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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Yet we have thousands of people and we should be honest a lot of soldiers, (mostly in the lower ranks, mostly) eager to go into war again because it makes us look cool and manly raghr AMERICA FUCK YEAH!! and they want to shoot foreigners.
Despite the isolationism a lot of the Right Wing is no doubt SALIVATING at this chance to "hurt Islam".
Trump realizing that this would destroy him. His supporters don't want a war either as racist as they are against brown people.
And, as Megan Trainor said, he's all about that base.
Even this will cause him to lose points with those paying attention.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 20th 2019 at 9:54:12 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.From my understanding, there was no Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) prior to the sendoff and dozens of civilian aircraft were still within a kilometer of the Strait of Hormuz at the time.
There would have been hundreds of civilian lives caught in the crossfire.
Edited by tclittle on Jun 20th 2019 at 11:56:54 AM
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."@Drunken Nordmann: Until the first of there family or friends come back in body bags you mean. They won't care if it is someone else's kid. Basically how many of them treat gay people to. All sinners who should be kept from polite society, shunned, or harmed until they find out their kid might have feelings for someone of the same sex.
Edited by Wildcard on Jun 20th 2019 at 1:09:25 PM
There's nothing substantive in the article beyond what's been said here already. Strike was planned for dawn Friday to minimize civilian casualties. "No comment" from the White House.
He really, really is. Here's a bit from the NPR story
I posted earlier about him, for those who didn't read or listen to it.
KELEMEN: Yeah. I mean, I first came across Bolton when he was a top nonproliferation official at the State Department during George W. Bush's administration. And he was always really skeptical of negotiations with the North Koreans or the Iranians, you know, skeptical that they can be talked out of their nuclear programs. And I remember sitting down with him after he had left government. It was toward the end of the Bush administration. And, you know, this was also after the Iraq war. And he was still talking about why pre-emptive strikes may be necessary to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of regimes like Iran.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BOLTON: You can't allow the world's most dangerous weapons to fall into the hands of the world's most dangerous people. And the point is the cost-benefit ratio of political and diplomatic life changes dramatically once a country gets nuclear weapons. So thinking about the pre-emptive use of force is intended to prevent the catastrophic shift that occurs once the weapons fall into their hands.
SHAPIRO: It's striking to hear somebody say that so soon after the Iraq War had gone sour and a pre-emptive strike had really created a mess for the administration.
...
But Bolton himself has never hidden his desire for regime change in Iran. It was a common theme in his many paid speeches to a group called the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (ph), which is an exiled Iranian opposition group that was once on a U.S. terrorism list.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BOLTON: The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change, and therefore the only solution is to change the regime itself.
(APPLAUSE)
BOLTON: And that's why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran. Thank you very much.
...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah. John's very good. John is a - he has strong views on things, but that's OK. I actually temper John, which is pretty amazing, isn't it?
By the way, that group Bolton was speaking in front of, the MEK? They were apparently doing a Russia style disinformation campaign against Iran. Link
(Note: op-ed piece by Jason Rezaian, the Iranian-American Wahsington Post journalist who was held prisoner by Iran for a year and a half)
On Sunday, the Intercept published an investigation into “Heshmat Alavi,” a rabid supporter of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), a controversial Iranian opposition group. Since 2014, he had amassed a large Twitter following, which he apparently leveraged to attract interest in freelance submissions.
But according to the Intercept report, it turns out Alavi, the self-proclaimed “Iranian activist with a passion for equal rights” who claims to be “in contact with sources that provide credible information about the mullahs’ regime in Tehran,” was a team of MEK members producing the content in Albania.
That didn’t stop Forbes, the Hill, Daily Caller and even the Voice of America from amplifying Alavi’s platform as a voice on Iran policy. [Note: Forbes and Voice of America have since removed “Alavi’s” pieces from their websites.] All of these outlets, and several more, have published articles by Alavi that claimed the MEK is the main opposition to the current Iranian regime.
More disturbing than the articles, however, were the Twitter tirades that Alavi directed at established journalists who write on Iran — including me — referring to us “lobbyists,” “agents” and “collaborators” of the Islamic republic. These efforts actively sought to undermine our credibility about the best approach to deal with Iran and resorted to personal attacks in order to do so.
Apparently, libel isn’t a concern if you’re not actually a person.
After the report, Twitter appears to have suspended the account. But the MEK, the organization that “Team Heshmat Alavi” represents, has a nasty history. It was on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations for years before being removed in 2012. These days, it has no discernible popular support in Iran and egregiously mistreats its members.
Despite its history and negligible influence among Iranians, the MEK happens to have the support of many U.S. officials, including Trump advisers John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom have appeared as paid speakers at the group’s events.
The new revelations come less than two weeks after reports that the State Department had been funding an initiative called the Iran Disinformation Project, which was outed last month by Iran watchers for targeting and spreading lies about knowledgeable and experienced Iran commentators. The State Department suspended the funding to that initiative temporarily, but a full accounting of how taxpayer money may have been used against U.S. citizens — a crime under U.S. law — has not happened yet.
The Heshmat Alavi saga does not appear to be directly linked with the Iran Disinformation Project. But both operations raise similar concerns.
In both instances, the U.S. government — knowingly or not — aided in the flow of falsehoods perpetuated by opaque sources targeting U.S. citizens and attempting to discredit journalists and other commentators. And in both cases, the administration seemed to care more about advancing their views on Iran than about verifying the truth.
In the current atmosphere, any discussion of Iran that doesn’t explicitly advocate for the most severe measures against Iran — and, by extension, all people inside Iran — is branded apologia by supporters of President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign. The MEK and Iranian Disinformation Project talking points have a captive audience here in the capital. So, too, do the rants of others echoing the most hawkish elements of the Trump administration’s Iran rhetoric.
Sadly, Bolton is far from being the only problem from the Republican bench. He's just one of the loudest and most consistent voices. Take, for example, Senator Tom Cotton
:
On Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” Cotton followed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who forcefully argued that evidence proves Iran was behind Thursday’s attacks on two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. It should be noted that other countries such as Germany and Japan do not believe that the evidence released so far proves that Iran was behind the attacks. But overconfident predictions about intelligence have never backfired on the United States, aside from that one war about supposed weapons of mass destruction that dragged on for years with hundreds of thousands of deaths. Regardless, when host Margaret Brennan asked whether the president had the authority to strike Iran, Pompeo thankfully dismissed the idea, saying, “I don’t want to get into hypotheticals.”
Cotton took a different view:
- Iran for 40 years has engaged in this kind of attacks, going back to the 1980s. In fact, Ronald Reagan had to re-flag a lot of vessels going through the Persian Gulf and ultimately take military action against Iran in 1988. These unprovoked attacks on commercial shipping warrant a retaliatory military strike.
Taken aback, Brennan asked, “Are you — you’re comparing the tanker war in the ’80s to now, and saying that that’s the kind of military response you want to see?” Cotton affirmed the comparison and his preferred response. He left out that the U.S. action under Reagan came after several years and hundreds of attacks on tankers by both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. The current situation is far calmer, yet Cotton is champing at the bit for another U.S. strike on a Middle Eastern country.
The other surprise ties into Sunday’s, because it shows us Cotton’s worrying answer to the obvious follow-up question: If Iran isn’t deterred, what next? In May, Cotton appeared on PBS’s “Firing Line,” where host Margaret Hoover asked him, “Could we win a war with Iran?” Cotton answered “yes” with a speed that seemed to surprise Hoover: “That didn’t take you a second,” she replied. And it was here that things got alarming: “Two strikes,” said Cotton, “the first strike and the last strike,” would be enough to win.
This is, to put it mildly, delusional. Cotton, who served in Iraq, surely knows that tens of thousands of troops were insufficient to “win” that war. Iran is more than three times larger than and about twice as populous as Iraq. Even the military plans ordered up by hard-liners such as national security adviser John Bolton envision as many as 120,000 troops deployed to the region. Nothing in U.S. history suggests that “two strikes” would be enough or that any military intervention in the region would be anything other than a foolish return to a quagmire. Oddly, even Cotton has admitted several times, including on Sunday, that the most recent major U.S. intervention in Libya was unwise. Then again, he has said the United States should have replaced that intervention with one in Syria — a perfect balance of remaining thoroughly pro-intervention without endorsing a Democrat-initiated policy.
Edited by TheWanderer on Jun 21st 2019 at 3:42:31 PM
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |It's not going over well with Trump himself. Trump can see that there's absolutely no possible benefit to invading the Middle East.
Before anyone brings up the stopped clock again, it doesn't really apply here, because Trump is not actually stupid so much as disconnected from reality. He can still read a map and ask obvious questions, like "why do you want me to schlep forces halfway around the world to attack a country that can't possibly threaten us?"
I don't think Trump's reluctance to invade Iran has much to do with playing to his base—Trump fully expects his base to go along with anything he does. Rather, he does appear to genuinely be a dove, albeit out of isolationism rather than any moral stance. I think it's very possible that Pompeo or Bolton could spin a reluctance to invade as a sign of weakness, and then the next thing you know Iran is under new ownership
But, yeah, I wouldn't expect it to do much for Trump's polls without a better casus belli than what we've got
Seriously, I can't stress enough how much of a DISASTER war with Iran would be! Iraq will be a kindergarten compared to it. Not only is Iran's military way more powerful, the country is also HUGE and full of mountains and other easily defended terrain. Also, just think back to the Iran/Iraq war. Iranians are pretty huge zealots when it comes to defending their country (keywords: Children on landmines). I really can't see any other outcome than complete devastation for the country and it's populace.
Edited by Forenperser on Jun 21st 2019 at 11:44:13 AM
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% ScandinavianThat reluctance no doubt stems from US wars in the Middle East being perhaps the greatest PR disaster of this millennium, and he still has enough self-preservation instincts left to kick in and tell him that another one is a bad idea.
But because this is a matter of personal convenience, not ideological commitment, it's not remotely reliable.
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This implies two things.
1) That the Republican Party even remotely cares, even innthe abstract, about the Iranian people as anything other than 'the ones who got away.' They've been braying about Iran's destabilizing influence since the declaration of the Islamic Republic.
2) That the foreign policy aims of the Republican Party weren't met in Iraq. They were. America didn't achieve its foreign policy aims, destabilised the entire region, and made a huge mess of the whole thing, but the Republicans got what they wanted: control over oil deposits in the hands of American private corporations.
It's the same song with Iran. The money-worshipping death cult wants more money.
Edited by math792d on Jun 21st 2019 at 11:51:49 AM
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.
x4 Wars are tremendously expensive for states, but certain private enterprises stand to make a killing in the aftermath, even if you ignore the arms dealers directly profiting off that state of affairs.
Someone's gotta rebuild the rubble, and those contracts usually go to US companies.
Edited by math792d on Jun 21st 2019 at 12:15:53 PM
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.A war with Iran would also very likely be an Iraq-style war where the central government gets knocked over quickly and then there’s endless chaos to clean up afterwards. That’s a particularly profitable kind of war.
I wouldn’t necessarily say the main motive is profit though. With Republicans it’s a matter of dogma.
From the statements made in that article I’m guessing they were flying in long-range bombers for the strikes, maybe even B-2s.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jun 21st 2019 at 3:45:06 AM
They should have sent a poet.

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Yeah, Trump being weak-willed is something we've all known for a while.
Disgusted, but not surprised