Week 58
By
He did it. Along with Bibi. And now we will have to live with it.
He did it during negotiations for the third time. The second time was also with Iran, the last strike that he wanted to believe obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. No country can believe that American negotiations mean anything.
An early report is that 85 girls were killed in a strike on a girls’ school. So we have war crimes within an illegal war. Congratulations to Maureen Dowd and everyone else who believed Hillary was the Hawk.
Required caution: early reports are likely to be wrong.
Iran is retaliating. There was a strike on a US airbase, and the Strait of Hormuz may be closed. Iran warned that they would retaliate and that closing the Strait was one of the things they would do.
Trump did not warn the allies. Last week, the UK refused to allow US operations from their base in Diego Garcia because they were concerned about the illegality of the war.
Trump posted an 8-minute video early this morning. I haven’t found an embeddable version. He said that the purpose of the strikes is to decapitate the regime so that the people can take over the government. It was almost word for word what Paul Wolfowitz said back in 2003.
They are running the war from the secure and well-equipped base in Mar-a-Lago. Hopefully the military has better facilities.
A fair number of people in the military probably support this attack. Back in 2003, word was that Real Men™ go to Iran.
Trump repeated over the past week that Iran just had to say that they wouldn’t ever have a nuclear weapon. But the negotiations included missile programs and support for nonstate actors as well. The JCPOA negotiations did not include those two because they would have been too much. But Iran has said they won’t ever have a nuclear weapon. Ali Khameni has said that nuclear weapons are forbidden by Islam, and Iran’s ratification of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is another way to say they won’t ever have a nuclear weapon.
What Trump wants, though, is more than that. Iran made an agreement with President Barack Obama. Trump pulled the US out of that agreement to give the Iranians the opportunity to come to him with tears in their eyes, big strong men, begging him to take their nuclear program. They didn’t, so to him they deserve what they get.
I keep thinking something like this.
The war is entirely Trump’s choice.
Readings: A wargame from 2004, Paul Musgrave from today
***
Other things that happened this week:
- Supreme Court ruled against Trump tariffs
- State of the Union speech
- Abrego Garcia hearing
- Anthropic – DOD fight
- Netflix drops bid for Warner Brothers Discovery
- Zohran Mamdani charms Trump into releasing a Columbia student picked up by ICE.
Follow the court-watchers for the details of the lawsuits. Chris Geidner (LawDork, Bluesky), Roger Parloff (Lawfare, Bluesky), and the Just Security tracker.
Let’s stay away from hypotheticals, as usual. I have mixed feelings about posting pets today, but do what you want. I have little patience for “distraction” discourse. Attacking Iran is terrible. So are other things. Trump bounces from one to another. It’s not distraction, just one horror after another.
150 more weeks to go. What are you doing?
Previous weeks: Week 10, Week 20, Week 30, Week 40, Week 50, Week 51, Week 52, Week 53, Week 54, Week 55, Week 56, Week 57