> US can't do much due to internal politics (well a lot of people don't like Trump...)

I don't know why you're throwing this out casually, like the difficulty is merely due to political dissent? People "don't like" Trump precisely because all of his policies are exactly like this idiotic attack on Iran - poorly thought out, and inevitably end up doing the exact opposite as what he claims they will do. Trump's whole modus operandi has always been aggressive escalation against other parties, then making negative-sum "deals" to extract wealth. This half-works in business but absolutely fails in international relations (why all of our traditional allies are sitting this one out, at best).

You keep attributing these actions to the "US", but the truth of the matter is that the competent people at the top who was coming up with options like "here is a plan but it requires hundreds of thousands of US troops for years" would have been sidelined and replaced with a Party loyalist sycophant who said it would be easy. For further reading, see this HN thread on the Military Failures of Fascism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523207

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sysguest 3 days ago | parent [-]

well if the current president was Biden, people wouldn't complain even if the plan was bringing 100,000 ground troops.

Of course whether people like/trust the current president or not matters on the range of military power he can project on foreign land

dang if it was obama, it could have been 500,000 and almost no one would even fuss

	▲	mindslight 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You're saying that you personally wouldn't complain if it were Biden sending 100,000 troops, or Obama sending 500,000 troops? I certainly would. But the fact that the US doom industry has been beating the drum at Iran for years, while the US military intelligence community has still held back on actually attacking speaks volumes about what a poor idea this was.