the orange man is truly a fool. if you can't hear your adversary, when they know what a fool you are,  you haven't a chance; 

 

On April Fools’ Day, Donald Trump addressed the nation about the Iran War. It would have been too painful to listen to his adenoidal droning and borscht-belt insult comedian shtick, so I just read the transcript. He said nothing new. It was just a live version of his social media tweets: rambling, mendacious, self-contradictory, delusional, emotionally labile, and laced with insults and threats. I wish he was joking, but he probably wasn’t.

When it was all over, however, I was certain of one thing: Trump has learned nothing so far. So he’s going to send in ground troops.

Trump thinks he’s already won several times over because he doesn’t understand asymmetric warfare and consistently underestimates his enemies. He’s been fed a steady stream of videos of American and Israeli airstrikes on Iran, including strikes on civilian infrastructure, which constitute war crimes that he thinks he and his goons will never answer for.

He doesn’t understand that Iran’s leaders knew that they could not fight America by matching its military spending, equipment, and tactics: vast numbers of jets, tanks, naval vessels, missile interceptors, etc. Saddam Hussein tried that, and the US steamrolled him twice, because there’s no way to outspend the United States on military gadgets.

Iran didn’t just learn from Saddam’s defeat in Iraq. They also learned from America’s defeat by Iraq’s low-tech, asymmetric, open-source insurgency, which found low-cost ways of destroying American personnel and exhausting expensive military supplies while living on to fight. Imagine what they could have done with drones.

In the run up to the current Iran War, I compared four sets of numbers......more..........