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.