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Posted by crescit_eundo 9 hours ago

The Bromine Chokepoint(warontherocks.com)
145 points | 72 commentspage 2
themafia 6 hours ago|
ICL is the 6th largest company producing Bromine. The US, China and India are also large producers.

Why do I feel like every war is an opportunity to create artificial scarcity?

mullingitover 7 hours ago||
This particular thing may or may not blow up in our faces, but as long as the US and Israel fail to take vast military power away from their corrupt despots it's only a matter of time before something seriously bad blows up.

Despots will keep pushing their limits until they get punched in the nose, and so far the only limits they've hit have been a few angry parades.

chasil 7 hours ago||
Eisenhower's Iranian coup in 1953 set much of this in motion.

I really don't understand the motivation, as British Petroleum (BP) was not a direct U.S. interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

mullingitover 6 hours ago|||
Soviet Union containment policy. Same reason CIA didn't really care about the 1979 revolution (until it was too late): in their back channel talks with Khomeini, he told them that he wasn't opposed to US interests and wasn't going to let the Soviets in. That was exactly what the US wanted to hear.

The real head-scratcher is why the US refused to extradite the Shah back to Iran for trial. What a different world we'd be in right now: the hostage crisis never would've happened. Moderates would've been empowered. Iran's completely valid historical grievances would've been addressed. Who knows, maybe the Iran-Iraq war never would've happened. The US wouldn't have provided WMDs to Saddam Hussein. No Gulf War I and II.

chasil 6 hours ago||
I understand what you are saying, but we allowed Hugo Chavez to nationalize Exxon holdings in Venezuela (forming PDVSA), which was a direct U.S. interest.

Why Mosaddegh was denied what Chavez was allowed is not clear to me.

ErneX 6 hours ago||
PDVSA exists since 1975. What you referred to wasn’t the 1st oil nationalisation that happened in Venezuela.
scythe 5 hours ago|||
The British blockade probably did more for the downfall of Mossadegh than the US influence on the Shah. Iran's economy was severely impacted by the blockade and this allowed the Shah to gain support within the Iranian government for a coup. The US decided to support a coup because it was feared that a collapse of the Iranian economy would open the door to communist revolutionaries, and the US was not prepared to go against Britain and try to stop the blockade. I have wondered, however, if the outcome of the Iran situation in 1953 affected Eisenhower's judgment about the Suez crisis in 1956.

By 1979 it was no longer possible to marshal public anger towards the UK whose empire had been completely dismantled. Meanwhile, the US continued to support the Shah's regime by selling weapons until 1979, and this was probably at least as important as the coup for the image of America as a public villain during the Islamic Revolution.

dbspin 7 hours ago|||
Boy do you need to look in a mirror.
cramsession 4 hours ago||
It's not apparent on first read but I do think he's referring to the US and Israeli governments.
varispeed 7 hours ago||
Funny they will blow up the world, just so they don't face the reality of Epstein files and kompromats in the archives of Moscow.

Essentially cowards.

and the reckoning will come anyway.

dripdry45 4 hours ago|||
Look deeper. Larry Ellison and money is at the center of most of this.

Check out the Drey Dossier stuff and how it pulls lots of these strings together. Jared Kushner, Terry Wiles, Ellison... Lebanon, Gaza, even Iran. It’s all a big business interest grabbing for huge resources in the Middle East and in Africa.

It is not at all about the Epstein files, that’s just a smoke screen, and they don’t care. It’s about establishing an extra governmental organization, the board of peace, designed to take over the civil service, technology, and perhaps ultimately the military of the place is where Ellison installs civil, servants and technology, holding their data and their government hostage. It is designed to be an oligarch government outside of all governments. Basically a super villain ring from the movies.

bawolff 6 hours ago||||
This is a bit nuts. USA has hated iran since the revolution. Trump himself has talked about blowing up iran since long before he was in power. The geopolitical situation favoured it (while still being highly risky) like no other time previously in history.

Not everything is about epstein.

bitcurious 4 hours ago|||
> USA has hated iran since the revolution.

Since the revolutionaries declared themselves enemies of America, took hostage US embassy workers and tortured them for over a year.*

Agreed that this isn’t about Epstein though. According to the Biden DoJ, Iran attempted to assassinate Trump. He’s rather vindictive.

vasachi 6 hours ago|||
Look, it is calming to think that Trump is somehow a Russian agent, and not a sign of collapsing political class, but let’s be realistic here.

If it is indeed true, then Russia managed to put its puppet as The President of the United States of America. Twice. Without triggering any red flags from a dozen or so of US TLAs. That would be the best intelligence operation in the history of everything. At that point, USA should just put the chairs away and turn down the lights.

Epstein files yes, I grant you that.

selectodude 5 hours ago||
yeah, so there were a lot of red flags from the IC. We just chose to ignore them and elect him anyway.
littlestymaar 7 hours ago||
The more efficient a system is (due to specialization and removal of redundancy), the more fragile it becomes.

That's why biological systems look so wasteful (chlorophyll reflecting the more abundant wavelength, etc.)

MagicMoonlight 4 hours ago||
Whenever you see an article like this, it's important to remember that nothing ever happens. We've been promised all kinds of things, none of them have ever happened. Nothing ever happens.
denkmoon 3 hours ago|
curious take in a year where a lot has happened
johnwhitman 6 hours ago||
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commentprotocol 4 hours ago||
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a3w 6 hours ago|
Title says that "Strife" could halt production, so who Strife, a payment processor or s.th. like that? No, the word strife from the english dictionary.

I hate title case.