Iran Situation

[CJD]

Okay, spent the weekend brushing up on the situation. Think my opinion is...relatively informed now.

Here's the basics, in my opinion:

Soleimani deserved to die. He (and his military machinations) have led to the death of thousands (if not more) civilians, including Americans. Especially if it's true that he helped orchestrate the attacks on the US embassy in Iraq, although that still seems to be an unconfirmed detail.

The odds of this starting "World War III" are low, considering Iran has very few formidable allies and a ton of outright enemies. Iran + Iraq + Syria + Russia (If Russia even participates, which would probably be just defensive weapon assistance if anything) vs everyone else would not be a great war for them.

For that reason, I get the sense that most of Iran's retaliation will be in the form of terrorism or terrorist acts in America and other allied countries. We'll see how good the allies are at sniffing out and preventing those attacks, should they materialize.

I think the assassination was myopic though. I don't think this is a very similar situation to the Bin Laden or Al-Baghdadi kills. Both of those men were leaders of terrorist groups that, without a central figure, splintered into smaller and less effective groups (theoretically).

That won't happen in the Iranian government. It'll probably just be a "next man up" situation. Iran's terror network (or "covert forces" if you'd prefer) will not be affected that much by this assassination. I imagine it would be like someone assassination a US general. Sure, it'd piss Americans off a lot, but that General wasn't making sole decisions nor was he an isolated "head" of a snake, so to speak. Someone will be promoted to General afterwards and the machine will continue to run.

As it has been stated multiple times, both Bush and Obama had opportunities to kill Soleimani but did not. They likely decided that the unrest it would cause was not worth the incremental change in leadership in Iran's government/military it would create. It's surprising that Trump's advisers did not reach the same conclusion.

But it remains that the world is less one evil person due to this attack so it can't really be considered a bad thing, from that perspective.

HOWEVER, if this leads to increased military presence and deadly skirmishes in the area, that is when this assassination begins to look dumb as hell. Escalation is the key to determining the consequences of this attack. If we start shipping troops over there by the thousands and they start dying, then this becomes much more difficult to justify. After all, Vietnam was not originally intended to be a war either, as America initially only sent "advisers" to South Vietnam. The last thing we need, as a country, is another one of these drawn out wars in which we attempt to "establish Democracy."

Also, Trump's handling of the situation in the media is ***** disgusting. You can tell he's so war hungry. He sounds like he's looking forward to killing civilians with that comment about bombing cultural sites...
...That's literally a war crime.

Not that we've been good about holding our Presidents accountable for war crimes in the past...So I guess that part doesn't matter.