archive https://archive.is/6rPL5
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, repeatedly warned Trump that Iran would likely disrupt the Strait of Hormuz in response to a U.S. attack, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal.
Trump, 79, told his administration that he thought Iran would capitulate to the U.S. before it closed the Strait, adding that even if the Strait was threatened, the U.S. military could handle it.
What’s funny is they got into this mess solely by their own crass ignorance. I’m persuaded they thought it would be like Syria or other asymmetrical wars they fought. Well though luck dipshits, Iran is a whole other kind of beast.
They already shit their pants in Afghanistan despite it being literally nicknamed “the graveyard of empires”. But Iran is not that, Iran is its own empire and has been for thousands of years. Good luck trying to get Elamites and Medes to bend the knee. You’re not the first to try.
Iran has as unforgiving a landscape as Afghanistan, a population half again as large, and is not a bottom-of-the-heap, destitute basket case of a country. They may hate the mullahs, but that’ll be nothing compared to the hatred they have for a foreign aggressor.
If only every single person who knew anything at all about Iran had tried to tell them this repeatedly for years and years.
Isn’t that kind of their signature moves? Trying something that sounds kinda sorta like common sense but it’s profoundly stupid or has already failed countless times before…
Every policy Trump has is the kind of shite that some drunken asshole at a bar trots out, usually preferenced with “Why don’t we just…”
that’s the kind of attitude i loathe in real life. “I’ve thought about it for 5 minutes and reached a hasty conclusion and everyone is stupid for not having thought of it”, except everybody has thought of it minute 1, some have even tried it, and we know it doesn’t work.
…and then later saying, with zero hint of self-awareness, that “nobody knew that [issue] could be so complicated”
Who would’a thunk ?
This is an extremely weird take. Iran/Persia and its predecessors have been conquered many times. As far back as Alexander and as recently as WW2 with the Arabs, Turks, Mongols all taking control of it in between. Iran’s culture is as unique as it is because of all the ethnic admixture, not due to some imagined unbroken ancestry from Elam.
You’re right to point that out it’s shady to conflate a modern nation with some past empire within its borders, i didn’t mean it like that, or in the ethnic way.
I meant that this region, broadly speaking “Persia”, has often been the center of its own empire and a peer to its neighbors. It’s not some recently stabilized nation state with limited collective experience, it’s an old old place that already had a complex urban economy when western Europe was still neolithic. That’s why i joke with the Elamites, that shit is deep history man, broken to the yoke of empire time and time again.