Welcome back! In this instalment of Who Wants To Be An International Tough Guy, contestant Fat Donny has been posed a particularly thorny one, and would now like to use one of his lifelines. He would like to call a two week Time Out.
So first, let’s just admit that in the realm of geoplolitical brinksmanship and international military crises, almost anything’s possible, and nobody, however sage, has a reliable crystal ball. Thus it remains possible, I suppose, that what’s left of Iran’s battered leadership will agree to enter into substantive talks despite the ongoing Israeli bombardment, the personal death threats delivered over Truth Social, and the general futility of entering into agreements with His Orange Fickleness, and decide to fold while the folding’s good, giving Trump the unconditional surrender he demands, or at least something Donald can characterize as such. As I write this, the foreign ministers of Britain, Germany and France are meeting with “senior Iranian officials” in Geneva to discuss an end to the war between Iran and Israel. Who knows, it could come to something, though the Europeans aren’t the ones who need to be at the table, and it’s not terribly helpful that Israel has meanwhile vowed to step up (step up?!!! How?!!!) its air campaign, with Israeli defence minister Israel Katz saying that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “can no longer be allowed to exist”. That’s not the sort of conciliatory signal one usually sends if a peace deal could be something to which one might be amenable, but we’ll see what the Europeans take to Donald, who, as we all know, is reliably keen to receive the advice and recommendations of his allies. You never know, this two-week decision window that Trump just opened for himself might turn out to be the product of some savvy and fruitful strategic thought –
Crap, I just opened up the New York Times, and the Gray Lady reports this:
Jesus Beverly Christ, the talks fell apart already? Shit in a basket. And isn’t it just like those perfidious Iranians to demand that the Israelis stop blowing the crap out of everything that moves or stays still before they come back to the table? Of course, doing so would, from the Israeli perspective, be completely silly, if the conclusion has been reached that the only answer now, as ever, is to win militarily and effect regime change. Why give the bastards a breathing space to regroup and yak at us some more? This thing is on. It’s happening. The Mullahs have got to go. No turning back now, that’s what Bibi says.
If Donald was serious about giving diplomacy a chance, he might now yank on Netanyahu’s choke chain a bit, but let’s not count on that. First, Trump is too much of a mewling, pants-wetting weakling to boss Netanyahu around – if anyone’s getting his choke chain yanked, it’s Our Donny – and second, Trump didn’t call time so he could run down the diplomatic track for a little while. Probably he panicked, is all. He’s realized he may just have painted himself into a corner. His threats haven’t worked, and now, having set himself up as the true mastermind behind Israel’s pursuit of policy by other means, while burnishing his tough guy credentials with schoolyard taunts and absolutist policy pronouncements made over his fetid, farcical, faux-Twitter social media platform, he’s left himself with minimal wiggle room, and now faces the awful prospect of having to follow through. He doesn’t like where that goes. No, not one little bit. Wait! I Don’t wanna! Waaaaahhh!!
Look, we all know by this point that “I’ll tell you in two weeks” is Trumpspeak for I don’t have a clue, and I’m hoping you’ll forget the whole frickin’ thing while I manufacture a different shiny object for you to look at. Two weeks is the magic Trumpian temporal reset. With Donald, when he’s got nothing, can’t can’t come up with anything, and isn’t hearing anything from anybody else as he looks balefully around at the blank faces of the idiots in his Cabinet, the next move is as predictable as the tides: he tells you he’ll get back to you in two weeks. A new health care plan to replace Obamacare? He’ll tell you in a couple of weeks. A final decision on tariffs? Try back in 14 days. Infrastructure week? Won’t be this week, but he’ll have an announcement two weeks from now. It’s what he does. It’s as hackneyed a go-to move as his “sir” stories, and every bit as full of old rope. Even the useless corporate media have caught on to this, as can be seen in these headlines from Axios, the Times, and MSNBC.
Man, Bibi must be having kittens. Either he and Donald were in cahoots from the get-go, and now the old orange bastard is reneging on the deal, or he thought himself clever, starting a war on his own initiative that he knew a stunned and taken-by-surprise Donald would then have to finish, but now the dumbass won’t finish it.
Either way, what a ludicrous cock-up. What a three-ring clusterfuck.
Not that an attack of the yips isn’t called for at this point. On the contrary. There’s any number of reasons why a full scale war with Iran would be a dangerous gambit that threatens to spiral out of control and drag America into a bloody quagmire, and it may be that Donald is beginning, too late, to discern just a few of them. To wit:
Let’s suppose that going in with a few dozen successful sorties from B-2s dropping Massive Ordinance Penetrators would put a permanent end to the Iranian nuclear program, if the USAF can pull it off. The rub here is that they might not be successful. Maybe the USAF can’t pull it off, not quite. The premise of most commentary, including my own, has been that if the Americans want to dig the Iranian facilities out from under the mountains where they’re hiding, the USAF has the bombs for the job, but there are experts out there warning that it might not be so. The facilities at the key site of Fordow are very deep, constructed under several hundred feet of solid rock, and fortified by God knows how much super-hardened, steel-reinforced concrete (the whole defensive structure being designed with the assistance, it seems, of the North Koreans). It’s not like you can perform the aerial equivalent of a drive-by, drop a couple of MOPs, and Bob’s your uncle. Successive strikes, each dropping more massive bombs precisely into the holes drilled by the prior ones, will probably be necessary, and even that might not work. Failing obliteration of the underground complexes, they could perhaps simply seal them in by collapsing the entrances and exits, though that doesn’t sound like a permanent solution. I just don’t know. Look, for what little it’s worth, based on everything I’ve been able to glean from the best open sources, I think the Americans know how to get the job done, but let’s face it, actually I don’t know Jack. Maybe they actually don’t think they can do it, and maybe they’re telling Donald they don’t.
Anyway, a discrete set of air strikes almost certainly can’t do the job. You can’t just bomb the nuclear program out of existence, one-and-done. You can set it back, maybe for years, and maybe that’s worth doing, but as long as the current regime stays in place they’ll find a way to get it back up and running, probably with renewed energy now that they know they can’t deter Israeli-American aggression with conventional weaponry. They’ll dig in deeper, disperse things more widely, build in more redundancies. Then the “kinetic option” will have to be pursued again, and again, year after year, much as Coalition forces had to keep bombing Saddam’s military in Iraq repeatedly, year after year, after the victorious yet still inconclusive end of the first Gulf War. Which means –
The only real non-diplomatic solution is regime change. Which, oops, shit, really? Regime change, even when successful, is often – usually? – a godawful mess, and can leave you with something even worse. Remember Iraq? How did regime change work out in Afghanistan? Or Libya? Worse, it’s not entirely clear that you can achieve regime change from the air. Wasn’t that the lesson of all those years trying to keep Saddam at bay after Desert Storm? Won’t troops have to go in, just like they did in Iraq, finally, to get rid of current leadership? Hands up everybody who wants a land war in a mountainous country of 90 million people. Besides –
While we set about trying to topple the Iranian government, they might just decide to, oh, I don’t know, resist. They can attack US facilities all over the Middle East. They can get the allies they still have left, like the Houthis in Yemen and Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq – Israel hasn’t wiped out all of their proxies – to make painful, bloody mischief. They can stop up the bottleneck at the Strait of Hormuz, through which flows something like 25% of the world oil supply. They can activate terrorist cells which almost certainly sit ready throughout the Western world. Nobody seems to be talking about it, but Iran is also said to possess substantial cyberwar capabilities.
This could start to hurt. It could cost trillions. It could take years. It might not even succeed short term, let alone in the long run.
Maybe more important to Trump than any of that, most of which Donald may appreciate only dimly, if at all, is that the Base hates the whole idea. Hates, hates, hates it. They’ll hate it even more when gas prices shoot up, American service personnel start to die, trillions in tax money start swirling round the bowl, terrorists start blowing up train stations and power plants, and everything they thought Trump’s second term was going to be about gets thrown overboard while Trump’s clown car of a Federal Government apparatus dedicates all of its highly limited bandwidth to fighting the next Forever War and managing all the foreign and domestic blowback. Too bad DOGE decided to make so many cuts to so many vital agencies! Don’t forget, too, that if America commits to war, there goes the Big Beautiful Bill (good riddance, but this would be a real heart-breaker for Donald). You can’t cut trillions in new tax breaks for the rich while committing to spend trillions more on a war of choice, not now, what with the debt already close to out of control, and Donald’s disastrous tariff policies putting upward pressure on inflation and interest rates, while the general instability and lawlessness fostered by all of Trump’s other policy initiatives dampens down international demand for U.S. T-Bills.
Quite the pickle, Mr. President! Yup, that’s a fine kettle of fish, as we used to say back East. A real dog’s breakfast. And you know what? It’s not going away just because you clap your hands over your ears and sing la-la-la. You’re going to have to make some choices, or at least bow to the inevitable logic of the choices Bibi has already made for you. As Will Ferrel used to say when he was impersonating Bush the Younger, Presidenting is hard. If you don’t like the assorted shit soufflés and double turdburgers that fill out the whole of the current menu, well, maybe you should have thought about that before you made all those moronic choices, not the least of which was running again in 2024, though don’t let’s forget tearing up Obama’s nuclear deal during your first term, which you did, let’s cut the crap, just because it was Obama’s.
I’m not saying this can’t possibly work out in our favour. Heck, I’m not even saying that an eventual negotiated deal is now off the table for good. I don’t know, and neither does anybody else. I’m just saying that now isn’t the time to start debating the pros and cons, and from where I sit, it sure looks like the possible avenues out of this mess are closing off with alarming speed. So hear this, Mr. President: once you get off the boat, you damned well better be ready to go all the way.
UPDATE: Well, Trump took the plunge. If, as I derisively insisted, the two-week time out was just Trump getting the yips, for some reason he got over them. Did Bibi get him on the phone and twist his arm? Was this always the plan? Did intelligence come in making it imperative to act now, if action was to have any effect? Is this just Trump being mercurial and dangerously all over the place? Or what? We may not know, exactly, for years. We’ll see what Donald claims in his address to the nation. One way or another, though, America’s in the war.
the needlefish 