1/n #Foreign and #Domestic #Emergencies Dept: The analyst hat poses difficulties atm because there are metrics that made sense wrt how things will read post facto and for the most part ratonales will be sane.We don't want an #Iran with nuclear weapons. We don't want a stockpile of weaponry there suited for waging large scale regional war disruptive to supply chains. These are issues predating current domestic politics. Current actions will also be advantageous for #Ukraine in several ways...
2/n...the problems begin with the other half of analyses that certain people find need to obstruct or downplay. The assassination of a religious leader and a political leader cannot be logically separated when they happen to be the same person. This renders all notions of sparking internal revolution delusional. You've turned those people, permanently.
The jinn and the genies are all out of the bottle now, and they are going to play. The longer things go the more it looks like war for and...
3/n ...by vanity and venality as primary motives. This is not a situation we want to be in.
4/n Standard strategic / transactional type analyses see Iran retaliatory strikes hitting multiple widely separated targets with ballistic missiles and drones. While this is not a surprise it reveals a prepared escalatory curve on an already observed interval of weeks to months , not days.
That window extends to years with now highly probable ISIS like reintegrations across the entire region.
There are enough drones and ballistic missiles in the region to imperil shipping for extended periods-
5/n...all of this was well known prior to the decision to initiate major escalation.
Regional factions are not armed the way they were previously.Weapons production reflects the same shifts seen elsewhere so whatever is next is unlikely to hew to what came before.
The current administrations attacks on our internal agencies and institutions have significantly impacted the skilled and senior pool of expertise available for coherent internal feedback and decision making, replacing them with...
6/n...unskilled and in some cases no skilled authoritarian-submissiveness chains. The more unflattering term for this is cronyism.
Combined with a fully dysfunctional #Congress and #SCOTUS problems related to #NatSec and internal degradation of leadership standards leaves us vulnerable to further deliberate destabilization of constitutional guardrails and rule of law.
Malefactors are both within and without.
Arrogance is typically on display and proudly worn