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.

V-USA Day

Mike just reminded us that about four years after the Day that Will Live in Infamy the United States as part of an alliance signed the victorious articles of surrender over the last of the fascist powers that had begun the war.

On this day eighteen years ago today another war began, a war that continues to this day, a war that was, eventually subsumed and engorged by lies and fear, driven by greed and stupidity and hubris, and that ended up covering the bodies piled up here - in New York City and Washington D.C. and a field in Pennsylvania - with piles and heaps and mountains of bodies; bodies of innocent women, of small children, of innocents without so much as a drop of blood on their hands, with young men and women sent to fight and kill and die for those lies and that fear.

And those who shed that blood and took those lives?

"Don't you wonder if they ever pause on September 11 every year and ponder how they all used the dead of that awful day for their own purposes, to fulfill their long-held desires for empire-building in the countries of oil, to use other people's children in service of their profane desires? Don't you wonder if they ever pause on September 11 and ponder how they'd all screwed up so badly throughout the summer of 2001 when, as Richard Clarke recalled, "all the lights were blinking red"? Do you wonder if they make the connection, in the softening dark of the early morning, between their own incompetence and the use they ultimately made of it?

Of course, you don't wonder. Because they don't. Introspection was never a priority with this crew. And as we see so many of them on television today, deeply troubled by the actions of another underprepared, incompetent president*, and using the dead of 9/11 as protective camouflage for all their deception and bloody blundering that occurred beginning that very morning, we should all take time to mourn the dead of that day, and all the days thereafter, and, yes, say, Never Again."

The country we live in today; the country of security gates and drones and surveillance and national security letters and yellow-ribbon patriotism was built, bloody brick by bloody brick, from the foundation these people laid on that day.

THAT's what we should never forget, on this day, every year.

Damn them.

Damn them all to Hell.

Update 9/15: Charlie Pierce (as usual) continues the discussion better than I can:

"Right now, in the 18th year of our war on terror, American troops are engaged in making war in a number of places, including Afghanistan, where they have been engaged in making war the longest. American soldiers have died in Niger and in Mali in Africa, where hardly anyone in this country knew they were deployed. Navy SEALS have fought in Somalia and in Yemen. After four American soldiers were killed by militants in Niger, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and nobody’s idea of a peacenik, told NBC News:

I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger. This is an endless war without boundaries, no limitation on time or geography. We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world militarily and what we’re doing.

If, ultimately, the Vietnam War lost J. William Fulbright because its purpose and goals had ceased to make any kind of sense, it seems more than past time to apply that same kind of merciless scrutiny to the endless “war” on terror and on its most conspicuous manifestation: the continued deployment of American troops in Afghanistan. Does it make sense to stay there because we’ve been there for 18 years? If, upon our departure, the people of Afghanistan descend to slaughter again, is that reason enough to maintain a permanent military presence in the middle of a society that’s been torn by war since the days of Alexander The Great? Where are we in the world militarily, and what are we doing, anyway?

Good questions, and no less important because they remain largely unasked."

Muddle East

I get a fair amount of stick around this joint for my up-front contempt for His Fraudulency, the 45th* President of the United States and his coterie of meeching grifters, flaming morons, inchoate rage-drunk wingnuts, and just simply simpletons.

But it's hard for me not to be infuriated by the actions of this "administration". It's one thing to be a devious cabal of Iran-Contra felons trying to advance a ruthlessly avaricious agenda. I could loathe the Bushies while having a certain amount of rueful wariness for the purity of their selfish greed. They wanted everything and didn't care what they did or how they did it to get what they wanted. Their weakness was hubris; they really thought they created their own reality, and when reality refused to conform they simply bulled ahead until it shot them between the eyes.

But these idiot Trumpkins? Handing them the keys to the presidential limo was like giving a gibbering ape a live hand grenade. Anyone of us who had been familiar with the sort of gluttonously self-deluded liar and cheat the GOP picked to run in 2016 knew that it wouldn't end well. He wouldn't listen. He wouldn't learn. He would do whatever sated his capacious guts, or his tumescent penis, or his angry, aggrieved little hindbrain.

This past couple of weeks has put the reason I warned against electing this dope on painful display.

First was the Iran "deal".

Had the Bushies done this I would have immediately suspected a deep-laid plan to gin up a war in the Persian Gulf for some sort of crass geopolitical and economic gains. As the Beinart article points out, the Trumpkins didn't even have a bad rationale behind the move.

“Sr. European diplomat, on dealing with State Dept today re Iran: ‘All is a shambles there. Total incoherence between State and NSC. Plus, no one has any clue on the day after. There is no strategy.’” That same day, when asked by a reporter whether European governments would support new sanctions against Iran, an unnamed State Department official admitted that in their conversations with allies before Trump announced America’s withdrawal, “We did not talk about a Plan B.” When a reporter asked, “What makes you think that Iran is going to go along with a whole new renegotiation?” the official replied, “We don’t know if they will.”

So there's no real plan here. This isn't some sort of cunning 11th Dimension geopolitical chess. The Trumpkins, like a cranky baby, just threw their bowl of strained peas against the wall because they wanted to. They had no idea, and no plan, for what came next.

And now the final act of the "let's go full-on-Likudnik!" move to Jerusalem.

Now. You know my opinion on Israel. As a country, it is what it is. As a US "ally", it's not worth the tax dollars of an Indiana grandma. One of the single biggest impediments to a sensible US Middle Eastern policy is that it HAS to be warped to accommodate whatever the Israeli Right wants. That makes any sort of working relationship with the Muslim polities nearly impossible, because at some point someone drags the Israelis into the room like a dog into a cattery and everyone goes utterly batshit.

I'd accept this as a form of loathsome realpolitik if I thought that 1) Israel had a practical value as a US "ally", and 2) the Trumpkins had done the geopolitical analysis sufficient to make them confident that the Arab states will throw the Pals under the bus and accommodate with Likud.

I don't.

I think this is just US conservative fantasy wanking, and when one side or the other emerges from the current Shia-Sunni Thirty Years War with a headlock on the Muslim umma we will find out how shortsighted and stupid this is.

But that's "Trump"; shortsighted, unlearned, and uninterested in anything but his own profit.

One thing he DOES have in common with the Bushies, though. It's something you may remember from back in the Iraq War times;

We Are so, so, so, so, SO Fucked.

And speaking of Dick n' Dubya's Big Middle East Adventure...

...lookie at the latest "all the best people" our Napoleorange has brought back into the corridors of power:

Yep. John "Give War A Chance" Bolton.

The Economist - hardly a bastion of cuddly liberal peaceniks - had this to say about him over a decade ago:

"Mr Bolton had already made a name for himself as an arch-conservative and fierce patriot. He believed “multilateralism” was a dirty word, treaties were not worth the paper they were written on and American might was right. Diplomacy, he told Mr Bush, was “advocacy, advocacy for America”.

And:

"But in an organisation where nothing gets done without a readiness to make friends, form coalitions and accept compromises, Mr Bolton put almost everyone's back up."

Which is a way for polite British Tories to drawl "I say, what an enormous asshole..."

Remember "Hillary the Hawk, Donald the Dove"? Remember that? Well, if you're still kidding yourself that Trump is some sort of populist iconoclast who is going to break the neocon headlock on the GOP's foreign policy that pretty much begins and ends with "bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran" then look around the table.

Nobody else is the sucker, so...

I swear. Every time I think this chump has driven my country as deep into the Big Hole of Stupid as possible...

Update 3/26: Doanvo adds another layer of stupidity to the stupidity of this appointment; Bolton is a spectacularly prolific and remarkably pinheaded liar.

“Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear.” He soon “surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists” to analyze raw intelligence on Iraq without input from the intelligence community itself.

Bolton later allegedly blocked Secretary of State Colin Powell from receiving vital information on Iran in 2003.

Fast forward to the 2016 election, and Bolton’s assertions have become even more unhinged, leaning further into absurdity than the most volatile pundits will venture. In December 2016, he called Russia’s election interference a “false flag” operation conducted by the Obama administration."

As a prolific and remarkably pinheaded liar himself Trump needs as many rational people around him as possible. Adding this jamoke, between his ridiculous warmongering, insane worldview, and facile lying, is like giving a chimp a live grenade. In an Administration full of bad appointments this is a really, really, really, REALLY bad appointment.

The Third Gulf War and the Poison Gift that Keeps on Giving

As His Fraudulency thumps himself on the back for not completely goatscrewing relief efforts to Puerto Rico and farkles about tweeting about football players the poison tree that his GOP buddies and his fellow-idiot Dubya planted in Iraq back in 2003 continues to bear bitter, poison fruit.

The latest in sectarian strife there is ripening this week after the Kurdish minority voted overwhelmingly to secede and now the Shiite majority legislature in Baghdad is striking back with a measure to shut off air traffic to the landlocked Kurdish provinces.

The problem for Orange Foolius is that, due to the rank idiocy of Dubya's crew in knocking the secular Baath stopper off the Iraqi bottle, the sectarian genie is out, uncontrollable, and uncontainable. One of the favorite Republican "kwitcherbitchin'!" talking points back in the Oughts was to insist that Saddam is Evil and if you're against war in Iraq you are For Saddam and therefore For Evil.

The argument was transparently moronic then and looks even stupider now that the deposition of Saddam and the destruction of secular government has empowered every religious nut with an AK-47 to tear up what little bridgework allowed construction of the 20th Century over this already-bottomless post-Ottoman sinkhole. Evil?

Sheesh.

An administration headed by FDR and a military overseen by George Marshall would have a nearly impossible task trying to put this Iraqi Humpty Dumpty together again. The current passel of mouthbreathers, grifters, morons, reality-show carnies, egomaniac adolescents, and Trump (but I repeat myself) couldn't manage to do anything constructive with this mess if they had ten centuries, a magic 8-Ball, and a license to print money.

Oh, wait. They have the latter. They'd just sooner use it to fund Amway scamsters and give away cash to plutocrats.

I don't know if there's a point here, other than "Don't elect morons" and "WASF".

No. No, no, no, no. FUCK no.

Proving that like the Bourbons the people that constitute the "leadership" of the United States government learn nothing yet forget nothing the Obama Administration has gone to the poo-flinging monkeyhouse technically known as the United States Congress for a new authorization to use military force, this time against the congeries of wanna-be Sunni Muslim theocrats that go by the nickname "Islamic State".

"President Obama asked Congress on Wednesday for new war powers to go after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria...The president’s request would replace the 2002 legislation that authorized the Iraq War but leaves in place a very broadly worded resolution passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

Proving that you don't have to be a dry-drunk simpleton driving a short-bus-full of rage-drunk idiots and conniving weapons-grade-moron Machiavellis to fail to understand the words "don't", "involved", "land war", and "Asia" as well as the catastrophic decade of clusterfuckery that has followed Dick and Dubya's Most Excellent Middle Eastern Adventure the Obamites seem to believe that they can repeat the procedure without repeating the results.

I have absolutely no idea why they would believe this.

For one thing, the Daesh people (NB: apparently "Daesh" is the Arabic equivalent of the WW2 perjoratives "Huns" and "Nips" - it's the name that these guys' enemies use for it, since "Daesh" sounds similar to the Arabic words Daes ("one who crushes something underfoot") and Dahes ("one who sows discord") would like nothing better than for more U.S. joes to stumble around their 'hood killing people and breaking shit seeing as how that worked so goddamn well in Iraq. Doing what your enemy wants you to do is...well, "fucking stupid" are the words that come to mind but "the opposite of strategy" seems like a more measured way to describe it.

For another, well...fuck. IRAQ. Did we learn nothing? The reality on the ground is that the conditions in Iraq and Syria now are worse than when we invaded Iraq in 2003. There is no "government" in any sense of the word. The place has dissolved into a brawling mess of competing groups and semi-decrepit nation states (Turkey and Kurdistan being something of the exceptions...)

There are only two ways this will go.

The U.S. and it's "allies" will raze Sunnistan - the western portions of Iraq and the eastern portions of Syria - to the ground. They will kill and destroy until, as Bill Sherman would have put it, a crow flying over the Sunni lands will have to carry its own provisions. The U.S. will utterly destroy the Sunni capability and will to fight. And then...

...and then I have no idea. Perhaps the Sunni will consent to live under the rule of the other rump states, Alawite Syria and Shia Iraq, as chattel, as the Britons did under the Romans and the Tamils now do in Sri Lanka under the Hindus. That level of violence can produce submission.

Or, perhaps not.

But short of that level of violence?

I have no fucking clue what will happen. Nothing good, I assure you.

My friend Seydlitz says that the powers that be in the U.S. government have lost the ability to think about geopolitics strategically; to assess the economic, political, and military conditions realistically and then plot a course of action that uses U.S. strengths and the weaknesses of the area under consideration to produce a political, economic, and military endstate that benefits the United States.

I have always considered this optimistic. I don't know if the U.S. government has EVER had this ability outside of brief periods when smart people like George Marshall were running things.

But Marshalls seem to be in short supply, while we seem to have a never-ending amount of Dougie Fucking Feiths and Dick Goddamn Cheneys.

And now this.