Kinetic illegality

The Iraq war was illegal, and a massive collection of war crimes, but at least the Bush administration went to great lengths over many months to construct what lawyers call a “colorable” argument that it wasn’t. The most salient feature of the Iran war is that nobody involved in launching the war has made the slightest attempt to provide a fig leaf for its flagrant criminality.

This is why I have a certain impatience with arguments over whether this or that act within the war is a war crime on wholly independent grounds — that is, would be a war crime even if the war itself had some shred of legality or justification. I understand that this is an important legal distinction from the perspective of the individual commanders and soldiers who are carrying out their orders, but the whole thing is just a gigantic crime from beginning to end, and it’s startling — this is a rhetorical phrase, it actually isn’t — that these massive crimes are being carried out in public with almost no discussion of the fact that they are what they are (Again, the most striking feature here is the absence of any semblance of attempt to justify what is both morally and legally mass murder on a vast scale).

Commenter Brandunaware has a good summation of where this is all probably headed:

The desalination attacks on both sides are horrible for multiple reasons. They’re war crimes and humanitarian atrocities, especially attacks against Iran, which is not positioned to be able to repair anything or make alternative arrangements.

But unless Trump is removed somehow things are only going to get worse. Potentially much worse. Trump has always wanted to use a nuclear weapon. He’s impulsive, stupid, and will become narcissistically desperate as none of his ideas work and his popularity and reputation take further hits. More and more people will call him out on the global stage and he will become more and more enraged. Will he decide to pull that trigger in order to defeat Iran once and for all? I still think the chances are pretty low but I definitely do not think they’re zero.

But even if he doesn’t do that, the bombing campaign will become more vicious and more war crimey in an attempt to end this and establish dominance. Hegseth is clearly itching to commit more war crimes and who is going to stop him?

I’d say Republicans have to step up and stop this lunacy, but it’s a group of cultists and the dregs of humanity. Many of them have apocalyptic views. They don’t have the intelligence, moral fiber, or strength of character until things get much, much, worse. It’s already too late to unring this bell but it’s not too late to make things much, much, worse. If people think rising gas prices are the worst it can get they are fooling themselves.

I hope I am wrong and there’s some path out that I don’t see. Maybe Bibi can convince Trump to declare victory and move on after Israel’s strategic objectives are met. Maybe I’m wrong about the Republicans. Maybe a Trump health crisis ends his presidency. But what’s the road to deescalation here?

The stakes of the last election were literally “put a demented narcissist criminal in charge of the United States with no limits on his power” and it was treated as an election about egg prices and whether Harris was the right person for the job.

Trump 1 going as “well” as it did (and it was a disaster in many ways) was a result of the US burning through a lot of resources, including the last of the Republican old guard’s ability to restrain the new guard lunatics. It was obvious at the time that Trump 2 would get worse, especially after the insurrection.

It’s like riding a bus and having everyone vote for the bus driver to be thrown off so a tweaker in the throes of a meth binge can drive instead. Absolute madness. And we’ve already run through a school yard killing almost 200 girls and the people representing the other passengers still want the tweaker to drive!

Trump is a demented narcissistic criminal, and he is certainly going to be increasingly enraged by the failure of this vast series of crimes to improve his extreme unpopularity, which they haven’t. For what it’s worth I’ve heard third-hand from contacts in the military that Trump is still mulling some sort of “boots on the ground” intervention, although characteristically there’s been no real planning or preparation for this. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some basically symbolic bullshit, in which special forces are deployed to find Iran’s purported stockpile of enriched uranium, or some similar wild goose chase, as Trump becomes increasingly desperate to generate the positive headlines that he craves more than anything else in the world. But nobody knows where this insane escalation of a pointless and illegal war is going to end up.