Trump’s special military operation in Iran is failing. There’s no sign that the regime will be overthrown. The US and Israel can destroy a lot of equipment, but Iran still has a ground army and still has forces to keep control of the country. Without a massive ground invasion, there’s no sign that Trump’s special military operation will produce significant political results.
“U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed scores of ‌children on Saturday but have not yet reached a final conclusion or completed their investigation, two U.S. officials told Reuters.”
Israel previously destroyed Iranian mixers needed to make medium range ballistic missiles. This was supposed to keep production offline for at least a year, but the Chinese gave Iran the equipment needed to rebuild the program. Iran decided to build way more of these missiles than before. These are a huge threat to Israel.
Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, and then he tried to steal that election himself, and is now trying to steal future elections. US democracy is under threat.
If you are disenfranchising millions of Americans to stop a few dozen potential illegal voters, then your goals are to make it harder to vote, rather than to secure the election, unless you are just ignorant of the facts.
Kansas tried a documentary proof of citizenship law in 2011 and it blocked 31,000 citizens from voting–12% of first time registrants.
The founders intentionally did not give the president the power to regulate elections because they feared something like a king or a dictator. Yet, Trump is claiming such powers.
The problem wasn’t that Trump didn’t evacuate Americans from the area in advance, that would cause a panic and give a tell that we were attacking. The problem is that we didn’t have a plan to get them out at all! That makes it seem like the administration did not expect Iran’s reaction even though a large and deadly reaction should be expected when we are trying to eliminate their regime.
Israel sees Iran as an existential threat and is happy to see Iran greatly weakened so Israel can have some temporary breathing room.
This doesn’t match American interests. Iran is not the same level of threat to the United States. Using blood, treasure, and munitions to temporarily weaken Iran is a large net bad for the US. This war is only worth it for the US if Iran gets a friendlier regime or has a long term change in behavior.
W Bush focusing on fighting insurgencies while China was rising, led to the US not having the military industrial base and stockpiles of certain munitions. If the US uses too many munitions fighting Iran, it will be greatly weakened for a fight against China. This also weakens US deterrence against China.
However, if Iran is in too much chaos to pump oil, or if it is friendly enough with the US that in the event of a China-US war it would not sell oil to China, that would be a huge advantage in starving China of oil in the event of a war.