Some people say the first rule of war is: don't march on Moscow. If so, the second law is probably: good luck trying to hold Afghanistan if the locals don't want you there.
I mean, he doesn't even need to read history: Russia's "special operation" in Ukraine is RIGHT THERE, going on year five, a million Russian casualties and counting. It's a pretty good example of what happens when Plan A is "Oh they'll collapse quickly, don't worry about it" and then there is no real Plan B.
Of course, this is the same man who seemingly takes it at face value when Putin tells him Russia is "winning" this war, so maybe it's no use.
Putin in Ukraine, and Trump in Iran just prove the wisdom of The Wire “You take a swing at the king, you best not miss”. And no, I don’t remember which Baltimore gangster said that.
Putin was aiming for a quick strike in Kiev to decapitate the Zelensky regime-but he failed. Trump/Netanyahu zapped the king, but didn’t trigger a revolt, so the net effect is the same.
Well, that and the fact that for several centuries is was the one of the few socially acceptable special interests for autistic men to obsess over…
Pro-tip - as one of said autistic men who knows an awful lot about senior Allied figures and generals (Monty was absolutely one of us) the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia was interesting but the British liberation of it was arguably just as much so. If you aren’t already familiar with him, Orde Wingate is definitely going to become your favourite WW2 figure and is excellent fodder for this stack
Pleasure to be of service sir 🫡 Happy to supply large amounts of inspiration for posts on the endless bitching and incompetence between Allied commanders on demand, given any opportunity to talk about this stuff is pretty much what would make mine.
C’mon though, you can’t just be name dropping Bagdolio and Graziani without giving us who your favourite WW2 generals are…? 😉
Devers is a solid choice, but I'm rather less fond of Monty.
Slim is probably my favorite Brit--Wingate was cool, but never commanded beyond the division level. Favorite American would probably be Eisenhower, but that may be a reaction to the overrating of Patton as "war god" rather than just "really good." Favorite Russian would be either Zhukov or Rokossovsky. Favorite German--von Manstein, Rommel has been badly overrated, though I think that's changed over the past twenty years. Don't really have a favorite Japanese general.
Used to have a similar view about Eisenhower and Monty, however after having done a massive deep dive into exactly what happened in the Northwest Europe campaign, I’ve now completely changed my mind and think Eisenhower is substantially overrated whilst Monty was possibly the most professional of the lot.
Von Manstein used my grandparents house as a field HQ for a couple of weeks in 1943/44. My grandmother and aunts/uncle had to live in the barn, only my great grandmother was allowed inside to cook for them, my grandfather-who served in Rokosovskiy’s regiment as a groom to Rokosovskiy’s adjutant in the early 1930s- was hiding in the woods with partisans. My grandmother had one brother who was severely wounded at Stalingrad and died in a military hospital after the doctors attempted to transplant a goat stomach into him, and another brother-who grew up in a state orphanage-who became a general who went all the way to Berlin. After my grandparents emigrated to the United States, the general brother refused all contact with my grandmother.
My favorite WW2 generals would probably be Gen. Curtis LeMay, Adm. Nimitz, and Gen. Patton.
My grandfather (West Point 1915) got to know Patton when they were on the Punitive Expedition to Mexico to teach Pancho Villa a lesson, and he (Grandpa, not Pancho Villa) thought Patton was a dick. Later my father, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, also thought Patton was a dick. My conclusion: Patton was a dick.
Actually for all I know Pancho Villa also thought Patton was a dick. I should look that up.
Isn’t that kind of the universal consensus on Patton? I thought the only open question was is Patton an “asshole who is brilliant and right about stuff” or an “asshole who is usually wrong but got lucky and seized a bunch of unearned glory”.
Probably. I was forced to watch the movie "Patton" in 8th grade but I don't remember it. I just take my forebears' word on these things.
In other news, my dad liked Ike. This, too, was a consensus view at the time. Ike was in the West Point class of 1915 with my grandfather, and we have a little of their correspondence. It's pretty boring; mostly along the lines of "Happy birthday! Hope you're well. Okay, well, I'm pretty busy being president so catch you later."
Villa was an interesting dude to say the least. He was almost homicidally racist against Chinese, but had no problem with Japanese, enough so that the US Army sent a Japanese cook into Villa’s camp/entourage as a spy!
Not to mention the fact that he filmed his military actions and had an entire railroad car just for his personal harem.
Trump didn’t have to read thousand-page histories of the War of Jenkins' Ear to gain the wisdom to avoid this Iranian clusterfuck. All he had to do was reread his speeches from the last ten years. You know, the ones where he laid into his predecessors for getting involved in “stupid” wars. (Of course, that assumes that Trump is consistent and truthful in word and deed, which real estate guys with strings of bankruptcies tend not to be.)
As a fellow middle aged man who went through the change, I feel compelled to quote King Archidamus' speech before the Peloponnesian war,
"I have not lived long, Spartans, without having the experience of many wars, and I see those among you of the same age as myself, who will not fall into the common misfortune of longing for war from inexperience or from a belief in its advantage and its safety."
Then later, "but war undertaken by a coalition for sectional interest, whose progress there is no means of foreseeing, may not be easily or creditably settled."
i'm thinking maybe Trump hasn't read his Thucydides.....
The Dem candidate in 2028 needs to make part of their stump speech "the retard didn't even fill up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve before starting the war."
You've really got to wonder what's going on in the background here. Is this a case of the cabinet desperately trying to rein in an angry alzheimer's patient with access to the nukes, or is the cabinet simply operating around a senile old man too feeble to rein them in.
Honestly cannot recommend the Charlemagne biography King and Emperor enough - it’s only like 400 pages and it’s maybe half actually about Charlemagne’s life intermixed with another half about like the history of studying Charlemagne
In junior high when reading about Charlemagne, I remember thinking that it was cheating for Pepin the Short to name one kid Charlemagne and the other kid Carloman. That's the same name! They're just in different languages! Pick a whole new name, Pep.
It’s pretty clear by now that lots of people - Jeff included - are not so secretly rooting for the IRGC to win as long as they get to stick it to Trump. Iran can pressure countries to let them build nukes by threatening to close the strait whenever they went? Hella super awesome!!! You go guys!!! Haha you sure showed Trump! I wish more countries funded terrorism thanks to their leverage over global shipping! Did you see how they attacked every country within range of their missiles just because? That was sick!!! So cool!! Gosh I wish they had MORE missiles to do it! Take that DRUMPF!!!
Anyway, childish dipshittery of that view apart, here’s a question: what exactly would you consider the threshold for “Irans nuclear weapons program is destroyed?” I mean I get that at this point everyone is cheering for Iran to get a nuke (because DRUMPF LOOOOL!!) but in all seriousness - is your standard that as long as one person in the country remains who thinks “gee I think we should keep trying to build nukes” then the program is untouched? If whatever progress they made was set back even 5-10 years, or however long it takes to rebuild everything that was destroyed, then it was all a big failure? Do you actually have any concept of what a nuclear program is, what buildings and machines are? That they take time to build? Or do you visualize all industry as just a few dies sitting in a room having ideas until hardware magically pops out of the aether? I know, I know, the comedy writers who now masquerade as war correspondents are definitely people who know these things, as opposed to people who hyperventilate when they see a screwdriver and who think all industry can just be ordered on Amazon in a few days. And your confidence that this program was just completely and miraculously untouched comes from…where? You looked at your twitter feed and thought “hey you feelin what I’m feelin” and just rattled off an opinion masquerading as fact?
The same people who will gleefully call America the most evil country ever because of the two atomic bombs we used seem not to not have any fucking clue what a nuclear weapon actually is, and why letting a terrorist state obtain one so they can at best blackmail the world and hold shipping hostage, and at worst give it to a terrorist proxy to bomb Tel Aviv, is a stupid fucking idea no matter what your thoughts about the US and Trump. Is there any price low enough to pay to avoid that outcome that you consider worthwhile? What is it? Or is any amount spent to prevent this outcome still too much?
It’s pretty clear by now that this is a war that a lot of people like Jeff just “decided” for themselves was a failure on day one, and in fact would be definitionally a failure no matter what actually happened. Quite the students of history.
Maybe this war will be a “failure” in the sense that IRGC members still exist, and they still remember the words “missile” and “nuclear bomb” even if their capabilities on those fronts have been set back decades. Sure. But I’m not so morally bankrupt that I’m going to gleefully pray for the war to go poorly just to get my schadenfreude about Trump. If all the war does is highlight that hey, maybe having terrorists control a key shipping route is not a great idea; and delay the first use of a nuclear weapon since WW2 for another 5-10 years, then that’s still worth it. Otherwise when a nuke goes off in Israel or the US in your lifetimes and every major city in Iran is turned to glass in retaliation, don’t go crying about it because this is the outcome you actively rooted for.
If one could credibly argue that this war was launched with the limited aim of doing as much damage as we could do to Iran's nuclear program without engaging in ground combat, I might agree that it was a success. But that's not what happened, or is happening. Nor do I really think it engages with Jeff's criticism
One of the very oldest mistakes made in war is the idea that "if we inflict a sudden, decisive military defeat on our enemy, we will achieve our goals, even if we can't really define what those goals are." Sometimes that works, more or less: Germany's invasion of France in 1870, or 1940. More often, it doesn't: Germany's attack on France in 1914, its invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Japan's attack on the United States in 1941. In those cases and many others, a failure to think of what victory looks like, or how likely it will be achieved, if the "we win in a Round 1 knockout" plan doesn't come true led to disaster.
It seems obvious Trump had no plan beyond "we win in a Round 1 knockout." At this point, we'll be lucky, and bucking historic trends, if this war ends up as a net positive for US strategic interests.
Lol. If any good comes out of this for the USA then I'll have to start believing the hype that we are singularly blessed by a benevolent God. I'm not holding my breath.
No need to complicate matters. Trump is an idiot doing idiot things. He is driven by greed and racism and has backed is into a very bad position with no good way out. All while actively destroying alliances and weakening the world order. He ripped up the treaty that put effective limits on the Iranian Republic's nuclear program for the first time, because it was made by a black man, so had to be negated in Trump's view. His entire presidency is devoted to empowering the 0.1%, and fuck everyone else.
I couldn’t agree more about Trump. I hate everything he’s doing to damage the US and its allies. That doesn’t mean I’m obligated to view the war and Iran exclusively through the lens of Trump. Trump is a chaos agent, but this war and its consequences are bigger than Trump. I am more concerned about what happens to Iran, its people, and the IRGC. If it ends up being a net positive - fantastic. If it doesn’t- I’ll be happy to lay the blame at Trump’s feet. Maybe he should not have ripped up the prior agreement, but then it was clear the agreement wasn’t working. If the only party beholden to it is the US then what good is the agreement? It’s quite clear their nuclear program was not a civilian program, and done at great expense to the citizens of Iran, who are in a country sitting on gargantuan amounts of oil and natural gas and yet still suffering from power outages and water shortages. Given those facts the nuclear program would have been foolish at best even if it WAS purely for civilian purposes. Which it was not. A government in pursuit of a civilian program would not enrich uranium to that degree, would not kick out nuclear inspectors and build facilities deep within mountains, and would not turn down the offers that were made for free nuclear fuel for civilian reactors.
And no matter what Trump does - the IRGC are not sympathetic figures. I’m shedding zero tears about what happens to them. Their aspirations for nuclear weapons are still unacceptable, regardless of what Trump does. The commentary around this war has been concerning primarily because so many people and media outlets seem unable to separate those two things, and end up effectively rooting for the US to “lose,” which means the IRGC “wins” and gets to…continue murdering civilians at tremendous scale, continue to strive for a nuke to achieve their dreams of killing Jews and harming “the west,” and continue holding shipping hostage as they see fit to get whatever concessions they’re after. Nobody (well not most people) would root for the Nazi’s just because they hated the US president. This is no different.
And at no point did Trump have any plan to replace the IRGC, so who cares? We have an incompetent warmonger at the helm regardless of how evil the Iranian leadership is. And if preventing the Iranian state from acquiring a nuke is the highest priority, I assume you howled with outrage and demanded Trump's impeachment and arrest when he first unilaterally ripped up the treaty that allowed us to access their facilities and verify they remained nukeless, and then again last month when he assassinated the religious leader who issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons and replaced him with a guy who watched his whole family explode?
We aren't mindless rooting against Trump because he's on the other team and we're afflicted with TDS, we hate him for making the world crappier and more dangerous for everybody, including ourselves.
Did *Trump* say that the current war has destroyed Iran's nuclear weapons program?
As for the rest of your comment, it just has the same energy as when I would die in Mario and yell at my friends in the room for distracting me. Don't blame failure on the people who didn't fail, basically.
Shoutout to the best WWII podcast, “We have ways of making you talk”.
If you’ve ever listened to The Rest Is History and thought, “This would be better is every episode was about WWII” then this is the podcast for you. In fact, one of the hosts is the brother of one of the Rest Is History hosts
You listed Britain in Afghanistan once. They should be listed 3x
Some people say the first rule of war is: don't march on Moscow. If so, the second law is probably: good luck trying to hold Afghanistan if the locals don't want you there.
I mean, he doesn't even need to read history: Russia's "special operation" in Ukraine is RIGHT THERE, going on year five, a million Russian casualties and counting. It's a pretty good example of what happens when Plan A is "Oh they'll collapse quickly, don't worry about it" and then there is no real Plan B.
Of course, this is the same man who seemingly takes it at face value when Putin tells him Russia is "winning" this war, so maybe it's no use.
I should have put that one on the list!
Putin in Ukraine, and Trump in Iran just prove the wisdom of The Wire “You take a swing at the king, you best not miss”. And no, I don’t remember which Baltimore gangster said that.
Putin was aiming for a quick strike in Kiev to decapitate the Zelensky regime-but he failed. Trump/Netanyahu zapped the king, but didn’t trigger a revolt, so the net effect is the same.
Omar Little.
Well, that and the fact that for several centuries is was the one of the few socially acceptable special interests for autistic men to obsess over…
Pro-tip - as one of said autistic men who knows an awful lot about senior Allied figures and generals (Monty was absolutely one of us) the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia was interesting but the British liberation of it was arguably just as much so. If you aren’t already familiar with him, Orde Wingate is definitely going to become your favourite WW2 figure and is excellent fodder for this stack
You, sir, just made my weekend.
Pleasure to be of service sir 🫡 Happy to supply large amounts of inspiration for posts on the endless bitching and incompetence between Allied commanders on demand, given any opportunity to talk about this stuff is pretty much what would make mine.
C’mon though, you can’t just be name dropping Bagdolio and Graziani without giving us who your favourite WW2 generals are…? 😉
If you want to turn this thread into a discussion of WWII generals I will happily assist you in the endeavor.
Monty and Devers are my favourites - you?
Devers is a solid choice, but I'm rather less fond of Monty.
Slim is probably my favorite Brit--Wingate was cool, but never commanded beyond the division level. Favorite American would probably be Eisenhower, but that may be a reaction to the overrating of Patton as "war god" rather than just "really good." Favorite Russian would be either Zhukov or Rokossovsky. Favorite German--von Manstein, Rommel has been badly overrated, though I think that's changed over the past twenty years. Don't really have a favorite Japanese general.
Used to have a similar view about Eisenhower and Monty, however after having done a massive deep dive into exactly what happened in the Northwest Europe campaign, I’ve now completely changed my mind and think Eisenhower is substantially overrated whilst Monty was possibly the most professional of the lot.
Can highly recommend this thesis on the issue by one of the heads of the US War College History section who actually interviewed most of the people involved at the time - possibly the single best piece of research on the Second World War I’ve ever read: https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/6ac6738e-a2a5-4485-930e-23bfc7d82235/content
Von Manstein used my grandparents house as a field HQ for a couple of weeks in 1943/44. My grandmother and aunts/uncle had to live in the barn, only my great grandmother was allowed inside to cook for them, my grandfather-who served in Rokosovskiy’s regiment as a groom to Rokosovskiy’s adjutant in the early 1930s- was hiding in the woods with partisans. My grandmother had one brother who was severely wounded at Stalingrad and died in a military hospital after the doctors attempted to transplant a goat stomach into him, and another brother-who grew up in a state orphanage-who became a general who went all the way to Berlin. After my grandparents emigrated to the United States, the general brother refused all contact with my grandmother.
My favorite WW2 generals would probably be Gen. Curtis LeMay, Adm. Nimitz, and Gen. Patton.
My grandfather (West Point 1915) got to know Patton when they were on the Punitive Expedition to Mexico to teach Pancho Villa a lesson, and he (Grandpa, not Pancho Villa) thought Patton was a dick. Later my father, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, also thought Patton was a dick. My conclusion: Patton was a dick.
Actually for all I know Pancho Villa also thought Patton was a dick. I should look that up.
Isn’t that kind of the universal consensus on Patton? I thought the only open question was is Patton an “asshole who is brilliant and right about stuff” or an “asshole who is usually wrong but got lucky and seized a bunch of unearned glory”.
Probably. I was forced to watch the movie "Patton" in 8th grade but I don't remember it. I just take my forebears' word on these things.
In other news, my dad liked Ike. This, too, was a consensus view at the time. Ike was in the West Point class of 1915 with my grandfather, and we have a little of their correspondence. It's pretty boring; mostly along the lines of "Happy birthday! Hope you're well. Okay, well, I'm pretty busy being president so catch you later."
Villa was an interesting dude to say the least. He was almost homicidally racist against Chinese, but had no problem with Japanese, enough so that the US Army sent a Japanese cook into Villa’s camp/entourage as a spy!
Not to mention the fact that he filmed his military actions and had an entire railroad car just for his personal harem.
That's fascinating! I should read up. I really just know that the punitive expedition was a big ol' failure.
Dear Jeff,
In the history of IMBW, this is one of the better chapters.
Love,
Dad
“…we went from Ayatollah H.W. Khamenei to Ayatollah W. Khamenei…” absolutely sent me!
Trump didn’t have to read thousand-page histories of the War of Jenkins' Ear to gain the wisdom to avoid this Iranian clusterfuck. All he had to do was reread his speeches from the last ten years. You know, the ones where he laid into his predecessors for getting involved in “stupid” wars. (Of course, that assumes that Trump is consistent and truthful in word and deed, which real estate guys with strings of bankruptcies tend not to be.)
In fairness, listening to Trump speak is insufferable and I can’t blame him for not wanting to do that.
It also assumes that Trump can read.
I just started reading Misha Glenny's tome on The Balkans. I didn't realize it was actually my biological clock what made me do it.
As a fellow middle aged man who went through the change, I feel compelled to quote King Archidamus' speech before the Peloponnesian war,
"I have not lived long, Spartans, without having the experience of many wars, and I see those among you of the same age as myself, who will not fall into the common misfortune of longing for war from inexperience or from a belief in its advantage and its safety."
Then later, "but war undertaken by a coalition for sectional interest, whose progress there is no means of foreseeing, may not be easily or creditably settled."
i'm thinking maybe Trump hasn't read his Thucydides.....
That's a pretty good bet, I'd say.
The Dem candidate in 2028 needs to make part of their stump speech "the retard didn't even fill up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve before starting the war."
Repeat often.
I’m starting to get into history books.. and I’m 31. Oh god. Am I already hitting middle age?
There is an early onset version of this disease.
Yes, it was in college for me.
I see your 31 and raise you a 22. Send help
For me it was around 20 — I was a history major in college. But history was a lot shorter back then.
26 here and I’ve already been reading this stuff for years, so as the others have said it can definitely be early onset…
He remembers the Six Day War from when he was a young man, and probably was hoping to top that with a 5 Day War.
You've really got to wonder what's going on in the background here. Is this a case of the cabinet desperately trying to rein in an angry alzheimer's patient with access to the nukes, or is the cabinet simply operating around a senile old man too feeble to rein them in.
Enquiring minds want to know!
Honestly cannot recommend the Charlemagne biography King and Emperor enough - it’s only like 400 pages and it’s maybe half actually about Charlemagne’s life intermixed with another half about like the history of studying Charlemagne
In junior high when reading about Charlemagne, I remember thinking that it was cheating for Pepin the Short to name one kid Charlemagne and the other kid Carloman. That's the same name! They're just in different languages! Pick a whole new name, Pep.
It’s pretty clear by now that lots of people - Jeff included - are not so secretly rooting for the IRGC to win as long as they get to stick it to Trump. Iran can pressure countries to let them build nukes by threatening to close the strait whenever they went? Hella super awesome!!! You go guys!!! Haha you sure showed Trump! I wish more countries funded terrorism thanks to their leverage over global shipping! Did you see how they attacked every country within range of their missiles just because? That was sick!!! So cool!! Gosh I wish they had MORE missiles to do it! Take that DRUMPF!!!
Anyway, childish dipshittery of that view apart, here’s a question: what exactly would you consider the threshold for “Irans nuclear weapons program is destroyed?” I mean I get that at this point everyone is cheering for Iran to get a nuke (because DRUMPF LOOOOL!!) but in all seriousness - is your standard that as long as one person in the country remains who thinks “gee I think we should keep trying to build nukes” then the program is untouched? If whatever progress they made was set back even 5-10 years, or however long it takes to rebuild everything that was destroyed, then it was all a big failure? Do you actually have any concept of what a nuclear program is, what buildings and machines are? That they take time to build? Or do you visualize all industry as just a few dies sitting in a room having ideas until hardware magically pops out of the aether? I know, I know, the comedy writers who now masquerade as war correspondents are definitely people who know these things, as opposed to people who hyperventilate when they see a screwdriver and who think all industry can just be ordered on Amazon in a few days. And your confidence that this program was just completely and miraculously untouched comes from…where? You looked at your twitter feed and thought “hey you feelin what I’m feelin” and just rattled off an opinion masquerading as fact?
The same people who will gleefully call America the most evil country ever because of the two atomic bombs we used seem not to not have any fucking clue what a nuclear weapon actually is, and why letting a terrorist state obtain one so they can at best blackmail the world and hold shipping hostage, and at worst give it to a terrorist proxy to bomb Tel Aviv, is a stupid fucking idea no matter what your thoughts about the US and Trump. Is there any price low enough to pay to avoid that outcome that you consider worthwhile? What is it? Or is any amount spent to prevent this outcome still too much?
It’s pretty clear by now that this is a war that a lot of people like Jeff just “decided” for themselves was a failure on day one, and in fact would be definitionally a failure no matter what actually happened. Quite the students of history.
Maybe this war will be a “failure” in the sense that IRGC members still exist, and they still remember the words “missile” and “nuclear bomb” even if their capabilities on those fronts have been set back decades. Sure. But I’m not so morally bankrupt that I’m going to gleefully pray for the war to go poorly just to get my schadenfreude about Trump. If all the war does is highlight that hey, maybe having terrorists control a key shipping route is not a great idea; and delay the first use of a nuclear weapon since WW2 for another 5-10 years, then that’s still worth it. Otherwise when a nuke goes off in Israel or the US in your lifetimes and every major city in Iran is turned to glass in retaliation, don’t go crying about it because this is the outcome you actively rooted for.
Go home dad, you're drunk.
I’m not even a dad yet. Imagine how much worse it’ll get.
If one could credibly argue that this war was launched with the limited aim of doing as much damage as we could do to Iran's nuclear program without engaging in ground combat, I might agree that it was a success. But that's not what happened, or is happening. Nor do I really think it engages with Jeff's criticism
One of the very oldest mistakes made in war is the idea that "if we inflict a sudden, decisive military defeat on our enemy, we will achieve our goals, even if we can't really define what those goals are." Sometimes that works, more or less: Germany's invasion of France in 1870, or 1940. More often, it doesn't: Germany's attack on France in 1914, its invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Japan's attack on the United States in 1941. In those cases and many others, a failure to think of what victory looks like, or how likely it will be achieved, if the "we win in a Round 1 knockout" plan doesn't come true led to disaster.
It seems obvious Trump had no plan beyond "we win in a Round 1 knockout." At this point, we'll be lucky, and bucking historic trends, if this war ends up as a net positive for US strategic interests.
Lol. If any good comes out of this for the USA then I'll have to start believing the hype that we are singularly blessed by a benevolent God. I'm not holding my breath.
No need to complicate matters. Trump is an idiot doing idiot things. He is driven by greed and racism and has backed is into a very bad position with no good way out. All while actively destroying alliances and weakening the world order. He ripped up the treaty that put effective limits on the Iranian Republic's nuclear program for the first time, because it was made by a black man, so had to be negated in Trump's view. His entire presidency is devoted to empowering the 0.1%, and fuck everyone else.
I couldn’t agree more about Trump. I hate everything he’s doing to damage the US and its allies. That doesn’t mean I’m obligated to view the war and Iran exclusively through the lens of Trump. Trump is a chaos agent, but this war and its consequences are bigger than Trump. I am more concerned about what happens to Iran, its people, and the IRGC. If it ends up being a net positive - fantastic. If it doesn’t- I’ll be happy to lay the blame at Trump’s feet. Maybe he should not have ripped up the prior agreement, but then it was clear the agreement wasn’t working. If the only party beholden to it is the US then what good is the agreement? It’s quite clear their nuclear program was not a civilian program, and done at great expense to the citizens of Iran, who are in a country sitting on gargantuan amounts of oil and natural gas and yet still suffering from power outages and water shortages. Given those facts the nuclear program would have been foolish at best even if it WAS purely for civilian purposes. Which it was not. A government in pursuit of a civilian program would not enrich uranium to that degree, would not kick out nuclear inspectors and build facilities deep within mountains, and would not turn down the offers that were made for free nuclear fuel for civilian reactors.
And no matter what Trump does - the IRGC are not sympathetic figures. I’m shedding zero tears about what happens to them. Their aspirations for nuclear weapons are still unacceptable, regardless of what Trump does. The commentary around this war has been concerning primarily because so many people and media outlets seem unable to separate those two things, and end up effectively rooting for the US to “lose,” which means the IRGC “wins” and gets to…continue murdering civilians at tremendous scale, continue to strive for a nuke to achieve their dreams of killing Jews and harming “the west,” and continue holding shipping hostage as they see fit to get whatever concessions they’re after. Nobody (well not most people) would root for the Nazi’s just because they hated the US president. This is no different.
And at no point did Trump have any plan to replace the IRGC, so who cares? We have an incompetent warmonger at the helm regardless of how evil the Iranian leadership is. And if preventing the Iranian state from acquiring a nuke is the highest priority, I assume you howled with outrage and demanded Trump's impeachment and arrest when he first unilaterally ripped up the treaty that allowed us to access their facilities and verify they remained nukeless, and then again last month when he assassinated the religious leader who issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons and replaced him with a guy who watched his whole family explode?
We aren't mindless rooting against Trump because he's on the other team and we're afflicted with TDS, we hate him for making the world crappier and more dangerous for everybody, including ourselves.
Did *Trump* say that the current war has destroyed Iran's nuclear weapons program?
As for the rest of your comment, it just has the same energy as when I would die in Mario and yell at my friends in the room for distracting me. Don't blame failure on the people who didn't fail, basically.
Shoutout to the best WWII podcast, “We have ways of making you talk”.
If you’ve ever listened to The Rest Is History and thought, “This would be better is every episode was about WWII” then this is the podcast for you. In fact, one of the hosts is the brother of one of the Rest Is History hosts
I was literally listening to their episode on Kohima as the notification for this popped up on my phone!
Rather than a specific podcast, I would highly recommend watching recordings of lectures by people like Robert Citino.
Thanks for the suggestion RMIII.....