7 pointsby petethomas3 hours ago7 comments
  • burntoutgrayan hour ago
    For a guy who craves a Nobel Peace Prize, why is he starting wars? The campaign promise was to stop needless wars.

    Like the story "The Emperors New Clothes" the media needs to call him out and very forcibly. Until then the sycophants are just going to admire his naked butt.

  • anigbrowlan hour ago
    Forget 'after' the war; unless Iran surrenders or undergoes a dramatic regime change (neither of which have more than 5% probability in my view) there is no way for the US to get a win condition without somehow taking custody of Iran's nuclear materiél. The tissue-thin casus belli here is that after we 'obliterated' their nuclear enrichment capacity 8 months ago, they are somehow back to being within weeks of having enough fissile material for a bomb.

    Since every Israeli-financed politician in the US (which is most of them) feels the need to reiterate that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon every 5 minutes to prevent their smartphone exploding we can't just bomb them for a while and then declare victory; we're now in the official position (per Rubio) of having to attack them preëmptively any time Israel feels like bombing them, and Israel seems to feel like bombing Iran as often as possible. There's no way out of this cycle without removing Iran's ability to maintain and enrich nuclear fuel and/or configure it into a bomb and there's no way of definitively doing that without taking possession of it. No matter how many bombs we drop on their (known) nuclear facilities, the results of such a campaign can be instantly obviated by an intelligence report claiming the existence of more. And there's simply no way of taking possession of the nuclear materials without a ground war, which is a near-certain disaster.

    I also doubt Trump and his coterie have seriously considered the possibility that if the Islamic Republic's back is absolutely against the wall, they're highly incentivized to launch a 'dirty' bomb using fissile material with conventional explosives. It doesn't have to do significant kinetic damage: if they drop a few missiles on Tel Aviv and/or Jerusalem and make it clear that they have a radioactive payload, the Israelis will cast away the small amount of strategic objectivity they have left. No matter what the government of Israel may say at that point, I cannot see the highly-propagandized Israeli population just deciding not to worry about being radioactively dusted.

  • duxup2 hours ago
    People dying because this guy's poll numbers were not great and he decided to start a war with no idea what he is doing.

    https://x.com/realdonaldtrump/status/255784560904773633?s=46

    • stephenr2 hours ago
      Don't be so cynical. It's because he's a child rapist and wants a distraction. The poll numbers are a secondary concern at best.
  • tim-tday2 hours ago
    Wait, wait. Isn’t that something you should have considered BEFOREHAND?!
  • MonkeyIsNullan hour ago
    Shocked. I'm truly shocked. Absolutely, completely and utterly shocked. Who woulda thought?
  • SilverElfin2 hours ago
    He literally had no plan. The Iranian regime was evil, no doubt. But if you’re going to try to fix that you need a plan. Otherwise the vacancy will be filled. By bad people. I can’t believe this isn’t obvious.
    • anigbrowl2 hours ago
      I had to laugh (bleakly) when someone asked him the other day who the US would prefer to see leading Iran instead of Khamenei and he admitted that all his preferred alternatives were dead.

      No way to know if it's true for the time being, but I saw someone claim the other day that Khamenei had convened meetings of the more moderate senior clergy at his residence in anticipation of the attack, increasing the probability of a hardliner being chosen as his successor. Though speculative, it seems plausible.

    • JojoFatsanian hour ago
      His defense minister is an absolute lunatic media personality in way over his head who really thinks war is a video game. They’re using pew pews to try and drum up patriotism, all it’s going to do is drive up our gas prices.

      If there is a plan, it is to drive up gas prices to make fracked shale petroleum profitable again.

    • motbus32 hours ago
      Why would he? There will never be a way to prove, but somehow, many people thinks he just needs to repay his campaign supporters.

      It is funny to see how there are seemingly fake ruses just for people to forget. Like with EM for example

    • stephenr2 hours ago
      > But if you’re going to try to fix that

      How about just stop interfering in the rest of the world.

      Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan. What's next for the electric boogaloo treatment? Korea or Vietnam? Where would you like to lose the next pointless war.

  • codevark2 hours ago
    [dead]