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Important to note how victory has a thousand parents, defeat is an orphan. Everyone seems to be against this war now, or is leaking that they were against it. Vance was against it. General Caine was against it. The CIA was against it. The blame is getting shoved off onto Trump and Netanyahu, who surely deserve it... I can't help but think that others were in favour and have since jumped ship though.
I also claim vindication in my argument with a self-declared Iran policy expert: https://www.themotte.org/post/3467/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/401256?context=8#context
It's so very rare that we can quickly get a resolution to a political debate like this... Unless of course we get a second act of this war.
Trump, Netanyahu, Kushner, Witkoff. Can't even blame the CIA for this one (actually even before Iraq the CIA was resisting the WMD Intel coming through the OSP). Not enough blame is put on Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Laura Loomer. If you watch Mark Levin it's a no-brainer, and Trump watches Mark Levin. They are foreign agents, they should be registered under FARA and every time they talk about Israel a mandatory FARA disclosure should appear on the screen.
Ted Cruz should probably be considered a foreign agent too, recall that speech he made to some to some group of persecuted Christians in the Middle-East, he couldn't resist making it all about Jews and getting booed out by them. Or the part about how he said how his motivation in running for office was to be the most pro-Israel senator.
Trump himself went on air and bemoaned about how Israel used to control Congress and rightfully so but now it's changed so much, Israel barely has any control! Then the usual suspects called it an anti-semitic trope...
The whole thing is tragicomedic: one part farce, two parts horror.
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One of the sudden stomach cramp moments of realizing how bad things were was when Trump said it was Pete Hegseth's idea, that Pete spoke up first. That is atypical of Trumpian dialectics.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-publicly-tells-hegseth-he-was-the-first-to-push-for-iran-war-you-said-lets-do-it/ar-AA1ZgNwp
Please post the full video beyond a stripmined headline repurposed for twitter because I promise it does not suggest what you're implying it does.
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Yeah, that was a pretty bad sign. Also Elon not talking about it after day one. Elon is usually first to stick his head into a threshing machine with these things, I recall him bragging on day 1 about how Grok said the decapitation strike was a good move whereas Claude and GPT ummed and ahhed diplomatically. He changed the flag of Iran on twitter too to the monarchist flag. And given starlink and such, he was deeply involved with operations in Iran pre-war. But after day 1 he wasn't saying much of anything about the war.
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Subordinates are always in a tricky position when they disagree with their boss, because any administration, be it government, military, corporate, or anything else, should present a unified front. If things get bad enough, you can always resign, but that's the nuclear option.
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