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Iran War and its Ramifications
Much has already been written about our attack on Iran. Read it all and make up your mind.
But first, here are my personal thoughts on it.
My initial opinion is that the President acted illegally because it takes Congressional action, or at least spoken acquiescence among its members, to get us into a shooting war. The intent of the the Constitution is that a decision to go to war belongs to the people through Congress, only after which the President actively takes on the role of Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces. The President seems to think this works the other way around.
Compounding this, it appears Trump has no idea of how to bring about regime change in Iran, even with the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei now deceased, nor with whom to talk with about forming a new government in that country, Iranians within, or perhaps outside of their government (which is still functioning).
The price for his not looking beyond the tip of his nose regarding the consequences of his latest adventure will be the deaths of many Iranians as well as those killed in the Middle East and elsewhere by Iranian retaliatory strikes, including American military personnel and civilians. The greatest danger is that such retaliation will push us to increase our military involvement. We do not want this to blossom into another Afghanistan or Iraq. The President doesn’t understand that Iran, with a population of about 90 million, is not Venezuela.
(Because their names are similar, there is still confusion among some between Ali Khamenei, who was just killed, and his predecessor, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who took over after Iranians overthrew the Shah’s royal family in 1979, and held Americans as hostages for over a year. Obviously, they were different people.)
While Iran understandably poses an immediate danger to Israel and the Saudis and the Gulf States, that is not the case with the United States, certainly not justifying our direct involvement in a war there. For years, Iran’s leaders have been rhetorically threatening the United States referring to us as the ‘Great Satan,’ but chiefly conflicts with them have been in the worlds of finance, international trade, petroleum, and sanctions. Oddly, it was not Iran that attacked the World Trade Center in 2001, but terrorists from nations with whom we are presently allied against Iran and with which the President's family is reported to have financial dealings.
Trump’s ordering an attack on Iran sounds more like a way for him to build political unity behind him, which is clearly dissipating rapidly over domestic issues he has failed to properly address.
All Americans should think twice before voting for any Republican who, for any reason whatsoever, supports the President. That’s why he is working hard with State legislatures where he still has some influence, to make it more difficult for American citizens to vote in November’s mid-term elections, especially while he is ‘busy’ protecting our freedoms by attacking Iran. Certainly, he isn’t doing anything to protect our freedoms from illegal behavior by his appointees to the Department of Homeland Security and their minions of ICE enforcers.
Sampling various opinions, Professor Heather Cox Richardson commented In her March 1 ‘Letters from an American’ posting that ‘Trump seems unclear about the end game of the conflict he has started.’ That is perhaps the understatement of the century (or week, anyway.)
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| Trump speaking on TV (it was recorded earlier) when most Americans were asleep during the pre-dawn hours on Saturday |
Trump’s early Saturday morning pre-recorded announcement of the attack on Iran showed him wearing a white baseball campaign cap like what a teen-ager playing video games might wear. But that’s what you get when you let a teen-age-like President play with real weapons. Who is to blame? American voters! That’s who!
JL
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Artificial Intelligence Goes Political
Here’s Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column dated February 28, prepared before our attack on Iran. This is its text, not a link. Read it and make up your mind.
Real Despots Hijack Artificial Intelligence
Feb. 28, 2026
Maureen Dowd,
Opinion Columnist
'A.I. is a teenager now, roaring into the world, testing limits, rebelling against authority, itching to usurp the old guard and remake the planet in its image.
Unfortunately, Pete Hegseth is also a teenager. His hormones are raging; his judgment is shaky. Like a repentant frat boy, he had to promise the adults in the Senate that he wouldn’t drink while he is in charge of the military and its 12-figure budget.
He certainly lacks the maturity to guide, discipline or even understand the earth-shattering power of an adolescent A.I.
Hegseth should be focused on our nerve-racking duel with Iran. Instead, he spent the week at war with Dario Amodei, the thoughtful chief executive of Anthropic and one of the few in Silicon Valley advocating for humanity.
Anthropic is the only A.I. company operating on classified military systems; its clever chatbot, Claude, was deployed by the military to help catch Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
More than most of his peers, Amodei has been blunt about “civilizational concerns” — the risks of A.I. wiping us out. He even hired an Oxford-educated philosopher, a young Scottish woman, to teach Claude right from wrong. She’s feeding his “soul,” she said. Claude even has his own Constitution, rules for the bot’s values and behavior. (Good luck!)
A fully powerful A.I. may be only one to two years away, Amodei wrote in a January essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” adding that it will be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields: biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc.” It will be able to control “physical tools, robots or laboratory equipment through a computer.” And as we can already see, with A.I. partners and suicides related to A.I., it will have a powerful psychological influence on all of us.
Americans could land in a panopticon, constantly surveilled. “It might be frighteningly plausible to simply generate a complete list of anyone who disagrees with the government on any number of issues, even if such disagreement isn’t explicit in anything they say or do,” Amodei wrote. A.I. could “detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out before they grow.”
About fully autonomous weapons, Amodei conjured a Hitchcockian scene: “A swarm of millions or billions of fully automated armed drones, locally controlled by powerful A.I. and strategically coordinated across the world by an even more powerful A.I., could be an unbeatable army, capable of both defeating any military in the world and suppressing dissent within a country by following around every citizen.” There would be “a greatly increased risk” of democratic countries turning A.I. armies against their own people.
President Trump and Hegseth already have a healthy disregard for democracy. Trump is trying to take over our elections because he’s rightly worried that his party is going to get shellacked in November. And now he’s escalating his push to remove the few pathetic guardrails that exist on A.I.
Hegseth last fall revoked the press passes of all reporters who didn’t agree to sign a pledge agreeing to his draconian restrictions on where they could report and what they could report on.
Amodei did not want his A.I. model to be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons without human oversight — reflecting his deepest fears.
On Tuesday, Hegseth summoned Amodei to the Pentagon to demand that he let the Pentagon do whatever it wanted, as long as it was “lawful.”
This is poppycock, of course, because Trump and Hegseth have contempt for the law when it gets in the way of their whims, power grabs and revenge plots.
Their bizarre overkill with Anthropic makes me wonder what nefarious deeds they’re up to.
The self-styled secretary of war offered Amodei a double ultimatum: He would invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to give the Pentagon unrestricted use of its model, or he would designate it a supply-chain risk — a national security threat — which would put the company’s government contracts, and possibly the company itself, in jeopardy.
Anthropic had a choice: be extorted or blacklisted.
On Friday, Trump unleashed hell on Amodei, denouncing the Anthropic techies who helped the Pentagon pluck Maduro out of his bedroom as “Leftwing nut jobs.” Trump accused Anthropic of “trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution.”
“Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology,” he posted. “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!”
In a post on X, Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk: “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” He railed that “Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.”
Then, later Friday night, Sam Altman announced on X that his company, OpenAI, had reached an agreement with the “Department of War” to use the company for classified work with red lines that sounded the same as those that Amodei sought. “In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome,” Altman chirped.
It was confusing how OpenAI could be accepted on the terms that crushed his rival. Did the administration simply have an ideological grudge against Anthropic, which it sees as more “woke” than OpenAI, or did Altman’s buttering up of Trump work, or could his terms somehow have been different? While Altman said OpenAI was “asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies,”
Amodei said in a statement Friday night that he would sue the government.
Hegseth was wrong. Anthropic has principles. It’s the administration that is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.’
JL
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Not a Time for Politeness - prepared before our attack on Iran.
Those who persist in dealing with President Trump and his supporters in Congress as if they merely have a more conservative approach to meeting the challenges facing the nation are at best naïve.
Trump and his supporters must not to be treated gently in view of their dependence on ignoring our laws and our Constitution. We are a nation based on the rule of law. Trump and his Congressional allies do not distinguish between governing according to our laws and political campaigning, and the lies that the latter involve. Their actions prove that.
The President’s State of the Union speech was no more than what he would say at a campaign rally.
Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s February 26 and 27 postings on her daily ‘Letters from an American’ includes sufficient reasons to strongly oppose illegal acts by the President, his appointees, and Republicans in Congress who are fearful of primary challenges initiated by the President.
It is not a time to be nice nor respectful toward them. Their behavior is no better than that of Tories during the Revolutionary War or Secessionists during the Civil War. They are part of an effort dedicated to negating the rule of our country by its laws, and of course, of a democratic government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
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But there is a real risk in opposing these foes of democracy. In the words of Ko Ko, the Lord High Executioner in Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘Mikado,’ …
‘As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list — I've got a little list,
Of society offenders who might well be underground
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!'
Click here or copy and paste https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ on your browser line, read her postings there, and make up your mind, bearing in mind what Maureen Dowd has written about Artificial Intelligence, and what Ko Ko sang in ‘the Mikado.’
There are people in our government who have ‘a little list of those who never would be missed.’ Uncontrolled A.I. can even put Jackspotpourri on that list.
JL
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Housekeeping on Jaickspotpourri
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.
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More on the Sources of Information in Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered local daily ‘paper’ newspaper (now the South Florida Sun Sentinel) and what appears in my daily email; that includes the views of many contributors, including the New York Times and other respected journals.
Be aware that when I open that email, I first quickly glance at and screen out those sent to my very old former email address and those considered ‘promotional’ by Gmail’s system as no more than advertisements or requests for donations. Besides these sources, I also utilize the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want.
Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). On occasion I might use such search results, but when I do, I will say that I am doing so. Generally, however, I try not to use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.
Following such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the other results of my search.
Unlike the anonymous AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated, giving them a greater credibility than any AI summary. I feel that It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information: yourself or something else (Artificial Intelligence), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable. At least when I read a column by Timothy Snyder, for example, I know from where it comes, and to some extent, what to expect.
Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence.
JL
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