Iran Situation

[Dill]

(01-08-2020, 07:15 PM)jj22 Wrote: Guys. The Commander in Chief of the United States must have credibility. All politics aside.

Now we all (even Trump supporters I now see) know Trump doesn't, so his threat means nothing to them as it didn't with IRAN. But that is nothing to celebrate. We should all be outraged that Iran threatened us not to retaliate and we stood down.

They should have been the ones to stand down after our threat. That's American military might. Not the other way around. This is the twilight zone we are living. We all knew it was the twilight zone under this Presidency but this takes the cake as it's our military reputation that takes the hit for his ineptness.

The line has to be drawn somewhere peoples. Our Military should be that line.

No Commander in Chief of the United States has ever stood down at the order/threat of a foreign enemy after they've retaliated against an attack of their own ignoring our threat/order. Don't just disagree. Name one if you can. It's a lost unlike anything seen since Vietnam.

I often agree with you JJ, but not on this point. 

I mean, I agree that the US must have credibility, and that generally means following through with threats. But it also means that the "threats" have to be considered, thought through, clearly in the national interest, not random impulse, or worse.

If an ill-prepared and temperamentally unfit US president makes childish threats with little understanding of the consequences, then US credibility actually suffers more if he follows through than if he does not. The choice he thereby creates is between 1) another endless war in which thousands of Americans and Iranians die, or 2) a little backdown humiliation, not even registered by most Americans who still see it as a big "win" in a macho standoff.   Thousands of families are spared the death of a loved one so that the US can "save face."  

This brings us back to the original problem--it is not that the US is not following through with threats, but that the US president is issuing threats whose consequences he does not himself grasp and which bring us to the brink of war. In this case, we should be thankful if voters, Congress and diplomatic pressure from our allies can pressure that leader NOT to follow through.