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Message: [QUOTE="Queen, post: 87526, member: 27"] Trump's call for Iranians to overthrow their own government landed with zero infrastructure to actually deliver the message. Trump's surrender demand was pretty vague [LIST] [*]Trump told Iranian soldiers to lay down their weapons without specifying to whom. [*]His regime-change pitch targeted 90 million people with no clear plan. [*]Philip Gordon flagged the absence of ground troops to accept any surrender. [*]Gordon warned that regime change without boots creates dangerous power vacuums. [/LIST] U.S. broadcasting got gutted at the worst time [LIST] [*]Voice of America had nearly all 1,400 staffers put on paid leave. [*]Trump tried to shut down Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty entirely. [*]Ilan Berman called the gutted media apparatus totally unsuited for this moment. [*]Decades-old tools built for exactly this scenario got dismantled beforehand. [/LIST] Radio Farda's scramble to reach Iranians [LIST] [*]Radio Farda lost access to its Kuwait-based transmitter for months. [*]Steve Capus said Farda was literally built for a moment like this. [*]Saturday's deal restored AM broadcasting from Kuwait at RFE/RL's cost. [*]Internet and satellite disruptions inside Iran complicated everything further. [/LIST] Kari Lake jumped in with mixed signals [LIST] [*]Lake had previously slammed RFE/RL for not aligning with U.S. foreign policy. [*]Her agency reversed some Voice of America Persian-service cuts last year. [*]A Persian translation of Trump's speech hit Truth Social quickly. [*]Lake celebrated the moment on X as glorious. [/LIST] History says this playbook backfires [LIST] [*]Gordon worked on the NATO air campaign against Gaddafi in Libya. [*]That operation helped topple the dictator but threw Libya into chaos. [*]Iraq and Afghanistan followed similar regime-change-to-disaster arcs. [*]Every comparable U.S. intervention ended up becoming a costly mess. [/LIST] [/QUOTE]

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