall, one of my colleagues asked a hypothetical involving the Supreme Leader of Iran: If at that point, the United States government decided that it wanted to undertake a strike against him personally, recognizing that he would be a threat to the United States, would that require authorization for the use of military force?

The fact that there was nothing but a refusal to answer that question was perhaps the most deeply upsetting thing to me in that meeting.

In the NPR interview, Lee also disclosed that at one point in the briefing, an official “discouraged us from even having a debate on the Senate floor” about whether Congress should pass new measures constraining Trump’s authority to launch future military actions without authorization.

We continue to slide down the slippery slope to authoritarianism. We need Republicans like Lee to finally say enough is enough and draw a line in the sand. I don’t have any faith he’ll do so, but if it doesn’t happen we’re in deep trouble.

[JoshL]

He’s not saying we won’t get our hair mussed!

[Menzo]

We continue to slide down the slippery slope to authoritarianism. We need Republicans like Lee to finally say enough is enough and draw a line in the sand. I don’t have any faith he’ll do so, but if it doesn’t happen we’re in deep trouble.

In this case, both Democrats and Republicans in congress have been more than happy to cede power to the Executive Branch with regards to the military for years. This is just the chickens coming home to roost.

If they really cared, they would have already rescinded the AUMF that Presidents have been using since 2001 to justify their little excursions.

[Telefrog]

Everyone should listen to this podcast from Radiolab about how the AUMF works and how we got to where we are.

60 Words | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

Basically, the Adminstration has authorization to do just about anything to anyone as defined by the AUMF for 9/11.

[KevinC]

Thanks, I’m somewhat familiar with that but I will give it a listen, it’s certainly something I want to know more about.

It’s true that Congress has been ceding their authority to the executive branch for decades. I just feel like now that we have a despot like Trump, we’re at (or at least are approaching) the endgame. We either pull back or we become an authoritarian state.

[MrGrumpy]

Reminder (Paul Ryan ended up yanking it)

Barbara Lee Wins a House Vote to Stop the Blank Checks for Endless War

[draxen]

Did the Iranians shoot down their own plane by accident?

Deborah Haynes (haynesdeborah)

[KevinC]

I figured it might be something like that, either us or them. The timing just seemed like it may have been someone being jumpy on the trigger.

[antlers]

It’s not like the US hasn’t shot down a civilian airliner thinking it was an enemy plane.

[Guap]

Yeah, I thought of this right after it happened but didn’t comment. There were reports of the Iranians scrambling their Air Force at the same time they were launching the missiles, ostensibly to deal with any aerial response from the US. Almost certainly their AA systems were on and painting the sky too. I wondered at the time if they shot down this plane on accident. Military planes have some way of determining if they are “locked on” (I think they look at the strength of the radar signal being aimed at them but I’m not sure). I wonder if this 737 had the same tech. If so it might have recorded the tone lock on, or at least chatter from the pilots to that effect. Also, there were reports today that the plane changed direction drastically before it went down, like it was trying to evade something.

This would also explain why the Iranians launched that first wave of missiles then stopped. Perhaps they fucked up and killed a bunch of civilians and then suspended operations. What a clusterfuck. This flight was leaving from an international airport in Tehran, no? That’s a huge operational mistake.

[strategy]

This wasn’t some random guy. He was a 30+ year army general, war hero and mastermind of regional alliances.

And? Setting aside that you’re buying into the myth of Soleimani (which is overblown - Michael Knight has a much more sober assessment of him in his Washington Institute analysis), even if there is some effect from removing him, doing so is meaningless unless there is actually a strategic plan to exploit his removal. Which quite clearly, there isn’t.

The idea that people are quaking in their boots because the US might take them out with a drone is absurd - Soleimani flew into Iran through a civilian airport on a commercial flight and was operating more or less in full visibility of the US forces (whether or not you believe he was on a diplomatic mission). Sure, US enemies in the region will be more careful in future, but they are not children. They have operated in a region of near constant wars for the past 50 years and the people involved here are used to the possibility of US or Israeli strikes and assassinations.

Arguably, one of the reasons why Soleimani was so easy to get to was that he had gotten overconfident because the US had several times explicitly decided to not kill him when targeting others. See, e.g., this quite nuanced piece by Hareetz: https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/.premium-iran-soleimani-trump-1.8355539 which also notes that Soleimani failed far more often than he succeeded (something also noted by the WI piece) - hardly the infallible mastermind that the myth makes him out to be.

Ironically, if the US gains anything from this strike, it might very well be the death of Muhandis that has a positive effect. Muhandis was a central figure in the unification of the pro-Iranian militia, and while Soleimani will likely be quite competently replaced by his second-in-command (as you would expect in any competent military force), there is no figure that can easily replace Muhandis. In the short term, those militias are united by the attack, but over a longer period, his removal may actually weaken Iranian influence. But again - this requires that the US actually has a plan and policy for peeling away Iranian support and strengthening their Iraqi allies - of which there is very little evidence.

Finally, I would not be so sanguine about terrorist attacks. The Iranians are bad actors, absolutely, but they have generally limited their actual attacks to targets relevant to the shadow war going on in the Middle East. While I am much less worried about this today than I was a couple of day’s ago, retaliation for the assassination could (and can still) spiral into terrorist attacks on soft targets.

[strategy]

Did the Iranians shoot down their own plane by accident?

Ugh - even more tragic, if true. But would explain why the Iranians are less than forthcoming with details.

[scottagibson]

Some idiot pundit on twitter: “Imagine if the US shot down an airliner!”

Everyone else: “…they did.”

Idiot pundit: “Yeah, but they didn’t lie about it!”

[Tortilla]

Yeah, I thought of this right after it happened but didn’t comment. There were reports of the Iranians scrambling their Air Force at the same time they were launching the missiles, ostensibly to deal with any aerial response from the US. Almost certainly their AA systems were on and painting the sky too. I wondered at the time if they shot down this plane on accident. Military planes have some way of determining if they are “locked on” (I think they look at the strength of the radar signal being aimed at them but I’m not sure). I wonder if this 737 had the same tech. If so it might have recorded the tone lock on, or at least chatter from the pilots to that effect. Also, there were reports today that the plane changed direction drastically before it went down, like it was trying to evade something.

This would also explain why the Iranians launched that first wave of missiles then stopped. Perhaps they fucked up and killed a bunch of civilians and then suspended operations. What a clusterfuck. This flight was leaving from an international airport in Tehran, no? That’s a huge operational mistake.

Civilian planes have the bare minimum sensor and communication equipment that they need to operate. The commercial airlines are operating for profit, so the cheapest possible path is the one they always pick. Civilian passenger planes don’t have radars, or anything like it, much less means to determine if they’d been attacked by a surface to air missile. If a 737 was flying along and took a hit from a ground based weapon that blew an engine and damaged a wing, even the pilots and crew would have no way to know that it wasn’t just a catastrophic and explosive engine failure.

Also, the plane departed late and was several hours off schedule, which I think ups the possibility that some Iranian AA installation saw a plane where no plane was supposed to be and took a shot.

[playingwithknives]

Us: yup definitely the bad guys who did it

Also us: Can we sell you Suter?

[Timex]

This kind of explains why Iran refused to hand over the black box to Boeing.