Welcome to Chaos

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

War is never about operations, thought, it is about goals! And the Trump admin's goal was...okay that is just not clear, they keep lying, but it seems like the goal was to coup the government. Kill the leaders and blow up enough stuff so that the next guy will make peace with you. But A: that only works if the next guy wants to make peace with you, and I am starting to believe the Trump team when they say they "accidentally" killed the moderate guys they hoped might take over. Additionally, Iran is pretty correct to be pointing out they got suckerpunched in the middle of negotiations; really does shoot your credibility, right? Iran has no reason to make peace because the US seems constitutionally incapable of sticking to peace.

And B: that only works if the enemy doesn't have some difficult-to-counter ability to blow up the global economy and cause you endless economic (and therefore political) woes. Which everyone knew they had and would launch if you publicly stated you were gonna overthrow their government

If you launch a "coup the government" operation and you take ~no losses but it fails to coup, the right call is to go "uwu im sworry" and just make peace, right? It didn't work, oh well! But the Trump team's own incompetence has fucked up their exit plan, and in the same way TACO is true, "Trump Always Saves Face" is also true - he would never just admit defeat and withdraw. The US needs some form of victory. So you just keep going?

Like they are Iran hawks, they wanted a war pushing for regime change. They had a model where the war could be over super quickly with the coup. It "worked" in Venezuela, so it could work here, right? War is full of those kinds of gambles. But a lot of them understood that there was a Plan B, and it is the current thing that is happening. The war could take several months, it would involve some casualties, it would disrupt global trade. But the US would pound Iranian missile capacity to dust, maybe deploy Marines to the Strait for some "surgical" kill-and-hold operations, run naval escorts, and open it up after a few months. I don't see any reason to think that can't really work? Different from *will* work, but it could. It isn't crazy.

The disconnect comes from what was almost certainly a political process within the admin that Trump and maybe a few other figures were just totally banking on Plan A in their minds. And once it didn't materialize they are apparently honestly upset that they are being forced into the Plan B, and that is fucking with the coherence. Trump is balking at using the navy, whining about getting "international partners" to do the job for him, etc. The admin clearly lacked coherence amoung itself for what it is doing. But for the Iran Hawk types, this is all going fine! Israel isn't balking at the fucking Strait being closed, lmao. They will easily pay that price. They are in it to win it. It just turned out too much of the Trump Team was unprepared politically for the job their operational plan was demanding, and is (maybe, they are vacillating) unwilling to shoulder the political price the Hawks thought they all agreed to at the outset.

Okay they lie about everything, but more than that they are unconcerned with with how those lies will be received.

It's not just hypocrisy, it's that they spent a lot of time laying the ideological groundwork for rejecting their own position, and have demonstrably put very little effort into thinking about how they would reconcile what they are doing now with their previously stated positions.

Prior to this every administration in my lifetime has taken for granted that the lies should at least have a sort of internal consistency, that things which are incompatible with the face value of their ideology should be downplayed and rationalized, that the structure of their public statements should be such that if you *only* got your information from the administration the actions of the government should appear to make sense.

The Trump administration doesn't have that.

If anything, it's the reverse; it is *impossible* to make sense of administration actions if you take what they say at face value, or more properly if you assume that what they said in the past will have any particular relationship to what they say or do in the future.

When called on to rationalize the Iran war in terms of their own stated values they react with a kind of fumbling confusion, clearly unprepared for the fact that people would ask the question, spinning out evasive nonsense that often appears to be invented on the spot, later on blasting reporters for repeating their own words.

1984 though - and this is not a criticism of the book to be clear, the book is doing its own thing - is sometimes one of the worst guides to actual politics and authoritartianism, because Big Brother has all of agency of a government removed from the truth but with none of the downsides of that when it comes to actually doing shit. The Trump administration is often (not always, but often) completely incompetent. They have to be, because they lie about everything and only learn too late when things aren't working. They shit-test their followers so the only survivors are rubes and grifters. They appoint social media trolls and sycophants to position of high office and then are shocked when they fumble the ball. The strategy of endless deception very frequently overrides everything else, and just becomes actual mistakes. It isn't a choice, it's a fuck-up.