You know what? I'll defend it. I voted for Biden as harm reduction. Biden is a fucking terrible human being, and not much better than Trump. He is still less worse than Trump. The problem is that people think voting is the only type of praxis you can do and this thus led a months-long idiotic debate on this site that included the dumbest take: "Trump is better". He's not. He is worse. I view voting as a way to choose my opposition. I would rather fight against Biden than Trump. Third party candidates were never going to win, be honest.
For people who think that voting doesn't do a lot, you complain an awful lot about it. Before we can vote for a vanguard party, we need to have one. We need to focus on getting organized. We all knew Biden was never going to help us. Electoralism is a tiny sideshow of lesser-evilism. Chapo dumbly thought that Bernie would be the answer and burned themselves out on it. Don't burn yourself out. Organize!
You should for tanking Hillary's 2020 election chances because of your deep and uncontrollable misogyny.
You should be fucking ashamed of yourself for once again siding with white males when a perfectly acceptable female candidate could have won if you just voted for her.
Utterly disgraceful and disgusting behavior from a so called "leftist"
I’ll argue that Trump would have heightened the contradictions more.
But maybe it is a flagrant disregard for the functions of govt and the power it holds vs someone who takes it seriously and cares about the “image” of the government.
Electoralism is a tiny sideshow of lesser-evilism.
Biden wasn't the harm reduction candidate though. Clinton wasn't in 2016 and Biden wasn't in 2020.
Trump was busy destroying USAs image on the global stage.
When the US was fully geared up to destroy Venezuela Trump bottled it and called it off saying he didn't want to be known as "the body bag president" according to John Bolton who after seeing that campaigned for the Dems.
Trump encouraged the amateur security group that ended up trying to coup Maduro in Venezuela and they ended up shot by fishermen when they arrived or paraded in front of the worlds press as USA aggression on Venezuela. Trump was busy destroying Nato and pulling the USA into an unwinnable conflict with China. He also tried to withdraw troops from Syria and had to have his team lie to his face about how many troops were there. Pulled out of TTIP (anti worker legislation) which allowed China to sign RCEP and start pushing US out of Asia.
Trump was the harm reduction candidate on incompetence grounds alone.
Biden promised to rebuild the "American Nation" in which he means to unite America via a return to neoconservative war mongering and the scraps at the proletariat will be taken from the ruination of peoples in the global south. And indeed Biden re-invaded Syria on his first day as president
You can be a national chauvinist if you like and say "Biden was the harm reduction candidate for me and people near me."
Fair enough I don't disagree - If you truly were concerned with harm reduction you'd have put a tickbox next to Trump to watch him completely ruin Nato and the Atlantic Alliance and bumble through every coup attempt the US would like to perpetrate
But he wasn't in the grand scheme in the fight against imperialism and he wasn't for the rest of the 7.3 billion people on the planet
"Trump was actually better for the rest of the world" is consistently the worst take on here. It's also a take that's hard to find outside of the U.S.
When the US was fully geared up to destroy Venezuela Trump bottled it and called it off saying he didn’t want to be known as “the body bag president” according to John Bolton who after seeing that campaigned for the Dems.
You're talking about Iran here, and you're omitting that Trump took us from a significant diplomatic agreement with Iran to coming within hours of war. You're also omitting the many escalations he was personally responsible for, most notably the Soleimani assassination. Beyond Iran, drone strikes killed three times as many civilians under Trump.
Besides, the intelligence community had already figured out a way to work around Trump: lie to him. They had been withholding intelligence from him for years because he was so bad at keeping his mouth shut, and this blossomed to lying about troop numbers in Syria along with who knows what else. Accounting for institutional power like this shows how absurd stuff like "Donald Trump would have been the end of NATO" really is.
“Trump was actually better for the rest of the world” is consistently the worst take on here. It’s also a take that’s hard to find outside of the U.S.
The research in the article includes a majority(only 24 countries, skips the entire third world because who cares) of western first world countries.
Clearly capitalist nations would prefer Biden because Trump embarrasses and jeopardizes the legitimacy of the "free" "democratic" world led by America.
Trump simply exposed the ugly side of American politics to people worldwide who had no clue the white savior was actually clueless and stupid most of the time not to mention racist and incompetent.
Biden would help transform that image and with it the belief that we(westerners) live in a just world.
You can easily find polls about what Europeans and other people think of actual living conditions in the US like lack of healthcare, education, poverty levels etc.
Nobody in the first world is ready and/or willing to admit the US is their enemy. Trump's racist isolationist USA makes that obvious. Any other "civil" president makes it seem like it is back to good old USA freedom police yadayada.
Peru, Mexico, and Malyasia are in that survey, and they were all strongly against Trump. There are shortcomings to the survey, but it's ridiculous to claim to speak for countries outside the imperial core while (1) not even looking for evidence of what they think, and (2) ignoring what evidence we have.
Brinksmanship is a terrible policy -- especially when the president is being kept at least partially in the dark. If you push right up to the edge often enough you're not always going to be able to pull back in time. So Trump gets zero credit for playing a terrible game and getting lucky enough that the situation didn't unexpectedly escalate beyond his control.
Biden can be awful without Trump even kinda-sorta good in some areas.
Which may help explain why he was so angry Trump didn’t attack Iran last summer after the regime shot down a US surveillance drone. Trump at the last minute called off planned strikes on Iranian sites because he felt it wasn’t “proportionate.”
“‘Too many body bags,’ said Trump,” according to Bolton...
Trump pulled back from one full-scale attack after escalating us to the point where that attack was imminent. There was no comparable full-scale attack on Venezuela planned, and Trump didn't pull us back from one.
Ah my bad still I don't think Biden or Clinton would've bottled it on Iran like Trump did.
Instead Trump assassinates Suleimani giving Iran the sympathy of the world and the US looking like a Mafia state preventing any reasonable casus belli being created by USA - my 2 pence
I don't think we need to speculate about whether Biden or Clinton would have backed out at the 11th hour -- they wouldn't have gotten to the 11th hour in the first place. Both ran as "Obama Part III," and Obama's approach to Iran involved substantive diplomacy. It still wasn't good for all sorts of reasons, but it wasn't escalation, either.
Well rather there was no 12th hour. Yes if Biden had committed to war he wouldn't bottle it at the 12th hour but neither would he have led the US up the garden path of strategic blunder after strategic blunder to a dead end
12th hour would've been end of US Empire overnight had they actually gone to war with Iran and if they can't win a war in Iraq which is half the size of Iran with less mountainous terrain and with Iraq a divided society on ethnic lines compared to Iran an ancient civilisation with deep nationalist roots
Let's recap what Trump did
Pulled out the Iran deal while the Europeans stayed in it and tried to salvage it - Iran looks good in the eyes of the world. US looks deranged
Europeans realising they basically can't salvage it because of the US swift system
Iran attacks Saudi oil pumps as a show of strength but is a limited strike mainly meant to show that Iran can really fuck up SA if things start to go south
Sulemani killed
Iran retaliates by launching missiles at a US base in Iraq. Originally no casualties or injuries and over the months US is forced to admit a contractor was killed and 100 soldiers suffered brain injury and zero retaliation by US meanwhile Iran steps up support for the Houthis in Yemen
Iran starts refining uranium again with Irans head of atomic energy saying
We should also thank the enemy who gave us this opportunity to demonstrate the strength of the Islamic Republic, especially in the nuclear industry - Ali Akbar Salehi
Who has been strengthened and weakened by US policy under Trump?
These are all lucky, unintended consequences. Trump basically played Russian roulette with Iran and quit after pulling the trigger once or twice. Sure, things are arguably better off now, but all of that only happened because there was a major risk of what would have been a genocidal war. It's like looking at the Cuban Missile Crisis and focusing on whatever improvements came after it instead of seeing it as a near-miss that must be avoided at all costs. A policy that risks slaughtering millions of Iranians is a shit policy, full stop.
We shouldn't give Trump any credit for manufacturing such an enormous risk out of nothing, and we definitely shouldn't give him any credit for how other countries have responded -- he has no control over those responses, and he certainly didn't intend them. It was blind luck, the price for it was a near-miss, and the thing about near-misses is they're not always misses.
These are all lucky, unintended consequences. Trump basically played Russian roulette with Iran and quit after pulling the trigger once or twice. Sure, things are arguably better off now, but all of that only happened because there was a major risk of what would have been a genocidal war. It’s like looking at the Cuban Missile Crisis and focusing on whatever improvements came after it instead of seeing it as a near-miss that must be avoided at all costs. A policy that risks slaughtering millions of Iranians is a shit policy, full stop.
We see things differently then comrade and will have to agree to disagree. My 2 pence is I consider Kruschev a coward for blinking not once, not twice but three times during that period and don't particularly think there should've been something for the Soviets to fear with stationing missiles in Cuba. Once the crisis was in full swing Kruschev should've stared the imperialists down to the last.
Kruschev should've stared them down how Stalin would have (and did do during the Korean war by claiming he had nukes when he had none) and gone the full way instead of pissing his pants like he did during that period and cravenly giving into the imperialists. The entire history of the 20th century would've been different - the Vietnam war probably avoided had missiles been stationed in Cuba and Cuba not under a 6 decade long embargo.
Compare Kruschevs cowardly attitude of avoiding confrontation at all costs versus Che Guevaras stance of "we'll fight with what we've got"
the Russians were so thoroughly stood down, and we knew it. They didn’t make any move. They did not increase their alert; they did not increase any flights, or their air defence posture. They didn’t do a thing, they froze in place.”
Khrushchev’s response, broadcast on Radio Moscow on 28 October, was craven in the extreme, stating that “the Soviet government, in addition to previously issued instructions on the cessation of further work at the building sites for the weapons, has issued a new order on the dismantling of the weapons which you describe as ‘offensive’ and their crating and return to the Soviet Union”.
It is possible that part of Khrushchev’s motivation for embarking so light-mindedly on so serious a course of action was to give the lie to Chinese criticisms of revisionist passivity in the face of imperialist aggression – notably the refusal to assist China in developing her nuclear capability. In point of fact, however, the humiliation and dangers to which this zigzagging revisionist leadership exposed the socialist camp only served to confirm the Chinese comrades’ worst fears.
The October Crisis happened at a moment when fraternal relations between China and the Soviet Union were reaching breaking point, and Mao’s Marxist Leninist characterisation of Khrushchev’s handling of the crisis as moving “from adventurism to capitulationism” really hits the nail on the head.The criticism is not that one should never retreat – Lenin’s insistence on signing the very painful Brest-Litovsk Treaty with German imperialism wascorrect, and Trotsky’s preferred position of “neither peace nor war” was a disaster. The criticism is that, once so serious an undertaking as confronting US imperialism with nukes 90 miles from Miami was embarked upon, it needed to be followed through to its necessary consequences. Contrary to the view that Khrushchev’s retreat was a statesmanlike tactic which enabled Kennedy to pull back from the brink, the reality is that the combination of light-mindedness and cowardice, of adventurism and capitulationism, actually emboldened US imperialism, making the world a more, not less dangerous place. We should ask ourselves: if Kennedy had met a sterner rebuff from Moscow over Cuba, would he have been so ready to launch the genocidal war in Indochina which cost so many Vietnamese lives?
We shouldn’t give Trump any credit for manufacturing such an enormous risk out of nothing, and we definitely shouldn’t give him any credit for how other countries have responded – he has no control over those responses, and he certainly didn’t intend them. It was blind luck, the price for it was a near-miss, and the thing about near-misses is they’re not always misses.
There's nothing blind luck about it. Either he was foolish enough to make a decision to go to war with Iran (a mistake Biden would never have made) in which case the Empire collapses almost immediately given the numerous war games that show US getting it's ass handed to it or he strengthened Irans position and inadvertently China and Russias too
Though it took two years to plan and was scheduled to take place over three weeks, it only took ten minutes for it to end. Within those ten minutes, the backbone of the U.S. forces had been broken, and the Iran-like country emerged victorious.
This is an interesting discussion, and you are (as always) very well informed, so I'd like to keep exploring this.
There’s nothing blind luck about it. Either he was foolish enough to make a decision to go to war with Iran
I don't view brinksmanship as a game where one party can unilaterally decide to stop playing at any time. There are all sorts of human mistakes, equipment failures, or accidents that can cause the situation to spiral out of control even when neither side intends to escalate. In a normal situation, it's easier to navigate crises like the 1983 nuclear false alarm incident, or the 1988 shoot down of Iran Air 655, or a submarine sinking. How would those crises have turned out if they had occurred in a situation like our aggression against Iran? Maybe they still turn out alright, but maybe we go to war instead. When you're on the brink of a conflict even a little nudge can push you over, and that nudge can come from anywhere. Notably (as was possibly the case in the Iran Air 655 shoot down), that nudge can come from some overly-aggressive commander on the ground. How many of those has the U.S. military churned out?
The Russian roulette analogy wasn't adequate. A better analogy is lining two armies up across a field from each other, having them load their guns and point them at each other, and then waiting to see who blinks. At that point whoever is in nominal control of each side is not in full control, even of their own side. Maybe someone gets jittery and pulls a trigger. Maybe you get an accidental discharge. Maybe someone who's really spoiling for a fight pulls a trigger intentionally. In any of those situations a battle would break out and there would be a lot of killing before anyone could stop it.
in which case the Empire collapses almost immediately given the numerous war games that show US getting it’s ass handed to it
The U.S. empire didn't collapse after losses in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. I don't see why it would collapse with a loss in Iran, much less collapse immediately. War with Iran would really be uncharted territory -- as you point out, it would be the largest, most advanced country we've fought since WWII -- so I don't think we can draw any neat conclusions from it.
Three points on that reading of the Cuban Missile Crisis, although it's not the main topic here:
Characterizing it as capitulation on the part of the Soviets omits the fact that the U.S. agreed to remove first-strike nukes from Turkey in exchange for the USSR removing its missiles from Cuba. That article mentions this but (without support) claims the U.S. planned to retire its Turkey nukes soon anyways; without some evidence of this, one could easily read that claim from the U.S. as ass covering.
Primarily blaming Kennedy for Vietnam runs counter to most assessments of the war. It was Johnson who really escalated the fighting, and there's a credible argument that Kennedy planned to withdraw after the 1964 election. Certainly Kennedy had plenty of responsibility for the war, but the phrasing of that part makes it read more like a narrative constructed in hindsight than a logical progression of events as they unfolded.
I'm also reminded of Parenti's "anything the Soviets did would be construed against them" point. Sure, maybe further brinksmanship in Cuba wouldn't have led to nuclear war, and would have caused the genocidal anti-communists in the U.S. to back down. But it also could have been used by that crowd as evidence of the imminence of the communist threat, and as a sign that even more aggressive opposition was needed.
You know what? I'll defend it. I voted for Biden as harm reduction. Biden is a fucking terrible human being, and not much better than Trump. He is still less worse than Trump. The problem is that people think voting is the only type of praxis you can do and this thus led a months-long idiotic debate on this site that included the dumbest take: "Trump is better". He's not. He is worse. I view voting as a way to choose my opposition. I would rather fight against Biden than Trump. Third party candidates were never going to win, be honest.
For people who think that voting doesn't do a lot, you complain an awful lot about it. Before we can vote for a vanguard party, we need to have one. We need to focus on getting organized. We all knew Biden was never going to help us. Electoralism is a tiny sideshow of lesser-evilism. Chapo dumbly thought that Bernie would be the answer and burned themselves out on it. Don't burn yourself out. Organize!
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:sicko-spin:
Biden and trump are both fascists.
I do not regret my vote for Biden in the general. Let the contradictions heighten!
You should for tanking Hillary's 2020 election chances because of your deep and uncontrollable misogyny.
You should be fucking ashamed of yourself for once again siding with white males when a perfectly acceptable female candidate could have won if you just voted for her.
Utterly disgraceful and disgusting behavior from a so called "leftist"
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I’ll argue that Trump would have heightened the contradictions more.
But maybe it is a flagrant disregard for the functions of govt and the power it holds vs someone who takes it seriously and cares about the “image” of the government.
Biden wasn't the harm reduction candidate though. Clinton wasn't in 2016 and Biden wasn't in 2020.
Trump was busy destroying USAs image on the global stage.
When the US was fully geared up to destroy Venezuela Trump bottled it and called it off saying he didn't want to be known as "the body bag president" according to John Bolton who after seeing that campaigned for the Dems.
Trump encouraged the amateur security group that ended up trying to coup Maduro in Venezuela and they ended up shot by fishermen when they arrived or paraded in front of the worlds press as USA aggression on Venezuela. Trump was busy destroying Nato and pulling the USA into an unwinnable conflict with China. He also tried to withdraw troops from Syria and had to have his team lie to his face about how many troops were there. Pulled out of TTIP (anti worker legislation) which allowed China to sign RCEP and start pushing US out of Asia.
Trump then discredited USA democracy in front of the entire world on 6th Jan by encouraging rightists to coup the government. If Trump had been in office for 4 years Nato would be dead - an organisation that funded far right fascist paramilitaries all over Europe to prevent them going socialist
Trump was the harm reduction candidate on incompetence grounds alone.
Biden promised to rebuild the "American Nation" in which he means to unite America via a return to neoconservative war mongering and the scraps at the proletariat will be taken from the ruination of peoples in the global south. And indeed Biden re-invaded Syria on his first day as president
You can be a national chauvinist if you like and say "Biden was the harm reduction candidate for me and people near me."
Fair enough I don't disagree - If you truly were concerned with harm reduction you'd have put a tickbox next to Trump to watch him completely ruin Nato and the Atlantic Alliance and bumble through every coup attempt the US would like to perpetrate
But he wasn't in the grand scheme in the fight against imperialism and he wasn't for the rest of the 7.3 billion people on the planet
Good post, I've always thought that Trump has been worse for America but far better for the rest of the world.
"Trump was actually better for the rest of the world" is consistently the worst take on here. It's also a take that's hard to find outside of the U.S.
You're talking about Iran here, and you're omitting that Trump took us from a significant diplomatic agreement with Iran to coming within hours of war. You're also omitting the many escalations he was personally responsible for, most notably the Soleimani assassination. Beyond Iran, drone strikes killed three times as many civilians under Trump.
Besides, the intelligence community had already figured out a way to work around Trump: lie to him. They had been withholding intelligence from him for years because he was so bad at keeping his mouth shut, and this blossomed to lying about troop numbers in Syria along with who knows what else. Accounting for institutional power like this shows how absurd stuff like "Donald Trump would have been the end of NATO" really is.
The research in the article includes a majority(only 24 countries, skips the entire third world because who cares) of western first world countries.
Clearly capitalist nations would prefer Biden because Trump embarrasses and jeopardizes the legitimacy of the "free" "democratic" world led by America. Trump simply exposed the ugly side of American politics to people worldwide who had no clue the white savior was actually clueless and stupid most of the time not to mention racist and incompetent.
Biden would help transform that image and with it the belief that we(westerners) live in a just world. You can easily find polls about what Europeans and other people think of actual living conditions in the US like lack of healthcare, education, poverty levels etc.
Nobody in the first world is ready and/or willing to admit the US is their enemy. Trump's racist isolationist USA makes that obvious. Any other "civil" president makes it seem like it is back to good old USA freedom police yadayada.
Peru, Mexico, and Malyasia are in that survey, and they were all strongly against Trump. There are shortcomings to the survey, but it's ridiculous to claim to speak for countries outside the imperial core while (1) not even looking for evidence of what they think, and (2) ignoring what evidence we have.
No im talking about Venezuela
Bolton mentions it in his book - they had geared up for Venezuela invasion and Trump bottled it with the phrase i said.
You should go watch The Munich Conference and see what the European Atlanticists (read pro american neocon war criminals) think
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_rto1BZwAk
Brinksmanship is a terrible policy -- especially when the president is being kept at least partially in the dark. If you push right up to the edge often enough you're not always going to be able to pull back in time. So Trump gets zero credit for playing a terrible game and getting lucky enough that the situation didn't unexpectedly escalate beyond his control.
Biden can be awful without Trump even kinda-sorta good in some areas.
And the body bag quote was about Iran:
Trump pulled back from one full-scale attack after escalating us to the point where that attack was imminent. There was no comparable full-scale attack on Venezuela planned, and Trump didn't pull us back from one.
Ah my bad still I don't think Biden or Clinton would've bottled it on Iran like Trump did.
Instead Trump assassinates Suleimani giving Iran the sympathy of the world and the US looking like a Mafia state preventing any reasonable casus belli being created by USA - my 2 pence
I don't think we need to speculate about whether Biden or Clinton would have backed out at the 11th hour -- they wouldn't have gotten to the 11th hour in the first place. Both ran as "Obama Part III," and Obama's approach to Iran involved substantive diplomacy. It still wasn't good for all sorts of reasons, but it wasn't escalation, either.
Well rather there was no 12th hour. Yes if Biden had committed to war he wouldn't bottle it at the 12th hour but neither would he have led the US up the garden path of strategic blunder after strategic blunder to a dead end
12th hour would've been end of US Empire overnight had they actually gone to war with Iran and if they can't win a war in Iraq which is half the size of Iran with less mountainous terrain and with Iraq a divided society on ethnic lines compared to Iran an ancient civilisation with deep nationalist roots
Let's recap what Trump did
Pulled out the Iran deal while the Europeans stayed in it and tried to salvage it - Iran looks good in the eyes of the world. US looks deranged
Europeans realising they basically can't salvage it because of the US swift system
Europeans start building an alternative to Swift system - destroying a huge component of US hegemony and grip over Europe
Iran attacks Saudi oil pumps as a show of strength but is a limited strike mainly meant to show that Iran can really fuck up SA if things start to go south
Sulemani killed
Iran retaliates by launching missiles at a US base in Iraq. Originally no casualties or injuries and over the months US is forced to admit a contractor was killed and 100 soldiers suffered brain injury and zero retaliation by US meanwhile Iran steps up support for the Houthis in Yemen
Iran starts refining uranium again with Irans head of atomic energy saying
Who has been strengthened and weakened by US policy under Trump?
Thanks to Trump and his cabinet Iran is now doing military exercises with China and Russia - China and Russia themselves pushed together by US
These are all lucky, unintended consequences. Trump basically played Russian roulette with Iran and quit after pulling the trigger once or twice. Sure, things are arguably better off now, but all of that only happened because there was a major risk of what would have been a genocidal war. It's like looking at the Cuban Missile Crisis and focusing on whatever improvements came after it instead of seeing it as a near-miss that must be avoided at all costs. A policy that risks slaughtering millions of Iranians is a shit policy, full stop.
We shouldn't give Trump any credit for manufacturing such an enormous risk out of nothing, and we definitely shouldn't give him any credit for how other countries have responded -- he has no control over those responses, and he certainly didn't intend them. It was blind luck, the price for it was a near-miss, and the thing about near-misses is they're not always misses.
We see things differently then comrade and will have to agree to disagree. My 2 pence is I consider Kruschev a coward for blinking not once, not twice but three times during that period and don't particularly think there should've been something for the Soviets to fear with stationing missiles in Cuba. Once the crisis was in full swing Kruschev should've stared the imperialists down to the last.
Kruschev should've stared them down how Stalin would have (and did do during the Korean war by claiming he had nukes when he had none) and gone the full way instead of pissing his pants like he did during that period and cravenly giving into the imperialists. The entire history of the 20th century would've been different - the Vietnam war probably avoided had missiles been stationed in Cuba and Cuba not under a 6 decade long embargo.
Compare Kruschevs cowardly attitude of avoiding confrontation at all costs versus Che Guevaras stance of "we'll fight with what we've got"
http://www.lalkar.org/article/165/the-october-crisis-remembered
There's nothing blind luck about it. Either he was foolish enough to make a decision to go to war with Iran (a mistake Biden would never have made) in which case the Empire collapses almost immediately given the numerous war games that show US getting it's ass handed to it or he strengthened Irans position and inadvertently China and Russias too
This is an interesting discussion, and you are (as always) very well informed, so I'd like to keep exploring this.
I don't view brinksmanship as a game where one party can unilaterally decide to stop playing at any time. There are all sorts of human mistakes, equipment failures, or accidents that can cause the situation to spiral out of control even when neither side intends to escalate. In a normal situation, it's easier to navigate crises like the 1983 nuclear false alarm incident, or the 1988 shoot down of Iran Air 655, or a submarine sinking. How would those crises have turned out if they had occurred in a situation like our aggression against Iran? Maybe they still turn out alright, but maybe we go to war instead. When you're on the brink of a conflict even a little nudge can push you over, and that nudge can come from anywhere. Notably (as was possibly the case in the Iran Air 655 shoot down), that nudge can come from some overly-aggressive commander on the ground. How many of those has the U.S. military churned out?
The Russian roulette analogy wasn't adequate. A better analogy is lining two armies up across a field from each other, having them load their guns and point them at each other, and then waiting to see who blinks. At that point whoever is in nominal control of each side is not in full control, even of their own side. Maybe someone gets jittery and pulls a trigger. Maybe you get an accidental discharge. Maybe someone who's really spoiling for a fight pulls a trigger intentionally. In any of those situations a battle would break out and there would be a lot of killing before anyone could stop it.
The U.S. empire didn't collapse after losses in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. I don't see why it would collapse with a loss in Iran, much less collapse immediately. War with Iran would really be uncharted territory -- as you point out, it would be the largest, most advanced country we've fought since WWII -- so I don't think we can draw any neat conclusions from it.
Three points on that reading of the Cuban Missile Crisis, although it's not the main topic here:
great post but when I saved it for dunking liberals I changed this to "4 more years" since I think that's what you meant?
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:jesus-christ:
Pathetic