I had given up on giving donald trump free air time. You just can’t keep up with all of his outrages. One minute he’s killing American citizens who disagree with him, exercising their Second Amendment right to “keep and bear Arms”, and the next minute he’s telling the Iranians that they had better behave, according to his un-stated rules, and not execute their citizens. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!) Of course we all know now what his implied threat was, as his gunboats steamed towards the Iranian coast. But he was all 100% bluster, because he already knew that he was going to take action against Iran, but he only had enough balls to bomb them; the lily-livered American government doesn’t have the cajones to put boots on the ground, and really put their money where their mouths are.
And so today the Iranian citizens — the blameless men, women and children in the street — are all worse off, getting “bombed back to the Stone Ages”, while trump boasts that he has effected “regime change” because he (and the Israelis) has killed some of their leaders, while the regime — “the organisation that is the governing authority of a political unit” — is still well in place keeping the populace down.
First of all, let me state that, of all the people I don’t want in possession of nuclear weapons, it’s an autocratic, theocratic (of any religion!) regime, so good on you donald trump for finally doing something about it. But for the last 47 years, people have been doing something about it! Just because you have a different idea of what should be done, doesn’t mean your idea is better. As could have been expected and probably was expected by people who have been closer to and more involved in this situation than you have been over the last half century, America is back in a completely foreseeable position, and the Iranians don’t really care. They spent a decade at war with Iraq and know what it means to have their entire society neck-deep in war. Been there, done that. You, on the other hand, haven’t been neck-deep in war for 80 years (you were born after World War II), and even then you (America) showed up late after the Europeans had been doing all the heavy lifting for a few years. That’s why some of us can’t believe you’re complaining about Europe not wanting anything to do with your war/tantrum after only a couple of months, when you didn’t even have the courtesy to consult them or your Middle-East allies.
But trump can’t think past five minutes from now. He goes on about the fact that he’s “the first American president” to put his money (although he doesn’t have any) where his mouth is and actually do something, by pulling out his guns and sending the boys and girls (barely adults) of the American military as cannon fodder to their deaths. Except, that’s not quite true because, as I said, the lily livers in the American government (foremost among them tough-talking Pete Hegseth) didn’t send anyone into the fray of battle, as they eventually did in World Wars I and II; they just sent a few airmen in their air-conditioned cockpits to press a few switches to drop a few bombs. Granted, he’s been successful so far, with “only” 15 American combatants killed, and 538 wounded. Congratulations! There’s “only” 15 lives been lost; I’m sure those families don’t mind you killing their loved ones, not to mention the thousands you’ve killed in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere.
This little “excursion” — which sounds a lot like putin’s “special military operation” — has been going on since February, over two months now. I go back again to my statement that trump can’t think five minutes into the future (he has the attention span of a gnat); the consideration that he can’t think five minutes ahead, never mind two months, might be why no American president has ever decided to use military force on Iran! Imagine that! Here we are, two months in, and we’re two months into one of America’s notorious quagmires (after he swore off foreign wars), and donald trump has, effectively, bombed all of us back from the Space Age to the Stone Age. Although I’ve been thinking about this post since at least January — to use myself as an example of being affected by trump’s short-sightedness, despite the fact that I am nowhere near Iran and not (thankfully) an American citizen — I was just forced to cancel a short trip to Ireland for a school reunion. I’m pretty bummed about it, because they only happen once a decade, but I don’t want to be stuck in Ireland for an indefinite period of time, which has a chance of happening if you take as long to resolve the Iran war as your country took to skedaddle from Afghanistan. (That’d be two decades, for those of you who had forgotten.)
There’s so much to cover here, but I’ll try and summarise to some extent, in sort of chronological order:
- NATO: It’s so obvious to all of us that attended history classes, that you were out back smoking with the boys while you were supposed to be in class with us. NATO is a ***DEFENSIVE*** alliance; they are not there to do your bidding whenever you feel like attacking someone you don’t like! There is no obligation on the part of any NATO member to join in on one of your unilateral American operations (which the Iranians have called “adventurism”), especially when you haven’t even had the courtesy to talk to them about it in advance! They didn’t “fail” your dumbass test! They didn’t even know about your test any more than someone watching the news already did! Claiming after the fact that it was a test that they failed miserably is the most asinine and juvenile statement ever made by a so-called “world leader”.
- Also for those of us who have at least perused a few of the pages (and even pictures) is history books can see the startling similarity between the Communist “Red Scare” (led by the American Joseph McCarthy) and today’s Islamophobia (led by donald trump), the “least racist person in the world”. There is not an Islamist behind every tree or under every bed.
- Enough with the “card” analogies. Yes, you can hold as many Uno cards as you want; nobody wants to play with you.
- We’re not impressed with how many agreements you tore up to get yourself into a worse situation than you were in before you started bombing Iran. I mean, really, that statement tells us more than anything. A couple of months ago the Strait of Hormuz was open, and now it is closed, and you have no workable plan to reverse that situation … because, as I said before, you can’t think five minutes ahead.
The only good I can see coming from this situation is that all the poor people in America, that you allegedly love so much, are not going to be happy with $6-a-gallon gas when it comes time to vote in your midterm elections.