12/ why any of this is happening.

11/ time kind of fooling themselves. Like which of the ten arguments or "reasons" was the real one and which were they justifications, the arguments to get the country to do it but weren't the real motivations. Again, see the article above. This is different. It's really not at all clear ...

10/ actually a surfeit of reasons these guys had to invade Iraq. Like it wasn't what's the reason. They had like ten different reasons. Often mutually contradictory and it was actually had to disentangle what they thought they were doing. They were fooling the country but also at the same ...

9/ 90s. It's a basic story about interest group politics in the post-Cold War era. They had all sorts of theories and explanations about why it would be awesome. I wrote this article back at the time in which I argued that there was washingtonmonthly.com/2003/04/01/p...

8/ And to focus the point just a bit more, again: if you were in DC, familiar with national/dc politics 25 years ago there was a political faction mostly on the right that really REALLY wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government. You knew who the players were. They were active back into the ...

7/ Trump is willing to get into a major war with a non-trivial power let alone getting pulled into some limited occupation. And to focus the point a bit more I'm not saying well he hasn't brought the country along, or explained what he's trying to do or those kind of DC think ways of talking.

6/ supports drug running into the US. That may be true at some level. I don't know the specifics enough to know how true that might be. But again, what are we doing. Oil? Eh? It simply doesn't add up. Not in a way that you can come up with some idea that ...

5/ Maduro's regime and the Chavez regime before it. There are plenty of things to be against. I wouldn't be shocked to see the Trump White House try to support a coup. That is at least in a framework that certainly has a history in US foreign policy to put it mildly. We say the regime ...

4/ to do. Are we really going to invade Venezuela? Again, its not that invading Iraq was a better idea. What I'm getting at is that I don't think anyone has any idea what is motivating this and what they might do. And that is SUPER WEIRD and also SUPER BAD. Obviously the US has been hostile to ...

3/ people wanted to do that. I really have no idea what the White House is trying to do in Venezuela. So we can and should talk about how shocking and bad it is that we seem to be using the military to attack small civilian boats we think might be involved in drug running. But what are we trying ...

2/ reasons. But there wasn't a mystery about what they were trying to do. It was a whole complex thing. DISASTROUS IDEA. Terrible idea. The world we live in today was in many ways created by that catastrophically bad idea. So I'm certainly defending it. But I and lots of other people knew why ...

This sure seems like a deliberate choice to dare Boasberg into trying to do something against Noem, which they expect would get slapped down.

7/ a higher level of tradecraft? Putin's post-KGB pals or ... Steve Witkoff?

6/ of masters who made that happen was silly. The Russians really know influence operations, subversion, espionage, manipulation. They're particularly good at it. But most Great Powers are pretty good at that stuff. It's part of the Great Power job description. Who's operating at ...

5/ the Israeli public (i hang my head in shame as a Jew). He could apply force a way that unique to his specific relationships. And ... also, corruption. Which is the basis of those relationships. Money. Deals. Again, this is specific to Trump. The idea that Witkoff or Kushner were some kind ...

4/ realistic - was genuinely something that I think only Trump could pull off. Not because he's some kind of genius. And certainly not because Witkoff is. But he's built deeply embedded relationships with the Gulf princes as well as with Israel (both w Netanyahu but in some ways even more ...

3/ operates in NYC and Miami. By second tier I don't mean some loser. I just mean he's not one of the handful of biggest players etc. Has he worked in high stakes diplomacy? Espionage? I'm going to guess not. As I wrote at the time, Trump's Gaza deal - abt which expectations now seem much more ...