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Mistakes and civilian casualties will inevitably happen in war, but this case does still highlight some major issues going on right now.
Tradeoffs in pursuit of a goal are more acceptable if there's an actual stated and agreeable goal. The Trump admin is consistently giving the American people the runaround as for why the war started, what they hope to achieve, and what the end conditions are. And they.keep hinting that the tradeoffs will be bigger than they're letting on like Lindsey Graham basically saying that South Carolina citizens can be sent to fight. Vague ever growing tradeoffs for vague goals. Especially when it's clear part of the reason for vagueness is so that they can declare victory and goal achievement whenever they want (regardless of the ground conditions) and to hide how Israel led us into this. After all if they actually gave a clear goal then there would be a metric to judge them by if they fail.
That civilian casualties are going to happen doesn't mean that every case of civilians dying is acceptable. In the same way that just because people crash cars sometimes from basic mistakes doesn't make drunk driving ok. The problem is that there's no public trust that a real serious investigation will take place and accountability would be had under this admin if it was closer to the drunk driving equivalent of a callous and avoidable messup.
The war is already extremely unpopular among citizens. The US military accidently killing a bunch of children for something Americans want is just manifestly different than doing it for something Israel wants. The US and our soldiers don't exist to serve the whims of a foreign country's people more than our own people.
Accident or not, it doesn't excuse the bold faced lying that Trump constantly resorts to. No wonder he worried about if he's getting into heaven when he lies as naturally as he breathes. He'll simultaneously claim that Iran must have done it (including the implication that Iran has to tomohawk missiles but only use them for blowing up their own schools for some reason), and then when pushed back on it say that he, the commander in chief, apparently knows nothing about the war he started.
Edit: Forgot to even cover one of the bigger issues, the hypocrisy and twofacedness of the admin. They're essentially trying to pull a "we've always been at war with Eurasia" without even removing the "no to war in Eurasia" propaganda. One interesting effect of Charlie Kirk dying is that all the old stuff stays up, leaving us with stuff like this
This was the mainstream talking point, all the "no war in Eurasia" posters are still up on display for everyone to see. When everyone knows that it is just bold and unashamed lying to their face about the war now, they're gonna be a lot less willing to accept all the tradeoffs like hundreds of kids dying. It's not just me, here's Joe Rogan talking about the betrayal
I see people making this argument everywhere and I’m baffled. The have made it very clear why the war started and what our war goals are. They’ve been holding press conferences every day where they explain it! Proper press conferences, where they actually take questions! It’s like seeing someone argue that we shouldn’t land on the moon because it’s too purple. It’s…it’s obviously not! The Trump admin has not been shy about this! I mean just two days ago Pete had this to say:
I feel like I’m going crazy. People really do love in different worlds.
It's a list written to sound specific but it's incredibly open ended. "Permanently denying Iran nuclear weapons" sounds like it must entail either regime change or a permabombing campaign that goes on forever. If they do a lot of damage to Iran's military structures but entrench its regime and cement its determination to get nuclear weapons, what's permanent about that?
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Are they? my impression has been that the admin has been clear from the beginning about what their intent is and that it has been been CNN MSNBC the BBC et al who have been trying to muddy the waters by claiming that this is all "coming out of nowhere" rather than Trump and Rubio following through on an ultimatum
Yes, but also Trump has been saying a lot of random stuff, which is just Trump being Trump, and "CNN MSNBC the BBS et al" have been pretending there's no way to sort that out.
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People say it for the simple reason that the stated rationale keeps changing, not just from day to day but even within the same day.
Here's some of the examples:
Iran nuclear and navy capabilities
Regime change and helping protestors
Not a regime change
Oh wait no it is a regime change.
Following up Israel who was gonna do the strikes so we had to help them
Actually not the above despite multiple top Republicans saying it, imminent attack from Iran instead.
Some assassination plot against Trump
Uh actually we've always been at war with Iran
"UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!"
Yeah if you isolate anything you can get a reason, but in the greater context they just keep throwing out claims even if they contradict.
It's not like it's just random people confused here, even right wing aligned media like Joe Rogan can't figure out what the actual reasoning is supposed to be. Heck the admin can't even decide if they should call it a war or not.
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