We're on so many wrong tracks

The Bulwark's Jonathan Last sees a misguided debate:

Over the last 48 hours most discussion has focused on whether or not America should have attacked Iran. This is the wrong question because

1. that decision is ultimately a judgment call, with no objective answer; and

2. the net outcome of the U.S. attack cannot be known on a near time horizon.

I'm not being catty in noting that rare is the military initiative whose judgment comes with immediacy of objective assessment. I note it only to segue; such is the truism that keeps (fewer than less) historians professionally employed while budget-fattened STEM fields gobble the day and neglect yesterday.

A good 50 years commonly pass — often, far longer — before sound, empirical conclusions can be drawn and valid evaluations made about military adventures' overarching consequences.

But a preponderance of existent realities, informed considerations and strongly suggested "near time" effects underlies careful military actions — emphasis on care's supremacy among all government enterprises. Teeming masses of human lives are nearly always at stake.

Hence Bush II's abysmal, egregiously reckless Iraq intervention. His was a mindlessly lethal, monumental blunder that invoked no prudence but plentiful ideological abstractions, wishful thinking and arrogant power.

Today, two of the three.

Last goes on to ask presently answerable yet unanswered questions about the fog of wankers, chicken hawks, and the chief chicken-hawk wanker himself, all of whom have thrust America into what's more like the smog of hazy war aims and misty water-colored intel.

"She's wrong" and "I don't care what she says," says Trump about what his DNI says. I don't much either. But though Gabbard is a Tehran-aligned Putin shill, she nonetheless was right when saying "warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and [international] tensions."

Not to discount Mr. Last's morning piece in The Bulwark — perhaps the most peculiar publication on the web, brimming with former gung-hoers pulled from the icy depths of Condaleeza's Hell yet now angelic voices crooning delightfully intense hatreds of successor Trump and Trumpism — but for all our war queries, we need only look to Vice-Pretzel JD Vance.

Before the storm, he attempted (italics mine) this clarification. "I've seen a lot of confusion over the issue of 'civilian nuclear power' and 'uranium enrichment.' These are distinct issues." Praise Jesus ... Medieval Catholic JD reached out to succor the poorly informed, to clear up that pesky load of befuddlement? Nope, Jesus fled him as would a bat from a falcon.

For the veep's Yale Law-trained mind proceeded to pile onto popular incoherence by bumbling along in self-cancellation. "Iran could have civilian nuclear power without enrichment, but Iran rejected that. Meanwhile, they've enriched uranium far above the level necessary for any civilian purpose."

Also, "POTUS has been amazingly consistent," and "I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue." Described less than a year ago as "one of the party’s leading national security doves," Vance no more believes that than does anyone who's known the amazingly consistent wonder of epic untrustworthiness. Telling is that he offered no evidence of Trump's "earned trust." (Or is it more telling that he wrote, in a Tulsi Gabbard-like way, that Trump "has earned some trust.")

Not long after JD wrote his MAGA Pacification curiosities on X, on "Meet the Press" he intoned, "I empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East... The difference is that we had dumb presidents." He omitted a critically pertinent difference within the difference.

If Trump hadn't trashed President Obama's Iran nuclear deal, which limited its uranium enrichment level to civilian grade, a limitation Iran honored, we would not now be entangled in another dumb war triggered by a creature so wickedly dumb he's earned not even the title of our dumbest presidents.

Unlike other wartime leaders, President Franklin Roosevelt took to the airwaves during the world's cruelest, bloodiest, deadliest conflagration and eloquently spelled out to parents, wives, brothers and sisters the lives their loved ones were forfeiting in foreign lands. I often wonder if America shall ever again be comparably respected by leadership so barren of disingenuity.