On Bluesky just yesterday, in response to

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blockquote cite=”https://bsky.app/profile/shipwreck75.bsky.social/post/3mr6jcs5wik2i”>Trump allies believe the President has now exhausted most options to exit the Iran war and are now “afraid” a longstanding, unpopular, expensive conflict is inevitable, causing major anxiety about GOP chances in midterm elections.-Politico

a poster wrote

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blockquote cite=”https://bsky.app/profile/shadowtodd.bsky.social/post/3mr6o73lji22k”>The options of exiting war with Iran is exiting war with Iran you disgusting freak. What the fuck do you mean “options” you just literally do nothing

Admittedly, there is lot of precedent for this kind of weirdly obsessive meddling in other countries, be it the crusades or the Italian adventures of various medieval German emperors and French kings.

Reformulation: The US should also force Israel to retreat to 97% of the 1967 borders which means that Israel would only occupy 3 percent but hopefully 100% of the occupied territories should be returned to the Palestinian National Authority in the future.

That type of erroneous wording is something that can happen when we don’t get to edit our posts!!

Equalitus “If you just said your comprehensive plan for US strategy in the ME region is for the US to retreat all military bases and stop using money in the ME area including aid to Israel”

You figured it out in the end, and I think most other readers did so too. Silence speaks volumes

My opinion is that the US should invade Tehran and implement direct democracy in Iran similar to that of Switzerland.

What death toll would you expect?

The US should also force Israel to retreat to 97% of the 1967 borders which means that Israel would only occupy 3 percent but hopefully 100% in the future.

What death toll would you expect?

A well-written and comprehensive overview. Thanks for taking the time to write this!

This is a fairly routine piece of spam, but for once, it’s uncannily appropriate

I know I am perhaps a bit unhealthily annoyed by LLMs at the moment, but stuff like this is why. Where on earth does the idea come from that Claude has anything to say on the topic of a ground invasion of Iran more useful and reliable than if I were to ask our cat for her opinion? At least she has a mental model of what happens if she kicks a ball or jumps onto a chair, whereas Claude is nothing but a probabilistic model that has been trained to predict what words might reasonably follow other words in its training corpus of books and web pages.

What is going on here? I know humans are primed to impute agency even to machines and to see faces in rock or cloud formations, but come on. How catastrophic a decision has to be based on asking the word guessing models before a generation of users wises up? Blowing up a girl’s school wasn’t enough, clearly, because the consequences only hit them, and they don’t seem to count as real people in Western media.

JQ’s plan is appealing, but unrealistic: even if there were no national interests at stake in the region, it’s too effective a means of money raising for any US party to abandon.

As for the X-fueled fantasies of “Equalitus”: Not only does the US has absolutely no business dictating what kind of government Iranians have, recent events have convincingly demonstrated that it doesn’t have the power to do so either. Nor does the US government have much of a track record on compelling (as opposed to enabling) Israel to do anything significant, let alone take a move that would result in the collapse of any Israeli government that agreed to do it. It’s long past time to give up on fantasies of US omnipotence and focus onthe more limited goal of getting the US to stop making things worse.

JQ: can I just say, your plan was crystal-clear to me, and I especially appreciated its … -brevity-. But (not your fault) what is most distressing, is that over the last FIFTEEN YEARS, your plan has become more and more urgent, more and more unambiguously correct, and the most dire thing is, -Israel- makes it more and more clear that your plan is the only one that has any chance of working.

Let Israel learn to live with its neighbors like a normal country.

BBA @13. “If only you had the courage to post this in January” I don’t usually swear in comments threads, but this is pretty fucking annoying. I didn’t post in January this year for the same reason as I didn’t post in February or March or April. I can’t keep repeating the same joke or restating the same minority position endlessly and expect people to keep reading.

I had already observed that the US strategy was doomed to fail

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/10/14/the-us-just-lost-a-war-and-nobody-noticed/

ending with “I haven’t discussed the broader horror of the various Middle East wars, which gave rise to the Houthi attacks. My long-standing view is that the US can do nothing useful and, beyond humanitarian aid, should do nothing to help any party”

and wrote something similar on my Substack at the beginning of the year.

Apology would be welcome, but I’ve learned not to expect them.

I believe Professor Quiggin has proposed a sound strategy for the United States, one which it should also adopt with respect to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.

Perhaps the Board of Peace could start with a modest project like unifying the two Chinas.

What LS wrote. Also, even if the USA were omnipotent, I find the idea that the US government would have any interest in an Iranian democracy very peculiar. What is it that the USA want? A government in Iran that (a) stops competing with Saudi Arabia for regional power status, (b) stops supporting factions that have its own religion in other countries in the Middle East, and (c) lets US companies cheaply exploit Iranian oil. Why would the Iranian people, even if given a decisive vote on each of these questions, particularly want any of that and vote for it? Also, Iran does have elections. The problem is that they aren’t gold standard free and open, and for very similar reasons as apply to US elections: there is a massive filter for who gets to stand for elections in the first place, and a reactionary, unaccountable council gets to overrule the decisions of elected politicians on a whim.

So, when people in the USA talk about democracy in Iran, they don’t mean a democracy that may decide to continue funding Hezbollah and to control their own resources. They mean an Iranian government that will do as told by the USA.

I didn’t ask an AI before a few seconds ago, but my estimates would be perhaps 5000 dead US troops, 100.000 to 500.000 dead Iranians.

How do you feel about the prospect of that many people being killed?

As for the question of forcing the Israeli settlements being retreated to similar to that of the 1967 borders presumably 2-4% of the 1967 borders, only very few people …

Can you imagine that only few people would be killed if the US was imposing this settlement over the opposition of the Israeli state? Or, if you’re imagining the Israeli state being in favour of this measure rather than opposed, why do you suppose US force would be required?

… which would almost certainly be religious fundamentalists would die in the process and it would be militant settler Jews which can’t really be compared with orthodox Jews in general especially Jews in Europe or Northern America.

What difference is this supposed to make?

BBA @20 Thanks

Engels @23 Yes, the strategy has been adopted and is unlikely to be reversed. Fortunately for all concerned, the Chinese government appears to have learned the lessons taught by Ukraine and Iran, and is unlikely to invite a similar disaster by invading Taiwan

To JD: The questions are how many deaths caused by a [hypothetical] invasion compared to other scenarios and the length which also is a divisor for any number of years. If no more than 10 years is needed to change the Iranian constitution into something very similar to that of the constitution of Switzerland, then I would favor it, and the US definitively should have done it in Iraq. The death rate variance can also be compared with other HDI aspects and we don’t know how happy or content future Iranians would be unless they get to live in a real democracy. Iranians are 90m and suffering because theocratic dictatorship.

As for the West Bank intervention scenario, perhaps a few thousand would be killed but I seriously doubt this even with the fundamentalists in this area, probably only a few hundred would fight against overwhelming force that US invading force would be, and no, there’s 100% chance that the Likud Government in Israel would never accept retreating to 97% of the 1967 borders.
To the last moral part of your question in that post is that they are violent and murders and do not apply equality before the law, because the only rights for them is fellow members of Judaism, it seems for me at least.
This might sound extremely outlandish but I suggested the removal of Hamas from power after the terror attacks a few years ago, before the war on Hamas started. Because only then can the Palestinians also pursue their Democracy, self determination and sovereignty

equalitus, I’m sure you can get all those deaths in Iran. As for building democracy through military conquest, how well did that work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Libya? If Iran was left to itself, I’m sure the people there could move towards democracy on their own as they did before USA and UK helped overthrow their democracy back in 1953. All foreign interventions do is justify crackdown on the opposition as traitors working for foreign powers.

You also seem to have forgotten that Hamas was elected in a fair although somewhat rigged election. (PA changed the rules at the last minute to prevent Hamas from winning, which backfired). After the win, Hamas tried to negotiate, but Israel “refused to negotiate with terrorists” (i.e. give up territory) so the faction within Hamas that wanted non-violence lost influence in favor of the more militant branch.

“change the Iranian constitution into something very similar to that of the constitution of Switzerland”

What a bizarro fantasy world this poster lives in. If countries could be turned into Switzerland by way of a war of aggression, the Middle East would already be full of cheese and chocolate and cows. But also, as Alex points out correctly, if Iran were indeed organized as a direct democracy, people like equalitus would unlikely to be happy with the results.

Addendum, that Trump and Netanyahu’s war of aggression had any intention of “bringing democracy to Iran” is nonsense. Trump had no plan really but Netanyahu knew quite well (or thought he knew) what he was doing. His aim is to reduce Iran to the status of a dysfunctional failed state, like Lebanon, Syria and others (*), so it couldn’t get in the way of Israel’s own expansionist programme. A democratically legitimate Iranian government would be the last thing Israel’s fascist regime wants. It was entirely predictable that the unprovoked attack would strengthen the hardliners in Iran and practically annihiliate the internal opposition movement. Anybody surprised by this course of events should never again be allowed to comment about international politics (but we all know what happened to everybody who was wrong about Iraq – they continue to be the “experts” whose utterly incompetent advice our broken media will amplify at every opportunity).

(*) A good article in German about Netanyahu’s express policy of waging “eternal war” against Lebanon and Syria, thereby further destabilizing the whole region, in the dubious belief that those dysfunctional states won’t interfere with Israeli expansionism.
https://www.republik.ch/2026/04/20/ewiger-krieg

LS@15 “Nor does the US government have much of a track record on compelling (as opposed to enabling) Israel to do anything significant, let alone take a move that would result in the collapse of any Israeli government that agreed to do it.”

The metaphysical distinction between the US government “enabling” the Zionist enterprise or the US promoting the Zionist enterprise to achieve its own aims escapes me. Searching the historical record for a period when the US government actually opposed the Zionist project does reveal one instance: The Suez crisis. If one objects that was really about the US opposing the English sponsors—implying the subordinate status of the Zionist state—the question then, when did this cooperative colonial corporation become genuinely independent?

Alex SL@24 “Also, Iran does have elections. The problem is that they aren’t gold standard free and open, and for very similar reasons as apply to US elections…” I’m sorry to irritate you with my agreement with this, but I’m going to aggravate the offense by noting this reservation also applies to the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East.” (No prize if you guess who that’s supposed to be.) The Islamic Republic of Iran is as democratic as the Zionist polity, which also openly grants legal privileges on religious grounds and enforces religious prohibitions. The secular lifestyles of some Zionists are matched by the secular lifestyles of some Iranian citizens so far as I can tell.

Addressing no one in particular, well, maybe armchair warriors. I have noted the distress in some quarters that the US supply of advanced missiles and aircraft carriers (devices for force projection thousands of miles from self-defense) aimed at PRC are gravely depleted. Despite too much experience my mind still boggles at how unselfconscious such people are. There ingrained hostility and aggression against China are so fundamental to their political person that they can’t imagine relaxing the threat.

[The right of nations to self-determination includes the right of national unity. See: the Confederate States of America. This does contradict any principle that current existing political boundaries are sacred, unless the US says otherwise, often miscalled I think the principle of sovereignty.]

The recent Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite, had actor Tracy Letts give a demented speech the mindlessly presumed the entire world was a mortal threat to America. I suggest that this is ideological, an institutional form of psychological projection. The assumption that foreign nations are plotting conquest and annihilation is because it is the American empire that plots conquest and annihilation.