Madman minute

The current situation of the Fourth Gulf War is...

...yeah, well, okay, I have no fucking idea either. 

It looks like 1) after Felony Fats' went utterly nuts (as in "hanged after Nuremburg for being a huge goddamn war criminal" utterly nuts) on Monday 2) some sort of Iranian proposal - that had been on the table for some time previously, AFAIK - gave him and the Fraudulency Administration a sorta-ceasefire-offramp and they took it.

But 1) as we've discussed, one of the biggest problems facing the Trumpkins (beyond "these are not bright people and things got out of hand") is that the way they got reeled into this clusterfuck has basically made Trump & Co Bibi Netanyahu's bitch, so 2) when Bibi continued to paste southern Lebanon and the Iranian proxies therein, it was inevitable that 3) Iran went all "fuck you assholes!" and took the most immediately troublesome course of action they could, shutting down movement through the Strait of Hormuz.

Now it's difficult to be sure where Iran and the U.S. are geopolitically. Israel? Those worthless fuckers have gone Full Apartheid State and don't care. They've quit even pretending that they want some sort of modus vivendi with the non-Jewish people around the Levant. So any settlement coming out of this war has to accept that Israel will fuck with it and find a way to workaround that.

Problems being that 1) Trump is too stupid and ignorant to understand that and 2) none of the people around Trump will get that through his foot-thick skull. So Israel will end up having some sort of effective veto on the "settlement" to the degree they can and the MAGAts will let them.

Here's the real bottom line I see.

1) At this point the Iranian government - what- and whoever that is - has no real reason to simply "give up" (i.e. unconditional surrender), which is the only "settlement" Tubby and his bobos want or will accept, but

2) The U.S. dare not risk physical invasion, which is the only sure way to compel that unconditional surrender. Short of millions of soldiers actually occupying the nation the only tool in the U.S. bag is death and misery for Iranians.

3) But the current Iranian regime has made it brutally obvious that it could give a shit how much death and misery it's people suffer! Shit, one of the many bullshit "reasons" Trump sharted out for this fiasco was how many Iranian people had been killed protesting the mullahs' rule. 

4) So the two sides appear locked in place; American bombs and missiles will blow shit up in Iran, Iran will reply to the degree they can. Rinse, repeat.

It's worth hammering, again, on several things:

The U.S. has been fucking around in the Middle East since the 1940s.

During that whole time, U.S. political and military assessments of the potential risks of dragging Iran into a local (or, worse, regional) war included concerns about the difficulties created by the sheer size of the Persian nation and by its potential for creating problems - that is, largely, destabilizing - throughout the region.

In particular the production and supply of petroleum, either from production (extraction, refining), or in transit, particularly through the Strait.

Which is largely why, despite U.S. geopolitical concerns about the Islamic Republic, the various armed adventures former U.S. administrations ginned up in the region were crafted to ensure that the Iranian responses were limited and peripheral. Not even the vast reservoir of ambitious belligerent ignorance contained within the Bush the Lesser Administration allowed the "Real Men Want To Go To Tehran" faction off the leash.

Now?

We can see why even those evil dumbfucks didn't do this.

I don't see how any of this ends "well" for anyone. As Bret Devereaux pointed out:

"...the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.

Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer."

To which I can add only...

Yep.

One last thought: Fred Kaplan has a long piece at Slate (here's the link but, well, fucking Slate; it's paywalled) about how Tubby's ignorance has a lot to do with the whole Death of NATO story. He concludes:

"At his press conference on Tuesday, the president capped off his tirade against the NATO allies with a particularly petulant remark.

    "It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, “Bye-bye.”

This is an unserious man. I take back my suggestion at the top of this column that someone needs to brief Trump on what the NATO treaty says. It doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t listen anyway."

I'd walk it back even past that, though. It's not NATO. It's the whole Greenland nonsense and what it says about the inside Felony Fats' fat head.

Specifically the statement "We want Greenland"

 We want Greenland.

 WE want Greenland.

 As Tonto asked in the joke;

Who the fuck is this "we", Porky?

Me? Fuuuuuck no. I'm fine not "wanting" Greenland. You? You want a big-ass ice slab in the middle of the North Atlantic? No? How 'bout you? (kicks the back of the seat in front of him) What? No, no, not "Greenburg", GreenLAND! Eskimos! Polar Bears! Y'know...no? Forget it.

Nobody gives a shit about Greenland except you, fat boy. 

People who understand how the 1951 agreement works (that'd be me, among others...) understand that we "have" Greenland in any sense that matters to "us" as citizens of the United States. 

People who don't are...well, they probably don't even know where the damn island is. So.

No. What these three words do is open an inspection port to the ridiculous mess that occupies this dim bastard's skull and exposes the tangle of decay and stupidity within.

Because inside his head "we" - We the People - want what HE wants. 

And what he wants IS what "we" want. So he "should" get it.

He really, truly, no fucking shit, believes that what he wants, anything, everything he want - Greenland, more money for him, dead darkies, women's genitals - is what We, the entire country, wants. So "we" - that is, HE - should get it.

That's...something beyond just insane.

I've seen Trump referred to as "our Mad King".

But this? 

This is the most up-front truly gonzo, bull-goose-looney, outright batshit thing I think I've ever heard, and from Trump?

That's saying a lot. 

The Return of Baghdad Bob

 Soooo..? How's our Splendid Little Gulf War going this week!?

 Well, Felony Fats supposedly gave one of his patented Fireside Weaves Wednesday evening. I say "supposedly" because I didn't listen to it...

(Confession; it's not so much the projectile vomit of lies, more lies, and even weirder "is this even a lie? WTF?" that comes out of Orange Foolius' piehole that keeps me away from his YouTube fodder; it's the tone. The actual sound of him; that nasal, whiny, Queens-white-trash thing he always does. No matter what he actually says - and Jim Wright does a perfectly good job of describing his Wednesday word salad - it's that nails-on-a-blackboard sound of his voice that drives me to instant loathing. So I read the transcript.)

...but apparently we've won. 

But we're going to keep winning for just another Infrastructure-Week-slash-GOP-heathcare-plan-units (hint: two weeks) and then...something something build a Victory Arch.

The IRGC and whoever else is sending the commo check messages from Tehran seem to disagree that "...we are on the cusp of ending Iran's sinister threat to America and the world." and as Clausewitz (drink!) would remind us, the enemy gets a vote, too, so.

Included in that vote are the numerous Iran-connected Shiite militias in Iraq, which, since all this explosive winning ("Their leaders, most of them and the terrorist regime they led, are now dead,") has removed the IRGC liasons that acted as strategic dampers on the angry Shiite guys in the basement of the Basra Rite-Aid, are now coming out of the woodwork, as anyone who'd lived through Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure would have told you was as predictable as a Republican lying about immigration, health care, or Social Security. 

From the link:

"For years, Iranian-backed groups like Kataib Hezbollah have targeted U.S. and coalition bases, headquarters, embassies and other facilities in Iraq. While these groups have been supported by Iran with funding, weapons, intelligence and command and control, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has also reigned them in. With the IRGC fighting for its own survival now, and its command and control structure decimated, their grip over the militias has loosened."

Y'think? And even if those IRGC C&C operators were in place, why would they want to go all kumbaya on the angry boys from the Muqtada al-Sadr Memorial Marching and Chowder Society? Why would the Iraqi militias want them to?

Fuck. If I were a twenty-something taxi driver in Mosul, y'know what?

I'd be hating on some American ass. Any American. ALL Americans.

Because it'd feel like every ten or twenty years the fucking ferenghis show up and just kill a shitload of people who look like me. 

For "reasons". Kuwaitis. Oil. "Freedom". Geopolitics.

Me in my taxi with the Twelver iconography and the radio tuned to that Emirati pirate hip-hop station? Like I give a shit about the "reasons". These murderous sonsofbitches are about as welcome as a dose of the clap. If I had the chance to blow some Yankee bastard into fun-sized pieces, y'think I wouldn't take it?

Meanwhile back here in the Land of The Free Because Of The Brave? What are We the People getting for all this multibillion-dollar gold-plated explosive winning?

"President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending."

Ummm...

Talk about saying the quiet parts out loud. 

Oops. 

Of course, Tubby's spokesliars had race out and walk, no, run, his blabber back inside the Bodyguard of Lies, because showing the rubes too much of the script behind the GOP kayfabe might actually scare some of the less-uninformed normies:

“President Trump was referring to rooting out the billions of dollars of fraud in these vital programs — and his record proves he will always protect and strengthen Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement. “The President proudly signed historic legislation eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits for nearly all seniors and barring illegal immigrants and other ineligible individuals from fraudulently receiving Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Trump economic agenda will continue to lower costs, making everyday life more affordable for hardworking American families.”

Okay. "Waste, fraud, and abuse"? 

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha(gasp)hahahahahahahaha... 

Suuuuure, Livvy. Gotcha. Enter the DOGE Boyz, pursued by a bear. 

Back in the day there was this guy; 

 

Muḥammad Saʿīd Al-Ṣaḥḥāf. He was the Saddam-version of the Nightly News, and was tagged with the nicknames "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob". His job was to rep the Iraqi "version" of what was happening as the Westerners blew the ever-loving hell out of Iraq.

He was widely mocked; ridiculed because his "version" was - had to be, given the one-sided nature of those earlier Gulf Wars - a ridiculous farrago of lies, evasions, bullshit, and bombast.

And, no matter how hard he spun his version, the brutal reality of those wars - that Saddam's Iraq was hopeless before reality, that his master had no plan, no scheme, no one secret trick that would have allowed Bob's bullshit to become fact - meant that in the end he was and is remembered only as a sad, tattered clown whose performance was nothing but a tawdry sideshow, a kayfabe of nonsense that was buried beneath a charnel heap of death.

Whose American authors were, in turn, shown to be fools for the fooling, liars and cheats that lied and cheated for nothing, whose imperial ambitions came, in the end, to ruin and merciless hatred. 

The ironic twist to the end of Tale of Baghdad Bob is that, in the fullness of time and the foolishness of the goddamn American public...

 ...his enemy has become him, the speeches of his enemy's leader have become as bloated with lies and foolishness as his speeches were, and those lies have come full circle, and the meaningless pile of destruction has turned round upon it's maker.

(Cross-posted to Graphic Firing Table) 

...it was a mistake

So just the other day we were talking about the...whatever the fuck the Trumpkins are doing in the Persian Gulf that's not-a-war.

(Here's Mike "My Balls Are In A Drawer In The Resolute Desk" Johnson today: "We're not at war, we have no intention, we have no intention at being at war. The president and the Department of Defense have made it very clear, this is a limited operation.". So it's a "limited operation"? A "punitive expedition"? A cabinet war...no, it's not! It's not a war! IT'S NOT A WAR!

Not a war. Are we clear on that now?)

Sure. Okay.

Anyway, the historical examples we discussed as looking real similar to whatever-this-is included Libya and Syria because 1) the U.S. part of those wars was largely limited to airstrikes, and because of that 2) they largely just resulted in dead and maimed people and blown up buildings and destroyed military things like tanks and aircraft, leaving behind nothing but chaotic failed states that served principally to spread disorder and violence to nearby parts of North Africa and the Levant.

Now.

Just having soldiers to occupy the targeted polities doesn't promise success, either; Iraq is the test case for how you can send a bunch of guys to walk around with weapons and still have no fucking clue how to use them effectively.

But experience (and common sense) would suggest that if the actual end state for - let's us at least be honest and call it what it is- the Fourth Gulf War is something other than "chaotic failed state" someone's are going to have to actually go into Iran and make claim to the actual physical ground, buildings, animals, and people. In war, as in any tort, possession is nine-tenths of the Law, and infantry are the bailiff's men.

Do any of these wanna-be Iran filibusterers wandering around the blanket fort at Mar-a-Lago have a plan for that?

Well...supposedly the spooks at the CIA do:

"The CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran, multiple people familiar with the plan told CNN. The Trump administration has been in active discussions with Iranian opposition groups and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about providing them with military support, the sources said."

If so, then we're out of Libyan territory and closer to Syria, where the anti-Assad rebellion included Kurdish soldiers aligned with the U.S. (who were then abandoned by the U.S. when they became inconvenient to U.S.-Turkish relations, so I'm not sure they'd be the right people to ask about this cunning CIA plan).

What this Kurdish Free Iranian Army idea reminds me more than anything else is the early stages of the Afghanistan incursion, when the idea was to "go in light", using only U.S. Special Forces to augment the "Northern Alliance", an outfit largely made up of - as the name says - the northern tribes in Afghanistan; Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras.

Which wouldn't have been a problem, except for that the largest, most influential, and traditionally most powerful group in Afghanistan has always been the traditional rivals of those groups, the Pashtun, who also comprised the bulk of the Taliban that were the target of the 2001 invasion.

Enlisting the northern tribes meant that even after the Taliban was driven out of the major cities into the mountains of the Afghan southeast the locals who remained behind, the population that the U.S.-led occupying force and the Afghan regime it supported, were mostly Pashtun and were unlikely to cozy up to these damn outsiders. Afghanistan might be the most extreme form of "me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the outsider" kind of clannishness.

So if the Pashtun didn't rally to the government in Kabul - and they largely didn't, for a number of reasons but tribal loyalties being a major part of them - the chance of getting far enough ahead of the Taliban counter-occupation insurgency was slim, at best.

We know how that worked out.

What's the story in Iran? What would sending a Kurdish proxy force into Tehran look like?

Here's a Reader's Digest version of the ethnic makeup of modern Iran: 

Pre-modern Iran was known a "Persia", and the people who lived and live there are Farsi-speaking Indo-Europeans (closely related to Afghanistan's Tajiks, in fact). "Persians" are about 60% of the population of the modern country.

The second-largest group of people are Azerbaijanis, a Turkic-related , that make somewhere between 15% and 20% of the country. The Kurds are about 10%, and there's a couple of percent of various smaller groups like "Lurs", Baluchis, Turks, and Arabs.

What does that mean for a Kurdish "Western Alliance" on the ground in Iran?

Not much good.

 A Iranian Kurdish-led ground force wouldn't be much different to the rest of Iran than an Iraqi or, for that matter, a Saudi or Jordanian army. Or how a bunch of Tajiks or Hazaras walking around Pashtun territory were in Afghanistan. 

They'd be outsiders.

 

And we've been there and done that, and seen how that fucking went.

"Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublie'" 

Worse than a crime...

I don't really have much to add about the Fourth Gulf War to what all of you probably know by now.

Unless the U.S. and/or Israel can convince some sort of alliance of Middle Eastern allies - or, if they're really insane, on their own - to invade and occupy Iran there is...well, perhaps not "no chance", but a infinitesimally tiny chance that this latest round of killing people and breaking shit in Southwest Asia will leave the region more peaceful, less violent, and better governed that it was before the missiles and drones began exploding.

Remember "we" (in the sense of "the Bush claque of imperialists, isolationists, filibusterers, and nitwits") already tried that in Iraq, a much smaller and less turbulent polity. 

It was an utter, bloodyhanded failure.

Afghanistan?

Same.

How about the other Middle Eastern countries that Israeli, or some mixture of the U.S/Israeli/Western Europe has tried to bomb (or at least claimed to be bombing) into liberal democracy?

Libya?

That's enough to make a cat laugh. 

From a post right here seven years ago:

"Well...that didn't work out very well. Libya has, since 2011, devolved into a semi- (or completely, depending on your definition) failed state. So far as I can tell there is a "government" in the old capital of Tripoli, but this "government" is, in most parts of the country, purely notional and those parts are in the best post-colonial, post-dictatorial tradition swarming with outlaws, rebels, armed insurgents, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists."

Syria?

G'wan. Pull the other one. 

From this post, also seven years ago:

 "Update 10/14: What a fucking shitshow:

"Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in the words of a senior American diplomat — likely will be debated for years by historians, Middle East experts and conspiracy theorists.

But this much already is clear: Mr. Trump ignored months of warnings from his advisers about what calamities likely would ensue if he followed his instincts to pull back from Syria and abandon America’s longtime allies, the Kurds. He had no Plan B, other than to leave. The only surprise is how swiftly it all collapsed around the president and his depleted, inexperienced foreign policy team."

Stable genius!

Update 10/16: Sweet Holy Jesus Fucking Roosevelt Christ, get the fucking net!

"Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine. It’s a lot of sand. They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with."

What the...what the actual fuck..?

One thing I think is important is not to overestimate the rock-bottom level of Orange Foolius' actual understanding. I don't know much about the topography and geography of Syria, but right off the top of my head I don't think there really IS a "lot of sand over there". The deserty parts of eastern Syria are mostly rocky desert (the Hamad) or bare soil (the Homs desert).

But here's the thing; when this simple fucker hears "Arab" he probably really does think "Ahab, the A-rab, Sheik of the Burnin' Sands".

Seriously.

It's like having a really simple ten-year-old as a president.

Jesus wept."

So far as I know there has never been a successful internal "regime change" from a use of military force that didn't include physical invasion and occupation of the targeted nation. 

The closest anyone has come might be the 1954 Guatemala coup which was primarily accomplished by psyops and an almost-comic air "campaign" which included bizarro stuff like lobbing pop bottles from the aircraft because they made a loud noise when they broke.

But even that mess - which, remember, resulted in the assassination of the U.S.-installed caudillo and a decades-long, savage civil war - required a notional opposition invasion army to make it stick. 

And, as the specific Libya and Syria and Guatemala coup examples make the case in general, the usual result of the flyby shootings is just more chaos. Civil war, as often as not. Often dragging in neighboring states and factions.

Just as in Iraq, Iran is a polity with little or no experience, and little or no internal frameworks, for peaceful democratic governance. There's no Washington, or even a Mandela or Gandhi, to walk the people and nation from autocracy to democracy and the rule of law. There's not even a U.S.-backed potential caudillo in the wings. Not even one of the sad-act Chalabi variety.

But that's kind of the point here, at least from the U.S. citizen's view.

It's difficult to tell from the outside whether the pointlessness of the death and destruction in Iran and the surrounding area is because the Trumpkins don't actually understand this, or whether they just don't care.

Many of the people now in power in D.C. - Republicans, and particularly the Trump clique - are deeply stupid. Many of them, although not always the same people, are profoundly ignorant. A large number are implacably captive to irrational, illogical, or magical thinking, ranging from supply-side economics to Christiantist theocracy to pure Trump-Love Derangement Syndrome.

So it's entirely possible that there literally is no reason for all this beyond gullibility, short-term anger, greed, and stupidity.

Or it's possible that there's a "plan", but one, since it almost has to have been devised by the combination of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that drives damn near all that passes for "policy" in the Second Trump Administration, that is based on nothing but some bizarre combination of credulity and ignorance. 

It's worse than a crime. It's a mistake.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope that somewhere in the U.S. government there's an actual cunning plan for this war. I'm not real hopeful, mind you; these are the same idiots who keep insisting that what the U.S. domestic economy needs is more 1890-style McKinleynomics. The bar is pretty fucking low for these goobers.

But that's all the hope I've got.

Short of a successful decapitation strike on Mar-a-Lago, We the People are stuck in the audience for this Trumpian GOP shitshow, replaying all the Dick n' Dubya's Greatest Hits only without the attempt to make them sound sensible to the normies.

In the words of a different Frenchman:

"Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublie'"

 "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

"That's what we're talking about. We're not talking about vast wealth. We're talking about sand and death."
~ Donald Trump on the Middle East, 2019.

کمربند و جاده, or "How do you say "Belt and Road" in Farsi?"

So much for "maximum pressure":

"Iran and China have quietly drafted a sweeping economic and security partnership that would clear the way for billions of dollars of Chinese investments in energy and other sectors, undercutting the Trump administration’s efforts to isolate the Iranian government because of its nuclear and military ambitions.

The partnership, detailed in an 18-page proposed agreement obtained by The New York Times, would vastly expand Chinese presence in banking, telecommunications, ports, railways and dozens of other projects. In exchange, China would receive a regular — and, according to an Iranian official and an oil trader, heavily discounted — supply of Iranian oil over the next 25 years.

The document also describes deepening military cooperation, potentially giving China a foothold in a region that has been a strategic preoccupation of the United States for decades. It calls for joint training and exercises, joint research and weapons development and intelligence sharing — all to fight “the lopsided battle with terrorism, drug and human trafficking and cross-border crimes.”

The partnership — first proposed by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, during a visit to Iran in 2016 — was approved by President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet in June, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said last week."

This is an obvious move for Iran, given that it is unavoidably clear that any Republican administration - and 2016 makes clear that the US electorate cannot be counted on not to elect a Republican government, no matter how ridiculous - will treat Iran to whatever they can manage of the Ledeen Doctrine.

This is also obviously a very deep tarpit for Iran. Other "Belt and Road" nations have found that the PRC gives nothing that it cannot take, and have found themselves in hock up to their national ears.

Still...a worthwhile reminder that when your only tool is a hammer, and the tool using that tool is an utter tool, you end up with a "foreign policy" stupider than a bagful of hammers.

Oh, well. We're too busy catching the Plague to worry about any of this stuff anymore.

New Year starts with a bang

Well the Moron has just put over 5000 US troops and 7000 US contractors in the firing line.  Wag the Dog strategy.  War for partisan internal politics.  Popmpom and the neocons now apparently have control of the Idiot's brain.

Not only Suleiman, but also Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Hashd al-Shaabi, and a member of the Iraqi National Council, who was said to be in line for Iraqi Minister of Defense.  Several other high ranking Hasd al-Shaabi leaders killed.  The attack was reportedly done by attack rotary wing on a convoy traveling on the Baghdad Airport road.

Mr. Thucydides on Line 1... An addendum from FDChief

Mike has given us the bare facts, but I want to add a note on just how geopolitically moronic this is.

Leaving aside the purely moral questions of murder-by-drone (and I suspect that a drone is more likely to have been the Angel of Death here rather than an Army aircraft...) any politico-military act by a Great Power can and should be judged by the cost versus the benefit of the action. So, let's look at those here; first, what are the benefits?

1. Taking a powerful Iranian piece off the board.

Fred Kaplan has a pretty good summary of the larger view of this action here (he also calls it an "act of war" eliding, I think, the reality that the U.S. and Iran have been in a cold war since Trump's abrogation of the JCPOA). Bottom line is that the Dead Guy was effectively the combined Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the CINC of Special Operations for Iran. This was a decapitation strike and, as such, a successful one.

2. Reminding everyone, especially everyone in the Middle East, and especially everyone in Iran, that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Not that anyone really needed that reminder. But this is an in-your-face example of the Ledeen Doctrine. As such it raises as many questions as it answers, and we'll discuss that below. But there's no question that this is a sort of "you're not safe anywhere" gesture to anyone thinking about giving Uncle Sammy the side-eye.

3. Aaaaand...that kinda runs me out of "benefits".

Seriously. I'm not sure what else this does, other than ratchets up the US-Iran cold war.

OK, so...what are the (direct) costs?

1. Rachets up the US-Iran cold war.

Which in itself isn't a good thing, but my real concern is that it could lead to a US-Iran hot war, and there's simply no "good" result of that.

Look, the United States at this phase of it's existence is a "status quo" Power. Stability and regularity are its friends, chaos and uncertainty its foes. Like any status-quo Great Power, it benefits when it can work with smaller regional powers to exert its influence. When it's forced to respond to troubles thrown out by regional instability it risks - as it has found - getting mired in endless sapping brushfire wars and profitless imperial adventures. Status-quo Powers are not usually good at "responding", they're not designed to be nimble or flexible. They do best when they can surround themselves with buffers of client and proxy states that can be bribed, wheedled, intimidated, or some combination of all three, into doing the Power's dirty work for them.

What We the People should have learned from the last 19 years is that "regime change" in politically un- or under-developed polities is unlikely to produce more stability. The Clintonistas tried to "save" Somalia and just knocked it further into the tules. The Bushies knocked the Saddam cork off the Iraq bottle and produced the unholy clusterfuck that this move is part of. The Obamites went along with defenestrating Ghaddafi in Libya and produced an even-more-failed-state.

Removing the mullahs from Iran won't produce a "better" Iran (from a US policy standpoint). Whoever follows is going to be 1) Persian, and, as such, convinced of Iran's place as the regional middleweight power, and 2) reminded that the US has not been a good thing for Iran since back in the 1950s - he, she, or they will remember Mossadegh and the Shah and the Gulf War and, now, this.

2. Replaces the Dead Bad Guys with...some other bad guys we don't know.

The Trumpkins make much of how the Dead Guy was a Bad Guy, but...c'mon. Seriously? This was fucking Napoleon? How "irreplaceable" a military-political genius was this joker? It's not like the IRGC is some sort of modern-day Alexander's Companions. They've made trouble in the Middle East and...what? Like it's that difficult to make trouble in the Middle East? Like it takes some sort of 12-dimension-chess-master? The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men.

And - as we found with Ghaddafi and Saddam - sometimes the people who replace the guys you kill are madder, badder, and more dangerous to know.

I said this succeeded as a decapitation strike. But who knows? It may turn out to be a "Yamamoto shootdown"; a little revenge drama that has no impact on the military organization it's targeting. Only this one wasn't in the middle of buttrump nowhere Southwest Pacific but at the freaking Baghdad Airport, which brings us to...

3. Punks the Baghdad government and every Iraqi regardless of political affiliation.

Imagine how you would feel if your neighbor kicked your door down, walked into your kitchen, and shot dead the guest your cousin had invited in.

You might not like the guest, or your cousin all that much...but that? That's a punch in your face. That's utterly contemptuous of you and your home. The neighbor has, to put it bluntly, just shown that you are his bitch. If you don't respond with force, well...you are.

It's one thing to know that the strong do what they can. It's another thing to have your nose rubbed in it.

Seriously, I have no idea how the current government in Baghdad survives this if they don't make every American persona non grata and order the whole nutroll out of their country within 30 days. Hell, you'd think that they'd demand the extradition of the drone operator and everyone in their chain of command on murder charges. They won't...but why not? I mean, it kinda WAS premeditated murder.

3. Bogs the US even further in the Middle Eastern/Sunni-Shia War of Religion mire.

The one thing that everyone here has tried to make a Trump Positive is his supposed longing to #endendleswars. How the hell does this do anything to do that? I mean...you want to whack this dude? Fine. You can't find a way to get him to turn up in the Baghdad Marriot with a fatal heart attack, two labradoodles and a boy toy wearing a full wetsuit and stripper heels? Instead you choose the most ridiculously in-your-face fuck-you to every Masud and Amina between Gibraltar and the Celebes?

-----------

We've had discussions here that always seem to come back to the "Well, sure, Trump talks bugnuts shit, but that's just Trump..." thing. But I think this is a perfect example of WHY it's a problem. This doesn't strike me as something that was the result of some sort of deep foreign policy analysis. This feels like Trump gets pissed off at these pesky little Persians fucking with HIS embassy and making the news like he was a girly-man Jimmy Carter sorta wuss and calls down to his CIA Iran desk and says "Goddamn it, find me some Iranian sonofabitch to kill!" so he can look Strong and Commanding. This really is Foreign Policy by Tweet.

I'm not trying to say that he's somehow breaking U.S. Middle Eastern policy. That's been a shitshow since we stepped into the French and British colonial shoes after 1945.

But the feckless bastard has found ways to make it an even bigger shitshow, and after Bush I wasn't sure that was even possible.

What a fecking mess.

Update 1/4/20: Oh, for fuck's sake...

OK, so...the part where this whole idiocy is "Foreign Policy by Tweet"?

1) Fifty-two hostages? The 1979-1980 "Hostage Crisis"? Seriously?

2) "Iranian culture"? You're advertising that you're gonna war crime Iran by targeting cultural heritage sites? Why not bomb Coventry Cathedral, too, bubba, so you can bag the sweep. Jesus wept.

3) No more threats, hunh? I guess you're King of the Playground now, Spunky.

IF one of my troops had actied this stupid I'd have had the sonofabitch pulling extra duty until he ETSed. Since the POTUS is in the chain of command,...

Update 1/5/20: No, duh.

Like I said; this was fucking inevitable.

Anyone but a complete goddamn moron or goddamn Donnie Trump - but I repeat myself - could have seen this coming. KNEW this was coming the minute the warhead of the Reaper missile detonated. Does it mean that the GIs will have to do a Saigon-embassy-un-ass the joint? Maybe. The Baghdad government knows damn well that the GIs are the only militarily effective force in their country, and that if the GIs go it'll be a matter of time before the Sunni rebels re-rebel (the ridiculous Islamic State panic masked the reality that, in Iraq, anyway, the IS was more-or-less just the continuation of the Sunni resistance to the US occupation that began in 2003.

But the hell with tomorrow; today the Iraqi pols have only one choice, and that's between giving Uncle Sammy the finger, or being his tool. No Iraqi pol is stupid enough to think that being a Quisling is going to get him anywhere after this past week. Trump has made it cleat that his entire geopolitical approach to the Middle East is summed up in the sort of thing one of his goobers would wear on a T-shirt at one of his Nuremburg rallies; "Kick the ass. Take their gas."

IF I thought that Trump was serious about #endingendlesswars, that he'd simply tell the guys to grab a hat and not let the door hit them in the ass?

Fine.

But whacking Solemani and sending paratroops to Kuwait and not even feinting towards repealing the AUMFs?

Nope. He's not even trying. He's pulling your leg just like he pulled the poor bastards' legs who "invested" in his fake university. That's who he is. That's what he does.

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSF.

Gumbo

Saudi Whistleblower:  MbS was supposed to visit Saudi troops at Najran on the border with Yemen.  But it appears he is cancelling that trip.  Meanwhile Saudi troops there are reported to be openly cursing him.  Time for a coup???

https://english.almasirah.net/details.php?es_id=9129&cat_id=2


Sanctions:  The Brit Exchequer sidestepped President Bone-Spurs sanctions on Iran.  They paid Iranian Bank Mellat $1.6 Billion in damages from a ten-year old squabble that was finally adjudicated by the Supreme Court.   Bank Mellat although mostly private is 17 per cent owned by the Iranian Government.  The US Treasury has Bank Mellat on their watchlist of Iranian banks trading in violation of UN Security Resolutions.   So it seems Boris just gave a big FU to Donny-Boy.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/uk-dodged-sanctions-to-settle-with-iranian-bank-mellat-5xwkclgdm


This Day in History:   "With all available men conscripted, 100,000 Moscow women, children & elderly are digging vast defensive trenches around city."  (Hat tip to RealTimeWWII twitter account)

Operation Decisive Strike

September 26^th marks four and a half years of the Saudi and Emirati war in Yemen.  With US support!  Below is a link to a piece from April 2015, a month after that intervention started.  Titled US generals: Saudi intervention in Yemen ‘a bad idea’.  Some flag officers at CENTCOM and at Special Ops argued strenuously against supporting the Saudi-led intervention because the "Houthi movement has been an effective counter to Al-Qaeda."  Those Special Ops guys were also clairvoyant in noting that Saudi/UAE intervention was doomed – even as the Saudis were saying it would take a few weeks.  Supposedly some in SOCOM still “favor the Houthis, as they have been successful in rolling back AQ and IS.”  
 

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/17/us-generals-think-saudi-strikes-in-yemen-a-bad-idea.html

The Saudis labeled it 'Operation Decisive Strike', a criminal misnomer IMO.  There are 91,000+ dead Yemenis many of them civilians, hundreds of thousands devastated by cholera and malnutrition, three million displaced, 54 months of indiscriminate bombing of marketplaces & funerals & weddings et al, and billions of dollars down the toilet.  Just glad it is Saudi and Emirati dollars, except for the million or two US $$ for refueling flights.  But it looks like the T-Rump is going to increase that by an order of magnitude with this new force package he is sending to protect the House of Saud and their pinheaded prince.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/09/25/us-troops-to-saudi-arabia-stand-by/

And recently in Aden some Saudi supported factions and Emirati supported factions started killing each other.  Yemen is now looking worse than the goat-rope in Syria.  There are at least five different wars-within-war going on there:  

1] Saudi Arabia and the UAE and their minions against the Houthis and their tribal allies. The minions later included some help from Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain.  This is the main fight, and was meant to restore the propped up president, Abdrabbuh Manṣūr Hādī (who like an absentee landlord lives in luxury in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)  -  and thrash the Houthis who they consider heretical and convert them to a creed more in line with Wahhabi thinking.  

2] Add in Iran support to the Houthis.  Although I don’t believe they were ever outright proxies of Tehran.  Reportedly Iran advised the Houthis NOT to take over the Yemen capitol of Sana’a back four and a half years ago.   But they did anyway.  And after the bombing campaign started Iran gave what support they could.  Undoubtedly there is funding and IRGC connivance in weapons supply.  And probably targeting intel within KSA via the Saudi Shia resistance, which is infiltrated by Iran.  But bin-Salman and bin-Zayed and our neocons seem to believe the entire Houthi movement started at the behest of the Ayatollahs.  I object, but those guys get paid much more than I. .

3] Another conflict is the battle for influence and control between the Saudis and Emiratis.  Both back factions opposed to one another.  Current shoot-em-ups are between the Saudi-supported Yemeni government in exile (Hadi) and southern separatists backed by the UAE (the STC or Southern Transitional Council).  The STC wants a two state Yemen like it was during the period from the early 1960s up until unification in 1990.

4] The fourth war pits al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and/or Ansar al-Sharia against everybody else.  With a few US drone strikes against known or supposed hi-value AQ targets.

5] This one is kinda like the fourth, but it is the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – Yemen Province (ISIL-YP) instead of AQ.

As of July.  Houthis in green, Saudi backed govt in exile in pink, UAE backed STC in khaki, AQ in white, IS in gray

Numbers 3, 4, and 5 have been mostly underreported, if reported at all in the western media.   

Do real men still want to go to Tehran..?

I've beat this drum before, but one of the really infuriating - and more than a little unnerving - things about the Trump Administration is that you can't be sure which of its lies are lies, which are damned lies, which are statistics, and which may, just possibly, be truths.

Case in point.

The Saudis apparently want the hell out of this to be Iran's doing. That makes geopolitical sense. The Saudis can't do anything to the Yemenis they're not doing already, they are regional power rivals to the Persians to the north, but they'll need some U.S. help to take a slap at the Iranians without getting slapped pretty hard in return.

If they can get the Yankees to buy it who sent the drone airmail doesn't really matter; they'll have their Gulf of Persia Resolution and it's Bombs Away! over Tehran.

What's less explicable is the intentions of this government as expressed by the various spokescritters within the Trump Administration.

Since the Saturday strike on the Saudi refinery at Abqaiq everybody and their dog (and Mikey Pompeo, but I repeat myself) has blamed the tricksy Iranian devils. Pompeo practically busted a nut on Twitter fulminating about the wascally Iwanian wabbits:

Thing is, there can't really be much doubt if there's physical evidence. There will be bits and pieces of the aircraft as well as the ordnance. There is likely to have been ground-to-air tracking of the UAVs in flight.

Frankly, I find it hard to believe that the U.S. doesn't 1) know where Iran's cruise missile launch sites are located, and 2) monitor the hell out of them, Iranian communications, and, especially, their aerial attack capabilities.

If this was as unequivocally an Iranian op I have to think that the U.S. intelligence services already know that.

Now...there may be an good reason to keep the intelligence sources on the downlow - tho the Boss doesn't seem to have problems with tweeting out classified reconnaissance photos - and there may be a reason (likely something to do with fire control problems at the Abqaiq facility that are delaying crater analyses and other on-the-ground intel collection that needs to be done to nail down the exact means and methods used) for playing cagey about whodunnit.

But if that's the case, why jump in with the scary ooga-booga "We Know You Did It!" stuff so soon?

I mean, in a tweet he fired off yesterday Trump appeared to say that all he needed was the go-ahead from his pal MBS to nuke those meddlesome Persians:

(As an aside, remember when Republicans used to go nuts about how Obama was just a cat's-paw of everyone who wanted him to use American force to meddle in foreign business? IIRC that was the point of denying him use of force in Syria regardless of red lines here and there; because we are Amurrikuns, gawddamnit, and we don't bow the knee to no furriners. Ah, yes, those were the days...)

However, at the latest White House presser Trump wouldn't directly say that.

"A reporter off-camera asked, "Could you clarify Mr. President? You said you think Iran is responsible for the attack, do you think --- "

"I didn't say that." "Why do you say that?" he asked. "I said we think we know who it was, but I didn't say anybody but ... Certainly it would look to most like it was Iran but I did not say it the way you said it."

So in classic Trumpenstyle the Orange One has managed to 1) make it seem like he's waffling around waiting for his Saudi pals to tell him what to do, and in so doing 2) irk the living shit out of a bunch of people in D.C. by opening his piehole before thinking about it.

Tulsi Gabbard's response “Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not ‘America First,’”may the juiciest, if not the most informative, but pretty much sums up the general enthusiasm for whatever-the-hell-the-Trumpkins-are-up-to.

But what's kind of weird about this is that if the Iranians DID blow the hell out of this Saudi refinery it's either an Iranian-Saudi problem (and only a US problem if we make it one, so why shout and make a fuss until we decide to do that?), or a "global oil supply" problem and thus an attack on everyone who depends on that supply, including the US - which means that we either take some action, or not; again, fulminating on Twitter seems a very odd way of re-envisioning the Ems Telegram.

Anyway, here's my take.

The bottom lines on this one are;

1) I have no idea who really blew up this Saudi refinery, and I could care less. The Houthis certainly had a good reason. But, frankly, with sanctions squeezing their own petroleum sales the Quds Force might well be disposed to remind their neighborhood sheiks that their own lifestyles aren't out of reach if they get too bitchy. Hell, it could have been the Saudis themselves trying to fool their Uncle Sammy and Tangerine Tiberius to launch a Operation Persian Pacification,

2) As a U.S. citizen, please tell me why I should care, or want to help the Saudis in any way? As far as petroleum goes, gas made from Iranian crude drives the ol' Subaru as far as Saudi, and as far as Islamic despotisms go I'd say the difference between the two gas-pump polities is "pick 'em". I don't have a dog in the Shia-Sunni fight, and the best thing my nation can get from Middle Eastern politics is "out", and

2) I'd be a lot less nervous about some moron starting Gulf War IV if I had a higher opinion of the grade of moron currently running things in the Fraudulency Administration, and this nonsense doesn't reassure me in any way. I think that there are still a lot of Bush Era ne'redowells in this Administration that still Want to Go To Tehran, and I don't trust the real-estate-grifter-in-chief to either recognize that or keep those damn gomers' hands off the bomb release levers.

Are WSSF?

We'll have to wait and see, unfortunately.

Update 9/18: There seems to be an increasing consensus that some Iranian organization(s) was/were involved in this attack. The only real question at this point is whether Trump will take his marching orders from his Saudi bros.

What makes this even more frustrating is that Trump's bobo, Pompeo, is straight-up confessing that this is all because his boss blew up the JCPOA:

“There is this theme that some suggest that the president’s strategy that we allowed isn’t working. I would argue just the converse of that. I would argue that what you are seeing here is a direct result of us reversing the enormous failure of the JCPOA,”

When you edit this for Trumpian Newspeak you get the gist that the problems Iran is involved in - whether caused by or not - are the direct result of some idiot blowing up the diplomatic agreement that was actually working and replacing it with nothing but Tweets-o-War and bombast.

The notion that people are going to die because Donald Trump's ego is chafed by the impudent Negro who twitted him at a dinner meeting years ago just reminds me of the scene in Shaw's Devil's Disciple where Richard Dudgeon objects to paying taxes to King George. GEN Burgoyne answers that a gentleman's part is to fulfill his obligations, regardless of their distastefulness, to which Dudgeon responds that it's not the money, it's being swindled by a pigheaded lunatic like George Hanover.

To which Burgoyne admits is another matter entirely...

What's Arabic for "C. Turner Joy"?

Here's the problem.

It may very well be possible that Iranian assets are striking oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

It is definitely likely that the Trump Administration would lie about whether that is possible or probable, or both, or neither.

That's the drawback of letting your system foist an incorrigible liar and a coterie of New Gilded Age grifters into the highest executive offices; you then don't know whether you can trust them not to lie you into a shooting war.

If the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson - that were staffed with genuinely intelligent and experienced foreign policy players - lied us into Vietnam, and the Lesser Bush administration - that was crock-full of wingnuts, imperial fantasists, outright kooks, as well as the Stupidest Man on the Face of the Earth - lied us into Iraq, I sure as hell don't trust THESE gomers not to lie us into some sort of idiotic whack-a-Persian blood hunt based on some sort of moron idea that it'd take normal humans smoking a full ounce of prime weed then drinking two cans of sterno and a half-rack of Old English 800 to come up with.

I sure as hell hope the rest of my countrymen aren't stupid enough to let the Trumpkins play this game.

And goddamn if it's not time to repeal that #@!%$!#! AUMF.

Update 6/14: The lies have already begun:

"The Japanese owner of the Kokuka Courageous, one of two oil tankers targeted near the Strait of Hormuz, said Friday that sailors on board saw "flying objects" just before it was hit, suggesting the vessel wasn't damaged by mines. That account contradicts what the U.S. military said as it released a video Friday it said shows Iranian forces removing an unexploded limpet mine from one of the two ships that were hit. Company president Yutaka Katada said Friday he believes the flying objects seen by the sailors could have been bullets. He denied any possibility of mines or torpedoes because the damage was above the ship's waterline. He called reports of a mine attack "false."

As Sven points out in the comments, The U.S. hasn't been an honest player in the field of foreign policy for a long time, and this administration is a more prolific and consistent liar than most of the previous ones.

IMO this is a patently crude attempt between the Trumpkins and their Saudi pals to gin up a casus belli. If the US public and Congress falls for it, well, as a well-known foreign policy expert once said: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...won't get fooled again!"

And Jim Wright, as he often does, is asking the question that EVERY news agency should be asking: "Cui bono?".

Who would benefit from a US-Iran dustup? Especially one that would, as it inevitably would, raise the price of petroleum?

Hmmm.

Update 6/26:

"Strategy? I don't need no steenkin' strategy? I have guns! I take YOUR strategy!"

What a fucking maroon.