Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead by 6ixStringJack

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Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead

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UPDATED: Wednesday, April 1, 2026 07:29
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Tuesday, March 31, 2026 11:06 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Psychology of Military Incompetence

How the Iran War was lost

Paul Krugman | Mar 31, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-military-incompet
ence

Transcript

So the world’s greatest military power went to war against a fourth rate nation whose military budget would be rounding error in our defense spending. And it appears that we lost.

Hi, Paul Krugman with a late night, well, evening update, which I don’t usually do, but I wanted to get this in before who knows what happens in the news tomorrow.

It’s Tuesday. It’s the day that the stock market rallied enormously, that the futures price of oil dropped precipitously, all on the happy news that the United States, at least based on Trump’s Truth Social, appears to be surrendering. Trump put up a Truth Social post saying that, you know, we don’t need to open the Strait of Hormuz. If the Europeans think they need it, they should go ahead and do it. And it’s up to them. And this is pretty amazing.

Of course, the idea that it only matters to the Europeans, that it doesn’t matter to us, is all wrong. And that will be a subject of a Substack post shortly. But it is pretty much a confession. Although it’s framed as we won, now let somebody else do the cleanup, the reality is it’s effectively a confession that, well, we lost. We can’t do this.

How the hell did we manage to do this? I mean, the objective reality is that this was never going to be... Maybe it wasn’t even going to be doable. There were reasons why we didn’t go to war with Iran, particularly why we didn’t go to war in a way that basically became an existential threat for the regime so that they have no compunction about creating lots of damage because the alternative result is annihilation for them personally. But everybody who thought about it even for a couple of minutes, anyone who knew anything, particularly anyone who’d been paying attention to four years of war in Ukraine … we know something about what modern war looks like and about the inability of countries that have conventional superior forces to avoid major damage from drones and missiles. So this was completely, unbelievably stupid.

How did we get there? Well, there was a very good article by Tobin Harshaw in Bloomberg, and mostly I’m just riffing off what he wrote, but I think that it deserves wider circulation. He resurrected a book I had forgotten about, a 1976 book by Norman Dixon called The Psychology of Military Incompetence. It was very British oriented, but the lessons apply; Dixon looked at the great military disasters of British history.

You might think there were many reasons why really bad decisions were made, but he actually said there was a kind of consistent pattern. That what happened was that you had military leaders, or people making military decisions, who for the most part shared two things. First, they believed, they had this atavistic, anachronistic belief that warfare is all about muscles and not about minds. which hasn’t been true for a very long time. And second, he argued that they are just generally anti-intellectual, anti-education.

So in some sense, it’s all about muscles and don’t give me all of these smarty-pants intellectuals who are telling me about why I’m doing it wrong. It’s an uncannily accurate portrait of Pete Hegseth, down to even seemingly minor details. Muscular Christianity is among the defining symptoms of the bad British military leaders that Dixon analyzed. So this is what happened.

This is not about specific bad judgments. It’s not, in a way, about the specifics of the case. It is that we were led into war by people who exemplified in the classic way how really bad military decisions are made. And it all comes down to believing in brute force and toughness and muscles — muscles in the age of drone warfare! — and hate intellectuals, hate learning.

What really gets me is that in a war where the deciding factor is having some intellectual understanding of what you’re doing, a theocratic regime in Iran, which basically wants to bring back the Middle Ages, mostly got it right.

And the world’s leading haven of scientific thought, or we were at least until the current administration, got it completely wrong. It’s humiliating. It’s awful. And, you know, we will all be paying the price for this incredible defeat for probably for the rest of our lives.

Enjoy the evening.

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How a Psychologist Warned of Military Incompetence

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to rewrite the military’s culture in order to replicate a mindset that has led to historical disasters, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Tobin Harshaw explains.

Mar 31st, 2026

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-03-31/opinion-hegseth-s-cul
ture-wars-lead-to-disaster-video

-----------------------

Hegseth’s Culture Wars Are Inviting a Military Disaster

By Tobin Harshaw | March 31, 2026 at 4:00 AM CDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-opinion-hegseth-culture-wars-a
re-inviting-military-disaster/

One person who understood the importance of the second half of the phrase “military mind” was Norman F. Dixon. A British psychologist with a decade of military experience, Dixon wrote a remarkable (and surprisingly funny) 1976 study called “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence,” which won a devoted following among military and corporate leaders and remains in print on its 50th anniversary.

Download for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=On+the+Psychology+of+Military+Incomp
etence

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, April 1, 2026 7:29 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump Would Love To Leave, but Iran Might Not Let Him.

Trump has made a prison for himself. He started the war to have what he imagined would be some great “victory”. He would pummel Iran, kill its leaders, put in place compliant new ones, get paid, reap political benefits, and maybe even have a victory parade to celebrate. It was simple, really. If he cannot have his victory, there is no point to all of this. And here is the rub: he can declare “victory” at any time; indeed, he declares victory multiple times every day with ever more outlandish claims. However, if he ends the campaign and the Strait of Hormuz is not open, the Iranian theocratic regime in power, and Iran’s nuclear weapons program is not “obliterated”, he understands that his claims will be a farce. Moreover, the first of these alone means that the world economy will be on the point of implosion with a real chance of a worldwide recession and high oil prices. This stagflation world will be a massive problem for him and the GOP in the run-up to the 2026 elections. So, while Trump can declare victory at any time, he cannot ensure Iran recognizes his triumph. And this is the dilemma he faces when he gives his address to the nation tonight at 9 pm ET “to provide an important update on Iran.”

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-4-trump-would-lo
ve

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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