3 comments

  1. Good one. Saturday’s New York Times said EVERYONE told Trump he had to have a strong retaliation to teach the Persians they cannot shoot down a US drone flying over US territory (everything within 10,000 km of the Strait of Hormuz belongs to the US of A). But he wimped out and made some feeble excuse that killing 150 Persians for one unmanned drone was not a proportional response. Most US experts agree: the proportional response would be to carpet bomb the entire country. Shooting down a drone over US territory is an act of war, and must be punished the same way the US punished Japan for Pearl Harbor. (And there are plenty of parallels: the US ordered a complete blockade of Japan, which, if you’re a strong power, is an act of war, and justifies an attack on the blockader, but if you’re weak, what can you do? Japan, of course, thought they were strong enough, given their logistic advantages, but they weren’t.) Iran knows they’ll lose a war, so they won’t start one, but if the US bombs, they’ll take as much as they can down with them. Which means the fleet, the US bases in the MENA, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh will be toast.
    Trump is bad, but I figure he’s the lesser of the two weevils. (Do you have weevils in your cotton fields?) At least he hasn’t started any new shooting wars. Yet. For which the neo-cons and the neo-liberals cannot forgive him.

  2. What a mess. A week or so later, and many in the US military note that Iran tried to shoot down one drone, missed, and all the US ‘experts’ said the primitive Iranian military cannot hit an advanced, stealth-protected US aircraft or drone.
    Then Iran did shoot down a US drone, and the ‘experts’ said that the US must retaliate for an unprovoked attack on a US drone over US territory.
    They keep saying it was terrible for Trump to say he was withdrawing from the terrible Obama JCPOA. It’s obvious that the right thing to have done was to praise the JCPOA as a great deal negotiated by America’s Greatest President, and then impose severe, world-wide sanctions for Iran’s violations–the US has proof, since US intelligence knows much more than the UN inspectors, that Iran is in violation, but while imposing sanctions, the US is in full compliance with the greatest deal of the 21st century, and if Iran doesn’t stop, the US must start bombing, which will still be in full compliance with the JCPOA.
    Trump is obviously the worst president in history for criticising Obama’s Great JCPOA, and then, after saying the JCPOA is terrible and saying the US is withdrawing, only imposing severe sanctions when a military response is required.
    We all must hope Trump continues to listen to Tucker Carlson, the only competent US analyst I’ve heard yet.

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