Another day ending in "y"...

...bringing with it more Trumpfuckery. 

Given the utter firehose of stupid shit these nitwits produce it's hard to decide whether to yawn, scream, or try and find discounted dimension lumber for the many, many guillotines this Evil Clown Posse so desperately needs and deserves. 

I do have a couple of random links to read and ponder before that, though.

First, from the ever-useful Techdirt, this extended discussion of the recent release of a couple of Elmo's DOGEboys stumbling and blabbering about the fundamentally ignorant and nihilistic methods, if such they may be called ("I see no method at all, sir..."), they employed in doing whatever the fuck they were doing. 

It's good that Masnick lays out the indictment of these callow techboys, and yet...what the fuck else should anyone have expected from this whole DOGE nonsense?

It was obvious from the jump that Elmo didn't actually give a shit about federal government "efficiency". What he wanted was to get inside and wreck the place. 

 

Like almost all these tax-fattened scabrous techbros he hates the entire notion of collective governance if it doesn't further fatten his wallet or pimp his ride. The whole fucking point of DOGE was to insert these gooning wankers inside the GSA to yeet confidential information useful for making money and in the process jerk the public around to increase skepticism in the notion of government of, for, and by the People.

You need fucking TikTok videos of a couple of these useless DOGE wingnuts actually saying the quiet parts of all this out loud? 

That just confirms that you were way too credulous and gullible in the first place, to the point where it should be a matter of real weight whether or not you should be issued a credit card or allowed to operate heavy machinery. 

Then, from the military history blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, another extended rumination, this on the Fourth Gulf War. 

Bret Devereaux breaks it down - the preconditions, the circumstances leading to the initial attacks, the current situation, and the potential likely outcomes - in a clear and easily understandable fashion.

The nut graf, in my opinion, is that the whole "who's "winning", who's "losing" arguments miss the point; that there's a reason that, as irking a geopolitical irritant the mullahs have been to the Gulf region, there were damn good reasons that U.S. governments all the way back to Reagan's time resisted the impulse to do more than huck the occasional round downrange at them.

Many of those reasons are all over the current news cycle; Iran's response attacks on regional neighbors, effective closure of the Persian Gulf, and the potential long-term destabilization of the region, or many parts of it.

Worse, as Devereaux points out:

"And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?

And 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."

Although it's also worth pondering this, from earlier in the piece; that the U.S. airstrike on the purported Iranian nuclear storage/production facility back in June of 2025 wasn't just a bit of the usual big-stick Great Power dick-waving..

(which I, at least, thought at the time given that it didn't seem to make sense any other way.) 

...but was actually a major geopolitical mistake because:

"The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack (emphasis mine, not Devereaux's). 

It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.

But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time. (again, emphasis mine)

It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so."

It's funny - in a "not-funny-like-a-clown" but in the funny-how-sometimes-something-that-looks-idiotic-really-IS-idiotic way - that Trump, a living embodiment of insecure manospheric compensatory tics, who insists that only HE is "the decider", that he's the Ultimate Alpha Male, was trick-fucked into becoming Bibi Netanyahu's Bitch because he's some combination of too stupid, gullible, aggressive, and ignorant to realized that before waving his kinetic dick back in 2025.

 
But, yeah, here we are.

To me the even-bigger problem is that probably about a quarter of the U.S. public are actually okay with all this stupid fuckery, and there's probably another third that either doesn't know, doesn't care, or doesn't understand.

Meaning here we will continue to be.

Is there a way out of this dystopian mess?

Without a better electorate in a better country?

I don't see it. 

All the troubles in the world, January 2024 edition

 Couple of quick thoughts today.

1. Israel vs South Africa in the International Court of Justice

A quick reminder that the ICJ, along with a lot of the other "international law" and "law of war" institutions are effectively creations of the last truly horrific global episode of mass death, the Second World War.

That's why, for example, things like the bombings of London during the Blitz, Dresden, the fire-raids over Japan in 1944 and '45 are now officially the "war crimes" that Curtis LeMay admitted he'd have been hung for had Japan won the Pacifc War.

The supposed key is "proportionality". Even in war, if someone attacks you without provocation ('making aggressive war", also a war crime that George Bush could easily have been prosecuted for going into Iraq in 2003...) you're fully justified in hitting them hard.

But not TOO hard. You can't firebomb their cities and kill millions of their people to get the political and military leaders who war-crimed you when they attacked. You've gotta try and kill those people without butchering job-lots of their countrypeople who had nothing to do with the original crime.

What I think is "wrong" with the ICJ case that South Africa is bringing is that it accuses the Israelis of "genocide".

I don't think for a moment that if the Netanyahu government could genocide the Arabic former residents and descendants of those residents of the Ottoman province of Palestine they wouldn't because they're just nice guys.

They're vicious ethno-supremacists, who have utterly embraced the idea that only they are truly human and the Palestinians are some sort of two-legged humanoid vermin. Don't be surprised; had you asked a typical frontier American anytime between 1750 and 1900 of their opinion of the various native groups they were pushing out of their vicinity you'd have gotten a damn near identical answer.

The Gaza "campaign" is just the hot phase of the war that Israel has been fighting against the Pals since the mid-1940s. Including the long march to apartheid since 1967 - something that a South African would be expected to be brutally familiar with.

The equally vicious bastards who engineered the attack on 10/7 know that better than anyone, and that was their plan all along; to rip the smile off the pretty Israeli girl soldier and bare the teeth behind it. They intended to bait the Israelis into what they're doing. Netanyau's people responded like the junkyard dogs they are, and here we are.

The problem I see is this.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is clearly a war crime. It's not proportionate to kill tens of thousands of innocent women and kiddies who happen to be in the vicinity of war criminals. It's not within the bounds of whatever the fuck "international law" is to be doing ethnic cleansing. We - the U.S., that is - bombed the fuck out of the Serbs for that, remember?

But I don't think it rises to the level of "genocide".

So I think the ICJ will rule in favor of Israel.

Which, as Juan Cole points out here, is troublesome just because "(i)f the justices fail in their duty to uphold International Humanitarian Law in this instance, the failure could be fatal to what is left of the legitimacy of international institutions, throwing us back into the jungle."

I note that, per the BBC today, Israel's "response" to the charge is that they are acting in "self-defense".

I'll keep that in mind the next time my neighbor takes a swing at me. Because when the cops show up at the smoking ashes of his house I can point to the ruins, the corpses of his family, and explain how I was acting in self-defense. 

I'll be curious to see how that'll fly.

2) The airstrikes in Yemen

Bret Devereaux has an excellent breakdown of why a) this is entirely expected and - as opposed to the Israeli clusterfuck we've just discussed - is entirely within the bound of international law, and b) likely to lead to a difficult and troubling escalation.

The real problem is the methods.

Airstrikes are a big, blunt hammer. As John Paul Vann said about how they were useless in Vietnam, the best weapon in counterinsurgency is a knife. You try and "pacify" an insurgency from fifteen hundred feet AGL all you're likely to do is piss off the surviving civilians whose homes, businesses, churches and schools you flattened.

But the alternative is doing a Shores of Tripoli sort of punitive expedition, which in the IED-and-cheap-automatic-weapon-casualty-averse world of Western powers is a nonstarter. There's no way for an Anglo-American landing party to do an O'Bannion in Yemen without a hellishly high risk of losses. 

And if so the Anglo-American public, who in general has no fucking idea where Yemen even is, much less the issues of freedom of navigation, the Saudi-Yemeni War, what's going on in Israel and Gaza, and the geopolitical balance between the Saudi-Gulf States and Iran, would rouse from the latest episode of "90 Day Fiance" in wroth and pillory their various governments for...well, something.

Decereaux sums things up neatly, if ominously:

"So on the one hand, the Houthis are unlikely to back down over just a few airstrikes – they’ve shown tremendous resiliency in the past against air campaigns. On the other hand, Houthis have endangered the vital national interests of many countries which are substantially stronger than they are. Historically speaking, piracy and indiscriminate trade disruption were not long-term successful strategies and states have been willing, when necessary, to employ extreme levels of violence to make those activities stop. I don’t think that has changed. Unfortunately, many of the people of Yemen – who have little say in what the Houthis do – are likely to suffer as the Houthis find out why is has been, historically speaking, a terrible idea to indiscriminately try to close down the seas."

Talk about eating soup with a knife.

There is no peace

 ...in Israel today.

That's from 2012, by the way. Same shit. Different day.

I don't see a point in writing a deeper dive into this Gaza-Israel disaster than I already have multiple times.

Here, back in 2006 (and the other three parts of that series are worth a look, because I was a fun read back in those days. Glib and snarky, but funny...)

And here and here, the last time a bunch of people died in and around Gaza in 2012.

Here's my conclusion from 2012:

"Now I'm more than willing to own my own country's atrocities and vileness in genociding the pre-1492 residents of the place I live. If a native American "terrorist" organization started rocketing North Portland and blowing up Tri-MET buses I'd shake my head in grim sympathy - before arming up to exterminate them like vermin. In that fight I'd completely understand WHY my enemies were fighting, and at the same time understand that there was no middle ground there; we both wanted exactly the same thing, and for them to win I and mine would HAVE to lose. And I'd choose for their women and kids to die rather than mine.

But at the same time, I'd also understand that that would make me a monster. I wouldn't make excuses for myself. I would be doing wrong, and willingly, because that's the nature of colonialism.

The very nature of Israel and its situation in the Middle East makes for monstrous choices.

But here's the thing; as a citizen of the U.S. I don't HAVE to make a choice. I can blithely wish a curse on both the houses in this colonial mess. I can wish that everyone involved in the business had made better choices. I can wish that Truman had offered Utah to the Zionists. I can wish that David Balfour had choked on a kipper at the age of 16. I can wish a lot of things, and none of them will made a half-damn's worth of difference."

In the ensuing decade nothing has changed. 

In the decade to come nothing will change, either. 

Last night my Bride asked me "They can't possibly win, right? What does Hamas expect? And why now? "

Here's my guess.

1) I think that the Arab residents of the former Ottoman province of Palestine see that their Muslim co-religionists are wearying of the endless expenditure of blood and treasure on the Palestinian bloody shirt. The Saudis are cozying up to Israel. The Syrians and Egyptians have their own problems to worry about. The old grievances are losing their appeal, so...

2) I think that Hamas see this as a sort of grand scale suicide/martyrdom - dying on their feet rather than living on their knees - AND the chance to hand the Israeli government their Own Personal Atrocity; a Warsaw Ghetto that will help make more anti-Israeli warriors.

My friend says that the whole Occupation is a horror for the way it exposes and destroys one of the most comforting tropes of many American Jews; that there is something uniquely thoughtful about Judaism that makes it resistant or even immune to the sorts of Inquisition/Crusade/Pogrom sort of evils. As he points out, what the apartheid state of 2023 Israel makes clear is that the difference was just that prior to 1967 organized Judaism simply lacked the opportunity.

And I think this is a chance for Hamas to goad Netanyahu's Israel into a Final Palestinian Solution that will stain it the way the original stained the Nazis. Before Treblinka there were fascists. But after Treblinka and Auschwitz and the sonderkommandos? No. Nazism became a uniquely awful evil. The taint of genocide could never be removed.

And Hamas wants to paste that label on Israel. Along with the satisfaction of killing as many Israelis was they can.

Is that insane and pointless bloodshed?

Ohfuckyes.

Is that just another day in the nightmare that is the eastern Levant?

Ohfuckyes, too.

As I saw when I looked out over this field of blood 17 years - and eleven years - ago, I see no "good" outcome here. The horrific conclusion was written...back in 1917 when Arthur Balfour promised away a piece of the Ottoman Empire he had no right to speak for...or in 1948, when Harry Truman jumped in and wrote a check that my country has been paying on for more than half a century.

And I still don't.

"Ruin and merciless hatred..."

Twenty Years Ago...

...a dive-bar's-full claque of criminals, fools, grifters, and clowns let slip the dogs of war and drove the foreign policy bus off the Iraq cliff.

I've already written everyfuckingthing I can say about that. I can't say it any better than I did ten long fucking years ago:

"The persistence of these Tin Gods in the public life of our nation is, and should be, a great enduring unbearable shame to us, all of us, us the We the People who were entrusted with the honor and truth of this nation. We have chosen to be a nation of Men rather than a nation of Law, chosen comfortable dishonor above painful rectitude, chosen the deaths of others rather than to sacrifice ourselves.

When our generation is remembered it should be for that, and for that above all. Whatever good we have done, whatever kindnesses we may do, the crimes for which we hung the defeated leaders of Nazi Germany, the crime of making aggressive war, the "crimes against peace" of Nuremberg; the crimes of others that by our acceptance and indifference we have made our own, will remain with us always. 

Like the unquiet ghosts of the dead of Baghdad, Ramadi, and Basra, like the mournful fragments of the GIs flown home inside plastic sacks, and like the cries of the headscarved women, weeping for sons and fathers and lovers vanished in the morning mists that rise above the Tigris as the merciless dawn floods the watermeadows with light as red as blood."

So all I can do is spit on the ground and curse the nation that considers a transgender kid more worth persecuting that putting scum like Yoo and Wolfowitz and Perle and Dubya and Dick on trial and in prison.

In the Time of Trump we are surely getting what we deserved when we let that trash walk away from the bloody disaster they made smiling and whistling.

I'm old and tired of returning to the pointless runaround of "who fucked up Iraq", and we have newer and Trumpier scumbags we should be trying and jailing, anyway.

Whether we will do that will say a lot about what we are as a nation.

Let's just say I'm not optimistic.

Ukraine, one year on

I'll admit freely that I was one of those who assumed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be, if not a walkover, over quickly and in Russia's favor.

"The fighting continues in Ukraine, with the Russian forces doing surprisingly poorly (relative to the preponderance of weight-of-metal on the Russian side...). I still doubt the outcome is in play - poor or not, quantity has a quality all it's own (just hard on the people in the "quantity"...)."

Well.

I'm a well-known Eeyore in Portland soccer circles and that carries over into geopolitics, as well. I still don't see how this ends well for Ukraine. Largely, though, not so much because of Russian battlefield performance but because of Western and especially United States political attention span.

It's difficult for the Western democracies, driven by the short electoral cycle, to keep eyes on the prize - in this case, ensuring that a rapacious kleptocracy isn't rewarded for its neighborhood aggressions - and this problem is made even more difficult because the EU/US Right is openly Russiaphilic. 

This isn't just Trump, either. He's obviously either 1) just a stooge, 2) deeply in hock to the Russian oligarchs/Deutschbank execs who are propping up his "wealth", or 3) compromised in some truly vile way (old saying: "dead girl or live boy" because nothing short would genuinely shame Trump...) by Russian intelligence. Throw in his visible man-crush on Shirtless Vlad, and his stanning the Russians is utterly unsurprising.

But the remainder of the Western Right is all-in on Putinism because it clearly fits into the jigsaw puzzle weirdness of their worldview, where transgender teens and moms-against-assault-rifles are existential threats while rapacious plutocrats and anthropogenic global warming aren't.

Unfortunately for Ukraine these people are either close to or holding the levers of power. Watch this U.S. Congress - the nutbars in the House WILL strip out support for Ukraine. Empty G and her fellow Nazis have a Molitov-Ribbentrop Pact that ensures their constant attacks on Ukrainian aid in hopes of ensuring a Russian victory.

And without Western help the Russians will win; if not the complete subjugation of Ukraine - occupying the Ruthenian heartland will be no easier in 2025 - worse, if anything - than it was in 1946 - then the effective "Finlandization" of Ukraine or worse.

Even with that help, it's going to be damn near impossible for a true Ukrainian "victory". Russia is still immensely larger and can keep hammering at the Ukraine so long as the Ukrainians can't effectively hammer back. They can't; Russia has the geographic strategic depth that no Ukrainian weapons can threaten short of risking Putin throwing a nuke.

And if he does...

So I think we're still stuck with the "lessons learned" we learned a year ago:

1. Thucydides is still correct: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

No real explication needed; we're still here.

I still agree with Point #4. But that doesn't mean that everyone else does, so being capable of giving a bloody response to those who, like Putin, believe that they can just take what they want by force is still, sadly, a necessity.

But.

Anyone who's familiar with the U.S. procurement and doctrine processes knows that neither one is particularly well suited for ensuring that We the People get a most our of our tax dollars. The "conservatives" love to blabber on about how there's SO much "waste, fraud, and abuse" in the federal government, yet are unwilling to look for it where it lives; in the "defense" budget.

2. When someone tells you what they are, believe them.

This applies both to Putin - who told us he was going to put the USSR back together repeatedly - and to the Western Right, which has told us over and over that they want what Putin has; the ability to harm, jail, and kill those he/they hate and the power to bind and loose regardless of the democratic norms and opinions of others who disagree. And are fine with him doing what he wants if he helps them with what they want.

3. The Russian military is proving what a bad fucking idea personal autocracy is.

As if we hadn't seen enough of that from the reign of Dick Cheney, who intended to reverse the Decline of the Imperial Presidency, and Donald Trump. There's a reason that old imperialist Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government...except all the others. And the worst form - both for those who live within it and for those who outside who are the targets of it - is autocracy, whether in the sort of kleptocracy currently in Russia or the theocracy dreamed of by Western Christopaths or the Dictatorship of the GOProletariat that lives inside Lauren Bobert's head.

4. Smedley Butler is still right, too; war was a racket and still is.

The "leaders" - in Russia and here in the US - will never pay and never have paid the price for their war crimes. Dubya isn't in jail in the Hague, Cheney is still a bloated remainder of the stupidity of the Iraq Misadventure, and Putin won't be the one who falls out of the window.

So here we are; a year on, with more dying and more killing to come, and with no real hope for a "good" outcome, merely bad and worse.

And if there's a more powerful statement about how war is all hell, I can't think of one.

Some things I dread about 2023

 

Hunter Biden.

Let's just start there.

Mind, that's just a placeholder for the tl:dr version, which I now kind of have to explain. So.

There's always a handful of ominous clouds on the new year horizon, every year, things we know are in view but have no way of knowing how they will affect us or even whether they will affect us..

But this one's both a surety and a misery; the GQP's takeover of the federal House of Representatives, which I'll just go ahead and call "Hunter Biden" for short because the coming ridiculous fucking clown show is sure to include massive amounts of the sonofabitch.

(And in case you haven't been following this goat rodeo, the central fact of our next two Congressional years is that the fucking monkeys will be running the House zoo. The steering wheel will be in the clutch of the whackjobs - the Greenes, the Gaetzs, the Gym Jordans...the people who make Louie Gohmert look like a sage.)

As we've discussed here (over and over, because it's the central reality of our current U.S. politics) the modern "conservative" movement has only a handful of actual policies, all of which are loathsome to anyone who can't check all the "rich, "white", "male", "god-botherer", "ammosexual", and "bigoted" boxes.

Popular support for policies like "tax cuts for rich fucks!", "let's make American society socially, politically, and financially more like 1929!", and "let's hand over more political power to big business!" ranges from nonexistent to miniscule to at-least-less-then-two/fifths-of-the-public. 

In a genuinely popularly-elected government flogging those sorts of political goals would get you locked out of the corridors of power for generations if not forever; there's just not enough plutocrats, plutocrat-fluffers, and morons to get you elected.

Since that's all the "conservatives" have, though, they have to spend - and will spend - the vast bulk of their time fapping over ridiculous QANut conspiracy bullshit that is red meat to their lunatic base.

So when Margie Taylor Greene gets her little dickbeaters on the House Judiciary Committee gavel you know damn well she's gonna drag Tony Fauci in front of her to explain why...ummm...well, that's a good question, actually, given that it was Greene's outfit - starting with her Orange Crush - that fucked up the COVID response and managed to kill something like half a million people and all Fauci did was what he could to stop the suicidal morons from killing others along with themselves

Over at wherever Matt Gaetz lands he'll gin up a dozen Hunter Biden "investigations" generating a shit-ton of FAUX "News" content while trying to make Hunter a scandal on Daddy Joe...as if Jared Kusher didn't even fucking exist or if anyone outside the looney wingnut Right gives a shit.

All the while these chucklefucks will deliberately impede every other goddamn thing the federal government is there to do.

Because the bottom line is that these fucking people are 1) dumb as a box of rocks, 2) mean as weasels and 3) convinced that "government is bad" so they're bad a governance.

Which, in a republic where the fucking people are supposed to BE the fucking government, is a nonsensical and dangerous conviction.

Which isn't going to stop these nitwits. 

They'll tie the House, and to the extent they can, the entire federal government and everything that government has a hand in (which means damn near everything, the modern U.S. being an immense industrial nation that cannot continue as an entity without constant and continuous governance in everything ranging from foreign defense to meat-packing inspections...) with their "Hunter Biden"-level foolery.

Which means that the true disaster of our age...

Climate Change

...will roll unchecked.

We've talked about this, too. We're headed straight into the Perfect Storm of the Holocene Thermal Maximum and the Sixth Extinction without the slightest idea what that will mean.

Except not good; we can take that as read.

Will 2023 be The End of All Things?

No, of course not.

But it'll be incrementally worse than 2022 was. More extreme weather. Probably another bad western fire season. Trouble with supply chains. Difficulties in crop yields, and changes in, especially, water budgets that will affect everything from drinking water to fish runs.

It's difficult enough to get even the left side of the political spectrum to pay attention - let alone doing anything genuinely useful - about this stuff. It's complicated (meaning that the vast majority of Americans neither understand it nor appreciate how potentially devastating it will become...) and expensive (meaning taxes, which nobody likes, particularly the rich fucks who have their hand up the typical elected sock-puppet's ass...).

The Right?

Probably 80% still think the whole climate change thing is a Red Chinese hoax.

Yes, they ARE that fucking stupid.

I'm old. I'm not going to live to see how bad this could and probably - at the rate we're going - will get. But my kids will, and I'd just as soon not hand then the mess that it looks like we're going to get.

There's a lot of other shit that we're going to see in 2023 that ranges from "gee, that's kinda fucked up" ro "WTAF!!??"; increasing plutocracy and the New Gilded Age, more COVID (including new strains that we're incubating now because we've effectively given up on trying to run the Smallpox Program and vaccinate the fucker out or existence), and more trouble around the periphery of the former Soviet Union. 

Because...

Wars and Rumors of Wars

...are likely to continue to roil eastern Europe and north Asia as well as all the usual (ahemMiddleEastahem) places.

Ruth Deyermond has a useful Clif's Notes discussion of the problems of Russia and the West, but the tl:dr is Ukraine has made clear if nothing else that the Western (including the U.S.) assumption that the post-Soviet status quo - a chastened Russia unwilling and unlikely to act aggressively outside its post-Soviet borders - is gone so long as the current Putin-led leadership remains in place.

Okay, let me make this clear - I am NOT writing a new Long Telegram for 2023.

Putin Russia is a problem. That doesn't automatically make it OUR problem, or automatically make it a geopolitical-military problem. I'm not arguing for a new Cold War.

I'm agreeing with Deyermond, though, that we need to:

1. Accept that the old energy relationship with Russia cannot be recovered. Communicate this, and the reasons for it, clearly to readers/viewers/voters.

2.  Acknowledge that the need to pay attention to Russia isn’t going to go away and that this requires reorganisation and investment.

Deyermond has a long sub-thread that expounds on how institutional neglect of post-Soviet Russia has gone a long way towards putting us (and Russia!) in a vastly more risky position.

This is a new bud on the troublesome U.S. foreign policy tree, but there's a lot of poison fruit still hanging on the old branches.

Unquestioning support of Israel even now that it has become an openly theocratic apartheid state. 

Ignorance, or, worse, ignorant meddling in internal troubles in subSaharan Africa and the Middle East.

The uncertainty about the PRC's intentions towards it's own "near abroad", especially Taiwan.

Problems in Central America - a lot of this is related to the climate issues mentioned above - and the instability of Mexico in particular brought about by a combination of demographics, economics, the institutional political dysfunction baked into Mexico by its colonial master Spain, and the collision of the Mexican underworld and U.S. drug policies.

Ugh. I won't even want to think about what will happen with all this shit if Trump gets back into the White House in 2024.

But 2023's gonna be bad enough as it is.

Homelessness in Portland

With the defeat of Joanne Hardesty there's no Portland commissioner who will push back against Mayor Wheeler's "might, power, and beatings" plan to sweep the poor people in these squalid camps out of Portland.

So we'll go on with the whack-a-hobo "policy" that's been all the City can come up with to try and figure out what to do with poor people who either can't afford Portland's astronomical rents, or who are struggling with everything from addiction to mental and physical health problems.

And we'll hear the usual bullshit from people like Betsy Johnson about how this is going to "solve" the problem, which is the equivalent of pissing on your head and telling you how lucky you are that the rain is warm.

All the while the City will he shoveling money at the worthless fucking Police Bureau.

Plus there's all the usual bullshit. Payday lenders. Non-alcoholic beer. Bathroom ceiling fans (I'll have a post about that in a bit...) The Fucking Big Bang Theory.

Is there going to be more good than bad?

Christ, I hope so.

But whatever we're going to get, it's too late now. We're gonna get it good and hard.

America Worst

Long before Orange Foolius and his gang of GQP nitwits adopted it, the slogan "America First" was the boast of another gang of fascist-fluffing traitors.

That would be Charles "Lucky Lindy" Lindbergh and the original, isolationist version.

The Wiki entry at the link cited claims that most of the Forties Firsters were genuine isolationists who didn't want the nation to get involved in "foreign wars".

That's fine. I'm all for not getting involved in other people's wars, or wars, period, if it comes to that.

On the other hand, there are some people who have some ideas or goals rotten enough that only killing enough of them will stop them, and those people will force wars on you whether that's a good idea or not.

The bulk of the original Firsters recognized that; the outfit killed itself on December 11, 1941 when it became brutally obvious who those really rotten people were. 

That brings us to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

I'm not going to make a case for war. Or that war. Or for Americans to fight, kill, and die in that, or any war not forced upon us.

If I was going to make that argument I'd be learning Ukrainian on my way to volunteer to run a battery fire direction center for Сухопу́тні військá Збрóйних сил Украї́ни. 

I'm not, and so I refuse to be a hypocrite and cheer for other people's sons and daughters to go and fight.

But.

There doesn't seem to be any gray area on which side as Americans we should be fighting for if it comes to fighting, and it sure as fuck isn't Vlad Putin and his gang. My compa the Rude Pundit pretty much sums it up:

"Here's the thing: I've been watching the United States fund bullshit fascists and totalitarians my entire fucking life. In Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, this country has provided arms and money to the worst goddamn people and the most worthless causes. We've funded mercenaries and weapons manufacturers. We've funded crazed terrorists by calling them "insurgents" and funded evil militaries crushing freedom-fighting insurgents. 

What Zelensky did was say to us, to we who live in this goddamned ludicrously powerful country in this goddamned ludicrously debased age, that we're supposed to represent some fucking ideals to the rest of the world. Look, Zelensky said, your mythology is based on real shit that happened, real battles with real lives and real consequences. Now we have this battle against this enemy. The consequences for failure would be genocide and expanded aggression by the lunatic Putin. For the US to walk away would be shameful. It would make us an accessory to mass murder, even more than we usually are."

Yes. Ohhellyes.

We now have the same choice that We the People faced in 1939. Do we help out the dictator whose people will - who are - cheerfully butchering anyone in their conquests they can catch? Or do we help the people fighting those sonsofbitches?

It's not really a hard choice.

The Ukrainians don't have to be great. And they aren't; there's a lot of post-Soviet fuckery there.

But they sure as Hell are better than the actual Putin-led post-Soviets.

And that brings me to the Latter-Day America Firsters.

That's a couple of them there; January 6th traitors; Matt Gaetz and Lauren "I luv gunz" Boebert during the speech that the ;leader of Ukraine gave to the joint session of Congress. The Wordle of that day must have been a real toughie; both the little rascals are still glued to their phones during the applause lines. 

But that's just another day at the shop for the New Firsters. It's part of their job as the Putin Wing of the GQP, to stan for a criminal fascist.

Well, hell; if you're gonna rep for Donald Trump, how is Putin a stretch?

Look. There's no such thing as a "good war". I can certainly understand being on the fence about, say, the war in Yemen. There's a lot of bad and no real good options there. Most wars are a choice between worse and even worse.

But here?

Fuck that noise.

We shipped millions of tanks and trucks to that rotten bastard Stalin to beat that rotten-er bastard, Hitler because it was in our national interest.

To send arms and ammo to Zelensky - who is not anywhere near as rotten as Stalin - to beat that rotten bastard Putin is a no-brainer.

Unless you're a MAGAt-loving, QAnon-huffing, Putin-fluffing GOP shitweasel.

Like these two and the other Firsters, the Cosplay Mossy Oak Militia (thanks, Jim Wright!) and all the other Putin Fanbois?

You know how I keep saying these people are traitors?

Well, if you were an original Firster and you still had your Adolf poster up on the wall on December 12?

Yeah. You were a traitor.

Who's gonna tell these people about that?

Their domestic policies, such as they are, are enough to make me loathe them. But to prefer a brutal foreign dictator over a flawed but still-better polity that dictator is invading?

The new Firsters are...what their Adolf-loving predecessors were. 

I'll let the Rude One see me out here:

"That's why the conservatives who dangle from Putin's taint hair went crazy. It's because they say constantly that the United States is the greatest country in the history of everything. They say all the time that we are something special. And we're saying, and Zelensky is imploring, that we fucking well act like it once in a while. Sometimes even a superpower has to put the fuck up or shut the fuck up."

Learned nothing and forgot nothing

 Fourteen years ago I wrote this:

Seven years after 9/11, we're stuck in Groundhog Day and I just don't care anymore. Bin Laden has become, like the flu or like natural male enhancement, something that cynical hucksters use to bilk the rubes. For the past two years I've posted the usual solemn reflection on the innocent people who died that day.

Fuck that.

We lost the right to parade that goddam bloody shirt when the first baby died in a mistaken bomb run over Baquoba or hapless taxi driver got sodomized at Bagram Air Base. 

Now we're just another Great Power on the make, another Smedley Butler racketeer using our dead and our grieving to justify our own damn greed and fear.

Fuck that. Fuck all that. Who'd have thought that we would let nineteen yay-hoos with boxcutters and screwdrivers and a bunch of panicked politicians yank a nation so far off the road of national self-interest and sanity?

I see not the slightest reason to retract or restate any of the above.

I've stayed away from the television and, largely, the internet today simply because I would be irked by the usual hypocritical wailing about the events of the day. I get a sense that they're more muted than ever outside the usual right-wing nimrods, which is both fortunate and long overdue.

But the bottom line is that Dubya and Deadeye Dick Cheney still live in cossetted retirement and Charles Gittings died with his mission of justice unfulfilled.

"Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien apprendre."

 

Well, it's That Day again.

I'm not going to bother going over all this nonsense again; it's bad enough that my country will, for the twentieth time, wave the bloody shirt of the towers and the Pentagon and the farm field where the fourth airliner went down to try and draw the audience's attention from the mountainous heap of death and destruction it built on those ruinous foundations.

I've already talked that sonofabitch to death and there's nothing more to say.

Instead I want to think about the original pile of corpses harvested from that day twenty years ago; the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

By pure coincidence, one of the books on my nightstand the day the last U.S. troop walked up the ramp to the evac bird was Andy Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam.

Krepinevich is supposed to have been moved largely by another Vietnam post-mortem, Harry Summers' On Strategy, that posited that the problem was that the U.S. wasn't WW2-enough, that the real problem was that the Army never really went full-D-Day on the Communist forces and defeated them militarily.

Krepinevich's analysis, though, suggested that the opposite was true; that the Army have never really stopped trying to D-Day the war. That what he calls the "Army Concept" - "a focus on mid-intensity, or conventional, war and a reliance on high volumes of firepower to minimize casualties" (Krepenevich, 1986, p. 6) - was central to the reason that the U.S. failed to realize either it's military or political objectives in Vietnam.

Krepinevich's assessment of low-intensity (call it "guerrilla war" or "counterinsurgency" or "foreign internal defense"...) conflict is that the ultimate objective of the counter-insurgent forces has to be to separate the rebels/insurgents/guerillas from the bulk of the local people, and then to weld the locals to your local proxy through...well, a bunch of stuff, but basically by making the proxy attractive to the locals.

You do that, you eventually win.

He writes that while paying lip service to this objective that, outside a small and relatively powerless group of low-ranking officers (largely in the Special Forces and advisory cadres), the Army hierarchy had no interest in doing this. They wanted to meet the NVA and VC Main Force units in open combat and smash them.

So the low-level, day-to-day, grinding work of securing the population was left to the South Vietnamese, from the ARVN down to the Regional Force and Popular Force paramilitaries and the National Police.

And this crippled the actual counterinsurgency. The ARVN and the police were a corrupt mess even where they were militarily competent, the RVN government was, if anything, worse, and the RF/PF (the "Ruff-Puffs") starved for resources and unsupported so at the mercy of the local VC.

The "contribution" of the US and ARVN maneuver forces was to swing through in a "big sweep", shoot the fuck out of the landscape, create a bunch of refugees among the survivors, and then move on, leaving the locals to get re-occupied by the local force VC and the political cadres that had largely gone to ground before the sweep.

That pretty much tallies with my reading of the conduct of the war, and Krepinevich in his conclusion, says that:

"Low-intensity warfare represents the most likely arena of future conflict for the Army, and counterinsurgency the most demanding contingency. As in the period following the Korean War, (after Vietnam) the Army is erecting barriers to avoid fighting another Vietnam War...instead of gaining a better understanding of how to wage counterinsurgency warfare within the unique social, economic, political, and military dimensions comprising that form of conflict, the Army is trying...to transform it into something it can handle." (op. cit., p.274-275)

That, fundamentally, the Army Concept "won" the war for the U.S. Army's hearts and minds. Instead of being in Vietnam one year twelve times, the Army tried to forget that the nasty interlude even happened so it could return to the sort of high-kinetic warfare it was good at.

Fast forward thirty years, then, and the U.S. Army gets dragged into southcentral Asia.

I won't pretend to have read any tactical or operational studies of the ISAF mission in general, but the impression I get from what I have suggests that not only did the US operational command not review or learn from the lessons of Vietnam, it actively repeated the mistakes that it had made before.

The maneuver forces leaned hard on firepower and air-and-vehicle mobility. Units rotated in and out without ever spending enough time to truly learn the ground and the people they fought over. The primary focus seems to have been trying to find, fix, and finish the Taliban field forces rather than securing the population.

The Afghan military and police appear to have been as bad or worse than the ARVN; vastly corrupt and randomly brutal. The ISAF command doesn't seem to have been particularly picky who it sponsored, and that ended up putting a lot of the same people whose bad behavior had encouraged Joe and Molly Afghan to support (or, at least, tolerate) the Taliban in the first place - Anand Gopal's The Other Afghan Women does a good job of detailing the problems this created.

From what I can tell - and it's worth noting that whatever truth is there in the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan it's surrounded by an imperial guard-size bodyguard of lies - what horrifies me the most is that having had twenty years to learn the fundamentals of suppressing a rebellion in Vietnam my Army, the U.S. Army, not only didn't learn those lessons but actively turned their back on them and spent another twenty years reapplying the methods they knew, they should have known from the beginning, had failed before.

And that, for me, sums up my personal connection to the tragedy of the twenty years that began this day.

My Army, my country, We, the People, forgot none of our outrage and fears and grievances.

And then we proved that we had learned nothing, as well.

You can argue about whether we should have sent an army into Afghanistan. I tend to agree that the occupation was not a bright idea...but I also understand why it happened.

But once that Army was there...how the hell did we manage to do things not just catastrophically wrong, but catastrophically wrong in nearly the identical way we'd done them - and knew we'd done them - wrong fifty years before? 

We knew - we should have known - what would happen when we did the things in Afghanistan we did (and the way we did them) because we'd done them that way before - in Vietnam - and ended up with a heap of ashes.

And yet, here we are again.

That seems to me the bitterest legacy of the lake of bitterness that is this day.

The South Dakota Borderers

Those dusky border ruffians are put on notice! The Mount Rushmore State Mosstroopers - a whole platoon of the hardened veterans! - will fan out and become The Wall! No pasaran!

Seriously. Some Republican fatcat is paying for a whole platoon or so from the South Dakota Guard to TDY down to Texas to stop the Brown Hordes. 

Be assured that now the Republic is safe from La Raza.

Hey, Abbot? Hey, Noem? I seem to recall we tried this once. It didn't go all that well.

"We left the border for Parral
In search of Villa and Lopez, his old pal.
Our horses, they were hungry,
And we ate parched corn.
It was damn hard living
In the state of Chihuahua
Where Pancho Villa was born."

Update, 6/29 pm: Dan Nexon wins the Internets:

 

A Mess of Pottage

 

The U.S. Congress has, in the usual scatterbrained and dysfunctional way that body seems to work, taken up the issue of repealing the 2002 "Authorization to Use Military Force" that was the legal cover for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the mess-o-potamia that followed.

I trust that no one who regularly visits this place has forgotten the appalling clusterfuck that resulted from that cynical bit of Great Power stupidity, so it's obvious on its face that it is time and past time to flush the boneheaded and dangerous thing, full of more lies than nuts in a fruitcake, and I wish they'd 86 the 2001. 9/11, version while they're at it.

The notion of having a political rule just lying around that provides any U.S. government who wishes the "legal" authority to start throwing projectiles around the globe seems dangerously stupid. It's not like illegality will stop a cabal that wishes to do that, but to give them a sort of real-life "C'est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l'Etat que le porteur du present a fait ce qu'il a fait."?

That 's a Bad Idea.

Both of the 2000's AUMFs are Bad Ideas spawned by my country's weird and ugly combination of geopolitical hubris and laziness, the sort of mindless aggressive response to any sort of provocation that makes every problem a nail to be militarily hammered.

It's unfortunate that the mindset that produced them cannot also be repealed. But at the very least - given the lessons that the mindless ruin and merciless hatred that the two have spawned should have taught us - these two loaded guns need to be unloaded.

We'll see if there's enough political sanity left in the U.S. capitol to do that.

Notes from the Airsoft Coup

Anderson and Deeks have a long digression at Lawfare on the latest stabile genius foreign policy chess move between sorta-kinda-the-U.S. and the Maduro government in Venezuela and, specifically, did it roll over into the "Neutrality Act" of 1795 (18 U.S.C. § 960), which says:

"Whoever, within the United States, knowingly begins or sets on foot or provides or prepares a means for or furnishes the money for, or takes part in, any military or naval expedition or enterprise to be carried on from thence against the territory or dominion of any foreign prince or state, or of any colony, district, or people with whom the United States is at peace, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."

The pithiest description of the Trump Administration is "malevolence mitigated by incompetence" and that as much as anything surely describes this opera bouffe' "coup".

Obviously the part of this we'll probably never know (or won't until the clearance expires in a quarter century, assuming it ever does) is the degree to which the U.S. government was involved. The principle of the Neutrality Act is that it is illegal for a private citizen or citizens of the U.S. to take actions that might lead the nation into war with a foreign nation. But...if the U.S. government did authorize this clusterfuck, then it's no longer illegal under U.S. law. The Trumpkins deny any involvement because, duh, fail, of course they would whether they greenlit this thing or not.

My question would be...does that "authorization" extend to what might be called "guilty knowledge"? Can silence imply consent or even "authorization - without explicit authorization? Assuming that the administration knew this "coup" was in train - and since the knucklehead mercenary CEO publicly announced it (cunning move, there, Clausewitz...) it is difficult to believe they did not - and deliberately did nothing to forestall it...does that provide the mercs with implicit "authorization"? Certainly it would provide the US intelligence agencies plausible deniability. Sure, we knew. So what? Not our business. Oh, wait, it worked? Sweet! Welcome, our new Venezuelan buddies!

Once again, the difficulty is separating the incompetence from the malevolence from the pure goofy "WTF?" with these people.

Somewhere in Hell William Walker sneers in bitter contempt...

“...disunited, undisciplined, ambitious, faithless...”

Worth noting, as we drift unmoored through the final days of the Republic, that we're showing as many indicators of a late-stage political dissolution abroad as we are at home, one of these being an increased dependence on mercenaries to fight our cabinet wars.

I'm not going to pretend that these hired guns are going to have anything like the negative domestic effects Niccolo Machiavelli reported they had on the Italy of the Renaissance:

"Mercenaries...are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were."

The United States is not the Florence of the 1500s; we will neither be conquered nor ruined by these mercenaries.

But a putative republic should be concerned with the interests of its citizens. When it increasingly becomes, through using hired troops to further divorce its actions abroad from its people at home, more of an imperium it furthers the conditions that make all the more likely that - although the standards may still read "The Senate and People" - that the orders that move those standards do not reflect any actual intent to do good for, or further the interests of, We the People.

I wish I could, as I so often do, make this into a partisan problem. It's not; the desire to make the nation's military adventures less fraught with political consequences has been sought by the "leadership" of all factions outside the tiny genuinely Red Left (such as it is) and the equally tiny isolationist Right.

No, it's not a Democratic or Republican problem.

It's an "American" problem, and one generated by the massive indifference We the People have shown towards holding our "leaders" accountable to us for their indifference towards...I won't even say "our interests"; it's an indifference towards even trying to honestly and openly assess what those interests are.

Any truly rational evaluation of the value of spending blood and treasure to send soldiers - any soldiers - to chase the ragged aspirants of a theocratic fantasy around a disputatious and chaotic foreign region would quickly conclude that value is utterly nil. All the bullets ever cast cannot kill the notion of Islamic hegemony any more than they could kill Christian dominionism when it was the animating force of the West. It took an Enlightenment to do that, and by our part in discrediting and destroying the secular authorities in the Islamic lands we've done a hell of a fucking good job ensuring that the Islamic Enlightenment is further away than ever.

I have not desire to see my fellow soldiers thrown into this pointless abyss.

But I have even less desire to see my country continue to sow the dragon's teeth simply because I and my fellow citizens are too lazy and disengaged to bother with that sowing when it's done not by our "own" hands but by hired ploughmen tilling foreign fields with the seed my taxes have bought.

Those underneath the harrow are not too stupid to know whose money is behind the rifle, regardless of who is actually carrying it. If we do not understand that, if we do not understand the idiocy of trying to use those hired rifles to divorce ourselves from our cluelessness and geopolitical stupidity, we will never understand that we can never hire enough of those rifles to ever prevent being continually nipped by the dragons.

"...he who told us that our sins were the cause of it told the truth, but they were not the sins he imagined, but those which I have related. And as they were the sins of princes, it is the princes who have also suffered the penalty." ~The Prince, Chapter XII

Ruin and merciless hatred

I don't really have much to add to what all of you know. The Iranian "leadership" has proved nearly as stupid and impulsive as my own.

There really is no "win" here. The U.S. cannot possibly invade and occupy Iran in order to effect a dramatic change in the nation of Iran as it did in Germany and Japan after 1945. Iran cannot possibly force the United States to back down without the U.S. choosing to back down.

Instead there will simply be killing and maiming, destruction and chaos. In the end the combatants will remain, richer in nothing but ruin and merciless hatred.

You know I was a soldier. I cannot in good faith preach to anyone the virtues of pacifism.

But there are times and reasons when wars must be fought. Often those reasons are bad ones, and those times are never right. There never was, as Benjamin Franklin wrote, a good war or a bad peace.

But there are worse wars. Stupid, pointless, needless wars, and this is surely a very, very bad war, in that nothing good can ever come of the "peace" that will finally follow it.

I will say more tomorrow.

But for tonight, I will leave you with the rest of Doctor Franklin's quote for you to ponder as we wait uncertainly for the news that will come with the dawn.

"What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility. What an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads and other public works, edifices and improvements, rendering England a complete paradise, might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief! In bringing misery into thousands of families, and destroying the lives of so many thousands of working people who might have performed the useful labor."

Update 1/9/: Well, color me surprised. Both sides sorta-kinda walked this back from the abyss. The mullahs made it clear that all these missiles were warning shots, targeted to make big booms but not kill anyone. And Trumpy Bear, looking and sounding like a kid forced to eat his vegetables, produced a brief statement that made it clear that he was doing nothing to ratchet the tensions down. The punitive U.S. sanctions on Iran remain in place, "sanctions" that amount to a level of blockade that would be considered warfare if it were being done to the U.S. by another nations. The GIs aren't moving out of Iraq regardless of what the Iraqis may say. All the elements needed for an utterly weapons-grade-moron-level war are still there.

And, worse yet, in my opinion, the airwaves are full of the same fucking idiots - Bloody Bill Kristol, Hannity, Coulter, Rushbo, the loathsome Cheney and Trump spawn, pimping as hard for that moronic war as possible.

So we dodged that bullet. But these dumb fuckers are waving the gun around, and if it goes off and shoots my country in the foot I will be as shocked as when my kid announced that Cap'n Crunch abraded the roof of his mouth.

Mr. Thucydides on Line 1...

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.