You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
Matthew, Chapter 24.
You have to make sure you know why you are going to war and then use decisive force to end it as soon as possible.
Colin Powell,
March 3, 2026
United States and Israel v. Iran
The war continues on, obviously, with the Administration struggling to explain what its about, why now, and why it can omit Congress from its constitutional duty.
It's expanded into a regional war, so far all aircraft and missiles. Included in the exchanges are those between Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon.
Afghanistan v. Pakistan
Hardly noticed in all the general war exploding in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan are fighting.
It's become perfunctory to note that the Iranian government is horrible, which it is. It murders and rapes its own citizens in the name of an extreme variant of Shi'a Islam. But, there are a lot of horrible governments in the world. North Korea and Russia's are two such examples, Afghanistan's is another, and Trump of course cut a deal with them allowing them to return to power.
The Iranians were going to have a nuclear weapon, it has been claimed, soon, with soon being a bit of a moving target. A nuclear armed Iran would be frightening and that's the best argument for this offensive war, which would make it a preemptive defensive war. Even that argument, however, seems very poorly developed.
Marco Rubio gave the justification that, if another nation (Israel) attacked Iran, they'd attack us back, and that was an imminent threat. He claimed Iran was going to be attacked.
That basically would amount to handing the power to declare war for the United States over to Israel.
It just seems that, in reality, an aged demented Trump looking for some sort of legacy was talked into it by the Neoconservatives and Apocalyptic Evangelist in his circle of influencers, with perhaps, probably, Israel itself playing a role in that. Of all those goals, the Neocon one would be the least disturbing, which is not to say that it would not be disturbing.
One disturbing thing about that is that NPR, in its Politics podcast, ventured the opinion, not put this way, that Trump is basically drunk on power and will keep toppling governments as long as he's successful in doing so. If that's the case, we can predict that Cuba will be next as its a pet project of Marco Rubio.
The US has lost some aircraft to friendly fire, which in the age of cell phone video, makes for interesting video.
Kuwaiti speaks to shot down U.S. pilot.
An interesting thing on this video, other than its a female pilot (she was lucky, as she nearly went down in the sea) is that the video shows the airplane to be an F-15, which means the Air Force, and not just the Navy, is flying some of these missions.
The U.S. death toll is up to five.
Cont:
Reports have revealed that at more than 30 military installations, U.S. commanders told troops the war on Iran is a Christian war in support of its being launched. One NCO reported that their commander told them today that the U.S. war is to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ.
I know that this was going to occur, and at least one Evangelical pastor in the U.S. has said essentially the same thing. This, I'd note, how Mike Huckabee sees the world.
So now we're at least partially in an American Evangelical Christian holy war against Shia Islam. It'll be a shock to Evangelicals, but they're a tiny percentage of the globe's Christians, and the percentage of them that hold such Millennialist views is even smaller. This is going to hurt us all, however.
It's also being reported that J.D. Vance encouraged Trump to go "all in", for lack of a better word. I'm not sure of his thinking, but he might be approaching this with a Clausewitzian view of how to wage the war, although that will require ground troops in the end. From a military prospective, that argument has merit to it. What it lacks here is legality.
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