Supposedly, “An army travels on its stomach.” A navy, on the other hand, is on its own. (The bolding is mine.)
You can take the man out of Faux news…
Faux is notorious for what they leave out. Pete, you still got it!
This is absolutely consistent with the Administration’s posture that we have NOT been, cannot have been, seriously harmed (and that it’s somehow treasonous to reveal anything’s going badly).
In what can only be interpreted as a sign of the U.S. overwhelming strategic victory over Iran…
‘I’ll make it $10,001,000, $10,002,000 if you include my… I mean his ugly daughter with the colored pencil collection.’ ~ John Barron
Trump is claiming that all the mines are gone out of the Strait of Hormuz now:
I feel like this is absolutely impossible without getting into drone/fast boat/missile range of Iran so I am calling bullshit on this one.
It’s something Trump said, so it has an air of bullshit built right in.
Of course it is not demined, that would be technically impossible. But he claims it is, and warns Iran not to do it again (tut, tut!). So when a ship inevitably runs into a mine, he can claim Iran did it again and react in a silly way. Genius!
But even if, in that oddest universe possible, Trump was telling the truth about it being de-mined, this is just another example of asymmetrical warfare, that seems to mostly be favouring Iran these days. Planting new mines is way easier than tracking down and removing mines. Hell, you don’t even have to get the job completely done to be effective. The US could destroy the Iranian assets that are laying the mines, but even 50%, or just 10%, or 1% of the mines being laid still acts as a deterrent to shipping, and you still have to sweep the whole damn straight to make sure you get rid of all of them. And the relative costs of both operations also favours the Iranians.
Relatively effective decoys have got to be cheaper to produce than actual mines, right? And for this situation, just about as effective?
With the added bonus of playing “I’m not touching you” with the US.
Oh, I’m glad that’s over.
Fantastic. Maybe this means sailors can stop jumping off ships now.
It occurs to me just now, for him, it is over. The mission, the distraction, the squirrel as I call it, has fully accomplished what he wanted or somehow realized at a base level, he needed it to do.
And he doesn’t care a whit about the fallout, the actual consequences to others, or who has to clean up his mess.
So where are we on the victory count after six months? Five? Ten? Fifty?
I don’t have a count for the number of times he’s already declared victory, but I’m fairly confident in predicting that he’ll do so again at least once as we get closer to the midterms in an attempt to manipulate last minute votes and headlines.
He has been surrounded by so many sycophantic assholes and yes men his entire life that he thinks he can just insist upon a thing and everyone is supposed to capitulate to his insane whims. The notion that he can’t manipulate the realities of a war on the ground half a world away by fiat is a violation of his lived experience. This is just another blip on the timeline.
Back around the end of May, someone had gone through all his Truth postings and counted 39 claims of victory. By now I’m sure we’re over 50.
Yesterday I was hearing some talk radio panelist trying to fight the whole rest of the panel on how Trump had won while even the other RW leaning participants were trying to get him to understand: you really win when you have achieved your goals and you stop fighting.
Trump keeps forgetting the essential second part of that claim: you declare victory and you get out.