Members of Trump’s own party have lined up to condemn the deal, which pledges to help fund Iran and scrap sanctions
Republicans have turned on Donald Trump over his plan to end the war with Iran, accusing him of making the “worst foreign policy blunder in decades”.
The U.S. released the 14-point interim agreement on Wednesday as Trump signed the documents in Versailles, France. The terms included stopping the conflict and reopening the vital shipping route, the Strait of Hormuz, but also financing Iran’s recovery with a $300bn fund and scrapping sanctions.
“Reagan is rolling over in his grave,” said Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy on Wednesday, referring to the former president Trump admires.
I mean, half the joke is that they didn’t vote for it. Trump has been outspokenly in opposition to wars abroad, in direct refutation to members of his own party (during the primary) and the opposition (during the general). American national politics is a sucking void of anti-war candidates, such that even a serial liar and shameless two-faced shit can fill it.
Incidentally, taking an anti-war tact is how Obama beat Hillary in 2008. And how he obliterated McCain several months later. And “Double Gitmo” Mitt Romney four years after that. It’s also how Clinton beat Bush Sr in '92 (people hating Operation Desert Storm). And it was a long-forgotten part of the Bush Jr campaign against Gore (criticizing US involvement in East Africa and the Baltic States). Hell, Kennedy and LBJ both campaigned as anti-war candidates. They beat Nixon by promising to de-escalate the Cold War (and avoid any future Korean Wars). And then Nixon ran the same playbook eight years later. Reagan beat Carter on similar grounds (peaceful extraction from Iran).
Candidates regularly run - and win - on anti-war positions, only to enter office and reverse course, generating a backlash as a result. Trump’s just the latest and most glaring example.
Point of order: all of your contrasting examples were competent.
Plenty of people will happily argue that Operation Desert Storm was a shitshow. Just ask all the veterans with “Gulf War Syndrome”. Or the millions of starving Iraqis that incentivized the “Oil for Food” program (itself an enormous swindle). Similarly, if you crack open Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States”, he’s got some hard truths to drop about the US intervention in Kosovo and Serbia. For that matter, it’s worth interrogating why Yugoslavia disintegrated so quickly to begin with (TL;DR; perestroika).
And then you’ve got Korea, which I would argue is the gold standard for “Failed US Wars” even relative to the current Iran cockup. MacArthur runs laps around Pete Hegseth when it comes to disastrous military adventurism.
Even the Bush Afghan/Iraq Wars are bigger blunders by sheer volume. Hard to compete with a 23 year long calamity inside a mere four months. We did not - blessedly - turn Iran into a narco-state that sent thousands of tons of cheap heroin into the veins of western allied nations for decades on end. We do not appear to have created a new ISIS by engaging in de-IRGC-ization. We killed tens of thousands of people rather than millions of people.
Coulda been way worse.
Nobody is worse at military operations than Pete Hegseth, nobody.
As for the rest, too tired to argue.
I would be hard pressed to name a military command more disastrous than MacArthur’s decision to invade China.
While I agree with you in theory, since it indeed was utterly disastrous, he at least has some sort of coherent (using that phrase mildly here).
Hegseth seems to just like to kill people with impunity, remotely.
Do you really think he could put together a real campaign against a country ready and willing to fight?
Competent? Who the fuck cares if they’re competent at betraying the public, starting pointless wars, terrorizing the globe, and slaughtering innocents?