Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/08/iraq-two-rockets-land-near-u.html
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Casualties appear to be either slight or non-existent. Iran did its token lobbing a missile at a military target to save face and create a way for both sides to walk away
Iran made Trump look like an idiot.
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Seems kind of weaksauce as far as retaliation moves go. Not that I’m complaining, but I don’t think this is the end of it.
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They should kill two birds with one stone and aim them at Dick Cheney’s house.
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On May 19, 2019, a Katyusha rocket was fired inside the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq, landing less than a mile from the US Embassy near the statue of the Unknown Soldier. No casualties were reported.[34]
On January 4, 2020, four Katyusha rockets were fired in the Baghdad area. According to two Iraqi police sources and an official Iraqi military statement, one Katyusha rocket landed in the Green Zone in Celebration Square near the U.S. Embassy and another landed in the nearby Jadriya neighborhood. Two other Katyusha rockets landed in the Balad air base, which houses U.S. troops, according to two security sources.[35][36][37]
Katyusha rockets are the Saturday night special of the area. I think the commenters automatically say “Katyusha rocket” before they actually know anything.
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Iran apparently has poor control of it’s proxies in the area. Purportedly even the Revolutionary Guard.
So this could just be after shocks.
These are apparently old Soviet truck mounted rockets that are common in the area.
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Sure… it was Iran that made Trump look like an idiot.
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Life makes him look like an idiot. But he had help this time around.
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Iran had better control of their proxies, but oddly enough the person who held that job isn’t available.
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I get what you’re saying but it’s kind of like stating that an animal trainer made Jumbo look like an elephant.
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Point well taken
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While there are those, “Katyusha rocket" seems to refer to a whole range of rocket sizes and vehicles. (Always has, back to WWII, when they’d mount rocket racks on whatever they had, including Willys jeeps and Studebaker trucks.) No doubt someone makes Soviet knock-off copies too.
For Communists, they had pretty good name-branding.
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Bah! they just hate us for our freedoms! I mean, we freed them from the worst tyrant ever to exist on god’s… Allah’s green earth! How can they not be eternally grateful! /s
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It’s not. They’re building a nuclear bomb. This mild response was brilliant. Now, if Trump again attacks Iran provocatively, Trump/America will again look like the oafish aggressor. Only Trump could push Europe to be on the side of the nation constructing a nuclear bomb.
They were not building a nuclear bomb until Trump pulled out the rug from under the “don’t build nuclear weapons and we’ll let you back in the global club” agreement.
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Iran’s nuclear efforts have been largely bluff since Stuxnet took out its enrichment efforts years ago.
Countries which actively look to make nuclear weapons don’t announce to the world their uranium enrichment efforts like Iran does.
They hide them underground and simply build up enough of a supply to surprise the world with a nuclear test. So by that time its too late for anyone to stop them. Uranium enrichment & plutonium creation are the typical barrier to nuclear weapon creation. The technology is 70+ years old and easy enough to adapt. But the process of creating enough fissile material is expensive, time consuming and easy to disrupt from outside sources. That is why bluffing about how much uranium your enriching is far more effective for propaganda than actually doing it.
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And they were technically still bound by, and mostly abiding by, the agreement despite that until the drone strike. Their first response was to formally withdraw from it.
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And, despite this formal withdrawal from the already-dead murdered-by-the-USA agreement, they still declare that they have no intention of building or using nuclear weapons.
Despite the fact that they have an extremely strong and valid justification to urgently develop nukes for self-defence.
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What proof do you have of this?
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