QOTD: "A Classic 'Diversionary War'"

 

Christopher S. Chivvis, director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing in The Guardian about the corrupt and depraved Malignant Fascist's deadly adventure in Iran:

"Having torn up the Iran nuclear deal and escalated pressure, the president has now initiated a military campaign explicitly aimed at regime collapse. Yet there has been no serious public reckoning with the risks, much less the plausibility of the political end state he claims to seek. By weaponising the military for the sake of the attention economy, Washington has traded grand strategy for the immediate gratification of the news cycle.

This is because the outcome of the war is less important to Trump than violent conflict with America’s enemy and the performative use of US power.

Trump’s foreign policy is not guided by a coherent theory of order, deterrence or alliance management. It is driven instead by the demonstration of dominance, the creation of spectacle and the command of the news cycle. Military force, in this framework, is not a tool subordinated to strategy. It is the strategy.

His escalation against Iran comes as he faces mounting domestic pressure, for attacking the civil rights of US citizens in Minneapolis, amid renewed scrutiny surrounding the Epstein files, and just days after the US supreme court struck down the legal justification for his global tariff policy. In this light, the strikes function as a classic “diversionary war” – an attempt to hijack the global narrative and drown out domestic scandal with the thunder of cruise missiles."  (our emphasis)

In his middle of the night announcement that the U.S. had attacked Iran, the MF, who dodged the draft during the war in Vietnam with a bogus case of "bone spurs," brushed off the likelihood that American lives may be lost in what seems likely to be a wider war (3 are already dead as of this posting).  If we do lose our military personnel, in the MF's thinking, that's all part of the performative nature of things (plus, they're all "suckers" and "losers" to him). They'd be used as props in a warped "patriotic" call to rally around the MF. Just watch.

(photo: Always a silly cap for messaging. So Presidential)