The madman doctrine
I have talked to an Iranian expat who lives in this country who lives here in the Washington DC area who hates the regime and has been looking for ways to to have them overthrown and from within for many many years. His family suffered and his friends suffered egregiously because of the government there. though he would love to see them gone. He is adamantly opposed to having his country destroyed by Israeli and American bombs. If they're going to change the government, they want to be able to do it from the inside on their time schedule in their way, not because it's forced on somebody else. And of course, they're not stupid. And they see this has nothing to do with freedom for the Iranian people. This has everything to do with taking the Iranian oil.
He's [Trump] in the eyes of all Iranians that I know, he's a psychopath and extremely evil. And that's one reason why Iran can't negotiate with such a person because he's unstable. He has already in the past torn up agreements. He negotiates and then he carries out, he negotiates with deceit, and then he launches blitz creek attacks. This is what he did twice already. So his signature means nothing to any Iranian and he's insulting Iranians and saying we'll send them back to the stone age. One of the interesting things is that no one in the Western media complains about these these threats to create the greatest holocaust in human history.
Did President Trump just threaten a nuclear strike on Tehran? [. . .] President Trump just a less just about an hour ago just posted. A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. That by itself is a cold shuttering start. No matter what he has in mind, that is I I'm just going to be honest here. I got to be got to be frank. We are unintimidated and uncompromised. That is Hitler kind of language.
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this moment we're at right here is the bitter fruit of the failure of our constitutional government, the Congress, the House and the Senate to abdicate its responsibilities. The constitutional is crystal clear. Article one of the constitution gives war making powers to the legislature. Period. The congress. That's it. The chief executive, the commander-in-chief. Article two can only use the militia, the armed forces after it's been authorized by Congress. Period.
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Now this could set up for a really really alarming situation to where maybe enough people recognize that he has gone crazy. If he tries to do this, I will just categorically say then he has gone crazy. He is insane and must be removed from power by legal means. If he does this, if this is anything more than just stupid rhetoric, then he will by definition have proven that he is insane. No rational human being on the planet would say that you can use nuclear weapons against a country because they won't give in to you.
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That's what he's doing right now. That's not rational. And if he launches this weapon here, the world the world that we have lived in our entire lives will be over in a flash. By the time that flash goes up and a nuke in a mushroom cloud goes up, nothing will ever go back the way it was before. I still can't predict even now what kind of consequences could follow, but they could be catastrophic and dire. We will create for ourselves overnight in an instant enemies that would never have been enemies before. I wager that people who are our friends and longtime allies now will turn against us out of fear that they could be next. Remember, we were already talking about taking Greenland from a NATO ally. They're not forgetting that. And then if they see this action here on top of what we did in Venezuela and on top of the threat that we're going to do the same thing to Cuba, people will say the United States has lost its mind. Not just the president. It's one thing if you have a guy who's lost his mind, but when you have an apparatus that's following in his footsteps and enabling it, then we're all guilty by extension and we'll be treated as such.
- www.commondreams.org - William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), who has taught at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and he taught History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.
- Books: Bill Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor
