Pentagon preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, Washington Post reports

Didn’t you hear? Trump said Kamala was guaranteed to start World War III, and here we are. Checkmate libs…

Non American here. Isnt ICE funded by the big bill Trump passed last year? The one that gave it a larger budget than most nation militaries.

That was my thinking too at the time. We needed those guard rails.

This is the one. I mean forget everything else that they've leid about. The entire excuse for this campaign is to prevent their nuclear weapons program... which we supposedly annihilated last year. No matter how you read into this, either they lied last year or they're lying now. How can anyone still trust this administration with *anything*?

As one of my maga coworkers said in response to me sending them the White House article stating this last summer, “yeah see, that says we destroyed their facilities not their capabilities.”

Was that really the present damn, if thats true these people are so pathetic

Agreed, I watched a few of them out of morbid curiosity, but stopped soon after realizing that there are crazy folks writing comments.

There probably isn’t really an easy analog for this conflict. Vietnam was a post-colonial state with several factions vying for power. One of which that was pretty amenable to Western help and owned a fair bit of key terrain. The US Government had also done much better job of manufacturing the consent of its citizens. There was already strong anti-communist sentiment, with the Cold War on in full. Everyone had been sold the line that if we let one country in Asia fall to communism, the rest would follow. Then we’d have two giant communist states owning over half the globe and we’d be in real trouble. None of this exists for Iran. The current US administration doesn’t even seem to know where to begin. Beyond that, Iran learned a lot of lessons from the American occupation of Iraq. The IRGC was a key player, funneling weapons, money, and advisors into the country to fuel the insurgency to pretty great effect. They also appear to have decentralized their military, which would mean that even if the US didn’t completely botch the demobilization and demilitarization of the Iranian military (like it did in Iraq), assuming it wins the conventional campaign, the Irregular Warfare campaign would have already started. That is, Iran almost definitely has pretty robust contingency plan for invasion, specifically by the US. The White House was hoping that some quick strikes would destabilize the Iranian government. Enough to ignite some form of grassroots coup in the country that would force whoever eventually grabbed the levers of power in the county to come to the bargaining table. This was a serious miscalculation and now the thought seems to be that inserting ground troops will somehow turn up the heat enough to trigger an agreement. I don’t think this will work either. If the trend continues we will see a series of poorly thought out incremental escalations that lead to a very bloody and protracted war with no material gains for the US. Even if the US pulls out now, Iran is going to have a bone to pick and will probably bide its time looking for ways to asymmetrically hurt the US.

For real. We had the internet, but not social media. That was peak for sure.

Right up until 9/11 we were at our pinnacle of freedom too.

99-2000 was peak everything.

I think obama was a hope that we could return back to the optimism of the late nineties and that it was proof that George Bush and the Bible thumping brand of patriotism that came with a heavy dose a xenophobia was a fluke and on its last leg. The absurdity of the tea party was actually once considered evidence that the republican party was dying.  But then 2016 painted the picture you just painted, that it was actually obama that was a fluke and that the Bible thumping, xenophobic, reactionary conservative politics was growing faster than ever. But then trump lost after only 1 term to a geriatric Joe biden and people thought Trump was a fluke.... And then trump won again and now here we are.  The truth is, no one knows what is going to happen because a new media landscape and now new technology is completely changing politics and society in a way that is unrecognizable to me and many others.  The personalization of media has also made it very difficult to know what information other people are exposed to.  Edit: The florida debacle and Hilary Clinton winning the popular vote in 2016 support the idea that Trump and Bush were flukes but Bush beating out Kerry and Trump winning overwhelmingly in 2026 are evidence to support they aren't. 

I think Afghanistan was always going to happen, but Iraq was truly the end for us. All the good vibes of one country just got split so hard off that move.