[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

the broken, on 08 January 2026 - 11:04 PM, said:

I feel like there are some relevant differences between Iran and the US.

'One person killed' v 'opened fire on crowd', for instance.

Trump wanted to have protesters shot in the legs during the George Floyd protests.

https://www.axios.co...ence-presidency

I expect that's most likely going to become at least a de facto policy. Granted, the fact that they're still bothering to try to claim "self-defense" as a justification, despite clear slow-motion video evidence to the contrary from the New York Times and the Washington Post, instead of simply saying they can shoot protesters in the face for being protesters, is... something at least. He hasn't gone full Putin yet, at least in terms of his administration's justifications, however flimsy.

https://www.bloomber...iefing-americas

Back on the topic of Iran... here's an interesting take:

https://www.donotpan...ar-edges-closer

The author points that one major issue with Trump trying to "vassalize" Iran (and extort and take control over their oil reserves) as he's "vassalizing" Venezuela would be that China gets 15% of their oil from Iran, much more than what they had been getting from Venezuela---though China had also been investing substantially in Venezuelan oil production, and Chinese diplomats met with Maduro just hours before he was abducted, and were still there during the abduction.

https://www.yahoo.co...-185529692.html

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 08 January 2026 - 11:21 PM

[the broken]

And yet, here we are, five years later, and it didn't happen, while in Iran something like 40 people are known to be killed in the last few days.

[Werthead]

Heavy clashes between protesters and regime forces in Shiraz. In Heravi District, Tehran the crowd might be larger than any we've seen to date, and security forces seem to have declined to try to contain them. Very large crowds in Mashhad today.

The regime cut the power in Punak District, Tehran but the demonstrators used flashlights and phone lights to illuminate the area instead. The Ashrafi Esfahani intersection is the nexus for protests in this area. Drones were spotted overhead. Farahzadi Square has been occupied after security forces apparently refused to fire on them.

In Lorestan Province, there are reports of armed clashes between the IRGC and Kurdish forces.

A transportation strike in Tehran, but the regime bussed in replacements to keep the transport system operating.

Some of the regime forces helping crack down on the demonstrations have been chanting Hezbollah slogans, suggesting that Iran is finding disdainful employment for its former allies driven out of Lebanon.

Currency exchange operations in Tehran seem to have ceased and cash machines have stopped working.

A large contingent of American aircraft relocated from the continental US to the UK a few weeks ago have departed and landed in Al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar, and airbases in Saudi Arabia. MQ-4C drones are overflying the Straits of Hormuz but that seems pretty standard. Some claims that two carrier groups could be dispatched to the Middle East seem premature. If the US wants to hit regime targets in Iran, it can do so with forces already in-theatre, or in conjunction with the Israelis. Iranians seem mixed on US strikes due to many key regime targets being in built-up urban areas, making civilian casualties probable (and 100% don't want the Israelis involved).

At least one government building in Tehran is on fire, possibly the tax administration building.

Absolutely huge numbers marching along Valiasr Street, one of Tehran's main thoroughfares and (huh) "the longest street in the Middle East."

Iranians in London tore down the Islamic Republic flag from the Iranian Embassy and replaced it with the Lion-and-Sun flag instead, the flag of the pre-Ayatollah regime. The Iranian Embassy in London is famous as the site of a 1980 hostage crisis.

Lindsey Graham has apparently said that "help is on the way." Whether that strikes horror or hope into Iranian hearts is another matter. The WSJ is saying that the US military has already agreed what government targets to hit and when, and the death toll is basically past what Trump considered reasonable.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 10 January 2026 - 11:46 PM

[Mentalist]

Unless the protesters can seize armories and defend themselves, I'm not expecting a positive outcome.

We've seen this in play out in Belarus, and in Georgia. If the regime is unwilling to budge, no amount of peaceful protesters in the streets sway them. And if IRGC and their foreign auxiliaries are willing to gun down protesters en masse, then you won't change the regime without organized resistance.

[Werthead]

The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group has been redeployed from the South China Sea to the Middle East.

The UK has advised against all travel to Israel.

Multiple airlines are rerouting flights away from Iranian airspace.

[Mentalist]

I fail to see how airstrikes make the Iranian regime relent.

Hate to be a downer on this, but I just don't see how this is supposed to work constructively.

[Werthead]

The US has sent 15 F-15Es from RAF Lakenheath in the UK to Jordan, joining a growing number of aircraft redeployed from across the region. There are around 35 F-15s in Jordan, whilst the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group has cleared the Straits of Malacca and is now in the Indian Ocean, heading towards the Persian Gulf, though its precise staging area remains to be determined.

At current speed, the Lincoln air wing will be able to support operations over Iran in 4-6 days, depending on what range and loitering time they are aiming for.

Israel is apparently still scrambling to prepare for incoming fire. There's a lot of unease there as they have not been able to fully restock their interceptors from last summer's exchange of fire, and there's some rumours of wrangling over whether to stay out of a US strike and only respond to any fire directed at Israel, or to join the US to ensure the first strike is so massive Iran's ability to respond is correspondingly limited (Israel did destroy a substantial number of Iranian ballistic missiles on the ground last time). Netanyahu may use the excuse of his anger over the composition of the "Nobel-Worthy Trump Best Boy Board for Peace in Gaza or Whatever" to try to stay out of it.

At the moment the chances of a US strike on Iran at the end of this week and over the weekend looks pretty high.

[Abyss]

Here's an interesting twist being thrown around... paraphrasing.... 'The Iranian government supports Hamas. The protestors are trying to overthrow the Iranian government. If you support the Iranian protestors, you are working against Hamas and Palestinians, and supporting Israel.'

...it's an empty argument in a practical sense, because the nuance/details are lost on most, and whomever ends up in power in Iran will inevitably either resume support of Hamas or else some near-enough to be identical replacement, but the positional knots some commentators are twisting themselves into has been fascinating.

[Werthead]

A whole bunch of Hamas forces kicked out of Lebanon are right in Iran with the security forces now. The entwinement between Hamas and the Iranian state is extraordinarily strong.

If the regime was to fall, Hamas along with it, and the replacement Iranian regime returned to the perspective of the pre-Revolution state (not a given at all), then the relationship would be utterly different. Shia Persian Iran is not an Arab state and is historically somewhat wary of the Sunni Arab states to its west and across the Gulf. It was an informal ally of Israel (and the first Muslim-majority country after Turkey to recognise it) until the 1979 Revolution, and afterwards Iranian intelligence officials would denounce the existence of Israel in one moment and then provide information to Israel the next to help weaken their mutual foe, Iraq and Saddam Hussein: some persistent claims that Iranian intelligence may have helped Israel decide to bomb the Iraqi nuclear programme in 1981 (how the wheel turns).

The Iranian people are not in love with Israel, especially the current government, but they are not as ideologically opposed to Israel's existence in their souls in the same way as many Sunni Arab states, and as the thawing with various Sunni Arab nations over decades has shown (even Saudi Arabia was preparing to recognise Israel before October 2023), even that's not as deep-seated as people think.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Trump was asked what his response was to [...] taunts and threats issued by Iranian leadership aimed at [him].

"[...] if anything ever happens, the whole country's going to get blown up," Trump responded.

[...] "But I have very firm instructions," he continued. "Anything happens, they're gonna wipe 'em off the face of this Earth."

Trump Threatens to Blow Up 'Whole Country' in Wild Warning - The Daily Beast

Threatening to blow up everything and murder everyone isn't likely to make the Iranian populace more open to US military assistance...

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

I should add: especially since US military airstrikes against regime targets would almost certainly result in violent retaliation against the US, which seems to be exactly what Trump is pledging to respond to by "blowing up" the entire country. So basically: if the US military comes to help you directly, they'll kill you.

Perhaps Trump is also trying to signal to other nations that he's willing to commit mass murder of civilians and mass destruction of infrastructure.

I'd guess some of Trump's Zionist supporters will enjoy the way he's echoing the Iranian regime's past threats to destroy Israel.

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 21 January 2026 - 01:09 PM

[Werthead]

It is extremely questionable if Iran can actually respond against all the US military bases in enough force to disable them. They almost certainly can't hit a carrier strike group or B-52s flying from the US mainland, so they'd have to hit civilian targets in Israel and possibly other countries (one reason the normally very cooperative Qatar has suddenly suggested that the US might not be able to use its airbase for attacks on Iran, and leaked sources claiming they might consider closing it altogether), and of course bringing Israel and its airforce into the fight (making up for a US deficit in the region at the moment) seals the fate of Iran's entire military infrastructure.

I think the current estimate is that almost 50% of Iran's ballistic missile stockpile was destroyed or used last summer, a lot of it unused on the ground, so how much of a threat can Iran be? But the Israelis were very worried about how many missiles got through their defences, particularly towards the end; 33 Israelis were killed and over 3200 were injured. And Israel has not rebuilt its interceptor stockpiles 100% since then, so there is some concern in Israel about how that would go again.

The real question is how much damage you can do to the regime whilst not remotely risking hitting the protesting civilians, whom in many cases are in proximity to government targets like police stations and regional IRGC barracks. Strategically targeting the regime to weaken it enough to a civilian uprising without causing collateral damage to said civilians is a very specific type of attack I'm not sure we've really seen before.

[Werthead]

The Abraham Lincoln carrier group is likely in position to strike Iran fairly imminently (certainly next 24 hours). Khamenei has apparently been relocated to a "secret bunker" under Tehran, and his third son has taken over management of the leader's office and is now the main communication channel with the security forces.

Dutch airline KLM has suspended all flights to Tel Aviv, Dubai, Dammam and Riyadh until further notice.

Apparently Vance, Rubio and Hegseth have aligned in recommending an attack on Iran, and Israel has returned to backing it once confidence of interception incoming missiles is high. Kushner and Witkoff have been arguing about doing a new nuclear deal with the regime, and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been arguing against it (Qatar even putting the use of their territory in question).

[Werthead]

Trump issuing ultimatums to the Iranian government, which have been received poorly. I suspect a military strike will take place, unless there is a major concession from Tehran (the restoration of internet suggests they have already tried some minor concessions).

[Cause]

More distraction?

What will the strike meaningfully accomplish? I don’t see how air strikes will support the portetestors?

[Macros]

America bombing people into freedom is hardly new

[Werthead]

Cause, on 28 January 2026 - 08:48 PM, said:

More distraction?

What will the strike meaningfully accomplish? I don’t see how air strikes will support the portetestors?

Destruction of IRGC facilities and even just encouraging IRGC personnel to stay at home and not be out on the street suppressing the protestors. If they feel the regime is doomed, and they know records are being kept of people involved in suppression activities, they are less likely to carry out repression now.

The main problem is that a lot of IRGC facilities are in the cities, and you can't hit them without risking hitting civilian structures. Bombing IRGC bases in the countryside to pieces is ineffectual if they have already been evacuated (which some have).

The current trepidation is based on the US Middle Eastern bases not having a lot of interceptors (true), allied nations having a lot of very vulnerable infrastructure (like Saudi oil fields) (true), Israel having expended a ton of ultra-expensive interceptors and not fully restocked yet (true) and Iran having some missiles and capabilities it did not deploy last summer (very arguable).

The two possible outcomes are 1) that Iran is hammered and unable to counter-attack effectively, US forces (possibly in conjunction with Israeli) gain total air superiority and have free reign to completely destroy Iran's military whilst maybe a few missiles get through to US bases and Israel, or 2) all of the exact above but Iran is able to launch a ton more missiles and drones and causes a larger and possibly significantly more painful number of casualties, but ultimately suffers the same fate.

The sources suggesting that the US could lose ships or even a carrier are fanciful in the extreme, and if that happens it would be insane luck or down to US incompetence.

The reason military action may not happen this week is purely down to the presence of Chinese and Russian forces in the Gulf for drills with the Iranians. The ultimate deterrence to US action will be modelling of outcomes where Iran completely collapses into civil war with possible spillover into Afghanistan, Iraq, Azerbaijan and nuclear-armed Pakistan, or where the regime collapses but is replaced by a military government which is no better and potentially far worse.

[Werthead]

An Iranian Shahed drone has been shot down by an F-35 after straying too close to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group. File this under "unwise."

[Werthead]

Iranian leaders are apparently wiring money out of the country at a rate of knots. It looks like something happened yesterday or today that caused Trump to lean back towards military action, and the Witkoff/Kushner/Saudi coalition is scrambling to convince him to hold off at least a few more days (apparently the Iranians were screwing around with the venue for talks, and Trump wasn't in the mood for it). Additional US assets have arrived in the Middle East, including AWACS aircraft.

The US has reissued guidance from early January that all US citizens in Iran should leave immediately, and no US personnel should consider travelling to the country.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 06 February 2026 - 07:51 PM