To be fair, if Trump was bombed tomorrow and a large portion of the chain of command was also wiped out, you’d have pretty rapid color revolution in America.

and then 1 second after the last bomb was bombed, millions will rush to the streets to celebrate and proudly proclaim, “yay, those were my people and my values, lets goo!” and topple the evil regime cuz its evil👌 the chosen puppet appears and says “now I’m in charge or the bombing continues! Also btw I gave away the oil already.” and everyone says “yeah ok that sounds fair to us”

It’s only slightly less stupid

Seems like there will be some regime changes happening as a result, except it’s gonna be US backed regimes being overthrown.

clearly top US analysts thought that too

Literally LotR at the end of the third movie with the orcs running around when Sauron is destroyed.

I resist to think that those in charge of these operations are really smoking what they sell, though. They hope to destabilize the region, mess with Asian countries’ projects of economic development and have another opportunity to sell weapons so stocks go up.

It’s like all the people on Fallout: New Vegas boards who are like “How come nothing happens aside from dialogue changes when you kill Caesar?”

I save the good headlines for the based instances :)

Realistically we should be skeptical of anything being published in Reuters, but there are explanations for how embarrassing gossip can leak to the press. Leaks can come from disgruntled employees who are trying to embarrass their superiors, competing factions within the state looking to weaken their rivals, and even the occasional attack of good conscience that government workers can sometimes suffer when the contradictions are high enough.

But, ultimately, we don’t really know what’s going on. Hope for the best, assume the worst, etc etc.

The way I look at it, what you have to generally be cognizant of is the spin western media puts into their coverage. It’s not that they outright lie and fabricate things, but rather the framing they use, the facts they omit, and so on. The problem with libs is that they don’t analyze what they read critically, and they’re missing the broader context for the events being covered, which leads them to buy into the narrative being sold.

We can read the same sources, but we are also able to spot the spin, and contextualize them using other sources, history, and our understanding of the material conditions.

Because bias has a “direction” of sort. American media won’t intentionally make a lie that makes the US looks bad because they are pro-US. As for lying to make enemies underestimate them, that’s just not how the US operate. They won’t try to make their enemy think they are weaker than they truly are because their strategy is precisely the opposite: the US spent a lot of resources on convincing the world that they are the most powerful with the deadliest weapons, that they can effectively wage war everywhere. They want their enemies to be intimidated into submission.

our opponents are fucking pakleds