[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('asg70', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', '
')I don’t watch videos, I read. Bandwidth limited.

[Yoshua]

There have been mass protests in 25 nations the last year. Only in Sudan and Bolivia were the governments overthrown when the police and army turned against their governments.

I guess it's all about who holds the guns and who they are loyal to that decides how things will turn out?

"You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit there for long". Yeltsin

[Newfie]

What I thought was GERY interesting was that it was the the head of the Iranian GUARD who said (paraphrasing) “We told the clerics about the accident the same morning.” Which placed the blame more in the clerics rather than the hapless Guard who made a “simple but tragic mistake.”

So I took that as a sign of a serious rift between the 2 factions. Which do I support? Neither. Which would be better for the USA? No clue.

Perhaps with out Solimani around forces in the guards feel they can topped the clerics. Will they set up a democratic government or a military dictatorship or ????? No clue.

I do think it’s dangerous times for the ruling clerics.

[Newfie]

Reposting from a different open forum.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Interview with a Russian expert of radar anti-aircraft missile systems
I have found a couple of interesting articles on the Novaya Gazeta (on their website, second article under: /articles/2020/01/11/83411-vse-taki-obezyana-s-granatoy, I don't know if I can post whole link here). They contain 2 interviews with Andrey Gorbachevsky, a Russian engineer and developper of radar anti-aircraft missile systems who worked for the Russian State Scientific Research Institute of Aviation Systems (GosNIIAS). That is: a person familiar with the Tor system.
It's clear throughout the articles that it's difficult for him to accept what happened, so much so that he says: "No one and under no circumstances could mistake a passenger plane for a cruise missile. To do that it would take not just a "monkey with a grenade", but a DRUNK "monkey with a grenade". He says the flight delay in his opinion couldn't have made any kind of difference, as "the plane took off from a civilian airfield and went along a standard track. A passenger plane cannot fly randomly, it goes along a dedicated corridor", plus "it was taking off", "that alone" would have told the crew commander (the one who gives the authorization to fire the missile, as he says, adding that without this authorization it is impossible to launch the missile) that it obviuosly was a passanger plane. He adds that after 20 seconds from take off the airplane would have been visible on the primary 'air search' radar (the TOR system has 2 radars, the second is for missile guidance) and for approximately 6 minutes it would have created a trace: so "it was clear where it was coming from" (i.e. the well-known civilian airport). He adds: the crew commander "evaluates the signal strength from the target by the magnitude of the mark (i.e. on the radar): if it's a large or small target. The indicators show a bright or dim mark. Simply put, the commander should have seen something big fly. From a large passenger plane, the mark will be ten times brighter than from a military target" (i.e. like a fighter plane). A cruise missile "has a very low reflecting power. The brightness of this point is no longer ten, but a hundred times less bright than that of a commercial airplane. And a cruise missile flies at a very low altitude, in order to avoid being detected... we are speaking about just tens of meters. And the Iranians shot down a huge plane flying at an altitude of 2400 meters. How can this be confused? The difference is where to direct the beam (i.e. for the launch): up to the sky or down along the earth".
Despite being so shocked by such an incredible 'mistake' (this shows, he says "the degree of collapse of its (=Iran's) air defense. I can't remember a bigger mistake in the history of air defense"), he concludes that the crew must have been terrified by the idea of the American raid and adds "they didn't see anything, they just took and fired".
So his take.
Edit: the radar expert says the guidance launch beam is so narrow (1 degree) that the passanger plane was aimed at (i.e. not possible that "something else" was targeted and then the missile hit it by mistake, he says). Regarding 'automated' mode for the Tor: he excludes that ("No, launching a rocket is not possible without an indication of the crew commander").
Reply

[derhundistlos]

"So much for the claim by the Ds that killing Solimanni would unite all the Iranians. They were wrong, as usual."

Shut-up, Planters Wart, with your gross generalizations. I see that you moved over to this side after having been run off the Member's Comment section for posting one too many stupid comments.

Soleimani was visiting Iraq on a previously announced formal state visit, which explains why his Iraqi counterpart was also killed in the assassination via missile strike as the motorcade left the international airport.

It would be as if the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs received an invitation from the UK to attend meetings with high ranking UK military officials. After flying into London's Gatwick Airport, the chairman was greeted by his UK counterpart and while departing Gatwick the Iranians launched a missile killing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs along with other high ranking UK military officers. Brilliant. This was done by Trump pandering to the neo-con, chicken-hawk element of the Republican party. Blood is what they wanted and that's what Trump delivered.

In 1988 a US Naval vessel shot down an Iranian Air Airbus A300 while flying in Iranian airspace killing all 290 passengers on board.

Some members of the US Naval Cruiser that shot the plane down were later awarded medals, and the United States has never formally apologized for the event.

The fact of the matter, regardless of how you try and spin it, is the assassination of a popular military commander did serve to unify the nation as it would in any country.

The "thousands" of protesters and "massive protests" you routinely cite are in fact hundreds. There is no mass uprising. Period. Next year at this time nothing will have changed in Iran.

I remember during the 2016 presidential campaign Trump's many promises to end stupid wars in the Middle East. More than three years later and nothing has changed except Trump increased troop levels in Afghanistan and now this. The Iranians, unlike Trump, are patient and cautious. They will wait for the right moment to strike.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51079965

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('derhundistlos', '
')Shut-up, Plant....

[shortonoil]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he Iranians, unlike Trump, are patient and cautious. They will wait for the right moment to strike.

[asg70]

Iran is mostly a case-study of demographic shift thanks to the depopulation of the older generation during the Iran/Iraq war. The younger demographic tend to be more sympathetic towards the west. They didn't live through the Shah or the revolution itself so it doesn't mean as much to them.

As for Plant, he can't contribute to any thread regardless of topic without trying to make a dig at Obama or the Democrats. He's got a one-track mind and it is grating in the extreme.

[Newfie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('shortonoil', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he Iranians, unlike Trump, are patient and cautious. They will wait for the right moment to strike.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'R')eposting from a different open forum.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Interview with a Russian expert of radar anti-aircraft missile systems
I have found a couple of interesting articles on the Novaya Gazeta (on their website, second article under: /articles/2020/01/11/83411-vse-taki-obezyana-s-granatoy, I don't know if I can post whole link here). They contain 2 interviews with Andrey Gorbachevsky, a Russian engineer and developper of radar anti-aircraft missile systems who worked for the Russian State Scientific Research Institute of Aviation Systems (GosNIIAS). That is: a person familiar with the Tor system.
It's clear throughout the articles that it's difficult for him to accept what happened, so much so that he says: "No one and under no circumstances could mistake a passenger plane for a cruise missile. To do that it would take not just a "monkey with a grenade", but a DRUNK "monkey with a grenade". He says the flight delay in his opinion couldn't have made any kind of difference, as "the plane took off from a civilian airfield and went along a standard track. A passenger plane cannot fly randomly, it goes along a dedicated corridor", plus "it was taking off", "that alone" would have told the crew commander (the one who gives the authorization to fire the missile, as he says, adding that without this authorization it is impossible to launch the missile) that it obviuosly was a passanger plane. He adds that after 20 seconds from take off the airplane would have been visible on the primary 'air search' radar (the TOR system has 2 radars, the second is for missile guidance) and for approximately 6 minutes it would have created a trace: so "it was clear where it was coming from" (i.e. the well-known civilian airport). He adds: the crew commander "evaluates the signal strength from the target by the magnitude of the mark (i.e. on the radar): if it's a large or small target. The indicators show a bright or dim mark. Simply put, the commander should have seen something big fly. From a large passenger plane, the mark will be ten times brighter than from a military target" (i.e. like a fighter plane). A cruise missile "has a very low reflecting power. The brightness of this point is no longer ten, but a hundred times less bright than that of a commercial airplane. And a cruise missile flies at a very low altitude, in order to avoid being detected... we are speaking about just tens of meters. And the Iranians shot down a huge plane flying at an altitude of 2400 meters. How can this be confused? The difference is where to direct the beam (i.e. for the launch): up to the sky or down along the earth".
Despite being so shocked by such an incredible 'mistake' (this shows, he says "the degree of collapse of its (=Iran's) air defense. I can't remember a bigger mistake in the history of air defense"), he concludes that the crew must have been terrified by the idea of the American raid and adds "they didn't see anything, they just took and fired".
So his take.
Edit: the radar expert says the guidance launch beam is so narrow (1 degree) that the passanger plane was aimed at (i.e. not possible that "something else" was targeted and then the missile hit it by mistake, he says). Regarding 'automated' mode for the Tor: he excludes that ("No, launching a rocket is not possible without an indication of the crew commander").
Reply

[Yoshua]

Soleimani worked in the shadows most of his career. No one knew of him. He turned him self into a public person only the last few years as the IRGC started to seek political power.

He was respected and loved among the people, but he was also feared and hated among other Iranians.

He was feared among the Mullahs because of his political ambitions. Trump did the Mullahs a favour by killing Soleimani.

IRGC and the Quds Force wanted revenge. The Mullahs gave them only the Ayn Al Asad base as a target and then warned Iraq about the attack so that the soldiers could evacuate and take cover.

[Yoshua]

The Talibans claim that they have shot down a U.S military plane killing all onboard, including the "Dark Prince" of intelligence who was behind the killing of Soleimani.

All rumours and speculation at this point.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Yoshua', 'T')he Talibans claim that they have shot down a U.S military plane killing all onboard, including the "Dark Prince" of intelligence who was behind the killing of Soleimani.

All rumours and speculation at this point.

[Yoshua]

The Houthies claim that they have attacked oil installations in Saudi Arabia with drones and missiles.

No confirmation from Aramco so far.

[Newfie]

VERY slow and intermittent bandwidth here. A quick news search turned up nothing. If so one could copy paste a credible report it would be appreciated.

[vtsnowedin]

Here you go.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')y Lisa Barrington

DUBAI (Reuters) - Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi movement said on Wednesday it had fired rocket and drone strikes at Saudi targets including Aramco oil facilities, <2222.SE> the group's first claim of such attacks since it offered to halt them four months ago.

Few details were given of the precise nature and timing of the attacks, and there was no immediate confirmation from the Saudi authorities of any strikes.

In comments reported by Houthi-run Al Masirah TV, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saria said more than 15 "operations" had been carried out in the past week inside Saudi Arabia in retaliation for an escalation in air strikes.

Saudi Aramco facilities in Jizan on the Red Sea were targeted, along with other targets near the border with Yemen, including Abha and Jizan airports and Khamis Mushait military base, "with a large number of rockets and drones", he said in a separate statement.

State oil giant Aramco declined to comment on the report.

The Houthis have been battling a Saudi-led military coalition for nearly five years. If confirmed, the attacks would be the first by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia since late September, when the group said it would halt missile and drone attacks if the coalition ended air strikes on Yemen.

Oil prices were higher after the reports.

The Houthis had made their offer to halt strikes on Saudi targets last year after claiming responsibility for a Sept. 14 attack on Saudi oil facilities that initially halved the kingdom's output. Riyadh rejected the Houthi claim of responsibility for that attack and blamed Iran, which denied it.

After a lull in hostilities in recent months on many fronts, violence has escalated at a frontline east of Yemen's Houthi-held capital Sanaa, since a Jan. 19 missile attack on a government military camp which killed more than 100 people.

United Nations Yemen envoy Martin Griffiths in the past week condemned the uptick in troop movements, air strikes, and missile and drone attacks, saying they jeopardise progress being made on de-escalation and confidence building.

Moammar al-Eryani, the information minister for the Saudi-backed internationally recognised Yemeni government, said the Houthi attack claims were a "declaration of the death of the political process in Yemen".

Yemen has been mired in almost five years of conflict since the Houthi movement ousted the government of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi from the capital in late 2014. The Saudi-led military coalition intervened in 2015 to try to restore him.

The United Nations has been trying to re-launch political negotiations to end the war and, separately, Riyadh has been holding informal talks with the Houthis since late September about de-escalation.


(Reporting by Maher Chmeytelli, Lisa Barrington and Rania El Gamal, Writing by Lisa Barrington, Editing by Jason Neely, David Evans and Peter Graff)

[Newfie]

Thanks for that.

[evilgenius]

What a fiasco. Trump has no plan. He's rooted around trying to fulfill the anti-globalist wishes of his political power base, and totally f'd up the balance of power. There has been in place a long term move on Russia, by taking the oil states nearest to them and most aligned with them. Iran is, essentially, Russia's proxy in the region. Now, Iraq, which has ties to Iran, is considering backing away from its ties to the US. All of that blood spilled over Iraq and Trump managed to throw a wrench into the situation with one impetuous decision that he calculated would make him look good, for the time being.

First Trump compromises the US with Ukraine, so that they lack trust in the US. Of course, that followed on the heels of anti-Chinese rhetoric reaching the point of a trade war. This when Trump got elected promising to do things like make coal mining great again. That's just a symbol of his anti-globalist agenda, appealing to people where they only think about these things one way. His whole make America great again strategy is a compilation of these one off anti-global reaches. Those people who think that way, however, are in for a surprise. Wrestling manufacturing status back from China is an AI era move. It can only take place in an employment situation where the cost of employing people is as low as AI can make it. The power those old jobs had to make a life for the people who still want to believe in them is over. Pretty soon, in the face of AI, everyone will be in the same boat as those Appalachian coal miners, taking whatever scrap work they can get - for whatever they can get from it.

He's framed the Soleimani killing in that same narrative, as a one off show of his, Trump's, testosterone. So, now, the Russians are in even more deeply with the Syrian state. Iraq may not be far behind, after the killing's ramifications become thoroughly known. The Syrian state will remain the Syrian state as we have known it too. It's not coming around toward the US because Trump failed to support the opposition. In fact, he blatantly bailed on the Kurds at a crucial time. That wasn't against the Syrian state, but the Turks. Still, it undermined the trust the Kurds may have had in the US. Trump is dismantling work done over many decades to help the US face Russia in the event that peak oil goes poorly for the US. That work was done with the idea that Russia could hold an unacceptable upper hand over the US during the peak, if things went poorly. Trump must really believe in fracking, or he doesn't know what he is doing. I think he doesn't know what he is doing. He also believes in fracking, so he won't let this criticism sink in. By accident he has sent a wrecking ball through the support for the US, in the event it goes a certain way in the future.

[asg70]

That is just a tip of the iceberg of Trump's mismagement. That despite all this the majority of active posters support this guy is baffling to me. I really think in the end a great number of americans are effectively in a brainwashed right-wing stupor, even to the point of extreme cognitive dissonance and voting against your real interests. I don't know if it's driven more by a hatred of the left (you see this with Plant) or what, but it's the only way to explain it.

[Armageddon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('asg70', 'T')hat is just a tip of the iceberg of Trump's mismagement. That despite all this the majority of active posters support this guy is baffling to me. I really think in the end a great number of americans are effectively in a brainwashed right-wing stupor, even to the point of extreme cognitive dissonance and voting against your real interests. I don't know if it's driven more by a hatred of the left (you see this with Plant) or what, but it's the only way to explain it.