Showing posts with label World War III. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World War III. Show all posts

Monday, March 9, 2026

What Has Trump Done?

When I was a kid, my sister and I had to spend occasional weekends with my maternal grandmother, because my mother had to work overtime on Saturdays.  It was not fun, because my maternal grandmother lived in an inner-city neighborhood in which there was no sign of grass.  Even her entire backyard was paved.  Anyway, one weekend there, I did something incredibly and spectacularly wrong.  I won't say what it is, but when my grandmother called my mother and told her what happened, my mother demanded to speak to me.  When I took the receiver and said hello, the first thing my mother said was, "What have you done?"

If the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) had the same directness and indignation as my mother had in that moment she spoke to me, they would be asking Donald Trump the same question about the war he started against Iran.  But WHCA's president, apparently, is a wuss, and so are the other correspondents, so no one is asking that.

But I'll answer that unasked question.  What Trump has done is spark a regional war that includes attacks on Iran from Israel, whose leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is a war criminal who is continuing his crackdown on Gaza.  Iran has retaliated not just by attacking American military installations but attacking civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and several other Middle Eastern countries with drones.  Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth are responsible for having destroyed a girls' school in Iran in which nearly 170 students were killed.  Oil prices are going through the roof.  (That's the one good thing that has come out of this war; maybe Detroit will revert to making small cars - Ford has said it has the ability to do so in short order - and Americans will dump their sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, and maybe Volkswagen will finally sell the Polo in America and maybe Honda will bring back the Fit.)  An explosion at the U.S. Embassy in Norway - whose capital, Oslo, is the site of the accords that tried to establish peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians - may have been  an Iranian terrorist attack and could be a portent of things to come . . . not just in Europe but here in the U.S.  

And as if that weren't enough, Christian nationalist commanders in the military, no doubt with Hegseth's tacit approval, have declared that this war is the prelude to the End Times, when Christ returns to judge the living, the dead, and likely the undead - including MAGA zombies.

Well, that's going to ruin my summer vacation plans!

And as if that weren't enough, Russian leader Vladimir Putin - supposedly Trump's best bud - is giving intelligence on American military positions to the Iranians! 

You know, when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the war that began was, at first, a minor conflict over the status of Poland., with the Third Reich claiming it as living space and the British and the French fighting to help Poland preserve its independence.  Unable to send troops to Poland, Great Britain and France occupied land along the German border with France, and both sides exchanged harmless volleys,  leading to the war's original name, the "phony war."  (The Winter War, which began with the Soviet invasion of Finland in November 1939, was a separate conflict.)   In April 1940 the phony war became real as Adolf Hitler attacked and occupied Denmark and Norway, followed by a major blitzkrieg that result in the Nazi occupation of the Low Countries and the fall of France, prompting Italy to enter the war and prompting Japan, already at war with China, to join what then became known as the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis.   By 1941, even before the Japanese attack on Peral Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt began referring to the conflict as "World War II."

My point - and I do have one - is that we are likely at the beginning of World War III, but it may take a year or two before that becomes apparent.  Such a war will likely redraw national borders at least, ,and end millions of lives at worst, and possibly wipe currently existing countries off the map.

Like the United States.

Oh yeah, that horrible thing I did at my grandmother's house?  It turned out to be no big deal in the end.  My mother would later laugh about it, though, I remembering the terror I felt at the time, did not.  And no one will look back in 2026 years from now and laugh.  They won't even have the urge to chuckle. 

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Iran Amok

Donald Trump returned to office promising that he would never start another dumb war.  Except if it's with Iran.
Iran has been a bugaboo for Americans for years.  Having had an Islamic republican government since the revolution that swept out the vacuous and hated Shah in 1979, it is living proof that authoritarian states can, in fact, last a long time, contrary to popular wisdom.  The U.S. had supported the Shah and had even put him back in power at the request of the British to keep a socialist prime minister from nationalizing British oil interests, yet it wasn't the British Embassy in Tehran that got overrun by Iranian militants in January 1979, it was the American embassy.  That takeover was short-lived, but on November 4, 1979, two weeks after President Carter let the Shah come to America for medical treatment, militants in Tehran overran our embassy again and took its inhabitants hostage for fourteen months.  Subsequent attempts at normalizing relations with Iran backfired miserably.
Donald Trump clearly has a particular hatred for Iran, or at least for the mullahs who run the show there.  Perhaps the paranoid Trump, who believes that all other nations are out to humiliate us, had his own sensitivities offended when, at the age of 33, he saw the U.S. Embassy get seized in November 1979.  Something about it clearly wedged into the folds of his brain.  For he clearly bought Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's overheated rhetoric about Iran being close to getting the bomb, and he even in his first presidential term withdrew from the agreement that was meant to ensure that that would never happen.  The attacks Israel has launched against Iran have given Trump the excuse he needs to pursue another Middle Eastern war as part of a clearly psychological need to punish Iranians for burning all of those American flags.
Except that even some of his staunchest supporters - Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson - have a problem with that.  Carlson was even appalled when interviewing Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) on his Internet program and Cruz demonstrated his clear lack of knowledge about the very country he wants Trump to go ahead and attack.
Adding to this is the fact that Mike Huckabee, a born-again Christian, is the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and his only qualification for that job is his experience with evangelical Armageddon prophesies.  He wants a war in the Middle East to bring about the Second Coming of Christ to restore the Garden of Eden with Christians, along with Jews who accept Jesus as the Messiah, to be saved and Muslims, along with Jews who still reject Jesus as the Messiah, to be condemned to the fiery furnace.
Meanwhile, the General Authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints will flee from Utah to the site where Mormons believe the Garden of Eden will be restored upon Christ's return - the place non-Mormons know as Kansas City.    
And wouldn't it be something it the Saints turn out to have been right all along.
I'd prefer not to find out just yet.  But it figures that I'm finally ready to travel to Europe, something I've wanted to do for 35 years, and yet one more thing might prevent me from doing so this time as well.
That thing is World War III.
Guess I'll be going to Kansas City instead.  I'm not a Mormon, but I want to hedge my bets.  Also, it's easier to get there than to the Holy Land. 

Thursday, March 3, 2022

A Mushrooming War

The situation in Ukraine is getting worse by the hour, and it may get worst by the minute.

Vladimir Putin has continued to expand the the fighting and the bombing in Ukraine, and he says a third world war will be nuclear.

Oh, we knew that about a third world war - we've known it for seventy years.  But Putin is suggesting that this is the war that could end up being World War III.

You know, somehow COVID doesn't seem important anymore . . . 

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Put a Corker In It

Republican U.S. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who's not running for re-election in 2018, is speaking out against Donald Trump's handling of the job he was elected to.  He said that Trump is treating the Presidency and setting the nation "on a path to World War III" in his handling of the Korea crisis and by his undermining of key foreign-policy aides and and advisers. 
"I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it's a situation of trying to contain him," Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,  said, comparing the Oval Office to an adult day care center.  This comes right after Corker (below) said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and White House chief of staff John Kelly are the only three men keeping us out of chaos.
The problem is that Tillerson's efforts at diplomacy to handle the crisis in Asia were scuttled by Trump himself, Kelly is one facepalm away from quitting the White House after Trump's United Nations speech, and Mattis can't contain the President alone.
Trump is blundering his way into a major catastrophe just like the European powers walked in to a major conflagration to save face after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which sparked World War I by stoking nationalist resentments that had been building up in Europe for decades.  Trump could start a war with North Korea's Kim Jong Un by doing and saying the wrong thing to provoke the North Koreans  . . . and maybe also the Chinese, considering his airheaded remark on trade.  The good news is that other Republicans agree with Corker.  The bad news is that they don't want to say or do anything about it because they have to get their tax reform bill through.
And despite all of this, former Bill Clinton adviser Doug Sosnik, noting tensions within the Democratic Party and a dispirited and disorganized opposition to Trump, believes that Trump can get re-elected in 2020.
The good news is that Democrats, despite what Sosnik says, don't have to worry about 2020.  The bad news is that's because we're not likely to make it to 2019 . . . or 2018. :-O