CSotD: Causi Belli
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Perhaps one reason Dear Leader never went to Congress to ask for a declaration of war or at least a positive War Powers ruling is that, as Telnaes suggests, he hasn’t got a rationale for the war, or, at least, one he can explain and is willing to stick with.
He has said it was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, but he’d already claimed to have “obliterated” their lab far too recently for that to make sense. And he’s said they were a threat to us, but hasn’t explained how.
We’ve heard great claims of Christianity among his staff and advisors, and rumors — still only from one source — of commanding officers declaring the invasion to be the opening phase of Armageddon, which, as Venables points out, takes us back to the 14th Century and various attempts to drive the pagans out of the Holy Land.
Not only is that approach a bigoted pile of bat guano, but it’s also a load of simpleminded “We’re Number One!” hubris.
Turner is not the only observer who has this theory, though I like his inclusion of Putin as one of two puppet masters. Not only does it strengthen his argument, but it allows him to bring in the “useful idiot” phrase which Merriam Webster defines as “a naive or credulous person who can be manipulated or exploited to advance a cause or political agenda.”
It wasn’t coined by Stalin, as often claimed, but it arose as an insult to those who couldn’t see the Soviet threat.
Côté also shows Netanyahu as the director of the war, saying “We’ll give it a strong blow and see!” and Trump responding, “Good plan!” As said, there are many suggesting that Netanyahu drew in the gullible Trump, and Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA), who has lived in Tel Aviv, said that Netanyahu has tried to get US presidents to make war on Iran for decades, but “Only Trump is stupid enough.”
The image of Slim Pickens riding an atomic bomb in Dr. Strangelove gets a little too much use, but Horsey justifies it by having Dear Leader actively admit that he just likes to blow things up, which fits his pattern of dropping bombs on various countries over issues that other presidents would resolve by employing the art of the deal.
We should, after all, bear in mind that Trump’s reputation as a wheeler-dealer was created for the TV show he hosted and he has, in fact, piled up failure after failure, surviving only because of his father’s money and apparently unlimited willingness to bail out his son.
He may even have been chosen for the show because of his bluster and his narcissistic tendency to brag about his phantom accomplishments, which he demonstrated well before the Apprentice encouraged him.
Chappatte hardly seems off-base, though Khamenei fits in many ways with the other autocrats Dear Leader buddies up to, including Putin, Xi and Orbán. He might have hung a Supreme Leader poster on his bedroom wall if he were not already on record as being an Islamophobe who tried, and continues to try, to keep Muslims from entering the country and to expel as many as he can. See Venables cartoon, above.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The bombing of an elementary school in Tehran, with the deaths of an estimated 175 little girls and school staff, remains a mystery, with Iran claiming 1,000 deaths, though there’s no proof, since they have obstructed the Internet and kept reporters out. At this stage, we don’t even know if it was an Israeli or American strike.
Bish is correct, however, that the disaster, and the war in general, hardly fit in with Dear Leader’s establishment of a “Board of Peace,” nor does it mesh well with his promise at inauguration to be “the Peace President,” and his bizarre insistence that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, Venables seems off-base with his accusation — however satirically intended — that American forces don’t attempt to fix targets for their munitions. There certainly can be errors, like the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988, the USS Gettysburg’s downing of a US jet this past December or Kuwait’s shooting down of three US jets in the current conflict.
During the Vietnam War, Hanoi accused US bombers of hitting schools, and the US reply was to claim there were antiaircraft guns on the roofs of those schools. Were there? Who knows?
We may have been lulled into admiration of smart bombs by the detailed briefings we got from Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf in the 1991 Gulf War, in which we got to see smart bombs precisely targeting Iraqi vehicles.
However, there was also a hit on what the US military insisted was a chemical weapons facility but the Iraqis said produced baby formula, and there has never been a clear answer to who was correct.
There would be no strategic advantage in deliberately targeting an elementary school, but accidents are an inevitable part of war.
Nor are we ever likely to get specific, undeniable answers. The term “fortunes of war” applies to its uncertainty, and Sorensen traces the only parts that we can count on to happen, repeatedly.
Part of the grumbling is about how the administration has cut funding for health care because that spending would hurt the economy, but it finds money for war.
The counter argument says that making bombs creates jobs, or, as the ’60s graffito said, “War is good business; Invest your son.”
I think Fell is kidding, but if Trump isn’t blaming Biden for the Strait of Hormuz being closed and gas prices rising, he blames him for everything else.
A year and more into Trump’s administration, rising prices don’t exist and, if they do, it’s not his fault. Joe Biden is the Emmanuel Goldstein of our nation, and it wasn’t Snowball, but Joe Biden, who made the windmill collapse.
But be of good cheer, because Summers says Khamenei’s death transformed Iran into a Western-facing modern nation in which Sharia law no longer applies.
Never thought of Summers as a Yippie, but he’s declared the war over!
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