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Iran war: pragmatic comments

 

  • The first problem with Trump’s attack on Iran is that it expands precedent for the President to exercise relatively unlimited foreign policy power. The current Congress should push back for Constitutional reasons but will not for political reasons; the Supreme Court has also shown tremendous deference to MAGA. The first politics is local politics, and the local politics is that it’s bad for America when Presidents initiate armed conflict without Congressional support and based on personal judgment.

  • Trump’s administration was testing a number of justifications with the public through several outlets in the lead-up to this attack. Examples: Iran still wants nuclear weapons (I thought we set them way back), Iran has missiles that can reach Europe (Iran isn’t nearly the threat to Europe that Russia is), Iran is repressive (among many other nations), and others. Ultimately, Trump senses that Iran is relatively weak and he is looking for a win. His administration has no intention of telling us their real reasons–they’re just testing different messages to push through a few news cycles.

  • The stated goal of this attack is regime change. I wish I had any confidence that we would see the current bad guys replaced with the good guys. The Trump administration has made it clear that they don’t oppose bad guys if those bad guys are ready to “make deals” where Trump and his friends will benefit. There’s a strong chance that the prior regime in Iran is replaced with a new set of autocrats ready to “make deals” with this administration.

  • People will remain uncertain about the moral standing of this attack because the Iranian regime is not a sympathetic character. If Iran’s military and leadership had spontaneously combusted, Americans (myself included) would not have seen it as a tragedy. Watching a movie, we may smile when a bully is hit in the head with a rock; in real life we need to decide whether we want children throwing rocks on a whim.

  • We have seen protests in Iran and the population has been shifting away from the fundamentalist regime. Good for them. Perhaps in one, five, or ten years, regime change was inevitable, from the grassroots. Now this administration will deny that any such future would have been possible without their intervention.

  • My favorite part of our attack on Iran is that Iran has been a major weapons supplier to Russia during Russia’s terrorist campaign in Ukraine. Iran’s shipments are likely over. However, Russia was already in the process of shifting that production to Russia, and continues to receive arms from China and North Korea, so I’m not holding my breath that Russia will face meaningful shortages.

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