Iran War Update: Dumber than You Could Possibly Imagine
By 
Speaking to reporters at the start of a White House meeting with Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, Mr. Trump claimed that Iran was about to attack its neighbors and Israel, and he made the decision to go to war to pre-empt that action. Officials with access to U.S. intelligence have said that Mr. Trump has exaggerated the immediacy of any threat Iran posed to the United States.
“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack,” he said. Asked if Israel had forced his hand, as has been widely reported, he said, “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”
Global stock markets tumbled on Tuesday and the price of oil surged, as the widening conflict in the Middle East sent a shudder through the world economy and American and Israeli officials signaled that their bombing campaign against Iran could last weeks. At the White House, Mr. Trump predicted oil prices would fall once the fighting stopped; Mr. Merz said the high oil prices were damaging the world economy, an argument for ending the war quickly.
Asked who he would like to take over Iran, Mr. Trump gave a strikingly blunt answer. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said. “Now we have another group, they may be dead also, based on reports. “So you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”
This is the stupidest man on the face of the planet. Iran is attacking natural gas production in the Gulf States:
Increased targeting of Gulf Arab States’ oil and natural gas production is part of a clear Iranian strategy to put pressure on those countries to, in turn, create complications for the United States. As the economic pressure builds, the idea is that these countries will seek to end the conflict, and/or that relations with the U.S. will sour. The prospect of major, long-term disruptions in energy exports from the region has global ramifications, as well, which could bring immense external pressure to end the conflict. There is also the aspect of drawing Arab countries into the conflict, which would complicate it politically and militarily. In addition, some energy targets are not as well defended as U.S. bases in the region, for instance, and scoring hits with the now finite weapons Iran has on hand becomes easier.
The soldiers killed in Kuwait were based at Fort Knox. And it looks as if they were utterly unprepared for Iranian attacks.
U.S. troops working at a tactical operations center at a commercial port in Kuwait on Sunday had no warning that a deadly Iranian drone was headed straight toward them.
Flying slow and low to the ground, the one-way attack system evaded U.S. air defenses and hit the Shuaiba port on the Persian Gulf, according to two U.S. officials, killing six American servicemembers and seriously wounding others.
The facility struck was a large trailer with walls protected by concrete slabs, but wasn’t fortified from the top, according to a third person briefed on the attack.
Their deaths highlight the risks posed by Iranian drones to tens of thousands of American military personnel serving in the Middle East after President Trump, who campaigned on bringing U.S. troops home from endless wars in the region, launched a massive military campaign against Iran on Saturday.
Even by modern “If the President does it, it’s legal” standards, the domestic legality of the war is on rough ground:
All told, Trump’s decision to use such broad military force against Iran pushes against the legal limits on his authority in almost characteristic fashion. His apparent international legal arguments lean heavily on permissive U.S. interpretations of when states may resort to the use of force, while his domestic legal arguments seem likely to focus narrowly on the limited risks to U.S. servicemembers without constraining how the president may use military force beneath that high threshold. While neither set of arguments are entirely without precedent, prior presidential administrations have generally approached their limits with a degree of caution; Trump and his advisors are instead leveraging them to the hilt. As in so many other areas, the end result is a clear vision of a president with few hard legal constraints, so long as he does not feel obligated to exercise his legal authority in good faith. Only here, the most severe consequences of these actions are not being felt by Americans, but by individuals in Iran and across the broader Middle East now caught in their wake….
…Instead, by embracing a narrow focus on the threat to U.S. service members, the Trump administration has rendered the nature, scope, and duration test highly permissible. So long as the president can colorably assert that the scale of potential harm to U.S. soldiers will remain below that of a major armed conflict—something that can often be readily accomplished against weaker states by, for example, using air power or special operations personnel that capitalize on superior U.S. military capabilities—the president can claim that nearly any military operation is within his sole legal authority to direct, no matter the other consequences for the United States or the rest of the world.
There’s too much to do the argument justice, so you’re going to have to click the link if you want to understand the whole case.
This shit is exhausting. I know a lot of people who live and work in the Middle East and many of them are now scrambling because the Trump administration made no effort to anticipate or prepare for the blowback from hitting Iran. On the upside, I did seven interviews yesterday which more or less accomplishes my service requirement for the year…