There are two primary points here:

A) Just the past couple of years there has been an assassination of a high-ranking officer in Iran, and iirc a bombing of their consulate in Beirut. None of these are related to the nuclear program, they weren’t even claimed to be related to the nuclear program. I also mentioned other countries: the whole “Iraq has WMD’s”-thing comes to mind.

B) Regardless of the above, both the US and Israel have signed the UN charter, explicitly stating that the will not attack other countries just to get their way. Doing that puts them on the same level as russia when it comes to respecting international law. Saying “you should have done as I said and you wouldn’t have gotten beat up” doesn’t justify beating someone up.

We can flip that argument though: “These people keep trying to make nukes to stop me from bombing them. Maybe if I stop bombing them and instead try to make something like the old Iran nuclear agreement, they won’t see a massive need for nukes”.

The thing is, the US+Israel have shown time and again that they will conduct bombings and assassinations on Iranian (and other) soil regardless of whether the country in question is actually anywhere close to building nukes. So the idea “maybe we should stop trying to build nukes” just falls flat on its face once the US+Israel bombs you anyway, which is basically what’s happening here.

unless you’re on their side it’s a very good thing if they don’t get them.

Of absolutely! I would much prefer that Iran (a fanatic, fundamentalist government) do not get their hands on nukes.

I’m just pointing out the irony in that bombing them “preemptively” around once a year, and in general breaking all kinds of international law against them (assassinations etc.) is basically just yelling to them that “As long as you don’t have nukes, we can do whatever we want to you, and murder your people as we please. We’re also gonna keep doing exactly that, regularly, to stop you from getting nukes!”

If that doesn’t convince someone to do everything in their power to build nukes, I don’t know what will.

Ironically, attacking someone “preemptively” because you think they’re about to develop nukes really just proves to those being attacked that they need nukes, because you won’t respect their sovereignty without MAD. I think it’s very clear to anyone with eyes and half a brain that the US+Israel wouldn’t have attacked Iran if it could result in Tel Aviv being glassed. Thus, the only logical conclusion from Irans side must be that they need to work even harder to develop nukes if they want the US+Israel to stop bombing them “preemptively” once a year or so.

I have such a hangup on this. Currently, a “tech journalist” in one of the big newspapers in my country is doing a series of articles about how he’s vibe coded an app that, apparently, has been green-lighted by the IT department and is very useful for his fellow journalists.

He admits to not being able to read or write a single line of code, and describes what he does as “leading a team” where he makes decisions about what kind of features to implement, when things are too slow and need speed improvements, etc. Apparently, this web-app is now 66 000 lines of code, and used in production (unclear what it’s actually used for). The LLM agents take care of everything from writing the code to setting up PR’s, reviewing, testing, and deploying.

I can’t help but see so painfully clearly that he’s created 66 000 lines of liability, that he has exactly zero concept of potential bugs in, and which no human in the world is likely to fix quickly if production goes down. He has no idea whether database rollbacks are safe or even possible if something is corrupted… there’s just so many foot canons waiting to go off. And this is just 66k lines. That’s not even a small web-app, it’s tiny (this guy can’t see the difference between generated files and written files, so I’m assuming 66k includes everything), and my personal experience is that LLM agents just get worse as complexity increases.

The biggest problem is that it’s painfully clear that this guy is oblivious to all the above. He’s happily chugging along as long as this looks like it’s working. I can only assume that other people with his level of experience (that is, none) see it the same way.

I honestly don’t see what you mean? It’s true that people in power have waged war on each other more or less throughout all of known history, no?

Whether or not said people had to actually take part in hostilities doesn’t seem to have much impact on whether they choose to wage war. Or do you have a counter example (a society that has changed whether it waged a bunch of wars based on whether its leaders had to fight in them)?

In that case, sorry I guess? Since I myself pointed out that that’s how it worked over 100 years ago I thought it was pretty obvious I was aware it didn’t work that way anymore, so I interpreted your comment as refuting my primary point (the one stated explicitly above). If that’s not what you meant to do then I don’t think we really have any disagreement.

With respect to strategic leaders I was more referring to officers than political leaders. Historically, the path from military power to political power was also shorter: A common way to get political power was to first establish yourself as a high ranking officer.

This whole pipeline of “protecting officers, because it makes militarily sense” via “high ranking officers often end up with political power” to todays situation seems a rather natural development to me.

To be fair it probably came from the fact that armies that protected strategic leaders at the expense of common soldiers were, over time, more effective. Military doctrine has a tendency to shift towards whatever works best, because the armies that don’t adopt it lose wars and don’t get to keep fighting.

The point is that history has shown us that people will wage war for profit even if it means putting themselves and their children at risk by being directly involved in hostilities.

The whole “we wouldn’t have wars if rich people and their kids had to fight in them” idea just doesn’t hold up to historical precedent. People with power are likely to start wars regardless, because they see it as a means of increasing their power.

While I agree with the sentiment, you don’t have to go much more than 100 years back before it was common that the upper class led armies more or less from the front. For long stretches of history, leading from the front and in general being in the army has been one of the ways the upper class has held on to its power.