Shane Harris in the Atlantic

"Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis. All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was an intelligence success." Shane Harris in the Atlantic (Archive).

"...neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work, will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the United States."

"Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing."

"...they [intelligence] couldn’t account for a decision maker who had been seduced by previous military successes into thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed command, could never stumble."

In the end it's just another case of a lying liar lying again. Trying to impose his fantasy vision. 

"The U.S. intelligence community is neither designed nor equipped to restrain a president who is moved by impulse, emotion, and his own feelings. It can only provide him with information. When the president disregards what he’s told, or distorts it, that failure is his alone." is the conclusion. 

The intelligence community should actually understand the president they are talking to and tailor their message to him. I'm not buying the idea that they're not complicity by willfully not knowing who they're talking to.

I get that people don't want to be responsible for everything, and you have to limit your responsibilities. But the "intelligence community" can't predict Trump's shenanigans? There has to be some complicity and enabling in there. 

Trump convinced conservatives to overlook his obvious criminality and grifts, to wreck up the government. He understood the right's desire to wreck government, to prove it doesn't work, we don't need it. As we sink into a recession, as citizens are murdered by ICE, as ICE kidnaps citizens and humans, a nightmare has emerged. It's only the recession that annoys most people. 

Clinton was right wing enough for me to consider him a republican, but things had swung so right that he was considered left with Bush and Reagan, which might be the natural swing after FDR in American political dialectic. 

Trump is the Hoover that precedes a truly left wing president, who will replace him, if he doesn't somehow finagle the cancelation of elections. He's actively trying to squash the midterms that could lead to his impeachment and jailing. Guy in the park says no president is going to jail, and he might be right. 

It seems like his running might have been all about avoiding the justice of accountability on the horizon. It is the enablers who allowed it all to happen. You can break the law sometimes, it's not quite as iron clad as people would like to make it seem. Enforcement is a real issue. 

Trump seem to think he can open the Strait of Hormuz with angry tweeting. The success of taking out the Venezuelan president emboldened him. Those in the left are screaming about the Epstein files, he needed a distraction. 

I see Trump similar to George W. Bush in that he takes the chaos inside him, and he inflicts it on the world. The article points out that Bush got bad intelligence. The intelligence issue for Trump is his own stupidity. Why does he need to be smarter, he's blundered into being president twice? He's a dyslexic genital obsessed real estate and reality TV star. His uncristianity doesn't matter to the Christian right. So many weird contradictions, I see why people don't like to pay attention to politics, curiouser and curiouser isn't interesting and politics is full of frustrations.

Whatever weird mojo and spells he can't on the American people, that's the interesting question. How did he really do that? And is that intelligence?

memes, images, graphic info, visuals

 

The National Review

Beersheba, Israel

The National Review article (Archive) by Noah Rothman on Iran is a catastrophe of perspective. Saying the dire and negative reviews of the wars are wrong, they focus on the good. And that is taking out a country's leadership and military infrastructure, destruction and death. Why is murder of foreign leaders not legal, again? 

I'm not a fan of the proxies that harass Israel. I think it's wrong, a distraction and a waste. The country deserves better leadership for sure, but does the US lead the way as an example? America's regime deserves to be overthrown too. Hopefully it will be a peaceful impeachment after the midterms.

In a moment that seems sarcasm like NY Times Pitchbot, "Donald Trump’s comments about the war are all over the map. To his detractors, that looks like flailing inconstancy. Among his supporters, it’s brilliant strategic ambiguity." When senility becomes brilliance, you know you're in trouble. Meanwhile contradictory pronouncements from Iran signal weakness. With the US it's brilliant strategy.

If they could neutralize the Strait of Hormuz problem, then they will do well. Um so the if is a future hope. That's not proof of success, indeed, it's proof that it's backfired. 

Pitching the article that we don't want to hear it--yea, it's wrong. Just like erasing Gaza is wrong. The people of Israel are out protesting this ongoing war.

War is war, and the idea that one side is righteous and the other side evil, well, that's how they feel in Iran too. You don't have to pick a side. You could be against the behavior from both countries' corrupt regimes. Israel needs to get rid of Netanyahu, as much as Iran needed regime change.

So the war has destroyed x, y and z in Iran. That means the war is good? The money and lives on both sides are not worth it. Overlook the bad will it's created, the bombing of the schoolgirls. And yet Iran's government seems as irreplaceable as the ones in the US and Israel. All war is crime and grift. And that grifter pedophile felon's efforts to amplify oil is backfiring. Classic unintended consequences. 

Rothman tries to spin the fantasies of negotiations Trump was caught lying about, and use it as proof of something good? Underlying military isn't as confused as he is. OK, wow, I hope so. 

To me the whole thing is about how undemocratic regimes can get into these violence games quite easily. 

"...there is a real risk that Donald Trump repeats the mistakes of the past, declares victory prematurely, and leaves the region in an ambiguous condition in which the Iranian regime can reconstitute itself and once again terrorize the world. That’s a fearsome prospect, but it’s also still a theoretical one."

Dismiss negatives on one side, manufacture positives, Rothman is playing a dangerous game of seeing what he wants to see, not looking closer. 

Quoting the notoriously skewed NY Post doesn't prove anything. They found a far right wing Iranian to quote. 

It ends with a conclusion even a middle school teacher wouldn't allow: "Whichever way you look at it, the U.S. and Israel are advancing their interests and strengthening international security."

Pretending there are no negative consequences is weird. The economy is in free fall, farmers are losing their farms, climate change is still spiraling out of control, and the US' place in the world has been destroyed. I'd say reducing Iran's capabilities is too high a cost, not distracting enough, and not our business.

Rubio recently accidently called it a war, and then corrected himself, operation. Only congress can vote to go to war, and Trump has done what every other president has done, and just not called it a war. After the blue wave, we need some laws that give serious concrete consequences to breaking this.

The current regime

The backlash on asking for more funds for the optional war, a war of choice, against Iran, is going to be so huge, I think we're getting universal health care with the next president. The pope has called for universal health care (source). The regime is trying very hard to not leave, but it's going to, Americans won't stand for such an unpopular dictatorship.

The galloping corruption of this regime is going to take years to give accountability to. 

He's a Herbert Hoover, doing exactly the wrong things to cut the economy off at the knees. We're waiting on the FDR to come rescue America, and create the next generation of conservatives who hate government. Things repeat and they don't repeat.

It's clear now how we give to the rich and steal from the poor. It's not just redistributing the wealth through taxes, Musk gets so much money from the government, it's sick. The regime leaned into all the wrong messages. I'm actually afraid the regime will sabotage their sabotaging, and take a popular turn, like giving a rebate. 

Getting rid of birthright citizenship is hugely unpopular, and just like the regime to break thing and then charge to fix them, the enshitification regime. 

The Epstein files have done some damage, though I knew he was a pedo quite a while ago. It's like people who didn't realize Woody Allen wasn't all there with Hemingway as a teenager girlfriend in his movie.

The urge to vote for the current regime is the urge to wreck it all, burn it all down, shoot it all up. That childish destruction is anger, anger over rides everything. I'm frustrated that I can't build anything, and I want to destroy everything.

I was so glad when my son lined his cars up in order, he created order instead of just toddler destroying. This regime is anal, wants to destroy, can't control the shit coming out of it. 

Iran

Curious opinion piece by an academic, from Exeter College in Devon England, published in Al Jazeera. Muhanad Seloom sees the slap back on Iran as good, containing their reach back to their own borders. His spin about everything puts it in the right column, but he ignored the life lost, the ecological damage. I don't know how he imagines the son being installed means it's automatically being weakened. Might be strengthened to change, and get younger. The son was put in charge, do you really know that much about him? Well, he might. I think he might, no wikipedia page to list where Seloom was born, I wonder. Is he fundamentally against Iran as being an Iraqi? He disclosed he lived 4 years in Iraq. He speaks Kurdish, is he a Kurd minority from Iran who doesn't like the power? It's interesting, I can't find out where he's born.

I think he underestimates the strategic patience the regime has, it's willingness to let their people suffer. They routinely slaughter many. 

Seloom seems to think reducing their missile stockpile and firing capacity and whatnot is worth it. 

Mark Dubowitz and Richard Goldberg in the Atlantic (Archive) think, "not only at degrading military capability but also at creating conditions for political change."

"The early results are promising, though much remains unfinished." They reference the 12 day war with Israel last year. That they can fly planes over Iran unthreatened, for the most part. 

The Atlantic has the same logic as Seloom: "The announced selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader may accelerate that erosion rather than stabilize it. A polished cleric in the mold of Hassan Rouhani could again provide the IRGC political cover and revive illusions of moderation abroad. Mojtaba offers no such illusion. His elevation signals a harsher, weaker, more corrupt order—and therefore a more fragile one."

I can't help but think they're amplifying administration points, and they're tacitly passing on a positive view of a corrupt and troubled administration in the USA. The military must see themselves as separate from ICE murders of US citizens in cold blood. They have a more Hobbesian view of life, brutish and short. Today is a good day to die. They only put forward positive details: "The movement of the USS Gerald R. Ford strike group down the Red Sea suggests that naval capacity is being positioned for the next phase." 

My Iranian friend was telling me to visit the island there in the Red Sea, as way of coming to Iran that doesn't threaten the regime. They would think that because I'm from America, I was a spy. I do want to learn about iranian literature, theater, poetry, music, food, rituals, customs and culture.

Friend in Iran has his communications blocked by Iran, which shuts down the access to the internet on the slightest provocation, and cutting off the internet is one of many fundamentalist punishments, infinitely better than murdering all the youths protesting.

We meditated most days together, and talk the Dharma when the internet is not cut off. He learned English listening to Buddhists talking on YouTube. I think he could tell the war was coming, he felt the tension. I'm personally letting this whole thing upset me more than I want it to, and writing about it is a little bit of a way of mastering it. He doesn't live near Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, and the city he lives in, he lives just out of town. I would never know if there was some secret facility that USA would target, like a school for little girls. 

Common Dreams and Steven Harper has an analysis that brings out other aspects of this situation. 

I'm pretty sure our allies in Europe wish for the regime change in the USA, as well. 

I love the people of Israel, and I love the people of Iran and I want neither to hurt each other. Stop war.

Memes, infographics

 

Memes, images, info