by liberal japonicus
The title quotes John McCain, (and I am in no way endorsing the sentiment), and novakant just noted the attack. The BBC has live reporting, while France24 reports Iran firing missles at Israel.
One striking thing to me is the paucity of coverage. It is not unexpected, but I don’t see a lot out there. Anyway, a thread for discussing this.
And double checking on Gemini, while McCain referenced the Beach Boys, it was actually a parody song by Vince Vance & the Valiants, which was recorded during the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
This is straight out of the current Russian playbook being used in Ukraine. Is there any reason at all to think it will work any better here?
The main difference I can see is that Iran starts out with sophisticated, long range, drones — designed and already being manufactured.** I’ll be amazed if Israel doesn’t become aacquainted with Shahed’s for the next few weeks. Or months, as may be. This isn’t like attacking Palestinians, who have no real industrial base.
As for the US, I expect Trump to just declare victory and scuttle home. Before he loses a US Naval vessel or something. Incompetent as this administration is, it will be no surprise if that doesn’t work out well. It’s not like attacking Venezuela after all.
** At least this may cut off Russian imports, and so reduce the attacks on Ukraine, at least a bit.
I’ve already fired off a letter to my Congressman, asking when the Declaration of War got passed. Sarcastically, obviously.
Not that there’s any chance that Congress will push back on this. But just to lend what little support I can.
Europe is already condemning Iran for shooting back (while only being ‘concerned’ about the US’ and Israel’s actions).
As had to be expected.
It would be wrong not to give you the Guardian’s article on this, with the headline Trump vies for Bush’s crown for worst foreign policy decision in history
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/28/trump-iran-analysis-us-foreign-policy-george-bush
Trump, last month, bested his own record (from last year) for the longest ever State of the Union address. (Which of his qualifies as most vacuous is a separate discussion.) Similarly, he will have three more years to exceed this worst foreign policy decision. Bad idea to bet against his doing so.
copying a comment I made elsewhere:
My prediction, which is mine, is that this was the LAST SOTU from Trump.
Why? Because just a few days after Jan 20 2017, when JD can potentially serve two extra full terms, Trump will have a “sudden fatal medical event”.
JD has already offed a Pope and a Queen of England, and is only known by an alias of an alias, so it fits.
Now, the other interesting question is whether Usha realizes that as JD gets close to running for the top job, JD will be motivated to give HER a “sudden fatal medical event” so he could marry the widow Kirk.
If Usha does understand the risk, then she might need to arrange a “tragic, fatal, freak, furniture accident” that removes JD.
All of this will be in the coming season of “Game of Armchairs”, look for it on cable!
…just a few days after Jan 20 2017...
Prediction is easy, especially when it’s about the past.
Heh heh!
TOO many years, it’s so hard to keep track of them all.
Just lucky for me that someone will notice these things when I have a lapse.
BRB, need to fix a nagging Y2K problem.
So the US attacked Iran because Israel was going to attack Iran and then Iran would attack the US which made it an imminent threat. I don’t even know what to call this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/02/us-israel-war-iran-live-updates-attacks-strikes-tehran-lebanon-beirut-hezbollah-dubai-latest-news?page=with%3Ablock-69a5fa488f0863f6a3f000cf#block-69a5fa488f0863f6a3f000cf
I know what to call it: contempt for the recipients of this ridiculous farrago of an excuse. It’s like a truculent 15 year old coming up with an absurd explanation for his appalling behaviour, and daring the listener to prove it isn’t true. As if everybody in the world doesn’t know that if the US forbade Israel to attack Israel would have no choice but to obey. And, since Trump likes to act the irresistible hard man, it has no internal coherence or consistency either. It’s pure contempt, for Congress, the American public, and the other nations of the middle east.
Should we applaud the mini star of whore for his honesty to publicly state that the US military will not feel obliged to obey any laws of war, that there will be no rules of engagement or any other woke or leftist stuff and that this war is definitely not about a changing Iran towards democracy?
“Should we applaud the mini star of whore for his honesty to publicly state that the US military will not feel obliged to obey any laws of war,”
It’ll make the war-crimes trials easier, it’s true.
Hartmut, could you check if the Nuremberg courtroom/gallows are available? Danke!
No reason to disrupt the tranquility the good people of Nuremberg. A simple transfer to the Hague and the ICC will do.
Granted, the US has declined to join the ICC. But as I recall, all it takes is getting the defendant to a country which is a member to get them arrested and sent for trial. (“Extraordinary rendition” anyone? Best use for it ever!)
But there is the ‘Invade the Hague’ Act, so one should use a different location.
The Nuremberg court room (Saal 600) is available (and has been reconstructed in its form used for the trials). The gallows was makeshift, so it does not exist anymore. It was a faulty construction anyway.
I would propose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_from_a_gun as more suitable. What about quartering by use of 4 Hellfire missiles?* Or the major Kong exit (bunker buster or MOAB, not nuclear).
For others nibbling to death by rabid chihuahuas or starving naked molerats could be an idea.
*expulsion from the forces has to happen before since quartering soldiers is unconstitutional
I’m guessing that any President sending miscreants to the ICC would decline to invoke the ‘Invade the Hague’ Act.
Not sure, but hasn’t Congress passed a law to forbid the president to do that (i.e. rendering US citizens to foreign courts, the ICC in particular)? Apart from that, that’s not how US politics work. Alas, I fear it would be political suicide.
Not sure, but hasn’t Congress passed a law to forbid the president to do that (i.e. rendering US citizens to foreign courts, the ICC in particular)?
The ICC’s jurisdiction is restricted to crimes committed in places under the jurisdiction of countries that are bound by the treaty that set up the court. The US is not a signatory, so is unlikely to extradite a US citizen. Iran has signed, but not ratified, the treaty.
Extradition to individual foreign countries is controlled by individual bilateral treaties. The US has treaties with something over a hundred countries. Dual criminality is a keystone — whatever crime the individual is charged with has to also be a crime in the US. This creates headaches for the US sometimes, as “conspiracy” is not a crime in many countries. Eg, Julian Assange was extradited to the US on relatively minor charges — the big charges were all conspiracy. And of course, under a recent SCOTUS decision, it appears that all acts committed by a US President are lawful.
This may be a rare instance in history where a greater percentage of the people in a country being bombed are pro bombing than the people in the country doing the bombing.
I like the Jon Stewart line that “Our bombs are smarter than our President”, which rivals CharlesWT’s comment for sheer truthiness.
But seriously: I wonder what the polls in either country would show if China, say, were to launch decapitation strikes aimed at regime change in the US.
–TP
I liked this, in today’s Times (a Murdoch paper, don’t forget).
Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric gives me that sinking feelingWhen the US gloats over Iranian deaths and pumps out propaganda war videos, it’s not just their enemies who recoil
Hugo Rifkind
Wednesday March 11 2026, 7.11pm, The Times
Already sinking under heavy fire at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in 1898, the Spanish cruiser Vizcaya burst into flames. The ammunition store ignited, a torpedo went off, hell was unleashed and desperate, burning men hurled themselves into the sea. Watching all this was John Woodward Philip, commanding the USS Texas on the other side. “Don’t cheer, boys,” he admonished his men. “The poor devils are dying.”
Last week, the Iranian warship Iris Dena was sunk by the Americans off the coast of Sri Lanka, claiming almost 100 lives. Perhaps you saw President Trump at a Republican conference recounting what a navy official told him when he asked why ships like this hadn’t instead been captured. “He said, ‘It’s more fun to to sink ’em’,” reported Trump, with a smirk. And his audience guffawed.
From one to the other. From “Don’t cheer, boys” to “It’s more fun to sink ’em.” Really, I could stop there.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-declared secretary of war, has also had a chatty week. Here he is talking about Iran’s long-running antipathy towards the US: “They didn’t always declare it openly,” he said, “except for their constant chants of ‘Death to America’.” Ah, that old giveaway.
His own rhetoric, though, isn’t terribly different. In the same speech, he gloated: “The regime who chanted ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel.” Over the past fortnight, he has also said: “They are toast and they know it,” and, “We will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” Plus, “This was never meant to be a fair fight, we are punching them while they are down, as it should be.” And more, and more, and more.
One might say Hegseth sounds like he thinks he is in a film, but only if it were a really bad film, perhaps written by a 15-year-old using ChatGPT. A comic, perhaps. A computer game. Probably, one should not use the phrase “small dick energy” on the comment pages, and particularly not when accusing other people of cheapening the discourse. But damn it, I think I must.
Hegseth is a veteran. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. What he’s trying to channel here, I suppose, is a sort of gung-ho military pep talk; how soldiers talk to other soldiers before leading them into war. Not all of them, though. Perhaps you recall Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins addressing his men in 2003 before leading them into battle in the Iraq War. “Iraq is steeped in history,” he told them. “It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there.”
“Is it something they teach at Sandhurst,” wrote Jane Shilling in these pages, “that beautiful, bleak, apocalyptic turn of phrase?” Don’t assume my intent is to crassly contrast Britain and America. George W Bush admired Collins’s speech so much he had it displayed on the wall of the Oval Office.
Listening to Hegseth this week, and to Trump, I also found myself remembering Tony Soprano’s despairing wail to his psychiatrist. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” he demanded. “The strong silent type? That was an American!” That’s Tony bloody Soprano. It’s quite something when the White House’s view of American values is less appealing than his.
Speaking of TV shows, you may have also seen the videos pumped out by the White House as another part of their propaganda blitz. Computer games mixed with real war footage alongside clips from films and TV shows. “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY!” said the attached tweet, no matter that it includes Bryan Cranston saying “I AM the danger!” in Breaking Bad, from a sequence in which his character brags about being a murderer.
Bad enough if you thought this was just an administration trying to communicate with its public in language it assumes they’ll understand. The suspicion, though, has to be that it’s worse than that. This is real. This is them. This is how they see what they are doing, their world view and their oomph.
Doubtless Hegseth, in his likeable way, would regard all this as “pearl clutching”. That’s what he said about those among America’s traditional allies, including the UK, who were sceptical about this war at the start. But language matters. When Trump smirks about dead sailors you can only conclude he is without doubts, without those 3am ceiling-staring moments of normal human horror at those poor devils lost at the bottom of the sea. Which in turn makes you wonder what he thinks about the collateral damage in Tehran as flames engulf the city.
But you don’t need to wonder. “The president doesn’t like the attack,” a White House insider told Axios after Israel bombed Iranian fuel supplies. Why? “It reminds people of higher gas prices”.
So no, it’s not just pearl clutching. Nor is it just about aesthetics. This is a real war with real, huge costs, and not just for America’s enemies. Few in Britain would instinctively side with the Iranian regime even in a war of at best dubious legality, begun seemingly on a whim, with little coherent plan for how it might end. But do they grasp, these chest-thumping war bros, how hard they are making it for their traditional, instinctive allies, whose own populations can see and hear every word?
“It’s more fun to sink ’em.” When our enemies talk like this we conclude they are dangerous and immoral lunatics. It’s going to take some circumspection, biting of tongues and blinkers if we’re to avoid the same conclusion about our friends.
Following on GftNC, I picked this particular link because it’s from almost a year ago yet is pertinent to the US strike killing scores of school girls in Iran. There are more recent articles linking the two directly, but I find there’s something more biting about this older article that simply raises the question “What could go wrong?” now that we know one thing that went horribly wrong.
https://theintercept.com/2025/04/15/pete-hegseth-pentagon-civilian-casualties-harm/
The f**kface won’t lose a second of sleep over it, I’d bet.
Civil War and Nuclear War.
I thougt perhaps one would come after the other, but now I believe they will be simulataneous.
These vermin will murder all of us.
Run for your fucking lives.
https://digbysblog.net/2026/03/11/the-boys-who-destroyed-our-government/
This vermin will murder you and your children.
He is Republican. He is MAGA. He is conservative. He is Libertarian. He is Christian. He is subhuman vermin.
He is not human.
May Pete’s end be as sticky and icky as anyone could come up with for a B movie (extended cut) with a count Rugen organized prelude.
At the minimum at the next security conference a bunch of foreign defense officials should gang up on him with knuckledusters and blunt instruments and then run the video of the event non-stop with laughing track and looney tunes sound effects attached. “Dick season! Rabid Season!” Then send him home (alive but wishing not to be) in an empty (American) beer keg with a big sticker: “Spoiled and rejected. Turn back to sender (Fox)” and another with “special/toxic refuse”.
Hegseth is starting to give me an Immortan Joe vibe, which is fitting since we are on our way to Mad Max style fighting over petrol any day now.
Mad Max, you say? Don’t forget about the water.
https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-desalination-water-oil-middle-east-12b23f2fa26ed5c4a10f80c4077e61ce
Kash Patel so wants to be shiny and chrome. Witness him.