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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran | |
| 1 in every 28 Supertankers on the Planet have been attacked this year | |
| 2026-10-26 | |
| [MeaningInHistory] First we had the Mother Of All Bombs. Then we had the Mother Of All Bubbles—and, actually, that MOAB is still with us. Now could it be the Mother Of All Bluffs? Yeah, I know that Trump keeps saying and doing things that make it sound exactly like we’re seeing the prelude to renewed bombing on Iran. But what would you do if you were trying to bluff Iran? I mean, really trying to bluff Iran. Or maybe really trying to bluff voters in USrael? You’d do exactly what Trump is now doing. Now, maybe you’re not a psychopath, so you’d balk at the abuse of military personnel and diplomats and their familes—none of which fazes Trump. But if you were Trump—hell yeah, you’d do all of that without batting an eyelash. Or maybe without even taking your Trumpian eye off, um, “the physicality of other men”. My bottom line has always been that if there actually were a viable military option for success against Iran Trump would have taken that option already. The military option isn’t there—as John Mearsheimer eloquently maintains on a regular basis—and it’s not getting better with time. To the contrary. Trump isn’t actually stupid, and I don’t think he’s suicidal—despite having put himself into a suicidal position. Yes, he’s getting pretty old, and that exposes his deviant personality more clearly than before. But, as Danny Davis points out today, Trump was always told that the military option would not work. We couldn’t get at those Iranian deep nuclear sites and we wouldn’t be able to bomb Iran back to the stone age. None of that worked in the Twelve Day War and it definitely didn’t work in the Forty Day Followup. Do see what I mean? In a sense you could say that it was always a gamble, except that the gamble wasn’t a military one. Trump knew that the military action wasn’t able to generate an actual military victory. Instead it was a political gamble—a gamble that Trump could bluff his way to a regime change in Iran before running out of standoff munitions. But that looks very much like it was a bluff directed at the Iranians. Trump wants everyone in the world to think that he’s a mad risk taker, but that’s the basic bluff. China didn’t fall for it. Russia hasn’t fallen for it. And Iran certainly hasn’t fallen for it. In retrospect, the war on Iran looks like a mad gamble, but at the time the likelihood is that Trump was persuaded that the military bluff really would result in regime change. In his hubris he thought it was making a rational calculation, based on the success of the Venezuela kidnapping, but he was wrong. And that makes you wonder whether, as suggested above, the bluff is directed more at domestic USraeli pre-election audiences than at Iran.
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| Posted by:Dopey Photch2701 |
| #2 |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2026-10-26 19:15 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-10-26 17:25 |