So colossally stupid even Geraldo gets it
The Iranians are promising to rain down destruction upon US personnel in the Middle East. That was to be expected. But they're not signalling when they will take their revenge.
Meanwhile, some members of Iraq's parliament are moving to expel America from Iraqi soil. Remember, Donald Trump railed against Barack Obama for following through on the agreement signed between Iraq and the George W. Bush Administration to draw down and withdraw most US troops from the country; by this one brazen, hubristic act, Trump is about to have all American influence 86'd from Iraq.
Also, because US diplomats on the ground know what's actually going on, the embassy in Baghdad has urged all American to leave Iraq immediately.
The top trends on Twitter are some variation of World War III. While I don't think—or at least hope—that this will cause a world-wide conflagration, make no doubt: In an effort to save his own skin from political destruction, Trump has committed an act which will have wide-ranging ramifications on America, its allies, and its standing in the world.
The Soviet Union was a much more existential threat to the US. And yet the US never assassinated its generals, much less actual leaders. Civilized countries don't assassinate each others' officials; if murder were a regular tool of the trade, diplomatic life would be impossible.
From the moment Trump designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, something like this was inevitable. Labeling an entire arm of a foreign government's governmental structure outlaws was never going to end well. Again, states don't do this, so as to not preclude diplomacy. But by the time Trump took this step, he had no one who knew anything about international relations on his staff; all he had left were political hacks laying groundwork for just such a wag-the-dog operation in the certainty that their master's power would be threatened by Democrats. Anyone with any grounding in local culture and history could have told the regime this was an abysmal course to take. Persians have survived Greeks, Romans, Turks, Mongols. They will survive a querulous buffoon like Trump.
This is such a truism that even a toady like Geraldo Rivera sees the writing on the wall. When you've lost the empty suit who discovered an empty safe, you know we're in for the shit, as the kids say.