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The Felon Has No Idea How to End the War With Iran

The Felon and Israel's Netanyahu launched their war of choice against Iran with no clear, consistent goals and no clear end game and exit strategy.  For Netanyahu, the reality is that constant war helps keep him from facing criminal prosecution in Israel and keeps him in political power.  As Gaza has shown, he has no qualms about murdering thousands of civilians. As for the Felon, the reasons for launching the war vary daily, if not hourly, and are inconsistent and often conflicting. Who knows the true motivation, although it must be noted that during the days just prior to the launch of the war against Iran, the Epstein files were once again dominating the news and damaging information about the Felon had been released. Whatever the reasoning driving the Felon, it is increasingly clear that he has no exit strategy in sight, any boots on the ground in Iran would be difficult and likely unpopular on the home front.  One thing is clear: the ongoing war will lead to far higher energy prices if the Felon's latest claim that the war is "almost over" proves to be yet another lie.   If the war does drag on, the higher energy prices will cause more angst among Republicans worried about the November mid-terms.  A column in the New York Times looks at the lack of a clear exit plan:

In September 1996, I visited Tehran for the first time. I stayed at the Homa Hotel, formerly a Sheraton. I wrote at the time that fixed above the door in the lobby was a sign that read, in English, “Down with U.S.A.” As I pondered that sign, I remember thinking something like: Wow, that’s not graffiti! That’s firmly attached. That won’t come down easily.

Now, we’re more than a week into the war with Iran launched by President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and the biggest question I have is this: What if the necessary is impossible? What if the transformation of Iran is so much more important than the war’s critics admit, but so much more difficult than the war’s designers understand?

Yes, nothing would improve the prospects of the people of Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Israel more than removing the Islamic regime in Tehran.

But what if that regime is also so embedded — in mayoralties, schools, police stations, government jobs, the banking system, the military, neighborhood paramilitaries — that, despite its unpopularity with a majority of Iranians, it can’t be removed without plunging the entire Iranian landmass, about a sixth the size of the United States and home to 90 million people, into chaos? What if the only quick alternative to Iran’s Islamic autocracy is not democracy but disorder on an epic scale?

Nothing underscores the embeddedness of this regime more than the fact that Iran just replaced its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, killed early in the war, with his son Mojtaba Khamenei, said to be another hard-liner.

[E]vents are telling me that Trump and Netanyahu should take their military achievement and call it a day, at least for now. Why?

First, it is obvious that Trump and Netanyahu started this war without any clear endgame in mind.

Netanyahu, I suspect, would probably be happy to turn Iran into another big Gaza and to just keep “mowing the grass,” or periodically putting down threats there, as he was so inclined to do in Gaza. As the Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel put it: “A few months ago, Netanyahu described Israel as a modern Sparta. But to preserve its militarist identity, a Sparta requires permanent military friction — of a kind that would also enable its ruler to remain in power — regardless of the price it exacts from the country.”

Keeping Israel at war with Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah enables Netanyahu to drag out his corruption trial and avoid a commission of inquiry for his failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion. (If you think that is too cynical, you don’t know Netanyahu.)

For his part, Trump has been all over the map when talking about the morning after in Iran — and saying truly ridiculous and often contradictory things that reveal a commander in chief who is just making it up as he goes along. One day it’s regime change, one day not; one day he doesn’t care about Iran’s future, the next day he will have a say in choosing the country’s next leader; one day he’s open to negotiations, the next day he is demanding “unconditional surrender.”

I thought the Middle East analyst Hussein Ibish summed up the Trump strategy in Iran concisely when he wrote: “It goes like this: The U.S. and Israel bomb and destroy assets. Then (fill in the blank) Iranians will secure (fill in the blank) political change that will achieve (fill in the blank) U.S. war aims.”

Would you invest in a company whose leader, without warning, embarked on a radically new business strategy and then, in the next week, described its goals in five different ways? That is a flashing red light.

That said, Trump and Netanyahu appear to have significantly knocked back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and its ability to project power through its navy, air force and missiles. That is good for the Iranian people, given how many have been killed by the regime controlling that power, and it is good for the region. The wise thing to do now is pause and see how this plays out on what I call “the morning after the morning after.”

But the morning after the morning after, I’d bet on an explosive debate and infighting among the ruling elite in Tehran. Many voices of the people, merchants and reformers in the regime will surely declare to Iran’s hard-liners: “Look at the disaster you have brought upon us. If this is a great victory by Iran, what does defeat look like? We have lost our savings, our economy, our environment, much of our military and the friendship of all our immediate neighbors. What future do we have?”

Just consider the infighting we are already seeing between Iran’s president and hard-line military factions over the wisdom of Iran attacking its Arab neighbors in hopes of getting them to pressure Washington to stop the war. Who knows what could emerge between the Iranian people and the regime, and within the regime, over time when the war stops and the true bill for Iran’s extreme behavior comes due.

To be sure, no one can guarantee that this morning-after-the-morning-after politics will end in a change in the regime or of the regime. But it has every bit as much a chance as just bombing Tehran and Beirut into rubble and hoping a popular uprising will emerge.

We are already seeing a desalination plant in Iran being bombed, and, in retaliation, Iran striking Bahrain’s desalination plant. If that trend spreads, people are going to run out of water very fast. The potential for Iran’s becoming an even bigger environmental disaster than the ayatollahs have already made it is very real; no one will be able to live there.

Iran’s regime is a disgrace — a menace to its own people, to its neighbors and to a rules-based order as much as any other nation. I pray that it can pass into history soon, at a reasonable cost, and unlock the Iranian people’s enormous potential to contribute to humanity.

But endlessly bombing it, destroying more and more military and civilian infrastructure and just hoping that Iranians seeking democracy will come together — with barely any internet to communicate with, and where moving anywhere on the roads can be deadly dangerous — and topple this entrenched killer regime on their own … well, show me where that has ever happened in history.

My guess is that this regime will break only from the top, which will be a process that will start only after there is a cease-fire.

The best that the Trump-Netanyahu bombs-away strategy can do is start that process; just tilting Iran onto a better track where it is less of a threat to its own people and neighbors would be a significant achievement. The worst the strategy can do is so devastate Iran with endless aerial bombardments that it becomes ungovernable for anyone. That would be a disaster of incalculable proportions.

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Americans Are Paying the Price for the Myth of Trump’s Competence

Oil prices are soaring - oil has hit $110 per barrel and is rising - the stock markets around the world are falling, American consumer prices are rising as is inflation, and new job creation is abysmal.  On top of this, America is blowing through close to a $1 billion per day in Iran and munitions supplies are falling. All of this disaster is thanks to the Felon and his circle of incompetent sycophants who make up his cabinet - Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense/War is frightening - and the bootlickers in the Republican Party.  One has to wonder if some in the MAGA base are belatedly beginning to realize that the cost of "owning the libs" and pushing white supremacy and privilege is perhaps far higher than they anticipated. As icing on the cake, report are that Russia is aiding Iran in targeting American troops and assets, something the Felon is ignoring.  Perhaps gas at or over $5.00/gallon may soon have some of the big pickup driving MAGA bubbas screaming and questioning whether killing Muslims has been worth the cost, but I will not be holding my breath..  A piece at The New Republic looks at the myth of the Felon's competence.  Here are excerpts:

At some point, early Wednesday morning, the cost of the Iran War will top $10 billion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a paper last week pegging the cost of this latest misadventure at $891 million a day. I’ve seen higher estimates, but CSIS is a respected nonpartisan outfit, so let’s go with their number for now. The report states that the vast majority of this money had not been previously budgeted, especially the spending on munitions. One Patriot interceptor missile costs close to $4 million, and we’re apparently burning through them. And “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth promises that we’re just getting revved up.

Donald Trump may have told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the weekend that the war was “already won.” But also over the weekend, a pre-war intelligence report was leaked to two Washington Post reporters showing that the National Intelligence Council, a panel of independent intel experts, seems to think that dislodging the regime could take a very long time indeed—at $37 million an hour, a rate that is almost sure to rise, especially if ground troops get involved.

Meanwhile, gas prices went up about 60 cents a gallon in the war’s first week. The Dow fell 453 points Friday. (It’s well below 50,000 now, so I guess that means, per Pam Bondi, that we’re now allowed to take the Jeffrey Epstein scandal seriously.) Also on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February. In the year-and-change since Trump returned to office, the economy has added around 140,000 jobs. In a year. The St. Louis Fed estimated last spring that simply to keep pace with the growth in the number of people who age into the labor force, the economy needs to add around 150,000 jobs a month. In other words, everywhere you look, the news isn’t merely bad. It’s terrible.

We’ve seen numerous examples in these last 13 months of Trump’s mendacity and malevolence. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans will never see him that way. There are those who adore him unconditionally, but beyond these dead-enders, there are others who know he’s not a good person but aren’t all that bothered by it.

That’s hard for millions of us to accept. But I hope to God that these people are finally starting to move themselves toward the conclusion that, even if they aren’t that troubled by the mendacity and malevolence, the man is just wildly incompetent. A mountain range of mythmaking has gone into creating the Trump persona over the years; by him, by a pliant business press in his real-estate days, and, since he entered politics, by a right-wing media that would make the old Soviet press agencies blush and a party of cowardly sycophants, most of whom know very well that he shouldn’t be in charge of a high-volume McDonald’s let alone the executive branch of the federal government but would rather let the country collapse than say so. . . . . And I was staggered during the 2024 campaign at all the voters who believed him when he said he’d bring down prices on day one.

Really. Who is that—okay, I’ll supply my own word—stupid? Presidents can’t control prices. Prices—of eggs, beef, oil, refrigerators, computers, you name it—depend on dozens of factors. Xi Jinping, who runs a command economy in a country where most electronics happen to be made, probably has far more control over the prices of refrigerators and computers than any president ever will. The price of beef has more to do with decisions made in Brazil than in Texas—and certainly at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We all learn this in school. So how did so many millions of Americans unlearn it?

Trump is going around now talking as if he has the power to appoint Iran’s next leader, as if it’s no more complicated than naming the next GOP chairman of Mississippi. As if there won’t be factions within the Iranian populace that will fight the elevation of anyone with the taint of a Trump association to the death.  Again, who can possibly believe his nonsense?

His poll numbers are bad. But they’re not nearly as bad as they ought to be. The man is, whatever his other faults, just way in over his head. Maybe Democrats should say that more often. The fact that he’s costing taxpayers a billion dollars a day on a war most of them didn’t want may be a good place to start.

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The Economy’s Warning Light Is Flashing Yellow

MAGA voters and others who voted for the Felon have claimed they voted for the Felon due to concerns about the economy - rather than admit it was the normalization of racism and/or promises that right wing "Christians" would be able to trample on the rights of others that truly attracted them - should be waking up to the reality that the Felon has taken a relative good economy and is running it into a ditch.  Between the Felon's insane tariffs which have increased prices and caused businesses to cut spend due to the new economic uncertainty , cuts to the federal work force and slashing spending put in place by the Biden administration, almost all of the economic indicators are headed in the wrong direction. Now, the Felon's war of choice against Iran is poised to potentially trigger an oil crisis akin to what hit the nation in 1973.  While the Felon continues to claim that the issue of affordability is a "hoax" and that with a war underway "some people die," anyone truly concerned about the economy and the economic struggles of average Americans ought to realize that the Felon has been a disaster for the economy save perhaps those running private concentration camps and manufacturing munitions.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the darkening economic cloud:

The job market is weakening, inflation is still too high, and we’re at serious risk of a once-in-50-years oil shock. This is almost the exact set of conditions that triggered the stagflation of the 1970s, which at the time was America’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. At the moment, the economy is still far from that kind of doomsday scenario, but the direction of travel is disquieting. The economy’s warning lights might not yet be flashing red, but they are certainly flashing yellow.

The jobs report released this morning showed that the U.S. labor market lost 92,000 jobs in February, causing the unemployment rate to rise to 4.4 percent. The numbers for the previous two months, which had suggested decent job growth, were also revised downward: January now showed fewer job gains than initially estimated and December showed overall job losses. These new numbers continue the trend of last month’s revisions, which showed that the economy had added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, a tenth of the jobs that had been added the year prior. Taken together, the numbers suggest that 2025 appears to have had the most months with negative job growth since 2010—the midst of the Great Recession—and that 2026 is off to a similarly slow start. . . . . the native-born unemployment rate has risen by half a percentage point since Trump took office.

The labor market is not the only sign of trouble. A report released by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis on February 20 showed that economic growth slowed dramatically in the final months of last year, from 4.4 percent in the third quarter down to just 1.4 percent, bringing total yearly growth to its lowest level since the pandemic decimated the economy in 2020.

The worst job numbers since the Great Recession, the slowest economic growth since COVID, and the worst inflation in nearly two years—these are not the signs of a healthy economy. And we haven’t even talked about oil yet.

As I wrote this morning, the U.S.-Iran war carries a very high risk of triggering an energy crisis if it lasts for more than a few weeks—the kind of crisis that experts believe could cause the price of oil to double or triple from its current level. That risk jumped almost immediately after my article was published, when Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the war would not end without Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” The price of crude oil promptly shot up to about $90 a barrel and may go higher still. Meanwhile, Qatar’s energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, has begun warning that oil prices could rise as high as $150 a barrel within weeks and that the situation could “could bring down the economies of the world.” As recently as yesterday, the oil markets were responding relatively calmly to the outbreak of war. Now panic might be setting in.

All of this looks eerily similar to the 1970s. At the beginning of the decade, the economy was already struggling. . . . . Then came the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and everything fell apart. Oil prices nearly quadrupled from late 1973 to early 1974. Because so much of the economy is dependent on energy, that caused the price of everything else to go up too. Inflation reached double digits. Meanwhile, consumers pulled back from spending, which, in turn, forced businesses to start laying off workers, setting off a vicious cycle. Economic growth plummeted, unemployment spiked, and the economy fell into recession.

The current situation is not yet 1973 all over again, and it doesn’t have to be. The biggest difference between the situation then and the one we face now is that this time the pain is mostly self-inflicted. When Trump came into office, inflation was falling, job creation was strong, and the economy was projected to grow quickly. Only after the imposition of his global tariffs did things take a turn for the worse, and only after his decision to wage war on Iran did the world face the prospect of a full-blown energy crisis.

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