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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   25535 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Hey, US taxpayers are paying for many of the pretty lights in the sky. How much do you think Arrow interceptors cost? Several million each. It wouldn't surprise me if Israel and co spent a cool billion on air defence today. Iran wouldn't have spent nearly so much - they come out ahead even before damage is factored in.

But Israel is also much wealthier than Iran- the cost/benefit analysis in terms of fractions of national wealth looks very different.

Only in nominal terms, in PPP Iran's economy is 3x bigger. While some have issues with purchasing power parity it does seem unreasonable to measure sanctioned countries in USD terms.

For purchasing internationally (and thus for the arms industry) nominal GDP is more important. PPP is a better indicator of domestic prosperity. International suppliers care about what you can offer them at market exchange rates, they don't care about your domestic prices. If Israel can offer me $500 for some small electronics part and Iran can offer me $400, I don't care if it's cheaper to live in Iran.

If Israel is overrun it won’t be for financial reasons. A billion is nothing to it or its benefactors.

True - though past a certain point the cost of the marginal interceptor missile rises to infinity. It's not simple to put those things together! There's no liquid anti-missile market.

Israel seems to have been shooting at Shaheds with air to air missiles: https://twitter.com/YaariCohen/status/1779511490795511988

The cost ratio is something like 10:1 against - unsustainable. It might not even be worth the wear and tear on the aircraft.

It is a win in a multitude of ways:

  1. Israel spent far more on this attack than Iran.

  2. It caused widespread disruption in Israel. Few people slept well last night, flights were cancelled, large numbers of people hid in bunkers and thousands of soldiers participated in the air defence operation.

  3. Air defence is limited by industrial capacity, not money. The interceptors are complex machines and production is limited. SAM were low priority during the 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan so few SAMs were bought and production capacity was reduced. Now Ukraine is consuming SAMs at a rate several times higher than production and their interception rate is dropping due to shortages of SAMs. Ukraine will also need thousands of SAMs after the war ends to rebuild. Israel is firing SAMs wildly as they are exceptionally casualty averse. Meanwhile China builds missiles are drones at a higher rate than any other country and they are stockpiling their weapons. Depleting SAM inventories is a success in itself.

Iran just gave Israel the option, but not the obligation, to launch a massive attack on Iran without Israel losing the support of the US.

So do you think this is why Israel bombed the consulate? Every reply so far seems to be concentrating on Iran as the aggressor, with nothing about "but their consulate was bombed".

Suppose an American consulate were bombed by anybody, what would you expect the US response to be?

Suppose an American consulate were bombed by anybody, what would you expect the US response to be?

Let's imagine that Iran didn't just bomb a US embassy, but stormed it and took diplomats/civilians hostage. What would happen?

There's precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis

The US response would probably be to tighten economic sanctions on Iran, but to avoid military escalation. As the Ukraine war shows, the US is very wary of escalating conflicts, even with second-tier powers like Russia or Iran.

It was a consulate in name only. It was a QF operational base used to conduct operations against Israel.

The Iranian MFA didn’t lose a bunch of passport stampers here.

“Why did Israel just blow up an Iranian MFA building without provocation” is not the correct framing here.

I suspect the US response to be blaming the free speech rights of an American that was orthogonal to the consulate attack

I don’t follow.

I was making a joke about Benghazi.

Benghazi.

The administration's initial reaction, IIRC, was to claim the attacks were incited by an inflammatory video some American posted on the internet.

I'm pretty sure he's referring to the narrative blaming the 2012 Benghazi attack on "filmmaker" Nakoula Basseley Nakoula's YouTube video "Innocence of Muslims."

Huh. Learn something every day.

Israel probably bombed the consulate in retaliation for what Iran's proxies did to Israel. International relations is not governed by rules treating agents symmetrically.

The main result has been to reaffirm how utterly hostile the Arab states are to Iran even in the middle of the partial Saudi-Iranian detente. Iran has no force projection, and a combination of the Quds expeditionary force, Hezbollah and a few Shia militias would never be enough to overrun Israel. This has made me a lot more optimistic about Israel’s position in the region; the Arabs and Turks both know that even if the masses hate Israel, Iran is a much more substantial threat. The Arabs just want the Gaza thing to be over (they don’t really care how it ends) and for things to go back to ‘normal’.

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