Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18d ago
But he's right that the military's job is to be lethal.
He's not. The military's job is to employ military force effectively in pursuit of state objectives. Given US conventional superiority, lethalitymaxxing is often pointless or counterproductive. Like, the problem of the US military in Iraq or Afghanistan was not that it wasn't lethal enough, and missions that require more sophistication than firepower are not going away.
There is a paradoxical sentiment amongst a certain segment of Americans* which simultaneously holds that the US military is a force of warrior-saints who would never commit target civilians (whether by accident or deliberately), but also that a we're too worried about moral and legal niceties.
I supposed the charitable resolution of the paradox is that if the military is staffed by paragons then there's no need for oversight, but this is both observably ridiculous (we have a number of well-documented instances of US military covering up or soft-balling war crimes, as well as many instances of target selection that was either reckless or callous) and belied by the overt appetite for brutality.
*tbf this is not unique to Americans, but given that the US gets stuck in a lot more, it's more salient
Why is that not a victory?
Because you didn't actually get what you wanted. Of course, it's hard to say here because the Trump administration can not articulate what it wants.
Ok, so Trump and Hegseth are baboons who can't formulate or even imagine goals so you don't have to try to understand it
I have tried to understand it. You act as if the only reason you could conclude Trump doesn't know what he's doing is because you're not paying attention.
The problem is that they seemingly can't articulate what we're trying to do and contradict themselves like twice a day. Let me ask you this: why should I extend any of these people the benefit of the doubt? Have they displayed some record of competence that suggests I should and wait and see what strategic genius unfolds? Spoilers: no, they haven't. These are the people who decided we needed to threaten a close ally to gain access to territory we already have access to. We are fortunate that they can at least lean on the immense operational competence of the US military, but that cannot cover for a strategic deficit.
No, all the evidence available to me suggests that they expected the Iranian government to be cowed by the initial attacks and don't have a follow up plan beyond "keep bombing until they give up" (a strategy with a terrible track record). Maybe this was done at the instigation of Israel/KSA, but "Trump got suckered into doing something stupid in Iran at the behest of self-interested 'allies'" is a point in favor of the "Trump doesn't know what he's doing" argument. He is at least in good company there, since that describes a lot of US involvement in Iran since the end of WW2. For Israel, we have both clear national strategic interests and the personal interests of the leadership, but Israeli leadership wants to do a lot of things and the US doesn't have to indulge them.
And there's the thing: you don't even have to be a weapons-grade dumbass to wind up in this situation. Military actions not producing the desired results and forcing planners to clumsily improvise has happened to smarter people than Trump.
Maybe everyone in the Middle East is incompetent?
I wouldn't dismiss the possibility, though I think it's more likely that the lack of quality institutions highlights the prevalence of incompetence more.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19d ago
The BoJ isn't staffed by populist outsiders who actively tout their lack of qualifications. If it was, the answer very well might be 'yes'.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19d ago
I'm well aware that the US eventually brought the conflict in Iraq to an on-paper successful conclusion. The problem is that by the time that finally happened, the bed was already shat, and the outcome was not really a flourishing democracy but a messy quasi-democracy that was halfway aligned with Iran. Not really something the American public was likely to see as a 'win'.
(It also had negative knock-on effects for the US military, e.g. contributing to the dire state the USN)
Worse than a black eye - the Iraq War was a huge blow to domestic public confidence in US foreign policy, probably second only to Vietnam. One of the reasons why the US public has become so skittish and unwilling to tolerate high-effort foreign policy is the legacy of Iraq.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19d ago
We killed the core of Iranian leadership in an afternoon and their only viable response is to attack unrelated countries and merchant fleets. What do you mean humiliation!
What happens when you do all that and it turns out you still don't get what you want (and possibly cause a humanitarian crisis to boot)? Energy price stability is the only reason the US cares about the sandy dump in the first place, and now that shit is literally on fire. I can't help but feel like the pro-Trump position sees this as some ape-brained dominance display and are confused and angry because people keep asking about things like 'consequences' and 'strategic objectives.'
The risk of humiliation is that the US tries to impose its will by force and backs down once it realizes that's going to take real effort that it doesn't have the will for. Blowing a bunch of stuff up and leaving is not victory. Neither is a situation in which the US destroys quality of life for ordinary Iranians but the same IRI regime holds power.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19d ago
Trump’s tariff performance suggests he isn’t willing to allow oil to be much above $100 for long at all.
He may find that it's not up to him.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19d ago
I just cited a study in my other comment showing that precisely the opposite is the case
Unfortunately, I said that I wouldn't check and I am man of my word.
There must be some kind of stratification going on.
Almost certainly. One of the many hazards of relying on personal experience to draw conclusions about societal trends. I wouldn't be surprised if highly mobile people are overrepresented on Internet fora, but then I have no research to back that up.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19d ago
TV, video games, social media, etc... share the quality of being low friction, inferior (for certain values of 'inferior') substitutes for in-person, group oriented entertainment. These things can be done with other people, but it is hard to meet other people doing them. Obviously, people still go out and do stuff, but it gnaws away at the margins.
Another factor, I suspect, is labor mobility. I'd have to double check (I won't), but I believe an ever greater share of people are moving significant distances for work. This puts them in the position of breaking existing relationships and puts them in the awkward spot of being an adult with no real social connections in their new community. And they may do this several times over their career.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
What stands out to me is that virtually no one seems willing to defend the war on the merits. Even the people who support it focus on how the IRI is bad or how we need to trust the president or how - per OP - not supporting the war is disloyal.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
Otherwise you have to go back to WWII for a clear victory.
It's not quite that dire. Grenada and Panama were fairly unambiguous successes and the NATO mission in the Balkans can reasonably be characterized as a success as well.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
And yet the media is once again trying to make the US lose a war that it can pretty easily win.
Yeah, I don't think the media is problem here. The media loves a good war.
The problem is that war is fundamentally about willpower, not firepower, and Trump has made no effort to build public support for this war. This has, in fact, been a more general aspect US foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era. The American public isn't willing to tolerate casualties or pain because they don't believe enough in the causes their support is being demanded for, not because they're soft or because the troops are being stabbed in the back by the media.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
There's certainly truth to that, in that most people tend to downplay the infractions of their friends and play up the infractions of their enemies. However, I consistently observe a meaningful difference in how left-wingers and right-wingers have talked about political violence over the past decade, which I think reflects their differing attitudes towards politics more broadly.
Left-wingers (or, more properly, the forerunners of the social justice movement) brought us the phrase "everything is political". While obnoxious to argue against because it involves dealing with people playing word games, it at least clarifies how many of them view the world. You don't have to struggle to get them to acknowledge the political nature of an act. Right-wingers (or at least the current populist-right), by contrast, have a habit of dividing things into 'not political' (meaning: reflects their beliefs/assumptions) and 'political' (meaning: challenges their beliefs/assumptions). Thus you get RWers complain about something being made political because, e.g. it has a gay character or something.
This difference in mindset impacts the way they process acts of political violence. For left wingers, they might condemn it, they might support it, they might try to disown it depending on their mood, particular beliefs, and the act in question, but they're generally not going to insist it wasn't political or didn't happen or doesn't count because the perp was crazy. This is not the case for right-wingers. Right-wing political violence is almost always either outright denied or shifted to another category in the eyes of the broader right (often in a way that is incoherent).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
I think taking the country and the troops hostage to your insane decisions is spiritually treasonous, if not treason by the letter of the law. Even if we grant (which I do not) that we really are irrevocably committed, the first thing to do would be to remove Trump and his cabinet and replace them with less corrupt, inept, and irresponsible leadership.
Many people would rather have had us not get here. But we are here. The ship has sailed.
See, I think what is going to happen is that we're going to bomb them for a while more, kill a bunch of people, and then proclaim victory and go home having accomplished very little. Sure, we'll have blown up some Iranian military hardware, destroyed a bunch of civilian infrastructure, killed some replaceable autocrats, and killed a lot of civilians. After which the IRI will rebuild and redouble its quest for a nuclear weapon. Trump does not believe in the Pottery Barn principle and he has a notoriously short attention span. Hegseth has openly stated that we're not in it for regime change and thinks war crimes are badass. So from where I stand, the options are 1) stop the war now and stop killing people, despite the job being 'unfinished' 2) keep the war going, killing a lot more people, and still leave the job unfinished. Either way, at the end of this we're going to be back to negotiating with IRI leadership.
Really, Trump II has really cemented my opinion that we need to gut the executive. The ability of the presidency to embroil the US in a major conflict unilaterally is untenable, and the notional justification for this broad authority doesn't seem to have much real-world basis.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
Ireland being aggressively in the tank for Palestine is not exactly new, but it is also an outlier. It certainly does not reflect American sentiment.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
we really could be bombing a school for every ayatollah we take out and it really would change the balance much here.
That makes no sense. It's not like Iran killed 30k people (nb estimates of the ongoing Gazan war are significantly higher) so we're The Good Guys as long as we keep casualties lower than that. Collateral damage happens in war, but it cannot be justified if the war cannot be justified. If you take out one ayatollah and a hundred civilians, you need to be able to justify why that is a morally acceptable tradeoff. "He was a really bad guy" isn't it. Not when there are numerous functionally identical really bad guys available to to take over because he's just a senior cog in a machine, not a load-bearing element.
And it really has to made clear: the US is not trying to democratize Iran, so these civilian casualties cannot be justified on that front.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
I'm not sure I see the relevance. Iran massacring tens of thousands of protestors would a strong point in favor regime change but that isn't what is happening. "We're the good guys because they're the bad guys" logic doesn't check out because not starting a war was an option. It is possible that both parties in a conflict are bad actors, and is possible that well-intentioned actors are exercising criminally poor judgment. The fact that collateral damage happens in war is why you need to think carefully and exercise judgment before going to war. Even if your adversaries are the most despicable people in history, you still have to ask yourself if starting a war will make things better.
In point of fact, we have very little reason to extend the benefit of the doubt to the current US administration. They've failed to articulate a clear purpose for war (basically everyone has offered a different rationale), but they have been openly disdainful of humanitarian concerns and dismissed democratization as a priority.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
There is a reason that MtG imposes minimum deck sized in various formats, but generally not maximum deck sizes (beyond the practical restriction that you have to be able to physically shuffle your deck). Even without turn-one combos defaulting the win to whoever goes first, it would enable efficient, hyper linear decks to an extremely boring degree.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
I can't speak to sentiments in Europe post 9/11, but I think this:
You do also have to understand that, just like 9/11, it is in a way nothing personal; Israelis are simply (1) abstract distant foreigners and (2) the smug overdogs who had been running circles around everyone else with impunity.
is wrong. The people celebrating had a problem with very specifically with Israel, and it was absolutely personal. Israel had been bleeding reputation for a while, and 10/7 was a momentary shot in the arm, precisely because you had a very visible group of people openly celebrating it in a way that seemed to validate Zionist critiques of anti-Zionism. They proceeded to burn all that good will and more with their conduct afterwards (not helped by Netanyahu being an extraordinarily repellent figure to all but the far right), which is when their reputation really started to tank.
"yeah, this kind of thing happens in war, just like friendly fire, it sucks but it's understandable since it's not like the US is omniscient & omnipotent".
The problem with "shit happens in war" is that, while true, it still rests on an underlying belief that the war is justified. "We accidentally bombed a school while fighting against tyranny" is easier to swallow (assuming it's credible) than "we accidentally bombed a school while carrying out a raid because we didn't like their drug importation laws."
As the USG made approximately zero effort to sell the effort to the US public and has had incoherent messaging, that belief appears not to be particularly widespread. As civilian (and, for that matter, military) casualties continue to mount, it raises the question of what aim is justifying them. By the Trump admin's own words, we're not spreading democracy and we're not responding to an attack or imminent threat. Best I can tell, this has either been an exercise in kinetic gunboat diplomacy or the US getting suckered into doing the heavy lifting for an Israeli attempt at regime destabilization.
I'll note again that people were fairly willing to swallow the collateral damage of coalition air and artillery strikes around Raqqa and Mosul because it was generally accepted that the alternative of leaving ISIS in control of these cities was even worse. They were less willing to excuse civilian casualties resulting from bad targeting/intel (or callousness) when it came to the broader efforts of Inherent Resolve, where it simply seemed to be adding to the carnage of the Syrian Civil War rather than achieving anything desirable.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
23d ago
I don't really think that's right. There are militant atheists, but they're the villains. Granted, the dynamics of religious faith are a little different when God turns up for major holidays and performs incontrovertible miracles. The D&D comparison I can see, in that it's got more than a whiff of D&D-style kitchen sink fantasy (each book is set in a different locale with its own idiosyncratic fantasy elements) in the setting.
I really honestly thought that the Murderbot series was making fun of leftists and that the show was too.
It is, but there's noticeable difference between people poking fun at themselves and outsiders mocking them. Murderbot is, IMO, very clearly the former; this is pretty noticeable if you compare how right-wing sci-fi would/has portrayed a similar group of characters.
I'd also note that it paints an extremely rosy picture of the Preservation Alliance society as being a functionally utopian society with complete abundance of core needs and functionally zero crime.
(are we sure the author isn't a closeted pro-capitalist?)
I think it's more that insiders don't realize how ridiculous they look to people who don't share their assumptions and blindspots.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
24d ago
When people say Trump is fascist, you should take them seriously, not literally :V
Clearly strikes me as descriptive, rather than normative.
It's not. Have you seen the context that quote is from? It's Miller justifying the US trying to strongarm Denmark into surrendering Greenland. It's not simply a bare description*, much as its proponents try to present it as such. It's a belief that power entitles you to do what you want, and that acting with scruples or restraint is weakness and stupidity. It is also why they become so petulant and angry when threats fail to secure submission - it's a violation of their understanding of order of the world and why the Trump administration is soft on Russia and China. It's why they seem to have miscalculated so badly with Iran. The IRI was supposed to be reminded of our overwhelmingly power and be awed into submission. Now they're fumbling because it turns out that "might makes right" is actually an extremely naive way of looking at the world.
"Bully worship" is an extremely apposite label. One of the reasons "bootlicker" has such resonance an insult is that it captures this attitude very effectively.
Last i checked, if you fired the first shot, you are the one starting the war.
I am once again reminded that right-wing political violence is completely invisible to many. Either it's excused because it's carried out under a veneer or law enforcement or the perpetrator is written off as a crazy person who in no way reflects on the right more generally. Or the perp gets a pardon. The history of political violence in America did not begin on 9/10/25.
*even as a bare description it is wrong, but it has the appeal of sounding superficially correct and looking like edgy truth-telling.
There are an amazing number of people responding with, essentially, "shit happens in war", seemingly with giving any further thought to questions like "can we make shit happen less in war?", "does what we're trying to achieve justify this shit?", and "should the fact that shit happens in war make us more cautious about going to war?"
Christ
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