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The Felon Is Desperate for a "Win" After the Iran Debacle

Like it or not, American foreign policy is now controlled by the whims, tantrums, delusions and need to be a "winner" of one man, the Felon.  With his war of choice against Iran having spiraled into a fiasco with no good exit ramp - the Felon's memorandum of understanding is viewed by many as a American surrender - the Felon is desperate for a "win." A likely target is Cuba which he likely believes will be another Venezuela, but he remains fixated on Greenland despite the damage an effort to take over Greenland would do to European alliances and the ugly image of America (or perhaps uglier image since the Felon has already done so  such damage) that would be a result. None of the fallout concerns the Felon who only cares about satiating his extremely fragile ego.  Everything about the Felon is self-centered and ego driven and poses a threat both domestically - he refused to sign the bipartisan housing bill unless the Senate voted to disenfranchise millions -  and on the international stage. A piece at Salon looks at the danger on the international front:

If there’s one big no-no in international diplomatic negotiations, it’s for one of the players to physically threaten the envoys. The negotiators are there to try to reach an agreement, so when they are threatened with death by the leader of the opposing side, it can be a bit of a poison pill. But such rules are designed for mature adults who understand how international relations work. America, unfortunately, has a leader who sees the world through the lens of gangster movies and can’t keep his mouth shut. 

We saw this illustrated over the weekend when [the Felon] President Donald Trump threatened the Iranian envoys in Switzerland with death if the Islamic Republic closed the Strait of Hormuz again, which the country had threatened to do if Israel did not stop bombing Lebanon. The president issued the warning in his usual classy fashion: “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your f**king country.” 

[T]he first paragraph of the memorandum of understanding he and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed reads:  The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, and their allies in the current war, by signing this MoU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.

By failing to enlist Israel in the agreement — and by threatening the use of force against Iran — it would appear the United States violated its terms.

But then, as everyone has learned, the president tends to talk a big game; he is only willing to bluster and bomb to the point where it costs him something, and then he backs down. Case in point: Following Trump’s threat, the Iranian delegation briefly left the talks, but they returned after being reassured he wasn’t serious. 

As the smoke from the agreement clears, a consensus has emerged — even among MAGA media, as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye has explained — that the U.S. has suffered a profound defeat. This is largely because Trump had no strategy beyond assuming that bombing Iran and killing some members of the nation’s leadership would instantly lead to unconditional surrender and new leadership, which would then welcome Western businesses eager to build resorts on the Strait of Hormuz. For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apparently assumed that once Trump was committed to the war, he would not back off and would instead escalate as necessary to achieve the goal of regime change.

For his part, Trump has already declared victory. He is clearly eager to move on from what is undoubtedly the worst foreign policy failure of his presidency — and one of the worst in U.S. history. But since his psyche is so fragile, he will not be able to admit that to himself. Trump will need to bag himself a “win” as soon as possible to erase his defeat in the minds of the MAGA faithful — and to quiet the voices in his head screaming that he has screwed up once again. 

So, what’s next on the president’s list? Well, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to be Cuba. He’s been talking about the communist nation quite a bit lately, even telling reporters in March, “I do believe I’ll have the honor of taking Cuba,” and asserting “I can do anything I want” with the country. He clearly sees it as an easy victory. 

He is also listening to his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose politics were fermented in that anti-communist petri dish — and who tells him that this one will be easy. One can’t help but wonder if, after the Iran mess, Trump is listening to anyone who tells him that these days. But he will likely take the country because he knows that Cuba is no Iran. It truly doesn’t have any “cards” to play, and its people are currently being starved by the siege being waged by the U.S.

And let’s talk about beachfront property: Nothing would thrill Trump more than to fulfill the Mafia dream of a gambling resort on the island 90 miles off the coast of Florida without all those pesky laws and regulations.

[I]t’s pretty clear that he’ll anoint Rubio as his successor, even over his own vice president. (Vance made the mistake of being right about Iran, which Trump will find unforgivable.) According to “Regime Change,” the new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, when Trump was asked if he thought his successor would keep all the gilt trappings in the Oval Office, he replied, “Cubans like gold.” Rubio, it appears, is already on track. 

But in the unlikely event that things don’t go well, Trump will need to find a win somewhere else. According to the New Yorker’s Ben Taub, the United States is still engaged in what the magazine calls the “ridiculous, deadly serious plan to take over Greenland.” They may have ways of doing it without a full invasion or a literal takeover of the country, but it’s pretty clear the latter is what Trump is really after. In his January interview with the New York Times, he said that it’s “psychologically important” for the United States to actually own the island. It’s very big, you see, especially on the map. 

Will he do it? Who knows. But at the recent G7 summit, Trump was caught on a hot mic, cryptically saying to European Council president António Costa, “You understand — Greenland.”

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

If You Love America, Cringe for It

Having recently spent time in France, the UK and done a crossing on the Queen Mary 2 with passengers from numerous European countries, one feeling I experienced - and I'm sure some of my traveling companions shared - is one of embarrassment given the Felon's occupancy of the White House and the endless lies and batshit crazy statements that flow from his mouth.  Like it or not, currently the Felon is the face of America to the world and notwithstanding the graciousness we experienced with those we met and fellow passengers, all sane Americans should cringe at this reality. How did this happen?  Basically, too many Americans failed to vote either out of laziness or ridiculous excuses such "I don't like Harris' laugh" or an ability to envision a female president.  With the Felon's approval rating now at 30%, hopefully the world realizes most of us cannot abide the Felon.  That said, all of us need to redouble our efforts to restore America's good name and rekindle the morality in public life that the Felon has obliterated.  A column in the New York Times looks at the need for patriotic Americans to cringe:

My father was fond of the Spanish expression “en los pequeños detalles se ve la persona” — the person is revealed in the small details. Last week, at the summit of the Group of 7 leaders in France, two details revealed two people in two starkly different lights.

The first — who else? — is Donald Trump, the world’s most powerful man yet possibly the world’s smallest. Speaking to a journalist, the president claimed that Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, with whom he was once friendly but has since fallen out, “begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so badly,” before adding, “I wouldn’t have done it, but I felt sorry for her!”

Meloni’s response came swiftly. Trump’s statement, she said, was “totally invented.”

“I don’t know why the president of the United States behaves this way toward his own allies,” she said in a video posted to social media. “After all, this is not the first time it has happened. I can only say that it’s upsetting that he doesn’t have the same resolve toward the enemies of the West, toward the enemies of the United States, toward leadership to which he instead proves much more indulgent.”

“There is one thing he should remember,” she concluded. “I never beg — and neither does Italy.”

No prizes here for guessing who’s telling the truth — or who, despite their very considerable difference in physical size, is the bigger and braver person. But there’s also a lesson in this relatively trivial but telling episode that it behooves Americans to learn on the eve of our semiquincentennial: If you love America, now is the time to cringe for it.

Cringing is not simply a physical reflex stemming from embarrassment or disgust. It also involves a mix of compassion and empathy. You cringe when someone’s child flubs lines in a school play. You cringe for a spouse trying to calm an abrasively drunk partner at a dinner party.

To exist as a sentient American in the age of Trump is to live in a perpetual cringe — morally, aesthetically, intellectually, politically. If the administration were a play or film script, it would be neither farce nor tragedy but instead a kind of absurdist travesty, “Waiting for Godot” meets “Pulp Fiction” meets “Dumb and Dumber.”

However much we may disdain him, the president has the rest of us on the hook, as the face and voice of a country that ought to know better. . . . His gilded, meretricious redecoration of the White House? That’s us. His repeatedly avowed admiration for Vladimir Putin? That’s us. His laughable claim about having achieved regime change in Tehran? That’s us. His Mafia-like threats against NATO allies? That’s us. His indescribably vain (and pathetically fruitless) effort to affix his name to the Kennedy Center? That’s us. His venal family profiting off his presidency in ways both transparent and tacky? That’s us.

The same goes for his insult of Meloni, which may be far from the worst of his sins but is also the most emblematic for being at once so utterly unnecessary as well as dementedly self-defeating.

The same country that freed its slaves, welcomed immigrants, invented airplanes, liberated concentration camps, landed men on the moon and challenged the Soviet Union to tear down this wall now bids to be the global equivalent of the expensively dressed man soiling his pants at a cocktail party.

For 10 years, I’ve watched my former political party work overtime not to cringe; to pretend that the Vesuvius of verbal infamies erupting daily from Trump’s mouth is either unimportant, or hilarious, or calculating and shrewd. Republicans turned their tolerance for the president’s mental goo into a shot-drinking contest — the more you drank, the manlier you were supposed to be.

Here, then, is our American challenge: Let’s not be afraid to cringe. Ronald Reagan predicted, correctly, that the Soviet Union would end up on the ash heap of history; now it’s our turn to risk winding up on the ash heap of idiocy.

So let’s not look away from the parts we played in bringing America to this moment. Let’s remember who we once were, because it’s what we may yet be again — if only we feel the sting of our present shame.

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

The Felon's Big Mistake in Iran

Seemingly, in everything he does, the Felon ignores the advice of experts and senior military commander.  Worse yet, in his second regime, the "adults in the room" who reined in his worse motivations and inclinations are absent, replaced with sycophants and "yes men" who will tell the Felon what he wants to hear as opposed to what he needs to hear.  Add in the totally unqualified Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense who is more obsessed with stamping out DEI and forcing out women, gays and non-white servicemembers and commanders than planning a winning strategy or learning the lessons of history, and a debacle in Iran was fully foreseeable. As a piece in The Atlantic outlines, perhaps the biggest mistake made by the Felon in launching his war of choice was to believe that aerial bombing without troops on the ground would be enough to force Iran into submission - he also ignored warnings that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz and inflict economic damage on both the USA and the world. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America faces a crushing strategic defeat in Iran, America is held in low esteem worldwide, former allies deem us untrustworthy, and among many of the very wealthy we are seeing greed and blindness to the needs of others not seen since the Gilded Age.  All because of one individual and his enablers.  Here are excerpts from The Atlantic:

When the United States and Israel launched the war on Iran in February, their plan was simple: bomb Iran until either the Iranian public rose up and overthrew the government, or the existing government capitulated to American demands. It rapidly became apparent that neither was going to happen. The Iranian people didn’t revolt against their oppressors. The Iranian government hunkered down, closed the strait, and gambled that the U.S. would be unwilling to invade or strike at crucial infrastructure.

So it seems U.S. planners made an obvious, if common, mistake: They assumed that a war could be won via aerial bombing alone.

Starting right after World War I, military theorists in the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom rallied around the idea that airpower lessened or eliminated the need for armies and navies. Their central thesis was that wars could be won almost exclusively with bombers and bombing campaigns.

In his 1921 book, Il dominio dell’aria (“The Command of the Air”), Italian General Giulio Douhet argued that whichever nation claimed air superiority first would be able to bomb their enemies’ cities to ash, forcing capitulation. Marshal Hugh Trenchard, the so-called father of the Royal Air Force who pioneered strategic-bombing theory during World War I, thought that airpower could break an enemy’s will to fight rather than merely provide tactical support for ground troops.

When these theories of total war through bombing were put to the test in World War II and beyond, however, they failed miserably. The German Blitz on London did not induce the British public to give in. Allied bombing of Germany did not break the Nazis’ will to fight; the German collapse at the end had much more to do with the (justified) fear of being captured by the Red Army, and the opportunity to surrender to the Americans.

In the case of Japan, the combination of the naval blockade and firebombing of cities left millions of Japanese people likely to die if the war went on into 1946. However, it was not until the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, that Japan sought a nearly unconditional surrender.

Strategic bombing failed in Vietnam as well. In that war, the U.S. dropped approximately 7.6 million tons of bombs, compared with the roughly 2.7 million tons dropped by the U.S. military across the European and Pacific theaters in World War II. The “Christmas bombings” of 1972 were not enough to persuade North Vietnam to offer favorable terms; rather, the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 were a result of U.S. exhaustion with the war.

The advent of “true” mass precision bombing in the 1990s led some analysts to conclude that the rules of war had changed, and that airpower alone was at last sufficient. But the supposed examples of victory through aerial bombing aren’t what they seem. The first Gulf War ended only after U.S. troops went into Kuwait in a 100-hour-long charge. In Serbia in 1999, Slobodan Milošević’s capitulation to a united NATO’s demands was based on fears of regime survival and the credible threat of ground invasion. The air campaign in Afghanistan succeeded because the U.S. had allies on the ground willing to fight for, take, and hold territory in the form of the Northern Alliance. In each case, there were troops on the ground, or a credible threat thereof.

A study by the RAND Corporation in 1996 on the capabilities and limitations of the psychological effects of U.S. air operations cautioned leaders that airpower alone was unlikely to coerce an enemy to offer favorable terms, unless there were other factors at play. Those external influences include the enemy’s belief that they would be defeated on the battlefield, that continued fighting would not improve their position, that damage from air attacks would likely be worse than concessions, and that there would be no hope of mounting a defense or effective counterattack.

The U.S. plan for attacking Iran was doomed from the start because it relied on airpower without the benefit of external factors that would have made an air campaign successful. There was no credible threat of mass ground invasion to overthrow the Iranian regime. It was either internal revolution or nothing.

The U.S. was also unwilling to inflict the sort of mass casualties and suffering that might have caused Iran to decide that capitulation was less damaging than continued resistance. The administration generally avoided targeting crucial infrastructure such as water and electrical plants and ground lines of communication (bridges and rail).

Unlike Serbia or Afghanistan, Iran had the ability to fight back and inflict significant pain on the United States. Iran fully grasped, from the beginning, that the outcome of the war would be determined by who could withstand the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The regime always had a plausible theory of victory and pursued it logically and consistently throughout the conflict.

Senior U.S. military leaders have spent decades studying warfare from every angle and must have understood the possibility of a prolonged regional conflict. In fact, General Dan Caine reportedly cautioned the Trump administration against attacking Iran.

But [the Felon] President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not appreciate the need for caution. Hegseth gained his experience at the tactical level, as a junior officer in the field. He seems to believe that technological might and physical strength, rather than carefully thought-out strategy, win wars.

The consequences of the botched war effort are nothing short of catastrophic. The U.S.’s munitions stockpiles are depleted, its military reputation is in tatters, its foreign relations are strained to the breaking, and Iranian leadership is in the best strategic position it has ever been in. It’s a hard way to relearn the old lesson that airpower alone doesn’t win wars.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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The Felon Can’t Spin His Way Out of His Messes

The Felon lies incessantly and typically tries to spin matters so as to avoid taking responsibility for poor decisions/actions or to sow doubt about criticism in the minds of his Kool-Aid drinking followers. While those in touch with objective reality see the Felon's statements and claims for what they are - outright lies - too often the MAGA base embraces the spin and lies rather than admit they have been played for fools.   With the reflecting pool debacle and the war of choice in Iran, the Felon is discovering that efforts to spin the situations - e.g., trying to blame the reflecting pool mess on vandalism - simply are not working in large part because everyone (i) everyone can see the horrible state of the reflecting pool (which was done on a no bid basis by one of the Felon's disreputable cronies) and (ii) the daily news coverage of the Iran war makes it obvious that the Felon's claims of "victory" or "winning" simply are untrue.  I suspect on the Iran war, the Iranian regime will drag out negotiations all the way up to the mid-term elections with the goal of hanging the war around Republicans' necks and undermining the Felon's already dwindling support.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the Felon's efforts to spin the fiascos he personally set in motion:

[The Felon] President Trump spent the weekend trying to calm the waters in Washington and roil them in the Persian Gulf.

Let’s begin with the less serious of these two self-inflicted crises. This spring, Trump for some reason became fixated on the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, which had not previously been a topic of national discussion, but which he believes should vibrate with a deep Technicolor blue. The administration awarded no-bid contracts for both a color coating and a new water-purification system, with the latter going to a company tied to a Trump-campaign donor previously convicted of conspiracy to bribe. Surprising no one, both parts of the project have been a disaster.

Now Trump says water will likely have to be removed from the pool to do “necessary repairs”—in other words, $16.4 million in taxpayer money will go down the drain. . . . . He also blamed vandals for the issues, though the White House has offered no evidence to suggest that’s true. Visitors who approached the pool this weekend were shooed away by National Guard members, and at least one who touched the pool’s broken liner was arrested . . .

Meanwhile, Trump nearly upended peace negotiations between Vice President Vance and Iranian leaders in Switzerland. Over the weekend, Iran claimed it had once more blocked the Strait of Hormuz because of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which appears to violate the fragile cease-fire in place. Whether the strait is actually closed is not entirely clear . . . On Truth Social, he said that if Iran didn’t rein in Hezbollah, he would “hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Threatening to kill interlocutors in the middle of a peace negotiation is generally seen as uncouth, in addition to counterproductive. Today, Vance was left to tell the Iranians that, in essence, they should just write off his threats as bluster: “What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us Millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record.”

Like Trump’s repeated blaming of vandals for damaging the pool, Trump is talking, but no one’s really paying much attention. Iran seems to have already concluded that it doesn’t need to take Trump seriously, which is a mixed blessing: good because it meant the Iranians didn’t quit the negotiations, but bad for the prospects of the U.S. reaching a favorable deal.

The Iran war and the Reflecting Pool, though very different in scale and importance, share some illuminating parallels. In both cases, Trump embarked on a project while blaming the Obama administration, his persistent bugbear, for an alleged problem: Iranian aggression or an insufficiently azure pool. In both cases, he charged forward without a fleshed-out plan, preferring to fly by the seat of his pants, and ignored the experts who warned of exactly the problems that resulted—algal blooms, a blocked strait.

What sets Iran and the Reflecting Pool apart from some previous cases is that he has been unable to deny reality. In the past, Trump has spun setbacks as victories, lying prodigiously to do so. In the case of his bogus claim of a stolen 2020 election, for example, he has relied on generalized public distrust of institutions, robust conservative media, and the arcana of election procedure to help create at least some doubt.

But no one can deny that the Reflecting Pool is, in fact, currently green. Nor can Trump spin the war in Iran—not when Americans spent weeks filling up their cars with gas that spiked well above $4 a gallon, and not when ships are visibly bottled up in the strait. These failures are plain in a way that exceeds even Trump’s capacity to get his supporters to believe him over their own eyes.

Now Trump’s only recourse is trying again, almost certainly with worse results. Vance is celebrating a tentative agreement to merely restore nuclear inspections—a safeguard present in Obama’s hated deal with Iran—even as the U.S. makes concessions such as allowing Iran to sell more oil. Trump badly wants the Reflecting Pool fixed by July 4, but it’s unclear if that is possible; if it is, doing so will almost certainly cost millions more in taxpayer money. The president chose two unnecessary battles and lost them both, and the American people will pay.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty