"Siri, what was the leading cause of death in the U.S. Army during the final year of World War 1?"

Asking for this dumbfuck:

Mind you, this fits with this overpromoted dumbass' worldview, where pushups always trump logistics (yswidt) and military learning. 

His abysmal ignorance of why the US military has been aggressive about things like preventive medicine, field sanitation and hygiene since 1941 explains a lot (tho this jackass is on record boasting that he doesn't wash his hands after dumping a load, so YMMV...).

I wrote a whole series on "The Imperial Japanese Army in WW2: What Went Wrong", and one of the single biggest failures that hammered the 大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun was the whole manly-man/bushido cult of warriorness that neglected beans and bullets for swords and spirit. 

The notion that somehow a poorly-supplied, under-resourced and -armed fighting force would beat more logistically and tactically competent enemies because of some sort of mystical whatever-the-Japanese-is for "cult of the badass"?

That's our boy!

So when I see stuff like this sad Fourth Gulf War Navy chow:

 

I think, yep, that's Major Pushups at work.

If the present Administration has a constant through-line, it's that if you can think up some way to do the dumbest thing possible in the clumsiest, most ridiculous way, the Trump people will find some thing that is so much more idiotic to fuck up in a way so ludicrous that you would dismiss it as an improbable fiction? That's what they'll do.

If it wasn't that innocent people will be hurt and killed by this dumbfuckery I'd just laugh.

Instead it makes me so goddamn furious I long for a sharp knife and their throats. 

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.

Operation Free the Petroleum!

I think it’s worth recalling the last time wingnuts were strutting around D.C. declaring "victory", boasting about making their own reality, and how they were going to show the rest of us how “war works”.

Didn’t end up so fucking well, did it? 

And that was with Dick Cheney & Co., an administration stuffed with people like Paul “The Stupidest Guy on the Face of the Earth” Wolfowitz, but who looks like fucking Metternich compared to this bunch of idiot grifters. 

At least the Cheneyites knew they were booting the post-war occupation. These dumb clucks? I'm not even sure they understand the whole "Phase IV" concept. Yes. They're that stupid.

Couple of quick notes here:

First (as a geologist); the whole "OMFG Venezuela has SO MUCH PETROLEUM!" thing misses one really important point. That much of - as in "a very large to overwhelming percentage of" - the Orinoco Belt is nasty, dirty, tar-sand type deposits, full of sulfur and organics and other shit. 

While they're supposedly less filthy than the Canadian tar sands, they're deeper and more difficult to recover, and only slightly less costly to process. Compared to the light sweet crude pumped out of the Gulf region, or even out of our own domestic fields, they're a fucking pain in the ass to access, expensive to process, and unlikely to be worth the oil majors' time and investment unless global crude prices rise, and rise a lot.

Felony Fats is too goddamn stupid to know that, or even understand it if it was explained to him. But the point is that while the selling point of this whole dick-waving exercise was "take the oil" that's been stuck in his brain cell since Iraq, the actual oil that's there? Ain't that big a seller.

Second, I'm not sure that anyone in this crew really understands, or is even close to understanding, the volatility of the region, but let's just put it this way; if you thought that the Middle East was an unpromising locale for freedom to reign after whichever despotic sonofabitch got the chop?

You'll love the northwest parts of South America. 

Colonialism - and Spanish colonialism, so the worst of the European lot - social friction, extreme wealth amid extreme poverty, deeply corrupt (hello? Spanish colonialism?) "institutions", such as they are, dysfunctional governance...there's a houseful of dynamite inside the former Gran Colombia, and dozens of potential sparks that could set it off, one way or another.

So…we’ll see. My bet is that these nimrods haven’t got a plan for the same things that screwed the Bushies in Iraq. I hope for the sake of the people in Venezuela that the sparks that set Iraq on fire aren't struck in the shantytowns of Caracas.

But I sure as hell wouldn't be surprised if they were.

Posse Stupidtatus

 So it turns out that sending U.S. soldiers to be ersatz Border Patrol was a pretty stupid idea.

"Leaders initiated more than 1,200 legal actions, including nonjudicial punishments, property loss investigations, Army Regulation 15-6 investigations and more. That’s nearly one legal action for every three soldiers. At least 16 soldiers from the mission were arrested or confined for charges including drugs, sexual assault and manslaughter. During the same time period, only three soldiers in Kuwait, a comparable deployment locale with more soldiers, were arraigned for court-martial.

Troops at the border had more than three times as many car accidents over the past year — at least 500 incidents totaling roughly $630,000 in damages — than the 147 “illegal substance seizures” they reported assisting.

One cavalry troop from Louisiana was temporarily disbanded due to misconduct and command climate issues — an extremely rare occurrence."

Gee. I wonder? Where did we have the occasion to learn - and recently - that soldiers are usually good at soldiering, usually not so much as domestic - or foreign - policemen.

"Tensions were ignited on April 28, however, when soldiers from the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment opened fire on a group of protesters in front of a school, killing 15 and wounding more than three dozen others. Although the military said the soldiers fired in self-defense under attack from Baathist provocateurs, residents said many of the demonstrators were unarmed.

The shooting set off a cycle of violence that wracked the city for weeks. Exchanges of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks started to occur almost daily."

 Oh, shit, yeah. That.

I swear, we're the fucking 21st Century Bourbons. We learn nothing but we forget nothing.

Naval Gazing

Good discussion here about what the USS Theodore Roosevelt fiasco shows us about the internal mess that is a now an integral part of "the world's most powerful armed force":

"The response to Crozier’s memo, after it was public, was incoherent. Everybody was saying different things. Modly got on the news and told CNN, We’re working on it, we have a plan in place, which was true because he was in communication with Crozier and his staff at that point. That same afternoon, Modly’s boss, Secretary Defense Mark Esper, got on the evening news and said, I haven’t made any decision and I haven’t read the letter in full. They were nowhere near on the same page. It was the beginning of this massive schism that’s happening right now between civilian and military leadership."

"You see a real difference between how the admirals and the political appointees are dealing with this. The admirals are looking for how to get the sailors off and investigate what happened. But the political appointees, specifically Modly and Esper, seemed like they were completely foundering and looking for a political mitigation tactic that might save them face."

And let's not kid ourselves; it wasn't just the flunkies - this clusterfuck goes all the way up to Head of Grifting:

"Last year, the Navy was roiled by Trump’s call for clemency for Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted of keeping war trophy photographs of himself with a dead Iraqi captive. So there was already this sense, when Modly came to the job, that you need to anticipate what the White House wants and carry it out. I think that’s an understanding most administration hopefuls have reached. It could be seen as a bit of a proximate factor for what happened with Crozier."

So as far as "most powerful" goes, while I do not question the sheer weight of metal that the U.S. military has and will continue to bring in the near future, it's worth noting that the track record of military organizations that are beaten into a sort of permanent cringe...

...by being forced to suck up to the whims of their dictators...

...is not a good one.

Update 4/25: Innnnnnnn-teresting:

"Pentagon leaders are now at an impasse about how to move forward. While CJCS Milley wants a broader inquiry, CNO Gilday and ASECNAV McPherson want to move ahead with reinstating Crozier. SECDEF Esper may be the deciding vote between the two camps."

Why I say this is interesting is because the CJCS is NOT in Crozier's chain. Remember the little thing I posted about the Navy chain of command?

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs ain't on it.

The only reason I can see that Milley is sticking his fucking oar in is that certain Trumpkins want to torpedo Crozier somehow but don't want their tiny little fingers on the firing button.

Like I said; the track record of armed forces who begin sucking up to political despots?

It's not good.

And, given the track record we already have from the U.S. performance in Central Asia?

Yeah.

That.

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.

#newendlesswars!

Well, THAT didn't take long!

This Administration is not going to have the mental throw-weight to recall the last time that GIs went across the southern border chasing bandits who killed American citizens, but that doesn't mean we all have to be that stupid. Hell, it was barely a century ago. But the poisons that infused still haven't leached out.

And this is, again, a reminder that the whole "Donald the Dove" thing is utter bullshit. The guy is a blowhard and a bully, and like all such, loves the idea of you and him fighting, so long as HE doesn't have to get his implants mussed. Trump will send GIs into harm's way whenever he sees some sort of transactional benefit for himself, whether it's emotional (waxing some of the darkies he hates) or financial (selling mercs to the Saudis) or political (getting his MAGAts swwoning over his manly manliness).

Nothing will come of this, of course, but only because the Mexican government isn't as stupid as he is and won't take him up on it.

It takes a thief...

This is totally made of awesome.

Syrian dictator and all-around genial thug Bashar Al-Assad gave an interview in which he characterized Donald J. Trump as "the best president".

“All the American presidents commit all the political sins and crimes and take home the Nobel prize, and they give every appearance of defending human rights and the ‘advanced’ and American or Western principles but they are in fact a gang of criminals who represent the interests of the American lobbies, i.e. the big arms and oil and other corporations. Trump speaks with complete transparency;'We want the oil.' This is the American political reality since at least the end of the Second World War: ‘We want to get rid of so-and-so. We want to provide a service in return for money.’ This is the American political reality. What do we want more than a transparent enemy?”

I guess it takes one dictatorial sonofabitch to know one, eh, Bashie?

Update 11/7: It's looking less and less like #endingendlesswars and more and more like #kicktheirasstaketheirgas in Northeastern Syria as several what appear to be conventional Army units, including cavalry or mechanized infantry, have been moved into the area around the Deir al-Zour oilfields.

Just a reminder that 1) Trump HAS no "foreign policy" any more than a street-corner punk as a "economic policy" outside of "what's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine", 2) U.S. Middle Eastern policy has been a complete shitshow for a long time and still is, Trump or no Trump, and 3) it's LONG past time to repeal the goddamn AUMF. It's not even a fig leaf anymore.

Springtime for Erdogan; the "Kick Their Ass, Take Their Gas!" Tour

So the latest piece of geopolitical genius kicking around the collective empty heads of the Trump Administration is the notion of parking a couple of...infantry companies?...(Sciutto at CNN says "200 troops", which would be about a couple of full-strength line infantry companies) in and around "oilfields" in NE Syria to "secure" them.

I'm fascinated by the point of international law here. These are pieces of Syria. They belong to someone, or something, Syrian. Admittedly, the Syrian government is not and has not physically held possession of them. But they are, by simple definition, "Syrian". Who has given the United States the authority to "secure" shit in and around them? If "possession is nine-tenths of the law" and infantry the bailiff's men? Well, yes, but that's the ONLY possible justification. There's no possible actual legal or diplomatic standing for these guys. If the Syrian Arab Army shows up and says "GTFO or we'll shoot" and we don't GTFO we've just started a shooting war with the Syrian government for something that is purely and unequivocally our fuckup. Any GIs that will die will be dying for a mistake, or worse.

And this is more than just a weird mission. This is stupidly risky mission. The US now has no - zero - "friends" in Syria. Check out this little video of random Syrian civilians cursing and pelting GIs with spuds, rocks, and rotten fruit. Nobody will have these poor bastards' backs - indeed, they're targets for everyone; Islamic State whackaloons, Syrian Army troops, Kurds pissed off at being betrayed, random jihadi nuts. Hell, it'd be shorter to list the people who DON'T have a reason to kill GIs than those who do. For the sake of some crappy little pieces of Syrian oilpatch these poor bastards are going to be hanging out there with a huge "Shoot Me Now!" sign on them.

But, hey! No worries! These sorts of things only semi-complicated and are totally not difficult for someone as smart as the Trumpster to figure out, right!

Oh, and this? THIS is simply fucking nuts:

"President Donald Trump is prepared to use military force against Turkey over its actions in Syria if “needed,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday as U.S. troops withdrew from the region. “We prefer peace to war,” Pompeo told CNBC’s Wilfred Frost in a taped interview that aired on “Closing Bell” on Monday. “But in the event that kinetic action or military action is needed, you should know that President Trump is fully prepared to undertake that action.”

I have no words to describe the idea of starting a shooting war with a NATO member. I know Sven likes to remind us how worthless an ally the U.S. has become to the nations of Europe, but this? Attacking Turkey, a NATO partner, for military actions taken in Syria? Where the hell does that leave Article 5 Article I, which states that "The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." (corrected per Sven's reminder on the limits of Article V)

WTF?

Christ, every time I think this Administration has reached Peak Shitshow...

Update 10/23: Unlike Fake News Donnie, his BFF Vlad the Impaler is a genuine badass dictator who rides around bare-chested on a pony and knows that if you grab your enemy by the balls his heart and mind will follow.

"According to the deal announced at a joint news conference in Sochi, Ankara will control a 32km-wide (20 miles) area between the towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain, which covers 120km (75 miles) of the Turkish-Syrian border. Beginning on Wednesday at noon, Russian military police and Syrian border guards will start removing the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which spearhead the SDF, and their weapons 30km (19 miles) from the border area. Once this is complete, within 150 hours, Turkish and Russian forces will run joint patrols 10km (six miles) to the east and west of the zone."

Here's what this will look like:

This is a huge backdown for Erdogan; he announced that he was going to grab a chunk of Syria 20 miles deep and 276 miles long, about 5,500 square miles. The 20-mile-by-75-mile piece he gets under this is about 1,500 square miles. His Syrian refugees are gonna have to be reeeeeal good buddies to pack into that.

Meanwhile, the Adventures of #EndEndlessWars continues; Trumpy's SecDef Esperanto announced that the US guys who had grabbed a hat out of YPG-land were moving to western Iraq, at which point the Baghdad government slapped him upside the head with what amounts to "Fuck YOU, Yankee dog!"

Thus proving that all this region needed was a very stable genius.

Unfortunately, it was an evil genius, and he runs the former Soviet kleptocracy.

Jesus wept.

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...

Wars and stupors of wars

One of the multifarious issues with electing a total idiot who predictably stocked his administration with a coterie of simply-flaming-assholes, dangerously incompetent sycophants who are also flagrantly authoritarian-curious (at least), corporate whores, grifters, and outright clowns is that when problems turn up it's extremely difficult to feel confident that these gomers will be able to do something that ranges from "not actively stupid" to potentially useful.

While the bulk of the corporate media organizations circle the drain that is Trump's Twitter feed repeating his nonsense about hordes of invading brownskins, several parts of the globe are getting...interesting, and not in a particularly good way.

One of them is along the Pakistan-India border, where the subcontinental quasi-Trumper Indian PM Narendra Modi has played to his deplorable-Hindu-supremacist base by hammering Kashmiri Muslims. This, unsurprising to anyone who has more than one brain cell, has provoked some nasty posturing from the other subcontinental nuclear power. Trump's contribution was to shove his enormous orange oar (what? You say it's NOT enormous? FAKE NEWS!!!) in back in July blabbering about U.S. stumbling into the dispute and forcing a hasty denial from Modi's people that, no, they hadn't asked the buffoon to do anything.

It's hard to tell whether this will lead to anything more than posturing, but it's already obvious that the Trumpkins' geopolitical shrewdity has effectively neutered much of the U.S. ability to help defuse tensions in this nasty little dispute between two putative allies.

Meanwhile, in the Ukraine the political mess is getting messier, with a stand-up comic/president, fascist Ruthenians, Putin-fondlers, and all-around whackjobs all getting involved in a political imbroglio that would make Machiavelli throw his hands in the air.

If Niccolo himself would despair of this twelve-monkeys-fucking-a-football disaster, what hope is there for this Administration, that is, apparently, managed by tweet and whatever bats are looping around whatever is inside the tangerine-hued Tiberius' combover that functions in place of an actual brain? Certainly this would seem to be a place for a judicious consideration of the actual stakes involved and whether there is an actual dog for the United States' foreign policy in this fight and, if so, to what extent.

But, again...who outside of the MAGAt fever-swamps actually believes this congeries of fools and damned fools can do that?

Who'd have thought that Obama's "elections have consequences" line would be repeated so soon as farce?

WASF.

(And let's not even think about the weather.)

Parade

For the out-of-towners, forget the First Toddler emceeing for an imitation of NorKo’s Kim Il-sung Square.  Here is what a normal American small town looks like on the Fourth of July.  No tanks and no B-1s.  And best of all no pompous windbag bloviating while staying dry from the rain behind bulletproof glass.  

More typical is my small town,  We had a Shopping Cart Drill Team from the local non-chain grocery, 

the Daffodil Ladies,

and the Butterfly Bicycle Troop.

Plus half a dozen gearheads showing off their antique cars, and Shriners in funny hats and trick cars.   

The only military presence was six old men from the VFW marching out of step, mishandling the colors, and winking at certain ladies in the crowd of onlookers.   

The only politician was a county commissioner in a convertible throwing candy to the kids.  No speechifying!  

Plenty of hot dogs and watermelon afterwards. 
  
I skipped the fireworks.  I miss the huge bonfires of stacked railroad crossties from my youth.  They lit up the night until dawn.

Tanks but no tanks

A couple of thoughts, based on this Politico piece that Sven provided in the comments on the previous post:

1. For a dude who claims to luuuuuurve his military guys El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago has no problems with making at least some of the poor bastards work over the holiday weekend rather than hang out at home or drink with the guys in the billets. I wonder who drew the short straw down in Ft. Stewart to drag ass all the way to D.C. to babysit the Brads and tanks and the M88 so somebody who would rather not have dragged ass to Southeast Asia when he had the chance (cough!bonespurscough!) could pose with the heavy metal and get a little woody?

2. There's a big reason that the Fourth isn't like Bastille Day.

For all that both republics were born in war and the use of force, the U.S. deliberately pushed the troops back into the barracks - hell, the Founders and Framers didn't want "troops" in the sense of regular GIs at all - in a way that France did not. And, in part because of that the U.S. has been spared the sort of man-on-horseback problems France has had with it's armed forces. There's a reason we here revere George Washington; for all his flaws (and he had them, like all of us) he could easily have been Napoleon and consciously turned away from that.

It's a sad comment - not so much on Trump, who is a ginormous toddler with the soul of a cinerious lump of coal and the intellect of a howler monkey who can only be expected to crave the fake toughness of being close to soldiers and military hardware, but - on the state of this nation that the vast bulk of Americans are reacting to this ridiculous Red Square propaganda show with vast indifference.

I'm sorry I'm 3,000 miles away, because somebody owes those 3rd ID guys a beer for having to be part of this Reichsparteitag shit, and I'd be buying.

And someone owes Trump a finger, while they're at it, and I got one of those for his orange ass, too.

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.

Somebody's been smoking Hemp For Victory...

THIS stuff is what drives me nuts about the current American pash for tongue-bathing soldiers.

When speaking of the Americans who are going to take it in the shorts because of the trade wars with the PRC that are fun and easy to win Senator Tom Cotton (R - Arkansas) consoled them that:

"There will be some sacrifices on the part of Americans, I grant you that, but I also would say that sacrifice is pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas that are fallen heroes that are laid to rest in Arlington make."

Except those farmers and manufacturers and Sears customers getting hit with these costs didn't ask to be dragged into a pissing contest with the PRC over Fitbit parts any more than those GIs asked to be walking the streets of Kabul trying to remake Afghanistan into Belgium.

To equate these trade wars with the "blood of heroes"?

It's despicable on it's face, but, worse, it makes taking issue with the trade wars to a level of Dolchstoß comparable to betraying the Noble Soldiers. It's a version of Godwin's Law, a rhetorical trick designed to put a stop to debate.

Worse, it's deeply dishonest, if for no other reason than those "fallen heroes" didn't "fall" as "sacrifices" in a war declared by the People in Congress, or to any sort of existential threat to the United States, or, for that matter, for any sort overarching national interest, but in a bog-standard squalid little imperial expedition in the global hustings that has been ginned up largely by lies, misdirection, fear, and pants-pissing panic.

I love my Army brothers, but the guys holding down a slot in Asia or Africa today aren't holding back global fascism, or facing the might of a hostile superpower. They're doing the dirty business of empire. If my country wants them to do that business that's one thing. But if Tom Cotton - or my country - wants to drag me and every other American into a trade war in Asia and justify it by comparing it to that service?

He and it need to come to me first and make a case for that trade war and that service, not simply assume that they're worth blood and/or treasure and demand I respect that because some poor bastards are getting hosed wasting a year-and-a-half in fucking Helmand Province playing whack-a-muj.

Because if you gave me the choice between:

1) "Sacrificing" in a boneheaded trade war with China because I "support the troops", or
2) Skipping the trade war AND ending the expeditionary wars in Asia and Africa and bringing those troopers home?

I'd go with Door #2.

It'd be bad enough if We the People really were Army-mad, but in a nation where barely anyone bothers to give up a couple of years to the tree suit it REALLY drives me nuts when I run across this faux-militarism stuff.