Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026

The reasons other U.S. presidents avoided war with Iran are becoming all too evident.


Congressional Democrats are opening a probe into millions of dollars private companies pledged to President Donald Trump's planned presidential library, asking what happened to the money after the original fund was dissolved last year. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) and Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut) and Rep. Melanie Stansbury (New Mexico) wrote Monday to the leaders of ABC, Meta, Paramount and X, requesting information about the terms of their agreements and the status of the funds they pledged to hand over to the president's representatives. The letters were shared with The Washington Post.


Widening the conflict is a classic tactic for outgunned combatants, and has cost the US dearly in the past.


White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair privately urged House Republicans on Tuesday to stop emphasizing "mass deportations" and instead focus their messaging on removing violent criminals, according to sources in the closed-door briefing.


Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Jenny O'Connell-Nowain was ready to go to jail. She had been prepared to spend six months in the custody of the Shasta county sheriff's office. One of the top prosecutors in this part of far northern California had presented the evidence against her in a weeklong trial, and a jury had delivered a guilty verdict. A judge offered probation, but O'Connell-Nowain did not agree to the terms. Her crime? Sitting on the floor in front of the dais of the board of supervisors with a sign, silently protesting an official who had criticized the county elections office. The case of a former preschool teacher with no criminal history tried and convicted for a peaceful demonstration was shocking even for Shasta county, which has drawn international attention for its rowdy and radical brand of conservative politics.


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More: On Monday, Donald Trump said the war on Iran was "very complete".

On Tuesday, Pete Hegseth, his secretary of defence, said Iran would face "the most intense day of strikes" yet in Operation Epic Fury.

If the messaging seems confused, it may be because the US " and to a lesser extent Israel " has found itself caught in a classic military trap. By relying on overwhelming firepower, they have been suckered into what could yet prove to be another Vietnam.

There, the US won every battle over 11 bloody years, but famously lost the war.

This was despite it, as now, having complete air superiority, and quickly destroying most of the crucial military and industrial infrastructure on which the enemy was thought to rely.

By escalating the Vietnam War "horizontally" into the towns and cities in the south on their own terms, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces outmanoeuvred the US.

Tehran also has little chance of defeating the US military, but escalation may again favour the enemy, according to Prof Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, and the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.

"Horizontal escalation occurs when a state widens the geographic and political scope of a conflict rather than intensifying it vertically in a single theatre," he says in an essay published in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations.

"It is especially appealing as a strategy for the weaker parties in a military contest. Instead of trying to defeat a stronger adversary head-on, the weaker side multiplies arenas of risk " drawing additional states, economic sectors, and domestic publics into the remit of the conflict".

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