The War Against Iran Continues
Until Trump's Morale Improves
I caught this headline at the New York Times this AM:
World
Analysis of Satellite Image and Videos Suggest Precision U.S. Strikes on Iranian Water Facility
*****
America’s leaders are always boasting of precision weaponry. Yet the NYT suggests that a precision strike against an Iranian water facility was possibly unintentional, an accident, I guess. Since an intentional strike against critical infrastructure (you can’t get more critical than potable water) for civilians would constitute a war crime—and obviously America would never do that!
Even asking that question, self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth bloviated, is both “disingenuous” and “impugning” the motives of America’s military professionals.
We can’t have reporters asking questions that might impugn the motives of our brave leaders.
Hegseth seems to enjoy himself the most when he’s attacking the media for their lack of faith in him.
The Iran War, yet another disastrous war for the American people (and of course even more so for Iranians), may continue until President Trump’s morale improves. And that may prove to be a very long time. Remember when Hegseth suggested that the war would last eight weeks at most? It’s already roughly double that with no end in sight.
Check out the Iran War Clock. And the war clock keeps ticking …
Hegseth (and Trump, et al) are the perfect manifestation of how diseased our society has become. Of course, not everyone in a society will be infected (at least visibly so); and many retain the human values of empathy, compassion and charity, along with critical thinking ability.
Yet even those immune to the societal mind- and soul-rot are not left unscathed; and so many of those will likely feel almost powerlessness given the extraordinary degree to which the Empire's war machine has been integrated into so much of the society- its economy, its language and very identity.
The fact is that these conditions are systemic. They can't be reversed by, say, the use of the ballot box - because the system works to ensure that none of the limited choices offered will be a threat to that system.
Still, despite this bleak understanding, it is indeed heartening to know that others care as much as we feel we do. That the dysfunction (and evil) are seen and resisted in whatever ways we may find is a seed of hope for me. May such seeds find plenty of fertile ground, water and light.
Until his morale improves - and then forgets it did (with Lindsey Graham whispering sweetly into his ear about his near divinity).
I find it bitterly amusing this is the first war in 70 years that hasn't been on television - at least for US audiences. No 'embedded' "journalists" assigned to Air Force squadrons or embarked on Navy combatants. Little to no reporting on the ground from UAE, Israel, or Iran.
Nowhere in any of it - after combat operations were supposedly over until this week - have there been any reports on actual US losses beyond a few aircraft and the initial casualties from February. There are credible reports the Lincoln was hit - no laundry fire lasts 60 hours; other surface combatants have been reported the same. How many aircraft have actually been destroyed?
I wonder if we'll ever really know. And what have the families of those lost been told - if they've even been told.
And what of the senior military 'leadership' that has stood by while all this has been going on? I suppose like former general Jack Keane - waiting to retire to become 'military experts' on cable news.