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Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced today he was resigning over the war in Iran.
What's most significant is that Kent is not a Marjorie Taylor-Green or a Thomas Massie. Kent served in the U.S Special Forces and in eleven combat tours, mostly Iraq, and then retired an became a paramilitary officer with the CIA. His wife was killed in Syria. Kent had a very public feud with the Nick Fuentes faction of America First which was started by Kent's public denunciation of Fuentes.
Kent was clearly amenable to an aspirational "middle ground" with respect to the tenuous America First/Israel Alliance, which is why he was targeted by the Groypers in the first place. Nobody can accuse him of hiding some deep-seeded Jew hatred because of his long and recent history of supporting Israel, this seems to be a genuine defection. This defection is highly significant and the first time a high-ranking official has described any of these conflicts in these terms.
There may be more shoes to drop/more resignations. My own criticism of Kent's resignation is that he tries to absolve Trump of blame, when Trump is neck-deep in all of this.
This resignation comes as the same day the Guardian reports that a UK security adviser present at US-Iran talks believed a deal was within reach immediately before the US/Israeli strikes on Iran.
Look, I think we can all agree that this open letter about nation-state disinformation is completely credible until 50 more intelligence experts sign it.
But more seriously, why can't this person just read too much 4chan?
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I don’t know enough about the guy to know if he is doing this for principled reasons, but this makes me confident that the war is going very badly and that the administration is either going to capitulate, or be forced to endure a long and costly affair. In either case it’s good for this individuals long term career to distance himself from the whole affair. Getting ahead and blaming Israel is also smart: if the conflict goes poorly blaming Israel is a political no brainer for any possible democrat and maybe even (with greater difficulty due to the evangelicals in the coalition) for a republican.
A US war going "very badly" with a power like Iran looks like losing a carrier, or an air wing, or multiple surface ships. All of which could still potentially happen (surface ships are pretty vulnerable to mines in particular).
Remember that the US has had several ships severely damaged in past operations in the Gulf (USS Samuel B. Roberts, USS Princeton, USS Stark) and lost a number of aircraft in the Persian Gulf War. Those sorts of losses are table stakes for a big war like this and the fact that the US hasn't seemed to lose a single aircraft to Iranian fire indicates that the war is going better from a purely military point of view than e.g. the Persian Gulf war.
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Does anyone have a place where people in favor of this war are discussing it? I’m struggling to find anybody who genuinely thinks it’s a good idea.
I think there are likely a bunch of us that are just casually in favour or on the fence. (While I'm worried about the fallout, I am always going to tilt in the direction of good old Team America deposing dictators.) Probably not too many people who are rabidly gung-ho about the whole thing and willing to argue it extensively, so they're going to lose out in wordcount to our local antisemites who will take any excuse to post multipage slop essays about the joooooooz. It's a shame, but the ideals of free speech do require a little bit of sacrifice.
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Zionist Twitter. Asmongold streams.
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I mean support is still reasonably broad. I saw stats suggesting somewhere in the range of 80-85 percent of Republicans are down.
Most of the internet continues to have an anti-Trump/Republican bias that doesn't change. So you'd expect to have trouble with pro-war discourse.
Witch havens like here are stuffed with people with deeply unconventionally views (die hard anti-intervention folks and anti-jew posters for one) and are not representative of the general Republican field.
I'm personally for the war and found the experience supporting it here to be not very rewarding, I imagine plenty of others have similar thoughts.
I for one would be quite interested in why you support the war. The information environment is bad right now, so I value getting perspectives which disagree from my own that I am quite confident aren't from a bot.
There are several justifications for this war that strike me as plausible, but I have no idea which ones (if any) are load-bearing among supporters e.g.
Are any of these close?
"Support" is a strong word. I've not sworn my life and honor to the Plannisters, but I've certainly learned not to bet against them. There's a lot of room for potential upside here, between positioning and maneuvering against China, the Middle East, knocking out a Russian ally, scaring and embarrassing our "allies", testing out next-gen combat, the fact that Iran just generally totally fucking sucks and has been calling for the death of my people for half a century, etc. It's not stuff I was chomping at the bit for, but I can see the logic, but it costs me little to wait and see if the administration can bring it home. If they can, it would be a hell of a coup, a lightsaber to a Gordian knot.
And maybe they can't. But frankly, there isn't a single politician in America I'd give better odds to than Donald Trump.
And on a more cold, personal level: I've been saying for decades that we should have just flattened every government building in Afghanistan and littered the country with pamphlets in every goat-herder language known to our anthropologists saying "If your government still offends us, we're just going to come back and do it again and again, so regularly you can plant your crops by the sight of our bombers smiting you. Repent or die. - Sincerely, the Fist of God (AKA: America)."
So I'm kind of curious to test the "can't do Islamic regime change by air power" hypothesis.
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Yes some combination of those, to expand on a few reasons to go about this (not that I believe in all of them):
-The expression of the power of the United States has been inappropriately curtailed for too long, the most straightforward example of this is the Russian invasion of Ukraine which likely only happened because of the Biden administrations weakness. Showing off reaffirms the U.S.'s superpower status and likely prevents all kinds of bad outcomes. China's fans like to make claims but realistically every military in the world is shitting their pants looking at this and Venezuela. Later losing for political reasons will not change this. The whole world benefits from U.S. lead global stability and this affirms our capacity.
-Israel can probably be considered something of an albatross but it is a key ally, and was one when we needed it. We shouldn't abandon them. Additionally coordinating with Israel and the other countries in the area is more or less bringing everyone in the region into the U.S.'s sphere of influence. Unclear if this will be durable once Iran and proxies are gone, but it is a thing, and the world is probably better off if we transform the religious regimes into klepto-authoritarian ones. This also is a boon against China, as Venezuela was.
-Oil (long term stability, not short term obviously).
-Morals. The death of the protestors and general oppression is not good. Anyone who thinks they would stop the Nazis but isn't stopping Iran needs to be asking themselves hard questions. And - while it is deeply tied to his ego (b/c ignoring threats), people who know Trump will seriously and probably correctly point out that killing the protestors made him mad and is a big part of what made him pull the trigger. Lots of people treat Trump like a character and not an actual person, but he has been consistent in this, and he is of a generation that that was deeply impacted by the hostage crisis.
-We've been (essentially) at war with Iran for decades, to some extent increasingly. Asymmetric options like terrorism, cyberattacks, drones are only going to be increasing in danger. The country has threatened to kill our president. People with intelligence backgrounds I know have frequently emphasized Iran as one of the biggest threats, and people who played in the sandbox have a lot of problems with them. You don't let someone keep punching you indefinitely, especially if they are probing for the right spot for David to kill Goliath.
-Nukes. Absolutely fucking not. Regardless of how close they were in reality their response to being attacked makes it pretty clear that Iran actually getting nuclear weapons would represent an existential threat to global stability. People emphasize closeness but that isn't the right question, when can we actually stop them is the right question, how close is just political justification.
-Speaking of when is the right time, it's pretty likely now. The regime is going through a lot of political and economic turmoil and waiting might have panned out, but if they survive the clearly increasing missile and drone capacity pretty readily substitutes for Nukes in a MAD scenario (at least for the global economy). If our intervention ends out being bad, then that's evidence waiting while they get stronger would have been even worse.
Importantly how real the threat of the last two is is not going to be something people will actually be able to know unless a credible leak happens, and likely only in the affirmative.
Ultimately this is pretty likely to be a "bad idea" in the sense it is going to be a shit show, but that doesn't mean it isn't necessary to do the hard thing.
... man, why can't the executive just say that. If this is a considered decision to embroil ourselves in a shitshow because the alternative is worse, that's understandable. What worries me is when the Trump admin doesn't show signs of awareness that it's going to be a shitshow.
Or maybe Trump posted something coherently explaining the reasoning on Truth Social and I just missed it.
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I'd think it was a good idea, if we were going to secure access to Iranian oil and cut off Chinese access. My view is that we might be (but aren't definitely) heading towards a major global conflict along the lines of WW3 and securing resources and regions ahead of time is one of our smartest options. But I don't think that's what we're doing here.
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America and Israel bombed Iran and they immediately started bombing other countries, so what does Saville Roberts know anyways?
Kent's resignation might be meaningful for all sorts of political-coalitional reasons but it begs the question -- who was right, Joe Kent or Donald Trump? In other words, is Iran a threat to America's interests, or only a threat to Israel's interests? Well, I don't think that's a very hard question. There's a new rising right-wing that is totally isolationist and really would pull out of the Middle East entirely but Trump has never been of that school and we don't need to resort to The Israel Lobby for an explanation. Theocratic Iran is one of America's deepest enemies. They fund Hezbollah and Hamas, they threaten America constantly. "Iran is not a threat" has never been Trump's position, even if it's the position of some of those allied with MAGA, and in this case it's not hard to decide who has the better argument.
I see these circular claims being repeated in every single thread on the topic, multiple times, and I'm really tired of it.
Well, this is a broad question. A lot of things can be a 'threat', and a lot of things can be of 'interest' to America. But how do you substantiate your point that it is?
Theocratic Iran is one of America's deepest enemies.
They fund Hezbollah and Hamas
They threaten America constantly.
There's no substance or reason to any of this except the threat of Hezbollah and Hamas, which has lead to American casualties in the region. So lets dig into that.
America is in the region chasing its yet to be substantiated 'interest'. This presence causes a response from Iran. I.e. allegedly funding proxies like Hezbollah, Houthis and Hamas.
My problem here is that this Iranian response is used as a reason to be against Iran without ever demonstrating that the Iranian response is unreasonable or unwarranted. Since the 'interest' America is seeking and the means by which they go about securing it are never explored.
For instance, back in the 50's, Iran, an allegedly democratic and sovereign nation, wants to nationalize its oil production. (We can discuss the validity of that want, but as far as I can tell the original demands weren't unreasonable) America and the UK want to prevent this. So they stage a coup and replace the democratically elected Iranian government with an authoritarian puppet. The Iranian people eventually revolt and the puppet government is replaced with a particularly ideologically fervent strain of Islam.(The rise of which is not entirely unpredictable given it was the strongest organization on the ground after the puppet government had repressed most explicitly political alternatives) The existence of this new religious government is then used to justify backing Iraq in invading Iran.
It is then, 3 years into a brutal war where America is a direct backer of a foreign nation invading Iran, that had already cost over a hundred thousand Iranian lives, that American forces are targeted by alleged Iran proxies in the Beirut attacks.
With this being said, can someone now remark on the validity of this narrative, what a reasonable Iranian response to these events would have looked like, and what the actual interests of the US is in the region and how that interest is served by continuing this particular strategy. Because it seems like we are neck deep in sunk cost and past mistakes that keep compounding with every further action being taken.
Like, if the Iranian government doesn't fall in the next three weeks, and if it isn't replaced with a regime that is anti-China, Russia and North Korea but also pro-Israel, what is the gain?
Do you think attacking the merchant ships of third party nations either directly or via proxies is "reasonable?"
Wouldn't you agree that, at a minimum, the US has an interest in preventing people from attacking US merchant and naval vessels and that to the extent that Iran supports and assists the Houthis the US has an interest in preventing such future support and aid?
I'm pretty much in favor of a realistic and restrained foreign policy and have concerns about this war but even the most pacifistic and isolationist American presidents have sent the Navy to blow up the things of people who messed with our shipping and they were correct to do so.
Destroying Iran's capability to effectively wage a conventional war while also forging a regional anti-Iranian coalition comprised of everyone Iran shot ballistic missiles at seems like a benefit, particularly if the United States would benefit from withdrawing its force presence in the Middle East but is unwilling to do so while hostile actors might target US regional friends, US shipping, etc.
I have my doubts that things will play out this neatly but if we actually thwap Iran and Israel can play nice with all of its new friends we might actually get something like regional peace and perhaps the US can even more or less stop playing in the sandbox, maybe.
Even if that doesn't happen, it will likely give the US greater freedom in the future from a force allocation/contingency planning perspective.
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America supported Iraq while Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran resulting in 50,000+ casualties. Iran did not respond in kind on religious grounds, which is ironic; they may have used them years into the war less extensively, but the evidence for this is iffy (no UN verification)
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They were always a threat to America's interests, just a matter of "how much." Israel aside, they've funded terrorism, provided arms to Russia for use in Ukraine, and threatened to build nukes. But they've been doing that kind of thing for decades. The real question is if the water's gotten hot enough for the frog to jump out. As Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq have shown us, war can be expensive and fail to actually get you the thing you wanted despite "winning" it. Or just make the problem worse.
I'm not crying for the Ayatollah, but I'm not seeing the plan of what we're actually going to accomplish by the end of this or how. Mostly I'm just noting the irony of Don the Dove. And laughing at how Trump can't get any of America's allies on board after calling them deadbeats.
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Which Donald Trump? The one who said starting a war with Iran is done because you're bad at deal making?. Or the Trump who promised on election night we would have no new wars? Is it the Trump who claimed last year that Iran nuclear efforts were set back multiple years from the strikes then but now they're just weeks away as Israel always claims? How about the Trump who claims we already won and the strait is open?
Which one is right here?
Those groups hate the US, but we're on the other side of the planet with much better armies. Especially Hamas, the idea that they meaningfully threaten the average American at all is laughable. Hamas is an Israeli problem, and if it wasn't for the immense Jew lobby we would be easily dismissing it as normal middle east nonsense.
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I'm not certain that one can meaningfully separate these; to allow, through inaction, the destruction of Israel would invite a metric arse-load of bad karma on a country already on shaky ice after the MS St Louis.
I think it is extremely telling that this is the level of argument you have to make to support this war or the pro-Zionist position. Israel and America's interests are deeply opposed here, and to pretend otherwise forces you to descend to this honestly laughable standard of argument.
Yea. One can go full John Hagee style Christian Zionist and find in the Bible proof texts showing that Jews are forever chosen people and God will bless forever everyone who blesses Israel.
To use religious arguments based on Buddhism or Hinduism to support Israel is rather ... unorthodox.
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Well, from the Guardian article you link:
Ok, so Iran offered this great deal where they concede on everything except the most important point that proves they're actually following through on their concessions -- why won't mean evil Donald Trump and the Israel Lobby do a deal?
The most important point was on enrichment and the treatment of the highly enriched stockpile, which Iran had conceded and was why those involved in the process, other than Witkoff and Kushner, thought a deal was within reach. And diplomats involved with the talks said Witkoff and Kushner were regarded as Israeli assets. So yeah the consensus among everyone involved except Witkoff/Kushner seems to have been:
"Iran will stop enrichment they just won't allow inspectors in their country to prove they aren't doing enrichment. (They can't do enrichment anyways because US bombs destroyed their capacity to do enrichments, but bombs don't work and are a bad idea.)"
Please explain why this is evidence that Kushner and Witkoff were incorrect, that Iran is a good boy who was turning his life around, and that we should actually take the word of an anonymous official in a Guardian Article that Witkoff and Kushner are instead traitors manipulating America for their own sectarian benefit.
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Trump of course immediately goes to his classic method of "just insult anyone who disagrees with you on anything" https://x.com/TheCalvinCooli1/status/2033939188064702746
Either he knowingly put someone "weak on security" in charge of counterterrorism efforts, or he's a lying bullshitter who just makes shit up about you if you ever upset him.
Kent goes above and beyond trying to paint over it being the president's own choices and he still gets treated this way, cause of course.
Huh what interesting names to be Israeli assets, crazy coincidence I suppose. I wonder if Witkoff was wearing the pager he was apparently given by Mossad during these discussions with Trump
Isn't this what Trump and Trump supporters actually want you to think though – that Trump is a lying bullshitter who will dunk on you if you upset him, regardless of the truth/falsity/merits of the case? That way he can build a coalition that maintains loyalty and enables him to use his bully pulpit to ram things through in a way others could not, because they are afraid to oppose him. That is how his whole operation works. If he didn't lie and bullshit, it would be possible for his opponents to use reason and evidence to combat his insults, which would defang them significantly. They have to be regarded as insult theatre, not grounded in reality, to act as effective in/out-group markers.
I would have thought that MAGA supporters would at least tacitly accept this characterisation, though I confess they sometimes surprise me.
I disagree about characterizing it as lying, but yeah, the simple statement that his insults don't really mean much, and are more reflective of whether he perceived their target as loyal or disloyal than of their actual merits, is uncontroversial.
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Yes because that's how that works. What is Trump supposed to say, "Maybe Kent has a point maybe I have been duped and lied to?" Don't be ridiculous. Trump's criticism is extremely mild here, which is about what you deserve when you leave with a big dramatic announcement while at least not criticizing the boss in harsh terms. But what exactly did you expect? Kent could have left quietly, he didn't have to put out a big statement saying, Donald Trump made a huge mistake, let's consume a news cycle with a high-profile resignation about how Donald Trump made a huge mistake. You resign in situations like this for your own sense of integrity and maybe the hope that this stores up goodwill for some other political endeavor in the future. That's all priced in to what it means to resign for reasons of conscience. If anything "he was weak on security" is about on the same level as "Trump was duped" -- which is to say this is not so far an escalation on Trump's part and this is just how men disagree with each other.
How about "Kent is allowed to have his disagreements, but I believe he is wrong here" instead of saying that Kent is so terrible at the job Trump nominated him for that it was always known, even before the nomination. There are a lot of ways to part in business and government without being an asshole are there not?
This isn't a dichotomy between "say nothing" or "insult your former employee". Kent was respectful and in return he gets trash talked and smeared.
Quite obviously Trump is a total asshole though so he is hardly going to respond in the way that you or I would prefer. It's not unreasonable to criticise him on these grounds, but to criticise him for lying, bullying, being an asshole, believing in conspiracy theory, not being long-term, etc etc is simply going to be water off a duck's back to his supporters because those traits are his entire thing.`
The only way to get through is to show that he is weak.
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Trump is in full bullshitting mode, lying and contradicting himself every other sentence. Yesterday he said he was preparing to announce a grand naval Coalition to re-open the Straits, today he says nobody is coming and he doesn't need them. Yesterday he said he talked to a former President who disclosed to Trump that the president regretted not attacking Iran like Trump did. A claim that was promptly disputed by every single living President. Most likely he was talking to AI George Washington, who happened to completely agree with Glenn Beck's support for attacking Iran.
This is just "he said she said". None of the presidents even denied it as such, it was just statements from their aides. Do you feel even a little dishonest characterizing this in the maximally negative way while yourself complaining about bullshit and lies?
I kind of assumed it wasn't a president of the USA.
Funniest option is if he was talking about Maduro.They should really watch the WBC final togehter.
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