Piling it on ...

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Following up on the Reflecting Pool fiasco with limos driving in the drained pool to show everything is STRAC is the ongoing CF, AKA Trump's War, now that Israel, America's partner in crime, has ducked out, leaving the orange menace twisting in the wind to "manage" an unnecessary war America has already lost, something most cavil and disquieting to say the least.

Trump drives across Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to inspect blue coating he's adding - PBS News

The war in Iran—so recently “ended” to the back-slapping acclaim of the administration that started it—is definitely back on. Iran attacked an air base in Jordan and other sites over the weekend, killing a total of three American soldiers (another service member was missing as of Sunday). The United States retaliated; Iran retaliated back. The New York Times described the countries as having “edged closer to a wider war.”

Donald Trump actually makes a fair point when he reminds people that Vietnam lasted a decade and cost 58,000 American lives (and two million Vietnamese ones, which he doesn’t mention as often). Iran isn’t close to being a “quagmire” just yet—not even a Dubya-style one. People can get a little overwrought when discussing these things.

Possible scenarios ..., Channeling Custer comes to mind here.

Or, Trump may decide to do a massive bombing raid on Kharg Island, the distribution point for 90 percent of Iran’s oil and natural gas. He bombed Kharg back in March, but that raid deliberately did not involve attacks on the island’s oil and gas infrastructure. Would Trump simply repeat that—an attack that had little discernible impact on events—or would he raise the stakes and hit the oil and gas installations this time? There has also been talk of a full-scale invasion of the island by U.S. troops. Doctor Testosterone over at the Pentagon probably can’t wait. Trump is surely holding off on both of these options because he knows full well that either would likely send gas prices soaring to the heavens and have other negative effects on the global economy. But Iran could do something that makes Trump change his mind, makes him feel he needs to do something dramatic, give Fox and Newsmax some A1 footage of things going boom.

An even worse scenario would see both sides escalating until some utterly predictable “unpredictable” thing happens. A U.S. bomb hits another school, or a town square, and a few hundred civilians die. Iran kills some critical mass of American soldiers—a couple hundred, say. Slowly, or maybe not so slowly, this becomes a real shooting war, the kind of conflict that leads the news every night and has no plausible end in sight.

Finally, there is the possibility that Trump gets impatient over a war he thought he was going to win in two weeks, and he takes drastic action that truly does shock world opinion. The wholesale bombing of civilian infrastructure. Bombing of civilian targets resulting in heavy casualties. The metaphorical “nuclear option” in this scenario would be quite literally nuclear. When people think of nuclear war, they think of the planet being blown to smithereens. But in fact, the United States has many small, tactical, variable-yield nuclear weapons in its arsenal, much smaller than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima (15 kilotons). I know—no one thinks this will happen, no one takes it remotely seriously. And they’re probably right. I’m just saying—with Donald Trump (and Pete Hegseth), never say never. I’m sure if you’d told the experts two years ago that the United States of America would start downing small watercraft in the Caribbean without apparent justification, going so far in at least one case as to strike a vessel a second time to kill the survivors, you’d have been greeted with condescending laughter.

Until now ...