[kcplate]

Which, again, has zero to do with my initial post. Again, the point was that we cant assume a blockade without the initial military operation would have been successful. And it’s a moot point anyway because only one of those three parties needed to believe that Iran was that close to having a nuclear device for a military operation to have taken place. Your opinion (or anyone else’s) of the trustworthiness of the Trump administration has zero bearing on whether or not they could or would launch a military operation. They obviously did.

[vel0city]

But you're basing your information off of the things people who are known to lie to you are saying. You're building your house of logic on quicksand.

I'm arguing you can't trust what they say about what was said at these meetings, because they've shown they can't be trusted to tell the truth at any time. Bessent says they said that, but you can't trust him. He's a liar. This is the problem when you have an administration that lies all the time even about little things. You can't even begin to actually trust the big things.

[kcplate]

I get it, you don't trust them. I am skeptical of the motives of all governments regardless of who sits in power. Frankly, none are truly benevolent or honest as far as I am concerned.

But that is a whole separate topic from speaking to the hypothetical “we should have tried a blockade first”. Whether you believe the justification or not there is a honesty to the timing, immediacy, and level of violence of the action here. When you couple that with some indisputable facts here—we know that for nearly five decades Iran has advocated genocide on Israel and the US as a matter of their state policy. We know that they have repeatedly acted when they could to this end. We know they were seeking nuclear weapons. We know that active diplomacy was going on and then it turned on a dime suddenly to military action.

It seems to me that the level of military violence inflicted on Iran with such a short switch from diplomatic talks was consistent with the belief by someone that they were danger close to having a nuclear weapon. You can be dishonest and corrupt, but still see and act on immediate threats.