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by macintux 5 days ago
> They can obviously cause a lot of damage but they would obviously lose that war if the US decided they had to remove the regime by force.

That is far from obvious. A command structure scattered around a huge country should be able to outlast U.S. willingness to throw bodies into a shredder.
2 comments
onemoresoop 5 days ago
It’s easy to look at Ukraine for example. Since drones came into the picture it’s way harder to do a successful ground invasion. Russia has unimaginable losses and they still haven’t reached their strategic goal.
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jameshilliard 4 days ago
> Since drones came into the picture it’s way harder to do a successful ground invasion.

Harder, sure, but it's unlikely Iran could stop a US invasion since a ground invasion would almost certainly only happen with the US having complete air supremacy.

> Russia has unimaginable losses and they still haven’t reached their strategic goal.

Russia does not have control of the airspace in Ukraine, the US was flying even non-stealth aircraft over Iran for most of the war with negligible losses for those aircraft.

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macintux 4 days ago
I’m reminded of the cold war joke: two Russian generals meet up in Paris in the closing days of WWIII. One asks the other: “So who won the air war?”
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jameshilliard 4 days ago
> two Russian generals meet up in Paris in the closing days of WWIII. One asks the other: “So who won the air war?”

The US with combined arms warfare capabilities and air supremacy is very difficult to defend against for a country like Iran in the event of a ground invasion.

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awesome_dude 5 days ago
The Vietnamese proved that it's not the bombs you can throw at the country - it's whether you have hearts and minds on your side.

The Americans learnt from that and went to Iraq claiming to have hearts and minds on their side - but quickly discovered that, in fact, they did not (and still do not).

The Americans need to take stock of their own actions in this conflict - they put Trump in the white house, they allowed him to be influenced by other governments, they gave him the power to get involved in the conflict.

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