The Grand Illusion
Although Trump and Bondi hope that “Operation Epic Fury” will fade their faults and overshadow all the domestic unrest, the fact still remains that two peaceful protesters were killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis. A disabled woman was dragged from her car even though she wasn’t part of the protests and was on her way to a medical appointment. She is a U.S. citizen, but she was removed so violently that her shoulders were injured, possibly permanently. None of the ICE agents have been investigated, let alone charged in any of these incidents.
As a follow-up, the disabled woman attended the most recent State of the Union Address as a guest of her Congresswoman and was arrested for disturbance even though she said nothing and bore no signs and did nothing to create a disturbance.
Yet Attorney General Pam Bondi has charged thirty-nine protesters for disrupting a service in Minneapolis at a church where one of the pastors was an ICE official, even though no one was injured or hurt. Bondi claimed that the protesters “attacked” a house of worship and stated that if any such protests occurred again, “we will find you, arrest you, and prosecute you.”
Contrast the reaction to a peaceful protest against a pastor who is an ICE official with the lack of Department of Justice response to the killings and violence perpetrated in Minneapolis by ICE agents.
Disturbing a church service merits charges against 36 protesters and three media types who were trying to report on the protests, but ICE killings and violence against peaceful protesters doesn’t merit investigation and charges?
What does that tell you not only about ICE, but also about the power of the religious right in the United States?
It’s all about the retribution. (It’s also all a con but it always has been.)
Remember when Ukraine’s prez didn’t suck up to Chump, and got ambushed on camera in the Oval Office? Now Iran didn’t kowtow sufficiently. A physical assault this time.
But the pattern is clear.
Protest against ICE? Get shot. Disrupt a (Christian) church? Get charged. Do anything whatsoever that Dorktator Don doesn’t like? Get attacked. Somehow.
Fascism lives.
Protest? That’s speak or carry a sign and do not assault, threaten, accost, or interfere with anyone or damage any property or obstruct vehicular or pedestrian traffic, or loiter, or litter, or create a public nuisance.
The camera footage suggests that that line was crossed by the “protesters” before they got shot.
Clearly there are screwups. Maybe someone WILL face consequences in the cases where agents clearly did wrong, maybe not. I don’t think that’s a policy from 1600 PA Ave one way or the other.
Ukraine? I don’t ALWAYS agree with Trump. Anyone that fights Putin should get some backing, which is not to say we should end up paying for it.
Iran? Destroying their government has been overdue since their revolution, definitely since Khobar towers, USS Cole, etc.
We’re not the world’s police, we’re the executioners, who should be neither reluctant nor eager to do the job, not always every dictator, but those that are a continuing problem (addicts deserve their fate, but those who profit should die too; and psycho theocrats desiring to bring on their peculiar apocalypse should NEVER be allowed brinksmanship in the pursuit of nuclear weapons or the means of delivery).
So in lieu of tiresome nation building, just be clear that only acceptable successors will survive, whether in Venezuela, or Iran, or hopefully Cuba one day.
I don’t like your America, Mr. Hamilton, one that is vicious, mean, and retributive. I want my America back, one that stood as a beacon of freedom and democracy in the world.
Exactly how can you honestly declare that retribution isn’t a White House policy (especially with a straight face) when everything Trump’s doing is either retribution or has an element of retribution?
Are SOME situations intentional retribution? One could think so, given some of what DOJ looked at and then (properly) gave up on. That doesn’t thrill me, but it is unfounded to suppose that everything that could be retribution, is.
I don’t think personal factors mainly (one could be understood to take assassination threats personally) are driving taking Iran down. Everything I’ve read says we want them to end enrichment (with guarantees of access to low-enriched reactor fuel), stop work on longer range missiles, and stop using terrorist proxies. They said they wanted to talk, but on the essential points they didn’t want to change. So they were stalling. Stalling a few months away from having nukes is not acceptable.
As I said, I don’t agree on severely limiting aid to Ukraine, or expecting them to make unreasonable concessions; I want Putin smacked down, and ideally gone, save that some successors might not be much better. But the history is clear, that Ukraine has a corruption problem (so does Russia and most of the other former SSRs). Some of their corruption had political spillover here. Hunter got money from Burisma for nothing more than his last name.
I don’t believe for a minute anyone gave an order to shoot protestors, or to refrain from investigating such incidents. So lumping that in with retribution doesn’t make sense to me.
When trying to deport millions (2/3 of which seem to be leaving on their own, so fear has its uses), there WILL be people hurt or killed that shouldn’t have been, but the answer is more training or more body cams or something, NOT letting all the illegals just stay.
Whether it’s reversing illegal immigration or taking down Iran, these have needed doing for decades, and Presidents of both parties just left the problems to their successors. Now we finally have someone with ego bigger than all the reasons (whether reasonable or political) that action wasn’t taken before.
I disagree. But I don’t see arguing further as productive.
In the wake of WWII, back in 1953, Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh ***seemed*** to be taking the country in a Soviet-friendly direction – and the USSR was right there next to Iran, too.
The CIA went to Truman and said, “We can do a coup if you want.” Truman gave the okay, and soon a more “acceptable” regime was in place.
Washington looked at how “easy” that was compared with the war that had ended 8 years earlier, and saw the (very) short-term success of it, and thought they had a model for how America could interact with the world.
Not so much.
Nation-building takes decades and patience. Long years of slow influence. And still is likely to fail, because humans.
It should never be embarked on in anger, or on a whim. Failure should be expected. A country, like Iran, that ends up more hostile to the US than it was at the start.
Yeah, sometimes we have to fight. Pearl Harbor for sure. Korea, pretty much. Vietnam, not so much. Iraq…oops.
Iran? Didn’t improve things in the long run in 1953, and in fact set the table for the hostile post-1979 regime. I don’t see this one taking us anywhere useful either.
The Khomeini/Khamenei regime always angered me. But anger and realpolitik don’t go together.
The “Islamic Republic of Iran” has killed enough tens of thousands of its own peaceful protesters (and others that weren’t hurting anyone except their feelings in small numbers, like women without proper head covering that ended up dead) that they have probably less support than the Shah did (who had his secret police and was hard on some dissenters, but otherwise mostly left people alone; those still alive from then tend to remember* having been far more prosperous and generally freer).
As long as the Iranian people have a major role in ultimately taking matters in a better direction (and incentives like the end of sanctions and lifting of some export controls so they can reconstruct legitimate business and commerce more quickly), I think there’s a good chance it could work out. The Marshall Plan worked out, although IMO it was effectively morphed into way too many subsidies of Europe for way too long. It does bother me that Trump says out loud that he wants a role in the selection of the next leader. Behind the scenes, at that point we should certainly be clear about what behavior is or isn’t acceptable, but other than that, not be seen as trying to force any specific choice. But Trump’s arguably main problem (albeit sometimes useful to expedite stalled negotiations) is that he has very little filter on his “outside” voice. Hopefully if and when the time that’s relevant gets closer, someone will be able to suggest that he puts a less direct public face on issues like leadership selection. If one hasn’t already chosen not to see it, there ARE times when it appears he changes his approach based on advice.
* I would have been 20 or 21 at the time of the ’79 revolution, in the Air Force in a technical intel field. While Iran was never my specific area of expertise, a limited degree of detail of info was available beyond one’s specific duties, for awareness; and I was always interested in international events, having German relatives on one side of the family, and having done the last three years of high school at Bonn American High School (Bonn being then the capital of West Germany, so most of the Americans there were either embassy staff or military kids for which that was the closest American school, or, paying, American employees of major multinational corporations; in an addition, those from most countries where English was taught early that didn’t have their own overseas schools, went there; an Israeli and Arab might not be friends, but they’d both understand very well that incidents were not going to be tolerated; and others (Netherlands, Argentina, Greek Cyprus, South Korea come to mind, and a few Germans too) all got along well enough. With that and some of the teachers that focused on how to analyze rather than just regurgitate textbooks, one got a much wider range of perspectives than someone regularly reading my comments might imagine I’d have been exposed to. But I was also subsequently exposed to DECADES of heightened awareness compared to the general public of what terrorists and communist propagandists and other adversaries were saying, planning, and doing, so my position tends to be rather harsh on any nation or group that’s anything other than a reliable ally (or in the case of a potential future citizen, someone that will assimilate more than they will expect to be accommodated, and obey the law, and not be socially disruptive).
Although given the millennia of abuse they’ve endured off and on since the fall of Judah to Babylon in 586 BC (and the few stories I’ve heard from family, like my then teenage mom smuggling food to endangered friends), I’ve got considerable sympathy for the Jews and Israel over anyone that violently opposes them, I have neither forgotten nor entirely forgiven the USS Liberty incident. Nobody I knew personally was lost in that, but it’s the sort of thing I would have been well aware of. So while I can’t have totally unmixed feelings about any conflict (there almost always being some cost in blood and quite a bit in treasure, although some conflicts have had less losses than the same amount of time in training back home), I’m quite pleased that both the US and Israel seem to be very satisfied with the smoothness of their working relationship in the current conflict.
Sorry that was long-winded. But to everything there’s context, and I’m NOT an ideologue simply to be a hater of not-us, it’s mostly patterns of dangerous CONDUCT long overlooked that I have a problem with, with considerable reason and evidence.
Variety in arts and cuisine and other non-disruptive aspects of culture, I rather appreciate up to a point.
(I did not enjoy the story of my parents being served the delicacy of sheep’s eyes – perhaps partly as a joke or test – when hosted by locals in Morocco; hint, they look more like cooked prunes rather than eyes, and I gather they’re slippery, you swallow them whole or at most cut in half, taste reasonably non-obnoxious despite being off-putting to those unfamiliar with them, and in that part of the world (some Europeans eat them too), you never refuse hospitality, and remember to belch afterward to show you enjoyed the meal; and I could barely stay in the theater for the meal scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; I can barely deal with whole lobster or crab or any other food I need to know the anatomy of to eat, despite liking most seafood; I haven’t yet seen a reason to try crayfish, not enough meat per each to bother unless starving, IMO, and I recall seeing introduced Red Swamp crayfish in an irrigation canal in Phoenix, which with the odd spoiled fruit floating in the canals, was seldom a pretty sight).
My main concern about the current mess in Iran is that I haven’t seen any sign that any thought and deliberation went into starting it. Not to say that Iran is a hotbed of virtue. But neither was Saddam’s Iraq, and tackling that turned out to be a mistake.
“I have neither forgotten nor entirely forgiven the USS Liberty incident.”
I’m with you on that one. (I don’t *always* disagree with you.) That was unforgivable, especially the lack of any punishment for the pilots who carried out the attack.
There was certainly months of planning. Google AI (not of conservative bias) said:
Months of Preparation: Israel and the U.S. collaborated for months to plan the specific strikes on Iranian military command facilities, missile/drone sites, and leadership.
which fits with what I’ve read. And we’ve been pushing contractors for faster munitions and aircraft production for even longer than that, so concerns about depletion may be exaggerated.
Former VP Pence, of understandably mixed feelings about Trump, recently made very supportive statements about the attack. Given his history, I’m inclined to respect his knowledge, integrity, and opinion on this.
My concerns include military end-state (challenging but feasible to destroy all their weapons of concern), political end-state (must come at least partly from within to work), and that if there are (I certainly hope there are) plans to remove the existing stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, no mention has been made of that.
OTOH, I perceive a tendency among most other than his at least semi-supporters to start from the assumption “Trump wrong (or bad)” and fit the story to that, rather than simply see where the story goes. And many things normally aren’t revealed this early, and some of what’s revealed may be misdirection of the adversary with partial truths.
So I’m fine with a reasonable (a few weeks for sure) amount of wait-and-see. Inaction would not have been defensible for more than a few months longer, IMO, and action then would have gotten more difficult for the wait.