Israel withdrew fully from Lebanon in 2000, and this was certified by the UN, yet Hezbollah kept attacking them anyway.
If Hezbollah offered Israel a choice between: peace with Hezbollah OR occupy land in Lebanon, I think Israel would rationally choose peace.
But Hezbollah has never offered this. Their stated goal is complete destruction of Israel.
So if the options are: Hezbollah shoots at you from right across the border OR you occupy a buffer zone and Hezbollah still shoots at you but from further away:
Isn't it perfectly rational to choose the buffer zone?
Israel just communited genocide in one place and displaced millions in two others.
It "ordered" wast places full of people to lead, destroyed bridges, created shoot at will area on other side and is getting ready to move settlers there.
Isreal is not defending itself. It is cleansing and expanding, feeling entitled to kill at will everyone not them.
American citizens have known since 1973 that their dependence on oil puts them at the mercy of every Middle East dictator. The governments have known this clearly since the 1940s - see the Barbarossa operation. The US had literal generations to reduce their oil dependency and yet chose to remain dependent. It has nothing to do with the current war.
The US succeeded in reducing their oil dependency and the country is now a net exporter. That doesn't solve the environmental concerns, nor hermetically seal the country from trends in global oil markets, but the US's energy independence agenda has definitely been successful on its own terms.
Unfortunately, it hasn't diminished the number of American foreign policy experts who think it's very important to fight lots of wars in the Middle East.
It seems to me that the current war in the middle east has more to do with ensuring those who chant Death To America do not develop nuclear weapons and to set back their ballistic missile program.
I agree those are big problems! That's why I supported JCPOA. The US foreign policy blob wanted to bomb Iran instead, though, with very unclear explanations of how bombing Iran would cause a kind and non-belligerent government to take over. The more articulate members seem to take it as an article of faith that people react to American bombs by doing what the American government wants; the less articulate members have just been insulting journalists when they ask basic questions about whether there's a plan or what the goal is.
A treaty whose key articles would start expiring in.. late 2025. Which Iran had no motivation whatsoever to extend had it being kept (imagine this Iran but with 2-4 trillion dollars more, more than a few going to drones and missiles). You'd have this war but on way worse terms.
It's kind of a problem if you can't definitely say why a war of aggression is being fought, no? But if we do say that this war is being primarily fought to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, then it has to be considered an unmitigated failure. The current outlook is immeasurably worse than it was at the end of the Biden administration, and I'd charitably describe Biden as having done next to nothing to stop them.
If Trump truly cared about nukes, he wouldn't have torn up the treaty in his first term. This war's about catering to Israel and distracting from the Epstein files.
The treaty that would have expired in January 2026 and left Iran with far more resources? Biden gave Iran $6 billion, a month later the Gazans infiltrated Israel with Iranian-funded weaponry.
> now.. with that $2M toll, iran just learnt it can just toll the ships...
But the strait has two sides and Iran only controls one side. The UAE/Oman on the other side could equally threaten to attack Iranian ships unless Iran pays them a toll.
According to this map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Strait_of_hormuz_full.jpg shipping lines are in Oman's territorial waters. Iran controls the whole area by creating a risk that a ship can be attacked. And if Oman would try to impose payments it would break the UN convention on the Law of the Sea.
I think what we should have learned from this is that it's extremely hard to "make a lesson out of" Iran if you depend on moving oil past their borders... the gulf states are much more exposed to this than the US is, and much less powerful.
They are also not neutral - they have been paying in to the US protection racket, and are discovering that their payments haven't bought much.
> it's extremely hard to "make a lesson out of" Iran if you depend on moving oil past their borders
it's not just gulf states -- look at who are the customers of those gulf states are. the whole asia, europe, and america -- the whole world is their customer.
Even if it's "extremely hard", those countries have no choice but "make a lesson out of" iran -- just like what we did with pirates
why would those "customers of gulf" just leave iran? after US leaves, will iran regime suddenly become nice and stop forcing that $2M-per-voyage bill?
no, and even if iran regime promises "I'll never bill those ships", how could you trust on that promise?
the only way to ensure free-ship-passing would be obliterating Iran as an example, even if US backs away.
> They are also not neutral - they have been paying in to the US protection racket
hmm so were they "helping" US bomb iran? "being neutral" means it didn't participate on attacking iran, not whether it paid or not.
If Canada and Mexico started letting Iran launch bombing sorties against US cities from within their borders, would the US consider them neutral?
2 Million a ship seems like a pretty cheap price to pay for the damage the us and Israel have inflicted on Iran - they cannot be made to pay it though, so I suppose the rest of us will have to (through marginally higher oil prices in the long term - much less than the spectacularly high oil prices the US war will cause in the short term)
Since 1985, Hezbollah has killed approximately 600 Israelis (if you count IDF soldiers during the occupation of Beirut). Israel has killed 5x that number of civilians in the last two weeks, if you count Lebanon as well as Iran. If you count soldiers...
The value of the oil / natural gas production in the Gulf states is not infinite. Nobody except the US has the force projection capacity to fight a major war against Iran. If they are not interested in fighting that war, the rest of the world will find that the cheapest and least disruptive option is to cut consumption. To assume that nobody is shipping oil and natural gas from the Gulf, until a new status quo emerges in the region.
Most nations who are affected don't have a blue-water navy or similar means to pose a serious threat to Iran. They have to either back the USA or deal with the toll and the uncertainty that comes with it.
I notice the repo has no data on supply of doctors per person in different countries. It's well known that the US residency system with its limited slots constrains the supply of doctors who can practice in the US.
There exist similar systems in pretty much any other western nation. The problem is that teaching doctors is expensive and isn't something you can ramp up quickly because you need other doctors to teach the new doctors. The supply of doctors is a problem that is universal to essentially all western nations especially if you move away from metropolitan areas. It's largely due to aging populations and failure to increase spending on medical education over decades. I think the US is actually better off than many other countries, because they pay disproportionately high salaries so get more immigrants.
That said I don't think there's evidence that lack of doctors is what is driving up cost in the US. Just an example, growth in hospital administrators has significantly outpaced medical staff over the last decades, which will directly increase cost.
> Because it makes pretty much no economic sense for anyone else to do it
I think other funding models simply haven't been explored. I'll pull one out of my ass. The hospital does it themselves. In exchange the doctor works at the hospital for the next N years, or pays a contract break penalty. The hospital can pay the doctor somewhat less than market rate and doesn't have to deal with staff turnover.
It should be obvious that other funding models will be invented if government funding goes away. Because the alternative is no new doctors and people start dying without treatment.
Residency training costs like $750,000 to $1.5MM per physician
Primary care doctors would have to work 12-15 years while giving up 25% of their gross salary just to pay for the residency program. They'd also have to pay x% of their salary to pay for their debt from med school training before the residency.
People just wouldn't go into the field, which is already happening even in a world where the residency is funded. The economics of being a doctor are simply not that great anymore, especially relative to other things you could do.
> It should be obvious that other funding models will be invented if government funding goes away. Because the alternative is no new doctors and people start dying without treatment.
There is an infinite number of jobs that would be great to have but we can't reasonably fund and so don't exist.
We currently live in a timeline where there are no new personal one-to-one tutors for middle schoolers and therefore every single middle schooler in the country receives subpar education, causing vast amounts of economics losses as compared to if they could be trained more thoroughly.
I find it completely unbelievable that residencies are not a profit center for most teaching hospitals. The residents do almost all the day to day work with a half dozen of them reporting to a single attending physician.
It’s not like you get a discount if you’re seen by a resident vs attending either. Sure the first year or maybe two a resident needs a lot of close supervision, but not nearly as much as people think happens.
I would bet dollars to donuts that the vast majority of patients seen by a resident have no clue. They simply call them doctor.
My bet is it’s all accounting tricks. You’d be utterly incompetent not to somehow make a profit on 60-80hrs/week of basically free doctor labor even if those are junior doctors. They generate massive amounts of billable services. Plus they are basically guaranteed to work for you for 4+ years, aside from the few that wash out.
> Only about 70 employers have paid a $100,000 Trump fee on H-1B workers from outside the US since it was imposed through a September White House proclamation, a government attorney said Thursday.
If Iran is unwilling to let neutral international observers confirm the number, that suggests they are trying to hide a number they don't want the world to know.
Who gets to define what "neutral" is? According to the US, the International Criminal Court is not fit for this purpose. It certainly can't be a nation-state that's in a military alliance with the US.
Human Rights Watch, MSF, UNICEF? Woke grievance factories, the lot of them /s . World Health Organization? US just left it. It's slim pickings out there.
Difficult to be sure what would happen in a counter factual universe without foreign interference.
We do know that Russia et al sow division online as part of their anti western efforts, a strategy detailed in their "Foundations of Geopolitics" manual.
Someone commented, and I paraphrase poorly, "Imagine if Russia didn't influence the voters in 2016; all the racism and bigotry in the USA would disappear!"...
I want American pedos to be brought to justice but let's not forget, in Iran it's legal to marry children so they are actually even worse on this issue.
While I don't think violence is always the answer, and I definitely don't support Iranian regime, I don't disagree with the statement an eye for an eye.
People and nations should expect that an attack will be met with an attack.
If a bully is hitting someone, one of the most effective ways of stopping it completely is hitting back.
If Hezbollah offered Israel a choice between: peace with Hezbollah OR occupy land in Lebanon, I think Israel would rationally choose peace.
But Hezbollah has never offered this. Their stated goal is complete destruction of Israel.
So if the options are: Hezbollah shoots at you from right across the border OR you occupy a buffer zone and Hezbollah still shoots at you but from further away:
Isn't it perfectly rational to choose the buffer zone?
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