The lack of buildup in the press has been strange. Normally an administration would prep the public for military action with a few months of war/atrocity propaganda, but the PR has been so lazy that we just ended up bombing Iran on the weekend and half the country wasn't even aware we were trying.
I'm not talking about the military buildup. Obviously a lot of people knew that Trump was staging the Navy in striking distance of Iran, but I feel like that was underreported in the mainstream, considering the scope of the attack.
The closest we got was the color revolution protests around the New Years, but even that was a lazy effort. We heard reporting about thousands dead, but there were no media symbols to rally around like dead Kuwaiti babies. Some kid posted a video about killing himself. Mike Pompeo just bragged about Mossad starting the protests as if he forgot they were supposed to be legitimate.
It's like they don't really care, or perhaps that they've resigned themselves to losing the 5th gen battlefield with the younger generations, so they don't even bother making the case to them. The boomers, on the other hand, are in the tank no matter what - every boomer I've talked to thinks the strikes are exactly what we should be doing - so maybe they figure that's all they need for now.
Someone said it best last June: "we don't manufacture anything anymore, even consent for wars of aggression". They don't need even manufactured consent for their new wars.
Regarding the protests in Iran, there certainly was legitimate discontent, and a lot of innocent people were killed by the regime. I wonder if the Pompeos of the world were not saying this to make the regime paranoid and to cause something like this. I assume even supposedly democratic countries would get antsy if a nuclear power was trying to use protests to overthrow the state and threatened them with attacks with many people in the streets.