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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6142 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced today he was resigning over the war in Iran.

President Trump,

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Directory of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

....

Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that you should strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make that mistake again.

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.

Iran had also made an offer of what the mediators described as an economic bonanza, with the US being given the chance to participate in a future civil nuclear programme.

In return, nearly 80% of the economic sanctions on Iran would have been lifted, including assets frozen in Qatar, a demand Iran made in the 2025 talks.

The Oman mediator believed the offer of zero stockpiling of highly enriched uranium was a breakthrough that meant an agreement was within reach.

Accounts differ on whether Kushner left the talks giving the impression Trump would welcome what had been agreed, or that the US negotiators knew it would take something massive to persuade Trump that war was not the best option.

One diplomat with knowledge of the talks said: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.”

The Guardian’s report that Powell was in the room during the talks was cited in parliament on Tuesday by Liz Saville Roberts, an MP for the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru party, during an update by Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper.

“It appears diplomatic options were still viable and there was no evidence of an imminent missile threat to Europe or of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Saville Roberts told Cooper.

“Does she therefore believe a negotiated path between Iran and the US was still possible at that time and, if so, surely that means that the initial US and Israeli strikes were premature and illegal?”

Cooper responded: “The UK did provide support for negotiations and diplomatic processes around the nuclear discussions.

“We did think that was an important track and we did want it to continue. That is one of the reasons for the position we took on the initial US strikes that took place.”

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.

  1. Iran was getting quite close to nukes, and negotiations were not working.
  2. Iran killed a lot of protestors recently, and the delay in military action was just because it takes time to get carrier groups across the planet.
  3. We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy (or even "actually, we still think it'll be easy").
  4. Iran has been a destabilizing factor across the middle east for decades, and we'd have to deal with it eventually, and now is a better time than most because [reasons]
  5. We are allied with Israel, and Israel attacked Iran, therefore we had to enter alongside them in order to maintain the alliance.
  6. Something else entirely.

Are any of these close?

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.

"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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