The surprise to me is the massive amount of chicken shittery we're seeing from leader after leader, in the DoD, in State, in the intelligence apparatus, in who knows how many other places, as they won't stand up and say, emphatically and in unison, that this is a bad idea.

In 2007 I was in staff college at Leavenworth. Most Majors go there for a year, and we have socratic discussions in small groups of 15 we spend the year with. One of my brethren was a real hawk; he was ready to expand hostilities into Iran and made that clear during one particular wargaming exercise.

I said something to the effect of "oh, you mean the country 4x the size of Iraq, with more than twice the population, a much more entrenched and homogenous Shia dominated leadership cohort in an 11 out of 12 Shia country, with a lot more military hardware than Iraq that they're a lot more adept at using?"

Iraq was biting us in the ass at the time, and dude sort of slowed down and pondered as the empirical reality of this hit some.

But nobody is doing this with this inept clown of a POTUS.