Above everything else, people are human. As people we are bound to make mistakes as much as we are able to be successful in any of our endeavors. We tend not to dwell on the blunders we make and depending on the seriousness, usually mentally write it off to ourselves a kind of teachable moment. The problem is, with most of us, we are incapable of learning from history, even our personal history, and continue to make the same mistakes again and again. They may be clothed to look like something new, but mostly not.

When president Trump was first elected in 2016, one promise he made that probably helped put him over the top was thast there would be no more generational foreign entanglements like we’d had with Afghanistan and Iraq. During that term, he kept that promise and even drew down our military from both of those countries with the goal of winding down both to zero, or have only a minimal presence in each country. Although he did authorize operations against ISIS, he did it with a objective in mind: destroy ISIS. He accomplished this in short order. Other than small interventions to prevent larger conflicts, he kept his word to the American people.

Fast forward four years, bypassing the utter disaster that was the Joe Biden presidency. In 2024, as he said in 2016, and his failed 2020 campaign, he promised no more involvement in foreign wars and was especially (and rightfully!) critical of Biden’s exit from Afghanistan giving it back to the same people we spent 20 years there fighting.And he didn’t just leave, he left the Taliban billions in military arms and equipment. Yes, best estimates were around 65 billion dollars of sophisticated military hardware. But this, president Trumps second term, is turning out to be exactly what he campaigned against and it is driving his supporters apart.

Currently, the administrations projection is an all-out air destruction of Iran will take at most 5 weeks and the way it has been proceeding, that’s probably a decent projection. It was also expected that Iran would of course, retaliate as they were able. In this case, utilizing drones and medium to long range missiles. A major mission objective is to knock out Iran’s missiles and drones and there has been some success there are well. But not before US troops were killed in a drone attack in Kuwait.Even the president is now saying that there. may be more US losses before all is said and done. This is without a single boot on the ground. Does the US government really believe they can tame Iran with just air superiority?

I heard someone on television, a refugee from Iran as a child, estimate the number of Iranians that support the regime out of 93-94 million total. She thought the number would be 10%. That’s maybe 9.4 million people. How many of those are men (women?) of fighting age (16=40)? Now add in that it’s the current, quickly fading regime, that has all the guns and now we have a situation when their supporters are handed a rifle, a civil war entails. For years. The US will have to supply the anti-regime weapons to put down the insurgent regime supporters. When was the last time we did that and what happened? Oh yes! When the Russians invaded Afghanistan. And eventually, those weapons were turned against us.

For some reason this administration and it’s talking head propagandists on television, believe that once the current regime is gone, a new government, interim, but supported by the people, will be installed and then in a year or two, after a new constitution is ratified, elections will be held and everything will be apple blossoms. The American people have experienced different outcomes. Although it’s too late now to argue against something that is currently occurring, I think it’s important to have our voices known that this is not something that we voted in favor of in 2024 and in fact, was not ever even contemplated in any campaign speech. Of course if we were really under threat, I would expect exactly what we are seeing.. In fact, I was okay with the “obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear facilities last year. That was the threat which we were told is gone. Now we’ve been told that we never did completely destroy Iran’s ability to become a nuclear power.

So, which is it? It looks to a lot of us this is all about Israel hegemony in the region. With Iran gone, who’s the power in the middle east?