Friend of the Blog mike wanted a response to the latest U.S. "fucking around in the Middle East", so here goes:
1) Meh.
2) Well...meh IF this is all it is. Dropping ordnance from the low stratosphere is the ultimate in Rich Man's War. Provided your target lacks similar capabilities? You can pretty much stroll away whistling. I don't see this as much, if any, different than bombing Serbs or Libyans, and all the earlier examples of Aerial Gunboat Diplomacy didn't result in any real military escalation. That sucked for the dead and maimed people within the impact areas, but otherwise? Meh.
3) Now...in terms of "the law of war"? This is obviously criminal, the crime of "making aggressive war" for which we hanged the leaders of Germany and Japan. It's technically "unconstitutional" as well, a violation of Congress' explicit war-making power. Which, as we all know, is as dead as the dodo assuming that the GOP majorities could even be bothered to stop fucking with idiocies long enough to bother.
4) Okay. Now...if this ISN'T all it is - that is, if Tubby wasn't just showing his whole idiot ass when he burbeled about "Make Iran Great Again" - and there's a faction in the Fraudulency Aministration that genuinely wants to put GIs in Tehran? Ohfuckno. THAT's beyond insane. This country couldn't do "regime change" in Iraq, a much smaller and less fractious nation, and after fucking around we found out when the Islamic State emerged from the ruins.
5) My opinion on the whole "Israel is the most utterly worthless "U.S. ally" in history" hasn't changed, either, other than this reinforces the whole notion. That kind of pisses me off, since the original Tzahal of the Six Day War was one of my childhood heroes, and the descent of the tough sabras of 1967 into the thugs of the West Bank checkpoints makes me grieve for everyone involved.
6) Jeffrey Lewis has a nice thread on the technical issues with these strikes, as well: https://bsky.app/profile/armscontrolwonk.bsky.social/post/3lsageddlpk2l - well worth a look.
So, to sum up, these things are actually one of the less-harmful (to his own nation) examples of Trumpfuckery. Fairly pointless? Yep. Driven by "addled FOX News grampa" energy? Sure. Possibly relating to the limp-dick performance of his Big Beautiful Birthday Perade? Maybe.
The wild card now is "what happens next?"
If the mullah government falls...then what?
Who or what replaces it? I wouldn't bet that Freedom Will Reign; Iran hasn't had decent governance since the Fifties, if that.
And this whole nonsense frankly just hammers home the lessons of Libya and Ukraine versus North Korea and Israel; if you're a smaller nation and you don't want to kiss the ass of (or get pushed around by) a Great Power?
You NEED fucking nukes. Now. Yesterday.
So whoever replaces Khameni, unless they really, really want to kiss Trump and Netanyahu's asses, need to speed-run Khameni's nuke program, which is kind of "the opposite" of what this nonsense is supposed to be about.
But we're going to have to just wait and see "what's next"
Update 6/24: Apparently what's next is "Tubby declares "ceasefire!", and both Israel and Iran reply "WTF, dude?"
There's no upside for Netanyahu to stop belting the mullahs. The IAF has got to be struggling - my understanding is that, for one thing, their aerial tanker fleet is aging and small - but anything that keeps the Israeli public angry and scared keeps his ass out of court/jail.
Iran? I'd sure they'd love to nope out of this. They're getting mauled. But, as I noted above, if they want ANY hope of not becoming the pawn of every nuclear power with a grudge (or a grift) they still HAVE to keep the hope of nuclear retaliation alive.
My guess is that both Iran and Israel will reach a sort of "peace of exhaustion" and Fatso can claim credit for that. But it won't be "peace" in any sense of the term. And what comes after that? I have no idea.
7 comments:
Dementia Don is still bragging about it. But some sources are saying that the strikes in Iran "did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months". That's according to an report completed recently by the DIA based on an assessment done by CENTCOM.
White House press secretary says the report was done by a low-level loser who wanted to demean President Dumpf.
Whether or not it's true, I'm wondering if Little Kim's NoKo will sneak export some of his reported small tactical nukes to Iran. Nobody I've talked to seems to think he can do so without being discovered. Maybe so. I'm sure all NoKo ships or planes headed toward that part of the world are closely momitored.
So:
1) Of course he is.
2) The linked thread in the post makes the lack-of-intel very clear. It's not so much what these B-2 strike did, or didn't, do, but how little we know for sure. It appears that Tubby's bloviating gave the mullahs a heads-up and SOME (most? a bit? again...WE DON't KNOW!) enriched uranium was moved...somewhere.
3) But for these MAGA chucklefucks the ignorance is a feature, not a bug. Pretty much every US intel agency that had any assets in Iran categorically denied the Israeli scaremongering about the imminence of Iranian nukes; Fatso and Li'l Marco pished that away ("never mind those silly spooks..!" - ironically, only Moscow Tulsi backed up her people, and Porky blew her off). Now? The dumb fuckers don't know what they don't know, and don't care.
4) If I were the mullahs, I'd be shoving petroleum at the NORKs, at Pakistan, at ANYone who could spot me a nuke. It's obvious to me that Netanyahu is going to try and collapse the Tehran government. That the descent into chaos in Iran will be a nightmare that spawns regional instability is meaningless to him; he's a chaos agent himself, and doesn't care if the Middle East burns around him. Only the threat of a nuked Tel Aviv has the potential to stop him.
5) What will actually happen? Fuck if I know. But whatever it will be, I guarandamntee it won't benefit most of the people here, or there, or anywhere. If we've learned anything from the first half-year of Trump 2.0, it's that nothing his crew does is in the interests of We the People or ANY People not rich, white, and the extreme bible-banging version of "Christianity"...
The Iranian parliament has voted to suspend cooperation with the IAEA.
Ali Larijani, former IRGC brigadier and now advisor to Khamenei, says "When the war ends, we will settle accounts with Grossi." Rafael Grossi is Director General of the IAEA. Larijani also said Iran would have no choice but to develop nuclear weapons if attacked by the United States, Israel or its allies.
Whoodathunkit, eh?
Like I keep saying; the lessons of the past 20-30 years are that if you don't want to be the bitch of whoever is in the Oval Office (or the Kremlin, or Tel Aviv, or Beijing...) you HAVE to have a nuke.
Attacked or not. Without the option to punish your Great Power enemies? You're meat.
I'm not happy about any of this. But the progression of it? I had it pegged from the moment the US and Israel started making noise about Iraqi and Iranian "WMDs" back in the 1990s.
The Fucktard-in-Chief is now bragging that he gave Iran permission to attack the base in Qatar.
https://bsky.app/profile/smotus.bsky.social/post/3lsickfpzrc23
Whut?
That's...I don't know how to describe that. Stupid? That's some level of idiotic-beyond-stupid. Why the fuck would anyone even think of that? That's utterly bugnuts.
And the same time 1) the Vaxx Quacks on Croaky's ACIP gang revived that idiotic thimerisol bullshit, and 2) the Furious Five told every poor person in this country "fuck you, you're our bitch" for wanting to go to the doctor they want.
Fuck these people. They need to die, and soon. Now would be best. Than rendered down to fats and bone dust, and the ground where their remains are buried sown with salt to ensure that they and all their "ideas" are really, truly, sincerely dead.
Extremely accurate twitter analaogy of Dementia Donaldo asks: is trump our first Ottoman president?
https://x.com/escapefrommelos/status/1937035780477890624
Commenters suggest a few things were missed though:
nefarious son-in-law;
association with child sex abusers and pederasts;
devious viziers.
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