War?

Two nights ago Christopher and Brent were in the basement setting up to play Days Gone. Before I headed down to watch I got the push notification that the US had killed Soleimani in a drone strike. I sighed and thought, here we go again, and then headed down to see the work Christopher had been doing.

After we had played (or more accurately Christopher played and we watched since games have gotten exponentially harder since the days when we actually played video games) for awhile and we got to see the way the game worked and a couple of the missions that Christopher specifically had worked on we shut it down. Then Brent and Christopher looked at their phones and saw the notification I saw earlier.

Brent read it and closed the story pretty much the same way I had. Christopher was stunned. He wondered if we were now at war with Iran, he was devouring all of the news he could read. And I think he wasn't sure why we weren't. Why I hadn't even mentioned it when I saw the story.

The next morning I was thinking about it again and Brent and I talked about it at breakfast. For Brent he just didn't have enough information to form a reaction just yet. For me going to war with Iran was expected. I told Brent back last summer when Trump declared that the IRG was a terrorist organization he was doing it give himself more power to attack them. If they are terrorists instead of the standing army of a country then it's like ISIS or Al Qaeda, much more leeway. So I had been expecting something. Some strike. And honestly we've been at war for so long, undeclared but ongoing, that this is just opening another front. I'm not sure that much changes, except we send back troops that we were supposedly withdrawing and Lindsey Graham is even more of a Trumpstan than normal.

But for Christopher he doesn't remember the start of the last cycle. He was really young when 9/11 happened. He wasn't much older when we invaded Iraq. His life has been a constant background drumbeat of war in the Middle East but there have been no "THIS IS WHERE IT STARTS" moments. For him this seems like a bigger deal.

And it might be.

Or it might just be the continuation.

And, again, for me it was inevitable. The Trump administration pulled out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, they hit them with sanctions again, they declared the IRG terrorists, they hit them with another batch of sanctions and then Trump got impeached. So they really needed this. Historically Americans don't like changing leadership mid-war. So a new war means another notch for his 2020 bid.

But historically Americans tend to line up at war time and get very USA! USA! and I'm not sure we are going to see that this time.

A huge chunk of the American public does not believe the Trump administration when they say that they HAD to take him out because he was about to do something big. They haven't earned that trust. Brent says they need to release their proof pretty quickly to get backing, I'm not sure that that will make a difference. After all the same talking heads are making the rounds right now saying we had to do this as were making the rounds saying we had to invade Iraq because they had proof of the WMDs. You remember those right? The ones that didn't exist?

So I think the trust in the government as a whole is too shattered for buy in.

But it won't matter if or when Iran retaliates. We'll still be at war. Again. Still.

I wish I didn't live in a world where that seems normal to me.