They're orthogonal, so there's no barrier. They're all nefarious, and most are also incompetent.

It's not an either-or question; they're very transparently both nefarious and incompetent.

Probably January 6th 2021

Your model of other people is profoundly broken and you should be stripped of your ability to use the internet

The last few times Iran participated in talks and agreed on a ceasefire it worked against them.

In the enlightened POTUS' own words (yes, he wrote in all caps):

> I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1162782323629...

Noem was removed from her position recently due to scandal. Weeks ago.

Sure you can:

https://www.pay.gov/public/search/global?formSearchCategory=...

Note that in addition to specific programs that accept donations, this list includes "Gifts to the U.S. Government" with no strings attached and "Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt".

I think is a worse disaster than Vietnam. Why? Because the Vietnam War was localized. It was devastating to the people who got drafted and obviously devastating to the Vietnamese as well as the Cambodians that Nixon and Kissinger decidedly to relentless bomb for literally no reason. There was internal dissent but that was, saldy, quashed quite successfully.

The US simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Iran. It's surrounded by mountains so there's no land staging area like we had for Iraq in 1991. Am ambphibious landing would have to be on the scale of D-Day. Personnel-wise, the military is a lot smaller than it was in 1991 too.

This is why I laugh when people panic "they're going to invade" when 5000 Marines and 2-3 amphibious landing ships are moved to the Gulf. Those are so incredibly irrelevant and wholly insufficient for any kind of ground invasion that the worse they can do is be the Bay of Pigs 2.0.

The Iranian national project has been to resist American imperialism for the past almost 50 years. The military is distributed. Lots of it is under mountains or otherwise reinforced from air bombardment and missiles. Drones are incredibly cheap to produce and there's no viable path to stop the production and launch of ballistic missiles and drones.

That's how bad a decision this is. There is no viable military path to "victory" (whatever that means here). There is no way to invade, no way to hold the country militarily and no way to manufacture regime change.

Other countries in the region are way more vulnerable to loss of infrastructure (eg desalination plants). Iran has desalination plants too but it also gets a lot of drinking water from snowmelt. Many Americans are surprised by that. Iran has ski resorts. That's how mountainous it is.

Israel has been begging the US to topple Iran for 40+ years and every president has refused. Because it's completely unviable. Until this one.

There are really three wars being fought here and the objectives are different in every case. Israel wants to turn Iran into Somalia, which is to say a fail-state. The US wanted regime change. Iran simply wants to survive. And it will.

So this is why you see Israel escalate to drag the US into a war it doesn't really want. And if Israel succeeds and somehow the regime does topple it will create a massive refugee crisis that will likely topple the governments of most of Iran's neighbours. Israel is completely fine with that. The US isn't.

Every country in the Gulf had essentially been converted into a US client state other than Iran. We went so far as to put a former al-Qaeda lieutennant in charge of Syria. A likely consequence of this move is US influence in the region is going to massively decrease because the myth of the American security guarantee has been broken.

While the war is still poular with Trump's base we'll see how long that lasts when gas hits $8/gallon and food inflation hits 20%.

> promised not to build advanced records

Like Dark Side of the Moon or Ok Computer?

(/s idk what "advanced records" was actually meant to be)

I never got how sanctions, which clearly only affect civilians in any real way, and in extremely life and death ways in that, are not considered "criminal" in a broad, moral sense. Does not Iran, which has been sanctioned for forever, demonstrate this particularly clearly?

Why would it be in any state's interest to get to a situation where you would have mass revolt? Don't you think they'd want to prevent that if they could? No matter how evil they are?

Or in paying a part of the tariff bill for companies in exchange to an entitlement to the full refund if the tariffs were ruled unconstitutional.

The order of magnitude of “money to be made” is the same.