Week One of 2020 and I’m Exhausted!
Great, first week into 2020 and Trump does something nuts.
Are none of you who voted for him exhausted with this madness? It’s like we elected our wacky drunk uncle from the 4th of July picnic. Except in our case he has the most powerful military, the most powerful economy of the most powerful country in history at his fingertips!
And so now instead of just saying he should blow people up, he actually is blowing people up!
Does this not frighten any of you?
Okay, okay, okay, well what about assassinating a general of a country we’re not at war with?
Does that not bother you a teensy, weensy, little bitty bit?
We don’t usually do that.
Can you think of a time where one of our generals was out in public and outright, assassinated by a foreign government?
I’m serious! Can you remember that ever happening?
No, you can’t. Because that is a declaration of war.
“But Dan,” you argue, “the Iranians were attacking our embassy in Iraq and they also had killed an American contractor.”
No, they didn’t.
Iraqis, influenced by certain Iranians did it.
That’s a big freaking difference!
Prior to this all happening Iran had been dealing with protests against it’s government like they hadn’t seen since the original revolution back in the seventies.
Guess who those protests were backed by?
That’s right, America! Us! The U.S. government!
We were winning the propaganda war!
So what did the Iranians do in return? What did they do to distract their population?
They did a little propaganda themselves, but not on our soil, on Iraqi soil. And Trump, our drunk uncle, took the bait.
The Iranian government is unpopular. Defeat from within is a lot more powerful than defeat from the outside. Remember Iraq? Remember Afghanistan? How did those “victories” work out for us?
I was a kid when the Iranian hostage situation went down. I watched Ted Koppel cover it on Nightline every night my folks would allow me to stay awake. And I can understand how even forty years later, there is an unsatiated thirst to “teach” those Iranians a lesson.
But I mean, come on. What does this really gain us?
We are the big guys on the block. We can take out their oil fields. We can take out their infrastructure. We can take out their nuclear facilities.
We can technically beat them. Maybe just like Iraq and Afghanistan we can occupy them.
But what has that gained us?
For all of the billions and billions of dollars those two wars cost, they gained us virtually nothing.
Iraq wants us out of their country. We are about to make a deal with the Taliban, another true terrorist organization, who by the way housed Osama Bin Laden, all so we can extricate ourselves from Afghanistan.
Twenty years later we are going to be right where we started from.
We can kill and in a short time terrorize the entire population of Iran.
But long after we’ve left, and long after we’ve won, and long after we’ve forgotten them, they will be sending their martyrs to crash our planes and to detonate their bombs.
I’m tired of the wacky uncle doing wacky things. I’m tired