President Donald Trump

What exactly is the end game for the us and Israel? I don't think I'm smart enough to figure it out.

Trump and Bibi not ending up in jail is high on their priority lists.

Destroy Iran's sovereignty and steal its resources. Keep those resources away from China and Russia. Essentially, they want to extend the Empire.

Somehow I think they'll be successful at this.

This, not so much.

I'm still holding out hope that during the last 6 months Israel and to some part the US has been organizing serious cells in Iran to organize a proper resistance. It's the only thing I can think of that could reach their goal with the current strategy of just airstrikes.
I'm not optimistic this is going to happen but if anyone had the intelligence capabilities to do this it would be Israel given their past operations on Iranian ground.
Happy to be proven wrong as I'm no fan of Iran's government.

It is about the best you can do. Information from inside Iran is shaky, and none of the public players involved are trustworthy, social media is its usual shitshow and most analyses are poorly dressed political takes which gamble on the possibility to jump eagerly up and down and say "I told you so!" when the dust has settled.

This is very much a war taking place in the post-truth society we have been warned about for the last decade.

Side question- Who actually puts money into these prediction market sites? I know a lot of people who bet online, a ton of crypto heads and **** coin gamblers. I don’t know a single person who uses Polymarket or Kalshi. Two minutes googling, can’t find anything about user base demos, just raw total numbers.

Every time I see these - This account made 50 million betting on war - I think who the **** is stupid enough to bet on that at all?

Were it not for Iran's nuclear ambitions, the last two bombing campaigns would not have happened. That makes gutting their nuclear program the primary objective. It doesn't appear were mobilizing for a ground campaign but we'll still need boots on the ground.

So I'm thinking that will come mostly for the air and maybe some amphibious inserts around the Straight. As for keeping the Strait open, that's an order of magnitude bigger priority for China than it is for the U.S.

just to level set here....viktor supports the iranian government, not the iranian people.

he's basically the actual terrorist that people accuse normal muslim people here of being...

Getting a nuke was pretty much Khameini's only shot. But it was always a long shot. Still from a strategic perspective a long shot is better than no shot when t-rex is heading your way.

then maybe the US shouldnt have killed him bc he was the one who issued a fatwa to not create a nuke. hopefully that fatwa died with him.

Do you support the Iranian government murdering 20K+ of their own citizens?

sounds like fake news

People who have inside information and no moral compass.

Prediction markets are now the go-to resource for journalistic leads.

Victor supports anything that gives him the opportunity to type “slaughter.”

That's a key point - it means that the recent suppression and killing of protestors was irrelevant to their motivation

Right. Obviously Vance knew he was bluffing. Apparently the Iranians fell for it and put their guard down. Misdirection is a key factor in warfare. Like issuing a fatwa.

so you think the internet being blacked out there is a coincidence?

Yea but who are they betting against? Like who is online enough to want to wager on how long a Trump speech is, see several signs it’s all manipulated with inside info, then come back for more?

Bolded is about where I am as well. If I had to guess, I would say that U.S. continues to bomb for the next 4-6 weeks until Trump claims that the campaign has been a success because the U.S. has successfully weakened the Iranian military and tilled the soil for an overthrow of the theocracy. Then a highly unstable situation will play out internally in Iran over a period of months or years in a way that is very difficult to predict or control. If we wake up in 2027 and theocrats hostile to the U.S. and Israel are in control of the Iranian government, which I guess seems more likely to me than any other outcome, then Trump will say that the U.S. did its part by weakening Iran's ability to project force and and he will blame the Iranian people and secularists within the country for not being able to prevent an ongoing repressive theocracy.

You'd be surprised... but ya, they are just betting against other people.

If you piled into energy stocks a few weeks ago, you're gangbusters now.

That could be. At this point it really is anybody's guess.

There were statements now that this was not a "democratization mission", which I very much suspect is just modern political double-speech for "We have strong doubts about how well organized the opposition to the regime is".

Getting a few hundred thousand into the streets or have the majority against the regime is one thing, to have them set aside their differences enough for resistance to be organized enough to a) fight the regime, b) beat the regime, c) avoid infighting and d) transition to stable government is quite another.

An important thing to note is that reporting on these events is an absolute pile of trash. And I don't mean that as in it is biased. We can sift through bias. I mean it as in there is pretty much a complete void of useful facts or knowledge. It really shines through how media outlets have been downgrading and downsizing their foreign desks for years, and how successful the involved parties are in being opaque as a result. We're just seeing parroting of public statements and the odd pundit or academic brought in to read tea leaves.

I'm sure that's Fake Newz as well.

or....

The Joos blacked it out.