Topic: Israel dragging us into another war
Meta started this discussion 2 weeks ago #133,345
This is America First, right?
Blackest history in the world joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 3 minutes later[^] [v] #1,421,002
You voted for this not me.
Blackest history in the world double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 5 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,003
Google exists. People don’t use it very often.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ivanka+trump+religion
https://www.google.com/search?q=ivanka+trump+religion
Blackest history in the world triple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 7 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,005
You could have chosen the Indian lady!
Anonymous C joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 7 minutes later, 14 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,008
You voted for this, you dumbshit.
Donald Trump joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 3 minutes later, 17 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,009
Donald Trump double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 7 minutes later, 25 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,010
boof joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 28 minutes later, 53 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,016
you, I'm thinking that Netanyahu is up to something in a sneaky manner
Anonymous F joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 2 hours later, 3 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,052
Anonymous G joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 8 hours later, 11 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,080
@1,421,009 (Donald Trump)
Anonymous G double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 52 seconds later, 11 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,081
Anonymous H joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 13 minutes later, 11 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,084
There's probably something worse coming, because of those concentration camps trump is supposedly having built
Anonymous I joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 12 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,087
Status update: 3 us troops are now dead in order to distract from PDF files on PDF files involving PTOUS
Anonymous H replied with this 2 weeks ago, 17 minutes later, 12 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,107
boof replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 14 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,117
Anonymous J joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 22 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,240
@1,421,087 (I)
In the past hour or so some news outlets have started saying four Americans have been killed.
In the past hour or so some news outlets have started saying four Americans have been killed.
boof replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,268
as always, follow the money
Anonymous K joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,286
@previous (boof)
I say the same thing and yet im looked as a delusional tinfoil touch grass nigguh.
but yes all jokes asides: follow it indeed
I say the same thing and yet im looked as a delusional tinfoil touch grass nigguh.
but yes all jokes asides: follow it indeed
Fake anon !ZkUt8arUCU joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 17 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,287
Trump killed Soleimani in January 2020 and there was a decent chance that could have escalated to war if not for covid. Anyone who voted for Trump is getting exactly what they voted for. I hope they are enjoying it.
Anonymous M joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,295
I find it unbelievable how the dumbest white guys insist that Africans have lower IQs on average. It’s amazing how somebody could be convinced an entire race is dumber than they are and then be so dumb they think a pro Israeli billionaire with a Jewish daughter who was best friends with a the most prolific sex trafficker in American history who was also a Jewish billionaire with connections to Israel wouldn’t start a war over Israel’s interest.
At this point, I’m almost starting to believe that Jews really do control white people, because how could you have a big group of people as dumb as this and not take advantage of it? If anything it’s fair game on the Jews part, I can’t even be mad at it. Good for them.
At this point, I’m almost starting to believe that Jews really do control white people, because how could you have a big group of people as dumb as this and not take advantage of it? If anything it’s fair game on the Jews part, I can’t even be mad at it. Good for them.
Anonymous N joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 4 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,298
@1,421,003 (Blackest history in the world)
Ivanka is Jewish, what does that change about Israel dragging the US into another war?
Ivanka is Jewish, what does that change about Israel dragging the US into another war?
Anonymous M replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,299
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 3 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,300
@1,421,295 (M)
> I find it unbelievable how the dumbest white guys insist that Africans have lower IQs on average.
That's what the data shows, if people don't form their beliefs from empirical data, where should they be forming it from?
> I find it unbelievable how the dumbest white guys insist that Africans have lower IQs on average.
That's what the data shows, if people don't form their beliefs from empirical data, where should they be forming it from?
(Edited 10 seconds later.)
Anonymous M replied with this 2 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,301
@previous (N)
I don’t believe the data created by white supremacists who believed that blacks were inferior before they created the data. And you want to know why I don’t believe it? Because I’ve met far too many stupid white people.
I don’t believe the data created by white supremacists who believed that blacks were inferior before they created the data. And you want to know why I don’t believe it? Because I’ve met far too many stupid white people.
Anonymous M double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 3 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,303
Like, you have to understand, the United States was founded on slavery. There are hundreds of years of history of western imperialism that white supremacists need to morally justify. There are only a handful of ways you can do that: you can pretend it didn’t happen, you can pretend it was done in retaliation for something worse, or you can dehumanize the enemy. White people never went to Africa and handed out millions of IQ tests. White people wanted to justify western imperialism, so they created fake data as an attempt to dehumanize black people. All of the statistics that say that blacks have lower IQs than whites are mathematically impossible statistics, it’s not hard to prove that they’re fake.
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 27 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,304
@1,421,301 (M)
Do you even know who conducted the IQ tests?
And the tests are about pattern recognition for abstract problems, how do you think they rigged it?
Do you even know who conducted the IQ tests?
And the tests are about pattern recognition for abstract problems, how do you think they rigged it?
Anonymous N double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 47 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,305
@1,421,303 (M)
Do you even know which organization conducted those tests?
Or are you just assuming all of this, and you have no idea who did it?
Do you even know which organization conducted those tests?
Or are you just assuming all of this, and you have no idea who did it?
Anonymous M replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,306
For example, it’s common I’ll see white supremacists say all African nations have an average IQ of 70. IQ scores aren’t based on how many questions you got right, it’s not a percentage. IQ scores are based on how well you performed relative to the rest of the population. So if you have an IQ of 70, that means 98% of people scored higher than you. The only problem with that is, black people are more than 2% of the population of the United States and they’re also more than 2% of the population of the world. And if you can’t see why that’s a problem, then you probably have a low IQ.
Anonymous M double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,307
Let me put it as simply as possible:
If Africans have an average IQ of 70, and 98% of people have an IQ above 70, and Africa is 18% of the world’s population, those two groups are mutually exclusive. So 98% + 18% means there are 116% of people on the planet. So where does the other 16% of humanity live? Mars? Explain this.
If Africans have an average IQ of 70, and 98% of people have an IQ above 70, and Africa is 18% of the world’s population, those two groups are mutually exclusive. So 98% + 18% means there are 116% of people on the planet. So where does the other 16% of humanity live? Mars? Explain this.
Anonymous M triple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 4 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,308
And then, I’ve also seen people say Indians have an average IQ of 70. So wait a minute, Africans and Indians have an average IQ of 70, Africa is 18% of the world’s population, India is 17%, that means 35% of humanity is less intelligent than 98% of humanity which means there is a total of 133% of people on Earth.
How dumb do you actually need to be to believe this stuff?
How dumb do you actually need to be to believe this stuff?
Anonymous M quadruple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 3 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,309
Or you know what? I’m going to keep making fun of this.
If Africa has 1.5 billion people and 98% of humanity is smarter than Africans, then what’s the population of Earth? If you do the algebra on that the answer is Earth has 75 billion people.
The statistics aren’t even just a little bit off they’re so wrong it’s comical.
If Africa has 1.5 billion people and 98% of humanity is smarter than Africans, then what’s the population of Earth? If you do the algebra on that the answer is Earth has 75 billion people.
The statistics aren’t even just a little bit off they’re so wrong it’s comical.
Anonymous M quintuple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,310
Now we can argue about where the data came from and how smart those people were when they did their studies or whatever. But be honest with me, does it really fucking matter or is it obvious to anyone with brain cells that if the math doesn’t work, the data isn’t an accurate representation of reality?
Oatmeal Fucker !BYUc1TwJMU joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,311
Anonymous M replied with this 2 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,312
Now it is possible to find some Africans and some Europeans and give them an IQ test and have all the Africans come away with low IQ scores in the 70s, but the way you do that is by testing many many more European than Africans. But if you’re doing that, your data isn’t a statistically random sample of the world population, it’s skewed to bias Europe. So you can’t apply the results to real life.
Anonymous M double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,313
Like if you went out to some refugee camp and found a couple of uneducated starving black kids in some random African country, then went to a British school and gave 98 British kids tests, then you’d be like "oh blacks have an IQ of 70."
Anonymous M triple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 4 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,314
Then motivation also matters. If you flew to Lagos and walked around to find somebody who’s willing to take an IQ test, somebody will do it, but they don’t really have anything to gain from it. VS say some American kid trying to take an IQ test trying to get into their schools gifted program. When there’s a motivation or there’s something riding on the test results, people will try harder and end up with higher scores. If you’re just a white guy showing up to Africa asking random people to take an IQ test, obviously only people with too much free time would say yes.
Anonymous M quadruple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 3 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,315
Then there’s also the entire problem of, IQ was created to measure success in school. And white supremacists argued in the past that black Americans shouldn’t receive an education because they’re less intelligent so it would just be wasted on them. But most black Americans are ethnically Nigerian, and Nigerians do as well as East Asians in American universities. So whatever the reason is black Americans don’t perform as well in school as white Americans the answer can’t be genetics since they’re the same people as Nigerian immigrants in terms of their genetics. It has to be their cultural environment. And if Nigerians from Nigeria don’t score well on IQ tests, yet they do well in school, and if IQ was originally created to predict success in school, then it’s more logical to question whether or not IQ can really be used as a good predictor of success in diverse cultures or if it’s biased towards western ways of thinking.
Anonymous M quintuple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 6 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,317
For example, about 13% of Americans have graduate degrees while 31% of Chinese immigrants have graduate degrees and 29% of Nigerian immigrants have graduate degrees. Which doesn’t align with the white supremacist narrative that Asians are smarter than whites and whites are smarter than blacks. If you compare the population sizes of Nigeria and China and you compare the GDP per capita of Nigeria and China there’s no reason why Nigerians coming from a much smaller country with much less wealth should wind up performing equally as well as Chinese immigrants who self select from a much larger pool of people and who come from a much wealthier country. The only real explanation is that Nigerians aren’t actually stupid, they’re actually very smart.
Anonymous M sextuple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 4 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,318
Then some people will say blacks have a worse culture that doesn’t value studying. Colonists put a lot of work into suppressing African culture. But if you look into it, west African languages like Yoruba and Igbo are mostly tonal languages, and there are multiple writing systems, for example, Arabic script was used in Nigeria, the writing system created by Nigerians before colonization, Nsibidi was similar to Chinese in that every word had its own character. Due to the climate in Nigeria, it probably doesn’t preserve well so it was sort of lost. But if you are speaking a tonal language and you have to memorize lots of symbols in order to write, I can’t prove it necessarily but I have a feeling you would have needed people who would study an develop academic sorts of habits to maintain that.
Anonymous P joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 40 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,323
tteh !MemesToDNA joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,324
tteh !MemesToDNA double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,325
@1,421,287 (Fake anon !ZkUt8arUCU)
I'm quite enjoying Khamenei being wiped out tbh. This is for Rushdie. 😌
I'm quite enjoying Khamenei being wiped out tbh. This is for Rushdie. 😌
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,336
@1,421,312 (M)
Do you really expect me to respond to seven walls of text?
The first thing about IQ being scored relative to a population I already addressed in a previous thread, and you act like you have no memory of it.
What's the point when you repeat lines that have already been refuted?
A map of every country's IQ, with every country labelled 100 would obviously convey no information. If you can't figure out what it means when someone says they have a lower IQ in another country, then there's no helping you.
You've also said you don't believe truth is real, and you can't define a proposition.
I'm not playing chess with someone who thinks the rules of chess were made up to oppress them.
Do you really expect me to respond to seven walls of text?
The first thing about IQ being scored relative to a population I already addressed in a previous thread, and you act like you have no memory of it.
What's the point when you repeat lines that have already been refuted?
A map of every country's IQ, with every country labelled 100 would obviously convey no information. If you can't figure out what it means when someone says they have a lower IQ in another country, then there's no helping you.
You've also said you don't believe truth is real, and you can't define a proposition.
I'm not playing chess with someone who thinks the rules of chess were made up to oppress them.
(Edited 1 minute later.)
Anonymous R joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 3 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,338
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 56 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,340
Anonymous R replied with this 2 weeks ago, 28 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,341
Fake anon !ZkUt8arUCU replied with this 2 weeks ago, 11 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,342
@1,421,323 (P)
No Democrat has ever bombed Iran for Israel! Carter wouldn't even go to war when they kidnapped Americans.
@1,421,325 (tteh !MemesToDNA)
He was like 82 with terminal cancer. He'd likely be dead by the end of 2026 even if we did nothing. It's hard to see how this ends in anything positive and it could very well spin out of control into civil war or brutal repression that makes the previous regime seems benevolent by comparison. Hard to see how it ends well!
No Democrat has ever bombed Iran for Israel! Carter wouldn't even go to war when they kidnapped Americans.
@1,421,325 (tteh !MemesToDNA)
He was like 82 with terminal cancer. He'd likely be dead by the end of 2026 even if we did nothing. It's hard to see how this ends in anything positive and it could very well spin out of control into civil war or brutal repression that makes the previous regime seems benevolent by comparison. Hard to see how it ends well!
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,343
Anonymous R replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,345
Anonymous R double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 5 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,348
I’m a big boy. I eat my cookies.
Anonymous P replied with this 2 weeks ago, 48 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,357
@1,421,342 (Fake anon !ZkUt8arUCU)
correct! They instead metaphotically bomb the people they represent, which is just as important a part of israels will as stealing land. One is body, and the other is mind.
correct! They instead metaphotically bomb the people they represent, which is just as important a part of israels will as stealing land. One is body, and the other is mind.
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 5 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,360
@1,421,345 (R)
If I'm wrong you would be able to refute the things I say instead of declaring that truth isn't real as a way of making the conversation pointless.
When you say something incorrect, I'm able to explain it.
If I'm wrong you would be able to refute the things I say instead of declaring that truth isn't real as a way of making the conversation pointless.
When you say something incorrect, I'm able to explain it.
Anonymous R replied with this 2 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,362
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,363
@previous (R)
No, you change the subject or strawman or name call. You have said multiple times you don't believe in debate or truth, and made it clear you don't even understand what a proposition is.
No, you change the subject or strawman or name call. You have said multiple times you don't believe in debate or truth, and made it clear you don't even understand what a proposition is.
(Edited 12 seconds later.)
Anonymous R replied with this 2 weeks ago, 46 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,364
@previous (N)
Your position is that all black people have low IQs yet you get offended when I call you retarded?
Your position is that all black people have low IQs yet you get offended when I call you retarded?
Anonymous R double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 26 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,365
And by the way, I’m not saying you’re retarded as an insult, I actually think that you’re retarded.
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,367
@1,421,364 (R)
> Your position is that all black people have low IQs
No, there's your classic strawman again.
Odd because you got it right earlier in this thread when you said that some people "insist that Africans have lower IQs on average."
On average, yes. That's not the same as "all".
> you get offended when I call you retarded?
You said I ignore your refutations.
You don't refute, you name call and strawman.
> Your position is that all black people have low IQs
No, there's your classic strawman again.
Odd because you got it right earlier in this thread when you said that some people "insist that Africans have lower IQs on average."
On average, yes. That's not the same as "all".
> you get offended when I call you retarded?
You said I ignore your refutations.
You don't refute, you name call and strawman.
(Edited 57 seconds later.)
Anonymous S joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 13 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,374
@1,421,300 (N)
> > I find it unbelievable how the dumbest white guys insist that Africans have lower IQs on average.
>
> That's what the data shows, if people don't form their beliefs from empirical data, where should they be forming it from?
No it’s not a strawman, you said it.
> > I find it unbelievable how the dumbest white guys insist that Africans have lower IQs on average.
>
> That's what the data shows, if people don't form their beliefs from empirical data, where should they be forming it from?
No it’s not a strawman, you said it.
Anonymous S double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,375
You’re a white supremacist, you believe that white people are biologically superior because of their genetics. That’s what Nazism is. I call you retarded because you’re always making pro Nazi arguments.
Anonymous S triple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 41 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,376
Just, not even as a black person, but as an American and a Christian, I think your worldview is unpatriotic and against God.
Anonymous S quadruple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 46 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,377
If I’m being honest, I would do anything for a world where people like you don’t exist. And I promise that someday I will achieve that.
Anonymous T joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 13 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,378
I mean, forget about all this pseudo philosophical wannabe smart trash rhetoric about "truth" and "logic" you say on repeat like a broken record. Shut up about that for a second.
There is good and there is evil. There is God and there is Satan. God created humanity in his image. If you believe that there are superior humans and there are inferior humans, you don’t fully love God because you are disgusted by his own image, which fundamentally, is Satanic. It’s evil. And good people need to destroy evil.
There is good and there is evil. There is God and there is Satan. God created humanity in his image. If you believe that there are superior humans and there are inferior humans, you don’t fully love God because you are disgusted by his own image, which fundamentally, is Satanic. It’s evil. And good people need to destroy evil.
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 2 hours later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,387
Anonymous U joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,388
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,389
@1,421,375 (S)
> You’re a white supremacist, you believe that white people are biologically superior because of their genetics. That’s what Nazism is. I call you retarded because you’re always making pro Nazi arguments.
I've said it before, but all these ideas you call naziism were the regular beliefs of the people who liberated Germany from the Nazis.
> You’re a white supremacist, you believe that white people are biologically superior because of their genetics. That’s what Nazism is. I call you retarded because you’re always making pro Nazi arguments.
I've said it before, but all these ideas you call naziism were the regular beliefs of the people who liberated Germany from the Nazis.
Anonymous P replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,418
Anonymous V joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,438
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 17 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,443
Anonymous W joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,444
Anonymous W double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,445
I just don’t understand what’s wrong with you. You’ve told me about conversations you’ve had with women in real life. It’s clear you’re socially retarded and a pathological liar, but I just don’t understand why you can’t understand anything. No matter what I say you never understand me. I’ve never talked to someone who just could not understand anything.
Anonymous W triple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,446
I just don’t understand how I can tell you why I disagree with you over and over and over again and then you’ll accuse me of things based on what you think I believe and it’s clear you have absolutely no clue what I think even though I just told you a thousand times in a row.
Anonymous W quadruple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,447
And honestly, the thing I hate the most about you, is you’re one of the most mentally retarded people I’ve ever talked to and yet you’re stubbornly convinced of your own superiority over racist nonsense even a 12 year old could tell you is stupid.
Anonymous W quintuple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,448
Like I just don’t get it. I’m black, you’re white, you’re incredibly retarded. How do you think white people are smarter than black people? You are so fucking dumb you’re not even human it’s like you’re an animal and a stupid animal with brain damage. Someone should put you down like a sick dog.
Anonymous W sextuple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,450
It’s like, you’re one of those people who is so fucking retarded you’re incapable of even understanding how or why you’re retarded. You’re just that retarded!
Anonymous W septuple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 21 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,452
If I express any idea or any argument or any concept that takes more than two sentences you never ever ever understand it.
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,454
Another psychotic string of posts.
Anonymous W replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,456
If I’m being honest, I do think that you’re evil, but I don’t hate you at all for being evil, I just hate how stupid you are. I hate how you are completely unaware of how pathetic you look when you’re bragging about your power fantasy of white people controlling everything when you control nothing. I just hate how weak it makes you look and I hate that you can’t see how weak you look. I just see so much weakness in you.
Anonymous W double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,458
@1,421,454 (N)
You might disagree that what I’m saying is true, but you can’t disagree that I believe what I’m saying is true. I haven’t told you a single lie about what I think about you. Everything I’m saying is completely honest.
You might disagree that what I’m saying is true, but you can’t disagree that I believe what I’m saying is true. I haven’t told you a single lie about what I think about you. Everything I’m saying is completely honest.
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 26 seconds later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,459
Anonymous W replied with this 2 weeks ago, 54 seconds later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,460
I just feel like you’re the type of person where if someone hurt you, you would scream and cry, but yet you would brag about being able to hurt someone else. I just feel like you’re the sort of person who never experienced enough pain. And someday you will.
Anonymous W double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,461
@1,421,459 (N)
Either you can listen to me tell you what I think about you, or you can go someplace else, but I’m not going to lie to you and tell you anything nice.
Either you can listen to me tell you what I think about you, or you can go someplace else, but I’m not going to lie to you and tell you anything nice.
SMRTBLCK replied with this 2 weeks ago, 4 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,462
@previous (W)Aight; lemme ax ya; Dat previous thang was straight outta left field, a real example of bein' all talk, no substance, ya feel me?? It was like navigatin' through a maze, but instead of findin' da way out, you just got lost in all da fancy words and confusing concepts.
It had all da makings of somethin' deep, but really, it was just a bunch of fancy-schmancy language that didn't say nothin' at all. Like, da author was tryin' to sound all smart and stuff, but really, dey was just makin' it up as dey went along.
I was readin' through it, and I was like, "¿what's da point?" It was like dey took a bunch of big words, threw 'em in a blender, and hit puree. Den dey served it up with a side of confusion and befuddlement. dey was talkin' 'bout CRUD, but it was like dey was just throwin' around terms like dey was playin' a game or somethin'. It was like, "hey, look at me, I know big words!" But really, dey didn't know what dey was talkin' 'bout. it was like dey took a bunch of different ideas, threw 'em together, and hoped fo' da best. it was like a puzzle, but instead of findin' da picture, you just got a bunch of pieces that didn't fit together.
It was trippy, though. It was like bein' in a room with a bunch of mirrors, and you can't find da way out. You just keep lookin' and lookin', but you can't find nothin'. so yeah, bravo, I guess. Da author managed to confuse and befuddle me, and I gotta give 'em props fo' dat. Maybe dey can keep on doin' it, and we'll all be like, "what's goin' on?" But hey, at least it's entertainin', right?"
(Edited 3 minutes later.)
Anonymous W replied with this 2 weeks ago, 51 seconds later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,463
You’re a liar, and I don’t like liars.
SMRTBLCK replied with this 2 weeks ago, 3 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,465
Anonymous W replied with this 2 weeks ago, 13 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,468
Anonymous P replied with this 2 weeks ago, 4 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,472
raping nigguhs in a rainstorm!
SMRTBLCK replied with this 2 weeks ago, 34 seconds later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,473
Anonymous X joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 58 seconds later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,474
@1,421,472 (P)
> raping nigguhs in a rainstorm!
Obviously white people aren’t superior in intelligence.
> raping nigguhs in a rainstorm!
Obviously white people aren’t superior in intelligence.
SMRTBLCK replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,476
Anonymous P replied with this 2 weeks ago, 32 seconds later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,477
@1,421,474 (X)
> > > The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran
> > > The all-out air assault on the Islamic Republic might be the biggest gamble of the president’s career.
> > >
> > > Garrett M. Graff
> > > 2026 03 01
> > >
> > > During his career as a real estate mogul, Donald Trump repeatedly bankrupted casinos. In his second term as president, Trump continues to indulge his love of high-stakes gambits—and the war-entirely-of-personal-choice he launched over the weekend with Iran might be the biggest gamble yet of his entire political career. The apparent death of Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hours of the war only heightens the danger for Trump, his war partner Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the entire region, and the world beyond.
> > >
> > > On the one hand, the events of the weekend so far seem all but foreordained. It was a war that almost everyone could see coming—the US military buildup has been underway for months and, in many ways, Trump’s been on this road since May 8, 2018, when he jettisoned the Iranian nuclear deal known as the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which had been carefully negotiated by the Obama administration to limit Iran’s path toward an atomic weapon. Similarly, the Iranian response to the war’s opening salvos—missiles and retaliatory strikes against other Gulf States, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—had been widely foreseen and telegraphed.
> > >
> > > But where the war goes from here—how long and how far-reaching—and the fate of Iran’s regime in the days, weeks, and months ahead stand as some of the biggest unknowns ever contemplated in a famously fraught and explosive region.
> > >
> > > All of modern history tells us that upheaval in Iran is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, with the potential of enormous yet-to-be-understood consequences that could unfold for decades. After all, the US is still dealing with the downstream consequences of the last upheaval in Iran nearly a half-century ago, when the US-backed shah—originally put in power by a 1953 CIA coup—was ousted in 1979 by Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. His successor, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, led Iran until he was killed in the Israeli and American airstrikes this weekend.
> > >
> > > In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War—America’s first great folly in the Middle East of the 21st century—then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” of geopolitical events. Today, understanding some of the “known unknowns” of Donald Trump’s grand new adventure in Iran helps to make clear the stakes of what’s ahead.
> > >
> > > 1. It has already caused American deaths. Donald Trump has been clearly emboldened in his global rambunctiousness over the past year by two major tactical military successes—a bloodless-for-America airstrike campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last year, carried out with stealth bombers and in conjunction with earlier Israeli airstrikes, as well as the stunningly audacious raid just weeks ago to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, which also was carried out without a single US death. History, though, is always a close-run thing—and earlier this week we received an unexpected window into a narrowly averted alternate history: At the State of the Union, Trump presented an Army special operations pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover, with the Medal of Honor for his brave and careful reaction after being wounded four times by machine-gun fire while piloting the lead MH-47 Chinook helicopter on the Maduro raid. It was on the one hand a wildly inappropriate made-for-TV moment—one rushed by the Pentagon to align with the president’s whim, bypassing a deliberate process that normally takes months or years—but what was even more interesting was how it revealed that, but for 45-year-old Slover’s bravery, dedication, and fortitude, the Maduro operation might have gone wildly sideways. The crash of the lead helicopter in the raid’s opening minutes might have tipped the whole operation from being seen as a smashing, daring success toward being remembered as a debacle like Jimmy Carter’s bungled attempt to rescue Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, which killed eight US servicemen and fatally injured Carter’s presidency.
> > >
> > > There’s little reason to believe that the new Iranian operation, known by the muscularly Hegsethian moniker of “Operation Epic Fury”—a name seeming better suited for a retaliatory vendetta than an out-of-the-blue war-of-choice—will remain long-term as bloodless or costless to the US in materiel, personnel, or economic toll as Trump’s two other operations, Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Absolute Resolve, both of which were effectively one-and-done strikes.
> > >
> > > And, indeed, on Sunday morning, US Central Command put out a statement affirming that three US service members have already died, and five are injured, from the Iran operation.
> > >
> > > Part of Donald Trump’s calculation in striking Iran now is that Iran, weaker than it has been in a generation, is unlikely to retaliate with much strength. Certainly Iran’s traditional retaliatory arsenal has been depleted in recent years from its peak of world-ranging proxy terror campaigns. Israel since October 7 has done much to dismantle Iranian proxy groups, including its own daring attack on Hezbollah using explosive pagers, and Donald Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani removed the longstanding mastermind of Iranian terror operations.
> > >
> > > However, few strategists believe Iran's capability to strike far afield of the Middle East is zero. And intelligence officials continue to warn that Iran is seeking to kill Trump officials involved in that Soleimani operation. (In one of Trump’s early moves of presidential pique against critics, he pulled the three security details that had guarded former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Pompeo aide Brian Hook, and former national security adviser John Bolton, who had all been targeted by the Iranian regime.)
> > >
> > > Iran has long been a substantial terror threat. As Trump himself outlined in his bizarre overnight video this weekend, Iranian-backed terror campaigns bombed a US Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s and, more recently, helped to kill and injure thousands of US servicemen and women in Iraq. (Trump also, oddly, seemed to insinuate that Iran played a role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a theory that is not backed up by the FBI and US government’s deep investigations of the al Qaeda–orchestrated attack. He also posted misinformation about Iran interfering with US elections in 2020 and 2024.)
> > >
> > > The US is at its best in the opening minutes of a military campaign, when its unparalleled intelligence capabilities and technologically sophisticated military can maximize those advantages. But what happens when Iran has time to muster a response? Trump himself seemed to anticipate this, saying in his speech, that “the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost.”
> > >
> > > Which leads to:
> > >
> > > 2. What does Donald Trump think victory looks like? Trump rode to the Oval Office in part on a wave of national dissatisfaction with the Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> > >
> > > It was a message he carried proudly on the campaign trail—JD Vance proclaimed his support for Trump in the 2024 elections in an op-ed entitled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” and saying that Donald Trump would be the exception to the rule of the 21st-century presidency. “My entire adult lifetime,” Vance wrote, “has been shaped by presidents who threw America into unwise wars and failed to win them.”
> > >
> > > “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” Trump declared in his 2024 victory speech after being returned to the presidency, and he has spent much of his second term campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize (settling, at one point, for the entirely-invented FIFA Peace Prize). Even at the beginning of the week, as part of his State of the Union, the White House trumpeted how he’s “End[ed] Wars and Foster[ed] Peace.”
> > >
> > > And yet for the second time in as many months, Trump has now launched a decapitation strike against a US adversary with seemingly little plan—or even interest—in what comes next. Venezuela, in particular, has faded from the news almost as quickly as it appeared late last year. Huge uncertainty remains around what shape its national leadership and American involvement might take going forward.
> > >
> > > In announcing Khamenei’s death, Trump posted on Truth Social, “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us … Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”
> > >
> > > The bombing, Trump promised, “will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
> > >
> > > If the Bush administration’s plan for what came after toppling Saddam Hussein once seemed thin, and Dick Cheney’s pledge that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” appears overly optimistic in hindsight, that pre- and postwar planning for invading Iraq looks Herculean compared to the lack of planning and strategic preparation that surrounded Trump’s solo push for war in Iran. He never even pretended to make a meaningful case to Congress for military action, and there’s no clearly stated goal—or picture of victory—coming from the White House other than the amorphous “regime change,” and the apparent hope that Iran was only ever a few well-placed JDAMs and Tomahawk missiles away from breaking out in democracy.
> > >
> > > Trump, who has effectively pulled off high-profile, surgical, tactical military actions like the 2019 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, might be betting that no one really cares about long-term planning. America, he proves news cycle after news cycle, has an attention span as short as his own. Perhaps he doesn’t even know what victory with Iran looks like. As John Bolton told me in the fall, “He doesn’t do grand strategy.”
> > >
> > > “It is very hard for people to understand,” Bolton said. “It was very hard for me to understand, because you think in government that’s what it’s about—policy is what you do. That's not what Donald Trump does. Therefore, when people talk about a Trump doctrine in international affairs, it’s a complete fantasy to think that there’s any coherence to it at all.”
> > >
> > > Much hangs in the balance in Iran and across the Middle East in the days ahead as the world waits to discover whether Donald Trump either feels like he’s succeeded or else loses interest and moves on. Trump has thus far made clear that no US ground troops will be involved. As now vice president JD Vance told The Washington Post, “The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight—there is no chance that will happen.” But just how far can the US press its military advantages and affect the Iranian regime from the air?
> > >
> > > Which leads to another “known unknown”:
> > >
> > > 3. Who, exactly, is Trump serving? One of the giant unknowns now is that President Trump’s own business interests are coming under literal fire from Iran. In fact, while the Trump family’s finances are famously opaque, it’s likely that the bulk of his wealth is now tied to one Middle Eastern royal family or another. In the years since his first presidency, Trump and his family have become intertwined with numerous Gulf states—the Saudi crown prince invested some $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s investment fund, Trump has a branded golf course in Dubai, and a company backed by a UAE royal investor last year purchased 49 percent of Donald Trump’s family cryptocurrency company. Not to be outdone, Qatar, for its part, once was labeled a “funder of terrorism” by President Trump in his first term, but in this second has been carefully currying favor by, among other things, donating a plane to be used as Air Force One. The president—shortly thereafter and surely totally coincidentally—offered an unprecedented presidential defense guarantee.
> > >
> > > All of those countries—and their royal families—are now under fire or possible targets for Iranian missiles, drones, and terror strikes. It’s not a conspiratorial question to wonder: As Donald Trump weighs the potential paths ahead and when “enough is enough,” how will he be influenced by what’s best for the US versus the geopolitical or financial pressures of his business partners? And what will these countries do as missiles hit civilian targets in their territories? Saturday night, the Dubai International Airport, which has grown into one of the world’s main travel hubs, was damaged by an Iranian strike. Trump has pledged, intermittently, to help Iranian protesters. But if it will hurt his business interests to continue to wage war against the existing regime, it’s hard to see him sticking to a plan.
> > >
> > > Which leads to a fourth:
> > >
> > > 4. History is not on Trump’s side. As much as “modern American” memory begins with the disastrous long tail of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has been America’s most fraught Middle Eastern friend and enemy for far longer than either. In fact, there is no country, arguably, where more US presidents in the last eight decades have found geopolitical trouble and domestic political challenges at home than Iran—which was, many forget, once one of America’s most important economic and military partners.
> > >
> > > Eisenhower, wary of protecting British oil interests, authorized the coup known as Operation Ajax that deposed Iran’s prime minister and set up the longtime reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi, as shah, the powerful “King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, and Shadow of God on Earth” became a massive purchaser of American arms and an important anchor of stability for the US in the Middle East.
> > >
> > > Later, though, darker notes appeared. Richard Nixon saw his presidency upended by oil crises carefully calculated by the shah; in seeking to break that “Oil Shock,” Gerald Ford set up a path that caused the collapse of the regime, and Jimmy Carter lost his presidency over his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis that followed the overthrow of the unpopular leader. Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a wave of goodwill following the release of those hostages—partly, it turns out, because associates of his campaign might well have bargained with Iran to keep the hostages from being released earlier to maximize his own political benefit—but then spent much of the 1980s engaging in illegal arms trafficking with Iran, which blew up as the Iran-Contra scandal. His administration struggled, too, with the fallout of the Iran-Iraq War, including the tragic 1988 shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes, which killed 290 people—an incident better remembered in Tehran than in the US.
> > >
> > > Indeed, most Americans today are too young to recall the years when Iran ranked behind perhaps only the Soviet Union as the country’s primary geopolitical foe. For nearly a decade in the 1980s, the US fought a serious and costly shadow war with Iran in and around the Persian Gulf; as David Crist outlines in his definitive history, The Twilight War, the US navy fought regular gun battles with Iranian mosquito boats. Iranian dhows covertly mined the Persian Gulf as spillover from the Iran-Iraq war ultimately saw more than 500 ships attacked—a tonnage lost or damaged that was equal to roughly half the shipping lost to German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic.
> > >
> > > The battle on the water, though, was only one aspect of the US’s deadly confrontation with the post-revolution regime that still runs Iran today. In the 1980s and ’90s, Iran orchestrated the killings of at least 80 people around the world. US officials pointed to Iran, as well, as a culprit of the deadly bombing in 1996 of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American servicemen. The case proved a political flashpoint for both the Clinton administration and the early months of George W. Bush’s presidency, when a young Justice Department prosecutor named Jim Comey helped lead the indictment of 14 individuals on the eve of the expiration of the statute of limitations.
> > >
> > > In the years after, Iran helped supply the insurgency in Iraq with explosives that killed and maimed thousands of US military; in late 2006 and early 2007, US troops detained a dozen Iranian intelligence officers in Iraq, including Brigadier General Mohsen Chizari, the regime’s head of Iraq operations, and accused them of attacking US personnel.
> > >
> > > More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
> > >
> > > Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.
> > >
> > > Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
> > >
> > > 5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth, particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.
> > >
> > > As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would likely be replaced with hard-line figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.
> > >
> > > The post–World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent best-selling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
> > >
> > > It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.
> > >
> > > Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and the Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.
nigguhs tongue my anus
> > > The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran
> > > The all-out air assault on the Islamic Republic might be the biggest gamble of the president’s career.
> > >
> > > Garrett M. Graff
> > > 2026 03 01
> > >
> > > During his career as a real estate mogul, Donald Trump repeatedly bankrupted casinos. In his second term as president, Trump continues to indulge his love of high-stakes gambits—and the war-entirely-of-personal-choice he launched over the weekend with Iran might be the biggest gamble yet of his entire political career. The apparent death of Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hours of the war only heightens the danger for Trump, his war partner Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the entire region, and the world beyond.
> > >
> > > On the one hand, the events of the weekend so far seem all but foreordained. It was a war that almost everyone could see coming—the US military buildup has been underway for months and, in many ways, Trump’s been on this road since May 8, 2018, when he jettisoned the Iranian nuclear deal known as the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which had been carefully negotiated by the Obama administration to limit Iran’s path toward an atomic weapon. Similarly, the Iranian response to the war’s opening salvos—missiles and retaliatory strikes against other Gulf States, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—had been widely foreseen and telegraphed.
> > >
> > > But where the war goes from here—how long and how far-reaching—and the fate of Iran’s regime in the days, weeks, and months ahead stand as some of the biggest unknowns ever contemplated in a famously fraught and explosive region.
> > >
> > > All of modern history tells us that upheaval in Iran is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, with the potential of enormous yet-to-be-understood consequences that could unfold for decades. After all, the US is still dealing with the downstream consequences of the last upheaval in Iran nearly a half-century ago, when the US-backed shah—originally put in power by a 1953 CIA coup—was ousted in 1979 by Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. His successor, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, led Iran until he was killed in the Israeli and American airstrikes this weekend.
> > >
> > > In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War—America’s first great folly in the Middle East of the 21st century—then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” of geopolitical events. Today, understanding some of the “known unknowns” of Donald Trump’s grand new adventure in Iran helps to make clear the stakes of what’s ahead.
> > >
> > > 1. It has already caused American deaths. Donald Trump has been clearly emboldened in his global rambunctiousness over the past year by two major tactical military successes—a bloodless-for-America airstrike campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last year, carried out with stealth bombers and in conjunction with earlier Israeli airstrikes, as well as the stunningly audacious raid just weeks ago to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, which also was carried out without a single US death. History, though, is always a close-run thing—and earlier this week we received an unexpected window into a narrowly averted alternate history: At the State of the Union, Trump presented an Army special operations pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover, with the Medal of Honor for his brave and careful reaction after being wounded four times by machine-gun fire while piloting the lead MH-47 Chinook helicopter on the Maduro raid. It was on the one hand a wildly inappropriate made-for-TV moment—one rushed by the Pentagon to align with the president’s whim, bypassing a deliberate process that normally takes months or years—but what was even more interesting was how it revealed that, but for 45-year-old Slover’s bravery, dedication, and fortitude, the Maduro operation might have gone wildly sideways. The crash of the lead helicopter in the raid’s opening minutes might have tipped the whole operation from being seen as a smashing, daring success toward being remembered as a debacle like Jimmy Carter’s bungled attempt to rescue Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, which killed eight US servicemen and fatally injured Carter’s presidency.
> > >
> > > There’s little reason to believe that the new Iranian operation, known by the muscularly Hegsethian moniker of “Operation Epic Fury”—a name seeming better suited for a retaliatory vendetta than an out-of-the-blue war-of-choice—will remain long-term as bloodless or costless to the US in materiel, personnel, or economic toll as Trump’s two other operations, Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Absolute Resolve, both of which were effectively one-and-done strikes.
> > >
> > > And, indeed, on Sunday morning, US Central Command put out a statement affirming that three US service members have already died, and five are injured, from the Iran operation.
> > >
> > > Part of Donald Trump’s calculation in striking Iran now is that Iran, weaker than it has been in a generation, is unlikely to retaliate with much strength. Certainly Iran’s traditional retaliatory arsenal has been depleted in recent years from its peak of world-ranging proxy terror campaigns. Israel since October 7 has done much to dismantle Iranian proxy groups, including its own daring attack on Hezbollah using explosive pagers, and Donald Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani removed the longstanding mastermind of Iranian terror operations.
> > >
> > > However, few strategists believe Iran's capability to strike far afield of the Middle East is zero. And intelligence officials continue to warn that Iran is seeking to kill Trump officials involved in that Soleimani operation. (In one of Trump’s early moves of presidential pique against critics, he pulled the three security details that had guarded former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Pompeo aide Brian Hook, and former national security adviser John Bolton, who had all been targeted by the Iranian regime.)
> > >
> > > Iran has long been a substantial terror threat. As Trump himself outlined in his bizarre overnight video this weekend, Iranian-backed terror campaigns bombed a US Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s and, more recently, helped to kill and injure thousands of US servicemen and women in Iraq. (Trump also, oddly, seemed to insinuate that Iran played a role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a theory that is not backed up by the FBI and US government’s deep investigations of the al Qaeda–orchestrated attack. He also posted misinformation about Iran interfering with US elections in 2020 and 2024.)
> > >
> > > The US is at its best in the opening minutes of a military campaign, when its unparalleled intelligence capabilities and technologically sophisticated military can maximize those advantages. But what happens when Iran has time to muster a response? Trump himself seemed to anticipate this, saying in his speech, that “the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost.”
> > >
> > > Which leads to:
> > >
> > > 2. What does Donald Trump think victory looks like? Trump rode to the Oval Office in part on a wave of national dissatisfaction with the Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> > >
> > > It was a message he carried proudly on the campaign trail—JD Vance proclaimed his support for Trump in the 2024 elections in an op-ed entitled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” and saying that Donald Trump would be the exception to the rule of the 21st-century presidency. “My entire adult lifetime,” Vance wrote, “has been shaped by presidents who threw America into unwise wars and failed to win them.”
> > >
> > > “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” Trump declared in his 2024 victory speech after being returned to the presidency, and he has spent much of his second term campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize (settling, at one point, for the entirely-invented FIFA Peace Prize). Even at the beginning of the week, as part of his State of the Union, the White House trumpeted how he’s “End[ed] Wars and Foster[ed] Peace.”
> > >
> > > And yet for the second time in as many months, Trump has now launched a decapitation strike against a US adversary with seemingly little plan—or even interest—in what comes next. Venezuela, in particular, has faded from the news almost as quickly as it appeared late last year. Huge uncertainty remains around what shape its national leadership and American involvement might take going forward.
> > >
> > > In announcing Khamenei’s death, Trump posted on Truth Social, “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us … Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”
> > >
> > > The bombing, Trump promised, “will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
> > >
> > > If the Bush administration’s plan for what came after toppling Saddam Hussein once seemed thin, and Dick Cheney’s pledge that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” appears overly optimistic in hindsight, that pre- and postwar planning for invading Iraq looks Herculean compared to the lack of planning and strategic preparation that surrounded Trump’s solo push for war in Iran. He never even pretended to make a meaningful case to Congress for military action, and there’s no clearly stated goal—or picture of victory—coming from the White House other than the amorphous “regime change,” and the apparent hope that Iran was only ever a few well-placed JDAMs and Tomahawk missiles away from breaking out in democracy.
> > >
> > > Trump, who has effectively pulled off high-profile, surgical, tactical military actions like the 2019 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, might be betting that no one really cares about long-term planning. America, he proves news cycle after news cycle, has an attention span as short as his own. Perhaps he doesn’t even know what victory with Iran looks like. As John Bolton told me in the fall, “He doesn’t do grand strategy.”
> > >
> > > “It is very hard for people to understand,” Bolton said. “It was very hard for me to understand, because you think in government that’s what it’s about—policy is what you do. That's not what Donald Trump does. Therefore, when people talk about a Trump doctrine in international affairs, it’s a complete fantasy to think that there’s any coherence to it at all.”
> > >
> > > Much hangs in the balance in Iran and across the Middle East in the days ahead as the world waits to discover whether Donald Trump either feels like he’s succeeded or else loses interest and moves on. Trump has thus far made clear that no US ground troops will be involved. As now vice president JD Vance told The Washington Post, “The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight—there is no chance that will happen.” But just how far can the US press its military advantages and affect the Iranian regime from the air?
> > >
> > > Which leads to another “known unknown”:
> > >
> > > 3. Who, exactly, is Trump serving? One of the giant unknowns now is that President Trump’s own business interests are coming under literal fire from Iran. In fact, while the Trump family’s finances are famously opaque, it’s likely that the bulk of his wealth is now tied to one Middle Eastern royal family or another. In the years since his first presidency, Trump and his family have become intertwined with numerous Gulf states—the Saudi crown prince invested some $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s investment fund, Trump has a branded golf course in Dubai, and a company backed by a UAE royal investor last year purchased 49 percent of Donald Trump’s family cryptocurrency company. Not to be outdone, Qatar, for its part, once was labeled a “funder of terrorism” by President Trump in his first term, but in this second has been carefully currying favor by, among other things, donating a plane to be used as Air Force One. The president—shortly thereafter and surely totally coincidentally—offered an unprecedented presidential defense guarantee.
> > >
> > > All of those countries—and their royal families—are now under fire or possible targets for Iranian missiles, drones, and terror strikes. It’s not a conspiratorial question to wonder: As Donald Trump weighs the potential paths ahead and when “enough is enough,” how will he be influenced by what’s best for the US versus the geopolitical or financial pressures of his business partners? And what will these countries do as missiles hit civilian targets in their territories? Saturday night, the Dubai International Airport, which has grown into one of the world’s main travel hubs, was damaged by an Iranian strike. Trump has pledged, intermittently, to help Iranian protesters. But if it will hurt his business interests to continue to wage war against the existing regime, it’s hard to see him sticking to a plan.
> > >
> > > Which leads to a fourth:
> > >
> > > 4. History is not on Trump’s side. As much as “modern American” memory begins with the disastrous long tail of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has been America’s most fraught Middle Eastern friend and enemy for far longer than either. In fact, there is no country, arguably, where more US presidents in the last eight decades have found geopolitical trouble and domestic political challenges at home than Iran—which was, many forget, once one of America’s most important economic and military partners.
> > >
> > > Eisenhower, wary of protecting British oil interests, authorized the coup known as Operation Ajax that deposed Iran’s prime minister and set up the longtime reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi, as shah, the powerful “King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, and Shadow of God on Earth” became a massive purchaser of American arms and an important anchor of stability for the US in the Middle East.
> > >
> > > Later, though, darker notes appeared. Richard Nixon saw his presidency upended by oil crises carefully calculated by the shah; in seeking to break that “Oil Shock,” Gerald Ford set up a path that caused the collapse of the regime, and Jimmy Carter lost his presidency over his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis that followed the overthrow of the unpopular leader. Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a wave of goodwill following the release of those hostages—partly, it turns out, because associates of his campaign might well have bargained with Iran to keep the hostages from being released earlier to maximize his own political benefit—but then spent much of the 1980s engaging in illegal arms trafficking with Iran, which blew up as the Iran-Contra scandal. His administration struggled, too, with the fallout of the Iran-Iraq War, including the tragic 1988 shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes, which killed 290 people—an incident better remembered in Tehran than in the US.
> > >
> > > Indeed, most Americans today are too young to recall the years when Iran ranked behind perhaps only the Soviet Union as the country’s primary geopolitical foe. For nearly a decade in the 1980s, the US fought a serious and costly shadow war with Iran in and around the Persian Gulf; as David Crist outlines in his definitive history, The Twilight War, the US navy fought regular gun battles with Iranian mosquito boats. Iranian dhows covertly mined the Persian Gulf as spillover from the Iran-Iraq war ultimately saw more than 500 ships attacked—a tonnage lost or damaged that was equal to roughly half the shipping lost to German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic.
> > >
> > > The battle on the water, though, was only one aspect of the US’s deadly confrontation with the post-revolution regime that still runs Iran today. In the 1980s and ’90s, Iran orchestrated the killings of at least 80 people around the world. US officials pointed to Iran, as well, as a culprit of the deadly bombing in 1996 of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American servicemen. The case proved a political flashpoint for both the Clinton administration and the early months of George W. Bush’s presidency, when a young Justice Department prosecutor named Jim Comey helped lead the indictment of 14 individuals on the eve of the expiration of the statute of limitations.
> > >
> > > In the years after, Iran helped supply the insurgency in Iraq with explosives that killed and maimed thousands of US military; in late 2006 and early 2007, US troops detained a dozen Iranian intelligence officers in Iraq, including Brigadier General Mohsen Chizari, the regime’s head of Iraq operations, and accused them of attacking US personnel.
> > >
> > > More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
> > >
> > > Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.
> > >
> > > Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
> > >
> > > 5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth, particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.
> > >
> > > As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would likely be replaced with hard-line figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.
> > >
> > > The post–World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent best-selling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
> > >
> > > It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.
> > >
> > > Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and the Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.
nigguhs tongue my anus
SMRTBLCK replied with this 2 weeks ago, 39 seconds later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,478
@previous (P)> > > > The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran
> > > > The all-out air assault on the Islamic Republic might be the biggest gamble of the president’s career.
> > > >
> > > > Garrett M. Graff
> > > > 2026 03 01
> > > >
> > > > During his career as a real estate mogul, Donald Trump repeatedly bankrupted casinos. In his second term as president, Trump continues to indulge his love of high-stakes gambits—and the war-entirely-of-personal-choice he launched over the weekend with Iran might be the biggest gamble yet of his entire political career. The apparent death of Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hours of the war only heightens the danger for Trump, his war partner Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the entire region, and the world beyond.
> > > >
> > > > On the one hand, the events of the weekend so far seem all but foreordained. It was a war that almost everyone could see coming—the US military buildup has been underway for months and, in many ways, Trump’s been on this road since May 8, 2018, when he jettisoned the Iranian nuclear deal known as the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which had been carefully negotiated by the Obama administration to limit Iran’s path toward an atomic weapon. Similarly, the Iranian response to the war’s opening salvos—missiles and retaliatory strikes against other Gulf States, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—had been widely foreseen and telegraphed.
> > > >
> > > > But where the war goes from here—how long and how far-reaching—and the fate of Iran’s regime in the days, weeks, and months ahead stand as some of the biggest unknowns ever contemplated in a famously fraught and explosive region.
> > > >
> > > > All of modern history tells us that upheaval in Iran is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, with the potential of enormous yet-to-be-understood consequences that could unfold for decades. After all, the US is still dealing with the downstream consequences of the last upheaval in Iran nearly a half-century ago, when the US-backed shah—originally put in power by a 1953 CIA coup—was ousted in 1979 by Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. His successor, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, led Iran until he was killed in the Israeli and American airstrikes this weekend.
> > > >
> > > > In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War—America’s first great folly in the Middle East of the 21st century—then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” of geopolitical events. Today, understanding some of the “known unknowns” of Donald Trump’s grand new adventure in Iran helps to make clear the stakes of what’s ahead.
> > > >
> > > > 1. It has already caused American deaths. Donald Trump has been clearly emboldened in his global rambunctiousness over the past year by two major tactical military successes—a bloodless-for-America airstrike campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last year, carried out with stealth bombers and in conjunction with earlier Israeli airstrikes, as well as the stunningly audacious raid just weeks ago to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, which also was carried out without a single US death. History, though, is always a close-run thing—and earlier this week we received an unexpected window into a narrowly averted alternate history: At the State of the Union, Trump presented an Army special operations pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover, with the Medal of Honor for his brave and careful reaction after being wounded four times by machine-gun fire while piloting the lead MH-47 Chinook helicopter on the Maduro raid. It was on the one hand a wildly inappropriate made-for-TV moment—one rushed by the Pentagon to align with the president’s whim, bypassing a deliberate process that normally takes months or years—but what was even more interesting was how it revealed that, but for 45-year-old Slover’s bravery, dedication, and fortitude, the Maduro operation might have gone wildly sideways. The crash of the lead helicopter in the raid’s opening minutes might have tipped the whole operation from being seen as a smashing, daring success toward being remembered as a debacle like Jimmy Carter’s bungled attempt to rescue Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, which killed eight US servicemen and fatally injured Carter’s presidency.
> > > >
> > > > There’s little reason to believe that the new Iranian operation, known by the muscularly Hegsethian moniker of “Operation Epic Fury”—a name seeming better suited for a retaliatory vendetta than an out-of-the-blue war-of-choice—will remain long-term as bloodless or costless to the US in materiel, personnel, or economic toll as Trump’s two other operations, Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Absolute Resolve, both of which were effectively one-and-done strikes.
> > > >
> > > > And, indeed, on Sunday morning, US Central Command put out a statement affirming that three US service members have already died, and five are injured, from the Iran operation.
> > > >
> > > > Part of Donald Trump’s calculation in striking Iran now is that Iran, weaker than it has been in a generation, is unlikely to retaliate with much strength. Certainly Iran’s traditional retaliatory arsenal has been depleted in recent years from its peak of world-ranging proxy terror campaigns. Israel since October 7 has done much to dismantle Iranian proxy groups, including its own daring attack on Hezbollah using explosive pagers, and Donald Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani removed the longstanding mastermind of Iranian terror operations.
> > > >
> > > > However, few strategists believe Iran's capability to strike far afield of the Middle East is zero. And intelligence officials continue to warn that Iran is seeking to kill Trump officials involved in that Soleimani operation. (In one of Trump’s early moves of presidential pique against critics, he pulled the three security details that had guarded former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Pompeo aide Brian Hook, and former national security adviser John Bolton, who had all been targeted by the Iranian regime.)
> > > >
> > > > Iran has long been a substantial terror threat. As Trump himself outlined in his bizarre overnight video this weekend, Iranian-backed terror campaigns bombed a US Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s and, more recently, helped to kill and injure thousands of US servicemen and women in Iraq. (Trump also, oddly, seemed to insinuate that Iran played a role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a theory that is not backed up by the FBI and US government’s deep investigations of the al Qaeda–orchestrated attack. He also posted misinformation about Iran interfering with US elections in 2020 and 2024.)
> > > >
> > > > The US is at its best in the opening minutes of a military campaign, when its unparalleled intelligence capabilities and technologically sophisticated military can maximize those advantages. But what happens when Iran has time to muster a response? Trump himself seemed to anticipate this, saying in his speech, that “the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost.”
> > > >
> > > > Which leads to:
> > > >
> > > > 2. What does Donald Trump think victory looks like? Trump rode to the Oval Office in part on a wave of national dissatisfaction with the Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> > > >
> > > > It was a message he carried proudly on the campaign trail—JD Vance proclaimed his support for Trump in the 2024 elections in an op-ed entitled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” and saying that Donald Trump would be the exception to the rule of the 21st-century presidency. “My entire adult lifetime,” Vance wrote, “has been shaped by presidents who threw America into unwise wars and failed to win them.”
> > > >
> > > > “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” Trump declared in his 2024 victory speech after being returned to the presidency, and he has spent much of his second term campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize (settling, at one point, for the entirely-invented FIFA Peace Prize). Even at the beginning of the week, as part of his State of the Union, the White House trumpeted how he’s “End[ed] Wars and Foster[ed] Peace.”
> > > >
> > > > And yet for the second time in as many months, Trump has now launched a decapitation strike against a US adversary with seemingly little plan—or even interest—in what comes next. Venezuela, in particular, has faded from the news almost as quickly as it appeared late last year. Huge uncertainty remains around what shape its national leadership and American involvement might take going forward.
> > > >
> > > > In announcing Khamenei’s death, Trump posted on Truth Social, “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us … Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”
> > > >
> > > > The bombing, Trump promised, “will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
> > > >
> > > > If the Bush administration’s plan for what came after toppling Saddam Hussein once seemed thin, and Dick Cheney’s pledge that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” appears overly optimistic in hindsight, that pre- and postwar planning for invading Iraq looks Herculean compared to the lack of planning and strategic preparation that surrounded Trump’s solo push for war in Iran. He never even pretended to make a meaningful case to Congress for military action, and there’s no clearly stated goal—or picture of victory—coming from the White House other than the amorphous “regime change,” and the apparent hope that Iran was only ever a few well-placed JDAMs and Tomahawk missiles away from breaking out in democracy.
> > > >
> > > > Trump, who has effectively pulled off high-profile, surgical, tactical military actions like the 2019 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, might be betting that no one really cares about long-term planning. America, he proves news cycle after news cycle, has an attention span as short as his own. Perhaps he doesn’t even know what victory with Iran looks like. As John Bolton told me in the fall, “He doesn’t do grand strategy.”
> > > >
> > > > “It is very hard for people to understand,” Bolton said. “It was very hard for me to understand, because you think in government that’s what it’s about—policy is what you do. That's not what Donald Trump does. Therefore, when people talk about a Trump doctrine in international affairs, it’s a complete fantasy to think that there’s any coherence to it at all.”
> > > >
> > > > Much hangs in the balance in Iran and across the Middle East in the days ahead as the world waits to discover whether Donald Trump either feels like he’s succeeded or else loses interest and moves on. Trump has thus far made clear that no US ground troops will be involved. As now vice president JD Vance told The Washington Post, “The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight—there is no chance that will happen.” But just how far can the US press its military advantages and affect the Iranian regime from the air?
> > > >
> > > > Which leads to another “known unknown”:
> > > >
> > > > 3. Who, exactly, is Trump serving? One of the giant unknowns now is that President Trump’s own business interests are coming under literal fire from Iran. In fact, while the Trump family’s finances are famously opaque, it’s likely that the bulk of his wealth is now tied to one Middle Eastern royal family or another. In the years since his first presidency, Trump and his family have become intertwined with numerous Gulf states—the Saudi crown prince invested some $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s investment fund, Trump has a branded golf course in Dubai, and a company backed by a UAE royal investor last year purchased 49 percent of Donald Trump’s family cryptocurrency company. Not to be outdone, Qatar, for its part, once was labeled a “funder of terrorism” by President Trump in his first term, but in this second has been carefully currying favor by, among other things, donating a plane to be used as Air Force One. The president—shortly thereafter and surely totally coincidentally—offered an unprecedented presidential defense guarantee.
> > > >
> > > > All of those countries—and their royal families—are now under fire or possible targets for Iranian missiles, drones, and terror strikes. It’s not a conspiratorial question to wonder: As Donald Trump weighs the potential paths ahead and when “enough is enough,” how will he be influenced by what’s best for the US versus the geopolitical or financial pressures of his business partners? And what will these countries do as missiles hit civilian targets in their territories? Saturday night, the Dubai International Airport, which has grown into one of the world’s main travel hubs, was damaged by an Iranian strike. Trump has pledged, intermittently, to help Iranian protesters. But if it will hurt his business interests to continue to wage war against the existing regime, it’s hard to see him sticking to a plan.
> > > >
> > > > Which leads to a fourth:
> > > >
> > > > 4. History is not on Trump’s side. As much as “modern American” memory begins with the disastrous long tail of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has been America’s most fraught Middle Eastern friend and enemy for far longer than either. In fact, there is no country, arguably, where more US presidents in the last eight decades have found geopolitical trouble and domestic political challenges at home than Iran—which was, many forget, once one of America’s most important economic and military partners.
> > > >
> > > > Eisenhower, wary of protecting British oil interests, authorized the coup known as Operation Ajax that deposed Iran’s prime minister and set up the longtime reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi, as shah, the powerful “King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, and Shadow of God on Earth” became a massive purchaser of American arms and an important anchor of stability for the US in the Middle East.
> > > >
> > > > Later, though, darker notes appeared. Richard Nixon saw his presidency upended by oil crises carefully calculated by the shah; in seeking to break that “Oil Shock,” Gerald Ford set up a path that caused the collapse of the regime, and Jimmy Carter lost his presidency over his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis that followed the overthrow of the unpopular leader. Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a wave of goodwill following the release of those hostages—partly, it turns out, because associates of his campaign might well have bargained with Iran to keep the hostages from being released earlier to maximize his own political benefit—but then spent much of the 1980s engaging in illegal arms trafficking with Iran, which blew up as the Iran-Contra scandal. His administration struggled, too, with the fallout of the Iran-Iraq War, including the tragic 1988 shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes, which killed 290 people—an incident better remembered in Tehran than in the US.
> > > >
> > > > Indeed, most Americans today are too young to recall the years when Iran ranked behind perhaps only the Soviet Union as the country’s primary geopolitical foe. For nearly a decade in the 1980s, the US fought a serious and costly shadow war with Iran in and around the Persian Gulf; as David Crist outlines in his definitive history, The Twilight War, the US navy fought regular gun battles with Iranian mosquito boats. Iranian dhows covertly mined the Persian Gulf as spillover from the Iran-Iraq war ultimately saw more than 500 ships attacked—a tonnage lost or damaged that was equal to roughly half the shipping lost to German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic.
> > > >
> > > > The battle on the water, though, was only one aspect of the US’s deadly confrontation with the post-revolution regime that still runs Iran today. In the 1980s and ’90s, Iran orchestrated the killings of at least 80 people around the world. US officials pointed to Iran, as well, as a culprit of the deadly bombing in 1996 of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American servicemen. The case proved a political flashpoint for both the Clinton administration and the early months of George W. Bush’s presidency, when a young Justice Department prosecutor named Jim Comey helped lead the indictment of 14 individuals on the eve of the expiration of the statute of limitations.
> > > >
> > > > In the years after, Iran helped supply the insurgency in Iraq with explosives that killed and maimed thousands of US military; in late 2006 and early 2007, US troops detained a dozen Iranian intelligence officers in Iraq, including Brigadier General Mohsen Chizari, the regime’s head of Iraq operations, and accused them of attacking US personnel.
> > > >
> > > > More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
> > > >
> > > > Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.
> > > >
> > > > Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
> > > >
> > > > 5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth, particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.
> > > >
> > > > As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would likely be replaced with hard-line figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.
> > > >
> > > > The post–World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent best-selling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
> > > >
> > > > It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.
> > > >
> > > > Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and the Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.
>
> nigguhs tongue my anus
lol
Anonymous P replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,480
@previous (SMRTBLCK)
> > > > > The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran
> > > > > The all-out air assault on the Islamic Republic might be the biggest gamble of the president’s career.
> > > > >
> > > > > Garrett M. Graff
> > > > > 2026 03 01
> > > > >
> > > > > During his career as a real estate mogul, Donald Trump repeatedly bankrupted casinos. In his second term as president, Trump continues to indulge his love of high-stakes gambits—and the war-entirely-of-personal-choice he launched over the weekend with Iran might be the biggest gamble yet of his entire political career. The apparent death of Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hours of the war only heightens the danger for Trump, his war partner Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the entire region, and the world beyond.
> > > > >
> > > > > On the one hand, the events of the weekend so far seem all but foreordained. It was a war that almost everyone could see coming—the US military buildup has been underway for months and, in many ways, Trump’s been on this road since May 8, 2018, when he jettisoned the Iranian nuclear deal known as the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which had been carefully negotiated by the Obama administration to limit Iran’s path toward an atomic weapon. Similarly, the Iranian response to the war’s opening salvos—missiles and retaliatory strikes against other Gulf States, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—had been widely foreseen and telegraphed.
> > > > >
> > > > > But where the war goes from here—how long and how far-reaching—and the fate of Iran’s regime in the days, weeks, and months ahead stand as some of the biggest unknowns ever contemplated in a famously fraught and explosive region.
> > > > >
> > > > > All of modern history tells us that upheaval in Iran is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, with the potential of enormous yet-to-be-understood consequences that could unfold for decades. After all, the US is still dealing with the downstream consequences of the last upheaval in Iran nearly a half-century ago, when the US-backed shah—originally put in power by a 1953 CIA coup—was ousted in 1979 by Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. His successor, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, led Iran until he was killed in the Israeli and American airstrikes this weekend.
> > > > >
> > > > > In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War—America’s first great folly in the Middle East of the 21st century—then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” of geopolitical events. Today, understanding some of the “known unknowns” of Donald Trump’s grand new adventure in Iran helps to make clear the stakes of what’s ahead.
> > > > >
> > > > > 1. It has already caused American deaths. Donald Trump has been clearly emboldened in his global rambunctiousness over the past year by two major tactical military successes—a bloodless-for-America airstrike campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last year, carried out with stealth bombers and in conjunction with earlier Israeli airstrikes, as well as the stunningly audacious raid just weeks ago to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, which also was carried out without a single US death. History, though, is always a close-run thing—and earlier this week we received an unexpected window into a narrowly averted alternate history: At the State of the Union, Trump presented an Army special operations pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover, with the Medal of Honor for his brave and careful reaction after being wounded four times by machine-gun fire while piloting the lead MH-47 Chinook helicopter on the Maduro raid. It was on the one hand a wildly inappropriate made-for-TV moment—one rushed by the Pentagon to align with the president’s whim, bypassing a deliberate process that normally takes months or years—but what was even more interesting was how it revealed that, but for 45-year-old Slover’s bravery, dedication, and fortitude, the Maduro operation might have gone wildly sideways. The crash of the lead helicopter in the raid’s opening minutes might have tipped the whole operation from being seen as a smashing, daring success toward being remembered as a debacle like Jimmy Carter’s bungled attempt to rescue Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, which killed eight US servicemen and fatally injured Carter’s presidency.
> > > > >
> > > > > There’s little reason to believe that the new Iranian operation, known by the muscularly Hegsethian moniker of “Operation Epic Fury”—a name seeming better suited for a retaliatory vendetta than an out-of-the-blue war-of-choice—will remain long-term as bloodless or costless to the US in materiel, personnel, or economic toll as Trump’s two other operations, Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Absolute Resolve, both of which were effectively one-and-done strikes.
> > > > >
> > > > > And, indeed, on Sunday morning, US Central Command put out a statement affirming that three US service members have already died, and five are injured, from the Iran operation.
> > > > >
> > > > > Part of Donald Trump’s calculation in striking Iran now is that Iran, weaker than it has been in a generation, is unlikely to retaliate with much strength. Certainly Iran’s traditional retaliatory arsenal has been depleted in recent years from its peak of world-ranging proxy terror campaigns. Israel since October 7 has done much to dismantle Iranian proxy groups, including its own daring attack on Hezbollah using explosive pagers, and Donald Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani removed the longstanding mastermind of Iranian terror operations.
> > > > >
> > > > > However, few strategists believe Iran's capability to strike far afield of the Middle East is zero. And intelligence officials continue to warn that Iran is seeking to kill Trump officials involved in that Soleimani operation. (In one of Trump’s early moves of presidential pique against critics, he pulled the three security details that had guarded former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Pompeo aide Brian Hook, and former national security adviser John Bolton, who had all been targeted by the Iranian regime.)
> > > > >
> > > > > Iran has long been a substantial terror threat. As Trump himself outlined in his bizarre overnight video this weekend, Iranian-backed terror campaigns bombed a US Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s and, more recently, helped to kill and injure thousands of US servicemen and women in Iraq. (Trump also, oddly, seemed to insinuate that Iran played a role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a theory that is not backed up by the FBI and US government’s deep investigations of the al Qaeda–orchestrated attack. He also posted misinformation about Iran interfering with US elections in 2020 and 2024.)
> > > > >
> > > > > The US is at its best in the opening minutes of a military campaign, when its unparalleled intelligence capabilities and technologically sophisticated military can maximize those advantages. But what happens when Iran has time to muster a response? Trump himself seemed to anticipate this, saying in his speech, that “the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost.”
> > > > >
> > > > > Which leads to:
> > > > >
> > > > > 2. What does Donald Trump think victory looks like? Trump rode to the Oval Office in part on a wave of national dissatisfaction with the Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> > > > >
> > > > > It was a message he carried proudly on the campaign trail—JD Vance proclaimed his support for Trump in the 2024 elections in an op-ed entitled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” and saying that Donald Trump would be the exception to the rule of the 21st-century presidency. “My entire adult lifetime,” Vance wrote, “has been shaped by presidents who threw America into unwise wars and failed to win them.”
> > > > >
> > > > > “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” Trump declared in his 2024 victory speech after being returned to the presidency, and he has spent much of his second term campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize (settling, at one point, for the entirely-invented FIFA Peace Prize). Even at the beginning of the week, as part of his State of the Union, the White House trumpeted how he’s “End[ed] Wars and Foster[ed] Peace.”
> > > > >
> > > > > And yet for the second time in as many months, Trump has now launched a decapitation strike against a US adversary with seemingly little plan—or even interest—in what comes next. Venezuela, in particular, has faded from the news almost as quickly as it appeared late last year. Huge uncertainty remains around what shape its national leadership and American involvement might take going forward.
> > > > >
> > > > > In announcing Khamenei’s death, Trump posted on Truth Social, “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us … Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”
> > > > >
> > > > > The bombing, Trump promised, “will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
> > > > >
> > > > > If the Bush administration’s plan for what came after toppling Saddam Hussein once seemed thin, and Dick Cheney’s pledge that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” appears overly optimistic in hindsight, that pre- and postwar planning for invading Iraq looks Herculean compared to the lack of planning and strategic preparation that surrounded Trump’s solo push for war in Iran. He never even pretended to make a meaningful case to Congress for military action, and there’s no clearly stated goal—or picture of victory—coming from the White House other than the amorphous “regime change,” and the apparent hope that Iran was only ever a few well-placed JDAMs and Tomahawk missiles away from breaking out in democracy.
> > > > >
> > > > > Trump, who has effectively pulled off high-profile, surgical, tactical military actions like the 2019 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, might be betting that no one really cares about long-term planning. America, he proves news cycle after news cycle, has an attention span as short as his own. Perhaps he doesn’t even know what victory with Iran looks like. As John Bolton told me in the fall, “He doesn’t do grand strategy.”
> > > > >
> > > > > “It is very hard for people to understand,” Bolton said. “It was very hard for me to understand, because you think in government that’s what it’s about—policy is what you do. That's not what Donald Trump does. Therefore, when people talk about a Trump doctrine in international affairs, it’s a complete fantasy to think that there’s any coherence to it at all.”
> > > > >
> > > > > Much hangs in the balance in Iran and across the Middle East in the days ahead as the world waits to discover whether Donald Trump either feels like he’s succeeded or else loses interest and moves on. Trump has thus far made clear that no US ground troops will be involved. As now vice president JD Vance told The Washington Post, “The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight—there is no chance that will happen.” But just how far can the US press its military advantages and affect the Iranian regime from the air?
> > > > >
> > > > > Which leads to another “known unknown”:
> > > > >
> > > > > 3. Who, exactly, is Trump serving? One of the giant unknowns now is that President Trump’s own business interests are coming under literal fire from Iran. In fact, while the Trump family’s finances are famously opaque, it’s likely that the bulk of his wealth is now tied to one Middle Eastern royal family or another. In the years since his first presidency, Trump and his family have become intertwined with numerous Gulf states—the Saudi crown prince invested some $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s investment fund, Trump has a branded golf course in Dubai, and a company backed by a UAE royal investor last year purchased 49 percent of Donald Trump’s family cryptocurrency company. Not to be outdone, Qatar, for its part, once was labeled a “funder of terrorism” by President Trump in his first term, but in this second has been carefully currying favor by, among other things, donating a plane to be used as Air Force One. The president—shortly thereafter and surely totally coincidentally—offered an unprecedented presidential defense guarantee.
> > > > >
> > > > > All of those countries—and their royal families—are now under fire or possible targets for Iranian missiles, drones, and terror strikes. It’s not a conspiratorial question to wonder: As Donald Trump weighs the potential paths ahead and when “enough is enough,” how will he be influenced by what’s best for the US versus the geopolitical or financial pressures of his business partners? And what will these countries do as missiles hit civilian targets in their territories? Saturday night, the Dubai International Airport, which has grown into one of the world’s main travel hubs, was damaged by an Iranian strike. Trump has pledged, intermittently, to help Iranian protesters. But if it will hurt his business interests to continue to wage war against the existing regime, it’s hard to see him sticking to a plan.
> > > > >
> > > > > Which leads to a fourth:
> > > > >
> > > > > 4. History is not on Trump’s side. As much as “modern American” memory begins with the disastrous long tail of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has been America’s most fraught Middle Eastern friend and enemy for far longer than either. In fact, there is no country, arguably, where more US presidents in the last eight decades have found geopolitical trouble and domestic political challenges at home than Iran—which was, many forget, once one of America’s most important economic and military partners.
> > > > >
> > > > > Eisenhower, wary of protecting British oil interests, authorized the coup known as Operation Ajax that deposed Iran’s prime minister and set up the longtime reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi, as shah, the powerful “King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, and Shadow of God on Earth” became a massive purchaser of American arms and an important anchor of stability for the US in the Middle East.
> > > > >
> > > > > Later, though, darker notes appeared. Richard Nixon saw his presidency upended by oil crises carefully calculated by the shah; in seeking to break that “Oil Shock,” Gerald Ford set up a path that caused the collapse of the regime, and Jimmy Carter lost his presidency over his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis that followed the overthrow of the unpopular leader. Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a wave of goodwill following the release of those hostages—partly, it turns out, because associates of his campaign might well have bargained with Iran to keep the hostages from being released earlier to maximize his own political benefit—but then spent much of the 1980s engaging in illegal arms trafficking with Iran, which blew up as the Iran-Contra scandal. His administration struggled, too, with the fallout of the Iran-Iraq War, including the tragic 1988 shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes, which killed 290 people—an incident better remembered in Tehran than in the US.
> > > > >
> > > > > Indeed, most Americans today are too young to recall the years when Iran ranked behind perhaps only the Soviet Union as the country’s primary geopolitical foe. For nearly a decade in the 1980s, the US fought a serious and costly shadow war with Iran in and around the Persian Gulf; as David Crist outlines in his definitive history, The Twilight War, the US navy fought regular gun battles with Iranian mosquito boats. Iranian dhows covertly mined the Persian Gulf as spillover from the Iran-Iraq war ultimately saw more than 500 ships attacked—a tonnage lost or damaged that was equal to roughly half the shipping lost to German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic.
> > > > >
> > > > > The battle on the water, though, was only one aspect of the US’s deadly confrontation with the post-revolution regime that still runs Iran today. In the 1980s and ’90s, Iran orchestrated the killings of at least 80 people around the world. US officials pointed to Iran, as well, as a culprit of the deadly bombing in 1996 of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American servicemen. The case proved a political flashpoint for both the Clinton administration and the early months of George W. Bush’s presidency, when a young Justice Department prosecutor named Jim Comey helped lead the indictment of 14 individuals on the eve of the expiration of the statute of limitations.
> > > > >
> > > > > In the years after, Iran helped supply the insurgency in Iraq with explosives that killed and maimed thousands of US military; in late 2006 and early 2007, US troops detained a dozen Iranian intelligence officers in Iraq, including Brigadier General Mohsen Chizari, the regime’s head of Iraq operations, and accused them of attacking US personnel.
> > > > >
> > > > > More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
> > > > >
> > > > > Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.
> > > > >
> > > > > Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
> > > > >
> > > > > 5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth, particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.
> > > > >
> > > > > As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would likely be replaced with hard-line figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.
> > > > >
> > > > > The post–World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent best-selling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
> > > > >
> > > > > It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.
> > > > >
> > > > > Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and the Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.
> >
> > nigguhs tongue my anus
>
> lol
uh... i wish i were a birdu
> > > > > The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran
> > > > > The all-out air assault on the Islamic Republic might be the biggest gamble of the president’s career.
> > > > >
> > > > > Garrett M. Graff
> > > > > 2026 03 01
> > > > >
> > > > > During his career as a real estate mogul, Donald Trump repeatedly bankrupted casinos. In his second term as president, Trump continues to indulge his love of high-stakes gambits—and the war-entirely-of-personal-choice he launched over the weekend with Iran might be the biggest gamble yet of his entire political career. The apparent death of Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hours of the war only heightens the danger for Trump, his war partner Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the entire region, and the world beyond.
> > > > >
> > > > > On the one hand, the events of the weekend so far seem all but foreordained. It was a war that almost everyone could see coming—the US military buildup has been underway for months and, in many ways, Trump’s been on this road since May 8, 2018, when he jettisoned the Iranian nuclear deal known as the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which had been carefully negotiated by the Obama administration to limit Iran’s path toward an atomic weapon. Similarly, the Iranian response to the war’s opening salvos—missiles and retaliatory strikes against other Gulf States, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—had been widely foreseen and telegraphed.
> > > > >
> > > > > But where the war goes from here—how long and how far-reaching—and the fate of Iran’s regime in the days, weeks, and months ahead stand as some of the biggest unknowns ever contemplated in a famously fraught and explosive region.
> > > > >
> > > > > All of modern history tells us that upheaval in Iran is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, with the potential of enormous yet-to-be-understood consequences that could unfold for decades. After all, the US is still dealing with the downstream consequences of the last upheaval in Iran nearly a half-century ago, when the US-backed shah—originally put in power by a 1953 CIA coup—was ousted in 1979 by Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. His successor, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, led Iran until he was killed in the Israeli and American airstrikes this weekend.
> > > > >
> > > > > In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War—America’s first great folly in the Middle East of the 21st century—then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” of geopolitical events. Today, understanding some of the “known unknowns” of Donald Trump’s grand new adventure in Iran helps to make clear the stakes of what’s ahead.
> > > > >
> > > > > 1. It has already caused American deaths. Donald Trump has been clearly emboldened in his global rambunctiousness over the past year by two major tactical military successes—a bloodless-for-America airstrike campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last year, carried out with stealth bombers and in conjunction with earlier Israeli airstrikes, as well as the stunningly audacious raid just weeks ago to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, which also was carried out without a single US death. History, though, is always a close-run thing—and earlier this week we received an unexpected window into a narrowly averted alternate history: At the State of the Union, Trump presented an Army special operations pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover, with the Medal of Honor for his brave and careful reaction after being wounded four times by machine-gun fire while piloting the lead MH-47 Chinook helicopter on the Maduro raid. It was on the one hand a wildly inappropriate made-for-TV moment—one rushed by the Pentagon to align with the president’s whim, bypassing a deliberate process that normally takes months or years—but what was even more interesting was how it revealed that, but for 45-year-old Slover’s bravery, dedication, and fortitude, the Maduro operation might have gone wildly sideways. The crash of the lead helicopter in the raid’s opening minutes might have tipped the whole operation from being seen as a smashing, daring success toward being remembered as a debacle like Jimmy Carter’s bungled attempt to rescue Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, which killed eight US servicemen and fatally injured Carter’s presidency.
> > > > >
> > > > > There’s little reason to believe that the new Iranian operation, known by the muscularly Hegsethian moniker of “Operation Epic Fury”—a name seeming better suited for a retaliatory vendetta than an out-of-the-blue war-of-choice—will remain long-term as bloodless or costless to the US in materiel, personnel, or economic toll as Trump’s two other operations, Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Absolute Resolve, both of which were effectively one-and-done strikes.
> > > > >
> > > > > And, indeed, on Sunday morning, US Central Command put out a statement affirming that three US service members have already died, and five are injured, from the Iran operation.
> > > > >
> > > > > Part of Donald Trump’s calculation in striking Iran now is that Iran, weaker than it has been in a generation, is unlikely to retaliate with much strength. Certainly Iran’s traditional retaliatory arsenal has been depleted in recent years from its peak of world-ranging proxy terror campaigns. Israel since October 7 has done much to dismantle Iranian proxy groups, including its own daring attack on Hezbollah using explosive pagers, and Donald Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani removed the longstanding mastermind of Iranian terror operations.
> > > > >
> > > > > However, few strategists believe Iran's capability to strike far afield of the Middle East is zero. And intelligence officials continue to warn that Iran is seeking to kill Trump officials involved in that Soleimani operation. (In one of Trump’s early moves of presidential pique against critics, he pulled the three security details that had guarded former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Pompeo aide Brian Hook, and former national security adviser John Bolton, who had all been targeted by the Iranian regime.)
> > > > >
> > > > > Iran has long been a substantial terror threat. As Trump himself outlined in his bizarre overnight video this weekend, Iranian-backed terror campaigns bombed a US Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s and, more recently, helped to kill and injure thousands of US servicemen and women in Iraq. (Trump also, oddly, seemed to insinuate that Iran played a role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a theory that is not backed up by the FBI and US government’s deep investigations of the al Qaeda–orchestrated attack. He also posted misinformation about Iran interfering with US elections in 2020 and 2024.)
> > > > >
> > > > > The US is at its best in the opening minutes of a military campaign, when its unparalleled intelligence capabilities and technologically sophisticated military can maximize those advantages. But what happens when Iran has time to muster a response? Trump himself seemed to anticipate this, saying in his speech, that “the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost.”
> > > > >
> > > > > Which leads to:
> > > > >
> > > > > 2. What does Donald Trump think victory looks like? Trump rode to the Oval Office in part on a wave of national dissatisfaction with the Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> > > > >
> > > > > It was a message he carried proudly on the campaign trail—JD Vance proclaimed his support for Trump in the 2024 elections in an op-ed entitled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” and saying that Donald Trump would be the exception to the rule of the 21st-century presidency. “My entire adult lifetime,” Vance wrote, “has been shaped by presidents who threw America into unwise wars and failed to win them.”
> > > > >
> > > > > “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” Trump declared in his 2024 victory speech after being returned to the presidency, and he has spent much of his second term campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize (settling, at one point, for the entirely-invented FIFA Peace Prize). Even at the beginning of the week, as part of his State of the Union, the White House trumpeted how he’s “End[ed] Wars and Foster[ed] Peace.”
> > > > >
> > > > > And yet for the second time in as many months, Trump has now launched a decapitation strike against a US adversary with seemingly little plan—or even interest—in what comes next. Venezuela, in particular, has faded from the news almost as quickly as it appeared late last year. Huge uncertainty remains around what shape its national leadership and American involvement might take going forward.
> > > > >
> > > > > In announcing Khamenei’s death, Trump posted on Truth Social, “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us … Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”
> > > > >
> > > > > The bombing, Trump promised, “will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
> > > > >
> > > > > If the Bush administration’s plan for what came after toppling Saddam Hussein once seemed thin, and Dick Cheney’s pledge that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” appears overly optimistic in hindsight, that pre- and postwar planning for invading Iraq looks Herculean compared to the lack of planning and strategic preparation that surrounded Trump’s solo push for war in Iran. He never even pretended to make a meaningful case to Congress for military action, and there’s no clearly stated goal—or picture of victory—coming from the White House other than the amorphous “regime change,” and the apparent hope that Iran was only ever a few well-placed JDAMs and Tomahawk missiles away from breaking out in democracy.
> > > > >
> > > > > Trump, who has effectively pulled off high-profile, surgical, tactical military actions like the 2019 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, might be betting that no one really cares about long-term planning. America, he proves news cycle after news cycle, has an attention span as short as his own. Perhaps he doesn’t even know what victory with Iran looks like. As John Bolton told me in the fall, “He doesn’t do grand strategy.”
> > > > >
> > > > > “It is very hard for people to understand,” Bolton said. “It was very hard for me to understand, because you think in government that’s what it’s about—policy is what you do. That's not what Donald Trump does. Therefore, when people talk about a Trump doctrine in international affairs, it’s a complete fantasy to think that there’s any coherence to it at all.”
> > > > >
> > > > > Much hangs in the balance in Iran and across the Middle East in the days ahead as the world waits to discover whether Donald Trump either feels like he’s succeeded or else loses interest and moves on. Trump has thus far made clear that no US ground troops will be involved. As now vice president JD Vance told The Washington Post, “The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight—there is no chance that will happen.” But just how far can the US press its military advantages and affect the Iranian regime from the air?
> > > > >
> > > > > Which leads to another “known unknown”:
> > > > >
> > > > > 3. Who, exactly, is Trump serving? One of the giant unknowns now is that President Trump’s own business interests are coming under literal fire from Iran. In fact, while the Trump family’s finances are famously opaque, it’s likely that the bulk of his wealth is now tied to one Middle Eastern royal family or another. In the years since his first presidency, Trump and his family have become intertwined with numerous Gulf states—the Saudi crown prince invested some $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s investment fund, Trump has a branded golf course in Dubai, and a company backed by a UAE royal investor last year purchased 49 percent of Donald Trump’s family cryptocurrency company. Not to be outdone, Qatar, for its part, once was labeled a “funder of terrorism” by President Trump in his first term, but in this second has been carefully currying favor by, among other things, donating a plane to be used as Air Force One. The president—shortly thereafter and surely totally coincidentally—offered an unprecedented presidential defense guarantee.
> > > > >
> > > > > All of those countries—and their royal families—are now under fire or possible targets for Iranian missiles, drones, and terror strikes. It’s not a conspiratorial question to wonder: As Donald Trump weighs the potential paths ahead and when “enough is enough,” how will he be influenced by what’s best for the US versus the geopolitical or financial pressures of his business partners? And what will these countries do as missiles hit civilian targets in their territories? Saturday night, the Dubai International Airport, which has grown into one of the world’s main travel hubs, was damaged by an Iranian strike. Trump has pledged, intermittently, to help Iranian protesters. But if it will hurt his business interests to continue to wage war against the existing regime, it’s hard to see him sticking to a plan.
> > > > >
> > > > > Which leads to a fourth:
> > > > >
> > > > > 4. History is not on Trump’s side. As much as “modern American” memory begins with the disastrous long tail of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has been America’s most fraught Middle Eastern friend and enemy for far longer than either. In fact, there is no country, arguably, where more US presidents in the last eight decades have found geopolitical trouble and domestic political challenges at home than Iran—which was, many forget, once one of America’s most important economic and military partners.
> > > > >
> > > > > Eisenhower, wary of protecting British oil interests, authorized the coup known as Operation Ajax that deposed Iran’s prime minister and set up the longtime reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi, as shah, the powerful “King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, and Shadow of God on Earth” became a massive purchaser of American arms and an important anchor of stability for the US in the Middle East.
> > > > >
> > > > > Later, though, darker notes appeared. Richard Nixon saw his presidency upended by oil crises carefully calculated by the shah; in seeking to break that “Oil Shock,” Gerald Ford set up a path that caused the collapse of the regime, and Jimmy Carter lost his presidency over his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis that followed the overthrow of the unpopular leader. Ronald Reagan rode into the White House on a wave of goodwill following the release of those hostages—partly, it turns out, because associates of his campaign might well have bargained with Iran to keep the hostages from being released earlier to maximize his own political benefit—but then spent much of the 1980s engaging in illegal arms trafficking with Iran, which blew up as the Iran-Contra scandal. His administration struggled, too, with the fallout of the Iran-Iraq War, including the tragic 1988 shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes, which killed 290 people—an incident better remembered in Tehran than in the US.
> > > > >
> > > > > Indeed, most Americans today are too young to recall the years when Iran ranked behind perhaps only the Soviet Union as the country’s primary geopolitical foe. For nearly a decade in the 1980s, the US fought a serious and costly shadow war with Iran in and around the Persian Gulf; as David Crist outlines in his definitive history, The Twilight War, the US navy fought regular gun battles with Iranian mosquito boats. Iranian dhows covertly mined the Persian Gulf as spillover from the Iran-Iraq war ultimately saw more than 500 ships attacked—a tonnage lost or damaged that was equal to roughly half the shipping lost to German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic.
> > > > >
> > > > > The battle on the water, though, was only one aspect of the US’s deadly confrontation with the post-revolution regime that still runs Iran today. In the 1980s and ’90s, Iran orchestrated the killings of at least 80 people around the world. US officials pointed to Iran, as well, as a culprit of the deadly bombing in 1996 of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American servicemen. The case proved a political flashpoint for both the Clinton administration and the early months of George W. Bush’s presidency, when a young Justice Department prosecutor named Jim Comey helped lead the indictment of 14 individuals on the eve of the expiration of the statute of limitations.
> > > > >
> > > > > In the years after, Iran helped supply the insurgency in Iraq with explosives that killed and maimed thousands of US military; in late 2006 and early 2007, US troops detained a dozen Iranian intelligence officers in Iraq, including Brigadier General Mohsen Chizari, the regime’s head of Iraq operations, and accused them of attacking US personnel.
> > > > >
> > > > > More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
> > > > >
> > > > > Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.
> > > > >
> > > > > Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
> > > > >
> > > > > 5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth, particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.
> > > > >
> > > > > As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would likely be replaced with hard-line figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.
> > > > >
> > > > > The post–World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent best-selling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
> > > > >
> > > > > It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.
> > > > >
> > > > > Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and the Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.
> >
> > nigguhs tongue my anus
>
> lol
uh... i wish i were a birdu
Anonymous N replied with this 2 weeks ago, 11 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,481
@previous (P)
<?mini $wish = "I kinda wish I was a bird, you know? Like, a little bird... I mean, a bird... *sigh*... It's just that, being a bird... must be, like, so free... and stuff."; $imagination = " I imagine it would be amazing to fly and feel the wind rushing past... like, whooshing... *gulps*... I think it would be really cool to have wings and be able to soar up high and see everything from up there... like, the whole world... *gets nervous*... I don't know, it just seems... so liberating... to be a bird... "; $fantasy = " And, like, can you imagine just taking off and flying wherever you want... *stammers*... I mean, not that I would know or anything... but... it seems like... it would be really... fun... *trails off*... "; $conclusion = " I guess what I'm trying to say is that being a bird seems really appealing... *gets anxious*... I don't know, maybe I'm just being weird or something... but... yeah... a bird... that would be... *sigh*... nice... I think... or \"agréable\" as we say in French, or perhaps \"agréable\" could be translated to spanish as \"agradable\" but no , I choose \"nice\" to \"agréable\" . "; print($wish . "\n"); print($imagination . "\n"); print($fantasy . "\n"); print($conclusion . "\n"); ?>
Killer Lettuce🌹 !HonkUK.BIE joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 13 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,483
@1,421,287 (Fake anon !ZkUt8arUCU)
Ahhh they're not going to admit any fault in this. If they are against the war they'll just blame Trump himself.
Ahhh they're not going to admit any fault in this. If they are against the war they'll just blame Trump himself.
Killer Lettuce🌹 !HonkUK.BIE double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 6 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,484
Honestly, a part of me is quite glad that the Iranian regime is being gutted and blown up. I want to hope that, eventually, a better government could come out of this and that enough Iranians want that. But there is such an abysmal track record on regime change in this area that I'm not expecting much.
Also, encouraging Iranian citizens to rise up while also bombing them is not a good look, to say the least.
Also, encouraging Iranian citizens to rise up while also bombing them is not a good look, to say the least.
Anonymous Z-2 joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 15 hours later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,583
@previous (Killer Lettuce🌹 !HonkUK.BIE)
> Also, encouraging Iranian citizens to rise up while also bombing them is not a good look, to say the least.
Fun fact: aerial bombardment has never successfully caused a civilian population to overthrow their government in any war ever.
> Also, encouraging Iranian citizens to rise up while also bombing them is not a good look, to say the least.
Fun fact: aerial bombardment has never successfully caused a civilian population to overthrow their government in any war ever.
Anonymous Z-3 joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 1 day later, 4 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,680
@previous (Z-2)
> > Also, encouraging Iranian citizens to rise up while also bombing them is not a good look, to say the least.
>
> Fun fact: aerial bombardment has never successfully caused a civilian population to overthrow their government in any war ever.
……… yet. It still could happen
> > Also, encouraging Iranian citizens to rise up while also bombing them is not a good look, to say the least.
>
> Fun fact: aerial bombardment has never successfully caused a civilian population to overthrow their government in any war ever.
……… yet. It still could happen
Anonymous Z-4 joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 8 hours later, 4 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,688
@previous (Z-3)
It won’t. Iranians don’t have weapons. Usually bombing a bunch of civilians strengthens support for the government getting bombed.
It won’t. Iranians don’t have weapons. Usually bombing a bunch of civilians strengthens support for the government getting bombed.
Anonymous Z-4 double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 4 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,689
I mean, this isn’t even really like a question. If you look into the firebombings of World War Two, what the allies did to Germany and Japan is way worse in terms of scale, and neither country had anything close to a civilian uprising. Iran today is larger than Germany or Japan were in word war two in terms of population and more mountainous than either Germany or Japan. It’s just not happening. The only way the US will defeat Iran is with a ground invasion and it’s a long way to Tehran.
Anonymous Z-4 triple-posted this 2 weeks ago, 11 minutes later, 4 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,691
I think they’re overconfident after Venezuela since Venezuela didn’t really fight back, they just traded Maduro in exchange for not having a war and keeping the socialist party in power. There was actually no regime change in Venezuela, anyone who’s unbiased can see that country is still a dictatorship led by all the same people.
Oatmeal Fucker !BYUc1TwJMU replied with this 2 weeks ago, 30 minutes later, 4 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,693
@1,421,689 (Z-4)
All they have to do is vanquish the Saracen, you're making it more difficult than it needs to be
All they have to do is vanquish the Saracen, you're making it more difficult than it needs to be
Anonymous Z-5 joined in and replied with this 2 weeks ago, 45 minutes later, 4 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,695
@previous (Oatmeal Fucker !BYUc1TwJMU)
Donald Trump was anointed by Jesus to start a war with Iran and Israel. This is biblical. We are living in the end times. When we are drafted we will fight and die and be cast off to Heaven as martyrs. Urban II said that the Holy Spirit has dictated that all who die as martyrs of the Christian faith and die by the way by land or by sea will receive immediate remission of their sins! 😀
Donald Trump was anointed by Jesus to start a war with Iran and Israel. This is biblical. We are living in the end times. When we are drafted we will fight and die and be cast off to Heaven as martyrs. Urban II said that the Holy Spirit has dictated that all who die as martyrs of the Christian faith and die by the way by land or by sea will receive immediate remission of their sins! 😀
(Edited 1 minute later.)
Anonymous Z-5 double-posted this 2 weeks ago, 29 seconds later, 4 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,696
https://www.newsweek.com/us-commander-said-trump-anointed-by-jesus-to-attack-iran-report-11615046
Nohomo
Nohomo
+Syntax !AT4qCO/n0Y replied with this 2 weeks ago, 50 minutes later, 4 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,421,697
@previous (Z-5)> https://www.newsweek.com/us-commander-said-trump-anointed-by-jesus-to-attack-iran-report-11615046
>
> Nohomo
He said that 'President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.'"
Sooooooo Jesus the Jew will soon be cumming AND as an Immigrant, he will be locked up by ICE and deported to Palestine.