I had a piece all written and ready to send out this morning and…Jeebuz Krist, the 4 idiots of the apocalypse (*rump, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth) chose to tweet a war.
Let’s see, who was it that claimed to the Candidate of Peace? Will the thugs of ICE be sent to fight this latest Middle-East imbroglio?
For one, Americans don’t want war. According to Axios, 60% of 1,512 polled Americans think the U.S. military should not get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran, according to an Economist/YouGov poll (https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52380-donald-trump-approval-israel-iran-ice-immigration-protests-vaccines-robert-f-kennedy-jr-june-13-16-2025-economistyougov-poll) released this week. Only 16% support U.S. military action, and 24% are unsure.
You may recall that another blunderer-in-chief, GWB, declared "Mission Accomplished" not long after we invaded Iraq. We all know how that worked out. He stated seven times between October 2005 and July 2006 that “we will never accept anything less than complete victory.”
A journal article worth a read discusses the concept of the “victory trap” to explore why the presidents of the War on Terror have used the unrealistically decisive language of “victory” and the political consequences of this type of rhetoric.
The trap consists of two related components. First, because of the electoral consequences of “losing” wars and popular conceptions of how wars should end, presidents feel obliged to remain in conflicts to avoid military “defeats” and make claims about success and eventual “victory” even if they do not believe in the accuracy of these statements. Secondly, because of strategic realities and the lack of willingness of the American public to bear the costs of war commensurate with achieving the culturally appropriate idea of total victory, policymakers are criticized for being unable to produce results proportionate to their previous rhetoric. In that way, the victory trap relates to both policy and politics, explaining both the longevity of American conflicts and the political costs associated with them.
Another ‘trap’ not mentioned in that article is the tendency to conflate Governments with People. Hamilton Nolan just wrote that Nations have governments. Nations are full of people. The government and the people are two different things. The failure to take this distinction seriously lays the groundwork for much of the world’s suffering.
This is the most important thing. This is the substance. Cultures may be foreign but people are the same everywhere. Your birth in one country rather than another is nothing but a flicker of randomness. When you are struggling to imagine what some news event might mean for people in a faraway place, ask yourself: If I was living there, how would I feel about it?
Israeli strikes have so far killed at least 400 people in Iran and injured 3,000, according to Iran's health ministry. The death toll in Israel from Iran’s retaliatory strikes remains at 24.
And yet it just seems like one more frickin’ distraction from the guy who can’t hold a cohesive thought in his tiny brain. No strategy, just impulse.
Rebecca Solnit’s writing last night is worth a read wherein she notes that political science professor David Faris observed that "Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades trying to strong arm the United States into an unprovoked war against Iran and finally found a president stupid enough to do it for him."
She went on to write it's also worth remembering that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is covered in white supremacist and far-right tattoos, including a crusader's cross and one that reads Deus Vult," literally God will it, but the phrase "has been popularised by the far-Right, as a rallying cry railing against the spread of Islam." By which I mean he's an idiot and a fanatic and incapable of assessing why this really bad decision is a really bad decision and mounting reasoned objections to it.
Robert Reich’s piece, The Dogs of War, dives deep into questions and answers regarding this blunder. There’s nothing like a war to help a wannabe dictator like Trump justify more “emergency” powers.
Then there’s the old reliable comment from my LA drummer friend who is never shy about speaking his mind…
Why is everyone losing their shit over Caligula bombing Iran? Of COURSE he was going to bomb Iran. Israel has exposed Iran as an incompetent paper tiger & any "attack" from B2 bombers was a low risk, high political payoff stunt in keeping with the Circus fucking up everything fuck-upable. The only upside to reprisals from Iran is that they know that our crazy motherfucker is even crazier than their crazy motherfuckers. But as long as we're cleaning house on the middle-east thugocracy - when do we bomb Saudi Arabia, Qatar and all the other oil gangsters who finance the assholes who fly jets into our skyscrapers? Oh ... almost forgot - because they're Caligula's golf buddies.
Good luck, 'Murica ... you fucked the pooch this time.
And now…
