......... Starting wars in the Middle East that get out of control and lead us to have far greater costs with the benefits, is one of the cornerstones of the unrealistic strategy that this administration has criticized over and over and over again. And yet, here we are in a full scale Middle East war, and we’ve seen the costs of that.

Running through some of those costs, Smith underlined the human cost in thousands of civilian deaths, the deaths of 13 US service members, other countries being “dragged into the war”, gas prices at home, and the cost of fertilizer.

He then moved to a big question for Hegesth today, which is what is the US’s endgame in Iran, given that fundamentally nothing has changed in Iran despite the war?

One of the big questions that we need to get answered today is, where is this going? What is the plan to achieve our objectives? We’ve seen the cost, and the cost is very, very high. All we keep hearing on the objectives is we keep seeing all of the targets that we have struck …

We’re in this to fundamentally change Iran. And as we sit here today, Iran’s nuclear program is exactly what it was before this war started. They have not lost their capacity to inflict pain. They still have a ballistic missile program. They’re still able to blockade the strait of Hormuz and have the ships that are capable of doing that. What is the plan to get that to change? And most disturbingly, the president keeps telling us that it’s over.

Smith also criticized the administration’s harsh treatment of Nato for not joining the war, highlighting that Nato supported the US by invoking article 5 after 9/11 and adding:

There’s nothing realistic about starting a war in the Middle East, going it alone and pushing aside all diplomacy.

In his final point, Smith stressed the need for answers regarding the strike on the Iranian girls’ school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children:

There is absolutely no question at this point what happened. We made a mistake and that happens in war. We identified this target based on earlier charts. And yet two months after it happened, we refuse to say anything about it, giving the world the impression that we just don’t care.         ...........

Armchair_Politician wrote on Apr 30^th, 2026 at 6:12am:


their movies glorify extreme violence.
the more violent anyone is, they win and that is good.
they ahve the most gun deaths in the world.
it is an extension to the extrinsic culture.

Armchair_Politician wrote on Apr 30^th, 2026 at 12:53pm:


I love that movie.

"What were you doing?"

"I was trying to parallel park."

"Parallel to what?"

Lol.

When fighting in Afghanistan,  the Americans and Australians had to deal with roadside explosives designed to maim.
I don't think they laid too many IED S themselves.

Afghani soldiers fighting with the allies often had 10 yo boys tied to their bunks as sex slaves.
The allied soldiers were told ( as they listened to child rape at night) that it was culturally acceptable in Afghanistan and to be quiet about it.

I think we know who the real creeps are.

The leftie intellectuals who love such cultures and hate their own superior culture.

Bobby. wrote on Apr 30^th, 2026 at 1:54pm:


the kill bill series, godfather series, goodfellas, casino , scarface, almost every western movie.