Boots Up Yours

 As bad as things are right now, they may be about to get catastrophically worse and very quickly.  

The overwhelming winner for cliche of the moment is "boots on the ground."  That is apparently a military term adopted by pols pushing the Iraq war, as a heroic-sounding alternative to the term that became toxic during Vietnam: ground troops.  

However you say it, deploying soldiers and war machines onto foreign soil is a huge commitment, and a huge risk.  People understand this, if only because of the "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's probably why the deploying of American ground troops in Iran has very little public support.  A Fox poll registers 12%, and a UMass poll out on Monday gives it an 8% approval.  That's eight per cent of those polled.  

A popular and trusted President might eventually overcome even that nearly impossibly low number, but we don't have one of those.  Approval for Boss Chaos in today's poll is 33%.  That's his MAGA minimum.  About two thirds of those polled disapprove, most of them strongly.

Nevertheless, some 50,000 US troops are in the Middle East, with reports of more to arrive.  Observers point out that while Boss Chaos is wildly inconsistent in his statements, he usually has used forces that he gathered.  Let's hope the numbers are deceptive--that a big deal has been made about those sent there, though the total number is not a lot more than are usually in the region.

But if this is a real preparing for deployment moment, a few statistics, courtesy of Lawrence O'Donnell, suggest what awaits:

Against a force of 50 to even 75 thousand US troops, Iran has 600,000 under arms.

The entire complement of the American armed forces currently numbers 450,000, including the mechanics, the cooks and the paper pushers.   

In World War II, it took a total commitment by the US, the Soviet Union, the UK and other Allies, with millions of soldiers for four years to defeat Nazi Germany.  Germany at the time had a population of about 70 million. Iran currently has a population of around 90 million.

A participant in Saturday's No Kings march in Manhattan was a 2024 Chaos voter and self-proclaimed MAGA guy from the Republican stronghold of Staten Island.  He described the current situation as "moving farther from peace and closer to catastrophe."  

The US has already set fire to hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money in one month of air attacks. Thanks to resulting huge spikes in oil prices and sudden disruptions of other vital resources, we're facing the distinct possibility of long-lasting global economic catastrophe and the certainty of economic pain for months if not years in the US--even without the devastating addition of a ground war in Iran.

Once begun, it conceivably could get so bad so quickly for this ignorant, incompetent and blustering executive that the exploitable worries about nuclear weapons could become reality.  But they won't be Iranian nuclear weapons exploding.