Sunday and today, we saw absolute clown shows across the US government:
So far we’ve heard 12 different primary reasons for the war, 7 different main objectives, and 5 different exit strategies.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 3:12 PM
— George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 (@gtconway.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 7:37 AM
The glibness. The indifference. The carelessness. The utter lack of planning for a war against a country of 90M. The sickness of a man who acts on whim that will kill thousands not hundreds. The horror of a regime that enables this sickness. The broken body politic that votes in such malignancy.
— Steven Beschloss (@stevenbeschloss.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 7:39 PM
This is actually a pretty good summary of where we’re at, and how we got here.
— John Collins (@logicallyjc.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 1:54 PM
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Just like Venezuela does not send fentanyl to the U.S. and Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. It’s all been false flags to justify military aggression and war.
— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 1:31 PM
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Here's a listing of the criticisms I've seen:
/ Lloyd Axworthy "double standard [to] curry favour"
David Coletto "sudden and open-ended"
Justin Ling "feckless, bewildering, totally unnecessary"
Lorne Warwick "bootlicking"
Dale Smith "pragmatism without much in the way of principle"
Charlie Angus "Playing nice with crocodiles in the hope that they will be nice to us never ends well"
Evan Scrimshaw is ready to listen but wants an explanation ASAP.
I have seen three arguments that support Carney: avoiding a direct rupture with Trump, keeping Canada on-side with America, and maybe he knows something we don't know.Carney: Canada supports the United States… Canada: no, we fucking do not.
— Jen the Feisty Librarian (@feistywaters.com) February 28, 2026 at 10:42 AM
At Thoughtful Energy Journalism, podcaster Markham Hislop wrote on Sunday Baying Hounds in a Fractured World: The Canadian Fox Is Not Yet Run to Ground A more nuanced view of the Prime Minister Mark Carney's response to the US-Israel attack
...Was the government’s language imperfect? Yes. Could it have been more carefully calibrated? Certainly. But to demand that Carney respond as if it were 2003 — to insist that he speak as then Liberal foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy once did, invoking the United Nations Charter with moral absolutism — is to ignore that the architecture which made that posture coherent has been smashed.In the Globe and Mail, opinion columnist Campbell Clark writes Carney picks a realpolitik side on Iran war
Axworthy’s Sunday critique in The Star rests on a vanished premise: that the rules-based order is intact and enforceable.
It is not.
...Canada supports preventing nuclear proliferation. That is easy consensus language. Canada did not endorse regime change. Canada did not commit troops. Canada emphasized civilian protection. Canada positioned itself close enough to Washington to avoid direct rupture, but far enough to avoid co-ownership of the war.
It was balancing.
Could he have downplayed the endorsement further? Yes.
He might have led with de-escalation language. He might have stressed Canada’s non-involvement more forcefully. He might have explicitly flagged the absence of a regime-change endgame. This last one is particularly important, given Trump’s bungling of Venezuela. And he might have supported elimination of the nuclear program while seeming to avoid endorsing open-ended political transformation.
That is the narrow ledge Canada occupies.
...There will be time to judge Carney’s handling of Iran. If the war widens, for example, or if Canada is somehow drawn in. But today is not that day.
Today is a moment of rupture in a fractured order, driven by a superpower that no longer anchors the system as it once did. The hounds may bay. The fox may run.
But before we demand that Carney walk the plank, we should first acknowledge that the sea itself has changed.
...When Mr. Carney issued a statement supporting the attacks, he offered a dose of the realpolitik he claims to espouse.
He chose to put Canada on the side of its biggest ally and trading partner when it went to war against a repressive regime that foments terror and conflict – even if the casus belli is being fudged.
He chose not to quibble over the legalities. Then he quickly ruled out any future military role.
It was, to use a phrase that Mr. Carney favours, an example of taking the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.
Like most of the world, Mr. Carney and Canada will watch from the sidelines as Mr. Trump takes a high-stakes gamble on a war of choice.
It’s hard not to hope that the gamble ends with a new and different Iranian government that reflects the will of its people and stops bankrolling terror and conflict across the Middle East. It’s hard not to worry that it is unlikely the bombing will accomplish that...
I agree. I think people took issue with "Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon" when Trump had just unilaterally cut off all negotiations and bombed the crap out of them. That said, Carney and Anand have far more intelligence access than any of us.
— Democracy, Canadian Style 🇨🇦 Elbows Up! (@democracycan.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 9:00 PM
As for how the war is going - I think "badly" covers it. Here's a quick summary:In order to call out support for the US relating to the situation in Iran, PM Carney must have much intelligence to support that position.
— louisek2.bsky.social (@louisek2.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 2:34 PM
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Like when Putin invaded Ukraine, the Trump administration seemed to expect that Iran would collapse in just a few days - like Venuzeula, like law firms and universities, like businesses and corporations.
Not.
So now thousands of Americans across the Middle East have found themselves trapped and in trouble.Trump + his Gnomes: 1. Bomb Iran 2. ??? 3. Regime change!
— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 12:09 PM
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a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 9:32 PM
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Saudi Arabia isn't happy anymore either:
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European bases in the region are being attacked too, so now Europe is getting dragged in:
CNN's Live Tracker is reporting tonight that Americans have been told to leave the Middle East - how, I'm not sure - and Canadians are being told to leave the UAE. Oh, and the Asian markets are plunging already.⚡️Update: UK, France, Germany threaten potential 'defensive action' against Iran's missile, drone capabilities. "We will take steps to defend our interests and those of our allies in the region, potentially through...defensive action to destroy Iran's capability to fire missiles and drones."
— The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) March 1, 2026 at 2:24 PM
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6 comments:
So we learned from Marco Rubio what Canadian intelligence knew but couldn't say -- that it was Israel that initiated the attack on Iran. And since we know who's the boss in that relationship, Trump couldn't tell Bibi to stand down and had to join the attack.
This makes Carney's statement even more absurd. He condemns nuclear proliferation without mentioning Israel at all. Israel of course has nuclear weapons and refuses to sign the Nuclear Non--Proliferation Treaty. Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, has signed the NPT, and their Supreme Leader -- now murdered -- issued a fatwa against nukes. Seems Bibi's the boss in more than one relationship.
As to the nuclear weapons, I think it's worth noting that this has obviously made Iran MUCH more likely to acquire nuclear weapons.
So the open secret about Iran's nuclear program is that they are not and have all along not been trying to develop a nuclear weapon, and everyone involved in the project of giving them a hard time for trying to develop one, knows it. Khameini thought they were un-Islamic and refused to countenance it. All the intelligence agrees that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons. All the countries claiming they were, and were going to have them next month (for the last 25 years) simultaneously had quiet intelligence briefings surfacing that said there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. The media report this JUST enough to be able to say they did, but pretend they didn't know the rest of the time.
Rather, Iran was trying to develop nuclear POWER, which is their right under the non-proliferation treaty, which guarantees the right to peaceful uses of nuclear technologies. Everyone hassling them, incidentally, is in doing so breaking that treaty. And they refused to stop out of pride and I suppose out of some misguided idea that nuclear power would be somehow useful. Mind you, in a way there was no point abandoning it because if they did, the US and Israel would have made something else up and hassled them about that instead. Because the supposed nuclear weapons program was always just a handy stick to beat Iran with, and if the pretense became untenable they would look around for another stick.
(Ironically, the Shah DID have a nuclear weapons program, but nobody minded)
So. Khameini's dead now, and his politics of caution and not providing pretexts for US/Israeli aggression have been shown definitively to be useless. Whoever is in charge when the dust settles is VERY likely to think, "OK, the only real deterrent is a nuclear weapon. Let's get some." Some countries watching the events may conclude the same thing. So this war is not reducing proliferation risks, which Iran never posed. It is increasing them strongly.
The common denominator is the Trump wishes regime change to meet his political and financial needs from; Iran, Venezuela, Greenland/Denmark, Canada and I suspect more to come!
Other than getting out of bed in the morning, Trump has no plan for anything other than making himself and his family richer..
Its all whim of the day, when it comes to politics .
We cannot understand Trump but we can understand the toadies that worship him for political gain, financial gain and empowerment..
TB
My last, lingering ligament of goodwill for PM Carnage is dust in the wind.
Carney and Arand walked it back somewhat today, perhaps too little and too late.
Carney is a political neophyte.
His strengths are in finance.
For a closet Conservative he should be given a chance in this world where political norms have been up ended!
The old days of , blindly, adhering to a political philosophy are gone; natural order has been exposed as corruptible fallible and false.
TB
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