December 4, 2019

The Blob Is Going After Iran

A few months ago Donald Trump decided to suddenly yank our troops from Syria. We’d already beaten ISIS, so why not? It was time to get out. But the Wall Street Journal reports today that apparently things have changed:

The Trump administration is considering a significant expansion of the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East, including dozens more ships, other military hardware and as many as 14,000 additional troops to counter Iran, U.S. officials said. The deployment could double the number of U.S. military personnel who have been sent to the region since the start of a troop buildup in May. President Trump is expected to make a decision on the new deployments as soon as this month, those officials said.

Ah yes. To counter Iran. Apparently our current military presence in the Gulf is just too thin to provide us with the ability to respond if Iran were to fire a missile or something:

Hell, this military escalation probably isn’t even Trump’s idea. It’s the blob at work. Still, it was his idea to piss off Iran just because Barack Obama had done the opposite, and now he—and we—are paying the price. We never learn, do we?

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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