quote:
“Once again,” Simon Tisdall ranted in The Guardian, “a bellicose U.S. president has unleashed overwhelming military firepower to force a sovereign nation to its knees. Once again, blatant lies and exaggerated claims are being propagated to justify the attack. Duplicitous American diplomacy became a fig leaf for premeditated aggression. The cautionary advice of allies was spurned. The UN, international law, and public opinion were ignored. Democratic consent is lacking. And once again, there are few defined goals by which to gauge success, and no long-term plan. . . . Like Bush, Trump manufactured a crisis, founded on falsehood, and effectively cornered himself.”

And so on. If we were still allowed to use Anthropic’s Claude, I could have generated a hundred different versions of this op-ed....

And yet, contrary to the criticism already being aired on both the left and the right, Trump is not reverting to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s “regime change” playbook.

After the U.S. captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro last month, I suggested to a senior administration official that what we had just seen was not regime change but regime alteration—in the sense that, while Maduro had been replaced by Delcy Rodríguez, the structure of the Chavista regime remained in place. The alteration was that Delcy would now report to Washington, not to Havana or Beijing....

Indeed, regime alteration is the practical consequence of the approach laid out in Trump’s National Security Strategy published late last year. The strategy rules out the deployment of American ground forces other than special forces. It requires a short time frame for military operations. It will disappoint those who want to fast-track Venezuela and Iran to democracy. But the lesson of Iraq has not been lost on Trump.

That is why it misses the point to say, “Trump claimed to be an isolationist and he’s just started another forever war.” One thing I can confidently promise about the U.S.-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic: It will not last long.

Operation Epic Fury differs from Operation Iraqi Freedom—the 2003 invasion of Iraq—in two key respects. Yes, the justification is preemption against a regime intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction and implicated in international terrorism. But the goal is not to march into Iran and confer, much less impose, freedom on the Iranians. It is to decapitate the Islamic Republic’s political structure and leave the Iranians to take their freedom from the mullahs and their murderous henchmen. As Trump said in his speech this morning, “members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police” can “have complete immunity” if they lay down their weapons.

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Posted by Deuces

The bottom

Member since Nov 2011

16682 posts

Posted on 3/1/26 at 8:54 am to prplhze2000

People are scarred from Iraq and Afghanistan, so they think that we can never have another foreign intervention ever again because that’s what’s bound to happen.

It’s not necessarily true. Iraq and Afghanistan ended up that way because that’s what the leaders wanted.

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Posted by thebigmuffaletta

Member since Aug 2017

15642 posts

Posted on 3/1/26 at 9:23 am to prplhze2000

quote:
The strategy rules out the deployment of American ground forces other than special forces. It requires a short time frame for military operations.

SloProMullah will not like this one bit.

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Posted by prplhze2000

Parts Unknown

Member since Jan 2007

57624 posts

Posted on 3/1/26 at 9:36 am to Deuces

Another reason I hate the Bush crowd. They made it toxic to take necessary military action just like what happened in the 70's after Vietnam.

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Posted by JasonDBlaha