The Intelligence Failure in Iran
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
That's not true at all. The intelligence community reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction but then the White House got involved in the analysis and brought politics into it and changed the reports.
Most cities have graves, cemeteries, memorials were families still grieve and remember their dead.
Notably, Iran never retaliated with chemical weapons. Could have a common root cause that later led to a fatwa against developing nukes.
I am surprised that the lay American gets so surprised that they do not like the American administration so much.
Add to that the fact that US upended their parliamentary democracy with a sponsored coup, that the US shot down one of their domestic passenger jets in flight with no apologies forthcoming.
As was Iran-Contra. Oliver North should still be in jail, not a talking head on the propaganda channel.
Nah, mate. We mainly remember the history that touches us. The Iran-Iraq war is surely not forgotten in their countries, but its impact on the West was limited, so we don't really talk about it.
Don't be. Most americans can't read above a 6th grade level
Side note: Colin Powell always seemed like one of the more reasonable people in the Bush administration, and he had the decency to later criticize and apologize for his own actions.
He sold his soul that day and regretted it almost instantly. I agree that the people who put him up to it were also setting him up as they knew he already wasn't really with them on this thing. They were politicians, after all. I have no sympathy for the personal toll it took on him. He's a war criminal like the rest.
He still sold it in front of the UN -- he could have resigned.
Apologies don't make missiles go back in silos or resurrect dead people.
Made not a jot of difference. In Tony went anyway. Shame.
> Made not a jot of difference
Yeah, that’s probably why.
The Russians want to see the US dragged into a "Special Operation" and to have the global oil markets collapse so they can buoy their collapsing economy with oil money.
China is just watching it happen but ratcheting up propaganda.
This is painfully obvious to virtually everyone except the US taxpayer, or the shillbots that control their viewpoints.
this is an attempt to make it look like the CIA or NSA fucked up, when we know damn well they knew Iran had been prepping to fight the US for decades.
this is a Presidential failure, or more likely, a Presidential Advisor failure. and "failure" in the sense that Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon have been pushing for this since day 1.
there is a reason no president ever decided to take a go at them until now, and we're seeing why
they could have put it in the headline, or first paragraph.
If this will stop, it will do so because of the threat to Kushner's investments in the ME.
To use a slight inaccurate historical cliche -- do you think Nero gave two hoots about whether Rome burned or not.
that's the goal of Project 2025. Put billionaires in power by owning everything.
The phenomenon of the Epstein class explicitly calling wars and coups and crashes "full of opportunity" gets virtually zero analysis in Epstein-class owned media, and it's past time that people connect those two dots.
* Did I sign in to the Atlantic to confirm that they pretended not to understand this? No. But I would be shocked to be wrong.
They give themselves away because they expect their adversaries to act like they would.
But really, it's a values failure.
Wanting to make decisions that are good for America, and good for its friends, is a value. Putting people you are supposed to represent ahead of yourself used to be the kind of thing people would say mattered. It used to be a thing that leaders tried to demonstrate that they had carefully considered their decisions.
Once you have an administration that puts itself ahead of everything else, this whole thing makes sense.
This administration is full of insecure people who want to show how strong they are. You can see it in how they talk, and the constant stream of memes coming from the WH. It's incredibly juvenile, stuff like having Trump portrayed with a sixpack, beating up his enemies.
Strongman regimes have a tendency to try to steal the blind, to use a poker concept: bully the opposition into giving you a concession, by making super aggressive moves. Like picking pennies off a train track, most of the time you will win and the opponent will back down, EVEN if on paper the opponent tends to have the better cards, because a rational opponent will appreciate putting a lid on risk. This last bit is really important, because it means the bully learns that he can win despite rejecting advice.
So you can go around sucker punching people until it stops working, and there's a decent chance Iran is where it stops working. If it's not Iran, it will be the next thing, because they can't stop.
And to get back to values, too many Americans are unwilling to take responsibility for their country's actions. If you look at what causes discontent with the current Iran situation, it is things like gas prices. In other words, self-interest, still.
North Korea is another but I don't think they will dare to make that move.
Invading nuclear-armed India (from where?? Pakistan?) would be a completely insane thing even by Trump standards. It's a plan that disintegrates on contact with a map.
India can do what to the US with its nuke ? It's a deterrent for China.
The same thing that France or Russia could do with their ballistic missile submarines. Just because the ICBMs won't reach the US doesn't mean that the ALCM and SLBMs are harmless.
They bought a few that are more silent, but their acoustic signature got acquired through intelligence/bribery operations. Quite an irreparable loss that the Indian population is not as acutely aware of.
One asset that India can threaten is Diego Garcia.
Case in point. I wouldn't expect a submarine to occupy the littorals of San Francisco, but an attack on Florida, Hawaii, or a distant base would be difficult to defend against.
Of course, such an attack is basically suicide, but still a possibility. Defensive systems like AEGIS are stretched too thin to deter a coastal attack.
I expect Indian subs to be kept good track of. Threatening Florida seems a stretch. Assets in around Indian Ocean are a distinct possibility. In fact India does not need subs for that.
One thing that's an open pair of questions for me is: exactly how dangerous is a high-altitude EMP anyway? And do countries with nuclear weapons actually model this in war games?
I've seen it suggested that even a relatively modest HAEMP would be able to physically damage most transformers in the continental USA, necessitating replacement of all of them at the same time when they're all custom and have month-to-year lead times. No electricity, no fuel pumps, no refrigeration, in the US 90% of the population starves within a year.
The US power grid could have been defended in the decades since the March 1989 geomagnetic storm revealed such weakness, but given various evidence such as the fires in California caused by failure of century-old power lines that were well past due for repair, I doubt they have been.
My original point was that indian nukes and their delivery vehicles as they stand now are a deterrent for China, not for the USA.
As for Iraq, the article is just wrong. Here's a 1998 letter sent to then-president Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq [2]. The astute will notice this was 3 years before 9/11. Look at the signatories. They include:
- Donald Rumsfeld: future (and previous) Defense Secretary under George W. Bush who oversaw the invasion of Iraq;
- Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld's deputy under Bush, arguably even more hawkish than Rumsfeld. He openly admitted Iraq was "about oil" and the WMD excuse was "bureaucratic" [3];
- Richard L. Armitage: Colin Powell's deputy at State during the Iraq war;
- Peter W. Rodman, an assistant Defense secretary under Rumsfeld;
There are other names there who are or were influential conservative journalists and "thought" leaders in the neocon movement eg William Kristol.
Whatever else you might say, intelligence didn't fail on Iraq (or Iran) for that matter. Political goals simply trumped everything else.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JC56Ltg5zDE
[2]: https://noi.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/iraqclintonletter...
[3]: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/socialist-vie...
This is the central theme of the article at the center of this post... which admittedly has a complete BS, clickbait title suggesting the opposite.
People before me have observed how Trump's moves all are ego driven, or self serving or serve Putin or Israel or gas companies, and I'm here to add to the mix a different conjecture.
Trump's moves all tend to increase inflation in a plausibly deniable way. Tarrifs, fed-fighting, wars, etc.
And that is a deeply unpopular but elite-viewed necessity for handling America's national debt.
Inflation allows the wealthy class to get away with extending government spending without admitting/pursuing austerity which was political suicide under Carter.
The wealthy shelter in their land and stock portfolios which keep growing unlike cash and also benefit from said spending, while ordinary people pay the extra regressive tax that is inflation. The elite can then turn around and blame the little guy for supporting Trump and their hands are clean.
What happened was entirely predictable, as the article says. Iran using the Strait of Hormuz as leverage was an obvious consequences of putting them into a sufficiently precarious position.
People talk a lot about Trump. But he's of course not acting alone. The big picture here is that this wasn't as impulsive as it may seem and was rather enthusiastically supported by the team that runs day to day policy for him. The worrying thing of course is that things aren't exactly going as planned. Which by itself was entirely predictable and widely predicted from day 1. But the point here is that Trump is a stooge and focusing on just him is a mistake. Follow the money.
His presidency was bought and paid for. Partially with oil money and the accompanying hard line towards the middle east. Those are the same deep pockets behind the Gulf wars I and II. And we might as well start referring to this one as edition III.
A lot of that money comes from Texas. Where all the oil and gas is. Texas exports oil and gas. That stuff becomes more lucrative if the Strait of Hormuz is closed. And it looks like rebuilding infrastructure might take a few years. IMHO, they overestimated how successful they were going to be with this and all the disruptive effects (e.g. Maga supporters getting angry at Trump) because of oil driven inflation at the pump might be backfiring a bit. But it's easy to see how the decision making could have gone if you just follow the money.
That's why this has gone so wrong. He can't articulate further goals because he didn't expect this to be anything other than a 10 day conflict with Iran begging for the US to stop punishing them.
That is to say, he accomplished his objective on day one, but that didn't produce the results expected. And now because everything is fucked, he keeps escalating because if he pulls back now it will be a clear loss. We are basically fighting a war now because a narcissist can't admit he fucked up.
Massively overplayed by unchecked power.
This is false, France made a misstep and even fired the head of French military intelligence because of the failure to predict the invasion and Germany was also notably skeptical. Other countries like UK, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania were on board that the invasion was going to happen.
Not always the case though: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-672.html
Given the situation with the strait, it's clear they were caught off guard that the Iran regime has survived a transition (for now) and is fighting back.
Let's say the US had a massively unpopular regime that had taken power to the point that they couldn't be removed by elections.
Now let's say the Chinese start bombing us to "liberate" us.
People would be cool with that, right? Everyone would cheer for the Chinese, right?
Trump and his ilk likely care about that more than what effect it has on the US.
Administration charged with insider trading and corruption charges, that's not a very remote possibility. President and administration charged with treason -- quite remote.