The US is not a democracy. The majority did not want this war.
Though the majority will help bear the costs, and several family members will grieve dearly for the sacrifice of entertaining some brutal geopolitics that do not serve America first.
America is a democratic republic, not a direct democracy. The only restriction is the president can’t declare war, only congress can do that.
They are pretending these strikes are “preemptive” in response to a nuclear bomb being developed, just like the “emergency” that was declared to enact the tariffs.
If it were a democratic republic, as you say, the representatives would have to vote on war. Representatives would also have to vote before 190,000 pages of CFRs are created by unelected bureaucrats and then enforced as if they were law (sometimes, by the exact same bureaucrats that write the rules they enforce as law [ATF for example]).
Most of what people think they know about this country is a facade. They are living on lies, confirmed to them through the legitimization of a SCOTUS that lies to your very eyes about what the constitution says, so that people don't rebel when a politician tells them peace is war and love is hate.
The majority absolutely voted for this war. You're attacking the democracy when you insist that the elected politicians following through on campaign planks are not representing the country. That's exactly how this works.
IDK, "America first" is practically speaking, the financial interests of the current president and his ruling clique, nothing more. This does serve them by, among other things, distracting from the Epstein files and asserting lucrative control over petroleum-producing nations. These brave servicemen died for that.
What UK Prime Minister lost their office because they were rude and patronising to women?
Starmer is still in office, Sunak lost because the Tories were unpopular and because he didn’t win an election to get the Prime Ministership, Johnson lost because during Covid people stayed at the office a little bit longer and had a birthday party, teresa May lost because she couldn’t deliver Brexit, Cameron lost because he gave people a vote on Brexit, Brown lost for the same reasons as Sunak, Blair lost because of the Iraq war.
You left out Liz Truss, which is understandable really.
Liz Truss lost because she was barking mad, manifestly wildly out of her depth and her and her think tank buddies tanked the economy. She was rude and patronising to women (but only because she was rude and patronising to everyone).
PM Gordon Brown did call a female voter "bigoted" on a hot mic (1) - with some justification actually, as she did say some unpleasant anti-immigrant rhetoric. Mr Brown lost an election shortly after, but this incident was not in itself what brought him down.
One massive risk that I don’t hear anyone in the West talking about is the risk of giving Sunni populist rage over Gaza the spark it needs to overthrow US-aligned partners all over the Middle East. This could backfire really badly for Israel and the US if they suddenly lose all of their friends in high places in these countries. 98% of the non-elite Sunnis all over the world are enraged at Israel over Gaza. All of the surrounding countries (Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia) currently employ brutal authoritarian methods to suppress any pro-Palestinian sentiment beyond thoughts and prayers. If the regimes fall, all hell will break loose, and all of the hate will be directed towards Israel.
You mean all those countries that have us troops and massive amounts of us support? That have systematically for decades dismantled any pan-arab or pan-islamic unity?
Come on. Israel might be the most high profile US partner. But they are far from the only one.
This war is completely on Trump since he didn't get Congress' approval or even justify it to the American public. I wonder if the "no new wars" voters will condemn him?
>I wonder if the "no new wars" voters will condemn him?
They'll retcon it and fall in line behind Trump, just like with Venezuela. This is from both opinion polls and also interactions with actual MAGA people.
I understand the cynicism, but Trump is a lame duck president, and there are plenty of incentives for people outside and inside the government to continue to move against him, because even if he moves for a third term he's old and the leadership vacuum is inevitable. Also, anti-israel sentiment has been growing on the right, which is one reason people think Israel pushed so hard for this. People who have and continue to identify as Republican will for sure support him because most of those folks have always been neo-cons who liked Bush and preferred the old school Republican interventionism to what Trump offered. They held their nose for Trump thinking he wouldn't do things like this.
But the MAGA / "America First" crowd led by such folks as Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes absolutely have the incentive to move against Trump.
What does that mean in practical terms though? The absolute worst that can happen to trump is he is both impeached and successfully indicted. When the worst case is maybe by some extremely unlikely "luck" he loses his job and has to sulk back into his billions and golden towers, and on the other hand he can gamble with the lives of million of serviceman and the tax money Americans could otherwise spend on healthy food, healthcare, education and other things they need -- why not? He's not up for re-election anyways.
Trumps an unhealthy older man, with no prospect for re-election, and a big golden parachute even in the worst case scenario. The fact the war is all on him is seen as a plus because he gets all the credit for the history books and the mothers of the dead servicemen are just forgotten trash used to achieve his objective.
Trump is acting completely rationally. His MO is to push the envelope until he is stopped. It is mostly others who are irrationally acting in the service of Trump that are acting irrationally.
The Iranian regime funded Hamas that started the last major war and the regime was responsible for the mass slaughter 30 to 40,000 people a few weeks ago.
Israel did not set up Hamas, Israel prevented the PA, then the PLO, which was taken over and supported by the KGB from massacring Hamas in it's krib.
That's one very underappreciated part of the conflict there. That the KGB and Israel fought one another, obviously long ago. As part of that fight, they both helped/financed/protected/... lunatic Palestinian movements. The KGB is long dead and Israel started regretting many of it's actions against Russia decades ago, but the lunatic movements each created are still massacring one another.
Oh and the UN is still supporting and financing the PA, even against Hamas. Hmmm, I wonder if anyone at the top of the UN ever had any affiliation with Soviet Foreign policy ... (say, for example, the best-paid politician in the entire world, obviously a communist)
What I am claiming isn't even controversial. It's quite well known and accepted. So much so all the standard search engines will confirm it, and search engines typically reflect a consensus view of crawlable documents.
This is what I get when I pose the question
"Yes, Israeli officials have acknowledged providing covert financial support to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist networks in Gaza during the late 1970s and 1980s. This was done to bolster religious groups as a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was viewed as the primary adversary at the time"
This is a common talking point, but if we look at the underlying facts of what Israel did to "support" or "set up" Hamas, they... allowed Qatar to provide aid to Gaza to fund some infrastructure and civil servants' salaries. Would you have preferred that they block the aid and Gaza's governance collapse?
You claimed that "It's Israel that set up Hamas". Now you're talking about Israel supporting a charity that ran schools and mosques before Hamas existed. That doesn't support your claim.
Doesn't change the other side of the equation either: it is also not controversial that the KGB and the Soviets are financially behind the PLO (now PA), that Yasser Arafat ("the wise Egyptian") was a Soviet agent.
First time hearing about it, so cannot comment without reading further.
KGB and CIA had their noses in the affairs of every country, more so in the mid east, so cannot be ruled out.
Historical interest aside, that was not the point I made on this thread.
The point was justifying war on Iran upon the reason that they funded Hamas. So did Israel, they pretty much helped birth it. KGB may or may not be funding PLA, but that doesn't change who set up Hamas in the first place.
If reminding Arafat's Egyptian origin is to caste a shade, many in the Israeli government have European (often Polish) origin and surnames that they changed to fit their political career. Netanyahu included. So that cuts bothway.
So what? It's an argument that maybe we should do something, for the American people's consideration, but it doesn't change the fact that this war has been started without Congressional approval by a president who IIRC explicitly campaigned on "no new wars" or something to that effect. As far as I can tell, he has stated no consistent or coherent justification for any of this.
If we are going to engage in brute force regime change on the other side of the world, regardless of how bad the current regime is (yes, they are evil), this is not how it should happen. And everyone should take a moment to remind themselves why the term "regime change" carries the connotations it does.
The campaign promises from Trump were "no new wars" and "America First" along with a bunch rhetoric saying that his political opponents were war mongers.
What do Hamas or Iran protestors have to do with America? I agree that it's bad but you have to admit that it goes against literally all the "peace" talk that MAGAs were pushing.
Since when do American deaths (in an attack that happened 2+ years ago mind you) mean you can unilaterally go to war with an entire country?
> and Iran constantly threatens to hit America (and about everyone else) with nuclear weapons
Okay, but he campaigned as the peace ticket so presumably he'd be able to figure that out without resorting to military action, no? Obama managed to work out a deal with them (that Trump then tore to pieces in 2018)
Your second question isn't coherent and I didn't see it as relevant regardless. I think Republicans are sycophantic MAGAs at this moment, does that answer it? You're not answering any of my questions, though and instead just word vomiting about a hostage release deal under Biden.
I can sort of see his position. When there were mass protests around Jan 2nd he said to the Iranian government don't kill them or else:
>US President Donald Trump has warned Iran's authorities against killing peaceful protesters, saying Washington "will come to their rescue". In a brief post on social media, he wrote: "We are locked and loaded and ready to go," but gave no further details. (bbc)
And the Iranian government are now in the find out stage.
Wow, browsing the comments with showdead=1 gives me the highest ratio of flagged vs normal comments ever. Surprised the whole thread is not flagged, yet. I mean, can we expect that more insights come out of this?
It is pretty hard to have a calm discussion about the outbreak of war. War is awful. People will suffer, people will die. Being angry is an appropriate response. The article is just a list of the ap wire briefs, so it does not tell us very much.
>I mean, can we expect that more insights come out of this?
No, because all the points for/against the attacks have already been argued to death in the first thread, and both sides' argument don't hinge on whether there are deaths or not, so this bit of news doesn't really make a difference.
> So tired of the idea that HN trying to stay relatively clear of politics is some great loss when every Israel Palestine submission that makes it through is just...
Honestly I don't mind not talking about those things here but it gets ridiculous when there's directly tech related stuff being flagged because it touches on politics, like the whole DOGE saga for example.
Is it heroic to join the military to pay for school/stay out of jail/escape poverty, and then die because the pedophile president of your country unilaterally decided to begin a bombing campaign against a sovereign nation? And then get unlucky enough to be in the path of retaliation?
That’s not heroism. It’s waste. Their lives were wasted by the MAGA cult, just like the tens of thousands of Iranian civilians and children who are dying to our bombs.
You can't celebrate people's deaths like this on HN, and it's shocking to see. I feel ashamed of HN when I see things like this. I can't believe you did it, and my first response was to ban the account.
After a minute, I reconsidered, especially after I saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930988 (an excellent post) and realized that your account has been around for over 10 years. I've unbanned it now.
Please don't post like this to HN again. The same, of course, goes for any other account, regardless of political angle.
Also, please don't use HN primarily for political/ideological battle—again, regardless of which politics you're for or against. A certain amount of political overlap is necessary and inevitable, but when an account crosses into primarily doing that, it's basically the line at which we ban it (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for past explanations).
> Cry no tears for the slaughter of imperial troops
This comment from the same account above is dead so can't reply to it, but you must understand that the troops themselves do NOT want this. They are not clones genetically engineered for war. A very large fraction of them have been effectively conscripted due to economic pressures and lack of other opportunities.
As a data point, I happened to have a couple of brief but very candid conversations with students in the ROTC program just as the Afghanistan war had broken out. Their chances of getting deployed to the frontlines after graduation were suddenly spiking. Despite each conversation being very fleeting, each of them expressed consternation of their prospects and some regret at signing up just for the chance to get a free college education. They all acknowleged that they knew the risks when signing up, of course, but they had taken the chance at a time when the country was not mobilizing for war.
Under their military rules, they have an obligation to disregard illegal orders. This war was not declared by congress. It is illegal and unconstitutional. They are chosing to do this and are thus complicit.
There are many aspects here, but I'll only comment on the one I brought up originally: they are in the military because they had few other options in life. And this is true in this very situation as well. If they choose to disobey orders, they risk court martials, loss of pension, imprisonment, or worse... even if they are right because, well, you've seen what else is happening in the country.
To be clear, these people were not on the front lines in an invasion. Our contributions are currently (AFAWK) precision strikes. These dead service members would be victims of region-wide retaliatory missile strikes and may genuinely not have even known we had attacked Iran before a missile came out of nowhere and killed them in their (e.g.) cushy Dubai job.
Heck, if they were told the day of, what are they going to do? They're stuck in the Middle East on a deployment and will need to rely on a military vehicle to take them across the pond.
You should at least inform yourself about what's happening before making comments like this.
That's what I was addressing: for many it's "voluntary" in the way poor people "volunteer" to be homeless. (This applies across many countries BTW.)
I absolutely do not mean to slight any soldiers anywhere, I have the utmost respect for them putting their lives on the line for their country, but I also realize many of them are there only due to having few alternatives to escape their circumstances.
The US does. I live near a base and there's a votech high school on the same property that nukes are transported to/from.
During the Cold War, the US government even had maps of potential Soviet ICBM targets and there's a nice dot here where hundreds of thousands live. The US knew the risk but put bases and nukes smack in the middle of that anyway.
There's several buildings in Edinburgh that have designation "military base" (mostly Territorial Army) and are within a few hundred yards of a school or nursery. Probably the same in many cities.
It's up to the people with bombs not to bomb schools.
Yeah, Epstein (like a lot of people) was obsessed with Trump, who was the President at the time. But what’s the smoking gun? It seems like if there was one that would be your lede.
You're snart. You can figure out why those 3M files they were legally required to release weren't released. Also, the article specifically mentions thks.
Though the majority will help bear the costs, and several family members will grieve dearly for the sacrifice of entertaining some brutal geopolitics that do not serve America first.