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Trump has known about Kharg Island for 40 years so therefor I should not be skeptical or pessimistic about the still undetermined goal of a plan that would be drawn together by the same institutions that brought us Iraq one and two, Afghanistan, Lybia and Syria.
I'm willing to wait five weeks and be proven wrong. As I said before, worst case scenario they are throwing shit at a wall hoping that it sticks. That doesn't change the underlying contention here. Which is that there is no stated goal with regards to this invasion. So how would one be able to judge the strategic salience of any action?
I think you mean the same institutions that brought us Venezuela. Iraq and Afghanistan began over two decades ago, which is a complete replacement cycle for the US military. Literally thousands of people have no other job than to analyze those conflicts and figure out what went wrong and how to do better.
No, it's the same institutions that brought us Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Made obvious by how vague and obscure everything about this conflict is. Which is one of the problems highlighted in the Afghanistan Papers, but was also intuitively obvious regarding Iraq. Why invade Iraq? Because of 9/11. Except they had nothing to do with 9/11. Well, the WMD's! Except there were none and Saddam had already accepted investigators to confirm they had gotten rid of all of those. Well, the oil! Saddam was already providing regional stability and selling it internationally. I could go on.
The US was using the exact same tactic back then as they are now, except the Venezuelans allow themselves to be bought, whilst the Taliban did not. Iranian officials seem to not be accepting any bribes at a broad scale. So what alternatives do US strategists possess?
We are still waiting on the results of this conflict, but as it stands I see no reason to believe there is anything different going on. A thousand people can analyze a hammer, that won't make it any better at screwing. All we've seen so far is the hammer. I'm still waiting to see the screwdriver.
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