I’m actually leaning more to Chicago than Venezuela. We haven’t seen the mobilization of Air Force assets to jump in let’s say the 82nd, unless he thinks the Navy’s got this on their own with like 2,000 dudes to launch the ground assault on an entire nation state. Just Cause II needs more buildup.

Just 'Cause II

Bay of Pigs III, however...

i cannot think of a better way to start a war than by disappearing for so long everyone thinks you died and then announcing a surprise war against a country nobody was thinking about until just today

not incompetent enough. just bomb that country's leaders, assume they cannot meaningfully retaliate, and have them kill an entire embassy, sink a boat, and kill maybe a thousand soldiers

has it occurred to us that maybe Donald Trump just hates boats, in the same way that he inexplicably hates wind turbines and is trying to do whatever he can to make ocean shipping as unpleasant as possible

Losing a battalion of marines on a moronic regime change operation might actually change some minds.

i am willing to bet the media goes full juche if something like this happens. they love this shit.

the question is whether the media loves “going to war” or “complaining about how the war we started isn’t won already” more, and that’s a cointoss tbh

i think they're completely cowed and they'll love the going to war forever, and report every development breathlessly. they will eventually get broken by various troops and widows shouting directly at them any time they try to do an interview with anyone involved

18-24 months from war start is the popularity danger zone imo

from recall of previous it literally had to wait until the military started bitching. i think it will depend how severely they push back and how much really bad media comes out and proliferates in the current env

They keep deliberately structuring NG "deployments" specifically to deny them benefits and protections. This is gonna get bad. The question is whether the FGOs give a fuck if their people suffer.

Thus far, the answer to that question has been (to the eternal dishonor of the Armed Services) "no." But who knows. Maybe they care more about fatalities than deliberate "fuck you" deployments, active re-segregation efforts, and the return of blue discharges.

previous ones had substantially more popular buy in and and ideological/propogandistic set-up. they have not done anything at all in terms of PR.

yeah there was a much more visceral reaction. And there were a lot more "trustworthy" figures on the pro-war side. Colin Powell pretty much torched all his presidential ambitions to sell us on the war.

it also featured a very broad coalition which probably shouldn't be ignored either. For all his faults, Bush knew how to sell a war.

yeah the comparison is if bush had invaded Iraq despite no 9/11 and no attempt to link saddam to WMD's

Depends where it starts from a bit

The response to the Iran bombing makes me question this a lot more created pretext existed for that and the response was a lot of confusion

Everyone love starting wars, nobody likes ending them outside of complete unconditional surrender. Trump is betting it’ll be an other Iran, but it could easily blow up in his face.

If anything the media will get bored of it and so will stop talking about it until a dem is president and say enough is enough. Then they’ll do the same thing they did with Afghanistan. Complaining about how it’s ending

Painfully sad and dreadfully true.

Level of juche depends on whether it’s just airstrikes or a full on invasion

depends primarily on how much sick footage and/or how many puffy interviews they get iirc

wolf blitzer is still alive right. he goes into a sort of rapturous trance if you let him see explosions live

and people say nominative determinism isn’t real

It’s crazy bc Holden bloodfeast actually gets to push the button in a sense, wolf is just in it for the love of the game

him and holden go to the same golf course and they debate which of the beer girls deserves to be named after each operation

They give huge tips though, which is kind of surprising

I'm not 100% on this. It feels like newsrooms are barely holding off literal mutinies. Not metaphorical mutinies but someone takes the editor hostage and dangles him from a window.

they might face a legit employee revolt but that will be when we hit the point where it is impossible to staff your org with anyone whose family is not seriously impacted in some way

Jake Tapper gets to cosplay a troop again

On the other hand, doing this without consolidating your regime is a great way to explosively topple it.

chat is it historically a good idea to throw battalions of young men into mountainous and heavily jungled meat grinders

Yeah, though the quislings in the media will be guarding the fucking bunker.

That’s right

I think losing marines could undermine trump but these things have a logic and inertia of their own once kicked into motion. The imperialist dr strangelove turd rolls downhill

Who’s that NBC chud that’s basically their war correspondent?

Mayaguez incident except dumber

c'mon if we do this we're just bombing the shit out of things for a while and calling it a day, we don't want to or know how to actually take territory anymore.