Comments by "" (@SusCalvin) on "CaspianReport" channel.

  1. The Revolutionary Guard is an odd beast. It has a lot of autonomy, including from the parliament, the presidency and the theocratic guardian council. It has some organisational independence from the regular army and military intelligence service. I don't think the theocrats can tell the Revolutionary Guard exactly what to do. They have a lot of freedom to interpret their mission to safeguard the revolution. One function of the Revolutionary Guard is to act abroad. Revolutionary Guard members are part of Iran's influence in Syria, Iraq and other places.
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  2. North Korea are the ones doing most brinkmanship. They regularly do various saber-rattling stuff as they negotiate for something else.
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  3. It reminds me of how fast it took for Iran to band together against Saddam even when the post-revolution terror was still fresh.
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  4. There's a large chance an alien probe, if it landed somewhere random on the earth, would send back very interesting data on deep sea fish life.
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  5. The USSR arsenals mostly transfered to the different successor nations, with the nuclear arsenal in Russia. We didn't get to see a nuclear-armed post-soviet minor nation.
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  6.  Florian Cravic  In a dictatorship, loyalty and nepotism is your merit. You can't appoint someone who could threaten the monarch. Monarchies are like a family business where you all agree to conserve stuff within the family.
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  7. There is a whole slew of places that straddle the line of being a state without being recognized. Or they lack one supporting leg before they are a state.
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  8. I don't think Iran could be broken up either. The best hope I have is for something else to replace the current government.
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  9. There is a fair amount of industry in the north. In the northern coasts all around the Botnic Sea and up in the Arctic, towns cling in a line around the coast. Towns sprung up where the rivers met the sea so barges from the inland could meet sea-going ships. The rivers have been replaced in importance by the train nowadays but the important port towns remain.
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  10. A lot of dictatorships do that. Raw materials require less civilian development to dig up and ship out.
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  11. I also thought so. People largely banded together with the regime against Saddam.
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  12. Saudi Arabia has an expedition force in-country. I don't know how well they are doing.
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  13. I think it depends on how hard the Iranian central government has to suppress minorities. I'm not sure how religiously cohesive Iran had to be to fight Saddam.
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  14.  @Lestibournes  The nationalists on the israeli fringe talk about resettling millions of them somewhere outside the country instead. Right now they're effectively stateless people.
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  15.  @reredongy  Tora Bora turned out to be pretty small. Like a bunch of small, non-connected natural caves with maybe a door instead of a big Cobra Commander base or at least vietcong tunnels. It was more like places where you could stash weapons and a few guys sleeping, not the Taliban Maginot Line.
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  16.  @curtisthomas2670  The kurd enclave in Syria managed to come into being because the central government got very busy with other things than suppressing them. Like these groups don't need to be stronger than their respective governments, they need their respective governments to be busy elsewhere.
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  17. It sounds like communist Afghanistan was not very popular. They tried to change things too fast and was too obviously a foreign puppet. Maybe a normal country the same way Chechnya under Kadyrov today is a functional russian puppet.
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  18.  @johnpijano4786  The impression I get is that Saudi Arabia prefers to keep its own population paid off instead of cracking down. Citizens can stack a lot of benefits, and the migrant workers just get their wage and go home.
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  19. I'd like to see what China wants to do. I know they have kept channels with Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. They're an option for nations that don't want demands on democracy and such. The PRC hasn't stopped the ongoing korean republic's nuclear program, they're still a chinese client state.
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  20. The job of the army in a dictatorship is to prevent palace coups and keep down its own population. The second is rare in Saudi Arabia, the population seems to accept the wealth given. But the first happens, different parts of the royal house can compete for power. Then it's better to keep the army compartmentalized, no single uncle has enough personal power to topple the monarch.
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  21. Everyone in the North Sea/Baltic region is looking to claim some stake either in their own economic zones or further out.
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  22. My friend described kurd groups as a whole lot of local kurd groups. The kurd regional autonomy in Iraq is not the same as the kurd enclave in Syria etc.
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  23. What does China demand? When I read about them, they often seem focused on infrastructure, mining concessions, port access etc. They have less demands on democracy than actors from the EU might have.
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  24. It depends partly on how necessary their state believes a nuke is needed. A lot of nations, even those with no nuclear weapons ambitions, can have so many necessary bits that if they should start a program, they could do it in x years.
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  25. The latest rounds of israeli elections left a much weaker Netanyahu, depending on what had been a religous-ethnic nationalist fringe in earlier years for power. The longer he can stay in power, the longer he enjoys immunities from corruption trials. The people he depends on are the ones pushing for annexation now. They've seen Fatah as the primary threat to annexing the West Bank. Hamas and relations with the saudi are secondary for them.
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  26. I also think Iran is a bit more secular under the hood than it looks like when we deal with it's government. You could look at the war with Saddam, and how national cohesion worked then.
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  27. The other example I can think of is Egypt, where the army keeps turning up in everything from construction to the tourist industry.
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  28. I still think the EU would need to come to terms with being a wartime economy first. It is taking a few early steps in that direction. The EU is financing more of this and trying to push up production of materials with the manufacturing capacity at hand.
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  29. That's what I thought when I read about Israel starting to find allies of convenience in Saudi Arabia and their clients. The weakest point Iran can focus on isn't Israel. The importance of the israeli-palestinian conflict on the region isn't as dominant any more. A lot of the kingdoms have more important things than the future of Palestine on their hands.
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  30.  @mr.x90603  That's why the crown prince and a few others wants to jumpstart a diversified economy, I guess. I don't know how that will go if the royal house wants to avoid radical change to its own status.
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  31.  Florian Cravic  The US report I read thought individual units and soldiers can be effective. Some of these monarchies and ba'ath states have guard units who can measure up with modern combined arms tactics. But a lot of them are kept separated to avoid power concentration. The old soviet union and a bunch of other dictatorships used to have similar structures. You keep three-five security services and the second army around to keep eachother in line.
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  32.  @tunahxushi4669  A couple grand or three is still cheaper than a missile.
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  33. There is the Fatah party, who has deeper security cooperation with Israel than neither Israel or Fatah themselves want to talk about. From israeli governments, there was a boon in having two territorial authorities who occasionally skirmished. The less Fatah can show for this cooperation, the more room Hamas gets. The settler movement itself went from assassinating Rabin to sitting in on the government. They also really don't want to talk about the security cooperaton with Fatah, just how any split can be used to excuse new settlements. They're not a majority, but Likud and Netanyahu personally are starting to get fewer other allies willing to uphold his government.
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  34.  @TRYCLOPS1  The party likes to give the impression they are always watching. From what I understood, they focus on what they think can turn into organized non-party movements. You can probably yap on the internet like an isolated nobody or have private talks with your family but the party pays extra attention on independent churches, unions, local parties etc. Anything where people start to have an organization the party doesn't have insight and control in.
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  35. A lot of it available in mainstream media, academia and other open sources around the world. Sorting through and compiling it all s the daunting task. Like it's not too little information, but a torrential flood of information from the various actors.
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  36.  Two Natal Yods  The IDF looks like a functional force. They rely a lot on US aid and arms sales abroad. They don't look too keen on getting stuck in and actually invade one of their neighbours, and have a repeat of Libanon.
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  37.  @mattia8327  Contribution for their size is one way the NATO nations compare eachother.
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  38.  @GeneralGrievousCIS  The saudi public opinion is against Israel. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy so the crown prince has a lot more room to sign off whatever he wants without asking them. Saudi Arabia sits with Jordania as a buffer between them and the conflict. They and other neighbours don't really like the idea of some millions of refugees being directed towards them.
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  39. I'm always worried whenever someone gets the clever idea to press the armed forces into secondary and tertiary functions. It looks real tough to make the army do riot suppression and watch over train stations, suppress riots and search for drugs but then that becomes those unit's job. People can't train and outfit for everything. I'm not a fan of France's Operation Sentinel either, where they have small foot patrols of troops moving around on the subway and sitting on landmarks. Any soldiers you want to have sitting on the Louvre must be taken from somewhere else.
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  40. I think it depends on how close you are to Russia. A nationalist in France can have very different ideas than one in the Baltics.
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  41. From what I understand of Egypt, they are half-and-half cooperating with Israel to contain Hamas. Egypt has control over the other land border into Gaza and how much or how little goes through there.
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  42.  @Bakarost  I think the USA pulled out of the nuclear treaty. Now Iran says there is no longer any binding treaty.
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  43. Nations here come out a lot poorer and weaker after wars, not the other way around. We've had wars where states won themselves into poverty.
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  44.  @fasih-ur-rehman9630  Pakistan has one regional conflict going, the one with India. Sometimes it seems like the ISI likes having groups they can point in that general direction. Personally I don't think Pakistan gets any more safe from this. You don't want a porous border against chaos. I think there was an episode years back when some group of islamists started taking over pakistani provinces themselves too.
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  45.  @noonecares793  The USA keeps showing up and proclaiming that the locals should fight towards some new strategic goal the USA likes. War on terror, war on drugs, stop communism etc. They dump a bunch of resources and expects the locals to put all their old conflicts on hold to focus on the thing the USA wants.
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  46. "Attention-hungry wannabes" was how one of my friends described IS in comparison to al-Qaeda. Lots and lots of flash and press kits for a bunch who just managed to take over towns out in nowhere while everyone else was fighting over the cities and ports. Like if there was a massive siege of Detroit or LA with artillery levelling the city, and me and a few hundred friends roll into some small town in Montana and think we are the coolest guys around. We had a correspondant lecture about the fight who showed an overlay of the syrian population density over who controls what, and a lot of IS territory was out in the unpopulated interior.
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  47. I'm always a little confounded by the IRGC's role in Iran. They seem to have a lot of autonomy to define their role in safekeeping the revolution. It looked a bit like in Egypt or Pakistan where the armed forces have a weird role in the civvie economy as well. I thought they had some independence from the clerics themselves as well. I don't think Hezbollah could or even wants to enter Israel. The landscape sounds like there's more ground to give until Beirut is reached. Everyone loves rocket artillery these days. Rocket artillery has a huge role in Ukraine, and there's probably more of it coming in the EU nations.
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  48.  @lilimai4066  Egypt has an army like that. They have a weird mixing of business ownership and interests.
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  49.  @Kosinuss  A lot of the baltic navies have minesweepers and coastal patrol boats. I think Denmark, Sweden and Norway plus the russian baltic fleet are the powers with larger ships. And then the USA shows up with a single cruiser as a show of force, with more firepower than half a normal navy. :D
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  50.  @FrostedMike  The sunni-shia conflict reminds me a bit of old-school nationalist hatred in Europe. The states treated distrust of others like something they could have simmering underneath and then quickly start up when needed.
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