Subject: Re: Is NATO figuring it out?
If you want to understand the left, you have to stop attributing our skepticism of the current operation with being blind to past Iranian practice.

You mean, as opposed to reading left wing posts that really don't discuss anything other that how much Trump sucks?

We're just also aware that you're not likely to improve the situation all that much by lobbing missiles at them from a few hundred miles away. Sure, we can temporarily degrade some of their capabilities - but to temporary effect, and at such considerable cost to ourselves that it's not much of a net benefit even if all goes well.

So we should...do nothing. The Iranians admitted - bragged, actually - that they had enough nuclear material for several bombs already. And they've also been lying about the scope and scale of their ballistic missile programs.

I suppose we could have done nothing, and waited until we had a world where Iran could shoot nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles over the arctic and into New York City. Inaction is always a choice, after all.

And of course, once you go up the escalatory ladder you lose the deterrent effect of even those attacks: once you start bombing them, you can no longer threaten to start bombing them. Which is what led them to seize the strait, which they hadn't actually done in the last 50 years. It became a smart move for them once we went to war against them. So yes - things can actually get worse in some ways when you go to war, even if the regime is already terrible and fomenting problems to begin with.

They've threatened to close the Strait before, specifically during the Iran/Iraq war and at other times: https://www.history.com/articl...
The Iran-Iraq War raged for eight years and threatened to disrupt the movement of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil tankers became targets for both sides. In 1984, Iraq attacked some Iranian oil tankers and Iran retaliated by laying naval mines in the Persian Gulf and harassing Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi tankers with armed speedboats. During the so-called “Tanker War," the U.S. sent warships to escort neutral tankers safely through the Strait of Hormuz.

In 1988, an Iranian mine damaged the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a naval frigate on escort duty in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. responded with Operation Praying Mantis, a major military operation that sank or crippled much of the Iranian navy. Later that year, a U.S. warship accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 civilians aboard the commercial flight.

Trump made a call that Iran was an imminent threat and decided to act. It's that simple.

Had he consulted NATO before doing any of this, they would have had an opportunity to explain to him why this was a bad move.

How do you know he didn't?

We've discussed NATO before. If the NATO nations had any actual projectable combat power, you'd see them participating. But they don't, so we don't. That's put them in the position of various sizes of mice who all hope that who they think the cat is won't come looking for them.

I can't respect that. Iran has committed enough mayhem and murder over the years against the entire West that a reckoning was due at some point. Given that war with China is a non-zero possibility in a few years having a nuclear-armed Iran threatening US interests in the Gulf *and* having the ability to close the strait *and* having unlimited access to terror proxies is an unacceptable national security risk.

The europeans don't see it that way, however. For them, they pay lip service to world affairs and national security but their actions are merely those of a fading set of countries hoping to stave off their inevitable declines; their GDPs, stagnant, their population driven by increasing unassimilable groups of people who actively work to undermine their shared culture and a nonrepresentative beareaucratic governmental structure that actively limits choice and national dexterity.

So Trump is making a strategic gamble. The left - which hates Trump and refuses to see the world beyond that - is acting as one would suspect they would.