SabreFan1

No, but they aren't selling them top of the line military equipment. They sell them surplus. The planes that the US sells our allies, including Canada, are purposely nerfed. The cross-section on any stealth capabilities are made large enough so the US can shoot down any allied aircraft. We also sell crap. Saudi Arabia isn't exactly getting the best of weapons we have either.

That would be a stretch. Israelis have no qualms about smacking down their leaders. I also can't see the US letting Israel join in the fighting. All the US would really need is intelligence from them.

Still feeling all cocky and strong now that Canadians also got "lit up tonight"?

Allies is too strongly worded. They're basically customers. Iran buys whatever outdated crap Russia and China will sell them. Now both countries will get to sell them more crap. Russia is golden either way this conflict goes. Iran gets leveled, they sell more oil. The US just takes out a few targets in retaliation, Russia sells the Iranians more weapons. Trump's buddy Putin is going to bed with a smile on his face. Those missiles they used tonight are notoriously inaccurate. Iran says they lobbed "tens of intermediate ranged missiles" at the airbase. I'd be willing to bet 90% or more hit open desert rather than the airbase.

Videos of the missiles being launched and landing at Al Asad base are on this guy's Twitter feed. A few are close up but most are from far away. https://twitter.com/ZaidBenjamin5

Don't you start that Twitter idiocy. WW3 won't start because parts of Iran get blown up. In fact, that'll help Russia move more of their oil and China's more concerned with the parts of Asia that it wants to eventually gobble up.

A war council. They're likely heading into the situation room to organize the counter-attack. Likely drones and Naval cruise missiles.

Imagine if this happened in a Trump second term.

It would be a pain in the butt and possibly affect Trump's re-election chances.

The US won't want Israel to join in. Logistically it would slow the counter-attacks down, and it would cause serious regional unrest. Israel will basically just be providing intelligence on targets and locations of Iranian leaders.

I'm annoyed because Trump's ginormous tax cuts coupled with an Iranian war will make the deficit go up even quicker. Maybe the US will just rain down 30 or 40 cruise missiles on Tehran and wherever the Ayatollah is and call it a day. That cost would be negligible.

Someone would have to actually attack US territory in order to invoke the mutual defence clause. Shooting rockets into a base or two doesn't even come close to qualifying.

I actually still remember watching the Oliver North hearings live. He pretended not to remember a whole lot of things. Ronald Reagan could have gone to prison after his presidency was over. Although even had North not covered for him, it's doubtful that he would have considering Nancy was all but running the final year or so of the administration since Reagan was already affected by alzheimer's by then.

That series and it's spin-off were before my time.

Never saw it. I know there's a WW2 movie out there that downplayed Poland's assistance in breaking the Enigma Codes, Poland was peeved about it, but I forget which movie it was.

That's a shame. I understand when you say a story is based on reality like most Hollywood movies say so they can add in or take out stuff, but when you delete, or worse yet, change a fundamental part of that story, you are doing a disservice to the people involved.

Was. He passed away a few years ago.

I didn't watch Fargo, but Canada went in with the CIA and helped get a handful of hostages released. If I remember the details correctly, they issued Canadian credentials to some of the hostages so Iran would release them since Iran didn't have anything against Canada or Canadians. It was brilliant in it's simplicity and relative effectiveness.

That's exactly what the US did and the entire Iranian population rebelled against the US in 1979. Jimmy Carter mishandled Iran before, during, and after the US embassy hostage situation began and was one of the main reasons Iranians stormed the embassy. He pretty much kept saying stupid things that enraged Iran's conservative young people. Believe it or not, it was Canada's diplomatic attache in cooperation with the CIA that rescued a handful of the initial US hostages from Iran. The main body of hostages were finally released after Algeria helped the US negotiate with Iran. Iran purposely waited until Reagan was sworn in to release them. They had nothing but disdain for Jimmy Carter. Ever since then, Iran has been an aggressive theocracy headed up by the Ayatollah.

No. If it were up to me, the US would have left Iraq after Saddam Hussein was executed and let Iraq have their civil war then. Or better yet, taken the issue of Iraqi sovereignty to the UN and let the rest of the world split the country into 3 parts with each major religious faction getting their own territory to form their own nation. What word is the bolded meant to be? I can't tell if it's a typo or just a shortened version of a word that I'm not getting.

Sure Libya became a cluster. The US sanctions and political maneuverings finally took a toll and enough Libyans finally wanted Gaddafi out of power enough to do something about it. It still doesn't change the fact that Obama was pulling the strings for 3 years before as well as during and after that clusterf**k of an operation.

for and with are 2 very different things. For money is called extortion and is a crime. With money is poltical and the US federal gov't even does that with it's own states. The US isn't obligated to provide for Iraq's economy indefinitely.

Of course it is. The majority wants the US to go so it can take control of Iraq and exterminate their rivals and this recent move gave them a perfect excuse to ask the US to leave so it could try. Yep. The majority will likely wipe out the 2 minorities pretty quickly especially if Iran helps them. As are the Republicans to keep the White House. They aren't losing per say, they just haven't started gaining any momentum. It hasn't helped them that Bloomberg has entered and is peeling votes away from other candidates, especially Biden. They've been moving further left for a few years now just as the republicans moved to the extreme right when Obama was in office.

Congress has been slowly bleeding away it's powers to the executive branch for a very long time. If Obama had done the same thing that Trump just did, you would barely hear a peep out of the Democrats. Bill Clinton tossed cruise missiles into the Middle East and blew up buildings and killed high and low ranking military personnel and civilians and Obama ordered far more drone strikes than Bush. I want Trump voted out of office, but the only thing unusual that he did by killing the Iranian general was not the way it was done, but the location. It was only less than a decade ago that NATO dropped bombs into Libya and aided rebels who chased down Gaddafi and sodomized him with what was likely a knife before finally killing him. Guess who was president then. It may have been under the auspices of NATO, but NATO doesn't break wind without heavy US participation and presidential permission.

Read it again. The US is threatening economic sanctions which could decimate the already fragile Iraqi economy. The US isn't asking for money. Iraq is poor enough as it is and already counts on aid as it is to supplement it's oil income.