Bad Germans! Bad! You’re no better than animals.

Maybe it’s for the best. If they ever get the upper hand* there might be bears and eagles for real this time.

*pun intended

Like it or not, our leadership took the Faustian bargain of “World Order Maintainer up after the Brits decided “Enough of this sh*t”, and withdrew from Empire. And, did so with subterfuge, alacrity, and a certain amount of greed for the goodies. The downside was not examined, nor discussed. So, here we are.

Smarter choice would have been to pay off the Brits to be our front men, subsidized Empire, and maintained a friendly background presence in the world. Sadly, our elites wanted to play at running the world, God-like in their wisdom, sagacity, and mien.

Frankly, from my point of view as one of poor bastards doing the scut-work of Hegemony, it was always a poor bargain, one we shouldn’t have taken up. Now that we have, the entanglements and the facts of who would succeed us prevent a clean dismount from the tiger, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to live in that world absent the US as an international force. It’d be a huge mess, with immeasurable and unknowable blow-back effects. So, here we are, stuck in the middle of it all, until the next major turn of the wheel. About the only off-ramp I see coming is perhaps something like the Yellowstone Caldera erupting, or another Pleistocene meteor strike. Statistically, that one should hit elsewhere, like the much bigger target of Eurasia. Which means that some mouth-breathing missileer in Russia will decide that the falling rock has to be an American strike, and then launch in the aftermath…

Frankly, I think we should have paid off the Brits, and then let them take the heat for maintaining international infrastructure. They did a pretty good job of it from about 1820 on to about 1920… Too bad they dropped the ball with Hitler in the Thirties.

Milner’s Kindergarten had to really have its ducks in a row to get the Brits out of India. Running the world wasn’t all that unpopular in England.

The whole thing is nuts, but it’s like with Afghanistan in the ’90s: You let these things fester, and before you know it, the problems are on your doorstep.

The US is in the same position that the Brits were during the heydey of the Raj. We have a massive target painted on our backs just because we’re the biggest kid on the block. I look back over all the false outrage and animosity that the British had to deal with in the course of keeping international order up and running, and I suddenly understand why the Empire went away as quickly as it did. They were just tired of the bullshit, and eager to give it up. Well, the ones making the decisions were, at least.

Nobody likes the guy who has to play international arbiter, who also holds the reserve currency. But, pull his ass out of the equation, and a whole lot of “bad” happens. I dare say that everyone whinging about the USA right now will be doing the same thing everyone was doing after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. “Oh, that was truly a Golden Age! Woe is we! Woe! Who will protect us and keep trade going, now?”. You only know what you had when it’s gone, and I suspect even the Chinese will be looking around and wondering why the hell they wanted the grand prize of being the top dog, given the expense and the pain of it all.

I agree it’s still irrational. We could have obeyed a peaceful order to leave Iraq

I’m expecting to hear one of two things within hours: Either the heads of Hezbollah will come out and say that they want no part of this, or the Israelis are going to be making a pre-emptive push into South Lebanon. They may wait until the Hezbollah idiots attack, but then… Maybe not.

[sigh] Interesting times, interesting times… No real idea where this is going to end, but I think it’s going to end badly for Iran’s regime. The fact that the Israelis were able to get in and out with all that nuclear data a couple of years ago tells me that their internal security can’t be that good, and thus, they’re likely to have a few very unpleasant surprises coming their way.

Friggin’ idiots, the lot of them.

Interesting times. To say the least.

You might be right. The history shows a different precedent. Every time the Iranians have had their pee-pees slapped, they’ve backed off and waited.

The mistake we made was in not reacting to the Quds Force activities in Iraq; that built up entirely unwarranted confidence in the Iranians that we were afraid of them. Bush should have taken action against the obvious provocation and escalation, but when he did not, they took that as a sign we were going to let them get away with it. Had something like this been done back around 2004, we’d have had none of the many problems we’ve had since. Especially if we’d have simply put the detainees at Camp Bucca up on trial for Law of War violations and then summarily executed them for same.

The root of our problems in the region are that we’re unwilling to direct our wrath at the right people, like the ISI in Pakistan (which you allude to), and that we’re not operating in a manner that these people understand. 7th Century mindsets require 7th Century responses, and those are the sorts of things that get results, sadly.

What’s unfortunate is that there are some decent people over there, but the fact is that they aren’t running things. Iran’s issues begin and end with the regime, and until that’s gone…? Don’t look for any sort of solution happening.

Frankly, I think the whole thing is going to go about like East Germany or the Soviet Union did–One day, there’s going to be a preference cascade, and a bunch of people are just going to wind up dead. You can only coerce so far, and it’s fairly obvious that the Iranian people are quite polarized. What’s going to come from this? Who knows.

Personally, I think Trump is playing the “Crazy Man” card. All the bluster on Twitter isn’t dignified, but it sure as hell serves to keep the Iranians on edge, and with the way things are shaking out in Washington, who knows? I find it very interesting that none of the usual suspects in the go-along-to-get-along circus that is our State and Defense/Intelligence “establishment” knew about this strike on Suleimani beforehand. This is not surprising at all, because Trump is learning not to trust them, and it’s about damn time someone figures out that their interest isn’t in American security or the benefit of the Republic, but their own self-aggrandizement.

No idea where it ends, but since what we were doing wasn’t working, why the hell not try “Crazy”?