You know. It's crazy thinking about just how many life changing disasters I've witnessed growing up. Obviously every generation has some big things they go through, millennials are no different, but it just feels like this particular 30 year cycle has been extra hard?
Just naming a few but we had 9/11. The Iraq war. The recession. Sandyhook. Pulse Night Club. The Vegas concert. The Florida high school A 2x impeached president that got reelected 4 years later. A president having a major health crisis live and ceding his position to the vice president because he could no longer do his job. An Iranian war. I believe there was a huge mosque shooting in the south, as well as a synagogue? ( I feel horrible I can't remember the details.) A Christian school getting shot up. The huge movie theater shooting. A second recession. A global pandemic. Private militarized police storming a US city and killing US citizens. Kids being held in cages and essentially concentration camps. Roe vs Wade being over turned. The Epstein files being released and nothing coming of it… God. The list is endless.
If I'm being honest, the only positive major event I can think of within the US in the last 12 years is gay marriage finally being legalized country wide, and conservatives constantly being shot down to have it over turned.
And this is just what's happening in the US. Malala(?) getting shot for trying to attend school comes to mind. A middle eastern country (sorry I can't remember which) only allowing women to drive in the past decade. Brexit. I'm not super cultured, so I'm sure there are other global events but got damn, can we catch a break?
Congress didn’t authorize this war, and the only response to questions is a loyalty test we’ve fallen for before.
Parker Molloy at The Present Age:
Marc Thiessen, the former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush, posted on X this week. He just can’t understand the logic, he wrote, of Democrats “siding with Iran.”
That’s the whole thing, right there, in one sentence. If you oppose the war, you are siding with the enemy. If you think the president should have gotten congressional authorization before launching Operation Epic Fury, you are siding with the enemy. If you note that Trump’s own Defense Intelligence Agency contradicted his stated justification for the strikes, you are siding with the enemy. There is one acceptable position, and it is total agreement. Everything else gets filed under treason or something like it.
Trump, for his part, said the same thing louder. “What most people understand is that they are only complaining BECAUSE I DID IT,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night, going after Democrats who’ve criticized the strikes. “The fact is, whatever I do, they will be on the opposite side. These people are SICK, CRAZY, and DEMENTED.”
Thiessen says it in pundit-speak. Trump says it in all caps. Both saying the same thing: get in line.
If you’ve been alive for the last 25 years, you’ve heard this before. You’ve probably heard it from some of the same people. And if you know who Marc Thiessen is, the déjà vu is about to get very specific.
The script
Here’s how this works. It’s the same every time. A president launches a military operation without congressional approval. Critics raise objections. Maybe it’s about legality. Maybe it’s about strategy. Maybe it’s about the fact that the justification doesn’t hold up. The specifics vary, but the next part doesn’t.
Supporters skip past the objection entirely and go straight to motive. You’re not questioning the war. You’re siding with the enemy. “Siding with Iran.” “Maduro supporter.” “Saddam lover.” Pick your era, fill in the blank.
Now the critic is on defense. They have to prove they’re not rooting for the bad guy before anyone will engage with what they actually said. So they lead with a concession. “Of course, Iran is terrible, BUT...” “Obviously, Maduro is a dictator, BUT...” They’re trying to clear a loyalty checkpoint before getting to their point.
But the concession does something worse than fail. By opening with “Iran is bad,” the critic has already accepted the terms of the argument. They’ve agreed that the question on the table is whether Iran is bad. And once that’s the question, the answer is obvious, and anything you say after “but” sounds like an asterisk on something everyone already agrees about. The real questions (did the president lie about the justification? is this legal? does the public support it?) never get asked because the critic just spent their opening statement answering a question nobody actually disagreed about.
The pattern
President George W. Bush gave the modern framework its catchphrase. On September 20, 2001, standing before a joint session of Congress, he told the world: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Six weeks later, at a press conference with French President Jacques Chirac, he boiled it down: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”
That framework helped sell both the immediate response to 9/11 and the Iraq War, which was built on claims about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be false. Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and the lives of more than 4,000 American service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The framework did its job.
Marc Thiessen was there for all of it. He joined the Bush administration in 2001 as chief speechwriter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, working out of the Pentagon. He was in the building when it was hit on September 11. He later moved to the White House, eventually becoming Bush’s own chief speechwriter. He spent years crafting the language that told Americans to pick a side or be sorted into the enemy camp.
The same guy
So here’s where Thiessen is now: Washington Post columnist. Fox News contributor. And the author of Courting Disaster, a 2010 book arguing that the CIA’s use of waterboarding was effective, lawful, and moral. That last one is worth keeping in mind. When Thiessen talks about America’s moral authority abroad, remember that he wrote an entire book defending torture.
[...]
Two different Democratic leaders. Same structure. Open by accepting the administration's premise, then pivot to process. Schumer's version has the literal 'but.' Jeffries doesn't need one. The pivot does the work on its own.
There are Democrats who skip the concession, and their statements come across a lot stronger. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Marine veteran, called it “a war of choice without congressional authorization.” No “Iran is bad, but.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren went further. She called the war “dangerous and illegal” and said it was “built on lies.” That last phrase matters. “Built on lies.” That’s the message. Not “the president should have asked Congress first.” The war is built on lies.
The Democratic response is a spectrum, from Schumer’s full concession to Warren’s near-miss. But none of them do what their own voters already believe: this war is wrong, the justification is a lie, and it should stop. The administration would love for the question being debated to be “is the Iranian regime bad?” Schumer and Jeffries appear to be okay with the question being “should the president have asked permission?” But the question the public is already answering is “should this be happening at all?” Jack Roush at the London School of Economics’ US Politics blog made the same comparison to 2004, when John Kerry tried to criticize the Iraq War’s management without opposing its underlying mission and got outflanked from both sides.
The throat-clearing might actually make the administration’s framing stronger. When Schumer says “Iran must never get nukes” before pivoting to authorization, he’s agreeing with the administration’s stated premise for the war. He’s just disagreeing about whether the president needed to ask permission first. To anyone listening casually, the Democratic position sounds like: we agree that something needs to be done, we just wish you’d asked us first. That’s not what three out of every four Democratic voters think. They oppose the war. But their elected representatives are so afraid of being sorted into the wrong side of the binary that they lead with concessions designed to preempt the accusation. And in doing so, they accept the frame. “Iran is terrible, but” isn’t going to stop Trump and guys like Thiessen from calling Democrats traitors, anyway.
Cheerleaders of Trump’s Iran War have a “with us or against us” attitude, not too dissimilar to the 9/11 aftermath and Bush 43’s war with Iraq.
Liars, manipulators, and propagandists are not limited in their tactics and they cannot be summed up in a single pithy slogan--not even “beware anyone who tries to tell you that complex situations are simple,” because of course these people can also take a simple situation and make it seem complex.
For example, they can drown you in thousands of years’ worth of history to make it seem ambiguous who are the colonizers and who are the colonized in Palestine-Israel, when the truth is that the colonizers are the people who act like colonizers: The side that refers to slaughtering the other side’s innocent civilians as “mowing the grass.” The side whose police forces literally train USAmerican ones in the art of being thuggish occupying brutes. The side that doesn’t let the other side drive on roads built in their own country. The side whose police and officials turn a blind eye when their civilians form into lynch mobs and start burning down olive farms. The side that imports fauna and flora from Europe to a region of the world where it either can’t naturally flourish or becomes invasive. The side that has literal settlements in what they themselves claim to be legally the other side’s country. See? It’s actually quite simple.
Who was the bad guy in the Iraq war? That would be the side that literally made up its reason for invading out of whole cloth, never punished (and indeed rewarded) the liars who did so, and proceeded to bomb schools, hospitals, and baby formula factories in the process of slaughtering one million mostly-civilians.
Who was the bad guy in the Saudi-led war in Yemen? The side that was murdering children. Who was the bad guy in the Vietnam war? The side that was murdering children (and dropped chemical weapons and dropped cluster munitions and ran concentration camps). Who was the bad guy in the Korean war? The side that was murdering children (there were many among the 20% of the Korean population we freaking genocided). Who was the bad guy in the Afghanistan war? Well, both sides were murdering children--but the fact that even “the side that murders children are the bad guys” can’t always help you in parsing geopolitics just goes to reinforce the greater point about how no pithy slogan can.
The world is indeed a complicated place, but the nuances of a situation are not always relevant (“cool motive; still murder”). Some issues really are black and white. Sometimes the debate really is hydrogen-bomb-vs.-crying-baby. Sometimes one side is just ontologically evil--and usually when that happens it’s the side that’s allied to the United States of America.
And conversely “but what if...both sides bad?” is such a transparent thought-terminating cliche that it literally gets memed on, and yet you look at American electoral politics and the primary difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that the Democrats are a little bit better at hiding their fascist tendencies. The world is not of a piece.
Many believe ancient extraterrestrial technology was buried in Iraq. It is suggested that a hidden Stargate that can facilitate inter dimensional travel was the main reason for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
في ذكرى تحرير الفاو من العدوان الفارسي نستذكر شهداء الحرب العراقية الايرانية داعيين لهم بالرحمة والخلود في الفردوس الأعلى ونستذكر الأسرى والمفقودين الذين غُيبوا في غياهيب السجون قبل اكثر من ٣ عقود وعيون أهاليهم تطالع في السماء وفي الرسائل القديمة وبين الوجوه على أمل عودتهم بعد زمن طويل فينيرون قلوبنا في وسط عتمة سنين الفراق المُرّة
رحِم الله الشهداء وأطال الله بعمر ابطال الجيش العراقي وصقور القوة الجوية وألهمنا الصَبر والسلوان على فراقهم
(في الصورة عمي البطل الأسير النقيب الطيار محمد سامي محمد رشيد فَكّ الله أسره)
