Micheal Peter's

You make my heart go jug o’boom 🧨

Happy valentines crawlers, hope your AI admirers enjoy your feet pics 💕

have you seen this? Very sweet 🥺🙁

oh my goddd someone said Oscar was stuck being checked out in medical so he couldn't even come for the anthem and Lando knew everyone would be wondering ;__;

I actually looked and found video of it too it's even sweeter how he's showing that he's showing the love in place of Oscar

“there were definitely points where a hug every now and again would have been nice.”

“Reasons for going to war are continually being made available to great nations… Vigorous, self-confident, prideful, determined and opinionated peoples, such as the British were in the last century and the Americans in this century, will always provide themselves with armies, and the temptation to use them to enforce national desires is seemingly irresistible.”[i]

Until, oh, say a few weeks ago, wisdom in the modern era was that a nation that starts a war “owns” that war—that is, it will be held responsible for the results, including unpredictable consequences and collateral damage.

But, according to The Wall Street Journal, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, persuaded President Donald Trump to trash that silly, outmoded idea and go into Iran guns a-blazing, consequences be damned. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ride again!

“Sitting in his Senate office this week with canisters of Planters peanuts and hundreds of scattered papers on his desk and signed MAGA hats on his shelves, Graham was almost giddy about persuading Trump to bomb Iran. One of the newer hats reads “Make Iran Great Again.” “What are they going to do to me?” he said of critics who opposed his efforts.”

“They say if you break it, you own it. I don’t buy that. You break it when it’s a threat,” Graham said in the Journal interview.”[ii]

See, Dorothy, Iran was a THREAT TO SOUTH CAROLINA!

Now it’s not!

And it’s Great Again!

(By the way, I love Planter’s peanuts and am never without a supply. But I digress.)

Not only that. Graham bragged about how he had gotten top secrets from Israel, coached Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on how to lobby Trump for war, and sealed the deal with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Gee, this guy has connections! He’s a contender!

Well, as some of us multi-ethnics say (when ICE’s masked thugs are not around), “Vamos a ver.” We’ll see how all this works out.

Anyone who says they know how the Graham-Trump war on Iran will end militarily or—more importantly—the impact of whatever fractured version of peace follows the fighting is either a liar or a dammed fool.

Quite likely both.

That said, although history never repeats itself, it does offer the opportunity to learn from  instructive examples. Among relevant examples today are two wars that turned out much differently than the imperialists who started them thought they would.

These are, in the early nineteenth century, the British Empire’s wars on Afghanistan, and in the twentieth century, the Japanese Empire’s war in China.

In this post, we will examine the Victorian British invasions of Afghanistan—none of which went well and which foretold modern Russian and American humiliations in the twentieth century. In the next post, we’ll look at Imperial Japan’s ambitions in China.

Tired of Winning—Britain in Afghanistan

Britain’s several wars in Afghanistan grew out of “its obsession with the vulnerability of the Indian subcontinent—its greatest imperial possession—to possible invasion by Russia via Afghanistan.”[iii]  History Byron Farwell summed up the situation in his survey, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars:

“It is difficult for anyone to understand the reasoning behind the extraordinary attitude of the British towards Afghanistan; the Afghans must have found it impossible. While always professing friendship, the British repeatedly invaded the country and shot at its inhabitants. Although unable to subdue the proud, fiercely independent Afghans, they always feared that Russia or Persia would, and this frequently served as an excuse for meddling in Afghan affairs.”[iv]

So, in 1839—the second year of young Queen Victoria’s reign—the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, decided that the “best way to foil Russian designs …was to counter a pro-Russian ruler in Persia with a pro-British ruler in Afghanistan.”[v] Among other problems with the plan was that the British candidate for regime change was detested by the Afghans themselves.

“The plan sounds fantastic today, and so it sounded to many in London when it was explained: the Afghans were to be persuaded that the British would save them from the clutches of the Persians and Russians by invading their country with Anglo-Indian and Sikh armies—the Sikhs being the most hated enemies of the Afghans—and deposing their ruler, replacing him with the man whom they distrusted and detested!”[vi]

Or, as another historian, David Saul, puts the matter two key questions remained open: “How would the fiercely independent Afghan tribes react to the imposition by British bayonets of a former ruler of doubtful popularity? And how would the British, even if they succeeded in conquering Afghanistan, be able to hold on to it?”[vii]

The British invasion began in March 1839. Afghan warriors—who “were natural fighters who knew instinctively how to make the best use of cover, and who could move from rock to rock with the nimbleness of a mountain goat”[viii]—inflicted many casualties and frequent frustrations, but the British managed to reach Kabul in August.

The British garrison “settled down to the life of a typical Indian hill station, with concerts, horse races, wrestling and cricket matches. They even felt confident enough to send for their wives and families.”[ix]

Trouble was brewing. Especially after the bookkeepers in London and India decided to cut back on the graft they had been paying Afghan tribal leaders to keep the peace. The leaders were…well…they were pissed.[x]

“The Afghans openly expressed their contempt for their new rulers, even in Kabul: British officers were insulted by shopkeepers, sentries were killed in the night, lone soldiers had their throats cut, and once an Afghan coolly walked into a tent in the British camp and shot a sleeping soldier.”[xi]

Eventually, in the dead of winter, the Brits were forced to cut and run. On January 8, 1842, the British force of 4,500 troops (only about 700 of whom were Britons, the rest Indian sepoys), some officers’ wives and their children, and about 10,000 camp followers, left Kabul and headed for Jalalabad, where there was a strong British force.

Seven days later, the only British survivor of that entire army—a surgeon named William Brydon—showed up wounded, riding a dying pony. “A handful of sepoys struggled in later; There were a few other survivors, including a number of the wives and children, who had been given as hostages or were taken prisoner; but most of the army had been slaughtered in the passes.”[xii]

An entire army had been wiped out.

The British managed a face-saving foray, but eventually got the hell out of there. Until the next foolish Afghanistan War toward the end of the nineteenth century, which ended up with just as embarrassing results.

If you break it, watch out for shards of glass underfoot.

[i] Farwell, Byron. Queen Victoria’s Little Wars. New York: W.W. Norton & Company (1972), xvii.

[ii] Josh Dawsey, “Lindsey Graham’s Quest to Sell Trump on Striking Iran,” The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2026, https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-war-news-updates-2026/card/lindsey-graham-s-quest-to-sell-trump-on-striking-iran-DQiOgLFxxxR4tcKYGlGA?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqcXvnrxjtoEl2EFUCbiLzm4sFzIlk69GYvubg8KOcbCN6coGVr7sPSJUYMTusY%3D&gaa_ts=69aeedde&gaa_sig=Xv1oWTM9KSqYNwuXz5mIPbl094SyuKXsvweuZEU5YSf3rBvC0ZXxeH_OzMAv-UaLgTuYewynzusquk2l7CvNCA%3D%3D.

[iii] Fremont-Barnes, Gregory. The Anglo-Afghan Wars 1839-1919. New York: Osprey Publishing (2009), 8-9.

[iv] Farwell. Queen Victoria’s Little Wars, 4-5

[v] David, Saul. Victoria’s Wars: The Rise of Empire. New York: Penguin Books (2007), 17.

[vi] Farwell. Queen Victoria’s Little Wars, 5.

[vii] David. Victoria’s Wars, 21.

[viii] David. Victoria’s Wars, 26.

[ix] David. Victoria’s Wars, 41.

[x] David. Victoria’s Wars, 43.

[xi]  Farwell. Queen Victoria’s Little Wars, 8.

[xii] Farwell. Queen Victoria’s Little Wars, 9.

Blog Navigation

by person lando | oscar | ln4 (lando only) | op81 (oscar only) | max | lewis | george | yuki | charles

by ships/pairings landoscar | norussell | yukioscar | norstappen | jendo

by race first 3 letters + year, e.g. dut25 (dutch gp 2025)