Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 05:42
VIEWED: 15626
PAGE 60 of 73
Trump isn't afraid of Iran. But he should be cautious.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Trump’s War-Not-War Is Doing Something Odd to the Economy
Businesses and consumers are struggling with a bizarre conflict that is simultaneously happening and not happening.
By Idrees Kahloon | July 9, 2026, 1:54 PM ET
Idrees Kahloon is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for The Economist. He writes about American politics, policy and economics.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/imf-report-consumers-iran-wa
r/687858/
Yesterday, the International Monetary Fund happily reported that the world had weathered the recently settled Iran war surprisingly well. That same day, President Trump declared the cease-fire “over” and promised, “We’re going to hit them hard again tonight.” The United States resumed bombing Iran. For months, businesses and consumers all around the world have been trying to deal with a bizarre situation in which Trump’s war is both happening and not happening at once.
In quantum mechanics, alternate states of the world can be said to exist together in superposition—Schrödinger’s famous cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Contemporary geopolitics has a similar weirdness. The Strait of Hormuz has been declared simultaneously open and closed. Cease-fires coexist with intermittent bombings. America has decisively won the war, the Trump administration has insisted many times; all the while, it has been negotiating a diplomatic settlement that Iran both does and does not seem to want.
Many countries have been muddling along anyway. Unlike in its pessimistic April report, which had warned of a potential global recession, the IMF was sanguine yesterday in declaring that “the global economy as a whole has, so far, weathered the shock from the war better than feared.” Global GDP growth is now forecast to be 3 percent—less than the 3.3 percent forecast before the war actually began, but not much worse than the IMF’s April projection. Global inflation should be 4.7 percent, mostly because of the war-induced increases in oil and natural-gas prices. Even economies in Europe and Asia that were dependent on imported energy from the Middle East performed surprisingly well, for two reasons: Energy importers tapped their oil and gas reserves, preventing shortages, and the artificial-intelligence boom has kept equipment exporters such as China and South Korea growing much faster than expected.
Strikingly, the United States, a net exporter of energy, has inflicted war-related costs on the rest of the world without harming its growth trajectory at all. It is one of the few advanced economies that the IMF expects to grow faster in 2026 than it did in 2025. American consumers have grumbled about higher gas prices, but the S&P 500 is up almost 9 percent since the joint American-Israeli operation that started the war in February. Perhaps that is why, after delivering one stress test to the rest of the world, Trump is willing to deliver another by resuming hostilities. But a few more months of war-not-war could have more dire effects. The natural-gas reserves that Europe typically builds up in anticipation of winter are now very low. Reserves acted to dampen price pressure at the start of the war; now the impetus to refill them as the cold months approach could act to accelerate price pressure.
A protracted conflict could produce a disjunction, in which the global economy is both harmed and unharmed at the same time. The IMF’s headline growth projection yesterday, 3 percent, is not terrible. Yet the projection is a blend of two opposing states. Most countries will actually experience only one or the other. Economies involved in the AI boom will shrug off the effects of the war as equipment sales, rising stock indexes, and perhaps even growing worker productivity promote confidence among businesses and consumers. But for poorer economies uninvolved in technology supply chains and dependent on imported energy, the harms of war will be impossible to overlook. These economies will likely suffer shortages in the case of further oil and gas scarc
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Nobody gives a single fuck what a Pakistani "journalist" at the Atlantic has to say.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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As Iran Cease-Fire Frays, Trump Faces a Muddled War and Unpalatable Options
The president appears to be confronting the consequences of a cease-fire deal cobbled together in haste, with little movement toward resolving the key issues driving the conflict.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html
Just two weeks ago, opening the Great American State Fair, President Trump triumphantly declared: “For the first time in 3,000 years, we are going to have peace in the Middle East.”
It was typical bravado for Mr. Trump. But the “peace” he was celebrating — the cease-fire with Iran that on Wednesday he declared “over” after less than a month — was already beginning to unravel. The result was perhaps predictable for a 14-paragraph memorandum of understanding that skirted major issues and was hastily assembled so Mr. Trump could declare he had reached a deal, any deal.
Now Mr. Trump appears to be confronting the consequences of his haste, and of his assumption, born of his time in the real estate business, that his adversary would prize economic benefits over the revolutionary ideology that has driven its politics since the 1979 Iranian revolution. That has left him facing a range of unpalatable options amid seemingly intractable sticking points over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program — to say nothing of its missile program, its support for terrorist groups and its repression of its own people.
At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday after the two sides had exchanged strikes, he threatened major new combat operations. Those included seizing a key Iranian oil processing island and attacking the country’s infrastructure and desalination plants, which experts have said could constitute a war crime. (Mr. Trump did say he was most hesitant to hit the desalination facilities.)
But Mr. Trump has made such threats without following through before, and he added on Wednesday that he did not anticipate a return to full-scale war. Such a move has little domestic support, and some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies fear the economic and political consequences less than four months before the midterm elections. No one is more aware of that calendar, or Mr. Trump’s hesitation to repeat the experience of the spring, than the Iranian leadership.
The president could instead reimpose the American blockade of Iranian ports, an attempt to cut off the country’s economic lifeline. But that would require a continued, intense American presence in the region, and while Mr. Trump contended in April that it would lead to Iranian economic collapse, his earlier imposition of it did not.
Or he could elect to live in a world of neither war nor peace, an era of episodic skirmishes in the Persian Gulf, punctuated by periodic negotiations, with traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil-shipping route, greatly reduced from the 130 or so ships that passed through each day before the war. The energy markets would most likely adjust; to some degree they already have.
But for a president who promised a quick, cost-free confrontation with an old adversary — “four to six weeks” was the White House prediction in the opening weeks — an ongoing conflict would amount to near-total failure on the mission he initially set out upon. And the price would be staggering: The Pentagon has already asked Congress for about $70 billion to cover the early operations around Iran, and the cost rises every week.
“The problem is that all the options — endure, escalate or agree — are unattractive in different ways,” Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain, said on Wednesday. “The likeliest outcome is a continuing series of low-level, tit-for-tat attacks, followed by frantic diplomacy by mediators, the emergence of a new and fragile cease-fire, and then probably another round of strikes.
Mr. Fontaine added: “It will be a long oscillation between cold war and low-level hot war.”
Many of the problems Mr. Trump is facing today were exacer
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Cool.
Thanks for the update, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The Timidity of America’s Top Generals
Deference to civilian power is part of the job but can go too far.
By Missy Ryan and Nancy A. Youssef | July 10, 2026, 11:45 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/generals-deferen
tial-military-trump/687822/
What is the role of a general in a democracy? Many of today’s military leaders have a very particular answer: Focus on tactics, carry out orders, and otherwise shut up.
This is not what America’s top officers have always done. The country’s most senior generals and admirals are expected to provide unvarnished military counsel to the president and swear an oath to defend the Constitution. History is full of examples of officers who also spoke up about the ethics and strategic implications of the president’s choices. But with a commander in chief who has stated that he prefers “the sort of generals that Hitler had,” and a secretary of defense who has fired top officers for exhibiting insufficient loyalty, military leaders during the Trump presidency have defined their advisory role extremely narrowly.
Dan Caine, the general whom President Trump plucked out of retirement—and obscurity—to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has come to personify that circumspect approach. He presents military options and addresses tactical and force-related matters, but avoids big-picture questions of geopolitics and the probity of the administration’s actions, provided the administration deems them legal. Other top officers have followed his example.
Caine articulated his stance to the graduates of the National Defense University last month. The future top ranks, he said, must be clear about the limits of their role when they advise senior leaders about the risks and benefits of potential operations. Can we go do this? is a military question, Caine told the officers sweltering in their dress uniforms, one “that the joint force answers.” But “the should we? question lands at the policy level, and we don’t do that in our business,” he said.
Seen one way, Caine’s studious deference to civilian authority is an appropriate correction from the generals in charge of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who were famously strident about what they thought the wars should be about and how they should be run. Top officers such as Caine serve at the pleasure of the president and can be relieved anytime; their jobs are to provide military counsel, not to shape preferred outcomes.
But looked at another way, Caine and other generals are being overly timid and deferential, in part because Pete Hegseth demands it. The secretary of defense has forced out more than 20 generals and admirals, including some of the most respected career officers in the forces: Caine’s predecessor, Air Force General C. Q. Brown Jr.; two other members of the Joint Chiefs; and, most recently, Army General C. D. Donahue. Meanwhile, Hegseth has promoted less experienced officers. He has offered no explanation for each individual ouster, and the dismissals have fed a sense among his senior commanders that he prizes fealty and acquiescence over competence and experience.
Assertive generals, too, can offer bad advice. The Afghan and Iraq Wars, led by more outspoken military leaders, dragged on, cost trillions of dollars, and ended far short of victory. Yet the Iran war, led by more reticent brass, hasn’t achieved the administration’s stated objectives, either. Before the conflict started, commanders had crafted a contingency plan for the U.S. military to keep shipping moving through the Strait of Hormuz, which called for additional ships, troops, and other forces in anticipation that Tehran might attempt to close it. But the president chose a different course. Commanders faithfully executed the president’s guidance and were careful not to criticize it publicly, only to see Iran close the strait to commercial traffic, disrupting global commerce and prompting the Trump administration to agree to a tenuous cease-fire and a (thus far futile) return to diplomacy.
All of which raise
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Timidity of America’s Top Generals
Deference to civilian power is part of the job but can go too far.
By Missy Ryan and Nancy A. Youssef | July 10, 2026, 11:45 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/generals-deferen
tial-military-trump/687822/
What is the role of a general in a democracy? Many of today’s military leaders have a very particular answer: Focus on tactics, carry out orders, and otherwise shut up.
This is not what America’s top officers have always done. The country’s most senior generals and admirals are expected to provide unvarnished military counsel to the president and swear an oath to defend the Constitution. History is full of examples of officers who also spoke up about the ethics and strategic implications of the president’s choices. But with a commander in chief who has stated that he prefers “the sort of generals that Hitler had,” and a secretary of defense who has fired top officers for exhibiting insufficient loyalty, military leaders during the Trump presidency have defined their advisory role extremely narrowly.
Dan Caine, the general whom President Trump plucked out of retirement—and obscurity—to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has come to personify that circumspect approach. He presents military options and addresses tactical and force-related matters, but avoids big-picture questions of geopolitics and the probity of the administration’s actions, provided the administration deems them legal. Other top officers have followed his example.
Caine articulated his stance to the graduates of the National Defense University last month. The future top ranks, he said, must be clear about the limits of their role when they advise senior leaders about the risks and benefits of potential operations. Can we go do this? is a military question, Caine told the officers sweltering in their dress uniforms, one “that the joint force answers.” But “the should we? question lands at the policy level, and we don’t do that in our business,” he said.
Seen one way, Caine’s studious deference to civilian authority is an appropriate correction from the generals in charge of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who were famously strident about what they thought the wars should be about and how they should be run. Top officers such as Caine serve at the pleasure of the president and can be relieved anytime; their jobs are to provide military counsel, not to shape preferred outcomes.
But looked at another way, Caine and other generals are being overly timid and deferential, in part because Pete Hegseth demands it. The secretary of defense has forced out more than 20 generals and admirals, including some of the most respected career officers in the forces: Caine’s predecessor, Air Force General C. Q. Brown Jr.; two other members of the Joint Chiefs; and, most recently, Army General C. D. Donahue. Meanwhile, Hegseth has promoted less experienced officers. He has offered no explanation for each individual ouster, and the dismissals have fed a sense among his senior commanders that he prizes fealty and acquiescence over competence and experience.
Assertive generals, too, can offer bad advice. The Afghan and Iraq Wars, led by more outspoken military leaders, dragged on, cost trillions of dollars, and ended far short of victory. Yet the Iran war, led by more reticent brass, hasn’t achieved the administration’s stated objectives, either. Before the conflict started, commanders had crafted a contingency plan for the U.S. military to keep shipping moving through the Strait of Hormuz, which called for additional ships, troops, and other forces in anticipation that Tehran might attempt to close it. But the president chose a different course. Commanders faithfully executed the president’s guidance and were careful not to criticize it publicly, only to see Iran close the strait to commercial traffic, disrupting global commerce and prompting the Trump administration to agree to a tenuous cease-fire and a (thus far futile) reNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:It is Trump who committed treason by going to war without Congress declaring war. Trump is losing the war despite falsely declaring he won.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm just waiting for somebody at the NYT to write this article so we can bring them up on treason.
President Trump Says "We've Won" Iran War - March 11, 2026
Trump’s War is NOT Won: Mediators try to save crumbling Iran deal as Trump, Khamenei trade threats
Iran's leader vowed to avenge his father's death at the hands of the U.S., while President Trump says he threatened missile attacks in response to threats to kill him.
By Jon Gambrell, Michelle L. Price and Will Weissert Associated Press
July 11, 2026, 2:30 p.m. ET | DUBAI, United Arab Emirates
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0711/Mediators-try-to-save
-crumbling-Iran-deal-as-Trump-Khamenei-trade-threats
U.S. and Iranian leaders traded threats on Saturday as the interim deal to end the war buckled under crossfire in the Middle East and efforts continued to keep talks going.
President Donald Trump overnight made threats on social media of further missile attacks against Iran, after the funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saw open calls for the U.S. leader's killing. Senior U.S. officials demanded that Iran make a public statement saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and ships won't be attacked.
Later, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei vowed that Iranians would continue to avenge his father's death. Such revenge "is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out," he said in remarks carried by state television. He still has not been seen publicly since the war began on Feb. 28 with strikes that killed his father.
Tehran has insisted that the strait remain under its control and that it be allowed to charge ships moving through it, a stance it took after the war began.
The exchange of threats followed days of U.S. airstrikes targeting Iran, sparked by Iran's attacks on three ships in the strait, and Iranian retaliatory fire targeting Arab nations in the region. Trump has declared the ceasefire over but said the U.S. would continue negotiations.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Saturday said he met with his counterpart in Oman, located on the other side of the strait, to discuss the waterway and "appropriate mechanisms for ensuring the safe passage of ships."
Trump says he responded to threats to kill him
A thousand "missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat," Trump wrote on his website.
He said he was responding to threats "to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate" him. During Khamenei's funeral, mourners held posters or banners calling for Trump to be killed along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Iran buried Khamenei, 86, this week.
Trump added that the U.S. military would "completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran — PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!"
Trump has repeatedly invoked the name of God in Arabic, and threatened to destroy Iran's very civilization. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, has criticized Trump's "deranged mocking of Islam."
Iran accuses Washington of violating the interim deal
Iran's foreign minister accused the U.S. of violating the interim deal by ending waivers allowing Iran to sell crude oil on the open market in U.S. dollars. Washington ended them in response to the attacks on ships in the strait.
"Reality check: There can only be mutual compliance," Araghchi wrote on X.
He was scheduled to meet with his counterpart in Oman. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told his country's state broadcaster, TRT, that he believed "a solution can be reached" this weekend between Iran and Oman.
The U.S. urges
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What's that, Shit Golem?
I wasn't paying attention to you.
You should get used to that now.
Because nobody is ever going to take anything you ever say seriously again.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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I wasn't joking.
You were the joke all along.
And not a particularly funny one.
And now everybody sees this.
Except for you.
Now carry that fucking weight.
Don't you worry. I know your stupid ass still doesn't get it.
But you will.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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