Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi spoke from Tehran in an exclusive interview with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Llamas.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Thursday that his country is ready for a ground invasion by American troops as the war launched by the United States and Israel has quickly spread across the region. He also refused any negotiations with the U.S. and said that Iran had not asked for a ceasefire.
His comments came after the U.S. and Israeli militaries began a sweeping attack on Iran on Saturday, which decimated its military defenses and killed its top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
US about to spend another $6 trillion on foreign wars, but no you can’t have heath care. Israel can though because subsidize their defense.
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t air dominance the US military’s strong suit?
Yes. Also it is in the best interest of the military industrial machine to burn through as much munitions as possible
I think this war is as dumb and pointless as the next person but obviously Iran would say this. It’s not like they’re going to publicly broadcast to the world how weak they are and that they absolutely could not hold off an American ground invasion
Is there a country they invaded that wasn’t able to counter their ground assault? All Americans have is their planes and bombs, they can’t win a ground invasion.
Operation Iraqi freedom ended in a route so successful that the tanks had to stop to allow logistics to catch up. They went from initial invasion to Baghdad falling within like 20 days.
Also the Americans were pretty pivotal in the D-Day landings that ended up with the liberation of Europe.
They also pushed the North Koreans from the Pusan Perimeter in the south east pretty much all the way back to the Chinese border during the Korean war after the North Koreans invaded the south. Before the Chinese got involved of course and pushed the Americans back down to the 38th parallel at obscene expense.
There’s probably more
Arguably, WW2 is the last war the USA won, and they only won that one by swooping in at a time when the Nazis were already battered and at the edge of strategic defeat. The Korean war was a stalemate, and the second gulf war ended in a quagmire and a withdrawal. The USA is great at taking territory, terrible at holding it and doing counterinsurgency. They’ll win the invasion, but lose the war.
They won because the highly motivated Russians were quickly moving toward them from the East, forcing the Germans to split their army into two different meat-grinder fronts.
America did not win the war, it was very much a product of the Alliance, assisted by strong rebel resistance.
i don’t disagree. the question was about invading though, not holding land.
And from a military perspective they can hold land for as long as they want.
They didn’t leave Afghanistan because they ran out of bullets/money/warm bodies to throw at it.
They left Afghanistan because they ran out of political capital to continue
political capital (or morale) is just as, if not more, important than bullets or money. And somehow, despite decades and decades of failures, the US empire fails to understand that
Iraq - had a lot of help from allies
D-day - had a lot of help from allies
Korea - had a lot of help from alliesNow do all the wars where the USA got their ass kicked. Especially the ones they fought by themselves. Americans are extremely bad at wars - historical fact.
Iraq - had a lot of help from allies
if 75% of the invading force is American, you can just say you were invaded by Americans
The Americans turned the tide of the Korean war single handedly. the only other ones fighting on their side were the south koreans who had just been pushed all the way down to the south east. Before china turned the tide back again of course.
The Americans comprised about half of the D-Day troops, fighting alongside the British (and a smaller canadian force) whos expeditionary force had been pushed back to Dunkirk before evacuating the continent entirely. The Americans also turned the tide here as much as i, a brit, hates to admit it
Also Korea not exactly a victory.
It’s because our wars are really about Military Profiteering, not winning. We actually want to keep it going as long as possible. War is good for the economy.
The wars where we have only been very successful at are the ones that take place in the Americas itself or fighting each other lol.
Operation Iraqi freedom ended in a route so successful
The war lasted nearly a decade. Come on bro.
Before the Chinese got involved of course
Oh so they were doing great up until a real military joined? Not exactly high praise.
Toppling Saddams government is the war OP is talking about which went by very fast. The insurgency that came after (what you are talking about) because Bush’s admin mismanaged the whole thing by disbanding all government employees and the Iraqi army. Which was a bad idea because occupying a country with an incredibly high gun ownership rate and a bunch of unemployed soldiers with nothing else to lose was always going to be recipe for disaster. All of would not have happened if they had kept the Ba’athist government intact. It was all very dumb and stupid just like this new Iran war is.
It’s all the same war, I see no reason to separate those parts.
You could say it was that initial operation/invasion. No need to get into semantics. The original goal of the war was to topple Saddam and it succeeded at that, but failed at everything after and became a prolonged nation building war.
Yeah, I think there’s a worthwhile distinction between when wars fail because of unclear or impossible goals vs when the fighting force is unable to contend with the military might of the enemy.
The US failed in Iraq and Afghanistan because the overall mission was poorly conceived and there was no long term vision or metric for success, just the amorphous quagmire of nation-building. The actual fighting force, however, dispatched the immediate and significant threats quickly.
So I actually do think this guy is completely correct.
What everyone needs to understand is that a (for now hypothetical) ground invasion of Iran would go very, very differently from both Iraq and Afghanistan, because of two specific factors: geography and population.
Geography
I’m oversimplifying for brevity, but the terrain is rather akin to Afghanistan. Most of the major population centers are in mountainous terrain.
This would not be like watching armored cavalry blitz through the Iraqi desert. This would be watching armored columns getting snarled up in choke points and taking focused fire and heavy losses. Seriously: it would be way more akin to the showing Russia made in the opening days of the active phase of the Ukraine war (2022) than the opening phases of the Iraq war.
Population
We all saw how difficult it is to fight a dedicated and hardy insurgent force in Afghanistan (twice, really - once before with the Soviets, too).
Now multiply that by ten - or maybe even a hundred. No, I’m not exaggerating. Iran’s raw population (~80m) is larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Their military, by size, is just under a million men, the 9th largest in the world. This number does not include the Basij, which, though “only” composed of militia volunteers, adds between 600,000 and twenty five million (yes, really; no, not a typo) potential combatants/partisans/insurgents/resistance fighters.
And then there’s the discipline and training and fanaticism, which for the first two are likely markedly better than Iraq’s in both the gulf war and the Iraq war (and, you know, they were watching, and so probably adapted their doctrine over the years too), and much closer to Afghan insurgents in terms of fanaticism. So, you’ve got a rather big population, with an absolute shitload of pissed off and motivated militants. And the US and Israel seem to be not caring that much about civilian collateral damage and casualties - definitely not the way to “win hearts and minds”, regardless of how brutal the current/for-now-ongoing Iranian regime is.
Overall
A concerted ground campaign in Iran would be like trying to invade a very large version of Switzerland, in many respects. And I am fairly certain it would rapidly deplete weapon stocks of both the US and Israel, in addition to being extraordinarily bloody - not to mention, the very real prospect of the conflict spiraling out of control into WW3.
And don’t forget: despite their lack of action thus far, Iran is technically still a client state of Russia. And Russia surely wouldn’t appreciate a massive and open-ended “Institute for Peace” (emphasis on an absolutely brutal amount of sarcasm here) that not only takes a primary client state off the board, but also is being done right across their border. And China gets (or got…? Implications are still actively shaking out at this point) a ton of their oil from Iran - remember, Imperial Japan executed Pearl Harbor largely in response to US intransigence around the oil embargo they had put in force in 1940 (technically, an expansion of earlier embargoes, but this was a major geopolitical tipping point that led to war). If this ends up throttling the Chinese economy (or looking like it will) I do not expect the PRC to take that lying down.
This entire shitshow is massively geopolitically destabilizing in the broadest sense of the term.
And that is why I am rather concerned this will, in time, spiral into WW3.
So, what you’re saying is… if Trump croaks, there’s a very real chance WWIII is entirely avoided in this circumstance? I mean… just going off the premise that this war with Iran is a convenient way to keep attention off the Epstein files, and otherwise we’d have likely taken a much different path forward
No, because orangeboi is just a useful idiot. The people driving this are much more committed.
They still need a figurehead. While it’s still a mystery to me why Pedolf has so much support, with him gone domestic support for this war will drop to near zero.
You think Vance isn’t on board with what’s happening? The entire Republican leadership is keen on war.
I mean, yes… but that’s been the case for a long while now, and we’re just now attacking Iran. Part of me wonders, was the Epstein situation just enough of an incentive for them to throw the ol’ war bone to their party? They needed a distraction, and per your own description, this was a perfect distraction. To me, it seems like the Epstein situation simplified the decision making process for them. Perhaps without Trump, that situation becomes, again, too complex for any one of them to follow through on?
Distraction or not I believe they were going to pick a fight with Iran anyways. Maybe if Trump never got his 2nd term war could have been avoided but his first term showed he was very willing to fuck with Iran regardless of his Epstein connection. I think now that war has begun the USA is locked in regardless of who ends up as president after trump. Even if it’s a democrat.
Not only is Vance on board but they’ve been positioning him as the champion of it. Or potential scapegoat.
America is designed to fight, though not necessarily win, a third generation war. What Iran will counter with is fourth generation war.
Release the Epstein files and remove Israel’s leverage
Pretty sure the US can succeed in invading. It’s the holding on the territory that the real impossibility happens.
Without holding it, it’s pretty hard to even define what “succeeding in invading” even means.
By that definition Napoleon and Hitler both successfully invaded Russia.
They got in there!
To be honest, I’m not even sure they could invade. Iran is a lot larger, more populated and more defensible than Iraq or Afghanistan. Saddam (with US support) found it the hard way in the 80s.
Not to mention they can easily receive materiel support from Russia. It would be a major clusterfuck for the US. I don’t think even Trump is that stupid.
Lmao sure.
What was the last land war that the US won?
Only America could lose back to back wars in both of Iran’s neighbors and think they are invincible.
A land war against Iran would likely go like worse than Afghanistan, Iran has a trained paramilitary that is at a minimum 3 or 4 times the size the Taliban was at the peak of the war in Afghanistan, plus they have likely been trained based on the success of the Afghanistan.
Not only that, but only the most corrupt officials are going to be willing to run the puppet state, given it’s just a matter of time until the regime collapses and is replacing by something worse (and all it’s public figures are forced to flee or die).
Like sure the US could technically win a war, but by any reasonable definition the war won’t end until they leave in defeat.
Look at Vietnam, look at Afghanistan.
The US may claim at one point “Mission accomplished” but their soldiers may keep dying from IEDs, sniper and mortar attacks even a decade later…
Guerilla Warfare is highly effective against big forces like the US Military. We’ve had our asses kicked by Guerillas on a number of occasions, and so have others.
Seriously though. Even if the US military gets a foothold in Iran, they’re still never going to be able to supply enough forces to overrun a mountainous desert twice the size of Texas with 90 million inhabitants. Afghanistan is a piece of cake by comparison, and the combined forces of NATO failed to effect regime change there. Iran is a fucking fortress. America will lose, again, if they try to march on it. And that’s possibly what Netenyahu wants to see.
Or so I’ve heard.deleted by creator
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Why is the distinction important in this case?
Is it reasonable to wonder if the official that isn’t speaking in their first language chose a slightly incorrect word?
“we can’t lose to shepards in the mountains we have air support”
And then our glorious soldiers defeated their barbaric warriors and that was our victory in the middle east
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“Try that shit on my M. Bison!!”
