quote:

Originally posted by old rugged cross:
A little short term pain for a long term gain is well, well worth it. No white flag waving from me

All good and dandy until it upsets the midterms, majority of people just don't care about Iran, they care about food on the table and gas to get to work. IF you are already stretched thin, doubling the gas bill doesn't help things at home.

Plenty of people don't think the way we tend to do in these threads when it comes down to food and clothes over bombs over Iran...

Just the way it works....

Yeah, the mid terms, the mid terms the mid terms.

Just like all the other mantra's. On and on and on. They will never stop.

Lets see what happens instead of predicting gloom and doom all over the place. For cris sakes.

80% of the American people would have all the $ they need if they didn't have 10's of thousands of dollars of debt buying all kinds of shit they had no business buying. Rant off.

quote:

Originally posted by old rugged cross:

Lets see what happens instead of predicting gloom and doom all over the place. For cris sakes.

Totally agree. By all means, bitch and moan, belly ache and cry, I do. But predictions are air coming from one's nether areas. Financial markets in the long term are generally very rational; short term aren't. It is not unusual at all for markets to turn mid-day after the majority of fart smellers , I mean smart fellers predicted Armageddon before the markets opened.

You pays your money and you takes your chances.

Lots of emotions around the Hampton Roads area..
Acting SECNAV Hung Cao flew out to the Ford a few days ago to address the crew after an 11-month deployment that went from the Med, North Atlantic, Caribbean, back to the Med and Arabian Sea, multiple times.
Carrier Air Wing 8 returned home to Oceana today.
USS Ford and the rest of the strike group I believe ties up Thursday.

quote:

Originally posted by tatortodd:
The real story is what percent of pre-war volumes each country has been able to bypass the Strait. Just Crude Oil per Grok:


The Saudis are the real winners here with their forward thinking, and UAE is a close 2nd with bypassing nearly 100%.

Update on Wednesday's post and things are truly shaping up so Iran can never do this again with the Strait. UAE investing to go from 89% bypass to 100+% bypass.
https://x.com/US_OGA/status/2055278769363894501?s=20

The Iranians aren’t particularly good chess players. They will eventually make the Strait an easily and preferably bypassed feature.

It’s already happening, has been for years.

quote:

Originally posted by Graniteguy:
Recognizing that your dollar is shrinking in not white flag waving.

No, it isn’t. Nor recognizing that the oil companies have their hooks in consumers for higher oil prices, history has told us they won’t let go quickly. Simply claiming “short term pain” without a clear definition of what “short term” actually means is foolish at best. It’s actually no more than a talking point.

quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
The Iranians aren’t particularly good chess players. They will eventually make the Strait an easily and preferably bypassed feature.

It’s already happening, has been for years.

While the pipelines are helping to bypass the strait there is still a lot of dry bulk and container that is going to have to be brought in or out overland.

quote:

Originally posted by fischtown7:

quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
The Iranians aren’t particularly good chess players. They will eventually make the Strait an easily and preferably bypassed feature.

It’s already happening, has been for years.

While the pipelines are helping to bypass the strait there is still a lot of dry bulk and container that is going to have to be brought in or out overland.

It's normally an area I'm not familiar with, but the Saudi's announcement last week was for the logistics of oil, conexes, and dry goods. The conex and dry portion of it is two ports on the Red Sea (Jeddah and King Abdullah) have 800 mile highway and railway via Riyadh and continuing to the Dammam (i.e. East Coast). From Dammam they continue to onward to UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq.

According to Grok AI:

UAE also built out the same Gulf of Oman port for dry goods as they did oil (Fajairah) plus Khor Fakkan port.

Oman has 3 ports outside the strait with major container and dry good shipping capability.

Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain are all reliant on Saudi and UAE ports for dry goods and conexes.

Ayatollah Orders Highly-Enriched Uranium To Remain In Iran, Stymying Trump's Basis For Deal

The illusion of a grand diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East is once again colliding with reality. The White House has been busy trying to paint a picture of a total capitulation by Tehran, which hasn't been demonstrated given its consistent position defying Washington's demands on the nuclear issue.

According to two senior Iranian officials speaking to Reuters, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has drawn a hard line in the sand, ordering that Iran's stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% remain strictly inside Iranian territory.

Reuters underscores that "Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei's order could further frustrate U.S. President Donald Trump and complicate talks on ending the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran."

"Israeli officials have told Reuters that ‌Trump has assured Israel that Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium, needed to make an atomic weapon, will be sent out of Iran and that any peace deal must include a clause on this," the report continues.

The officials noted that within Tehran, there is deep suspicion that the ceasefire is in fact "a tactical deception by the US," designed to lull Iran into a "false sense of security... before the fighting resumes."

The fresh directive from from the supreme leader flies directly in the face of the narrative being spun by Washington and Tel Aviv, given Israeli officials maintain that President Trump explicitly promised Israel that Iran's highly enriched stockpile would be completely removed from the country as part of any negotiated settlement.

Trump has also recently proclaimed this publicly, for example in a phone interview with CBS News last month, wherein he confidently proclaimed that Iran "agreed to everything" and would cooperate fully to ship its enriched uranium out of the country.

Extraction of nuclear material would of course rely heavily on the assumption of total Iranian compliance, given Trump has also lately appeared to rule out out a hostile invasion force, stating, "No. No troops."

There seems to be widespread agreement among national security officials at this point that some kind of special forces op to covertly go in and take it would be tantamount to a 'suicide mission'.

According to more of what Trump (prematurely) proclaimed in the prior CBS interview: "Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we'll take it to the United States."

The reality is all along the two sides' positions have been very far apart, and largely unbending:
https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/st...ng-trumps-basis-deal



And on a potential deal: "We'll be getting it together because by that time, we'll have an agreement and there's no need for fighting when there's an agreement. Nice right? That's better. We would have done it the other way if we had to" - he sought to explain.

At the moment, Iranian officials are reportedly reviewing the latest updated US proposals for peace, having reportedly asked Pakistan for time to assess and study the American points for negotiations."

However, Khamenei locking down the 60% enriched uranium inside Iranian borders, and amid suspicion that the US ceasefire offer is but a Trojan horse to get the Islamic Republic to simply given up its potential last line of defense, doesn't bode well for the chances of a breakthrough anytime soon.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...ng-trumps-basis-deal

We already won this conflict. Iran has no navy, air force, and their leadership is gone. As Trump already said, we won biggly but he wants to win bigger. That means we can already walk away but there's even more to gain by continuing the conflict. Iran has no cards and they are up against Hegseth on the battlefield and Kushner on the diplomacy end. That's like the 1990s Chicago Bulls playing against the University of Phoenix.

quote:

Originally posted by Carpentermaass84:
We already won this conflict. Iran has no navy, air force, and their leadership is gone...

If they still have enriched uranium, as is being reported, then it seems that they still have a major building block to strategic weapons.

They may have lost most of their naval, air and ground capability, but their negotiating posture is not that of a defeated regime. It is defiant and is doing the standard muslim "cease fire" to appear to regroup, and, of course, they ignore the cease fire when it is convenient. So they do still have an arsenal of some sort.

I am stumped as to what the President is doing wasting time with these liars, whose promises are meaningless. Unless he felt constrained by the 60 day conflict "rule" or we truly depleted too much of our weapons reserve, or we have done all we can do without either putting boots on the ground, or creating mass civilian casualties, I have no idea why he is doing this dance.



.

quote:

I am stumped as to what the President is doing wasting time with these liars, whose promises are meaningless. Unless he felt constrained by the 60 day conflict "rule" or we truly depleted too much of our weapons reserve, or we have done all we can do without either putting boots on the ground, or creating mass civilian casualties, I have no idea why he is doing this dance.

I'm losing my patience for it.

quote:

Originally posted by TigerDore:

I am stumped as to what the President is doing wasting time with these liars, whose promises are meaningless. Unless he felt constrained by the 60 day conflict "rule" or we truly depleted too much of our weapons reserve, or we have done all we can do without either putting boots on the ground, or creating mass civilian casualties, I have no idea why he is doing this dance.
.

Ditto.

I understand that Trump has vastly more information than we do. There may be reasons such as what you suggest.

I am concerned that he has been pulled into too much political calculation. Perhaps midterm elections. Perhaps foreign relations issues.

A short ceasefire to make a good faith effort at a resolution with fewer casualties is an honorable course. Perhaps he was hoping for an uprising by the Iranian citizens. But I think at this point those possibilities have expired.

He, and we the USA, risk starting to appear weak and defeated.

The domestic asshole TDS contingent who are relentlessly trying to undermine everything Trump does are aiding Iran at this point. They are nothing while our military is having demonstrable success. We need an undeniable victory soon, both for global security and for midterm elections.

My patience with the dragging this conflict is wearing thin as well.

I think I understand the 60 day thing but why just keep dragging this conflict out.

Iran is just a bunch of lying game playing fucks. They will never follow through with what they agree to. They have proved this for almost fifty years and even with eliminating first, second and some of the third lines of leadership they have still broken cease fire agreements from day one.

Prez Trump enough is enough already. Get fucking mean with them and bomb the ever loving shit out of them and now.

No boots on the ground. Do it from the air and from a safe enough distance that pilots have hardly no chance of being taken hostage.


Also the bs with going after the Cuba ex leader I guess is ok. Sure were lots of really emotional Cubans interviewed yesterday and thats all fine and good but what about going after and prosecuting the crooks here.

Get on with it already!!!

quote:

Originally posted by Fly-Sig:
We need an undeniable victory soon, both for global security and for midterm elections.

Word.

Guys, You are playing into the enemies playbook.
I have said it before. You cannot kill enough of these folks (extremists). There are way more of these people on this planet than there is the means to kill them. That is a fact.
You have to be strategic and build alliances in the region that can oppose them. Which is exactly what we are doing. Yes, hammering them is a tool. But the mentality of just "ending it" is not going be possible. It is a fantasy.

During WW2, Nazi Germany surrendered when they realized that if they didn’t, the German nation would no longer exist if the Soviets would have their way. They hoped that the Western Allies would take a more humane approach.

Japan was willing to suffer 10 million civilian casualties in a land invasion by the USA, which would have costed at least 1 million American casualties. It ended only after 2 nukes forced the Emperor to intercede, otherwise the Japanese nation would have been obliterated eventually.

I believe that the current regime of whoever is in charge, doesn’t really care if Iran/Persia continues if they can get their 72 “virgins” in the end.

Trump has held off on the “Carthaginian finality” only because of the absolute negativity that would erupt worldwide. But in the end, that’ll be the way it’ll have to be to ensure radical Islamists never get a nuke.