US expected to send thousands more soldiers to Middle East, sources say

61 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by cdrnsf
(reuters.com)

19 Comments

lwansbrough

4 hours ago

It’s just embarrassing at this point. How long will the Americans put up with this humiliation ritual?

cdrnsf

4 hours ago

As long as a significant portion of the population continues voting for it.

coldtea

23 minutes ago

That's not why they got this.

In fact they precisely voted someone promising no more wars, no more foreign meddling, and so on.

And they'll get wars and the same shit after they vote the other way too. Just like they got wars under Obama.

No matter who they vote, the bastards always win.

lwansbrough

4 hours ago

Well let’s hope, as Bush once said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… can’t get fooled again.”

cdrnsf

4 hours ago

Hopefully. They've bene fooled into voting for him 3 times already.

throw310822

3 hours ago

The US have been fooled by Israel for the past... thirty, forty years at least? Look who Trump is sending around the world to negotiate on behalf of the US: two committed Zionists, personal friends of Netanyahu and past financers of the Israeli army. The other negotiators regard them as Israeli assets, plain and simple. While they pretend to "negotiate", Israel launches surprise attacks that have not been agreed with the US and that forces them to intervene.

xg15

2 hours ago

I read somewhere that Bush made this awkward figure of speech not because he didn't know the idiom, but because he realized too late that he'd be saying "shame on me" on air, which is apparently a phrase absolutely Verboten by political media advisors (because it could have been taken out of context and used by his adversaries). In a way that says a lot about the political culture that resulted in a figure like Trump, I think.

nslsm

an hour ago

It’s been going on for a very long time. Remember USS Liberty?

Terr_

2 hours ago

I think "humiliation ritual" is a hugely important concept to keep in mind these days: It has a lot of explanatory power for the stuff we're seeing, such as brown-nosing by Trump cabinet members which is almost beyond parody.

A cult will demand members do things to "fit in", especially things that have a cost ("prove your sincerity") and also things which alienate them from the non-group. The latter is a ratcheting trap, leading to: "We are your only home now, nobody else will have you."

cyanydeez

3 hours ago

If you take Russia as a boilerplate; never. Trump will "trickle down" the corruption to just enough people to keep everyone complacent and do as he wills.

justonceokay

3 hours ago

So many people make so much money from it. I don’t personally this time but I did last time working for tech. Maybe I will again next time. This is the third time America been “humiliated” in my life and my life is awesome and getting better.

/s

But that is the overall sentiment if I had to describe it without pretense

Sabinus

3 hours ago

Is it just me, or are we taking the beginning of Iraq War v 2 very calmly?

exabrial

4 hours ago

Wars are waged through inflation. Allowing the federal government to "print money", essentially write checks on a negative account balance, is funding these forever wars.

If you continue to support reckless taxation, this is what you will get.

commandlinefan

4 hours ago

IIRC, the US debt is at 39 trillion right now, with no plan to pay it back. Which is logical, because it's unpayable. There's no way in the world that will ever be paid back. I still haven't seen anybody properly analyze how high the debt can go before it actually can't go any higher, but we're going to find out.

triceratops

a few seconds ago

Private US wealth is in the range of 200-400 trillion. A blanket 1% annual wealth tax would wipe out the debt in 10-20 years.

75% of US debt is held domestically. So most of that money will go back into the country.

It's highly unlikely a lucrative revenue stream like this would ever go to paying off the debt. But theoretically the money exists.

Ancalagon

4 hours ago

Without any funny business (meaning no re-valuation of the debt, which I guess there are strategies for) and assuming an interest rate on the debt of between 3-5%, I figured between 10-20 years before the interest payments eat up most essential services.

pfannkuchen

4 hours ago

Monetize it or default are the only options I think. Monetizing affects everyone while default only (directly) affects bond holders. Monetizing is much easier to obfuscate though so that is probably what will happen.

nradov

3 hours ago

Perhaps, but the monetization would have to be pretty extreme. And that would send interest rates to the moon, making further borrowing difficult.

While these things are impossible to predict, my guess is that in a couple decades the government will do some sort of technical default. Force Treasury bond holders to exchange their current holdings at par for new bonds with longer maturities and artificially low interest rates. Politicians will be able to claim that no one has lost money since the nominal bond values will remain the same even though the market values will be much lower.

The other thing I expect to happen is that the government will force retirement accounts (both defined benefit pension plans and defined contribution 401k plans) to purchase Treasury bonds. Because of course they're so much "safer" for retirees than risky stocks.

jleyank

4 hours ago

the US has run deficits for years, so it's not reckless taxation in the form I think you mean. "Pay for its bills" would be a novel concept, involving undoing various "give money to rich people" tax cuts.

In the current environment, very unlikely.