1 minute ago, Lacessit said:

Not quite. There's a big difference in the refining process of heavy sour crude vs sweet light crude.

Yes. FUNGIBLE.

I am not saying that all oil is interchangeable, obviously.

I am saying that oil is fungible: This means that given a type of oil and refining, then it is on the world market, or adds to the supply of the world market for that specific class of product.. So, yes, fungible, too.

3 minutes ago, GammaGlobulin said:

Yes. FUNGIBLE.

I am not saying that all oil is interchangeable, obviously.

I am saying that oil is fungible: This means that given a type of oil and refining, then it is on the world market, or adds to the supply of the world market for that specific class of product.. So, yes, fungible, too.

Oil is fungible to financial markets and pricing mechanisms. It is not fungible to refineries.

1 hour ago, Lacessit said:

Oil is fungible to financial markets and pricing mechanisms. It is not fungible to refineries.

As I say: Oil is a fungible commodity.

5 hours ago, Patong2021 said:

Houthis are a proxy of Iran and do not control; all of Yemen. They can be managed easier by a few well placed missiles that takes out their leadership.

Really? So when Israel and the US were bombing the Houthis before, why didn't they succeed in taking them out then?

13 hours ago, Alan Zweibel said:

Really? So when Israel and the US were bombing the Houthis before, why didn't they succeed in taking them out then?

You forget, they did. The Houthis went quiet after the last visit. All piracy and attacks stopped.

5 minutes ago, Patong2021 said:

You forget, they did. The Houthis went quiet after the last visit. All piracy and attacks stopped.

I didn't forget anything.

What does the phrase "to take out" mean to you?

This definition of AI I think matches the general understanding of the term:

"In the context of war, to "take out an enemy force" is a colloquial military term that generally means to render an enemy unit, position, or asset incapable of fighting, often by neutralizing or destroying it. It is a broad phrase used to describe a successful attack that removes a specific threat from the battlefield, preventing them from interfering with friendly operations."

Is that what happened?

18 hours ago, ronnie50 said:

The Strait of Hormuz is indeed within Iran's territorial boundaries. Let's not forget, ships passsing through the Panama Canal have been paying for that priviledge for decades. So there is clearly precedence.

AI search:

The Panamanian government receives substantial financial compensation from tolls paid by ships passing through the Panama Canal, which has been under Panamanian control since 1999. While the U.S. government formerly paid fees, recent 2025 disputes saw conflicting claims over whether U.S. vessels now receive free transit.

CNN +4

Geography and Maritime Law is not made up by you. Panama was a canal excavated through a nation. It os not comprable to the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz is international waters. For your claim to hold, Oman and the UAE and their rights can no longer exist. The Straits have been recognized as international waters for ages. There is no legal basis on which Iran can claim the Straits.

1 minute ago, Alan Zweibel said:

I didn't forget anything.

What does the phrase "to take out" mean to you?

This definition of AI I think matches the general understanding of the term:

"In the context of war, to "take out an enemy force" is a colloquial military term that generally means to render an enemy unit, position, or asset incapable of fighting, often by neutralizing or destroying it. It is a broad phrase used to describe a successful attack that removes a specific threat from the battlefield, preventing them from interfering with friendly operations."

Is that what happened?

If I want to exchange with AI generated inexactitude, I will do that. I do not need a messenger boy to cut and paste. You play fast and loose with facts, bending and presenting them such that they can be used to support your misinterpreted interpretation of events.

The Houthis are not the recognized government of Yemen. They are a terrorist group backed by Iran. In 2023, the Houthis were attacking international shipping and threatening the Gulf region as well as Israel. At the time, multiple nations responded including China, Pakistan, India and multiple NATO members. The intervention came to a head when the UK, USA and Israel responded with precision strikes taking out ballistic missile sites, drones, command and control centers and some local leadership. It was made clear at the time that unless the Houthis. stopped, their leadership would be targeted. It stopped. It was also agreed that the Saudis would not intervene. Now the Houthis are back to their violence, exactly as the UAE and Saudis warned. A few well placed missiles will silence them again. The Saudis may intervene to finish what they were not allowed to do before. This time, they must not be blocked or hindered. If Iran retaliates and attacks, Pakistan is obliged to defend Saudi Arabia. Hence, the urgency of the Pakistani mediation efforts ion the current conflict.

2 minutes ago, Patong2021 said:

If I want to exchange with AI generated inexactitude, I will do that. I do not need a messenger boy to cut and paste. You play fast and loose with facts, bending and presenting them such that they can be used to support your misinterpreted interpretation of events.

The Houthis are not the recognized government of Yemen. They are a terrorist group backed by Iran. In 2023, the Houthis were attacking international shipping and threatening the Gulf region as well as Israel. At the time, multiple nations responded including China, Pakistan, India and multiple NATO members. The intervention came to a head when the UK, USA and Israel responded with precision strikes taking out ballistic missile sites, drones, command and control centers and some local leadership. It was made clear at the time that unless the Houthis. stopped, their leadership would be targeted. It stopped. It was also agreed that the Saudis would not intervene. Now the Houthis are back to their violence, exactly as the UAE and Saudis warned. A few well placed missiles will silence them again. The Saudis may intervene to finish what they were not allowed to do before. This time, they must not be blocked or hindered. If Iran retaliates and attacks, Pakistan is obliged to defend Saudi Arabia. Hence, the urgency of the Pakistani mediation efforts ion the current conflict.

I notice, as usual, your lack of any kind of link to credible source to back up your claims. . As you clearly don't know, the Houthis didn't commit to not attacking Israel or preventing their ships from accessing the Suez Canal. And, in fact, following the cease fire agreement with the United States, which didn't include Israel, they have attacked Israel and interdicted some shipping. Here's an excerpt from an analysis by some folks from West Point with a link:

"Either way, the Red Sea crisis is far from over. The Houthis will take away two lessons from Operation Rough Rider. First, the group continues to understand exactly how disruptive it can be to the global economy by targeting commercial shipping. Second, it knows—or at least seems to believe—that it can outlast the United States in any bombing campaign. Whenever the group feels threatened or wants to make a point in the future, it knows that it can fire a few missiles or drones at commercial ships and create a crisis for the United States. What’s more, Russia and China know this as well, which means that in the future the Houthis could become one more tool these adversaries leverage against the United States."

 https://ctc.westpoint.edu/feature-commentary-an-assessment-of-operation-rough-rider/

16 hours ago, GammaGlobulin said:

Please understand that OIL IS FUNGIBLE....!!!

Please stick to starting threads on your ingrown toenails and rectal hemorrhoids.

7 minutes ago, Alan Zweibel said:

I notice, as usual, your lack of any kind of link to credible source to back up your claims. . As you clearly don't know, the Houthis didn't commit to not attacking Israel or preventing their ships from accessing the Suez Canal. And, in fact, following the cease fire agreement with the United States, which didn't include Israel, they have attacked Israel and interdicted some shipping. Here's an excerpt from an analysis by some folks from West Point with a link:

"Either way, the Red Sea crisis is far from over. The Houthis will take away two lessons from Operation Rough Rider. First, the group continues to understand exactly how disruptive it can be to the global economy by targeting commercial shipping. Second, it knows—or at least seems to believe—that it can outlast the United States in any bombing campaign. Whenever the group feels threatened or wants to make a point in the future, it knows that it can fire a few missiles or drones at commercial ships and create a crisis for the United States. What’s more, Russia and China know this as well, which means that in the future the Houthis could become one more tool these adversaries leverage against the United States."

 https://ctc.westpoint.edu/feature-commentary-an-assessment-of-operation-rough-rider/

More cut and paste.

Copying someone else's opinion that was written at a specific time when circumstances were different does not lend relevance. You are incapable of original thought. Again, if I want unreliable AI generated reading material I will make the query myself, thank you.

We all know that the Houthis left out Israel, but it does not matter because the end result was the same: The attacks were suspended. The Gulf Arabs don't care if Israel is attacked by a few drones or missiles from Yemen. They care about their merchant cargo. transiting safely. A few well placed missiles will send a message to the. Iranaian proxy. A visit from the KSA military will remove the illegal occupiers once and for all. The Arabs will use a scorched earth strategy this time and wall the westerners can apply their double standards and look away, since it won't be Israel.

Iran has outplayed America to such a dramatic extent it's downright embarrassing. They were obviously prepared, and the US was obviously unprepared. Seems as if the hubris on the part of Don and Pete was so overwhelming, that they did not take into account actual facts, history, and experience, and prepare properly.

The US has not won a war in 81 years, despite having the largest and most expensive military on the planet.

What does that say about America? What does this war, and the unforeseen circumstances that have arisen say about Don and Pete?

Nobody knows where this war is going to lead, but it was dangerous, it was reckless, it was unnecessary, it could end up lasting years and costing trillions of dollars, and the end result could be another Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Algeria or Egypt, just a few of the misadventures that the US has gotten themselves involved in, in the past few decades.

It might have been better to just let Israel do a surgical strike of the nasty Ayatollahs building, taking him and some top officials out, and letting it play out that way.

But Trump does not like clean and simple, he prefers messy and very expensive, that's just who he is.

This war initially started with a declaration that it was about stopping Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability.

Once that was debunked Trump quickly pivoted to regime change expecting millions of Iranians to take to the streets while he was devastating their homes factories and infrastructure. Well we all know how poorly that went, and how little the war planners knew.

Now the big mission seems to be securing the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians have been very clever in their tactics and they have caused considerable pain to the world economy and their neighbors. Securing the strait is going to be a very difficult job. In his usual daily bluster, the boviator in chief talked about how easy it was going to be for the US Navy to escort ships through the strait. Well we know that's not going to be the case, it's actually going to be quite difficult.

Trump is likely going to choose some sort of off-ramp very soon, without having achieved any of the goals he set forth, having set Iran back decades in terms of infrastructure, and completely failing at anything in the way of democratic progress or regime change for the Iranian people.

That will be just another war that the US has lost, and will add to the tally of Zero Wars won since World War II unless you count Grenada or Panama. The US military is huge and they do have the largest defense budget of any nation, but they don't seem to accomplish very much with that trillion dollars a year that's being spent.

Just another in the hundreds upon hundreds of failures for big Don.

The Western allies trying to negotiate a way to protect the Strait of Hormuz for energy shipping face a stark reality: a similar effort in the Red Sea that started years earlier cost billions of dollars and ultimately failed against Yemen's Houthis.

The costly Red Sea experience - four ships sunk, more than $1 billion in weapons expended, and ‌a route that the shipping industry still largely avoids - looms over the more complex Strait of Hormuz, the shipping artery used by roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supply and now ‌blocked by Iran, a more formidable adversary than the Houthis.

Iran's threats to the strait and its attacks on energy infrastructure in nearby Gulf nations have sent oil prices soaring in the worst disruption to oil and gas supplies in history. Absent the strait's reopening, shortages will become more acute, threatening higher costs for energy, food and numerous other products worldwide.

"There is no substitute for the Strait of Hormuz," Kuwait Petroleum CEO Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al-Sabah said in a fiery video call streamed to the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston on Tuesday. "It is the world’s strait, under international law and practical reality."

Reuters interviewed 19 security and maritime experts who described the myriad challenges facing the U.S. and its allies in protecting the strait. Iran has far more advanced military forces than the Houthis, an arsenal ‌of cheap drones, floating mines, and missiles, and easy access from its steep mountainous ⁠coast to the narrow waterway.

The U.S. mission to protect Red Sea shipping from the Houthis launched in December 2023, with European nations joining in with their own operation a few ‌months later. The allies shot down hundreds of drones and missiles, but the Houthis still sank four ships between 2024 and 2025. Shippers now largely avoid the passageway, once home to 12% of world trade, opting for a much longer voyage around the Horn of Africa. "It was a strategic draw, if not a strategic defeat," said Joshua Tallis, a naval analyst at research firm CNA.

The danger zone around the Strait of Hormuz is up to five times bigger than the Houthis' attack area around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that flows into the Red Sea. Unlike the Houthis, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a professional military with its own weapons factories and access to funding.

Providing escorts for the strait would require as many as a dozen large warships such as destroyers, backed up by jets, drones and helicopters to account for the limitations created by the lack of space to maneuver, some military experts said. ‌Overhead air cover would be critical to protect against flying drones as well as explosive-laden manned or unmanned vessels that can easily blend into sea traffic.

https://share.google/zk7okmke7WqnBwL0N

2 minutes ago, Patong2021 said:

Please stick to starting threads on your ingrown toenails and rectal hemorrhoids.

More cut and paste.

Copying someone else's opinion that was written at a specific time when circumstances were different does not lend relevance. You are incapable of original thought. Again, if I want unreliable AI generated reading material I will make the query myself, thank you.

We all know that the Houthis left out Israel, but it does not matter because the end result was the same: The attacks were suspended. The Gulf Arabs don't care if Israel is attacked by a few drones or missiles from Yemen. They care about their merchant cargo. transiting safely. A visit from the KSA military will remove the illegal occupiers once and for all. The Arabs will use a scorched earth strategy this time and wall the westerners can apply their double standards and look away, since it won't be Israel.

2 minutes ago, Patong2021 said:

Again, if I want unreliable AI generated reading material I will make the query myself, thank you.

You really are sinking to new lows. Stop with the falsehoods. I cited and linked a report from people at West Point, not "AI generated material". And I chose West Point above other valid sources, since I reckoned it would be the most authoritative. Against this we have in you an anonymous party who makes claims he doesn't back. Maybe in your world a rational person would choose your take over that of the experts. It is to laugh.

2 minutes ago, Patong2021 said:

A few well placed missiles will send a message to the. Iranaian proxy.

Really, just a few? How has that worked in the past? This is one of the reasons I cut and paste. Because you just make things up. Do I really need to show you how much firepower was expended on the Houthis before the current cease fire was achieved? You know, via a thing called cutting and pasting with links to credible sources.

2 minutes ago, Patong2021 said:

A visit from the KSA military will remove the illegal occupiers once and for all.

Do you have any use for recent history at all? How did the Saudis last excursion into Yemen end? The Saudis are a very formidable military power. On paper.

20 hours ago, jvs said:

Houthis are gonna do it again!

I think no one knows how to get out of this mess,created by one person and his cult of appeasers.

Not quite right - The Islamic Republic of Iran isn’t a ‘cult’ - it’s a brutal theocratic system run by a barbaric zealot, an extremist Ayatollah enforcing the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, supported by the Guardian Council - brutally enforcing its regime and committing domestic and regional atrocities.

1 hour ago, spidermike007 said:

Nobody knows where this war is going to lead, but it was dangerous, it was reckless, it was unnecessary, it could end up lasting years and costing trillions of dollars, and the end result could be another Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Algeria or Egypt, just a few of the misadventures that the US has gotten themselves involved in, in the past few decades.

It might have been better to just let Israel do a surgical strike of the nasty Ayatollahs building, taking him and some top officials out, and letting it play out that way.

But Trump does not like clean and simple, he prefers messy and very expensive, that's just who he is.

This war initially started with a declaration that it was about stopping Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability.

Once that was debunked Trump quickly pivoted to regime change expecting millions of Iranians to take to the streets while he was devastating their homes factories and infrastructure. Well we all know how poorly that went, and how little the war planners knew.

Now the big mission seems to be securing the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians have been very clever in their tactics and they have caused considerable pain to the world economy and their neighbors. Securing the strait is going to be a very difficult job. In his usual daily bluster, the boviator in chief talked about how easy it was going to be for the US Navy to escort ships through the strait. Well we know that's not going to be the case, it's actually going to be quite difficult.

Trump is likely going to choose some sort of off-ramp very soon, without having achieved any of the goals he set forth, having set Iran back decades in terms of infrastructure, and completely failing at anything in the way of democratic progress or regime change for the Iranian people.

That will be just another war that the US has lost, and will add to the tally of Zero Wars won since World War II unless you count Grenada or Panama. The US military is huge and they do have the largest defense budget of any nation, but they don't seem to accomplish very much with that trillion dollars a year that's being spent.

Just another in the hundreds upon hundreds of failures for big Don.

The Western allies trying to negotiate a way to protect the Strait of Hormuz for energy shipping face a stark reality: a similar effort in the Red Sea that started years earlier cost billions of dollars and ultimately failed against Yemen's Houthis.

The costly Red Sea experience - four ships sunk, more than $1 billion in weapons expended, and ‌a route that the shipping industry still largely avoids - looms over the more complex Strait of Hormuz, the shipping artery used by roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supply and now ‌blocked by Iran, a more formidable adversary than the Houthis.

Iran's threats to the strait and its attacks on energy infrastructure in nearby Gulf nations have sent oil prices soaring in the worst disruption to oil and gas supplies in history. Absent the strait's reopening, shortages will become more acute, threatening higher costs for energy, food and numerous other products worldwide.

"There is no substitute for the Strait of Hormuz," Kuwait Petroleum CEO Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al-Sabah said in a fiery video call streamed to the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston on Tuesday. "It is the world’s strait, under international law and practical reality."

Reuters interviewed 19 security and maritime experts who described the myriad challenges facing the U.S. and its allies in protecting the strait. Iran has far more advanced military forces than the Houthis, an arsenal ‌of cheap drones, floating mines, and missiles, and easy access from its steep mountainous ⁠coast to the narrow waterway.

The U.S. mission to protect Red Sea shipping from the Houthis launched in December 2023, with European nations joining in with their own operation a few ‌months later. The allies shot down hundreds of drones and missiles, but the Houthis still sank four ships between 2024 and 2025. Shippers now largely avoid the passageway, once home to 12% of world trade, opting for a much longer voyage around the Horn of Africa. "It was a strategic draw, if not a strategic defeat," said Joshua Tallis, a naval analyst at research firm CNA.

The danger zone around the Strait of Hormuz is up to five times bigger than the Houthis' attack area around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that flows into the Red Sea. Unlike the Houthis, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a professional military with its own weapons factories and access to funding.

Providing escorts for the strait would require as many as a dozen large warships such as destroyers, backed up by jets, drones and helicopters to account for the limitations created by the lack of space to maneuver, some military experts said. ‌Overhead air cover would be critical to protect against flying drones as well as explosive-laden manned or unmanned vessels that can easily blend into sea traffic.

https://share.google/zk7okmke7WqnBwL0N

That jumps around a lot.... You can’t say ‘nobody knows where this war is going’ and then confidently declare it’ll be another Iraq or Afghanistan - guesswork pretending to be insight - although given history a concerning possibility, one that could be driven by the very people criticising the administration - blame Trump and the administration for acting, then blame him when he stops acting enough.

...And the idea that a ‘surgical strike’ taking out someone like Ali Khamenei would neatly fix things is fantasy. That doesn’t end the system - if anything it risks making it more unstable or more hardline. That’s been the criticism already when Ali Khamenei was intially taken out - things don't change by removing a few individuals, the entire structure would have to change.

They’ve already targeted senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps figures in the past - it didn’t fundamentally alter behaviour. Iran was still projecting force and launching missiles across the region well before this current escalation.

Blaming everything on Donald Trump is lazy political bias. These tensions didn’t start with him and don’t end with him - this is decades-deep, structural geopolitics.

The whole ‘US has won zero wars since WWII’ line is just selective nonsense. It’s cherry-picking failures while ignoring outcomes that don’t fit the narrative.

... And yes, the Strait of Hormuz is difficult - no one serious is saying it’s easy - but acting like it’s impossible or already lost is the same kind of overconfident doom talk as the rest of your post.

20% of the worlds oil supply, 25% of LNG, 15% of Global trade passes the straghts - thats not insignificant.

Then there are less known factors, around 20–30% of the world’s helium supply comes from Qatar and thats stopped at the moment.

Over the past decade there’s been consistent restraint shown towards Iran’s behaviour in the Strait of Hormuz. I’ve been working across the Middle East for years - the constant has always been the risk Iran poses to maritime traffic and regional stability. This didn’t suddenly appear. A decade ago it was already a concern - the situation now is partly the result of not dealing with it earlier.

This isn’t just about nuclear capability, although that’s a key part of it - and it hasn’t been ‘debunked’. Iran enriching uranium to around 60% put it very close to weapons-grade. Combine that with its regional posture and repeated threats to disrupt or leverage the Strait of Hormuz, and you’ve got a strategic problem that goes well beyond one issue.

If nuclear capability has been set back, that’s positive - but the knowledge doesn’t disappear. The material doesn’t disappear either. Hundreds of kilos of highly enriched uranium and the technical capability to rebuild enrichment infrastructure mean the risk remains.

As for securing the Strait - that’s not just naval escorts. Control of key geography matters. Places like Qeshm Island sit right on top of that chokepoint - they have that Island houses the anti-ship missiles, the naval mine, the fast attack boats, drones and surveillance... Without controlling positions like that, the risk is not managed, nor eliminated.

This will get worse before it gets better - troops will be required on the ground (Island of Qeshm) and that will give anti-Trumpers more fuel to criticise - or if he doesn't put troops in, he will be critiqued for not doing the job !! - negative bias overruling any other thought process.

Bottom line: this isn’t some sudden, reckless detour - it’s the result of a long-building problem that was left to escalate. Donald Trump gets cast as the villain largely because of his image, and that distorts how people view the conflict.

If a Democrat administration had taken the same action, would the same people be making the same criticisms?

And would a Democrat administration have taken this action at all - or just kicked the Iran problem further down the road?

1 hour ago, richard_smith237 said:

Not quite right - The Islamic Republic of Iran isn’t a ‘cult’ - it’s a brutal theocratic system run by a barbaric zealot, an extremist Ayatollah enforcing the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, supported by the Guardian Council - brutally enforcing its regime and committing domestic and regional atrocities.

Ha ha,nice.

I was talking about trump of course,

23 hours ago, Chivas said:

I agree entirely its beyond belief

Am afraid one sole individual has managed to absolutely destroy us with his lunacy

TWO loons don't make a hole!

1 hour ago, jvs said:

2 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

Not quite right - The Islamic Republic of Iran isn’t a ‘cult’ - it’s a brutal theocratic system run by a barbaric zealot, an extremist Ayatollah enforcing the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, supported by the Guardian Council - brutally enforcing its regime and committing domestic and regional atrocities.

Ha ha,nice.

I was talking about trump of course,

Yes - I simply countered your bias.

1 hour ago, richard_smith237 said:

If a Democrat administration had taken the same action, would the same people be making the same criticisms?

And would a Democrat administration have taken this action at all - or just kicked the Iran problem further down the road?

You know the answer.

1 hour ago, TedG said:

2 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

If a Democrat administration had taken the same action, would the same people be making the same criticisms?

And would a Democrat administration have taken this action at all - or just kicked the Iran problem further down the road?

You know the answer.

I don’t actually - and I don’t think anyone does. Democrats have taken military action before, so it’s not as simple as pretending one side always acts and the other never does. Whether they would have acted this time is genuinely unknowable.

What is worth considering is the alternative scenario. If no action had been taken, there’s a plausible path - not guaranteed, but plausible - where within a decade Iran becomes nuclear-capable, develops longer-range delivery systems, and gains leverage over critical shipping routes like the Strait of Hormuz. That could mean higher global shipping costs, more instability, and a strong incentive for regional powers like Saudi Arabia or Turkey to pursue their own nuclear programmes.

Of course, none of that is certain. But that’s exactly the point - decisions like this are made under uncertainty. And a lot of the criticism seems to ignore the downside risk of not acting, which could be just as consequential, if not more so.

So rather than assuming bad faith or obvious answers, the more honest position is that both action and inaction carry serious risks - and in these discussions it seems people are choosing which risks they’re more willing to accept based on their political bias.

5 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

Israel's strongest ally! Oh, wait! That's not a mogen David!

2 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

Yes - I simply countered your bias.

Yes,so did i.

3 minutes ago, jvs said:

2 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

Yes - I simply countered your bias.

Yes,so did i.

You think this is bias ???

19 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

I don’t actually - and I don’t think anyone does. Democrats have taken military action before, so it’s not as simple as pretending one side always acts and the other never does. Whether they would have acted this time is genuinely unknowable.

Isn't Trump renaming the straights of Hormuz to the straights of Trump?

23 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

Iran has outplayed America to such a dramatic extent it's downright embarrassing. They were obviously prepared, and the US was obviously unprepared. Seems as if the hubris on the part of Don and Pete was so overwhelming, that they did not take into account actual facts, history, and experience, and prepare properly.

The US has not won a war in 81 years, despite having the largest and most expensive military on the planet.

What does that say about America? What does this war, and the unforeseen circumstances that have arisen say about Don and Pete?

Apparently there are plenty of people that agree with Little Pete spending seven million dollars on lobster tail, this is obviously not a privilege he's ever had before, as a low level Fox News host he probably didn't make much money. Now he's in on Trump's grift and likely making his first fortune.

There's no undoing what's happened. Sort of like kicking a hornets nest and trying to make it OK, you can't. Time to squash our enemy in Iran and this will require help from our many allies. It's to everyone's best interest to open the Strait for safe passage.

On 3/30/2026 at 5:44 AM, spidermike007 said:

Nobody knows where this war is going to lead, but it was dangerous, it was reckless, it was unnecessary, it could end up lasting years and costing trillions of dollars, and the end result could be another Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Algeria or Egypt, just a few of the misadventures that the US has gotten themselves involved in, in the past few decades.

It might have been better to just let Israel do a surgical strike of the nasty Ayatollahs building, taking him and some top officials out, and letting it play out that way.

But Trump does not like clean and simple, he prefers messy and very expensive, that's just who he is.

This war initially started with a declaration that it was about stopping Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability.

Once that was debunked Trump quickly pivoted to regime change expecting millions of Iranians to take to the streets while he was devastating their homes factories and infrastructure. Well we all know how poorly that went, and how little the war planners knew.

Now the big mission seems to be securing the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians have been very clever in their tactics and they have caused considerable pain to the world economy and their neighbors. Securing the strait is going to be a very difficult job. In his usual daily bluster, the boviator in chief talked about how easy it was going to be for the US Navy to escort ships through the strait. Well we know that's not going to be the case, it's actually going to be quite difficult.

Trump is likely going to choose some sort of off-ramp very soon, without having achieved any of the goals he set forth, having set Iran back decades in terms of infrastructure, and completely failing at anything in the way of democratic progress or regime change for the Iranian people.

That will be just another war that the US has lost, and will add to the tally of Zero Wars won since World War II unless you count Grenada or Panama. The US military is huge and they do have the largest defense budget of any nation, but they don't seem to accomplish very much with that trillion dollars a year that's being spent.

Just another in the hundreds upon hundreds of failures for big Don.

The Western allies trying to negotiate a way to protect the Strait of Hormuz for energy shipping face a stark reality: a similar effort in the Red Sea that started years earlier cost billions of dollars and ultimately failed against Yemen's Houthis.

The costly Red Sea experience - four ships sunk, more than $1 billion in weapons expended, and ‌a route that the shipping industry still largely avoids - looms over the more complex Strait of Hormuz, the shipping artery used by roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supply and now ‌blocked by Iran, a more formidable adversary than the Houthis.

Iran's threats to the strait and its attacks on energy infrastructure in nearby Gulf nations have sent oil prices soaring in the worst disruption to oil and gas supplies in history. Absent the strait's reopening, shortages will become more acute, threatening higher costs for energy, food and numerous other products worldwide.

"There is no substitute for the Strait of Hormuz," Kuwait Petroleum CEO Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al-Sabah said in a fiery video call streamed to the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston on Tuesday. "It is the world’s strait, under international law and practical reality."

Reuters interviewed 19 security and maritime experts who described the myriad challenges facing the U.S. and its allies in protecting the strait. Iran has far more advanced military forces than the Houthis, an arsenal ‌of cheap drones, floating mines, and missiles, and easy access from its steep mountainous ⁠coast to the narrow waterway.

The U.S. mission to protect Red Sea shipping from the Houthis launched in December 2023, with European nations joining in with their own operation a few ‌months later. The allies shot down hundreds of drones and missiles, but the Houthis still sank four ships between 2024 and 2025. Shippers now largely avoid the passageway, once home to 12% of world trade, opting for a much longer voyage around the Horn of Africa. "It was a strategic draw, if not a strategic defeat," said Joshua Tallis, a naval analyst at research firm CNA.

The danger zone around the Strait of Hormuz is up to five times bigger than the Houthis' attack area around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that flows into the Red Sea. Unlike the Houthis, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a professional military with its own weapons factories and access to funding.

Providing escorts for the strait would require as many as a dozen large warships such as destroyers, backed up by jets, drones and helicopters to account for the limitations created by the lack of space to maneuver, some military experts said. ‌Overhead air cover would be critical to protect against flying drones as well as explosive-laden manned or unmanned vessels that can easily blend into sea traffic.

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That's an interesting point about Suez Canal traffic. I hadn't realised traffic had declined so much. And that the reason we have supertankers and not just regular tankers, is because of the 8 year closure of the canal 67-75.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/a-lifeline-under-threat-why-the-suez-canals-security-matters-for-the-world

2 hours ago, EVENKEEL said:

There's no undoing what's happened. Sort of like kicking a hornets nest and trying to make it OK, you can't. Time to squash our enemy in Iran and this will require help from our many allies. It's to everyone's best interest to open the Strait for safe passage.

You and your Israel pal and the Gulf States that have spent a fortune on US kit and are aces at friendly fire. You started it so you can finish it.

21 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

I don’t actually - and I don’t think anyone does. Democrats have taken military action before, so it’s not as simple as pretending one side always acts and the other never does. Whether they would have acted this time is genuinely unknowable.

Its misleading to paint this as a Republican versus Democrat action. Its a Trumpian versus other administrations.

For those outside the US, the perceived difference between Republican and Democrat has always been slight. The foreign policies they followed were generally similar. Of course that is never the perception domestically, similar to how the US perceived the difference between Labour and Conservatives in UK government; the UK had always been, for the most part, a reliable ally irrespective of who was in Number 10. I'd like to think other administrations would have engaged with allies much more before planned actions. Certainly in recent decades, the US has been a big fan of building up Coalitions, rather than unilateral (bilateral) action that it knows will hurt its closest allies (note, Israel mostly purchases its oil, via Russia, from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, so tanker traffic through Hormuz does not directly hurt it, except through an increase at the pumps, rather than actual shortages being experienced in Asia).

A crisis has been created of the US's own making. In January, they could have continued diplomatic pressure, building coalitions, sharing intel. They could have been more serious at building and supporting the Iranian opposition. You are never going to now get rid of the know how to build the Bomb in Iran.

The crisis now is if the US doesn't succeed (in toppling the regime in Tehran to be replaced by one that is presumably completely pacifist), it leaves a bitter and belligerant Iran in place, possibly a failed state, and Gulf states with damaged infrastructure and a changed view of the US as a reliable partner. Worst case, the outcome might mean a defeated US completely pulls out of the Gulf, a militant Iran dominates the region, likely clashing with an emboldened Turkey trying to recreate the Ottoman empire. And Israel, ironically, finished. Who's going to invest in that place now? And a defeated US doesn't necessarily mean defeated on the battlefield. Was thr US defeated by North Vietnam. No, it chose not to continue the war any longer, because it wasn't going to reach its objectives and the losses were intolerable. In 1973, 50,000 dead was intolerable for the US. In 2015, 4,500 dead seems to be the limit the US public will now tolerate. In Iran, it will be 1000 that will be too much.

Last week my brother had his leaving do from the RN after 28 years. In his first 6 months, he was diverted from exercises in North Carolina to support bombing missions against Iraq. Then it was the horrors of Bosnia, then 3 tours of Iraq, including 1 tour in Al Anbar, and 2 tours of Afghanistan, at Kanadahar. He has a chest that looks like Uncle Albert's. He thinks they might want him back.....

Thats 30 years of this. Is it all Iran, or is this the world we live in, post Cold War, where its the law of the jungle, and war war is preferred to jaw jaw.

When the United States hands you a lever, you look for a fulcrum.