And then the Iranians got real real mad, and then the Iranians fired ballistic missiles at a US base in Iraq and kinda missed on purpose but not really, and The Troops stationed there were unscathed but got brain damage from being so close to the blast, and then it turned out the US and Iran were communicating through a Swiss back channel to arrange a "proportionate" counter-response to each other, and then Trump tweeted that everything was fine, and the libs got mad he didn't immediately invade Iran over what amounted to Havana Syndrome for The Troops and then everything got buried over COVID?
That was pretty fucked up when you think about it
EDIT: Oh YEAH -- AND THEN the Iranians got real paranoid and on high alert and ended up shooting down one of their own airliners on accident the same day, in a sick sort of mirroring of the USS Vincennes incident
Do you have a source on that back channel arrangement? First time I hear of it.
The first I read it was on the Guardian and the BBC -- I cannot for the life of me find the articles that mentioned this, but this NYT retrospective does mention the Swiss diplomatic channel the two countries used to talk to each other in the aftermath of the strike:
But the United States also sent secret messages through Swiss intermediaries urging Iran not to respond so forcefully that Mr. Trump would feel compelled to go even further. After it did respond, firing 16 missiles at bases housing American troops without hurting anyone as a relatively harmless show of force, a message came back through the Swiss saying that would be the end of its reprisal for now. The message, forwarded to Washington within five minutes after it was received, persuaded the president to stand down.
The real tragedy a was horrific set of coincidences and genuine fuckups -- the Iranian military was on high alert expecting a US counter-attack, some radar operator or another makes an error and by coincidence some poor airliner full of Canadians, Ukranians and Iranians gets deleted in mid-air.
The Iranians really took a lot of Ls that January, what with Soleimani's death, 50 something people getting trampled to death in his hometown at his funeral procession, and then the airliner shootdown by their own military killing nearly another hundred plus of their own people. Just a terrible month all around.
I remember there was some speculation that the AA targetting or comms or something were compromised and the Iranians were basically 'tricked' into firing
I also remember before then how some oil tankers blew up and the US tried so hard to insinuate that Iran was responsible.
fuck me i can't remember which pod it was someone just linked it here, but some analyst guy is on and fully believed Iran/Hezbollah were behind the things the US accuses them of, and said such actions are part of why the US lacks the confidence to actually go in on Iran.
the libs got mad he didn’t immediately invade Iran
This part didn't happen. No less of a Democratic ghoul than Pelosi said:
while American leaders’ “highest priority” is to protect American interests and lives, “we cannot put the lives of American servicemembers, diplomats, and others further at risk by engaging in provocative actions.” She continued, “Tonight’s airstrike risks provoking further dangerous escalation of violence. America – and the world – cannot afford to have tensions escalate to the point of no return.”
Even she was criticizing it as "dangerous escalation," and other Democrats were more direct.
Libs are bad enough in reality -- making stuff up about them will just make us sound like cranks when we have real-world conversations about this stuff.
There were some liberal pundits in the news that were cheering on the drone strikes, even when the party establishment reflexively spoke out against it. If it wasn't swallowed up by the next week's news cycle, we probably would have seen more of the party members repeating talking points they got from television.
Some pundits with 24 hours to fill talking about "looking presidential" at a press conference is not the same as actual politicians (or rank-and-file libs) calling for an invasion. And we know they wouldn't have changed their tune had we gotten closer to war, because they kept hounding Trump for this through the summer even as the news cycle moved on (the House voted to repeal the AUMF, which was floated as a justification of the assassination, in June).
Revisionist history will make you show your ass when you're talking to the libs in your life. Despite their best efforts, Democrats do not get every single issue wrong.
I suppose it's a good thing I'm bringing it up as a counter-factual hypothetical online, rather than asserting it as truth in the real world.
People sometimes say things they get off the internet in real life. It's good to be accurate, or at least not take issue when someone else is.
Well, for what it's worth, you're correct. Nobody with any real power, save for the people in Trump's cabinet, would come out uncritically fellating the action. It was nonetheless demoralizing and giving me that sinking heart feeling like the runup to 2003 seeing these Acela corridor ghouls vibrating through the woodwork on social media crowing about how Trump truly became president that day, twisting themselves into pretzels to justify, entirely post hoc, how Soleimani was the most dangerous terrorist to have ever existed and that his death was a net benefit to humanity despite 99% of them having never heard of the fucker until that morning. In the eyes of the pundits, the think-tankers, the wonks and columnists, Trump had done the most Presidential thing they could possibly imagine: murdering a dozen brown people, and important ones at that, for no fucking reason. And in the wake of Iran's (frankly rather pathetic) retaliatory strike, those same creatures would come out urging Trump to strike back even harder at Iran for daring to fight back and mildly inconveniencing the The Troops by blowing up a bike shed in disused part of their base. They smelled blood in the water, and by god they were gonna go for it.
It's true the dem leadership, and the libs who actually wielded any real degree of political power would ultimately condemn Trump's actions, but I suspect it wasn't out of any principled objection to the inherent act so much as a reflexive impulse to condemn Trump for any action he took, such as it was in the waning Resistance era. They were probably more upset he beat them to the punch, given Obama's and Hillary's propensity for doing the same. Still, they did come to the right conclusion, for the wrong reasons.
and then it turned out the US and Iran were communicating through a Swiss back channel to arrange a “proportionate” counter-response to each other
:what-the-hell:
no that wasn't havana syndrome, havana syndrome is fake, and you can actually get hurt being too close to an explosion.
The liberals were really quick to start calling Trump "presidential" and "grown-up" for that one week. Even otherwise normal people that I knew in real life were saying things along the line of, "I don't like that it's him doing it, but it needs to be done."
I remember because one of my friends that was deployed over there at the time had his outdoor gym area blown up by Iranian missiles.
the Iranians got real paranoid and on high alert and ended up shooting down one of their own airliners on accident the same day, in a sick sort of mirroring of the Carl Vinson incident
Damn.... either i never heard that part or I had forgotten it.
The Iranians shooting down their own airliner was Trump's fault too. Remember?
