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Notes -
To sort of echo Daste's recent post, it's remarkable the lack of threads for the ongoing conflict given its historic implications for Culture War, but I'll keep the ball rolling for another update/call to register your predictions:
It's very possible the next few days will be a turning point in history. I guess I will register the prediction of Trump TACO given any other alternative is too bad for the world to fathom. Yesterday Iran did enormous damage to the towns in Southern Israel hosting Israeli nuclear infrastructure (which actually does not fall under the oversight of the IEA in contrast with Iran's program to this point). The notion that Iran is incapable of following through with its avowed retaliation is bunk, given the recent strikes on Qatar gas facilities that will have long-term impacts on global supply of natural gas.
So what's going to happen tomorrow? All of the public signals point to Trump making the decision to totally destroy Iranian infrastructure in order to destroy the country. But Iran won't back down because it would be the end of the regime. So who's going to blink?
This one is tough, because we finally had a security apparatus retarded enough to back Iran up to the wall without actually having the capacity to make it stick: If they (Iran) don't make trump publicly eat shit and look like a bitch, then they are long term fucked. They signal that anyone whose dick is long enough can come in and fuck them, and they won't actually do the thing that they always threaten to do.
It's do or die for them now, and as a cherry on the cake: I imagine having the global freedom democracy western values christlike love country doing strategic bombing on them would go a long, long way to reconciling the public to the regime: "Observe the compassion of the people who were going to come and free you. Your paranoid suspicions weren't paranoid after all; they do hate you and they do think you are less than human."
Trump on the other hand did a no look walk across the street like a badass and comically fell into an open manhole surrounded by flashing lights. Makes you miss ol' Donnny "I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think, and, well, I assume it's what I said.". Makes Rummy "I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty." look competent. We went from one historic brains genius foreign policy Republican directly to another with an 8 year interregnum of neoliberal technocracy and a 4 year interruption of senile pattern holding.
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