Actually, you should look around the bar before you throw that first punch, to make sure someone has your back. Theoretically, that is — not that I’ve ever been one to leap into bar fights.
In totally unrelated news, Iran, China, and Russia are teaming up in a joint military exercise.
Iran has kicked off the first joint naval drill with Russia and China in the northern part of the Indian Ocean, Iranian state TV has reported.
The four-day exercise comes at a time of heightened tensions since the United States withdrew from a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in May last year.
“The message of this exercise is peace, friendship and lasting security through cooperation and unity … and its effect will be to show that Iran cannot be isolated,” Rear Admiral Gholamreza Tahani said on state television.
Well, our European friends have pledged their undying loyalty to us, I’m sure.
The US reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran after quitting the nuclear deal last year, prompting Tehran to hit back with countermeasures by dropping nuclear commitments.
Remaining parties to the badly weakened agreement include the UK, France and Germany, as well as China and Russia.
I can take on all of youse, c’mon. Just let me down a couple more shots first, ‘k?
Everything else aside, just look at the two world wars and add up the people and resources on each side. It makes the outcomes incredibly unsurprising. Should be noted that a big part of that math hangs on which side China and Russia found themselves on…
The US also just recently imposed sanctions on companies involved with a nearly completed Russian-German natural gas pipeline project in an attempt to delay it. I get the impression that even the “our transatlantic friends” technocrat types in German politics are running out of patience with them.
They aren’t happy that we backed out of the anti-nuke deal with Iran. They don’t trust us. Why should any nation trust us?
As I’ve said before, Trump failed to learn the first rule of kindergarten.
“Be nice to your friends or you won’t have any.”
It shows up all the time.
Now that he is being investigated and impeached, a whole lot of his employees and associates have testified against him. They are as loyal to him as he is to them, not at all.
Our allies long ago, gave up on Trump and are just hoping he doesn’t destroy the world before his term(s) in office end.
We’ve vaporized many decades of good will from our friends and allies.
That happened already with the invasion of Iraq.
Governments don’t care about good will, only about power.
The isolationist dream of orange man and ilk controlling the State Dpt. is working beautifully. The sabotaging and abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal insured the animosity and hardship an thus the provocation and ensuing buildup to war. As always when the historical context is connected it unfolds as a feature an not a bug.
well Trump does have some success to brag about and be remembered in history. he seems to be helping unite Russia, China and Iran to the degree that they are holding joint military maneuvers.
slow clap………….
uncle frogy
Remember what Ari Fleischer said: “I think it is entirely possible that this is going to be a catalyst inside Iran where the people celebrate this killing of Soleimani.” [delusional asshat]
Fact:
Link
OMFG! Really? Vice President Mike Pence falsely linked Soleimani to 9/11 in an attempt to justify the Trump-approved assassination.
Link
It’s no wonder that the U.S.’s European allies are not backing Trump’s play.
@#9, Lynna, OM:
Yep. Totally predictable, because claiming a link with 9/11 is the “get out of jail free” card for any and all military exercise, as I pointed out elsewhere. If we actually had had smart people in office, we would not have passed the 2001 AUMF Against Terrorists, or at least would have repealed it at the first opportunity. Instead, the Centrists who always claim to be the Adults In The Room insisted that we had to keep it once it was passed, and now Trump can use it. Sort of like our nuclear arsenal that Obama promised to reduce and then expanded instead, or the spy programs that Obama promised to get rid of and then expanded instead, or the detention centers that Obama promised to get rid of and then expanded instead, etc. etc. etc.
I predict that nobody will ever be able to prove that Trump and co. did not actually believe that load of bullshit, and since the requirements for the 2001 AUMF basically boil down to “the President can shoot first and we won’t ask questions later as long as he shouts ‘September 11’ loudly enough” there will be no legal repercussions. Thanks to the people who passed it — and that includes Sanders as well as the usual gang of idiots from the DNC — and the people who refused to repeal it — which is the Republicans plus the DNC-backed Centrists — the only ways this assassination will backfire on Trump will be if it kicks him out of office in the election, World War III goes off, or if the rest of the world responds in kind — which would be poetic justice.
@Vicar: Why do you feel the need to start deflecting to the Democrats again? I’m just a silly European, so I may be not entirely au fait with US politics, but as far as I know neither Trump, nor Pence , nor Fleischer are Democrats.
But congratulations, you managed to at least keep out Clinton’s name directly. You’re improving.
@The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)
I agree that should have been among the first moves when Obama took over and the dems controlled Congress.
But good lord, if you honestly think that repealing the AUMF would have stopped Trump and the ghouls in his administration from this shit, I have a bridge to sell you.
I just don’t understand why the conversation has to shift to these comparatively venial sins by Democrats when right now, at this moment, Trump and the Republicans are trying to gin up a war.
Just to add, the assassination of Soleimani is almost certainly illegal:
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/3/21048012/iran-general-killed-qasem-soleimani-legality
Point being, this is not an administration that gives much of a shit about laws and precedence. They’re trying to justify this under the IMF with some nonsense from Pompeo tying this into Al Qaeda and ISIS (even though Iran helped us fight ISIS).
But they’re also spewing total bullshit about the threat from Soleimani being “imminent.” This rationale exists independently of the AUMF, so to try and hang this one around Democrats or centrists or whoever is just more of this utterly pointless in-fighting that just gives cover to Trump and his cronies.
IMF=AUMF…that one is pretty bad.
Hmmm as for friends and undying loyalty can someone explain Tucker Carlson’s major malfunction:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/04/media/fox-news-iran-soleimani/index.html
“Is Iran really the greatest threat we face? And who’s actually benefiting from this? And why are we continuing to ignore the decline of our own country in favor of jumping into another quagmire from which there is no obvious exit? By the way, if we’re still in Afghanistan, 19 years, sad years, later, what makes us think there’s a quick way out of Iran?” […] “We fought quite a number of wars around the Middle East in recent decades,” Carlson said, listing off the war zones. “In every single place,” he said, “each of these conflicts has turned out to be longer and bloodier and more expensive than we were promised in the first place. The benefits? Often they’ve been non-existent. A lot of lectures about how the people we’re killing deserve to die. Certainly they did. Hope that makes you feel better.”
Holy frickin’ wow! Just wow!
@doubtthat:
I’d like to see an IMF-NATO joint task force going after people who overcharge IMF-funded infrastructure projects though.
Heck, maybe the IMF can authorize drone strikes on Halliburton.
Weird stuff. I’m still processing the current state of affairs in disbelief. I had hoped for Obama’s initiative toward Iran to portend a long term thaw despite shortcomings. I see the young ones over there as the future hope. As a young one at the time I recall the scars of the hostage crisis and the symbolism of Trump’s threat of 52 targets is not lost on me nor the irreversible negative disaster of doing that to them. Neither is the meaning of Ajax for Iranians. But in my coming to terms with the current conflict, though I find him otherwise despicable, frickin’ Tucker Carlson totally doved me. WTF? Will he maintain his resolve in that toxic environment of which he is a creative force?
@#11, mvdwege
I blame the Democrats because the Democrats claim to want to represent me, or at least people like me, but keep doing more or less the opposite of what I want them to do.
There is always going to be at least one party which is run by opportunistic evil rich people, representing their interests. There’s really no way to stop that, the history of democratic governments around the world strongly suggests that it is inevitable for that to happen. In the US at the present time, that party is notionally the Republicans.
So take it as read that the Republicans are evil and have to be resisted. That being the case, there is a crying, desperate need for a party to resist the Republicans. At one time that party was the Democrats. This is no longer the case — as I keep pointing out, the Democrats have been enabling Republican policy over and over again for decades now.
The change from being resistance to the Republicans to being their enablers happened fairly abruptly, and was deliberate. Like the REDMAP plan for Republicans (look it up), the replacement of New Deal Democrats (the ones who took over from FDR and maintained control of Congress for about 4 decades) with “New Democrats” was planned in advance by a specific group of people. They were open about it, it’s not some sort of conspiracy theory about secretive figures operating in the shadows — you can go to Wikipedia and read the entry about the Democratic Leadership Council, who were the movers and shakers who arranged for funding for center-right challengers to New Deal Democrats in Congress and eventually disbanded when they had put their own membership into enough positions on the DNC itself to not need a second organization. The DLC was for both Iraq wars, for the dismantling of welfare and notionally against “entitlement programs” (i.e. Social Security and Medicare), for war-as-foreign-policy (they approved, for instance, of GHWB’s idea of the US as “global policeman”), and for the modified version of Trickle-Down economics which was used to sell NAFTA — instead of “the rich will give us all great jobs if we make them richer” it was “multinational corporations will give us all great jobs if we make them richer”. All of this was demonstrably stupid and wrong, and they deliberately moved the Overton Window to the right while they were enacting it in order to protect themselves from challenges from more traditional Democrats.
And the prime offender? Bill Clinton. He was chair of the DLC before he became President, and since the party’s nominee can restructure the staffing of the DNC to a large extent, he was responsible for the shift of the party infrastructure into DLC hands. Hillary Clinton is worthy of hatred for having been a DLC member, but also for not going away after GWB’s Iraq War demonstrated quite thoroughly that “New Democrat” foreign policy ideas were as wrongheaded and disastrous as everything else about them.
And now we have Joe Biden, who was also in the DLC, shares all the flaws of the Clintons except for Bill’s inability to keep it in his pants — but more than makes up for it through his history of being strongly anti-abortion, desperately anti-marijuana, and so utterly out of touch with reality that he was saying the Iraq war was a good thing as recently as 1996. That’s the sort of person who was in the DLC.
The “New”/DLC Democrats poisoned the well. They destroyed any chance to stop the Republicans from screwing everything up. You want to know why American politics is so fucking screwed up right now? Look no further than them. Frankly, if you aren’t pissed at those scumbags, there is seriously something wrong with you.
Now, since I can’t change the Republicans, the only recourse left to me is to try to change the Democrats. And the only way the Democrats will change is if enough people realize what’s going on that the influence of the DLC is given the boot. I don’t have a lot of hope — the fact that even people on this site who should know better still think that after a career of screwups and backfired policy, Hillary Clinton was an acceptable candidate for the Democrats to run for President suggests strongly that in the main Democrats are, frankly, every bit as idiotic as Republicans. But you have to start somewhere, yes?
@#12, doubtthat
If the 2001 AUMF had been repealed, then this assassination would be an open-and-closed impeachable offense with no possible wiggle room. There would be absolutely no way to justify it.
Even the expert they’re interviewing in the article you linked says there’s no definition of “imminent threat” — which there isn’t — and that people disagree about what would constitute such a thing, and in any case the AUMF does not say the President has to prove that there is an imminent threat. I strongly suggest you read the original language of the thing — it’s extremely short. The actual actionable part says:
That last section, “in order to prevent…persons”? Is basically meaningless in court. Any prosecution of a suspected terrorist would notionally be “in order to prevent future acts of terrorism”. And that’s basically the whole text — there’s a smidgeon more, but it’s just a legal CYA meaning “this is not a declaration of war so our allies by treaty do not have to call up troops and assist us”.
There is no burden of proof mentioned anywhere. The President can attack anybody who he determines had anything to do with 9/11 or helped shelter them after the fact. If he determined wrong? No penalty is mentioned. The AUMF does not require the President even tell Congress what caused him to “determine” that somebody was a terrorist. If assassination wasn’t a sort-of-new thing for Presidents to do (from a formal perspective, at least) we probably wouldn’t even get Pence’s detailed conspiracy theory, we’d just be told “the President found links to 9/11 and deployed the military in accordance with the 2001 AUMF”.
Seriously, this was a hell of a stupid thing for Congress to pass, and it was a hell of a stupid thing to vote against repealing it.
Lynne @8:
Maybe we can sell Iran some military equipment to support this group, then use the money to destabilize governments in Central America.
Sorry, that should have been Lynna @8.
Singular Vicar:
Yeah, you’ve been doing it here for many years now. Hillary this, Obama that.
Always “the Democrats” — whether “Democrats could have undone this one” for Trump’s assassination directive.
(USAnian I am not, but I definitely see how you invariably blame “the Democrats”. Pretty fucking obvious that’s your schtick)
@Vicar:
Well, on at least a single point you’re honest.
Listen, no matter what someone else does before, the one committing the actual act is responsible. You’re essentially arguing that the Democrats shouldn’t have worn a short skirt. Congratulations for being a repulsive asshole. Then again, quelle surprise from a Trump supporter.
Again, Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Fleischer are all Republicans. None of them are called Clinton. They gleefully committed an assassination and brag about it.
Blaming the Democrats is exonerating them. Is supporting them. No amount of verbiage can hide what that makes you: a Trump supporter.
Perhaps we could trick The Vicar and GerrardOfTitan Server into arguing with each other, then quarantine the thread from everybody except those two monomaniacs and just leave them to get on with it. It would be like two bots slugging it out, trapped in a loop for eternity. With a bit of luck they’d be too busy composing their repetitive screeds to comment on any other threads. It’s a matter of finding just the right wording to set them both off at the same time. Hmmm, Clinton and nuclear power…
The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)
Seriously, man, what? I just don’t know how you could watch what has gone on since at least 2001 and think that precedence and clear legal standards mean fuck all. I thought not torturing was “open-and-closed”, but then some jackass dug through medicare statutes and drafted a memo and lo these many years later, no one save a couple of low level troops as ever been held accountable.
I thought the ACA was “open-and-closed” legal based on Constitutional standards and court decisions, then, nope – no medicaid expansion for you…and on and on.
Again, the discussion of “imminent” threats and such has nothing to do with the AUMF. It is derived from the loose legal precedent around the Executive’s Article II powers:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/did-president-have-domestic-legal-authority-kill-qassem-soleimani
Trump could have authorized this same action with the same excuse independently of the AUMF.
And, I’ll point out, this action CLEARLY, “open-and-closed,” has shit-all to do with 9-11 and the groups responsible. This is all legal gibberish.
You trying to pin this on the AUMF or centrists or anything other than the dedicated shithead warhawks in Trump’s cabinet is just absurd. You’re trying – for some reason – to blur very clear lines, here.
Yes, of course, it’s a terrible law. But it has NOTHING to do with what just happened. They are throwing shit at the wall, just like they did with Medicare statutes and torture. The AUMF, Article II powers…they will grab at everything.
Sure, repeal AUMF, but regardless of the existence of that law, the hawks would have engaged in this same action.
@#22, John Morales
@#23, mvdwege
@#24, tinkerer
And, as always, none of you ever address my points. At all. You go out of your way to avoid doing so. You compare me to GerrardOfTitan, but when people complain about him, they actually contradict his points and post sources. You guys just… “oh, since the Democrats say they don’t like Republicans, obviously they can’t possibly be enabling them repeatedly and with malice aforethought, because politicians never lie, and the total lack of accountability which is applied at every turn, and which has consistently made everything worse, is a total coincidence.”
Seriously, people who defend the Democratic establishment are a joke. 40 years ago, Democrats were the largest group of registered voters. Now Independents are, and IIRC despite Trump people are still fleeing the Democratic Party. Whenever they are asked by pollsters, the answer given is pretty much the same: the Democrats refuse to stand up to the Republicans or abide by the rhetoric they use to gain office. The party is committing suicide by keeping the Centrists in power, and you clowns are still sitting around saying “but… but… the Republicans are worse!”
Almost nobody cares that the Republicans are “worse”. (Particularly since an astonishing amount of the “worse” stuff they’ve done, like the Iraq invasion or the creation of ICE, was done with the connivance of Democratic Centrists — how are the Republicans noticeably “worse” when the big-ticket evils are bipartisan?) The Democrats don’t have to merely be “not as evil” if they want to win (and if you want to stop Trump, you need the Democrats to win), they need to be actually good. Continuing to follow the Centrists off a cliff is stupidity, and you’re encouraging it.
Congratulations. When Joe Biden gets the nomination and Trump steamrollers him because nobody under the age of 45 can stand Biden at all, you can pat yourselves on the back because you recognized that Trump was “worse” and supported Biden, the same way you congratulate yourselves for having supported Hillary Clinton. How on earth such an imbecilic point of view can foist itself off as being somehow more practical than wanting candidates who don’t constantly make huge mistakes I will never understand, but that’s what you tell yourselves.
Vicar, The:
I provided a synopsis.
(As always, you did not dispute that)
The way you relentlessly reviled and opposed her back during 2016 — you railed at the reality that it came down to her and Trump, and you still vigorously advocated not voting for her.
Jeremiah, you, yet the naysayers had it right, not you.
Hey, Vicar, remember when you said Clinton was worse than Trump because she was too warlike, and Trump wouldn’t provoke a war? Your political insight isn’t exactly holding up, is it?
And we don’t need to take your points apart because 1. That’s mostly already been done, repeatedly, years ago, and 2. It doesn’t matter if they’re correct or incorrect if the criticism is that they’re irrelevant and off topic. This thread isn’t about internal Democratic politics, or how they fix their electoral appeal, or what they would or should have done in a parallel universe, and yet you keep bringing all that stuff up, in every damn thread. Just give it a damn rest already.
@Vicar:
That’s because, as jefrir also helpfully points out, they are off-topic. The fact that your off-topic ranting at Democrats is on-topic as a deflection for blaming Trump though, might be another matter.
@#25, doubtthat
You neglect the fact that Trump is not actually carrying these missions out himself, or even giving the pilots/soldiers their orders. If there weren’t a legal fig leaf, do you seriously believe that the top brass would want to be left holding the bag when the mission blew up in America’s face (as this is in fact doing)? Trump would have been left sitting in the Oval Office while the generals ran off at full speed to testify to Congress that Trump was unquestionably trying to break the law.
Even when 9/11 was still recent history, and despite a semi-successful propaganda campaign to claim Iraq was linked to it (which would have covered the invasion under the 2001 AUMF), GWB felt the need to get an explicit, separate AUMF for Iraq. Obama couldn’t get Congress to approve his idiotic Libyan adventure, so he got NATO to take it over — but that wouldn’t work for Trump, because the other NATO members think this was batshit insane. (Except possibly Johnson, who is basically an English version of Trump — but since Johnson publicly mocked Trump apparently the love-fest is off now.) I don’t have much respect for the military at any level, but by and large officers do understand the idea that if they carry out an order they will hold responsibility if things go wrong.
@#28, jefrir
Throughout early 2017, Hillary Clinton issued statements about what she would have done had she won the election. More boots on the ground in Syria than Trump sent to Iraq, an increased and ever-widening bombing campaign far in excess of anything Trump has done to date, and a No-Fly Zone extending basically up to Russia — all of it no later than May of 2017. We would have been so far up Putin’s nose that we’d be standing on his sinuses. If you seriously think that that would not have have gotten us into a hot war with Russia at that point, then you’re so delusional that there’s no point in arguing with you. I guess you could claim that she would have been more efficient at trying to start World War III than Trump has been, but that’s about the extent of it.
And before you sputter and say “no, she would have been more sensible than that”: she was pro-war for every war up to that point — Obama even said in an interview that she was the only one in his administration who really wanted the disastrous invasion of Libya, and some of her college acquaintances came forward and said she had tried to get them to stop protesting Vietnam back in the day. Not too long before the election, but before Comey’s announcement, the New York Times — which, remember, endorsed her, so this was not some kind of hatchet job on a political enemy — ran an article saying that even the generals at the Pentagon found her uncomfortably hawkish and callous about war. Furthermore, under her watch as Secretary of State, she ran the program which gave away arms to anybody who promised to attack Assad, which turned out to include straight-up members of ISIS and Al Queda. She’s not very bright, extremely overoptimistic about the capacity of the US military, totally down for unethical actions, and excessively vicious, and she even says she would have done it. If you think she would not have started another war, you would just plain be wrong.
And, incidentally, the fact that you still don’t address my points means I feel totally okay with ignoring you when you tell me to shut up.
@#29, mvdwege
Yeah, yeah, because criticizing Trump even more, and blaming him for using the things Democrats approved of while they were in charge, is really going to accomplish things. 2016 totally proved that when Democrats run the same old Centrist idiots it makes Trump lose elections. I’m sure if we run another ridiculous wrong-headed Centrist the Republicans will welcome them with open arms instead of doubling down on Trump. Just because it has failed every time it’s been tried in the last 20 years, doesn’t mean it can’t work now!
Imagine thinking that not supporting idiotic warhawk Democrats that could have dismantled every single piece of Republican legislature but did fuck all is supporting Trump. This is your brain on political centrism.
@The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)
Haha, what?
I’m not even sure how to answer this. Who do you think gave him the idea:
https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2020/01/an-unhinged-president-by-tristero.html
Used Hullabaloo due to NY Times paywall.
When in American history has this happened?
Again, just like with Iraq, this assassination OBVIOUSLY doesn’t fall under the AUMF. The Department of Defense, you’ll note, did not cite the AUMF in their explanation, they used the “imminent threat” language. It was Pompeo and then, hilariously, Pence who tried to tie this into 9-11.
So, you’re just not making any sense. You’re mad at Democrats and “centrists” for not repealing the AUMF which obviously doesn’t apply in this case, then using the behavior of the military who didn’t even reference the AUMF.
This is some galaxy brain nonsense. There are plenty of problems with the Democratic Party and “centrism,” but this assassination cannot be hung around their necks. This, in fact, is among the most important examples (along with the insane judges) of where the difference lies. Why the actual enemy is the right wing in this country, and the left/center – establishment/progressive debates need to occur with a full understanding the most important threat comes from the right.
@Vicar:
See, that’s the problem. You don’t criticize Trump, you support him. By persistently blaming the Democrats for every bad thing Trump does.
And note that I’m not even addressing your teenage-level political sophistication here. I’m more than willing to say both sides are bad, in an appropriate setting.
But bothsiderism is a deflection tactic when you’re talking about the misdeeds of one side, and your constant one-sided attacks on the other side when it isn’t even the subject of discussion is right out support for the Republicans.