Iran: A War Is Coming

[mojomonkey]

[The Dog's Dangly Bits]

1 hour ago, mojomonkey said:

You were asked for your opinion of Eddie Gallagher not asked for a comparison.

You might as well ask for an opinion on Eddie Izzard though.  It's about as relevant.

[manxman1980]

So....

 

[quilp]

2 hours ago, mojomonkey said:

You were asked for your opinion of Eddie Gallagher not asked for a comparison.

Oh, ok. He's a psycho introduced as a sort of comparison. Will that do?

Edited January 4, 2020 by quilp

[Rog]

6 minutes ago, manxman1980 said:

So....

 

Iran started this particular resurgence of the ongoing war between Islam and the West that has been going on for 1300 years. It has never ended, there has never been peace as far as Islam is concerned. All there has been are periods of time in some parts of the world where total subjugation has taken place or where an armistice has been achieved.

[Chinahand]

Erm. Think this is mainly a war within Islam - Iran battling for control of the Shia crescent. 
The West has allied itself with Saudi Arabian Sunni Islam. 

A wonderful counter factual would be if a secularising Shah had remained in power in Iran as a Western ally. Oh how the world could have been different!

[Rog]

16 minutes ago, Chinahand said:

Erm. Think this is mainly a war within Islam - Iran battling for control of the Shia crescent. 
The West has allied itself with Saudi Arabian Sunni Islam. 

A wonderful counter factual would be if a secularising Shah had remained in power in Iran as a Western ally. Oh how the world could have been different!

There has been war between Islam and civilisation since 636 CE.  The Sunni/Sh'ia schism is as added complication.

The relationship between "The West", actually America, and SA came about by the creation of the petrodollar by SA in return for America agreeing to protect SA when the $us was about to collapse in the 70's which itself had come about by America having reneged on the Breton Woods conference.

[Manximus Aururaneus]

The West has been supplying both arms and training to both sides for decades.  Following the removal of the Shah in 1979 we had a massive kick-off in the barracks car park between the 400 Iranians and the Iraqis that we were training, in the same location, at the same time (Gosport). Orders were to just contain it to the car park and let them tire each other out. They had no firearms, just baseball bats, metal dustbins, even some guys using a metal bedstead! Still messy.

The 'SAAM' and the 'ZAAL' were two Iranian frigates in Devonport dockyard for refit when it kicked off. They were impounded and left for ages (a couple of years iirc) covered in red lead primer in the corner of 5 basin. Eventually released and still in service today (1960's ships). One of the class was sunk by the Yanks.

It's not going to end anytime soon.

 

Edited January 4, 2020 by Manximus Aururaneus

[the stinking enigma]

1 hour ago, quilp said:

Oh, ok. He's a psycho introduced as a sort of comparison. Will that do?

Yes thanks. Like I said, it was just for calibration.

[Chinahand]

Oh Rog stop swallowing lefty garbage and think!

In the 1970s the vast majority of the world’s investable assets were American. This was the 1970s with Europe state owned and the 3rd world offering little in the way of investable returns. 
The Saudis could have been paid in any currency they liked but the vast returns they were generating couldn’t be kept under a bed or in a safe. It needed investing. And you need dollars to invest in America. 
It was far easier than do all the conversions to start off in dollars. 
The Saudis needed to recycle their oil wealth into investable wealth and that meant dollars. 
The real irony in this was that because US banks had restrictions on US accounts abroad the main winner in the Petroleum dollar was the City of London with their creation of Euro-Dollar accounts. [nothing to do with the Eu’s Euro]. 
Rather than going all the way to New York the Saudis deposited their dollars in London and let the City get on with it for a nice commission. 

[the stinking enigma]

https://twitter.com/TeamTrump/status/1213188112710602753

[the stinking enigma]

its a great video. reminds me a bit of command and conquer

[Chinahand]

9 hours ago, TheTeapot said:

Closeted Jesus freak Mike Pence has been tweeting, trying to justify this killing by linking it to 9/11, despite the commission report saying Iran had nothing to do with it and getting the numbers wrong. Its pretty depressing that this is the world we live in

 

 

Things are more complex than you claim.  Yes, Pence got the numbers wrong, but the official conclusions of the 911 commission include these statements:

Turabi sought to persuade Shiites and Sunnis to put aside their divisions and join against a common enemy.  In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support - even if only training - for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States.  Not long afterwards, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. pdf page 78

and 

We now have evidence suggesting that 8 to 10 of the 14 Saudi "muscle" operatives traveled into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001 pdf p257

Iran supports and funds Hamas even though it is Sunni and Hezbollah has contacts with Sunni groups too.  One of the splits between al Qaeda and ISIS was ISIS's slaughtering of Shias which the al Qaeda leadership disagreed with.  Al Qaeda worked with and trained with Shia groups funded by Iran.

None of these groups are monolithic and their interactions are complex, but Iran sponsors terrorists who are out to attack the "big and little satans" whether they are Sunni or Shia.

That is the raison d'etre of the Quds Brigades and Soleimani's life's work.

Edited January 4, 2020 by Chinahand

[Rog]

1 hour ago, Chinahand said:

Oh Rog stop swallowing lefty garbage and think!

In the 1970s the vast majority of the world’s investable assets were American. This was the 1970s with Europe state owned and the 3rd world offering little in the way of investable returns. 
The Saudis could have been paid in any currency they liked but the vast returns they were generating couldn’t be kept under a bed or in a safe. It needed investing. And you need dollars to invest in America. 
It was far easier than do all the conversions to start off in dollars. 
The Saudis needed to recycle their oil wealth into investable wealth and that meant dollars. 
The real irony in this was that because US banks had restrictions on US accounts abroad the main winner in the Petroleum dollar was the City of London with their creation of Euro-Dollar accounts. [nothing to do with the Eu’s Euro]. 
Rather than going all the way to New York the Saudis deposited their dollars in London and let the City get on with it for a nice commission. 

It was the creation of the OPEC demand for the trade in oil to be in dollars that suddenly resulted in the need for dollars as the currency for trade.  It was that which created the need for dollars and so propped up the otherwise point of collapse of the $us.

 

[Chinahand]

Rog you don’t get it. The trade in oil could have been in peanuts: that isn’t the issue.
 

The issue is once you are drowning in peanuts what do you do with them? at the time, Something like 80% of investable assets were dollar denominated. All trading oil in peanuts would do is result in a need to convert them to dollars to buy something useful. Hence oil was dollar denominated to cut out the currency exchange. 

OPEC needed dollars to invest their profits, not to sell oil with. Why? to turn paper money into real assets. But because of this it was easier to price in dollars than peanuts. 
 

Edited January 4, 2020 by Chinahand