Let’s start with yesterday’s report by Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism.
Iran War: Trump Impotence – WSJ Reports Desire to Exit if Strait Opened, Netanyahu Rejects Gaza “Deal”, Pentagon Issues 21-Day Demand for Plans for More Weapons as Iran and Ansar Allah Keep Attacking
Though the Iran conflict is not in a very hot kinetic phase, the accumulating pressures, both military and economic, have built to a point where they are generating desperate-looking from the Trump Administration. And that is before considering that Ukraine is now in visibly desperate straits. Russia now has air supremacy. Ukraine has effectively zero air defenses left. Russia has blockaded Odessa, which handled nearly 90% of Ukraine’s grain and oilseed exports, and is also essential to steel exports, weapons supplies, and other commerce. Nearby ports can’t adequately compensate, even before getting to Russian action. Barges are no workout either, particularly given low water levels in many channels now. Russia is also attacking Ukraine’s logistics centers after Ukraine engaged in the cute stunt of striking Wildberries warehouses (Russia’s Amazon analogue). If Russia were to be so kind as to reduce the severity of a humanitarian crisis over the winter, it would behoove them to make living conditions so lousy now as to get civilians to depart before serious cold set in. That might also usefully generate “Who lost Ukraine” debates in the runup to the US midterms.
Back to the main event. It’s entirely possible that the uncharacteristic absence of Trump threats to reduce to rubble is a deception before his oft-threatened attack. Before, Trump had the cover of negotiations for his chicanery. But his team may hope that going quiet might do in getting Iran to relax its military vigilance.
We’ll turn to how Trump is being checked on multiple Iran matters at once, and then turn to the question of why oil (as opposed to refined product) supplies don’t seem to be as tight as many experts posited. The short answer to that is the data on private inventories ex the US is terrible and so they may have been higher than believed.
If the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, Trump is even more eager to find a way out of the Iran war than when he signed the Memorandum of Understanding on June 17. But his appreciation of how badly cooked the US goose is seems to be wanting.
Again, it is not clear that the current halt in US attacks is a new normal, even in the face of the new lead Wall Street Journal story, Trump Thought Opening the Strait of Hormuz Was Imminent. Iran Had Other Plans. At the top, it breaks that Trump’s had had a climbdown scheme, that of course Iran would simply “open” the Strait if the US stopped the war and took its toys home (not unpacked further but one assumes at best only recently mobilized forces would decamp). It depicts Trump as recognizing that Iran has upped its demands, meaning no face-saving exit is possible. The article effectively says that Trump will now fall back on economic warfare and can be “patient”. That means US still expects Iran to break economically soon. Even though the US will suffer less, its pain tolerance is low and war-inflicted economic costs are rising. The significance of Iran withstanding 47 years of fierce efforts against the revolutionary government still has not sunk in …
Continue at Naked Capitalism …
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Like a few other invaluable commentators, Yves attributes more agency than I would to POTUS 47. Getting its man into the Oval Office is a high stakes racket into which billions of dollars are sunk by a US ruling class not without its off-ramps should he step out of line and need reining in or contract severance. For the latter, remedies include the 25th amendment and the JFK.
Ergo, we may conclude from the fact of neither of those last having been applied that either the corporate oligarchies which beneath a fast thinning veneer of democracy rule the US approve of Trump or are so divided as to be incapable of decisive action.
In the meantime, the Tweedleblue tag team of that duopoly is no less committed to destroying the Islamic Republic than the Tweedlereds. (Psst: if you think that’s because they love freedom and dislike mediaevalist theocracies, I’ve a bridge to sell you.) The Democrat aristocracy’s beef with Trump’s Iran stance isn’t that the February 28 attack is by every metric as slam-dunk a case of waging a war of aggression as the one for which Nazi leaders Ribbentrop, Doenitz, Keitel and Jodl went to the gallows (Himmler and Goering electing jail cell cyanide on the eve of their own date with Mr Pierrepoint) …
… it’s that the tangerine narcissist did so on the back of dire planning. 1 Which is a vein Andrew Damon was mining, also yesterday, on the WSWS site.
As Iran crisis deepens, Democrats condemn Trump for having “lost this war”
Amid a deepening crisis of the US war against Iran, leading Democrats have intensified their critique of the Trump administration from the right, accusing it of having failed to secure the interests of US imperialism.
“Donald Trump has lost this war,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “America is weaker. Iran is stronger.”
Blaming US President Donald Trump for mismanaging the war, Murphy made clear: “I and my colleagues will be ready to provide the funding to replenish the stores of munitions.”
The war, he warned, has “allowed Russia and China to imagine things that they couldn’t have imagined earlier.”
Murphy’s statements echoed those of Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, who demanded of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at a Senate hearing on July 21: “You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war. Win the war” …
Read all about it at WSWS.org …
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- Plausible reasons for the lack of planning, and seeming disregard for the high likelihood of Iran closing the Hormuz, include the adrenaline rush of success in abducting Nicolás Maduro, genuine belief in America’s own propaganda of the Islamic Republic as a house of cards easily toppled from within given a push from without, and the near certainty of Zionists, Jewish and/or Christian, having Epstein kompromat.
The Democrats always were the “War Party.” Currently they are far more invested in war and hegemony and cheap jingo rhetoric than the Republicans who prefer to make easy money, tear the wings of butterflies and torture children.
So both parties appeal to the same shrinking market of fellow sadists at a time when mass apathy and cynicism is being worn away by rapidly declining living standards and dreams of security and happiness that have turned into nightmares.
Quite.