More importantly, arriving 4 weeks into active conflict.

Instead of arriving before the bombs started dropping, when they could have been 100x more effective by their mere presence -- especially if combined with a full-spectrum diplomatic and economic push with the Democracies of the world as allies.

Jesus Christ, Trump and his cabinet are fucking hubristic-stupid

If that figure is true.

holy shit the casualties are going to be terrible

But American will have the element of surprise! /s

Worth noting: Iraq and Iran are very different societies & cultures.

Before colonialism, Iraq was decentralized/tribal for thousands of years before being arbitrarily collected into a single political unit.

Meanwhile Iran was its own empire, with a central head of power for those thousands of years.

This is an important insight. People who support war generally harden their stance once their soldiers begin to fall. It also becomes much easier to guilt and shame others for not supporting the war, framing it as having let those soldiers die in vain. It's an important instrument in the fascist/imperialist toolkit for stamping out dissent.

Yes, what's the goddamn holdup?

Never did. I remember an article shortly back about enlistees feeling like pawns for the current regime, comments beneath unanimously ⁉️♟️🤣

The origin story in the modern era is the British East India company

35 million people genocided in 100 years.

Forced cash cropping so that farmers were growing opium, indigo and poppy rather than food.

Increased taxes during drought to pay out more to shareholders back in London.

Throughout thousands of years of Indian history the cultural norm was for taxes to be either reduced of waived during drought.

Extracting human suffering elsewhere for capital at home. That's what the East India company did. One of the world's first joint stock corporations.

WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG?

I don't think they would bring in troops if they were going to nuke. Bot who knows?

I fear that it ends with nukes unless trump is stopped.

And he absolutely doesn't need help, but it's a shame that the Europeans won't help. And he absolutely doesn't care about the Hormuz, but the Europeans should come in and open it up. Etc. etc.

Most of them are probably 18 years old, poorly educated, and raised on Fox News. They're just pawns that have no idea what's going on.

Congress on the other hand, knows exactly what they're doing, and has no moral qualms.

It's the troops coming home from Vietnam being spit on and called baby killers again.

Don't blame soldiers. Blame their government.