We now have excerpts from that Signal chat, where a reporter was accidentally included as they discussed bombing the Houthis in Yemen.
Jesus fucking christ.
Emojis? Cheering while they gloat about killing people? I know there are a lot of things wrong with this colossal fuckup, but please…can our military leaders take their own actions seriously? If you’re bombing someone, it is not an occasion for joy and laughter, it’s a catastrophe, a failure of policy that has led to violence. It may sometimes be necessary, but it’s also regrettable.
Others have noticed that these people are unqualified amateurs, putting on a clown show.
Zachary B. Wolf of CNN noted that “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Brian Tyler Cohen: “My first reaction… was ‘what absolute clowns.’ Total amateur hour, reckless, dangerous…. [T]his is what happens when you have basically Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials.” Foreign policy scholar Timothy Snyder posted: “These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.”
Four more years of this. Great.
What a great day for the circus!
Canada is now being led by a Carney, and the USA is being ‘led’ by a karload of klowns.
‽
Even if there are still elections in ’28, we’ll be dealing with this for a lot longer than 4 years. We are still dealing with the damage done by Reagan over 40 years ago!
I think it’s safe to assume that this wasn’t the first time the Signal app was used to discuss classified plans and information. The only difference now is that a journalist was along for the ride.
Something even more awful just occurred to me…
Proposition 1: Signal is not allowed on secure government devices, so these people must have been conducting this chat on their personal devices.
Proposition 2: This group is composed of exactly the sort of arseholes who send unsolicited dick pics.
Conclusion: It’s only a matter of time until one of these idiots causes a major international incident by accidentally sending a dick pic to a senior diplomatic contact or foreign head of state.
My money’s on Hegseth. He seems like the type.
So far.
It’s only been two months.
I’m sure they will come up with more and worse mistakes.
Why are we bombing the Houthis right now anyway?
The Houthis are not nice people and I don’t have any sympathy for them.
But AFAICT, they had stopped randomly attacking civilian ships in the Red sea.
It looks like the US is now bombing them simply because we can.
The current amateurs in charge just wanted to bomb someone and, if you can’t kill Houthis, who can you kill?
And how effective is this bombing anyway?
We found out in Vietnam and Laos that you can drop millions of tons of bombs (7.5 million tons) and not accomplish much.
We never stopped the commies and we lost those wars.
I looked it up on Google and I still don’t know why we are now bombing the Houthis.
This source doesn’t seem too biased.
They don’t have any idea why we are now bombing the Houthis again.
The last attack on shipping was in December.
It really looks like the Trump regime wanted to bomb someone to bomb someone and the Houthis were on the top of the list of people we don’t like.
Vance DMed that he’d say a prayer for victory.
Really? The most advanced military in human history (so far) needs prayer and divine intervention to kill a far weaker force armed with the modern equivalent of rocks and sticks?
Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada to get his poll numbers up and it worked marvelously. So war and violence aren’t a failure of diplomacy when the goal is tax cuts and deregulation. Deaths of the “other” is not only a small price to pay, it’s a no price to pay.
Trump has vowed to “annihilate” the Houthis and link their every move to Iran.
ARE they really supported by Iran? IS there clear evidence of this? I remember hearing the Houthis had either CLAIMED to have Iranian support, or ASKED for it, right after taking over Yemen; and then the US and Saudis have been treating them as dire enemies ever since, no further questions.
Others have noticed that these people are unqualified amateurs, putting on a clown show.
Yes, and they’re not being polite about it (thankfully):
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/american-foreign-policy-is-being
raven @ #5 and #6 — Part of the discussion in the Signal chat was whether bombing the Houthi was needed at this time. It was none other than JD Vance who questioned the need, which led to some of the thrashing of Europe. But someone said Trump wanted it and that ended the discussion.
Dunc @#4 — Taylor Tomlinson did a joke about the prospects of dick pics from these clowns last night in the intro to her comedy-game show. We’re all waiting with baited breath for the sight of someone’s equipment.
Saw a video with Trump doing a presser when he’s apparently first asked about the Signal chat screw up. He quite literally does a Sergeant Schultz Defense: “I don’t know about it”. As some have asked, shouldn’t Trump have been directly involved with that discussion and the decisions being made? Guess the clowns didn’t need another clown.
Saw another video of Trump in the Oval Office talking about sending JD Vance’s wife, Usha, to Greenland for some reason. It was clear that Trump could not remember her name. After the Signal chat blow up, JD announced that he was going with her.
The most salient characteristic of the US military is its gleeful adoption of area bombing as soon as it can. You cannot expect members of the military to do anything but cheer. There might be some performative hand-wringing for the balcony seats, but anyone who knows anything about US history and how we have used the military since the Civil War, the US deploys its military on false or wobbly pretext, then immediately starts bombarding the victim.
Bombing the Houthi has not accomplished anything since the Saudis started bombing them over a decade ago.
This is a typical US military fail-loop: “bombing didn’t work? Lets bomb harder!!” Eventually when it doesn’t work, the military will start suggesting nukes (they did in Korea and Vietnam and had them ready to go in Iraq)
I think Trump’s intent was to appoint cabinet members who were definitely NOT smarter than him. (Insert joke here)
More details:
“BREAKING: Atlantic editor in chief REVEALS attack plan texts shared by Trump officials”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=hSL-FtxQ7jQ
.
A Different Bias (UK): US Liberals should tool up or move to Canada.
“Americans Desperately Need a Plan for Trump”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=krwh2fyyytU
PZwrote: The administration is a mob of children
I reply: yes, children intellectually and emotionally, BUT THEY ARE CHILDREN WITH FLAMETHROWERS!
NOT just ‘We now have excerpts from that Signal chat’ —
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/atlantic-publishes-full-signal-chat-messages-showing-military-plans-us-rcna198148
Also, if interest to PZ and others interested in education:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/imran-khalid/113363/china-displaces-u-s-as-global-leader-in-research
christoph @ #14 — At last, Trump has met his goal.
Marcus Ranum @ #13 — “The most salient characteristic of the US military is its gleeful adoption of area bombing as soon as it can.” I understand it looks that way and you may be correct, but I don’t think there were any military people in that Signal chat discussion. Military leadership might excuse themselves that it’s the political people that want the area bombing and nukes (for the optics), and make the decisions about it. From my scant knowledge of the topic, military leadership in World War II was not convinced that terror bombing had much impact on the war. You need “boots on the ground”. So some military people probably know it’s a waste of time and money, and may recommend alternative strategies, but if the politicos ignore them and say do it, then they are going to do it.
What went through Trump’s head before he decided to lie and say he knew nothing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iHKXayw9Yk James O’Brien of LBC – Leading British Conversation.
military leadership in World War II
Curtis LeMay and Bomber Harris aside, you mean…
I think that since LeMay did the same thing in Korea, recommended pre-emptive nuclear strikes on Russia, etc… we can say he was a proponent of aerial bombing.
Mike Waltz is taking full responsibility for the Signal chat screw up. Trump says he fully supports his aide. Taking bets on how many hours before Waltz resigns.
@20 robro
Wait, is that the sound of a bus I hear??
Jesse Welles posted a new song “A message from Mike Waltz to home”
Calling this “bombing the Houthi” is giving it too much credit. Even taking the U.S.’s word for it, they bombed one Houthi militant and a residential building full of civilians who’s involvement was having a neighbor who’s boyfriend was a militant. Over 50 civilians are dead, over 100 more badly injured, and the Atlantic is taking the position that this is bad because hypothetically a leak might have put the pilots doing the bombing at risk in the series of articles revealing what happened.
FTFY.
These guys are bullies. The military objective in Yemen was getting their bullying rocks off, rather than anything to do with shipping, national security, or what-have-you.
We are not dealing with adults who are well-adjusted members of a functioning society here.
A stiff breeze, mildly scented with ozone by the UV covid-zappers installed five years ago in the White House’s HVAC system.
We know the impact, because we have a “control”, a place that got terror bombings but no invasion: the UK, during the Blitz. It did not demoralize (if anything, the opposite) and it did not significantly impair the UK’s capacity to contribute to the Allied cause.
The problem is all those guys whose big takeaway from that war was “we dropped a couple of nukes and Japan promptly surrendered”. The military brass understood things better, at least in prior administrations, but both the jarheads and the politicians … try telling them that Japan was on the verge of surrendering anyway because their logistics were collapsing and there was no way they could withstand an invasion, and that the bombs were not meant to influence that at all but instead to sabre-rattle at Stalin, and their eyes will just glaze over. Too complicated, but moreover, it’s an article of faith with some that The Bomb can work miracles. For them it’s not a fancy physics gadget but a magic talisman that they cling to like a security blanket, an ace in the hole that is a guaranteed win if played.
(The movie “Independence Day”, for all that it was chock-full of American exceptionalism and indispensability tropes, got this one right: the “sniveling little weasel” SecDef eventually convinces the Prez to nuke the alien invaders, the aliens’ force-shielded ship no-sells the bomb, and even after that failure the SecDef insists that the other bombers might “have more luck”, but is ordered to call them back by a Prez who was clearly significantly wiser. Oh, and then he gets fired. That SecDef is the filmmakers lampooning every idiot in the US political system who thinks nukes are a magic cure-all for any military problem. But clearly these kinds of idiots are still in high places over a quarter-century after that film was made.)
robro at 11:
So JD is now Erik the Red-In-The-Face.
@lumipuna #25:
Now come on, be fair. Erik the Red fled two countries after being wanted for murder. JD spent his military career being the world’s finest combat typist, so as far as we can tell he has not murdered anyone face to face. That he is trying to make up for it now by cheerleading some indiscriminate bombing is neither here nor there.