It’s hard to imagine the DOJ has any available resources, what with their aggressive criminal prosecutions of Fox News, Newsmax, OANN – along with Trump, et al – and other outlets for their complicity in The Big Lie about the 2020 election.
The opening line of Paul Krugman’s Substack this morning:
All around the world, big, strong men with tears in their eyes are coming up to Donald Trump and saying, “Sir, you’re a loser.”
[It’s a video, but for people like me who don’t watch videos, there’s a transcript right below. Thanks, Paul.]
IMHO, Krugman would have been better off either sparing his criticism of our ‘military might’ or drawing a sharp distinction between strategy (the policy makers) and tactics (the sharp end of the spear).
From what we know so far, I find no fault with the effectiveness of the US military.
In the same way that some are (wisely) saying that the left should NOT let the right (continue to) co-opt the American flag, it’ll be hard to garner the kind of support we need if we blame the military for what the Trump administration did/didn’t do.
TL;DR: It’s not the dog so much. It’s the owner
All those big, beautiful law firms and tech bros who gave President Ineptstein dozens of millions of dollars for discretional use in lawsuits against his enemies still have more where that came from, if need be. But he has not spent the first wave, there is still time. Of course, should they insist on writing the next cheques right now the Grifter in MisChief will accept them.
This is good news and bad news. Awakening consciences = good thing. Troubling disquiet, low morale = not a good thing.
I lay the blame at the feet of the so-called Commander In Chief (applying that title to him makes me want to gag, speaking as an American, an Air Force brat, and an Army widow).
There’s growing disquiet in the military. The Iran war made it worse
There’s growing disquiet in the military. The Iran war made it worse : NPR
Bill Galvin has spent much of the past month answering the phone.
“It’s been very, very busy,” he says. Galvin is the counseling director at the Center on Conscience and War, which helps run the 24-hour GI Rights Hotline, set up to inform service members of their options for military discharge.
Most callers are asking how to apply to become a conscientious objector — a difficult, invasive and rarely used process. But they’re also airing their concerns and frustrations, often anonymously, as the hotline allows them a space to do so without repercussions.
Military members are citing myriad reasons for wanting to leave, but the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has been a powerful motivator. In March alone, Galvin’s center took on more than 80 new clients — almost twice as many as it takes on in an average year. The busiest single day saw 12 new clients join, with one person saying four other members of their platoon were also interested.
Those numbers are a drop in the bucket when compared with the more than 1.3 million people enlisted. But for outside observers and former military officials, those calls and conversations are an indication of a troubling disquiet within the ranks.
The uptick is part of a larger pattern of military members seeking ways to end their service, according to NPR interviews with several organizations like Galvin’s and military members who deal directly with these issues. While there is no hard contemporaneous data on the number of members seeking to exit, the people NPR spoke to for this story say they have seen undeniable cracks in the military’s ability to retain troops, largely due to low morale or ethical concerns.
Galvin says nearly all the callers he talks to mention the bombing of a girls school in Iran on the first day of the war, which killed at least 165 civilians, many of them children. A preliminary assessment determined the U.S. was at fault, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly. NPR previously reported that the girls school was once part of what had been an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base and may have been shown on outdated U.S. target lists as a military building.
…
My bold.
How many will refuse to follow illegal orders? I’m guessing not many in the rank and file. It will be up to officers to refuse to issue those orders. How plausible is that?
And he’s a lousy dresser.
I’ve heard it said that this is the worst military defeat for the USA. Perhaps because it was supposed to be over within the infamous “two weeks.” And it’s probably done far more damage to respect for the USA than Vietnam did. Nixon promised he had a “secret plan,” yet never told anyone what that was. (Maybe David Frost asked him years later to discover it was gasp an outright lie and political check that could not be cashed.)
I learned a new acronym the financial sector uses that helps mitigate big sell-offs when Trump issues his two-week or two-day edicts: TACO. As in “Trump always chickens out”. Somebody (not Netanyahu) has to be thrown under the bus as Trump wants to move on. Wiping out civilizations is now a war crime, he’s told, and “that’s bad right?,” so find a way to declare victory or actually say he was behind all the peace-making, blame someone else (Sleepy Joe’s Generals if not Hegseth), and sit tight till he gets the Nobel.
It’s hard to find the good in this situation, but I’m proud there are numerous members of our armed forces who are so concerned over ethical and moral concerns that retention is a problem.
I’ve found a lot of people have a rather simplistic grasp of what it means to be victorious in war. To a lot of Americans, this doesn’t look like a defeat as our military forces absolutely crushed the Iranian forces. I try to remind those Americans that you can lose every major engagement and still win the war. War isn’t just about killing your enemy or destroying their assets, it’s about meeting your objectives. If you fail to meet your objectives and you are worse off than you were before the war, you have lost. It doesn’t matter how awesome your warfighters performed, you lost.
This.
The fact that you can win all the battles and yet lose the war is something that should be taught in schools, because it’s counterintuitive but true.
Add to it the tendence of seeing war as a sport, were the winner is the team that “scores more goals” instead of the complex political undertaking that really is and you have a receipt for ignorance in a dangerous scale.
It also helps if you have actual objectives.
This is real world/textbook talk. We aren’t in the real world. We are in trumpworld.
BTW, what the hell were trump’s objectives? Oh, right, he never told anyone.
We all know his main objective was to take the spotlight off the Epstein files. And make a few bucks playing the markets like a yoyo.
That’s the beauty of it! If you don’t have objectives nobody can accuse you of failing to meet them!, you literally cannot lose the war!
(You also can’t win it, but who cares?)
Scoring more goals is important. But people tend to keep score in war using body counts and equipment damage and so on rather than meeting the actual political or strategic objectives.
I.e. they’re counting the number of balls hit into the stands when the game being played is actually golf
Yes, I used the wrong expression, meeting “goals” as in objectives is the whole reason of the war.
I should’ve used “Scoring points” as in killing enemy soldiers and destroying enemy materiel and infrastructure.
If the aforementioned killing and destruction do not help you reach your goals they are irrelevant, but people seem to think that wars are decided by counting the number of casualties and buildings destroyed by each country at the end of a given period of time and awarding the war as won to the country that has better numbers.
Because in the end the point is to kill Muslims in general for having the “wrong” religion, and Iranians in particular for defying their rightful lords and masters (us). And in the most recent round of killing, to punish them for not instantly submitting to the One True God, Trump.
I don’t think so, they would think the same if it was a war against Canada for example.
I’m not denying the racism and bigotry of Joe R. Maga mind you, but this particular delusion is not related to that.
I think Trump went in there looking for a regime change. Someone convinced him the Iranian government was ready to collapse and by the time he realized it wasn’t true it was too late.
As I said at the start of this thing, if that’s the case it’s eerily parallel to Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, he was convinced that Stalin’s regime was teetering on the brink and that they would only need to “force the door to make the whole house go down” or words to that effect.
I assumed that was Netanyahu who talked him into it. It’s sad that we elected as president a man who is so easily manipulated.