Yeah thankfully I think this is the right take. We’ve been at war since 2001… and war with Iran would be pretty ugly. We will absolutely lose our share of troops. That won’t work politically.
This is just the next catastrophically bad Trump decision. He’s going to keep doing stuff like this until Election Day.
While I don’t think Americans are up for “war” and it would hurt Trump to engage troops in any meaningful way, I do think a majority of the population would be happy with “precision air strikes” to kill “insurgents” or whatever, so basically Trump does have free reign to spend billions indiscriminately bombing brown people if he so chooses. This would of course lead to some sort of retaliation but that would just further justify it in the lizard brains.
That’s not much of an option with Iran, who are a legit regional power. They are going to kill some semi meaningful number of Americans in the next seven days to a month in retaliation for this strike… and I can’t even blame them. If they don’t they risk becoming a pinata for Trump to smack every time he wants to score some quick political points. The Trumpists are right… Iran knows it’s place. It’s place is as one of the most important power players in the Middle East, and letting this go unpunished would be absolutely terrible for them.
They are going to hit us semi hard. I have no idea how, because I don’t know what their capabilities look like, but make no mistake it’s going to kill some people.
I doubt it’ll be anything that hits inside the US, because the Iranians aren’t trying to increase public support inside the US for this. Killing one of our high ranking military officers in the ME feels right to me.
Any other President would have been on-air long ago explaining what this mission was about and what it means long-term. From Trump we get crickets.
We are not at war with Iran.
weren’t*
I honestly prefer the silence. Trump speaking about this at all involved him likely going on TV and announcing WWIII or heavily suggest that it will happen. Right now we just got a low res picture of the flag on twitter
Agree with your assessment of Iran as a regional power, but I don’t think Iran itself will act so quickly. They’ve been pretty measured in the speed of their reactions so far, and the proper play here has to be complicated for them - I don’t think anyone really expected something so serious. Not sure, though. Can’t say I’d be amazed by missiles flying later today.
Also every chance a group in Iraq that will get called an Iranian proxy will have a crack.
Yeah. I’m not suggesting a reassuring speech from Trump would go well. MSNBC played a clip from 2015 of Hugh Hewitt asking Trump if he knew who Soleimani was, and Trump was utterly clueless. Just saying some show of leadership used to take place in times like these.
I would be zero % surprised if they farmed the job out to a proxy for deniability and to redirect the US response somewhere other than Iran proper. They definitely are thinking as much about how this will poll inside the US as we are. They don’t want an actual full scale war at all… they have absolutely nothing to gain from that and will lose a lot of people.
They need to do something that will do the following things: Have their own population feel like justice has been done, keep the US population from going 9/11 style war crazy, and maintain their table image as people you do not fuck with in the Middle East. How fast they respond depends a lot on what their capabilities look like, and how much planning for this eventuality the guy we just blew up had already done.
This wasn’t exactly impossible to see coming (the US doing something that required significant retaliation), so I’m going to be a little bit surprised if their military doesn’t already have a portfolio of options for this spot.
See that crowd? That crowd has to be appeased. The stability of the Iranian regime depends on it. So they are literally in a war room right now trying to game out how they can make that crowd go away without creating similar crowds in the US. Thanks Trump, what could go wrong?
Wouldn’t a good play for Iran be to just fuck with all Trump’s properties?
Yeah a lot of Iran’s better capabilities are irregular proxies. If they have good capabilities in the places Trump has properties there’s a nonzero chance they actually go that way. I’d definitely not book a room in Trump Istanbul right now.
Then again nobody will for the forseeable future, so maybe not a good target.
Targeting Trump himself for revenge is actually super clever and I really hope they go that way. The problem is that the anti US sentiment in Iran is pretty strong (for good reasons unfortunately). Maybe if they decide to just blame Trump himself for everything since the Nuclear deal fell apart they could get away with just hitting him. I don’t know what their messaging has been like internally for the last couple of years unfortunately.
Seems like Eric knew about the strike while the gang of 8 was kept in the dark.
Wonderful, what could go wrong?
That dude is just trying to go viral on twitter. Note how extreme his ask is for a giveaway. He’s not trying to give away shit.
There aren’t going to be very many people looking to enlist to go to war with Iran lololol. Particularly not in the MAGA camp. They’re all as FOS as this guy.
