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But Iran has a military that can fight back.
Trump wanted to look like Obama in the Situation Room. Instead, he looked ridiculous in a curtained-off side-space at Mar-A-Lardo:
#AddleBrain in a makeshift Situation room at Mar-A-Lago as he launched the llegal war on Iran, right now he’s hosting a fundraiser there.
President Obama in a real Situation room to monitor the Bin Laden mission.[image or embed]
— Pauline – proudly Antifa (@vixenreclaim.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 10:20 PM
On the map behind him, you can see the locations of carrier groups and military forces:
One, very pathetic that they’re still desperately trying to recreate the Obama situation room photo.
Two, Trump looks like he died last week and was badly preserved.[image or embed]
— ArgellaStone (@argellastone.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 3:26 PM
Here are the attacks on both sides, from the New York Times (gift link):
“The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack”
– Mark Carney
[image or embed]
— Luke LeBrun (@lukelebrun.ca) February 28, 2026 at 10:37 AM
What I wish he had said:
Wesley Wark has this to say about Carney’s statement:
All of this is mostly fine, minus the paragraph of support for the United States. The stated purposes of that support, at their high level of generality, do not encompass the totality of US war aims as Trump himself has outlined them. But now we are now stuck with full support.
No one would argue with the position, fully established in international law, that Israel has the right to defend itself. Is that what we think Israel is doing in joining this US war against Iran?
One last point. When faced with a war, call it a war, not “Iran-related hostilities.”
You know, Mr Prime Minister, you could have just said nothing. That might have been better.
— Raywat Deonandan 🍁🇨🇦 (@deonandan.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 10:50 AM
Our former UN ambassador Bob Rae doesn’t criticize Carney directly, but he writes this:
….Both Mr Trump and Mr Netanyahu have domestic tails to wag. That might explain the impulse. But in a world where consequences matter, it is hard to see through this current fog of war the “plan”. No one wants to see a nuclear armed Iran. But as recently as last week negotiations were underway in Geneva, with further “technical discussions” planned for Monday. There are many other ways of mounting effective pressure
I am always reminded of the three rules of Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s acolyte and Donald Trump’s mentor. First rule is “attack, attack attack.” Second rule is “never apologize”. Third rule is “whatever happens, declare victory.” We saw this strategy at work in the State of the Union speech. We shall see it again in this military adventure with the Israelis against Iran. Whatever happens in Iran, victory will be declared, just as it was in the last “obliteration”. Just remember that in the attack on Iraq, on land, sea, and air, hundreds of thousands died, and went on dying, in a brutal war. In the early days of that conflict, the US declared “mission accomplished”. That was untrue. The cost of that ill conceived attack is still being paid.
Canada needs to work effectively with many countries to ensure that sound policies are pursued in the interests of both peace and security. This is no time for “ready, aye ready”. This is not an argument about whether Iran is a dictatorship or a country that poses a serious challenge to the peace and security of the world. This should be a discussion about the most effective, and enduring, ways to achieve common objectives.
The conduct of foreign and military policy is not about listening to our “impulses” or our “instincts”. It is about constantly understanding the consequences of our behaviour, and what others can do in response to our own decisions. It is not about how we all feel on day one. It is about how we’ll feel as time goes on. As Shimon Peres said “so what happens on day two ?”
This evening, Rae added these comments:
Benjamin Parker at The Bulwark gives some support for what Carney said:
…LET’S START WITH WHAT we don’t know: Was there some secret exigency that required a decision at this point? Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said within the last week that Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bombmaking material.” Witkoff isn’t an expert in nuclear weapons or international relations; there have been no other reports corroborating his statement; and it directly contradicts open-source intelligence about the state of the Iranian nuclear program, to say nothing of the Trump administration’s own claim that the air strikes U.S. forces conducted as part of last summer’s Operation Midnight Hammer “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites.
Then again, if Iran had made some secret breakthrough in its nuclear weapons program, the Trump administration would have had every reason not to announce it, given those claims of “obliteration” last year. It’s possible, but unlikely, that Witkoff slipped up and accidentally told the truth.
Then, too, the Canadian and Australian governments—both members of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, along with the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand—issued statements expressing support for the operation on the grounds that it would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. (The U.K. released a slightly more ambivalent statement about the strikes that nonetheless emphasized that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nukes.) Maybe our intelligence partners know something the American public doesn’t….
When thinking about how long a war with Iran might last, and how bloody it might be, I remember this cautionary tale that I first read some 22 years ago.
2004 was also a time of US scare-mongering about Iran, because some in the Bush administration were pushing to widen the War in Iraq. This article is an old column from a publication called I, Cringely: The Pulpit, written by journalist Mark Stephens under the pseudonym Robert X. Cringely. It is long out of print, but I found it on the Wayback Machine.
The excerpt was nominally about the 2004 re-election of Bush, but it also featured Stephens’ description of a horrific 1986 incident in the Iran-Iraq War:
If the experts are correct, the 2004 election results mean we now live in a country where morality is apparently the major concern of people. Am I wrong, or is the same thing not true in Iran? And if our morality is in fundamental conflict with their morality, which side will be willing to sacrifice more to obtain what they view as their just end?
I can tell you it ain’t us.
Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: “How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran.” The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.
I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man’s Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that’s exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.
It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.
Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.
Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can’t really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn’t get it and he’ll proudly NEVER get it.
Welcome to the New Morality.
Trump doesn’t get it either. Nor do Hegseth or Vance or Rubio or Gabbard.
Nor, apparently, the media:
Looks like Iran has decided on three types of targets: US military bases in the region (Bahrain & others), oil infrastructure (eastern Saudi Arabia) and, perhaps most escalatory of all, densely populated urban areas to maximise economic and political impact (Dubai).
— Shashank Joshi (@shashj.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 11:22 AM
And on Saturday night, this was reported too
Pro-Iranian protesters also gathered outside the Green Zone in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, where the US Embassy is located.
Pakistan and then Iraq have the largest Shi’ite Muslim populations after Iran.[image or embed]
— FujiiPonta (@fujiiponta.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 2:55 AM
Here is something to think about, isn’t it
Chances are the stock markets will be jittery next week:
Finally, I liked this too:
