I have to agree more with Hanania and HC68 on this, as one of those remnant Neocons. I’d also note that as dubious and flagged on as Iraq was, it was a victory. The current government is at least officially a constitutional, democratic republic and loose ally of ours, even if previously under heavy Iranian influence. And we have an enlarged, secured Kurdistan in the North that is a strong ally. Iraq was much closer to an unambiguous victory than pop culture remembers.

If the President can order an attack like this then what else can the President order? We have wrestled with this question before. Korea and Vietnam. As Lab Rat reminds us we did not wrestle with this during the Obama administration.

— Rick67

Oh, it goes back much farther than that. The arguments about exactly what the President can unilaterally do militarily go back to the Washington Administration. Literally every Presidency since the first one has had this issue come up.

In practice, it is very difficult for Congress to stop the executive from using the military. They can cut off funding, of course, which would stop any action in its tracks, but doing so with fighting underway is politically super-risky. Thay can impeach, but that takes supermajorities. They can do subtler things like refusing to confirm a President’s officer choices (all officer commissions require Congressional approval, which is usually a formality below flag/star rank, but does not by any means have to be), but that takes time to have an effect.

As a practical political matter, the restraining force on what a President can do militarily is public opinion. If the public turns decisively against it, it won’t usually continue for long.

Hanania notes the real problem of Iraq was stupid nation building. Not the neocon idea of coming in, stopping the dictator, and leaving some mess.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-right-way-to-do-regime-change

Boot out the current bad guys, support less bad or good guys in the upcoming civil war. Iranians as the boots on the ground, not Americans.

— Tom Grey

Unfortunately, that approach has failed more often than it has succeeded.

The reason we didn’t just remove Hussein and the Taliban and then immediately leave was that we had already tried that before.

We helped the Afghans drive the USSR out…and left. The Taliban filled the power vacuum, and the result was 911 and 3000 dead (and it was pure luck that 3000 wasn’t closer to 10,000). We had engaged in other interventions where we acted and left, and it rarely worked out well.

Where we succeeded (South Korea, West Germany, Japan, etc.) we always had a substantial presence of some sort after the fighting stopped.

Nation building is almost impossible, by its very nature.

State-building, on the other hand, is something the USA has considerable experience in successfully doing. You can’t export Western liberal democracy to a place with no underlying religious or social foundation for it. South Korea was a functional dictatorship before it was a democracy. Germany, OTOH, had that necessary foundation and West Germany mostly skipped the dictatorship.

Regime change? Even if the regime is the source of so much chaos and violence in the region and aorund the world? and is so violent and repressive toward its own citizens? Sigh. Have we not been down this road before?

Yep, and we’ll have to go down it again in the future, too, because sometimes all the alternatives are worse.

So we’d better start getting it right, since we’re going to have to do it either way.

But I predict Iran will still have some form of theocracy to deal with at the end of US and Israeli operations, unless part of our plan is to arm massively an opposition militia.

— Jim Melcher

Even then, it would probably tend to go that way.

One of the errors America made in both Afghanistan and Iraq was to try to export Western hypersecularism in the aftermath, and it’s just not compatible with the operating system of the Islamic world. I was afraid that would happen from the very beginning in both places, because the Western elites have trouble imagining anything else. The Elite Right wants to export Ayn Rand, the Elite Left wants to export the freaky socio-sexual agenda, both are pure-secular to a tremendous degree. Neither is exportable except at the constant point of a gun.

For that matter, we’ve seen that pattern play out in the post-USSR Russia, in South Sudan, etc. Ever since the Cold War ended, the Western elites have been trying to implement two versions of a common vision of the world, a vision that Just Doesn’t Work.

No matter what comes to power in Iran, it’ll have to be at least Islam-compatible to function in that part of the world. But ‘compatible’ covers a lot of territory.

Time to permanently “retire” each one of these council members.

yes Neda Sultan’s murder by a Basij gets some accountability, on my old extant blog, I had a few posts about the Green Movement then, who was headed by some dubious players, who were part of the Pasdarans proxy war in Iran Mohahestimi pur (sic) and mir mussawi, who had been the Iranian ‘moderates’
that Reagan foolishly tried to engage, but Iran has often been a ‘mystery wrapped inside of an riddle, inside an enigma

*a quarter century before! only a few experts like the late Admiral Ace Lyons acknowledged the very hot wat, the Pasdaran had waged not only against us, but French and even Italian forces in the Levant,

https://xcancel.com/planefag/status/2027675360381239585

Chases Eagles on February 28, 2026 at 11:35 am said:
This is 47 years in the making and weeks in the preps. Dead ass useless congress had plenty of time to allow or disallow. They chose a pet show.

sdferr on February 28, 2026 at 2:46 pm said:
Zineb Riboua: “The Iran Question Is All About China — Why Operation Epic Fury Is the Opening Act of the Indo-Pacific Century”
Thanks for this article – very interesting. Plus it always seems to be disturbing to think of the CCP having the ability to achieve a strategy with a long term patience that we in the West sometimes seem to be unable to accomplish. Now we have several actions by Trump to set those chess moves back quite a bit.

Surely you know the rules by now: If the Democrats didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any at all.

I used to limit that to “Democrat leaders” but sadly we have learned that the brain-rot has gone a long way down over the last 10-20 years.
And I do say that with great sadness.