The only people who are fooled by this stupidity are Americans. They rest of the world knows what is going on.

if the US declares Iranian special forces terrorists, another country is then free to call US special forces terrorists.

Indeed. That same thought occurred to me as I listened to Philip Zelikow on (the increasingly right-wing) NPR last night. Visions of the invasion, our bombing, our killing of over a hundred of thousand Iranians, our cynical capture of five Iranian diplomats in their public offices, etc. etc. came to me just as he was saying —

It’s really the logical playing out of a position our government already has. We’ve already designated the government of Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. But because an agency of that government is actually engaging in terrorist acts outside of Iran actively working in other countries, we have now designated that agency as being the equivalent of a foreign terrorist organization. It’s not a new finding. But now, we’re playing out, in terms of our administrative regulations, the logical implications of that conclusion.

Our government-sponsored agencies are “freedom fighters.” Their government-sponsored agencies are terrorists.

No one should be fooled by this Newspeak. No one is, except too many Americans.

The Grand Ayatollah makes the decisions about the military, not the ranting fool of a President.

You really have to work at it to fool a CPU, and then it’s only a construct. Reality and testing are the only ways you can stabilize a program.

When I was working as an analyst in the military I would have to explain repeatedly that I wasn’t interested in what the US doctrine was, or how the US would react. My target was the Soviet military and I had to know how it would react. The Soviets did things for their own reasons. I could understand some of their reasons, but others were a total mystery. They were slavishly consistent which made understanding them easy for me, but then I had to convince my side.

These people just don’t bother to notice where their actions are going, and what other people are going to do. Every problem we have in the region can be traced back to some earlier US decision. Our government has the shortest attention span and weakest grasp of history in the world.