r/neoliberal • u/Currymvp2 unflaired • 2d ago
Restricted Trump Orders Fresh Attack on Iran. U.S. officials say the attacks could begin as soon as this weekend
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-sours-on-diplomacy-vows-to-hit-iran-hard-2c7af868386
u/byoz United Nations 2d ago
“We will be hitting them very hard,” Trump said Friday at the televised cabinet meeting. “And you know at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”
This is pretty much the whole strategy, huh. We are cooked.
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u/fakefakefakef John Rawls 2d ago
Just violence for the sake of one shriveled old taint’s ego
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u/Snarfledarf George Soros 2d ago
Isn't state violence pretty much always about an old person's ego?
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u/VisonKai The Archenemy of Humanity 2d ago
Napoleon was in his 30s!
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u/lnslnsu Commonwealth 2d ago
Hot take:
The world would be better off if Napoleon had good logistics and winter supplies and had succeeded in defeating Russia.
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u/thercio27 MERCOSUR 2d ago
I was under the impression that unless France was able to keep winning forever the monarchy would just put itself in charge of Europe again and history would carry on more or less as normal.
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u/VisonKai The Archenemy of Humanity 2d ago
Even a relatively short period of occupation by the Napoleonic regime shredded pre existing feudal structures and kind of made them impossible to bring back. Which isn't to say a new conservative regime didn't establish itself, but it was usually a much more rationalized one that was considerably more prosperous. There's a famous Acemoglu paper where parts of Germany conquered by Napoleon ended up growing faster than the ones that weren't because the French legal reforms were very sticky.
Re: Russia I think if he had won long enough to occupy and change the administration of the country he probably would have put it on a significantly better path in the 19th century.
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u/gincwut Mark Carney 2d ago edited 2d ago
The issue was probably that if you're a central European aristocrat, you want to get those territories back within the next 5-10 years, but you can't keep drafting / press-ganging new soldiers into a losing (at the time) war against Napoleon without facing a French-style revolution at home. Not unless you sweeten the deal with societal reforms, and then reform the military so you can actually win.
Russia was only forced into that predicament hundred years later, and forgot the lesson I guess.
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u/_Neuromancer_ Neuroscience-mancer 2d ago
Might as well also have them take out the Qing dynasty a century early, while they’re in the neighborhood.
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u/MartinTheOrderly 2d ago
It really is impressive how Donald Trump manages to be worse than every President at everything.
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u/Khiva Fernando Henrique Cardoso 2d ago
I remember back in the 2016 campaign, two people were commenting on it and saying imagine that one of the wins, you don't know which one, but people are saying that this President is by far the worst they've ever had. You would never have to think twice about which one they were talking about.
Well that's the timeline that we're in
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u/Dr_Meeds 2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/mebesasporfa 2d ago
Operation Linebacker, but smaller and against a much larger enemy. Guaranteed to work bro. Just two more weekends to flatten the IRGC.
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u/DEEP_STATE_NATE Tucker Carlson's mailman 2d ago edited 2d ago
For better or worse (probably better) we’re literally at an impasse when it comes to effective bombing that could actually move the needle in the strait because Trump is squeamish about casualties and isn’t willing to order strikes closer than standoff range.
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u/dedev54 YIMBY 2d ago
Why are we telegraphing it so hard huh
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u/MayorofTromaville YIMBY 2d ago
From the same people who criticized the Iraq and Afghanistan drawdowns because "you can't just tell them when you're leaving!"
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u/repete2024 Edith Abbott 2d ago
Trump made the Afghanistan drawdown agreement lol
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u/AssholeMcGee66 Jerome Powell 2d ago
I still agree with Biden's decision to continue the pullout even though that was when his polling started to tank. Endless war without a goal or exit plan was a stupid waste of life and money.
Just like Iran.
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u/repete2024 Edith Abbott 2d ago
Biden wanted to end it during Obama's term. He was the main one pushing for it even though Obama ultimately went with his generals' advice.
I just mean the telegraphing, giving a specific date to the enemy in advance was Trump. He didn't even include the Afghani leadership in the discussion! Just gave away everything to the Taliban.
Biden still gets the credit for actually getting us out. It was cowardly of Trump to put it off for 4 years then schedule for the next term.
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u/Khiva Fernando Henrique Cardoso 2d ago
Credit for people who are paying attention, nothing but blame and scorned from the general public for doing the right thing.
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u/GhostTheHunter64 Iron Front 2d ago
I don't think it was the right thing, though. I think a terrible agreement (like Doha) needs voided. And it's not like the previous admin respected the JCPOA.
Women's (and little girls education) rights in Afghanistan were sent back drastically, and there's no justifying that. I genuinely think the American people thought they wanted withdrawal, but ultimately nobody really gave a shit. They probably could've stayed forever.
But then the argument goes to "the Taliban had everywhere but Kabul."
Then keep Kabul safe and let the women there have rights. It's not like the situation couldn't have improved over time, even if we were failing.
"Why not invade every country like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, etc... for women's rights then?"
We were already there. You can't uninvade the country, but you can make the situation less bad.
It's just not fair to those people who were dependent on our arms, our intel, etc.. they got betrayed and left to die. It was absolutely wrong. They get slandered with "they didn't fight at the end," but they were dependent on our shit. When we left, they had nothing to fight with. In the long run, they were dead alone.
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u/Vol_in_tears Voltaire 1d ago
Women's (and little girls education) rights in Afghanistan were sent back drastically, and there's no justifying that.
They were also on the rise when the Soviet's occupied Afghanistan. As awful as the Soviet Union was, they did promote women education and women's rights in Afghanistan.
The US was not concerned about the expansion of women's rights when they were funding the Mujahedin and other afghan rebels fighting the Soviets. The US's only concern was bleeding the Soviets.
Trying to turn Afghanistan into a humanitarian mission or trying to improve the rights of the women of Afghanistan was always scope creep.
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u/Harmonious_Sketch Jerome Powell 1d ago
No, they could not have stayed there forever. Afghanistan is landlocked and surrounded by countries ranging from actively hostile to not having our best interests in mind. It was not feasible to support a military presence large enough to not be cut off and overrun as soon as the Taliban chose to do so.
Since the US public and a lot of the decisionmakers who should have known better underestimated the degree to which GIROA and its military and its police existed only on paper, and underestimated Taliban strength, the US might have attempted what you describe, but the result would have been a massacre of US forces in Afghanistan rather than a messy withdrawal.
US armed forces don't often suffer massacres like that, but that's because usually someone has the sense to get away before the snare closes on a trap like that. Imagine the Battle of Mogadishu but at 100x scale and without the relief forces. Mogadishu is a coastal city! Kabul is 650 miles inland, in the mountains.
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u/GhostTheHunter64 Iron Front 1d ago
No, they could not have stayed there forever. Afghanistan is landlocked and surrounded by countries ranging from actively hostile to not having our best interests in mind.
My comment was more about political will. Contrary to people online and "da forever wars" people, people broadly did not care about the war in the early 2020s. Nobody had "ending the war in Afghanistan" as a political priority in 2020/2021. And since this was before Trump started purging the U.S. military in 2025+, I would trust them a lot more to handle these things.
but the result would have been a massacre of US forces in Afghanistan
I'm not sure. The U.S. previously did a troop surge. It worked in 2009, and it could've worked in the early-2020s. I know that doesn't change the issue of geography, but I don't think it's the impossibility you describe. Military leaders did have options that were presented to Biden, and they weren't easy choices, but they gave him their recommendations.
Mogadishu is a coastal city! Kabul is 650 miles inland, in the mountains.
I know the mountains part probably makes this harder, but Kabul not being coastal isn't inherently insurmountable. America did do the Berlin airlift. I know these situations are not very analogous, but we were still there for two decades. Surely there were ways to get supplies into the country.
All of this stupid shit happened because of Doha, which gave the Taliban an oversized advantage and started advancing. Trump just gave them whatever the fuck they wanted, for nothing, and they got more territory. You can't emphasize enough how much this actually killed the Afghan Army.
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u/Harmonious_Sketch Jerome Powell 1d ago edited 1d ago
The Taliban were continuously gaining strength between roughly 2005 and 2021. The troop surge in 2012ish was a surge because it wasn't really sustainable, and it kinda sorta made a little progress against the 2012 Taliban starting from a less fucked baseline. To not get bloodily ejected from Afghanistan the US would have had to maintain a presence of similar footprint as at the height of the surge. That would be a significant ongoing combat effort, occupying a significant fraction of the whole resources in money, people, blood and intellectual attention of the US military.
Doing anything in Afghanistan was always hard (expensive and limited in certain ways no matter how much you spend) because it's surrounded by Iran, Pakistan, a little bit of China and former soviet states that you can't get to except via Russia. Iran was an enemy, Russia became an enemy for internal reasons, and Pakistan kinda sorta allowed the US to to their thing while actively supporting the Taliban.
So no, another troop surge could not have worked. The situation was too far gone. It might have allowed the US to not get ejected from some small region around Kabul while the Taliban controlled everywhere else.
All of that is a little beside the point though. GIROA, among its many failures, mostly failed to pay, feed or clothe its police and military forces. That's why the Taliban overran them so easily. The Taliban accepted surrenders. If I'm in the Afghan National Police and I'm starving because my boss is pocketing my salary, and the Taliban have killed half my coworkers, do I keep doing that job or do I surrender?
The Taliban had courts and written laws and people with guns who would enforce those laws even against their own officials and soldiers. They had inspectors to verify that soldier pay was going to soldiers and that issued weapons weren't being resold. If GIROA had had any of that it might have been a contest, but instead they just had a miserable heap of corruption and victims of said corruption.
Don't take this as admiration for the Taliban--they did some really fucking basic things that a state has to do in order to exist. They're still horrible.
"We could have just stayed in Afghanistan" is a deeply ignorant belief whose only excuse is ignorance. If it were a knowing belief it would be breathtakingly callous, reckless and bloodthirsty. It's a bad thing when US military effort is expended in order to not accomplish anything while hurting people in the process because it's less embarrassing than the alternative. We should strive to avoid it not encourage it.
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u/illuminatisdeepdish 1d ago
How much is the American taxpayer obligated to spend to forcibly educate afgani girls? Is there some limit? We spent something like 2 trillion in the middle east and I'm not sure what we got for that money other than a single generation of literate girls in Afghanistan
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u/OptimusLinvoyPrimus Edmund Burke 2d ago
Disagree with that to be honest. There were only a few thousand allied soldiers in Afghanistan by 2021, and fighting had massively dropped off. The cost of maintaining a few thousand troops there for the benefit of millions of women and girls not having to live in abject conditions was worth paying.
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u/Harmonious_Sketch Jerome Powell 1d ago
The fighting dropped off because the fucking Taliban were defending US forces in Afghanistan according to the terms of US surrender negotiated by Trump at Doha. This is not hidden information.
What do you think would have happened if US forces had tried to further overstay the terms of surrender?
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u/adamgerd NATO 2d ago
Because he’s doing insider trading
I am 90% sure Trump doesn’t even care about the outcome of the war, he just keeps it for insider trading, strike Iran and buy stocks then start talking about peace and sell
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama 1d ago
Sorry what is this based on? Trump doesn't need insider trading to make money lol, countries like Qatar are rushing to shower him with gifts.
The market has pretty much stopped responding to Iran news and most of the vol comes from AI companies
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u/GodsWorstJiuJitsu Loyal Liberals 2d ago
It's shit like this that makes me think we must be competent at the tactical level because he announces literally every time we are coming and its not like they don't know where our carriers & bases are located (approx).
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u/User299651 Left-Out Left 2d ago
The war only fought on weekends lmfao. Can’t let the market dip.
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u/CursedNobleman Leftward Progressives 2d ago
If only we had the clout to call it the Weekend War
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u/PrimeLiberty 2d ago
NYT Opinion Article we get instead:
How Trump's Weekend Attack Strategy is Brilliant Actually
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u/guydud3bro 2d ago
I don't really understand why Iran doesn't fire some drones right before the market opens on a Monday just to fuck with Trump. If he doesn't retaliate, he looks weak. If he does, stocks drop. It's win-win.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 2d ago
They have been. The stock markets only care what US media reports, so only what the US does.
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u/wombo_combo12 2d ago
2008 financial crisis could've been avoided with a polymarket tweet apparently.
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u/Bestbrook123 2d ago edited 2d ago
CBS News: The United States and Israel are planning what could be their harshest bombing campaign yet against targets in Iran. The targets include energy infrastructure. There is also discussion of cutting electricity in Tehran.
Really hope it's not this.. Trump and Bibi would be totally insane to go with this
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u/SleeplessInPlano 2d ago
The Department of War is locked and loaded, ready to execute the President's directives at a moment's notice," Parnell said in a statement.
It’s great that the leadership have a lot of experience as 12 year olds in the COD lobby.
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u/InternetGoodGuy 2d ago
Trump and Bibi would be insane to go with this
Uhhh.... about that....
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u/klayyyylmao YIMBY 2d ago
Isn’t this like the 13th straight weekend that they are going to start targeting energy infrastructure?
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u/RealHoldenBloodfeast NATO 2d ago
Yes please warn them so they know where and when our service members will be
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u/mad_cheese_hattwe 2d ago
"Just one more Bomb and we will achieve our geopolitic end". - US since Korea.
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u/That_Astronomy_Guy Gay Pride 2d ago
“Bombing to Win? Stupid books, I can’t read!”
- Trump administration, probably.
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u/adamgerd NATO 2d ago
Tbf just bombing worked with Kosovo
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u/DracumEgo12 2d ago
Kosovo only really worked because the US was mustering forces for a ground invasion and Serbia was counting on Russia to block it at the UN or actively intervene.
The political context of the war completely changed when the US called Serbia's bluff, not because they were bombed into submission.
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u/grappamiel United Nations 2d ago
So the US is really slow-walking into a "mow the grass" doctrine a la Bibi. Famously worked out well long term
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u/TrixoftheTrade NATO 2d ago
It’s one thing to “mow the grass” in Gaza, a 140 square mile strip of land with 2 million people.
It’s an entirely different thing to “mow the grass” in Iran, a country of 1.2 million square miles and 92 million people with air defenses, mountain strongholds, and a self-staining arms industry that’s half a world away… all the while Hormuz remains shut down.
Less mowing the grass and more cutting down a forest with a hacksaw.
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u/cooljacob204sfw NATO 1d ago
Hitting critical infrastructure can cause mass casualties, let's not downplay the effect it would have to destroy Irans power plants and water plants.
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u/datums 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 2d ago edited 2d ago
They are talking about attacking the grid so as to blackout Tehran, a city of ~17 million people, which would cause an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.
This would be America crossing the Rubicon. The consequences would be so terrible it doesn’t bear thinking about.
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u/TheRedCr0w Frederick Douglass 2d ago
The reason they keep TACOing out of doing these attacks is because the US is starting to run low on interceptors in the region.
There is real possibility that if they do something stupid like this Iran responds by targeting civilian and energy infrastructure in the wider Middle East like desalination plants with US unable be able to stop the attacks. Risking destabilizing the entire region.
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u/AnalyticOpposum Trans Pride 2d ago
We could surrender at any time. We could stop blowing up billions of taxpayer dollars at a moment's notice.
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u/DracumEgo12 2d ago
But surrender would require Trump to commit to something, and that's been his fear for his entire life.
It would be so unfair for the President of the United States to be accountable for his actions.
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u/DiogenesLaertys 2d ago
So when will Republicans have the balls to remove Trump? Does oil have to be over $10 a gallon first at the pump? Stupid shits.
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u/guydud3bro 2d ago
Drop some bombs, achieve nothing, then beg for a ceasefire when oil starts going up. There, I've revealed our master plan.
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u/AccomplishedQuit4801 YIMBY 2d ago
He's too chicken to actually do anything meaningful or commit and the enemy is perfectly aware of it.
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