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It\u2019s hard to believe the Iran war<\/a> is already over, principally because it\u2019s not. There\u2019s a Memorandum of Understanding to agree upon a real peace in 60 days. It\u2019s sort of like an armistice, one of which we\u2019ve been maintaining with North Korea since 1953. Which is to say, settle in. On top of everything else, the continuation of the peace process depends on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu observing a ceasefire, which he doesn\u2019t do, couldn\u2019t do for more than a day in this case, and which has already suspended peace talks<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p> Attacking a country that sits next to an artery that controls more or less the economic fate of the world without a plan for what to do when it puts the thing in a sleeper hold isn\u2019t incidentally or comparatively stupid, or stupid in a certain light. It\u2019s just stupid.\u00a0<\/p> The war was conceived, conducted and maintained by malicious stupidity months past the point of futility. The costs tower over the hard-won obligations of Barack Obama\u2019s Iran nuclear deal, as do the rewards reaped by Iran. Our only consolation prize is an answer to the timeless barroom thought experiment of what would happen if a\u00a0man\u2019s\u00a0man in the Oval started kicking ass and not taking no for an answer. It turns out to be exactly what you expected: They ruin people, break things and leave repair to someone else, just like they do with everything else.<\/p> The war was conceived, conducted and maintained by malicious stupidity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure> There was never a plan for this war. There was just a bunch of meatheads, ignorant and proud of it, who said, \u201cI bet it\u2019ll work if you force it.\u201d Like anyone who starts a proposition in that manner, they found out they were wrong, the hard way. Targets were chosen, strikes were planned, a couple weeks of whoop-ass ensued. But whatever happened in the Situation Room amounted to a YouTube clip that sends a dad who\u2019s \u201cpretty sure he knows how to cut down that tree without it falling on his house\u201d out with a chainsaw to meet his destiny. The Strait of Hormuz: America\u2019s Funniest Home Video.<\/p> There are two ways to understand that Trump<\/a>\u2019s Memorandum of Understanding is really a declaration of losing. You can\u00a0ask an academic<\/a>, or you can ask a Republican who isn\u2019t running for reelection anymore. For the latter, retiring North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis\u00a0cited a $100 billion war bill for two lost F-18s and numerous partners attacked in the Middle East<\/a>, while\u00a0primary-loser Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana<\/a>\u00a0added, \u201c13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.\u201d If you don\u2019t trust either of those sources, there\u2019s Trump<\/a> himself, who\u2019s already flipped the switch between delusional butchery and delusional comity and thinks that not allowing Iran to have ballistic missiles is very, very unfair<\/a>.<\/p> The vindication of Obama\u2019s Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, is almost total. A rigorous inspections regime with sanctions has been replaced with \u2026 well, not that. The theory that choking the Strait of Hormuz can break an opponent has been successfully tested, and freedom of the seas through it rests on Iranian sufferance now.\u00a0<\/p> The villainous number attributed to the JCPOA \u2014 $1.7 billion of Iranian assets and interest turned over because they did not belong to us \u2014 comes to 1\/235th of the $100 billion Donald Trump spent to start the war and the $300 billion-and-up reparations payment he agreed to pay to end it, all to re-create the status quo after a brief efflorescence of potential war crimes. The formula, in other words. Goodness knows how we would have spent that extra $398 billion, but one thing we could\u2019ve used it for is replacing all the munitions we just depleted in a losing campaign.<\/p> The vindication of Barack Obama\u2019s Iran Nuclear deal, the JCPOA, is almost total.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure> Already, the Trump and GOP<\/a> messaging machine has settled on blaming JD Vance<\/a>, who got fleeced at the table, because he still looks like an insufficiently masculine doll. This will sabotage the presumed line of succession, but it\u2019s unfortunate that Vance is repellent to enough people to have anything stick to him. It remains to be seen whether this clears the way for Participation Ribbentrop Marco Rubio to sail unctuously into 2028. It might be a reach, given that it was a failure of diplomacy that got us here. The head of the State Department did nothing as two biased and untrustworthy actors, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, walked away from a potential improvement on Obama\u2019s Iran deal\u00a0they would have wanted if they had been smart enough to understand it<\/a>. Assuming Rubio himself understood it and let their bigotry and incompetence bungle the job \u2014 itself a reach \u2014 he needed a ruinous war to sideline Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.\u00a0<\/p> No nation wants to find itself in a situation where Marco Rubio is your big-picture guy, but opportunistically dismembering the national interest passes for genius in a meathead Cabinet where \u201cwhat if we tried bombing?\u201d was the eureka moment each time. Turns out the eggheads at the military college were right that the best application of force is sometimes none at all. We end here, having learned what we already knew, formally acknowledging a loss that began when the war did.\u00a0<\/p> All told, approaching half a trillion dollars and somewhere around 10,000 Iranian dead amounts to a big price just to find out that the guy at the bar who thought we should man up and start shooting had not cut the Gordian knot. The president himself had no tools but terror and extortion<\/a>, no Plan B but to kill more<\/a>, no friends he wouldn\u2019t expend<\/a>, no options but surrender, and no hope but that his mouthpieces would keep calling that victory<\/a>.<\/p>\n The post Stupidity Comes Full Circle<\/a> appeared first on Truthdig<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\n
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donald trump,iran war,jcpoa,JD Vance,strait of hormuz\r\n
Source link www.truthdig.com<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s hard to believe the Iran war is already over, principally because it\u2019s not. There\u2019s a Memorandum of Understanding to agree upon a real peace in 60 days. It\u2019s sort of like an armistice, one of which we\u2019ve been maintaining with North Korea since 1953. Which is to say, settle in. On top of everything else, the continuation of the…","protected":false},"author":351,"featured_media":74,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,617,1189,1062,1190],"class_list":["post-2813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-donald-trump","tag-iran-war","tag-jcpoa","tag-jd-vance","tag-strait-of-hormuz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/351"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}