> America’s spies had told President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted a nuclear-weapons program and that Iraq possessed biological weapons and mobile production facilities, as well as stockpiles of chemical weapons.
That's not true at all. The intelligence community reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction but then the White House got involved in the analysis and brought politics into it and changed the reports.
It should also be mentioned that a significant amount of Iraq's chemical weapons were given to Iraq by the US. Iraq destroyed the munitions they hadn't already used in Iran or against the Kurds. Then UNMOVIC was sent to Iraq to inventory and account for all of the destroyed munitions. The head of the UN team repeatedly reported that the inventory of destroyed munitions and verification of compliance with UN mandates was a matter of months. The invasion of Iraq was announced shortly after.
Iran has been on the receiving end of those weapons of mass destruction. They have lost 30 to 50 thousand people to those US bankrolled chemical weapons attacks and its still an openly grieved unhealed wound in Iranian society.
Most cities have graves, cemeteries, memorials were families still grieve and remember their dead.
Notably, Iran never retaliated with chemical weapons. Could have a common root cause that later led to a fatwa against developing nukes.
I am surprised that the lay American gets so surprised that they do not like the American administration so much.
Add to that the fact that US upended their parliamentary democracy with a sponsored coup, that the US shot down one of their domestic passenger jets in flight with no apologies forthcoming.
The Iran-Iraq war is one of the nastier parts of the 20th century post-WW2 era, with huge casualties, and has been somewhat tragically forgotten. Perhaps because it wasn't entirely the fault of the US, although they did arm Saddam Hussein at that point.
As was Iran-Contra. Oliver North should still be in jail, not a talking head on the propaganda channel.
Especially Cheney pushed hard for this, ignored the intelligence communities assessments, then got his own source, a burned source, Ahmed Chalabi to fabricate reasons for an invasion.
In the UK the main deception was the farcical Iraq Dossier, aka "the dodgy dossier", put together by Blair's propaganda chief Alaister Campbell. Colin Powell had seen it before release but not sure what role it played in the US
It's difficult now to find the "Project for a new American Century" documents that were online in that era, but they described a planned attack on Iran through Iraq. That is, the Iraq war was supposed to be the first step towards the invasion they'd desired since 1979.
Colin Powell's WMD dog and pony show in front of the UN council looked really fishy at the time, as if it was being sabotaged by the people who had to make up all that bullshit. Of course, that didn't matter neither because GWB simply WANTED to invade.
Side note: Colin Powell always seemed like one of the more reasonable people in the Bush administration, and he had the decency to later criticize and apologize for his own actions.
I remember the set of his shoulders and generally pained body language during that address. He knew it was bullshit, and knew that the world could tell that he was bullshitting. They sent him because out of the four (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, and Powell), he was the only one regarded as somewhat reliable.
He sold his soul that day and regretted it almost instantly. I agree that the people who put him up to it were also setting him up as they knew he already wasn't really with them on this thing. They were politicians, after all. I have no sympathy for the personal toll it took on him. He's a war criminal like the rest.
I think this article is agreeing with you. It's saying that it's not an "intelligence" failure in the traditional "military intelligence" sense of the word we expect, but rather it's an "intelligence" failure in "runaway idiocy" sense.
then they should have called it a "mental faculties" failure.
this is an attempt to make it look like the CIA or NSA fucked up, when we know damn well they knew Iran had been prepping to fight the US for decades.
this is a Presidential failure, or more likely, a Presidential Advisor failure. and "failure" in the sense that Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon have been pushing for this since day 1.
there is a reason no president ever decided to take a go at them until now, and we're seeing why
Unless that self-interest involves "wanting to watch the world burn" as we trigger an almost fully unprecedented oil and commodity crisis that tanks the economy way worse than 2008 ever was, I'd say Hanlon's razor fully applies here.
That's exactly what it is; and it's worse than negligence for the Atlantic to pretend not to understand this*.
The phenomenon of the Epstein class explicitly calling wars and coups and crashes "full of opportunity" gets virtually zero analysis in Epstein-class owned media, and it's past time that people connect those two dots.
* Did I sign in to the Atlantic to confirm that they pretended not to understand this? No. But I would be shocked to be wrong.
Maybe? Israel has wanted us to go to war in Iran since Reagan. They finally got a president stupid enough (or with sufficient leverage over) to do it. But I wouldn't say from the US's side that this has been in the works for decades.
When campaign contributors tell policymakers to jump, they ask, how high? Our policymakers are completely captured by a shadow government of individuals who are at odds with the interests of Americans. Occasionally their interests will coincidentally align with the people's interests, but the link is not intentional, because they don't serve the people any more than necessary to get elected, at which point, they serve the shadow government
Superficially, the article is right, intelligence services didn't get this wrong, and the administration made a bad decision despite having a good appraisal to hand.
But really, it's a values failure.
Wanting to make decisions that are good for America, and good for its friends, is a value. Putting people you are supposed to represent ahead of yourself used to be the kind of thing people would say mattered. It used to be a thing that leaders tried to demonstrate that they had carefully considered their decisions.
Once you have an administration that puts itself ahead of everything else, this whole thing makes sense.
This administration is full of insecure people who want to show how strong they are. You can see it in how they talk, and the constant stream of memes coming from the WH. It's incredibly juvenile, stuff like having Trump portrayed with a sixpack, beating up his enemies.
Strongman regimes have a tendency to try to steal the blind, to use a poker concept: bully the opposition into giving you a concession, by making super aggressive moves. Like picking pennies off a train track, most of the time you will win and the opponent will back down, EVEN if on paper the opponent tends to have the better cards, because a rational opponent will appreciate putting a lid on risk. This last bit is really important, because it means the bully learns that he can win despite rejecting advice.
So you can go around sucker punching people until it stops working, and there's a decent chance Iran is where it stops working. If it's not Iran, it will be the next thing, because they can't stop.
And to get back to values, too many Americans are unwilling to take responsibility for their country's actions. If you look at what causes discontent with the current Iran situation, it is things like gas prices. In other words, self-interest, still.
Cuba is already lined up. If they feel confident they would try on India because India often does not do what it is told. They have almost got that region under their thumb, except for India. Impressed by Srilanka though.
North Korea is another but I don't think they will dare to make that move.
I think this is being overstated by Indians who would like to think that India is more important to the US than it is; other than H1B discourse, I think the US has largely forgotten India exists.
Invading nuclear-armed India (from where?? Pakistan?) would be a completely insane thing even by Trump standards. It's a plan that disintegrates on contact with a map.
Not necessarily with invasion to start with. First would be destabilisation. It's neighbors are not doing too well lately. Many of them imploded within a short time span.
India can do what to the US with its nuke ? It's a deterrent for China.
The same thing that France or Russia could do with their ballistic missile submarines. Just because the ICBMs won't reach the US doesn't mean that the ALCM and SLBMs are harmless.
They bought a few that are more silent, but their acoustic signature got acquired through intelligence/bribery operations. Quite an irreparable loss that the Indian population is not as acutely aware of.
One asset that India can threaten is Diego Garcia.
> One asset that India can threaten is Diego Garcia.
Case in point. I wouldn't expect a submarine to occupy the littorals of San Francisco, but an attack on Florida, Hawaii, or a distant base would be difficult to defend against.
Of course, such an attack is basically suicide, but still a possibility. Defensive systems like AEGIS are stretched too thin to deter a coastal attack.
You think so ? That is interesting. I am no expert though.
I expect Indian subs to be kept good track of. Threatening Florida seems a stretch. Assets in around Indian Ocean are a distinct possibility. In fact India does not need subs for that.
Joe Kent (the director of counterterrorism who recently resigned to protest the war) stated that US intelligence gathering in the Middle East is lacking, that the US has extensive intelligence sharing agreements with Israel, that the US relies on Israel’s superior intelligence in the Middle East, and Israel uses its position to bias US foreign policy in the region to further Israel’s geopolitical aims in the region - in this case attacking Israel’s adversary, Iran, even though it’s not in the US interest to do so. It seems that Trump really has thought this would be an open and shut war. The US does not gain by the war; nor does most of the world; nor do the Iranian citizens being bombed. Israel furthers its geopolitical strategy of destroying its neighbors, because that’s how its leadership defines security (and stays out of jail). One of the most obvious stupidities propagated in all this is the notion that Iran has been a regime waiting to be toppled by dropping bombs on its citizens, its schools, universities and hospitals.
This is a somewhat disengenuous article. Initially the Whitehouse couldn't even explain why they were attacking Iran. They responded as if they didn't expect to be asked. Then they gave nonsense answers. Then eventually, Marco Rubio said the U.S. had attacked at the behest of Isreal. Nothing in those answers is about foreign intelligence, or strategy, or even something resembling a plan. The word plan imples the US has a goal. It does not. Isreal has a goal. The US is merely a conveyance.
The Israelis, the Saudis, and the Egyptians all have reasons to see their rival Iran smashed.
The Russians want to see the US dragged into a "Special Operation" and to have the global oil markets collapse so they can buoy their collapsing economy with oil money.
China is just watching it happen but ratcheting up propaganda.
This is painfully obvious to virtually everyone except the US taxpayer, or the shillbots that control their viewpoints.
This is not good for Israel either, certainly not Israel's civil society. It's about Netanyahu's personal goals of self-aggrandizement, which are ultimately not that dissimilar from President Trump's.
Trump isn't even pretending to have a consistent, plausible reason to attack Iran. He never even set an actual strategic goal beyond blowing stuff up. It doesn't really matter what the intelligence said, since it had nothing to do with Trump's decision.
What happened was entirely predictable, as the article says. Iran using the Strait of Hormuz as leverage was an obvious consequences of putting them into a sufficiently precarious position.
Chances are that this was a calculated outcome that was found desirable. The potential closure of that strait has been the topic of intelligence reports going back more than half a century.
People talk a lot about Trump. But he's of course not acting alone. The big picture here is that this wasn't as impulsive as it may seem and was rather enthusiastically supported by the team that runs day to day policy for him. The worrying thing of course is that things aren't exactly going as planned. Which by itself was entirely predictable and widely predicted from day 1. But the point here is that Trump is a stooge and focusing on just him is a mistake. Follow the money.
His presidency was bought and paid for. Partially with oil money and the accompanying hard line towards the middle east. Those are the same deep pockets behind the Gulf wars I and II. And we might as well start referring to this one as edition III.
A lot of that money comes from Texas. Where all the oil and gas is. Texas exports oil and gas. That stuff becomes more lucrative if the Strait of Hormuz is closed. And it looks like rebuilding infrastructure might take a few years. IMHO, they overestimated how successful they were going to be with this and all the disruptive effects (e.g. Maga supporters getting angry at Trump) because of oil driven inflation at the pump might be backfiring a bit. But it's easy to see how the decision making could have gone if you just follow the money.
He very clearly thought he could just take out the supreme leader and Iran would ultimately appoint a servile replacement that'd kiss his ass.
That's why this has gone so wrong. He can't articulate further goals because he didn't expect this to be anything other than a 10 day conflict with Iran begging for the US to stop punishing them.
That is to say, he accomplished his objective on day one, but that didn't produce the results expected. And now because everything is fucked, he keeps escalating because if he pulls back now it will be a clear loss. We are basically fighting a war now because a narcissist can't admit he fucked up.
I throw out this observation more to be provactive than persuasive, but I haven't seen it elsewhere..
People before me have observed how Trump's moves all are ego driven, or self serving or serve Putin or Israel or gas companies, and I'm here to add to the mix a different conjecture.
Trump's moves all tend to increase inflation in a plausibly deniable way. Tarrifs, fed-fighting, wars, etc.
And that is a deeply unpopular but elite-viewed necessity for handling America's national debt.
Inflation allows the wealthy class to get away with extending government spending without admitting/pursuing austerity which was political suicide under Carter.
The wealthy shelter in their land and stock portfolios which keep growing unlike cash and also benefit from said spending, while ordinary people pay the extra regressive tax that is inflation. The elite can then turn around and blame the little guy for supporting Trump and their hands are clean.
In the case of Iraq, they lied on purpose to support the invasion. In the case of Iran, Trump just ignored the intelligence.
I do think the intelligence community is capable. For example, they warned of the Russian invasion weeks before it happened when all other European countries said it wouldn’t.
This is false, France made a misstep and even fired the head of French military intelligence because of the failure to predict the invasion and Germany was also notably skeptical. Other countries like UK, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania were on board that the invasion was going to happen.
What I’m curious about is, how are Trump’s fans justifying this complete fuck-up to themselves? _Are_ they? Like, I assume so, because they tend to take whatever shit they’re given, but it’s hard to imagine a “this is good, actually” spin in this one.
It is to take attention away from Epstein. The illicit sex, blackmail, and money laundering empire is the largest in recorded history, and in one person's mind, worth "Weapons of Mass Distraction" and outright war crimes to cover up. The same can be said of destructive and nonsensical actions taken since January 2025.
Just stop. You think MAGA are going to give two shits about affidavit and testimony in the Epstein files? What is actually playing out in front of our eyes is worse than whatever might be in those files - focus on what we actually know instead of a pig in a poke. Be outraged that troops were deployed in American cities. Be outraged about masked federal agents abducting and killing American citizens without even an investigation. Be outraged about war crimes. Fuck the Epstein files.
One doesn't really need to go much further than this Daily Show compilation to see what happened [1].
As for Iraq, the article is just wrong. Here's a 1998 letter sent to then-president Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq [2]. The astute will notice this was 3 years before 9/11. Look at the signatories. They include:
- Donald Rumsfeld: future (and previous) Defense Secretary under George W. Bush who oversaw the invasion of Iraq;
- Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld's deputy under Bush, arguably even more hawkish than Rumsfeld. He openly admitted Iraq was "about oil" and the WMD excuse was "bureaucratic" [3];
- Richard L. Armitage: Colin Powell's deputy at State during the Iraq war;
- Peter W. Rodman, an assistant Defense secretary under Rumsfeld;
There are other names there who are or were influential conservative journalists and "thought" leaders in the neocon movement eg William Kristol.
Whatever else you might say, intelligence didn't fail on Iraq (or Iran) for that matter. Political goals simply trumped everything else.
I think it's mostly that the leaders in the current administration are very stupid and full of hubris - so they genuinely thought they could just decapitate Iran's leadership and the survivors would quickly capitulate.
Given the situation with the strait, it's clear they were caught off guard that the Iran regime has survived a transition (for now) and is fighting back.
Yes - oddly parallel to the VDV decapitation attack on Ukraine. Supposed to be a quick win, now a quagmire, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead Russians.
I suspect they also wanted to distract from the Epstein files and probably expected some domestic "rally around the flag" effect. The first seems to be mostly successful for now, the second not as much.
There are much easier ways to manipulate the stock market and enrich yourself when you have high office, starting a war after you've campaigned against wars isn't the logical step.
I don't think so. Much easier. Much easier to get away with.
Administration charged with insider trading and corruption charges, that's not a very remote possibility. President and administration charged with treason -- quite remote.
> America’s spies had told President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted a nuclear-weapons program and that Iraq possessed biological weapons and mobile production facilities, as well as stockpiles of chemical weapons.
That's not true at all. The intelligence community reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction but then the White House got involved in the analysis and brought politics into it and changed the reports.
It should also be mentioned that a significant amount of Iraq's chemical weapons were given to Iraq by the US. Iraq destroyed the munitions they hadn't already used in Iran or against the Kurds. Then UNMOVIC was sent to Iraq to inventory and account for all of the destroyed munitions. The head of the UN team repeatedly reported that the inventory of destroyed munitions and verification of compliance with UN mandates was a matter of months. The invasion of Iraq was announced shortly after.
Iran has been on the receiving end of those weapons of mass destruction. They have lost 30 to 50 thousand people to those US bankrolled chemical weapons attacks and its still an openly grieved unhealed wound in Iranian society.
Most cities have graves, cemeteries, memorials were families still grieve and remember their dead.
Notably, Iran never retaliated with chemical weapons. Could have a common root cause that later led to a fatwa against developing nukes.
I am surprised that the lay American gets so surprised that they do not like the American administration so much.
Add to that the fact that US upended their parliamentary democracy with a sponsored coup, that the US shot down one of their domestic passenger jets in flight with no apologies forthcoming.
The Iran-Iraq war is one of the nastier parts of the 20th century post-WW2 era, with huge casualties, and has been somewhat tragically forgotten. Perhaps because it wasn't entirely the fault of the US, although they did arm Saddam Hussein at that point.
As was Iran-Contra. Oliver North should still be in jail, not a talking head on the propaganda channel.
> I am surprised that the lay American gets so surprised that they do not like the American administration so much.
Don't be. Most americans can't read above a 6th grade level
Especially Cheney pushed hard for this, ignored the intelligence communities assessments, then got his own source, a burned source, Ahmed Chalabi to fabricate reasons for an invasion.
Yeah this almost frames it as an honest mistake when it was actually a fait accompli. The decision to invade was made and some pretext was generated.
In the UK the main deception was the farcical Iraq Dossier, aka "the dodgy dossier", put together by Blair's propaganda chief Alaister Campbell. Colin Powell had seen it before release but not sure what role it played in the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
It's difficult now to find the "Project for a new American Century" documents that were online in that era, but they described a planned attack on Iran through Iraq. That is, the Iraq war was supposed to be the first step towards the invasion they'd desired since 1979.
Except they didn't try that after all. Which suggests that maybe they knew it would be a terrible idea.
Maybe by 'America's spies' they mean Mossad?
Colin Powell's WMD dog and pony show in front of the UN council looked really fishy at the time, as if it was being sabotaged by the people who had to make up all that bullshit. Of course, that didn't matter neither because GWB simply WANTED to invade.
Side note: Colin Powell always seemed like one of the more reasonable people in the Bush administration, and he had the decency to later criticize and apologize for his own actions.
I remember the set of his shoulders and generally pained body language during that address. He knew it was bullshit, and knew that the world could tell that he was bullshitting. They sent him because out of the four (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, and Powell), he was the only one regarded as somewhat reliable.
He sold his soul that day and regretted it almost instantly. I agree that the people who put him up to it were also setting him up as they knew he already wasn't really with them on this thing. They were politicians, after all. I have no sympathy for the personal toll it took on him. He's a war criminal like the rest.
Colon Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during Iraq I and knew damn well that Iraq II was based on BS.
He still sold it in front of the UN -- he could have resigned.
Apologies don't make missiles go back in silos or resurrect dead people.
Yup. People were being pressured. Fired. To get them to state what the Bush administration wanted them to state.
I remember the march in London. A staggering number of people. Makes a mockery of any modern-day ‘protest’.
Made not a jot of difference. In Tony went anyway. Shame.
I'm still waiting for Blair to be sentenced for his war crimes
> Makes a mockery of any modern-day ‘protest’.
> Made not a jot of difference
Yeah, that’s probably why.
?
If it doesn't have any effect, why bother protesting?
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Uh huh, sure.
There does seem to have been a psyop. With them being the target.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Helmets_(Syrian_civil_wa...
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My twitter friend SexSlayer69 told me the earth was flat, too, but good luck finding any mainstream news source to support that either.
It's everyone against you and me, bud! Journalists, scientists, governments, everyone!!
Get well soon.
You, too! :)
Calling this a mere "intelligence failure" rather than runaway idiocy from our policymakers is putting it way too charitably.
I think this article is agreeing with you. It's saying that it's not an "intelligence" failure in the traditional "military intelligence" sense of the word we expect, but rather it's an "intelligence" failure in "runaway idiocy" sense.
then they should have called it a "mental faculties" failure.
this is an attempt to make it look like the CIA or NSA fucked up, when we know damn well they knew Iran had been prepping to fight the US for decades.
this is a Presidential failure, or more likely, a Presidential Advisor failure. and "failure" in the sense that Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon have been pushing for this since day 1.
there is a reason no president ever decided to take a go at them until now, and we're seeing why
Read the last line of the article again.
I don't think it's idiocy. It's self interest of his and his cronies.
Unless that self-interest involves "wanting to watch the world burn" as we trigger an almost fully unprecedented oil and commodity crisis that tanks the economy way worse than 2008 ever was, I'd say Hanlon's razor fully applies here.
Watch their personal portfolios. Of course not an easy thing to do.
If this will stop, it will do so because of the threat to Kushner's investments in the ME.
To use a slight inaccurate historical cliche -- do you think Nero gave two hoots about whether Rome burned or not.
when you already have all of the money you can buy up the market once the crash happens.
that's the goal of Project 2025. Put billionaires in power by owning everything.
That's exactly what it is; and it's worse than negligence for the Atlantic to pretend not to understand this*.
The phenomenon of the Epstein class explicitly calling wars and coups and crashes "full of opportunity" gets virtually zero analysis in Epstein-class owned media, and it's past time that people connect those two dots.
* Did I sign in to the Atlantic to confirm that they pretended not to understand this? No. But I would be shocked to be wrong.
Feigned idiocy. The moves we're making in Iran today have been in the works for decades.
Maybe? Israel has wanted us to go to war in Iran since Reagan. They finally got a president stupid enough (or with sufficient leverage over) to do it. But I wouldn't say from the US's side that this has been in the works for decades.
When campaign contributors tell policymakers to jump, they ask, how high? Our policymakers are completely captured by a shadow government of individuals who are at odds with the interests of Americans. Occasionally their interests will coincidentally align with the people's interests, but the link is not intentional, because they don't serve the people any more than necessary to get elected, at which point, they serve the shadow government
The irony is that the current administration ran on a platform of dismantling the shadow government.
Indeed the irony is strong
Superficially, the article is right, intelligence services didn't get this wrong, and the administration made a bad decision despite having a good appraisal to hand.
But really, it's a values failure.
Wanting to make decisions that are good for America, and good for its friends, is a value. Putting people you are supposed to represent ahead of yourself used to be the kind of thing people would say mattered. It used to be a thing that leaders tried to demonstrate that they had carefully considered their decisions.
Once you have an administration that puts itself ahead of everything else, this whole thing makes sense.
This administration is full of insecure people who want to show how strong they are. You can see it in how they talk, and the constant stream of memes coming from the WH. It's incredibly juvenile, stuff like having Trump portrayed with a sixpack, beating up his enemies.
Strongman regimes have a tendency to try to steal the blind, to use a poker concept: bully the opposition into giving you a concession, by making super aggressive moves. Like picking pennies off a train track, most of the time you will win and the opponent will back down, EVEN if on paper the opponent tends to have the better cards, because a rational opponent will appreciate putting a lid on risk. This last bit is really important, because it means the bully learns that he can win despite rejecting advice.
So you can go around sucker punching people until it stops working, and there's a decent chance Iran is where it stops working. If it's not Iran, it will be the next thing, because they can't stop.
And to get back to values, too many Americans are unwilling to take responsibility for their country's actions. If you look at what causes discontent with the current Iran situation, it is things like gas prices. In other words, self-interest, still.
Cuba is already lined up. If they feel confident they would try on India because India often does not do what it is told. They have almost got that region under their thumb, except for India. Impressed by Srilanka though.
North Korea is another but I don't think they will dare to make that move.
What would the interest be in India? I don't think it figures much in the American consciousness, contrary to Iran or Cuba.
I think this is being overstated by Indians who would like to think that India is more important to the US than it is; other than H1B discourse, I think the US has largely forgotten India exists.
Invading nuclear-armed India (from where?? Pakistan?) would be a completely insane thing even by Trump standards. It's a plan that disintegrates on contact with a map.
Not necessarily with invasion to start with. First would be destabilisation. It's neighbors are not doing too well lately. Many of them imploded within a short time span.
India can do what to the US with its nuke ? It's a deterrent for China.
> India can do what to the US with its nuke ?
The same thing that France or Russia could do with their ballistic missile submarines. Just because the ICBMs won't reach the US doesn't mean that the ALCM and SLBMs are harmless.
Indian submarines are in general quite noisy.
They bought a few that are more silent, but their acoustic signature got acquired through intelligence/bribery operations. Quite an irreparable loss that the Indian population is not as acutely aware of.
One asset that India can threaten is Diego Garcia.
> One asset that India can threaten is Diego Garcia.
Case in point. I wouldn't expect a submarine to occupy the littorals of San Francisco, but an attack on Florida, Hawaii, or a distant base would be difficult to defend against.
Of course, such an attack is basically suicide, but still a possibility. Defensive systems like AEGIS are stretched too thin to deter a coastal attack.
You think so ? That is interesting. I am no expert though.
I expect Indian subs to be kept good track of. Threatening Florida seems a stretch. Assets in around Indian Ocean are a distinct possibility. In fact India does not need subs for that.
Ensuring unchallenged access to the Indian Ocean is a big deal and access to Indian market under US favorable terms and conditions.
https://archive.is/hScAw
Joe Kent (the director of counterterrorism who recently resigned to protest the war) stated that US intelligence gathering in the Middle East is lacking, that the US has extensive intelligence sharing agreements with Israel, that the US relies on Israel’s superior intelligence in the Middle East, and Israel uses its position to bias US foreign policy in the region to further Israel’s geopolitical aims in the region - in this case attacking Israel’s adversary, Iran, even though it’s not in the US interest to do so. It seems that Trump really has thought this would be an open and shut war. The US does not gain by the war; nor does most of the world; nor do the Iranian citizens being bombed. Israel furthers its geopolitical strategy of destroying its neighbors, because that’s how its leadership defines security (and stays out of jail). One of the most obvious stupidities propagated in all this is the notion that Iran has been a regime waiting to be toppled by dropping bombs on its citizens, its schools, universities and hospitals.
This is a somewhat disengenuous article. Initially the Whitehouse couldn't even explain why they were attacking Iran. They responded as if they didn't expect to be asked. Then they gave nonsense answers. Then eventually, Marco Rubio said the U.S. had attacked at the behest of Isreal. Nothing in those answers is about foreign intelligence, or strategy, or even something resembling a plan. The word plan imples the US has a goal. It does not. Isreal has a goal. The US is merely a conveyance.
The Israelis, the Saudis, and the Egyptians all have reasons to see their rival Iran smashed.
The Russians want to see the US dragged into a "Special Operation" and to have the global oil markets collapse so they can buoy their collapsing economy with oil money.
China is just watching it happen but ratcheting up propaganda.
This is painfully obvious to virtually everyone except the US taxpayer, or the shillbots that control their viewpoints.
This is not good for Israel either, certainly not Israel's civil society. It's about Netanyahu's personal goals of self-aggrandizement, which are ultimately not that dissimilar from President Trump's.
Trump isn't even pretending to have a consistent, plausible reason to attack Iran. He never even set an actual strategic goal beyond blowing stuff up. It doesn't really matter what the intelligence said, since it had nothing to do with Trump's decision.
What happened was entirely predictable, as the article says. Iran using the Strait of Hormuz as leverage was an obvious consequences of putting them into a sufficiently precarious position.
Chances are that this was a calculated outcome that was found desirable. The potential closure of that strait has been the topic of intelligence reports going back more than half a century.
People talk a lot about Trump. But he's of course not acting alone. The big picture here is that this wasn't as impulsive as it may seem and was rather enthusiastically supported by the team that runs day to day policy for him. The worrying thing of course is that things aren't exactly going as planned. Which by itself was entirely predictable and widely predicted from day 1. But the point here is that Trump is a stooge and focusing on just him is a mistake. Follow the money.
His presidency was bought and paid for. Partially with oil money and the accompanying hard line towards the middle east. Those are the same deep pockets behind the Gulf wars I and II. And we might as well start referring to this one as edition III.
A lot of that money comes from Texas. Where all the oil and gas is. Texas exports oil and gas. That stuff becomes more lucrative if the Strait of Hormuz is closed. And it looks like rebuilding infrastructure might take a few years. IMHO, they overestimated how successful they were going to be with this and all the disruptive effects (e.g. Maga supporters getting angry at Trump) because of oil driven inflation at the pump might be backfiring a bit. But it's easy to see how the decision making could have gone if you just follow the money.
He very clearly thought he could just take out the supreme leader and Iran would ultimately appoint a servile replacement that'd kiss his ass.
That's why this has gone so wrong. He can't articulate further goals because he didn't expect this to be anything other than a 10 day conflict with Iran begging for the US to stop punishing them.
That is to say, he accomplished his objective on day one, but that didn't produce the results expected. And now because everything is fucked, he keeps escalating because if he pulls back now it will be a clear loss. We are basically fighting a war now because a narcissist can't admit he fucked up.
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I throw out this observation more to be provactive than persuasive, but I haven't seen it elsewhere..
People before me have observed how Trump's moves all are ego driven, or self serving or serve Putin or Israel or gas companies, and I'm here to add to the mix a different conjecture.
Trump's moves all tend to increase inflation in a plausibly deniable way. Tarrifs, fed-fighting, wars, etc.
And that is a deeply unpopular but elite-viewed necessity for handling America's national debt.
Inflation allows the wealthy class to get away with extending government spending without admitting/pursuing austerity which was political suicide under Carter.
The wealthy shelter in their land and stock portfolios which keep growing unlike cash and also benefit from said spending, while ordinary people pay the extra regressive tax that is inflation. The elite can then turn around and blame the little guy for supporting Trump and their hands are clean.
Easier to repay loans. Who has lots of that to repay ?
In the case of Iraq, they lied on purpose to support the invasion. In the case of Iran, Trump just ignored the intelligence. I do think the intelligence community is capable. For example, they warned of the Russian invasion weeks before it happened when all other European countries said it wouldn’t.
> all other European countries said it wouldn’t
This is false, France made a misstep and even fired the head of French military intelligence because of the failure to predict the invasion and Germany was also notably skeptical. Other countries like UK, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania were on board that the invasion was going to happen.
On the Strait of Hormuz and surrounds they were capable.
Not always the case though: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-672.html
What I’m curious about is, how are Trump’s fans justifying this complete fuck-up to themselves? _Are_ they? Like, I assume so, because they tend to take whatever shit they’re given, but it’s hard to imagine a “this is good, actually” spin in this one.
It is to take attention away from Epstein. The illicit sex, blackmail, and money laundering empire is the largest in recorded history, and in one person's mind, worth "Weapons of Mass Distraction" and outright war crimes to cover up. The same can be said of destructive and nonsensical actions taken since January 2025.
Massively overplayed by unchecked power.
I'd be willing to bet money that there's bodies (some underage) in Mar-a-lago grounds.
Just stop. You think MAGA are going to give two shits about affidavit and testimony in the Epstein files? What is actually playing out in front of our eyes is worse than whatever might be in those files - focus on what we actually know instead of a pig in a poke. Be outraged that troops were deployed in American cities. Be outraged about masked federal agents abducting and killing American citizens without even an investigation. Be outraged about war crimes. Fuck the Epstein files.
Everything is a distraction from everything else. Flood the zone.
One doesn't really need to go much further than this Daily Show compilation to see what happened [1].
As for Iraq, the article is just wrong. Here's a 1998 letter sent to then-president Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq [2]. The astute will notice this was 3 years before 9/11. Look at the signatories. They include:
- Donald Rumsfeld: future (and previous) Defense Secretary under George W. Bush who oversaw the invasion of Iraq;
- Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld's deputy under Bush, arguably even more hawkish than Rumsfeld. He openly admitted Iraq was "about oil" and the WMD excuse was "bureaucratic" [3];
- Richard L. Armitage: Colin Powell's deputy at State during the Iraq war;
- Peter W. Rodman, an assistant Defense secretary under Rumsfeld;
There are other names there who are or were influential conservative journalists and "thought" leaders in the neocon movement eg William Kristol.
Whatever else you might say, intelligence didn't fail on Iraq (or Iran) for that matter. Political goals simply trumped everything else.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JC56Ltg5zDE
[2]: https://noi.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/iraqclintonletter...
[3]: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/socialist-vie...
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I’ve come to think that the costly quagmire is the point. It’s predictable and that’s why it’s done.
I think it's mostly that the leaders in the current administration are very stupid and full of hubris - so they genuinely thought they could just decapitate Iran's leadership and the survivors would quickly capitulate.
Given the situation with the strait, it's clear they were caught off guard that the Iran regime has survived a transition (for now) and is fighting back.
Yes - oddly parallel to the VDV decapitation attack on Ukraine. Supposed to be a quick win, now a quagmire, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead Russians.
I suspect they also wanted to distract from the Epstein files and probably expected some domestic "rally around the flag" effect. The first seems to be mostly successful for now, the second not as much.
Did the personal portfolios of US stakeholders gain?
Trump and his ilk likely care about that more than what effect it has on the US.
There are much easier ways to manipulate the stock market and enrich yourself when you have high office, starting a war after you've campaigned against wars isn't the logical step.
I don't think so. Much easier. Much easier to get away with.
Administration charged with insider trading and corruption charges, that's not a very remote possibility. President and administration charged with treason -- quite remote.
"The enemy always gets a vote"
It's certainly making all that Venezuelan oil seem economically viable.