My guess is: the US can’t directly blockade the straight’s choke-point or they would be in range of Iranian anti-ship missiles, speed boats, and other defenses. So they are stuck having to blockade a multi-thousand km long band of ocean 100s if not 1000s of kms radius away from the actual straight. Even with all the boats they have there, that’s just too big, there would unavoidably be gaps that boats could pass through before the navy could react.

Interested to see if they’ll come near the Strait or impose the blockade some 350km away.

They would be in range either way. They’d need to make that some 1000+km away.

I don’t think it can. Heck, I don’t think the global capitalist order in general can.

If you look at capitalism’s primary contradiction, it’s clear that capitalism as the dominant system won’t make it past the 2060s at the latest, one way on an other. The imperial core is getting by from exploiting whatever former colonies they still have a grip on. And the global south is slowly but surely liberating itself. As soon as a majority of Africa manage to kick out western corporations and armies, Europe and the US will enter a final crisis they won’t come back from.

what else could defeat Iran’s mountain fortifications?

Nukes can’t do that, actually.

They would have to deplete their very difficult to replace nuke stockpile by nuking every square-kilometer of the Iranian countryside to be sure there isn’t enough IRGC units left to fight back, especially if they use smaller tactical nukes. Any less than that, and all that would do is make the IRGC take the gloves off completely and dunk on the US and allies even harder than they already do. And not even the US has anywhere enough nukes for that. Nukes are good at destroying a large amount of targets concentrated in a small area^[1], but they are terrible at destroying a large number of targets scattered over a large area. Which the IRGC is.

Imperialism.

One of the biggest effect of imperialism in the imperial core is that it pacify the working class by turning the existential antagonistic contradiction of class struggle into a non-antagonistic contradiction about which class gets to have the biggest share of the imperial plunder. Proles in Europe get to have “free” healthcare and education, and relatively high wages for relatively short workdays and workweeks, because the bourgeois can make up for the losses in surplus value by going to Africa (and other places too of course, but mainly Africa) and makes the proles of Africa work inhumanly long work days/weeks for almost nothing, and sell the product back to the rich European proles. In other words, the benefits and good wages and work-life balance the European proles enjoy are literally payed for by the exploitation of global south proles, these are the European proles’ share of the imperial plunder, and “leftist” European movements are merely about increasing that share, which, of course, necessarily implies continuing the plunder so that there is a plunder to share in the first place.

This means that, in order for European proles to stop being passive, the plunder needs to be taken away entirely. A revolution in Europe isn’t happening before they are fully kicked out of Africa.

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If I’m not mistaken, taking the lowest estimates, that’s at least 81 aircraft total.

We are in the 7th day of the 14th week, as of when I’m writing this, so that’s 81/(14*7) = 81/98 = 0.83 aircraft shot down par day, or to round to the nearest integer, at least 1 every 2 days. And that’s a naïve estimate that assume the same rate throughout the entire war, which is actually not the case as it started low but has been seriously ramping up as of recently, so the current rates of downed American aircraft per day would actually be higher.

8,000 at the start of the war, only 1,500 evacuating. That’s 6,500 unaccounted for. Which means they either:

• Died
• Were already evacuated (ether to the US, to other bases in the region or to hotels)

For context, the A-10 is a jet they had since 1977 and are still using because they have nothing newer that would be remotely capable of replacing it. Though to be fair, it’s meant to fly low and hit hard close to the ground army on the front line (which makes me curious as to what the heck it was doing there without a ground force for it to support) so its role makes it inherently more likely to be hit than other jets.

Making America clownish again 🤡

“Our military, our beautiful, powerful military, peoples have been saying it, our military is so so powerful. I’ve heard folks say, our military is so powerful, we replaced the Talibans with the Talibans in only 20 years, only our military could have done it, folks are saying it, they are saying, all of them, they are saying that only us could pull it off, they are all saying this. Peoples are telling me, but sir, mr. president sir, only 2 of our most advanced fighter jets have crashed on their own this month, how is this possible sir? And I tell them, because we are great, that’s what I tell them. I tell them our military is so beautiful, so great. They are buying normal bolts, the same bolts you find in normal hardware stores, the same ones, they are buying those bolts, they are buying them for thousands of dollars for a single bag of them, they are buying them for that much, because they are great and powerful, that’s why they are buying them, and that’s why they are great.”

Please get Netanyahu.

15 more to go

So you’re telling me even the regime’s supporters are dissenting.

“Can we ask you anything, or not?”

“Well, it can be both. You can ask me anything but there are things you can’t ask me.”

It seems that his generals might be lying to him about how the war is going, so he might actually believe at lest part of this.

That explain a lot of things

It’s some hubris filled cool-aid demanding ridiculous conditions that Iran obviously won’t accept again, I’m sure.

If the US government was at least somewhat rational, I would say the chances are low because their military is already over-strained, over-stretched, under-maintained and under-supplied to a level that is just not remotely sustainable and they cannot afford yet another front, not even against the weak Venezuelan military.

But the US government and their Pentagon lackeys appears to be a bunched of fools and clowns with a gift for wasting resources on obviously doomed projects and have it all backfire in the worst way possible.