[ozgung]

I don't want to insult you but your president is a populist and a TV personality. He is not a policy maker, he is more like an actor. So your country went into war mode by changing the name of the Department of Defence to Department of War. This was not a cosmetic change. This means peace times are over and you are in war. Your government acts accordingly.

Since you are still a democracy find those people who make your policy decisions. It's not that yellow man.

[JumpCrisscross]

> find those people who make your policy decisions

Genuine question: who put Iran in their policy portfolio?

[jacquesm]

AIPAC is a thing...

And now of course you're going to label me an AIPAC nutter, but in this particular case I think the evidence is fairly plain given the collaboration between the two countries on this. If Israel had done this by their lonesome or if the US had not involved Israel then you could make the case that they reached this point independently, right now it looks to me as if collusion is a 100% certainty and that the US is executing a foreign policy that will not benefit it but that will benefit Israel. It also makes me wonder whether this will end up as a Venzuela re-run where the top names change but everything else remains the same, just with US companies the beneficiaries of the oil, which is, besides policy the main driver behind these things anyway.

[gizajob]

Make a genuine guess…

[oldnetguy]

I see this as Trump going after governments that were close to Russia and China. Which is why he is going after Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.

Also there are many countries in the middle east that we are friends with which would be happy if Iran falls.

[nostrademons]

The rumor I heard was that high-level Pentagon generals had subtly suggested that Trump target Iran. The reason was to distract his attention from Greenland. Logic goes that if you have a reality TV star who built his brand on being a tough guy in the White House, it's far better that he attack a theocratic dictatorship that funds a host of terrorist organizations and whose country is already on the verge of collapse than a NATO ally and fellow democracy that didn't do anything to us.

[Braxton1980]

The voters

[ThagH]

Indeed, the permanent bureaucracies and think tanks have advised all administrations:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt6wpgvg

This is bipartisan. The long term goals were to start with Libya, Iraq, Syria and then Iran. The latter two required Russia to be tied up in another conflict.

They don't explicitly put Iran in their portfolio because for Reality TV it is better to be a peace lover.

Now, undoubtedly the Democrats will pretend to complain, but Schumer and Pelosi want this, too.

[I am expanding on your comment, not trying to contradict anything.]

[coldtea]

>I don't want to insult you but your president is a populist and a TV personality. He is not a policy maker, he is more like an actor.

All of them are, even those that haven't had a show on TV.

[nixon_why69]

I'm not disagreeing with you but "Dept of War" is ENTIRELY a cosmetic change. It's literally just a name. There are people, mostly with desk jobs, who really want to feel like badasses and they really want the Dept of War. The real human consequences of this are unimportant to them and sadly unimportant to the rest of us also.

[delichon]

Cosmetic changes are frequently decisive in politics. "literally just a name" discounts the genuine power of names.

[avaer]

If you go to https://www.war.gov/ it says Department of War. The person in charge calls himself the Secretary of War. Warfighters are being sent into Iran. Presumably to engage in warfare. People are gonna die.

What's cosmetic about this?

[pfannkuchen]

Wasn’t it originally called the department of war also? If anything “department of defense” was doublespeak, as it was already primarily for war.

[trenning]

Ukraine’s TV personality leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems to be doing alright. Also went into war, but not of their own doing, and he has been measured, insightful, aware, throughout this whole war.

There’s more to it than Trump being a TV show personality. Far too complex and insidious than a simple quip.

[thiagoharry]

I don't think the American people can change their country's policy oriented toward a constant state of war, aggression, and invasions of other countries under the current system. This is a constant state policy, regardless of the party or the president. So it can be said that the United States is not a democracy. Money and capital rule, not the people.This can only be changed by a fundamental shift that empowers people over capital.

Of course, I agree that Trump is worse because, by removing the mask of civility and attacking others without first bothering to create propaganda and a narrative about how it is for the greater good and justice, he made the plundering and crimes faster and more efficient.

[JumpCrisscross]

> don't think the American people can change their country's policy oriented toward a constant state of war, aggression, and invasions of other countries under the current system

Of course we can. People disagreeing with you doesn't mean they don't exist.

These are the Senate seats in play this cycle [1]. How many of those do you think would be flipped based on any foreign policy item?

If you're on this thread you pay attention to foreign policy. The notion that someone doesn't–not isn't informed, but literally doesn't to any degree–is almost more foreign than the strangest countries we read about. But the truth is most Americans have never ranked any foreign policy item as being in their top three issues since the Vietnam War.

We could change it if we wanted to. We don't because it's not personally pertinent or worse, it's boring. (And, I'd argue, because a lot of foreign-policy oriented activists are preaching for the choir versus trying to actually effect change.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elec...

[shadowgovt]

That's assuming the people don't vote for this because they want this.

Many Americans have a hero complex. Their national mythology post World War II includes them being the "good guys" against the "bad guys." That mythology needs a bad guy.

[armada651]

The moment they made that name change and stated their expansionist agenda it finally became clear to me that this wasn't just MAGA anymore, this was actual fascism.

Whether you think the current targets are legitimate or not, the fact that the U.S. is going to war without seeking any democratic approval anymore is deeply troubling.

[autoexec]

> The moment they made that name change and stated their expansionist agenda it finally became clear to me that this wasn't just MAGA anymore, this was actual fascism.

I'm pretty sure MAGA was always fascism. I mean, all the signs were there and people were sounding alarm bells almost immediately.

[Saline9515]

This is clearly not fascism, and not very different from what the US is accustomed to. Let's not waste the meaning of words by throwing them at any occasion.

[lo_zamoyski]

I an opposed to Trump's unhinged offensive, but let's not fall prey to media narrative. Nobody called similar actions "fascism" before (or they did, as the word is thrown around casually in the US, but then nothing has changed). Similarly, when Obama vastly expanded deportations and the like, nobody cared.

I don't like Trump. At all. I think he's a terrible president on the whole and a shameless opportunist. But I don't like one-sided politics and hypocrisy even more so, and I dislike hysteria. History and long term trends paint us a different picture of current events. Most people's horizons are limited to the shallow, tendentious, cherry-picked, and sensationalist news cycle, unfortunately, regardless of outlet. Should we criticize Trump? Yes. But we should criticize all leadership when they do what they should not be doing.

BTW, the Dept. of War was the original name from 1789 to 1947. Curiously, it was soon after the change to Dept. of Defense that people like Eisenhower began to worry about the Military-Industrial Complex. That should give us pause. The name change conceals the intention, and coincides with a hungry imperial war machine that WWII helped bring into existence. Recall that Americans were largely isolationist before that.

[bluescrn]

But the Iranian regime isn’t at all fascist, right?

[epolanski]

I'm not American.

[yoyohello13]

The Trump admin would sooner drop nukes on LA then cede a fair election.

[gslepak]

An honest discussion about this cannot be had on this site, it's kinda funny how pointless all the comments are here. Yours is the closest anyone is allowed to get and I wonder if yours will stay up.

[peyton]

The guy’s in the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame. He’s been seeking or serving in office for over ten years. We all know. It’s old ground.