We’ve Won?

Then what are we still doing there?

Today’s first cartoon was inspired by an Associated Press story that said high gas prices had united Americans and pretty much everybody—Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, Liberals, Cats and Dogs—is upset about paying more for a gallon of gas.

So that’s what unites us?

Not outrage about military deaths or civilian deaths or grabbing people off the street and sending them to prison without a trial or killing people only suspected of drug running or shooting unarmed protesters or the President of the Fucking United States saying he’s not 100% sure he has to uphold the Constitution?

People (and I certainly include myself in this criticism) are willing to accept some horrible shit as long as the horrible shit is happening to someone else, but let gas prices go up by 87 cents a gallon and we’re ready to throw some tea in Boston Harbor.

And while I’m on my high horse or high on horse and either one sounds dangerous:

According to the occasionally reliable internet, studies covering 1700 to 1987 show approximately 50% of the deaths in wars were civilians, but that number jumps up in the 1990s in which 90% of the war deaths were civilians.

So if you think fighting a war is dangerous for soldiers, being a civilian in a war zone is no day at the beach either.

And that increase in civilian deaths is at least partially due to us buying the premise that we can just bomb the living shit out of our enemies and avoid sending in troops and if you’re currently thinking “sounds like a good plan” we usually have to send in troops anyway, because history shows us bombing campaigns tend not to work:

They failed in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

What bombing campaigns seem to be really good at is uniting the people getting bombed.

Bombing campaigns tend to foster resistance and rage and unite the people behind whatever inconvenient leader we’ve decided we need to get rid of and if you think about WW2 and the London Blitz, how many stories about the plucky British people refusing to knuckle under do we have to hear before we realize people from the “shithole” countries Donald Trump likes to insult might react the same way?

According to a story in the Kansas City Star, just 27% of Americans support the war with Iran (that number came from a Reuters poll) or maybe it’s actually 50% (that number came from a FOX News fantasy), but for comparison’s sake, the story said 97% of American supported retaliating after the attack on Pearl Harbor (no word on what the other 3% were smoking).

The point here—and I had one when I started this essay—is Americans will support a war if you give them a good reason for fighting one.

Which Donald Trump has failed to do.

Trump has offered a variety of reasons for starting the war with Iran and, according to the Associated Press, one of them was he “had a feeling” Iran was about to attack us first and unlike her less-perceptive boss, 28-year-old White House Spokesliar Karoline Leavitt realized just how bad that sounded and added Trump’s feeling was “based on fact” and then failed to provide any.

Not a huge Chuck Schumer fan, but he probably said the most true thing you’re going to hear this week when he described Trump’s thought process by saying:

“Again, he says whatever pops into his head no matter what the truth is.”

(I don’t know who’s advising Chuck, but those half-glasses are only a good look on librarians and every time I see him, I don’t think “leader,” I get the feeling he’s about to explain the Dewey Decimal System.)

Anyway…

Political cartoonists are always looking for a good metaphor to describe a situation and I came up with a carnival ride in which Trump refuses to tell us how much a ticket will cost or how long the ride will last and while I’m being critical, what the hell is wrong with us that we trust our lives to hastily-assembled carnival rides?

Having not much else to do while waiting for the next World Baseball Classic game to start, I googled that and the AI robot said carnival rides are “generally” safe, but being assembled and disassembled over and over can cause equipment failure, so they need to be inspected by the same local government in charge of filling our perpetually unfilled potholes and 60% of carnival ride accidents are cause by riders ignoring rules and restraints and I’m thinking:

“No shit, we’re the same dummies willing to climb on a ride that spins us upside down 70 feet in the air while the alcoholic who assembled it smokes a cigarette and decides when the rides over.”

Hmmmm…

I seem to be down on humanity today so take that into account when you read the rest of this. (You are going to read the rest of this, aren’t you?)

According to CNN, Donald Trump has had trouble explaining why we’re at war and how it will end and somehow simultaneously claimed that the war was almost over, but could get more intense and last longer than expected, which is not surprising coming from a guy who appears to have given more thought to what he wants from the McDonald’s menu than he did to starting this war.

If I recall correctly and I often don’t, in one of the 3,752 books Bob Woodward has written about politics, Bob made the point that in pretty much any White House meeting the president (and this includes all presidents) is the least-informed person in the room.

If you think about it—and I did—the president has been working on raising funds and getting elected, not studying economics, the environment or the history of warfare: that’s why he has advisors and a Cabinet.

But if the president appoints unqualified Cabinet members on the basis of their loyalty to him and not because they’re experts in the field, they might be swayed by some General Jack D. Ripper nutcase in the Pentagon who’s been working on the plans for invading Iran for the past few decades, because he sounds really confident and is going to make it seem easy-peasy.

If you’re now worried about how the war is being conducted, Trump assured us he’ll be consulting with these Three Stooges:

Trump also seems to have been caught flat-footed by the existence of the Strait of Hormuz (if you think of the Middle East’s oil supply as an intestinal system, the Strait is the colon) and how easily it’s been shut down (20% of the world’s oil goes through there) and Trump has now been reduced to begging other countries to get involved in protecting the Strait.

But never letting Reality interfere with a good rally line, Trump recently announced “We’ve won” and added somewhat incoherently: “We won the, in the first hour, it was over.”

If we’ve already won, what are we still doing there?

In other events Trump did not see coming:

We’ve had sanctions on Russia because we didn’t want them using oil profits to finance their war with Ukraine, but those sanctions have been eased because we need their oil, so now we’re helping Russia finance their war and if anyone in a cabinet meeting said, “Starting a war with Iran will get a lot of Ukrainians killed” we’ve yet to hear about it.

Today’s Lesson

There are almost always unintended consequences to pretty much anything you do, so don’t buy it when a contractor tells you how much it will cost to remodel your bathroom or a president when he tells you how long a war will last, and now Trump is saying the war will end when “I feel it in my bones” (and I really wish I was making that up, but I’m not—the bonehead actually said that) so knowing there will be unintended consequences, you don’t fight wars you don’t have to.

The conflict with Iran has been called a “war of choice” and I’m guessing whole bunch of Americans now wish they’d made a different choice in the 2024 election.

Hang in there; this is going to get worse before it gets better.

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