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Americans Need the Truth About the Iran War

Oil prices are even higher today as the price per barrel of oil moves back towards $100.00 and Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen are claiming strikes overnight on two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, something that if it continues will cause oil prices to soar even more. Meanwhile, neither the United States nor Iran are showing any letup in their fighting as most Americans continue to be told little about ongoing attacks on Iran, any hint of a thought out strategy or the total number of servicemembers wounded.  Indeed, the Felon, Pete Hegseth and Pentagon officials appear to actively suppressing information and continuing to deliberately lie about Iran's military capabilities being "obliterated" even as Iran's ongoing attacks show that the claim was and is a lie.  The reality is that Iran seems to realize that it has the Felon in a corner where he has no means of escaping the mess of his own creation.  Moreover, if Iran's Houthi allies succeed in cutting of oil flowing from the Red Sea, the last round of high American gas prices will look like nothing compared to the coming pain at the pump.  All as we move towards the mid-term elections. A column at The Atlantic looks at the Felon's ongoing lies:

For nearly five months, [the Felon] Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance. At this point, after more than 20 weeks of hostilities and at least 18 Americans dead and hundreds wounded, the people of the United States do not—cannot—entirely know what is happening, what progress U.S. forces are making, or what the president’s goals are.

This opacity seems to be by design: The [Felon] president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.

[The Felon] has insisted for months that the Iranian military is finished and that it has nothing left, as he did in the first week of the war when he said: “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” (He made similar claims at least half a dozen times in the first month of the war alone.) He has said that Iranian nuclear materials must be handed over, then said that the same materials are worthless and can stay where they are, and now has gone back to arguing that ending the Iranian nuclear program is the most important goal of the war.

All of these claims are dominoes that were set up to fall, one after another, by the single most egregious mistake that Trump made when choosing to go to war: He bet on quick regime change in a terrorist dictatorship and had no other plan should his long shot fall short. Perhaps Trump, after talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believed the optimistic scenarios of a rapid regime collapse that Netanyahu and others floated. Trump’s own secretary of state reportedly warned the president that he was being sold “bullshit.”

But within days, it became apparent that regime change was not happening. Unable to face failure, Trump resorted to prevarication. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month or a little more. When that timeline fell apart, Trump and his advisers began to dial through various reasons for staying in the war, but regime change—so prominent a goal in the first hours of the conflict—was now no longer one of them. Trump eventually claimed, dishonestly, that he’d never had any such intentions.

He then piled up more falsehoods. The war was going great, the president and the self-appointed “secretary of war” told the world. “Total and complete ​victory. 100 percent,” Trump told the French AFP news service on April 8. “No question about ​it.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the same day, called Operation Epic Fury “a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory” and said that Iran had been rendered “combat ineffective for years to come.” These statements were obvious nonsense.

Such assertions are clearly false and were almost certainly knowably false from the start. Iran’s military capability has been degraded, not obliterated, which is why this wording has come back to haunt Trump. Over the past few days, a clip of the Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo has gone viral; in it, Bartiromo points out what any sensible person who has listened to Trump talk about the war might question: “I don’t understand how it’s possible that Iran has the capabilities to fight this way and continue to try to lash out,” she said. She was puzzled, she added, “because the U.S. has obliterated Iran’s military, and the president continues to reiterate that.”

Bartiromo’s observation has only three possible responses. One is that the president genuinely has no idea what he’s saying, which would be beyond alarming in any circumstances, but especially during a time of war. Another option is that Hegseth and other advisers are keeping the truth from him, which would be a civil-military crisis of unprecedented gravity. The third option is that Trump is lying.

Now that a poorly negotiated cease-fire has finally fallen apart, Trump has returned to one of his most cringe-inducing howlers: The Iranians, he has said repeatedly, really want a deal. . . . Tehran appears to enjoy outing Trump on this one; sometimes the Iranians seem to launch attacks in the region just to make the point that Trump is wrong.

Americans, after months of war, cannot even be sure how many men and women in uniform have been wounded or how severely. . . . As the CNN reporter Brian Stelter notes, “Hegseth hasn’t explained the military strategy behind the renewed air strikes. His department hasn’t revealed the circumstances that led to the recent deaths of US service members. It’s all indicative of a larger effort to control information, limit access and avoid difficult questions about the war.” This is more than a lack of transparency; the Pentagon is taking away the ability to query actual human beings, instead redirecting journalists to an online source that is itself an obstacle to getting timely and accurate facts.

Trump and Hegseth are putting on a brave face, warning Iran that it will pay for killing more Americans. . . . Leaving aside the issue of this threat to commit potential war crimes, the United States seems to be running out of munitions: On Monday, The Washington Post reported that a “U.S. official familiar with internal administration discussions,” speaking on the condition of anonymity, warned: “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.”

But others—including people in the Pentagon and the intelligence community—must know the truth, and if the White House wasn’t aware of these concerns yesterday, it is now. Trump, Hegseth, and others in the administration know many other truths as well. They should start sharing those truths with the American people.

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A Desperate Trump and Republicans Push a New "Red Scare"

This morning, the price of oil is up significantly from just yesterday, military casualties are up in the Iran war, and the Felon remains stuck with no face-saving exit from the Iran war that he started. With new threats to oil shipments exiting the Red Sea, the likelihood of even higher oil and gasoline prices - and by extension many consumer goods prices - seems high.  Meanwhile, the Felon's polling numbers are literally in the toilet and appear headed towards pulling down numerous Republican candidates in the 2026 mid-term elections.  What's a flailing would be tyrant to do? In the Felon's mind, one tries to revive the McCarthy era and the red scare that he seeks to direct towards Democrats who the Felon and his prostitute-like imitators are calling "communists". Like all else he says, these attacks are untrue and hopefully outside of hard core Kool-Aid drinkers in the MAGA base voters will see both the lies and the desperation as the Felon's campaign promises of lower prices and no foreign wars remain completely broken.  A column in the New York Times look at the desperate efforts to launch a new red scare against Democrats and progressives.  Her are excerpts:

[The Felon] President Trump knows that he is unpopular. This is why he’s become even more obsessed with election fraud; why he fumed and rambled about the 2020 election for a prime-time audience last week; and why he wants Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill that — in his mind — would make it impossible for Democrats to win the midterm elections.

This is why both he and his Republican allies are throwing everything they have at Democrats in an attempt to find a message that sticks with the public, a message that could help them hold Congress for another two years. And what [the Felon] Trump and the Republican Party have settled on to spearhead their campaign against the Democratic Party is the threat of communism.

That’s right: communism. It is unclear exactly what Trump has in mind when he says “communism,” although there is no reason to think that the president could distinguish Marxism-Leninism from Maoism or Trotskyism or some other more boutique formulation. Whatever his meaning, the important point is that communism is, to the president, the single greatest threat to the safety, prosperity and integrity of the United States.

“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” he said at a semi-quincentennial event at Mount Rushmore on July 3. “It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

Following the president’s direction, Republican leaders in Congress have also pledged to fight the Red menace, tying it explicitly to the Democratic Party. “The Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, said. One imagines that we’ll soon see Republicans quoting Alexander Kolchak and waving the banner of the White Army.

It is clear that all of this is a response to the recent success of insurgent left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries, especially those with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America. These candidates, who won Democratic primaries — most recently Melat Kiros of Colorado — are not communists. D.S.A.’s origins, in fact, lie in part with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, whose leadership came from the anti-communist left.

In any case, Republicans hope to wield the public’s longstanding hostility to socialism as a weapon against Democratic Party politicians, whether or not they fall on the left or call themselves democratic socialists.

But Americans are neither as hostile to socialism as they once were nor as positive toward capitalism as they have been in the past. More important than polling, however, is the fact that for many Americans the “communist threat” is a total abstraction. There are tens of millions of voters (this columnist included) who were young children when the Soviet Union fell. There are millions more who weren’t yet born. For these Americans, “communism” is as much a concern as “the missile gap” or the Contras. It is completely unresponsive to the circumstances of their lives — to their struggles with housing, health care and the overall cost of living. As a message, “communism” is out of touch with reality; more likely to drive voters away from Trump and the Republican Party than push them into their arms.

It is fitting that Trump, a student of Roy Cohn, would turn to Red-baiting as he fights for political survival. Cohn was a prosecutor in the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, where he played a major role in McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts. The president, who isn’t known for his embrace of new ideas, might see anti-communism as an easy path to victory.

What’s more, Trump’s turn to Cold War-era rhetoric, and specifically that of the Second Red Scare, is of a piece with the overall dynamic of his administration.

You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and re-enact the most atrocious moments in American history . . . The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Its racist nativism is a throwback to both the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — which it recently defended in its tendentious critique of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History — and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which effectively closed the country to African, Asian and Southern and Eastern European immigrants for more than 40 years. Its use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration.

Of course this president, and this administration, would want to emulate the anti-communist hysterias of the 1910s and the 1950s. Of course he and his administration would want to resurrect the fear, bitterness and paranoia that marked the hunt for alleged subversives.

Both Trump and his movement are, as you might surmise from the slogan “Make America Great Again,” fundamentally derivative. His vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past.

The [Felon's] president’s attempt to drum up a third Red Scare is certain to fail. If it matters — if it is interesting — it is only because it gives us a glimpse into the stunted imagination of a man who seems to value only the worst this country has to offer.

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Trump Is Caught in the Trap He Set

Three more servicemembers have lost their lives in the Felon's war of choice and the Pentagon is not forthcoming with information concerning troops injured as the war heats up - also concerning, the Pentagon wants to hide spending - as the price of oil inches up more everyday.  Should Iranian allies in Yemen close the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, prices could skyrocket and $4.00/gallon gas might look appealing compared to what Americans and others might face.  Meanwhile, the Felon continues to lack a consistent rationale for the war and seemingly has no way out of the mess of his own creation, having dismissed warnings of how Iran might respond.  Who knows how many lives may yet be lost or how much damage could be done to both the U.S. and global economies. Obviously, Iran's military capabilities have not been destroyed or decimated as the Felon has claimed and Iran's drones are a far less expensive means to inflict damage that America's incredibly expensive fighter jets and missiles.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at where the Felon and the country find themselves and the lack of an apparent exit from the war that will not count as a defeat. Here are highlights:

You could, if you were so inclined, tell a story of the Donald Trump era via memes. Pepe the Frog, “This Is Fine” Dog, “Covfefe,” Leopards Eating People’s Faces—things of that nature. One of the essential examples would be an October 2016 Twitter post by Jesse Farrar, parodying the enduring belief that the walls were closing in on Trump . . .

The conviction that Trump was on the brink of final collapse remained popular in some quarters for years after Farrar’s post—as anyone who remembers the fevered anticipation around Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report and the subsequent letdown can attest—but at some moment, the tweet transformed from a riposte to naive pundits into a shorthand for the strangeness of American politics.

During the previous decade, Trump weathered a series of scandals that would likely have been career-ending for any other politician: the Access Hollywood tape, in which he boasted that he would “grab” women “by the pussy” without consent; the firing of then–FBI Director James Comey; his indiscreet sharing of intelligence with Russian officials in the Oval Office; an impeachment for attempting to extort Ukraine; an egregious approach to COVID-19, followed by a bout with the disease that reportedly nearly killed him; a series of attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection; his absconding with sensitive documents to Mar-a-Lago after his term ended; and 34 felony convictions. Despite all of this, Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. The notion of his invincibility became canon. Perhaps Trump himself came to believe it.

But the war in Iran has dealt a serious blow to the idea that Trump can slip out of any bind easily. Over the past three days, three American service members died in that conflict: two in Jordan, where Iranian missiles struck a military base, and a third in Iraq, killed by debris during the intentional destruction of an Iranian drone. The official American death toll in the Iran war now sits at 17.

That number is low—still less, for example, than the toll from the 1983 invasion of Grenada—although the military appears to have been keeping quiet just how many troops have been injured. . . . “Trump has offered no comprehensive explanation about why his administration is ordering U.S. military personnel to put their lives on the line.”

And the death toll may begin to rise, because Trump appears to be on the verge of being drawn into a larger war. As the defense analyst Brynn Tannehill wrote in The Atlantic last week, the president faces only bad choices. The United States could effectively cede control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, accepting a fee system that breaks global precedent and centuries of American policy and granting a hostile power the opportunity to close an important shipping lane at any future moment. Or the White House could embark on a major ground war, because fighting over the past few months has shown the limitations of relying on air power. That would be politically hazardous, likely lead to more American deaths, and suck the U.S. into a long-running presence in the region, and it might still fail. Meanwhile, the conflict threatens to grow even larger as Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen threaten to close some traffic to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

He’s offered different answers about whether one goal is regime change, and whether that has been achieved. He has suggested that the purpose is to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, even though it was open before the war and even though that may no longer be manageable. The administration has also struggled to explain to skeptical members of Congress why it needs more war funding.

In short, Trump’s misadventure in Iran is a story of hubris. The president didn’t bother to plan or consider the dangers before he started a war, and now it has spiraled to a point where even he seems unable to find a way to wriggle out of a jam. For the first time in a very long time—to some extent, the first time in his life—Trump appears to be facing the consequences of his actions.

The costs are measured not only in the blood of American service members but also in the deaths of Iranian civilians and of merchant mariners trying to sail through the Persian Gulf, in the damage to the global economy, and in the erosion of American alliances and a long-standing global order. Being confronted with a snare that he can’t escape must be unpleasant for Trump, but people around the globe will face misery because of it.

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