Establishment NYT leads the charge (for 'the world') with the next round of sinophobia/anti-communism

 ColdMiser wrote:
Trump will claim "victory" no matter what happens. The greatest victory of all time. The biggliest!

 rgio wrote:
I fully expect China to be the main player in the end of Operation Epic Trifle. They will emerge as the grown up in the room and be the ones that get the strait opened and will be the biggest beneficiary of that. They win big in this debacle without firing a single missel. Question is whether or not they allow Trump to slink away with something he can hang a Victory sign on. 

 R_P wrote:
Made America weaker, alienated allies, gave Russia and China leverage, and proved to Iran they have more control than they would have ever believed possible.

A historically stupid war with no plan to achieve any goals. 

The war on Iran will likely end in American retreat
The American empire cannot win the war against Iran at acceptable financial, military, and political costs.
By Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares

The war against Iran that the United States and Israel launched on February 28, 2026, will likely end in an American retreat. The United States cannot continue the war without producing disastrous consequences. A renewed escalation would likely lead to the destruction of the region’s oil, gas, and desalination infrastructure, causing a prolonged global catastrophe. Iran can credibly impose costs that the United States cannot bear and that the world should not suffer.

The US – Israel war plan was a decapitation strike, sold to President Donald Trump by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and David Barnea, the director of the Mossad. The premise was that an aggressive joint US–Israeli bombing campaign would so degrade the Iranian regime’s command structure, nuclear programme, and IRGC senior leadership that the regime would fracture. The United States and Israel would then impose a pliable government in Tehran.

Trump seems to have been convinced that Iran would follow the same course as had occurred in Venezuela. The US operation in Venezuela in January 2026 removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in what appears to have been a coordinated operation between the CIA and elements inside the Venezuelan state. The US won a more pliant regime, while most of the Venezuelan power structure remained in place. Trump seems to have believed naively that the same outcome would occur in Iran.

The Iran operation, however, failed to produce a pliant regime in Tehran. Iran is not Venezuela, historically, technologically, culturally, geographically, militarily, demographically, or geopolitically. Whatever happened in Caracas had little relation to what would take place in Tehran.

The Iranian government did not fracture. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), far from being decapitated, emerged with a tightened internal command and an expanded role in the national-security architecture. The supreme leader’s office held; the religious establishment closed ranks behind it; and the population rallied against external attack.

Two months on, Trump and Netanyahu have no Iranian successor government under their control, no Iranian surrender to close the war, and no military pathway whatsoever to victory. The only path, and the one the US seems to be taking, is a retreat, with Iran in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and with none of the other issues between the US and Iran settled.

Several reasons explain America’s disastrous miscalculations and Iran’s successes. (...)

Rubio's Red Scare Redux

NextGen Rambos/Death Squads

The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

This was a logical, even an admirable, foreign policy plan. Just as important, history showed it to be workable. Britain had to surrender its far-flung system of colonies and protectorates after World War II. Letting go was often awkward and sometimes left violence in its wake. But except for its ill-fated attempt to join France and Israel in seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, Britain did not try to hold territories it could no longer afford. It wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions. Its disengagement was a success, though this can be hard to see because what was being managed was decline. Mr. Trump had a chance of pulling off something similar.

The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor. (...)

🤡🤡

ICC for thee...

"You're not supposed to hit back!"

Platforming perfidious sociopaths on TV.  Normalized violence/terrorism.

"We got to move away from negotiations and get back to what we started to do from very beginning ... so weaken this regime that it becomes vulnerable to rising up inside the country. We can't do that, that's something the Iranian people have to do. Can Mossad and the CIA work to help that a little bit? I think so, and I assume they're already doing things."

Fox host: "Well, the intelligence from Mossad has been nothing short of spectacular"

CIA Ran MK-ULTRA Experiments on Prisoners of War in U.S. Custody, Declassified Docs Confirm

 R_P wrote:

Well, I caught the 57 headline.

US Launches Another Airstrike in Somalia as Trump Continues Ramped Up Bombing Campaign

Ongoing extortion/coercion via the US Treasury Dept.