Could you walk us through some realistic process through which this might have come about?
Feel free to start with where Madame President Clinton unilaterally pulls us out of the Iran Nuclear Agreement, but again, please try to make it realistic.
ETA: Dang. Ninja’d by HMS Irruncible.
You mean if Hillary had threatened to target 52 Iranian sites including cultural heritage ones? No, we wouldn’t.
The verdict seems to be that his stupidity won.
Today he could have taken a victory lap to spin some shit about how his expert statesmanship achieved American goals via skillful brinksmanship. (A lie, of course, but he could have sold it).
Instead he proposed ANOTHER round of retaliatory sanctions, which are the same thing that provoked Iran in the first place. So we can look forward to another round of brinksmanship in the not-too-distant future.
Of course, I call this stupidity, but if we frame this as Trump setting up more contingencies that he can manipulate to take the heat off the impeachment news cycle, then it looks like a strategic victory for his self-preservation skills.
This is hilarious, because you basically did the same thing back in 2011, when this board was debating the Libyan no-fly zone, and Bricker pointed out that lots of lefties on this board were complaining. Cite.
So you can take your both-sidesism and stick it where the sun don’t shine. You’ve become so useless as a poster. Such a shame.
As someone who very much dislikes Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons, I don’t see how anyone would expect her to do exactly what Trump did. She was in favor of maintaining Obama’s agreement with Iran - as far as I can tell the only reason Trump threw it out was that he doesn’t like it because it’s an accomplishment of Obama’s. If things had broken down with Iran, I can’t see her simply targeting a prominent figure without some kind of plan for what next. I also can’t see her threatening a list of 52 targets, including some that are war crimes to target.
Why would you think that Hillary would do something even vaguely like what Trump did?
Well I hope Iran hurries up and retaliates against us in this way. Tell me again wtf we are doing in Iraq in the first place? Oh yeah, mopping up ISIS after the invasion/quagmire based on… what again?
There was tons of criticism of many of Obama’s military actions on this board. Did you miss it, or are you only capable of knee jerk both-sides-ism at this point?
Because it makes it easier to be a disingenuous, smug fucking troll.
‘Why can’t you all just admit that Trump is almost exactly like Hilary, right down to the pant suit!’
In dollars and rubles.
“…I will make a statement in the morning.”
Did that have anyone else on edge last night? Like, I was hoping it would just take him that long to learn the words in the prepared speech. But turning Tehran into a fireball would also make a statement that would impress the hell out of his knuckledragging supporters. And he could call himself The Savior of Dubai.
But she wouldn’t have done exactly what Trump did, so there’s that.
All this bullshit about “They attacked our drone” or “They commandeered our allies’ vessels” or “They fired missiles at a Saudi oil field” is nonsense. Except for the attack on KSA’s oil field, I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that **none what we’ve been using as a pretext for war with Iran would have happened had we simply honored a nuclear agreement that was working. **
As I’ve said many times before, Iran and the US had a face-saving way to move toward a new stage in relations. But there are highly special interests in the US, Israel, and KSA, who don’t want Iran to become a regional power. I won’t say I completely blame them, but Iran still is still entitled to sovereignty last time I checked.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that - like at all. Colibri’s right: we’re just getting started. Whether Iran purposely tipped their pitch or not or whether it was just a poorly planned attack is still unclear. I suspect it might be the former, but only because they haven’t thought about their longer term strategy.
There’s no question that Trump caught them by surprise when he whacked Soleimani. Iran occasionally miscalculates just like we do, and attempting to overrun a US embassy was a miscalculation on their part. And I suspect that Trump and those who supported the attack probably used the fact that American diplomats were endangered as a pretext to counter cries foul that we killed a foreign official – hard to cry about a dead guy in a uniform if that guy was threatening our embassy.
Still, actually killing him as opposed to sending him a signal in some other fashion was another overreaction on our part, and there will be consequences - and like Colibri, I don’t think we know yet what those consequences will be exactly.
But, if I were to put myself in Iran’s shoes, my goal wouldn’t be to strike the American homeland - that would be the end of the regime and Iran knows it. What Iran really wants, as they’ve said, is to drive the US out of the region. And by the region I don’t mean just Iraq, but the entire Arab/Persian world. They won’t stop when we leave Iraq. They’ll strike us anywhere they can as long as we’re close enough to strike them.
The ground you are staking out to defend in this debate only exists in a fantasy world of your own creation.
Sad.
You’re not the only one to have worried about that. But the likelier explanation is that Donald didn’t want to say anything until he know how the FoxNews prime time hosts felt about the situation. He wouldn’t want to contradict them, after all. So he watched TV all last night to be sure he’d get his message in line with Hannity et al.
Also, there could have been concerns about his sundowning, if he’d tried to address the nation at night.
I think the smarter play for Iran is to exacerbate America’s divide. They would be stupid to attack US civilians, it would push some people into supporting Trump who wouldn’t normally do so. By letting Trump be the unhinged lunatic, Iran keeps America divided and has world public opinion on their side. They should keep it that way, make this a conflict with Trump, not America.
I honestly think that Trump was sedated by his doctors last night to prevent him from doing anything insane.
The current situation wouldn’t have come to be without the Orange Toddler.
I’m in Afghanistan, so I blessedly didn’t see the ramblings of a madman backed by religious fanatics, but several of the articles I read mentioned that he was “subdued.” He is obviously becoming more unhinged each day; imagine him at the end of his second term.
Did the articles mention who subdued him? Or at least how many guys leapt at the opportunity?
You libtards are at it again with your Fake News and Fake Facts.
Hillary would have cackled her way into War, trying to enrich her friends who speculate in commodity futures — lead and even uranium. Thousands of children would have been swept up in Iran and sent to the dungeons of pizza parlors all over the U.S. for her husband to play with. Our brave soldiers would have had to do all this with their bare hands because “Gunz are so very very bad!”
Donald Trump, OTOH, is an unselfish and noble patriot sent, like Cyrus the Great, by The Almighty. He is being Commanded by the Voice of God to rid the world of un-Christian heathens, and of would-be baby-killers who shriek their wrongness with foreign tongues and foreign skin tones.
You all would understand this if you could get out of your CNN-MSNBC bubble and stop masturbating each other in this echo chamber.
#MAGA
I’m sure I’ve misspelled a word or misplaced a comma above, and the hive mind will jump on that. But by God somebody has to defend our Glorious President!