Trump Lost Badly in Iran

The distraction of the shooter at the White House Correspondent Dinner over the weekend will likely be short lived and soon the mainstream media's focus will return to the Felon's war of choice in Iran and, of course, the Epstein files.  The former is likely the Felon's biggest concern at the moment as he finds himself in a mess of his own creation that now seemingly has no likely good solution that can somehow be spun into a "win."   The leadership in Iran seems to realize that the Felon has put himself and America in an untenable position where the longer the conflict goes on the more damage that will be done to America economically and the Felon's party of self-prostituting Republicans.  A piece at Salon looks at how badly the Felon miscalculated his Iran adventure while ignoring warnings that Iran would do exactly what it has done: block the Straight of Hormuz and send oil prices soaring (oil is just shy of $97.00/barrel at the moment). Meanwhile, the Felon finds himself faced with a proposal by Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the USA lifting its blockade and ending the war - something that would provide no "victory" to the Felon.  Here are highlights from Salon:

There is no way to sugarcoat the epic scale of America’s humiliation in Donald Trump’s disastrous and irrational war with Iran, or the damaging global effects that will endure years or decades into the future. With the “stable genius” and “extraordinarily brilliant person” in the White House visibly decompensating into impotent rage and erratic burst of mania, there is no obvious exit strategy that will allow him to declare victory (as he must, for interwoven and deeply unfortunate psychological and political reasons).

This war has accomplished exactly none of its stated objectives — even with those constantly shifting and being defined downward — and has almost certainly strengthened the regional power and global reputation of the Iranian regime, despite weeks of bombing and the deaths of much of its leadership. Trump’s options would seem to be a negotiated settlement that might, at best, approximate the pre-war status quo; a potentially catastrophic military escalation favored by literally no one except Lindsey Graham, the Israeli government and a handful of right-wing Iranian expatriates; or an indefinite continuation of the current phony war over the Strait of Hormuz, in hopes that the Iranian economy will suffocate before global recession sets in (an outcome that may be unavoidable no matter what else happens).

That’s a doubleplus-ungood list of options, and while it’s easy to say that the first one presents the most rational outcome for all sides, it’s not clear that even matters. . . . [the Felon] Trump is “quite fed up” with this war and eager to make a deal, reports Amos Harel of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, but is trapped between Benjamin Netanyahu on one side and Iran’s new war-hardened governing faction on the other, both of whom are more than willing to fight on.

We know Trump wants something he can sell as a big win to his dead-ender congressional loyalists and his declining support base, and that Netanyahu still hopes for an all-out U.S.-led war of destruction (although Harel reports that the Israeli leader now understands that’s unlikely). Opinions about what Iran’s new leaders want are all over the map, but in the words of Foreign Policy columnist Michael Hirsh, they now seem to be “calling the shots.”

From the beginning of this conflict, the Iranians identified the fundamental weakness of U.S. strategy, which was based on a litany of false assumptions, starting with the premise that total victory could be achieved with air power (something that has never happened in the history of warfare) and that killing Iran’s senior leaders would cause the regime to surrender or collapse.

Hai Nguyen, a Vietnam War scholar at the Harvard Kennedy school, told Hirsh that he saw history literally repeating itself. Like the Viet Cong of 50-odd years ago, the Iranians have perceived the American superpower’s Achilles heel: “They understand that the U.S. could drop thousands of tons of bombs, but it does not possess the patience to withstand a prolonged war.” . . . . the Iranian regime is observing a time-honored principle attributed to Napoleon: Never interrupt your opponent when he’s making a mistake.

Tucker Carlson . . . . is probably correct to describe the Iran war as the worst single decision made by any American president in his lifetime. It brings together all the worst tendencies of U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s — overconfidence, bad intelligence, inflated bluster and outright lies as a cover for irresolution and incompetence, xenophobic hubris, a misguided reliance on technical superiority and outmoded strategy, and a fundamental failure to understand the nature of asymmetrical warfare — as implemented by a team that not only failed to learn from history but proudly proclaimed that history was woke and for girls.

Whether or not this war will outdo the long-term destructive consequences of George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq is a question for future historians to sort out (should there be any). But these military misadventures 23 years apart already appear as aspects of the same historical phenomenon, despite the ardent claims of the Trump administration and its defenders that everything is different now because real men are in charge. Both these wars represent desperate, doomed efforts to reverse the inexorable process of imperial decline that’s been underway for several decades, and has constrained or dictated the actions of at least the last five American presidents.

Let’s come back around to Tucker Carlson, whose self-serving reverse heel-turn feels partway between the old saw about rats leaving a sinking ship and a harbinger of the apocalypse. Two years ago, Carlson conducted a very long and very strange interview with Vladimir Putin, who seemed almost visibly to conclude that America wasn’t sending its top talent. It’s worth watching the whole thing, if you’re exactly the right kind of sicko. Toward the end of their conversation, Putin says that this era of history will be determined by one question: Whether America will decline in a gradual and orderly fashion, or catastrophically and all at once. We don’t have to hand it to him either, but it’s a good question and the answer is now becoming apparent.