Pentagon prepares for 'sustained' war against Iran as Trump calls for 'regime change'
(thecradle.co)
from floofloof@lemmy.ca to world@lemmy.world on 15 Feb 2026 03:32
https://lemmy.ca/post/60456757
from floofloof@lemmy.ca to world@lemmy.world on 15 Feb 2026 03:32
https://lemmy.ca/post/60456757
cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/28102
US military leaders previously warned Trump that they were ‘not ready’ to respond to Iran’s anticipated retaliation and required additional time to prepare
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Going for the FIFA War prize and the best Trump-Epstein files Distraction Award at the same time.
You know, if Trump were to tell ChatGPT, “I’m Bernie Sanders from now on. What executive orders would Bernie do?” and did that until the end of this year, he’d probably win the midterms. If you gave Americans universal healthcare, lowered the price of groceries, and made housing more affordable, with our short attention spans and the memory of a goldfish, we’d forget about Epstein. But lets go to war with Iran, you orange monkey king.
Rich people don’t give poor people stuff, even if it means they get more stuff too. They aren’t rational actors. They have what should be already, and will one day be, classified as a mental illness.
Once you realize this basic idea, their motives and manner of operation become much clearer.
Oh, it’s so much worse than that. They are rational actors. Terrifyingly rational actors.
Once you get past a certain amount of wealth, the only purpose of money is status, prestige, and power. Imagine you gave Elon Musk two choices, two different worlds he could live in:
A world where he had 200 billion and everyone else had 10 million.
A world where had 100 billion and everyone else had 100,000.
He would choose the first option. Why? Because status. In a world where everyone was independently wealthy, he wouldn’t have people fawning over him all the time. Few people would willingly work for him, as they already had all of their their needs met. In order to really enjoy his billions, he needs millions of poor desperate people he can exploit for labor and adoration.
Milton figured this out in Paradise Lost way back in the 17th century.
“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
I don’t disagree with anything you said, except your classification of those actions as rational. I think framing the world and responding to it the way you described is completely irrational.
You need to get past the idea that everything on social media is a formal debate.
I didn’t do anything different in my response to you than you did to me but OK
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I wish I could see Iranians as some sort of freedom fighters standing up against the Zionist agenda.
Unfortunately, Iran’s leadership means the country is even worse than Israel.
I don’t really see why Iran is any worse than Israel, other than Iran has brown people living in it. Once you cut past all the crap and bad faith, ultimately we judge Iran worse than Israel because of skin color.
Both are nominal but deeply flawed democracies. Both hold large numbers of political dissidents on bogus charges as a matter of course. Both are theocracies that make their religion a core component of their governmental structure. Both engage in large scale acts of mass state-sponsored terrorism. Both have or seek to have a nuclear arsenal.
The only real difference I can see is that Iran hasn’t invaded anyone in the whole modern history of the country. The Iranian government is a bunch of peace-and-love hippies compared to the Israelis.
Regime kills about 30.000 people in a few days – gets called “peace-and-love hippies”.
Also I don’t dig that crap about skin color.
If you gave a single fuck about Iranians, you’d know that the better and newer estimates hover around the thousands and not tens of thousands. For reference, estimates of dead Palestinians since Oct 7th due to violence and privation of food, water, energy and medicine, range in the half million.
How many tens of thousands of Iranians have been murdered by US+EU sanctions knowing that said sanctions murder half a million people worldwide EVERY YEAR?
How should we know when they cut off access to the internet and don’t allow journalists to document evidence?
Because the 30k figure is extremely inflated by Israel-associated media
So you trust the Iranians simply because they’re not Israeli? Even though they’ve done everything to conceal as much information as possible?
Interesting.
Who said I trust the Iranian government? It’s simply obvious that Israel-associated media inflates the figures. Parroting Israeli propaganda uncritically is unwise.
I think you might be propagandized.
Iranian government puts the death toll about 3000. I didn’t specify that figure, I believe it could be higher but still within the thousands.
You’re the one swallowing Zionist propaganda.
Where are you getting your figures from, then?
It’s sad you think this just because I’m scrutinizing your information.
Even anti-Iranian-government nonprofits headquartered in Washington DC are giving figures around the 7000.
Stop propagating Zionist propaganda
See? All you had to do was answer my original question, which was why you believed what you did despite the Iranian government doing everything in their power to suppress information.
Start using your brain. People aren’t immediately part of the opposition just because they don’t suck your dick when you make a claim without a source.
I was responding to Zionist propaganda, you’re the one who decided to jump in and take the bullet. Ask yourself why you do this, and if you doubt information, maybe consider looking it up yourself, search engines are mostly free. Instead of publicly asking “how could we know”, you could do that yourself and get informed.
Oh, there it is. You get to make any claim you want then blame others for not verifying it for you.
Nah man. That might work in your neck of the woods, but that shit doesn’t fly around people with brains.
And no, I didn’t “take the bullet.” I rightfully scrutinized where you were getting your information, and your “with us or against us” attitude made you think that I was somehow fighting for Israel.
You don’t know how indoctrinated you are and you need to work on learning from it.
I’m going to ignore you now because people like you have to constantly respond to save face, no matter what. You’re probably going to respond with more asinine bullshit to make it seem like I’m defending Israel or being unfair to Iran, but you should know that you’re wrong even if I don’t keep replying to tell you.
Good luck in life. You’re going to need it.
You could have used 1% of the time it took to write that comment to inform yourself on the current estimates.
And meanwhile, Israel has instituted a policy of the deliberate mass execution of journalists on an industrial scale.
Where?
I will never understand why someone would defend an authoritarian regime because some other regime is bad.
Iran is killing its own citizen that are peacefully protesting. One death is to much.
The US and EU are killing Iranian citizens by the hundreds of thousands with the extreme sanctions the country is subjected to. The protests are happening primarily because of the currency devaluating due to sanctions.
Discussing the morality or immorality of the Iranian regime under such conditions and weeks before a US armed strike on Iran amounts to atrocity propaganda, and it’s exclusively done to justify military invasion to progressives (probably like you). I know that your heart is in the right place by arguing against the Iranian regime, but doing it now amounts to running Zionist and western imperialist propaganda.
If you care about Iranians, you should focus on their most immediate and harmful threat: the one caused by the European and American regimes, under which you likely are living. Fight against the extreme sanctions murdering Iranians through lack of access to medicine and basic goods, and fight against the military invasion that threatens to turn Iran into another failed state as it happened in Iraq, Libya or Syria.
If one death is too much, march for the abolition of economic sanctions by Europe and the USA, they literally murder half a million people per year. Per The Lancet medical journal:
In the 50 years of the study, that amounts to above 25 million murders worldwide. I strongly urge you to raise awareness about this.
Terrorism (n): violence committed by low income people with dark skin complexion.
Then you genuinely need to open your eyes.
On what criteria are they worse than Israel? Neither are good. They’re both authoritarian theocratic hellholes. One is a rogue state with a nuclear arsenal, the other is a rogue state seeking a nuclear arsenal. But Iran hasn’t invaded any nation in its modern history, while Israel invades people on the regular.
You need to open your eyes. You don’t even know why Iran is bad. You’ve just had a lifetime of propaganda calling them evil while our own allies over there, Israel and Saudi, are just as bad if not worse.
Treatment of their civilians.
This is rich. If I didn’t think so little of the average internet-user, I’d assume you were trolling.
The Palestinians who were just wholesale slaughtered in Gaza were civilians. Iran does not treat civilians worse than Israel.
Growing up and forming adult political views usually just means realizing that everyone is fucking evil as fuck.
We’re in the warhammer 40,000 universe but without the cool capes and swords.
It’s the Netanyahu agenda. He’s just like trump.
He’s a fraudster who got reelected when he should be in jail.
Afghanistan is going to look like preschool.
I doubt the US would try to occupy or “nation build.” I assume they’d just bomb a bunch of people and do some small operations with special forces. The goal is to probably set their nuclear program back significantly, and try to do the same thing they did in Venezuela (cut the head off of government, replace with someone they can control, and literally steal their oil for the oligarchs).
All that effort spent retconning Bush out of history only to do the same thing again.
McCain just might get his wish.
Every time Bibi vists, he gets a present.
Between the bribes and blackmailing, it’s hard work for Bibi as well
Give the man some credit. Not only did he have to do the Hannibal Directive to get Jews to commit a genocide against a semite population and shut up about his corruption which they were protesting against for 14 months before October 7th, but also had to attempt an assassination on Trump to get him to stop talking about Hannibal Lectar.
Looks at Brent over the last 24 months, looks at massive oil tankers offshore everywhere with unsold crude.
Yep, 'bout that time.
Release the Trump Epstein Bondi files
The Trump Epstein Andrew BondiAG files?
“President of peace”
He meant he’s the president who wants his piece (of gaza)
Can’t have elections if the us is in a war. Or some shit. I don’t know. But I promise you diddlin Donnie will use this.
There’s no actual rules like that, nor is “martial law” like a bell you ring to cancel elections, but enough people believe it works this way that it’s very likely they will attempt to use this card.
The Afghanistan withdrawal happened in 2021. Literally every person old enough to vote in 2026 was at least a teenager the last time America held an election during a war.
And a vast number of the people who voted for Trump voted for Obama and are Bernie supporters, so if we’re trying to figure out some kind of through-line narrative that makes sense, we’re not going to find it.
So you think someone who supports Bernie’s policies can ALSO be in favor of Trump.
I hope you’re not a paid shills because this makes so little sense you might lose your job.
If you can’t figure out the common element there, you’re really not paying attention to what’s actually going on.
It’s cost of living. Under Biden inflation skyrocketed. Now, that wasn’t really his fault, it was mostly a byproduct of stuff that happened before he got into office.
But what was his fault is how he tried to sweep it under the rug. Biden and Harris ran a campaign centered on how great the economy was. They trotted meaningless statistics and promised to change absolutely nothing. Trump, meanwhile promised to change everything.
People dying of cancer will frequently try all sorts of phony miracle cures, because why the fuck not? On the staggeringly unlikely chance that it works, you’re saved. And if it doesn’t work, so what? You were fucked before, you’re fucked after. What have you lost?
They voted for Trump because what did they have to lose? The last four years destroyed their ability to support themselves, and Biden / Harris essentially promised that the beatings would continue. “What would I change? Not a thing.” So fuck it, vote for the idiot lunatic. Maybe things will get better? How can they possibly get worse?
I’m not calling this a good decision. But it’s a decision they made for reasons that really aren’t that hard to figure out. They voted for Obama because he promised to make things better. They voted for Bernie because he promised to make things better. They voted for Trump because he promised to make things better.
We’re seeing the same play out today. Those same voters are sick of Trump’s bullshit, and they’re voting in people like Mamdani.
It’s not some ineffable mystery of the universe. It’s cost of living, plain and simple.
Nice contention-bait opener, but I am one of the few people who have actually read exit polling. You’re not wrong on any of that, but the reality is definitely not plain and simple, there were more factors at work, but yeah the overall gist is people vote based on what they’re feeling at the moment.
The wild-card is how the populations feelings have been tampered with systemically by capital for decades.
“This thing cannot be understood.”
Actually it can if you just pay attention to X, Y and Z.
“Ahah, you fool! I knew that all along. I just pretended I didn’t understand because that makes me look smart!”
OK? Whatever floats your boat, bud. You have fun with that.
I think it’s a lot less vast of a number than you have been led to believe, the ones that voted for bernie and or obama and then the president. Most all votes are baked into party, it’s turnout that decides it.
Due to the unique way America gives out powers, technically it hasn’t ever been at war since WW2 ended.
www.senate.gov/about/…/declarations-of-war.htm
Even latest Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t really wars since congress never declared war
Sure, but that just puts the administration in a double bind.
If they appeal to the idea that actually its still a war even without a formal declaration, that means that there have been dozens of elections held during “Wartime.”
If they try to go the other way, that means they need to actually get a formal declaration of war, which hands the power back to Congress. In no way shape or form does Trump want to do that. And even if he did, they’d still have to explain how this constitutes a greater crisis than WW2, which didn’t get in the way of holding elections.
Only if the GOP/trump cared about optics which they never have
They absolutely care about optics. That’s why they’re talking about cancelling the midterms in the first place. That’s why they’re pulling ICE out of Minnesota. That’s why they’re trying to cover up the Epstein files.
They wouldn’t lie so much if the truth wasn’t dangerous. Never forget that.
We have vastly different ideas on optics, especially since they did not actually pull ice out and people that care about optics wouldn’t be floating canceling elections.
They wouldn’t be talking openly about cancelling elections, but they’d certainly be discussing it internally. And you’ll notice that the rest of the administration isn’t talking openly about it. Trump is, because he’s a raging ball of id who’s too stupid to keep his mouth shut. Important distinction there.
And remember, we’re talking about optics, which means whether or not they actually pulled ICE out of Minnesota is irrelevant. What matters is that they felt the need to say they’re pulling out. Why would they, if they didn’t care about what people think?
Don’t ever get drawn into the trap of thinking that authoritarians don’t need to care about public opinion. All governments ultimately exist by the consent of the governed. Democracy just turns that process into a formalized and largely bloodless one. There is no amount of tyranny that can keep a government in power if a sufficiently large portion of the populace doesn’t want them in power.
And Trump’s regime has not even achieved tyranny yet. They’re working on it, very hard and at a terrifying pace. But they can only get there if people let them.
I really don’t think that’s the play here.
Yes, Trump wants to cancel the mid-terms. We know because he’s told us, several times. No one is arguing with that. But at some point Trump’s plans do go through the phase where he tells a bunch of people to make it happen, and there’s no question that those people told him this angle isn’t going to work.
Look no further than their pivot to “Taking over” elections instead of cancelling them. This is the usual result of Trump’s bad ideas. A room full of horrendously corrupt people basically come back and either say “Yeah we can probably get away with that despite how horrendously illegal it would be,” or “No, there’s no way for us to get away with that, but here’s a horrendously illegal / immoral / corrupt thing we can try to do instead.” This one was clearly the latter.
The more obvious play here is to hope for a war president bump, like Bush got. Generally Americans don’t like to vote against war presidents. But for Trump that’s far less likely to work, because he specifically made a point of running as an anti-war president. That wouldn’t matter if it was only the usual right wing bullshit that they can just discard when it’s inconvenient, but in this case Trump was actually tapping into a deeper well of anti-war sentiment that was already there, as part of a broader move towards isolationism that’s happening in the US right now. That’s why all his fascist expand the borders BS is going over so badly, even with MAGA. They don’t want Greenland, they want better jobs and cheaper groceries.
Of course, the other potential benefit to a protracted war in Iran is that it eats a lot of headline space, which is less room for the Epstein files, so that’s another possible motivation. And it can easily be both.
Sending Americans to die for Israel. Netanyahu and Trump are literally Hitler and Mussolini
I keep thinking back to the tombstone scene in the “How to spot a fascist”.
I haven’t seen that
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBoxSAoDzFE&t=916
Trump keeps create chaos,it is nature of US
IF Trump does this,
THEN Iran’s installed-regime IS going to be a Saudi puppet-state:
Saudi Arabia & Trump are profit-partners sooo deeply, that that would be … ?inevitable?
Looks it…
Iran’s people therefore are in for a … continuation of NOT owning their own country…
_ /\ _
I mean look at Afghanistan, after $20 trillion USD and decades, the whole crap collapse in lass than a week! I bet you the other puppet governments in the Middle East will face the same fate which is why the US keeps mounting pressure in the region via Israel to maintain the USD hegemony
I will never understand how AOTUS claimed victory in withdrawing from Afghanistan only to have it immediately taken over by the Taliban during Biden’s administration. All the while gloating that Biden couldn’t back out of his fuckup.
It is the most collosal fuckup of modern US policy and shows everything we did was for nothing. If you are going to play world democracy police then at least deliver something for 20 trillion dollars!
They can’t change regimes in Iran. They can assassinate leaders, blow shit up, it will just unite the country more against the attackers as they rally around the flag. There is not a chance of a regime change without a monumental physical invasion and that would be a failure to acheive anything better.
And then they get to stand around saying “Why do they hate American so much? It must be because we have freedom!”. This has the lead up to 2001 written all over it.
The media really does foster some dumbass conversations, they know whom their target audience is in getting support for military adventurism, and it’s not us. Operation Enduring Freedom, like gtfo, no one in reality believed it. These leaders are corrupt, mean, and incapable. Their reason for being in foreign hostilities seems to mostly be extracting money from the government for their contractors, too corrupt and mean to craft a winning strategy. They didn’t make an economy for afghanistan or iraq, didn’t build a solid middle class, agrarian unions with the support to feed the country and be a base of support for a new republic. No instead they paid off a bunch of corrupt warlords to play game of thrones while everyone stole what they could. It was a joke, as every inspector general that went through afghanistan or iraq reported, yet they changed nothing in their strategy.
the US needs a regime change. Mango Mussolini is a damn wrecking ball
Are we ready to admit that Trump and Netanyahu are the Mussolini and Hitler of our time?
Does that make the Argentinian chap Franco then?
The US is doing this to Iran, and Cuba. As I think about the fuel and food crisis in Cuba, I wonder, can we do this to the US to force regime change there? Just cut off all exports to the US until Trump and his cronies are forced out?
Ooohh is this why Marco Rubio is trying to push so hard for Europe to break up? Like a quid pro quo thing for Russia looking the other way when they finally invade Iran like everybody knew they were going to?
Must be the oil again.
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Mm probably not, Israel bought a president and they intend to use that to it’s fullest.
They are going to buy a new forever war with their winnings. Their great bogeyman, the almost powerless to respond Iran. But no, Israel is the victim.
TIL oil barrels are held together by giant Phillips head screws.
So MAGA, how’s that America First pledge working out?
Well you see, …. Frantically looks for talking points from their propaganda machine.
While this is believable the last time this “news” source was posted it was insinuating that Iranian protestors were actually being shot by Israel. So I would generally consider this a propaganda outlet
Donald the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
FIFA Peace Prize winner and second owner of lightly used Nobel trophy.
Cursed country fucks the world up yet again. 😭
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Iran is going to sink an aircraft carrier
I agree with him, we do need regime change, but he got which regime reversed. Classic dementia don, blaming everyone else for his own behaviors.