Our current state.
โIt is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.โ
โThucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, Book IV
I don't think this phenomenon of responding violently to disrespect is specific to a race. It's a human phenomenon. It's a defense of what we hold most dear, our identity or our conceptualization of who we are. In a, perhaps archaic word, our honor. The military understands this, at least tacitly, and puts great effort into tying its members identity to the team. This is why a Soldier will sacrifice themself for the team, because that Soldiers identity is that team. In the past, individuals risked their life in a duels to protect their identity, their honor. Today, for the majority of us, society itself secures our identity, our honor. But in marginalized areas, this is not the case. This is why preserving respect is so emphasized in communities on the edge of society, whether it's immigrant Irish communities 150 years ago, Italian communities 100 years ago, or inner-city communities today.
@ggreenwald@ChrisMurphyCT@amyklobuchar One has to wonder is the poster every criticized the "pallets of cash" line used against Obama as that money was also Iran's. I doubt it. Hypocrisy is just too easy.
@TrumpWarRoom@VP Doesn't matter where the money originated, the combined force is giving money to Iran to pay for war damages. That is the definition of reparations, something the US has never been forced to do, until this debacle.
@AlexGodofsky@charlescwcooke No. Reagan ran on hope but it was hope to build an improved America based on belief in ourselves. Since Clinton, the hope created by our Presidents, including Trump, was hope to avoid something worse.
@treeaston Reagan ran on the "bright shining city on the hill." That was a form of hope from belief in ourselves. Obama ran on hope but that hope was based on contempt for ourselves. Trump has ran on hope but that hope came from outrage.
@JustTheNews@SecWar And p.s., he did this AFTER insulting these allies, attacking them economically and threatening to attack them militarily. These clowns are so obtuse you know they live in a tiny, opaque, echo chamber.
He thought war was easy and he didn't need any support. He thought our NATO allies were vassals. He thought he could demand their support without consultation nor consideration. He found out that NATO is a defensive alliance of nations who have put themselves in harms way to support America far more than he has done. He found out that are sovereign nations, not the lapdogs he surrounds himself with in Washington.
NATO has held faith to their obligations far more than our serial adulterer frat boy SecDef has done for his wives and children.
Typical keyboard general gibberish. Grab a cool sounding phrase, fail to understand it, but use it to try to sound smarter than you are.
In relation to correlation of forces, the poster's ignorance causes him to miss the key point, that correlation is the comparison between TWO opponents. In writing, "timeless importance, in any struggle, of clearly perceiving an adversaryโs strengths and vulnerabilities, and assessing how much is at stake in the outcome" he fails to understand that this must be an understanding of the RELATIVE strengths and weaknesses. Sun Tzu did not write just know the enemy and you will never be defeated, but know yourself and the enemy.
The second failure of the poster comes from ignorance of the context of the traditional correlation of forces approach. It was the Soviet SCIENTIFIC framework for warfare. Count and compare numbers as they can be put onto a spreadsheet. Yet war is primarily a contest of will, not numbers. As Napoleon said, "In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one." The scientific correlation approach ignored the intangible aspects of war as they cannot be listed as numbers.
Commiting these two errors is the sign of an amateur and is what Washington did to put us into this debacle. I guess the poster is now demonstrating an additional sign of the amateur, failure (or refusal) to understand what really happened and arguing to do it again, without change.
@AriFleischer@ScotsFyre Let's pray to God that when Iran War III occurs, we don't have these incompetent amateurs in charge nor the keyboard generals from The Cult present.
People who think Vance is a really effective communicator seem to miss the fact that he routinely just makes up the arguments of fictional critics and then DESTROYS the strawmen.
@TRHLofficial Im sure the neo-cons are laughing their asses off at MAGA and the desperate efforts to misdirect from this absolute fubar. How are the neo-isolationists doing today?
JUST NOW: The Trump administration has reached a Memorandum of Understanding with the Reflecting Pool, allowing it to continue to produce algae and promising to not dump any more hydrogen peroxide into it for the next 15 years.
Over 3500 people dead in this conflict. Over 350 Americans injured. And this bozo says it was a worthy "roll of the dice." These types are the "civilian pukes" that drive military irrate as they play games with our lives.
It was said by many, as soon as this conflict started, that Iran won by not losing, primarily because geopolitics is not a one hour Monday night television show. Well, those people have been proven right, something that will become more evident as Iran rapidly reconstitutes.
@realannapaulina@WesleyHuntTX Slap as big a fig leaf on it as you want, $300 billion to rebuild Iran is reparations. It's what the losing side gives the winning side.