US Kills Soleimani in Airstrike

Gotta love the logic, if we don’t immediately start a war then we will have a war.

Feels like the calm before the storm. I have a feeling Iran will fuck us at some point… killing Mr.S was such a stupid move done for the sole purpose of humiliation.

He wants his white country with all the brown people separated by an ocean and all the black people separated by an another ocean but he probably doesn’t want to die in a ww3.

Disclaimer: not an aviation expert, have an amateur interest in aviation disasters.

If that plane footage is genuine, it shows the plane on fire before crashing, but according to FlightRadar data, the crash happened as little as two minutes after takeoff, as that was the time of the last ADS-B transmission. Most failures which would cause such a crash don’t involve fire, and most fires onboard wouldn’t result in a crash, or at least not that quickly. Engine fires generally don’t result in crashes at all. In Swissair 111, a textbook case of a fire-on-board crash, the time from detection of smoke in cockpit to the plane hitting the ground was 21 minutes.

I can think of two possibilities:

  1. Collision with debris on the runway causing a fuel tank rupture, as in the Concorde disaster Air France 4590.

  2. Explosion on board or missile strike.

Like I said, I’m not an expert and maybe there are other possibilities. But given the location of the plane, we’re talking a hell of a coincidence. Like, a plane crashing out of Tehran given the current tensions and given present-day levels of air safety is already a huge coincidence. A plane crashing 2 minutes after takeoff while on fire is a WAY, WAY bigger coincidence.

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On the other hand, there’s this:

Deadly Boeing 737 Crash Near Tehran Certainly Not Result of Terror Attack - Ukraine’s Embassy in Iran

Rapidly spreading engine fire, maybe? Hell of an engine fire.

Seems I picked a great night to get my best sleep for weeks, managed to miss all of WW3!

ChrisV nailed it more-or-less throughout, I think. This is certainly Iran’s attempt to end things, at least from an official Iranian response. The wildcards are obviously Trump and the US - they should leave things here but you can’t have total confidence that they will. But there’s also the Iraqi PMU, who will feel the need to respond as well, and there seems pretty genuine desire to re-open an insurgency style campaign against US troops there.

I’m sure Iran is factoring in the latter, but I don’t think it’s necessarily as a proxy way of fighting the US. I think it’s more something they will need to manage, and quietly support if it seems likely to push the US out, and walk back from if it goes too far and looks likely to escalate everything again. What Iran’s response has shown, I think, is that they, along with everyone else in the world that isn’t the US, do not want a proper war and will do everything in their power to avoid one - short of being seen to capitulate to US demands.

As for the attack and warning US & Iraqi troops and the like, I spent a few hours yesterday reading about Iran’s missile arsenal. Basically it’s massive, and very good for what it is - especially considering the sanctions they’ve been under for a long time - but, in terms of what they can fire now, it’s almost exclusively ballistic missiles. Against military targets the only way they get a job done is fired in large numbers and multiple, fairly close in time, waves. They are inaccurate and vulnerable to missile defence systems, so the idea is to use numbers to compensate for the former and overwhelm the latter. That is not what Iran did last night, so they definitely did not intend to do any actual damage or inflict major casualties.

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https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1214712056147922944

Such a Russian response lol. You are much better adapted to this post truth environment than we are.

You misspelled “impossible”.

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A lot of you think this is going to be a win for Orange… and it might be. Honestly though I’m still super happy with the outcome. As much as I hate Donald, and I really really do, I’m not willing to blow a trillion+ dollars, thousands of American lives, and probably hundreds of thousands of non American lives on giving him a black eye.

I don’t think he actually comes out of this looking like a winner except to the hardcore Trumpist set… and they would have supported a full blown war with Iran. Yes this could have theoretically been the straw that broke the camels back on the 40% of people who still love him, but let’s be honest, we aren’t even sure it would have been. Much more likely they would have rallied around the Trump jizz spattered flag.

So yeah a win for humanity here. I still stand by my thinking that with the news cycles being what they are nobody will remember this in February. Does anyone actually still remember al-Baghdadi?

If there’s one thing we can count on it’s that the Donald will go on fucking up like he did here… and sometimes the biggest donk in the universe is going to suck out like he did just now. Honestly when the stakes are this high and I’m involuntarily in the pot with him I hope it keeps happening until he loses in November.

I am also a bit of an amateur aviation crash expert. I’ve seen every episode of Mayday and read every book about aviation disasters I can find.

I agree with your points in general but there are lots of ways a plane can be on fire and almost immediately crash, especially given how low it was flying.

Same here, wouldn’t a missile strike likely lead to a mid air breakup?

Nope. Todays planes can take an amazing amount of damage and still fly. Look at Aloha Airlines 243. The roof blew off mid flight and it safely landed. Like Chris mentioned an entire engine could be blown off and it could still fly.

There is a utilitarian argument that there is a non-zero, positive number in all of those categories that we should be willing to expend, because getting rid of Trump will ultimately lead to spending less in blood and money, so there would be a net saving of lives.

Yeah I’m pretty sure war with Iran was one of the worse things that Trump could inflict on the world so fading it is good.

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A future with a Trump second term may be more likely to put us onto a track where we fight a world war over the rest of the world trying to force the US into compliance with things needed to combat climate change.

So basically Iran shows everybody what “de-escalation bombs” really look like.

Now if he can just read the damn teleprompter and not say some dumb inflammatory shit when he gives his reassuring-the-nation speech, we’re home free (for today at least).

if they accidentally shot down the jet, that is partially on the orange ■■■■■

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There’s no sane reason for Iran to be shooting down jets with international civilians.