We're going through the turmoil of having donald trump rattle sabers - again - at Iran, using more direct and dangerous language than he used back in 2019 (via Rebecca Rosman and Franco Ordoñez at NPR):
President Trump on Wednesday declined to say whether the United States is moving closer to a decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, after Iran's supreme leader warned the U.S. against an attack and rejected Trump's call to surrender.
"You don't seriously think I'm going to answer that question," Trump said when a reporter at the White House asked whether the U.S. would attack Iran. "I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do..."
"We're the only ones that have the capability to do it — but that doesn't mean I'm going to do it," he told reporters in the Oval Office after an unrelated event. The president said he would be meeting in the Situation Room — which he also referred to as the "war room" — about the crisis...
This comes amid nearly a week of fighting between U.S. ally Israel and Iran, and amid signals from U.S. and Israeli officials that Trump could be considering an attack on Iran.
In a string of social media posts on Tuesday, Trump demanded Iran's "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" and boasted, "We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran," raising speculation that U.S. forces were already more involved than previously acknowledged.
Khamenei responded to the demand in his address Wednesday, his second public appearance since Israel launched strikes on his country last week.
"This is a nation that will never surrender to any form of imposition," he said.
On Tuesday, Trump also issued a direct threat against Khamenei. "We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now."
Again, this could all be the bluster of an overgrown bully that we've seen from trump when he's trying to force a deal on others. However, trump is also impulsive, and currently irritable over how disastrous his birthday parade turned out. he's in a mood to hurt somebody, and dropping bombs on civilians over in the Middle East would seem too easy a move for him to make.
You have to remember what happened during trump's first tenure in the White House: sporadic missile attacks on certain Islamic targets, followed by our Army quitting the battlefield and our regional allies to struggle against Russian-backed Syrians, followed by a targeted attack on a high-ranking Iranian official on Iraqi soil that aggravated regional tensions.
All of this impulsive, unfocused acts of a desperate man trying to pose as an elite Alpha Male on the global stage; with no consideration of the consequences and harm those acts imposed on our nation and whatever allies we have left. Most of this getting imposed on our nation by the only "ally" we are counting on in that region, as Israel - led by a genocidal schemer in Netanyahu who's trying to avoid getting kicked out of power again - is forcing the United States to commit to a military action that will honestly lead into another quagmire for us.
I wrote about this the last time around, back in 2019 when I posed seven reasons we shouldn't invade Iran. All of the arguments I made then are still relevant today, with the added possibility that modern technological boosts to drone warfare will expose our Navy fleets and our regional military bases to potentially disastrous (for us) yet effective (for Iran) ends.
We also have to consider trump's flippant attitude towards our own nuclear stockpile, and that if this situation worsens - and considering how inept our current Defense leadership is, that's likely - trump could well exercise that option. Even one nuke dropped on any place in Iran would kill thousands of civilians and leave literal fallout, while the metaphoric fallout would be the entire world turning the US into a pariah state.
If trump thinks this can push Iran to the negotiating table to hammer out a no-nukes agreement to replace the one he blew up, he's wrong. It won't placate Netanyahu, and the escalation will continue to where we'll be back at the "bomb 'em all" brinksmanship only at a more extreme and irrational level.
This was never going to end well with trump in charge. None of you 77 million voters realized that? /headdesk
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