Iran had also contributed significantly in 2020. Although their regime ended up acknowledging their role, unlike Russia whose policy is bold faced lies.
The internal dynamics of different nations is always interesting to me. My understanding was that in Iran top leadership wanted to maintain the lie but there was a lot of resistance within the government, so much so they chose to admit it.
Iran is governed by factions that are occasionally aligned, but can have divergent interests. It’s very hard to understand recent Iranian history if one assumes that a single political entity is in control. I mean, Khamenei is nominally in control, but it’s not always that tight.
Russia is very different: Putin clearly has absolute control over all government entities.
> Were that true, I doubt all the bribery and corruption would have been allowed to destroy their military equipment.
I wasn’t precise enough. He does not control every individual specifically, just all organisations (as in, there is none that dares to contradict him, and the people in charge who do, don’t do it for long).
That’s a consequence of the power structure. It is optimised to avoid factions and keeping dissenting voices under control, but micromanagement has its limits. To some extent, corruption also helps in several ways at the highest levels. This seems to be one of the reasons why they cannot stop it. It enables selective enforcement, and is an effective tool to get rid of people who get too powerful, too independent, or not obedient enough (there are many examples of this in the last couple of years: when Putin wants to reshuffle the government he finds corruption charges). It seems that this culture spread down the ranks and pervades the whole state.
> I’m surprised they were able to shoot a plane down at all.
If anything, a civilian aircraft is a sitting duck for anti-aircraft missiles: it has no decoys, no flares, no jamming or any kind of countermeasures. Surely, not shooting it down when firing at it takes some effort. Also, we don’t know how many missiles were fired.
Yeah, it provides some history, and I wouldn't have flagged it personally, even though I don't think it was a particularly good response to the question. But then some one flagged my comment too, so maybe just trolls flagging everything.
Maybe not entirely seriously, but there is a direct causative path initiated by the United States that you can follow which lead to this result.
Iran shot down this airliner after mistaking it for a cruise missile launched by the US, which was arguably a credible fear given the events of days prior. If the US didn't assassinate Qasem Soleimani (with a drone, near an airport), Iran wouldn't have made this terrible error, as they would not have made a retaliatory strike.
Additionally, you can go even further back and argue that if the US didn't withdraw from the nuclear deal struck in 2015, none of these events would have taken place.
There’s a direct causal path from any event to every event in its future light cone. You need more than “if not X then not Y” to blame Y on X. Otherwise you end up with ridiculous things like saying your cat saved your life by barfing on the carpet because cleaning it up made you late for your bus which crashed.
This is absolutely a counter. There would be no assassination of an Iranian general in Baghdad had he not commanded the insurgency with the sponsored militias in Iraq.
That sounds like "another critical factor". A chain of events led to this. The parent is saying "one link in the chain is US involvement", you are saying, a different link in the chain is Iranian involvement. Both can be true, and neither invalidates the other. You've done nothing to invalidate the parent's post because you haven't removed their link from the chain, you've just added other salient links to the chain.
Stop treating blame like it's some simple, single element. It's a complicated, multi faceted chain of events.
If country a starts a war and then country b defending itself accidentally shoots down a civilian airliner it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. You’re saying it’s completely ridiculous to blame country a?
Yes. We rightfully expect people with guns to have an idea of what they are shooting at. Firing wildly at anything that moves tends to earn condemnation.
If you qualify country A's actions as "starting a war" then country B had started many dozens of wars themselves in the previous decade, and subsequent one.
That's basically my point. Ultimate responsibility lies with those who decided to fire a missile at a civilian airliner without doing any due diligence or applying common sense, not those who "created tension" or whatever you want to claim the US did in that situation.
I was assuming you were referring to the Ukrainian airliner shot down by Iran in the aftermath of the Suliemani killing, which is an actual example and not a hypothetical one.
It is. It's ridiculous when Israel hits aid workers with missiles and rockets, it's crazy when people wearing press jackets are killed even after communicating their position directly to military command and control. It's ridiculous when children die early, gruesome deaths because they sat next to a bad man with a pager at a Lebanese grocery store.
It's not the 1950s anymore, accountable nations are expected on the international stage to understand what exactly they are shooting at. Israel is under much closer scrutiny than Russia because they represent modernized doctrine and should be using their technological superiority to enable more targeted strikes rather than more indiscriminate ones. Modern Russian warfighting tactics have been under serious scrutiny since the Afghan retreat, then again in the Gulf War, and then again now during the retreat from Syria.
The only "clean" war Russia fought in recent years was Crimea, which was "won" by lying to the international community and breaking their trust forever. As evidenced by Ukraine, today's Russian republic cannot win a war with tactical prowess alone. The "special military operation" has devolved into IRBM fearmongering and rattling the nuclear sabre - Putin knows he's not the president of a world superpower anymore, he's a Tesco-branded Kim Jong-Un.
