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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.
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 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?
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.
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