Trump says he bombed Iran

[Astyanax]

I don't think Trump is some enigma that will be the sole source of decline in my nation. I think he's a symptom.

You are quite correct, sir. And not only of your nation; he is a symptom of the bankruptcy and imminent collapse of Western world dominion. I don’t use those words lightly; I was never an alarmist, nor a conspiracy theorist. 

And I am deeply, heartbrokenly sorry about this outcome. I am not a Westerner, but all my life I have lived in a world where the West and particularly the United States of America – for all their faults – were not only our best guarantors of global security and protectors of democratic and liberal rights, but also served as an economic mecca and cultural beacon for the world. Not quite the city on the hill you Americans like to tell yourselves you are, but worthy. We did not fear you nearly as much as we respected and admired you.

Now, all that is left is the fear.

The last of the civilizational assets enumerated above began eroding in the 1970s, when the establishment revanche against youth culture and the political changes it sought succeeded only too well, killing the counterculture (which was really just the latest evelopment of Western culture) stone dead. The decline in quality of Western art, music, film and architecture was the first sign of impending doom. Soon it was joined by the intellectual and moral collapse of the American and European intelligentsia – the embrace of Postmodernism, historical revisionism, the radicalisation of sexual politics and the rest of the late-twentieth-century idiot circus. Left and Right blamed each other for the results, but each was equally culpable – or perhaps not culpable at all, but mere cogs in the self-driving machine of history. 

American (and, therefore, inevitably, Western) support for democracy and human rights took a beating whenever a Republican administration took office in your country, but on the whole it held firm until the rise of the extreme right at the beginning of the present century. With the coalescence of MAGA behind Trump it began definitively to collapse.

Ten years later, the collapse of the USA itself is well advanced. It will not last centuries, as Rome’s did, though it will last awhile yet. It is happening in the way that one of Hemingway’s characters describes how bankruptcy overtook him: ‘gradually, then suddenly.’

February 28, 2026, marked not only the end of the MAGA era but also the end of US world hegemony. That is what brought me back to this benighted community for what, I suspect, will be the very last time. I see that some of our extreme-right friends here haven’t realised it yet and are still thrashing about. They will go quiet soon enough.

[IDELB2006]

I mean, it's possible in theory,

But i really don't think paying in Chinese Yuan will fly.

As to the Yuan becoming the new petrodollar.

It would require major trust in China's financial system and geopolitical shifts that i don't think currently exist.

Iraq began taking oil payments in euros, and the Chinese yuan prior to our 2003 excursion.

WMD's were the excuse back then also. At least we are predictable.

[bastion]

  It's not the United States job to take care of the world.
If other countries thought it was a threat, they could have taken care of it too, ya' know.
Not just wait for us to spend our money and blood on it.

That's because they're not a 'credible threat'.

There's no evidence Iran was near to making a bomb according to IAEA inspections and the US's own 2025 threat assesment reports -

We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear
weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so. 

https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents...Report.pdf -
Bibi has just been repeating the same 'six months/weeks away from a nuke' claims he's used for the last 30+ years that relies on the public/politicians having no idea how nuclear weapons are made to sound credible.

We're they an evil regime who would want to use WMDs if they had them? Absoluutely, but there's no evidence to back the current US-Israeli claim for war and both no longer cite regime change or plight of Iranians as a reason for the conflict.

In the UK it's illegal to change the basis for a war after entering a conflict and the current reasons for the war don't meet legal criteria and are changing every few hours so we can't enter it without a firm legal basis as we'd be comitting war crimes.

[Sky727]

The weapons being used by the USA, as usual, cost more than any rational person can justify. 

[andy06shake]

Does anybody remember these words of wisdom? 

[FlyersFan]

I said bunkum. Read the links and stop placing your own interpretation on the law.

I know you said bunkum.   That's YOUR interpretation.   Fact is, the military action is legal.

[FlyersFan]

I find the exercise of following your logic invigorating. It appears that, according to you, words trump actions. An act of war isn’t actually war until it’s been approved by Congress or something.

I'm saying that by legal definition, this action is not a war.   LEGAL DEFINITION.   Congress must approve it to declare it war.   It has not done that.

I have also said that we all know it's really war, just undeclared.      LEARN HOW TO READ.

You say these were not wars? Then, madam, they were massacres. Hang your head in shame, for you have made yourself an apologist for mass murder.

Oh the drama.   Again.  Learn how to read.    I'm stating what the law says.   By legal definition this is not a war until Congress declares it such.   I also said we all know that it's really war, just undeclared.

[andy06shake]

Again, I thought Trump took out 100% of their air force?

Can somebody please tell that to the attack drones they keep on launching at all angles.

[Sky727]

2 more bite the dust

[Vermilion]

Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war.

The chorus is loud and, in some respects, understandable. War is ugly, and this one has imposed real costs on millions of people across the Middle East, including the city I live in.

But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.

When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/...ere-is-why

Even aljazeera can see the reality now.