So, I mean, I guess a useful point of comparison here, if you want to talk about how kind of chaotic and disjointed this is, both at the level of execution and at the level of narrative, which is, I guess, what we were discussing, an interesting point of comparison and an obvious one really is the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where if you compare that to this, you have, what, a year, 18 months of kind of preliminary work being done by Bush officials to lay the groundwork for war, to at least officially try to go through international bodies like the United Nations. I mean, the administration largely fails in that. You know, many countries, many U.S. allies, including Canada,

stay out of that war entirely. The Security Council does not end up offering authorization for the

action. But nonetheless, they're doing a lot of work on other fronts too, right? They have,

you know, this whole narrative about weapons of mass destruction, and then later when that fails,

they turn to this kind of

nation building and democracy promotion. They find a new pretext there. And, you know, I'm very

much not doing sort of the lib thing of being like, oh, I miss George Bush. Remember when America

executed its wars competently? Because, I mean, the Iraq war was not, you know, even if you were

sympathetic to it, which even as a teenager, I certainly wasn't, not even for a second, but nothing about that war was competent.

Nonetheless, there was, if you want a unity of purpose, a unity of conviction, and kind of a singular narrative in terms of what the justification was, what the objectives were, and what the raison d'etre was.

And we're just not seeing that at all here.

Instead, what you have is the, I don't know, U.S. imperial equivalent of the movie Eddington,

where the thing that was going to happen, in the case of Eddington, it's the building the data center.

And in the case of this, it's a U.S.-Israeli attempt to destabilize the Iranian state.

But, you know, the thing that's going to happen is going to happen. And what everyone else gets to do is superimpose some narrative on it, some reason it's happening, some explanation or other.

And that's true, especially of the people who are actually waging the war

and carrying it out and who are nominally responsible for it. If you were to ask Pete Hegseth or

Trump or Marker Rubio or anyone, why is this happening? You would get a different answer

depending on, you know, the last person they talked to or what their priors were.

You know, I'm sure Rubio will give you the sort of cookie cutter neocon explanation.

If you ask J.D. Vance, he would twist himself into pretzels to explain how this is actually

not the thing that he has repeatedly said he was against and would prevent from happening.

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