CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Roaming Charges: Hail the Unconquering Hero!

Still of Eddie Bracken as Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith in Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero. (1944)

Why do we hunger so for vicious things? Our wishes bend the statues of the gods. ― Robert Lowell

Why do we hunger so for vicious things? Our wishes bend the statues of the gods.

Trump began his war on Iran during talks to prevent it. He said it gave him the element of surprise. His missile strikes killed much of the Iranian leadership, including some of the Iranians his team thought might govern the country after the bombing ended. One of his missiles hit a girls’ school, another hit the compound of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, one of the candidates Trump’s people had in mind to run Iran after they killed Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the Iranian religious leader who, austere as he was, preferred negotiation over confrontation.

Trump brushed off talk from some of his advisers that Iran would likely respond by shutting the Strait of Hormuz and attacking other Gulf States that had aided the US, either explicitly or covertly. His aides were right. He and Hegseth were wrong. Then Israel killed Iran’s top negotiators. Suddenly, there was no one left to talk to. Trump claimed that the Iranian military was completely destroyed. Iran responded by downing US fighter jets, drones and surveillance planes. It struck US military bases, ships and a CIA station house.

Trump claimed Iran had no leaders and its government was in a state of collapse. But the new regime quickly coalesced around Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, and took a more radical, uncompromising stance. Trump said the Kurds would invade Iran and arm Iranian dissidents. But the Kurds, burned one too many times by the US, declined. And after US and Israeli missiles hit neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, power plants and oil refineries, the Iranian resistance turned against the US.

The Strait of Hormuz was shut down. The price of oil shot up and Trump’s poll numbers sank. The global economy was sent into crisis. Trump asked the European nations he had refused to warn about his plans to go to war against Iran for help. They refused. Spain, Italy, France, Austria, and Switzerland went further. They either blocked or restricted the use of their airspace, landing rights or shared military bases for airstrikes on Iran.

His top intelligence advisors, Joe Kent and Tulsi Gabbard, either resigned or were pushed out. The CIA and the Pentagon began leaking stories to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that Trump had been fully briefed that Iran would likely respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Trump sent the FBI out to find the leakers and hound the reporters. More stories came about how the US had used half of its THAAD interceptor missiles to defend Israel, at $15.5 million a pop, while Israel held its own missiles in reserve.

Unable to extort former US allies to bail him out or bomb the Iranians into submission, Trump began to manipulate the market, announcing fake cease-fire deals one week, threatening to make Iran glow the next. The market spasmed up and down and people with inside knowledge, including Trump, who made over 3000 trades, cashed in.

The US kept bombing with Iran’s high-tech weapons to little strategic effect. Iran kept responding with low-tech drones, which got progressively more accurate in their targeting. Within two months, the US had largely exhausted its missile supply, while Iran was rebuilding its own Fateh-110 short-range and Shahab-3 medium-range missiles, repairing its missile launchers, and reinforcing the bunkers at its nuclear sites.

Chess not being Trump’s game (no one is quite sure what his game is), he responded to Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz by moving inexplicably to impose his own blockade, thus placing himself in check. He vowed to send the Navy SEALs to steal Iran’s uranium stockpile. He didn’t and they couldn’t have, anyway. Trump threatened to send the Marines to seize Karg Island. He didn’t and they couldn’t have, in any event. The Iranians took note. The price of gas continued rising. Farmers ran out of fertilizer. An airline went bankrupt. Trump shrugged. The costs of the war were peanuts to him.

Trump boasted that Netanyahu would do anything he asked him. Trump said he was in control. But the Israelis acted on their own. They did what they wanted, which was to deepen and widen the war, subverting every timid move toward peace by Trump, by escalating its attacks on Hezbollah, Iran’s ally in southern Lebanon. Fulfilling Thucydides’ prophecy, Trump had walked right into his own trap and Netanyahu, behind his cynical smile, helped to spring it.

Europe was against the war. Russia was against the war. China opposed the war. The global south opposed the war. The American public opposed the war. But Congress did nothing as Trump usurped its constitutional power, refusing even to invoke the War Powers Act. There was no one left to stop the war, which almost no one wanted.

Two months into the war, Trump was desperate to find a way out. He sent his negotiating team, led by JD Vance, to Pakistan. The Iranians rebuffed the offer. Vance came home in disgrace and out of favor with Trump, who now considers him a loser. Trump turned his affections toward Marco Rubio, who wants to invade Cuba, but keeps his distance from Iran, a war even he understands to be unwinnable, plugging his ears against the ravings of the Israel-lobby funded hawks in his own party, as Odysseus did the call of the sirens. So the negotiations were left to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two non-diplomats, whose negotiating style is predicated on the pursuit of their own self-interest.

Trump needs a fig leaf to end the war. He was willing to pay Iran billions to hand over its enriched uranium stockpile. This should be an easy win and could have been under Ali Khamenei, who seemed ready to make just such a concession to prevent war, before they bombed his home. After all, Iran doesn’t need it. There are other ways to acquire nuclear weapons, if it wants them. But at this point, Iran knows it holds all of the cards. Iran, not Trump, holds the fate of the global economy in its hands. Despite the death and destruction Trump and Netanyahu have inflicted, Iran is more powerful now than it was before the war. The cards it holds can’t be bombed away. The US would have to send hundreds of thousands of ground troops to come take them. To Trump’s credit, he’s too squeamish to endure the bloodbath such an invasion would inevitably engender.

Iran is now in the position to dictate the terms of any deal, not the man who hubristically considers himself the “artist” of dealmaking, though most of his deals, like this one, ended in ruins.

On hearing word of a potential agreement between Iran and Oman to control the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump fumed: “Oman will behave just like everyone else, or we’ll have to blow them up.” Even Hegseth looks at Trump as if he’s gone totally bonkers, thinking to himself, “Didn’t I just explain to him that we’d don’t have enough missiles left in the stockpile pile to blow up Berkeley, never mind Oman?”

In this bizarre, circuitous post, which was definitely not written by Trump or his late night helper, Natalie Harp (aka, the Human Printer), the author, perhaps Jared Kushner with Steven Miller’s help, is attempting to extort the Gulf States into joining the defunct Abraham Accords, the precipitating factor behind the Oct 7 attacks, by alleging that Iran (which Trump elsewhere claims to have destroyed militarily) will destroy them…Hard to see this ever happening. Why wouldn’t the Gulf States just cut a deal directly with Iran and leave Trump and Netanyahu in the cold?

Democrats like Cory Booker support invoking the War Powers Act on Iran in order to vote for it. He is attacking Trump from the right for trying to say “Uncle” and calling it quits. ON CNN’s State of the Union, Booker claimed that Trump was being “played as a fool” in negotiations with Iran. “This weak nation has put America in a stalemate.”  Booker said that Trump and Hegseth have run an incompetent war that has failed to prevent Iran from “fueling their terrorist proxies.”

Not to be outflanked by Booker, here’s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz attacking Trump from the Democratic Right:

I am concerned and frustrated, again, over another potential deal, or negotiations for more negotiations, where we’re going to unfreeze Iranian assets and give them billions of dollars to be able to control proxies again and to rebuild their ballistic missile programs, never mind their drone program which has been incredibly deadly and they’ve been increasing their drone capabilities. So this is deeply concerning. Look, I’m glad that Iran, their capability militarily has been degraded, but if what we get from this initial deal is just going back to where we were before, where Iran could not control the Strait of Hormuz, then what has been accomplished?

I am concerned and frustrated, again, over another potential deal, or negotiations for more negotiations, where we’re going to unfreeze Iranian assets and give them billions of dollars to be able to control proxies again and to rebuild their ballistic missile programs, never mind their drone program which has been incredibly deadly and they’ve been increasing their drone capabilities. So this is deeply concerning. Look, I’m glad that Iran, their capability militarily has been degraded, but if what we get from this initial deal is just going back to where we were before, where Iran could not control the Strait of Hormuz, then what has been accomplished?

Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in harmonic alignment with Cory Booker and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, rejects Trump’s deal with Iran…“The government of Israel cannot allow this to happen. This is a bad agreement. This is an agreement that can harm the State of Israel, and we will not allow this to happen.” And, he urged Netanyahu to start bombing the hell out of Lebanon, again, which Bibi did…

Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir’s partner in (war) crime, Finance Minister Belazel Smotrich called on Netanyahu to ramp up the airstrikes on southern Lebanon: “For every drone that hits one of our soldiers, 100 buildings must be taken down.” [Israel has lost 24 soldiers in the latest assault on southern Lebanon, which has killed 3,320 Lebanese, most of them civilians, including 50 in the last two days.]

It must have come as quite a shock to many of the professional Islamophobes and neocons that still inhabit some of the more rancid quarters of DC  that Trump wanted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to become the Delcy Rodriguez of Iran. Then, in true Trump-style, they nearly killed him in an airstrike on his compounds in the first hours of the war and the insane plan fell apart before it could even be set in motion…

Four months after Trump unveiled his Board of Peace, which he hailed as the “most consequential” international peace group in history, with a budget of $17 billion from pledged contributions by each member, the Board’s accounts are empty, void of even a single dollar. Meanwhile, Netanyahu has ordered the Israeli military to seize 70% of the Gaza Strip, a flagrant violation of the “peace” deal that Trump’s board, which doesn’t have even a peanut to its name, was meant to enforce. Israel has killed 890 civilians since the “ceasefire” began.

Ken Klippenstein on the fall, internal exile and ultimate eviction of Tulsi Gabbard:

When intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard resigned this past week, citing her husband’s health, the battle immediately began to shape the narrative — saying it was due to clashes with Trump over Iran, or being frozen out of the West Wing, or deep frustration with her own agency. These stories all have one thing in common: they cast Gabbard as a martyr. But that isn’t what happened. If you look at what Gabbard actually did, the picture is less flattering. She oversaw her agency’s National Counterterrorism Center’s move into purely domestic matters (contrary to its original design). The intelligence budget went up. The surveillance state tightened its grip on the American people, with Gabbard presiding over an intelligence community striking up alliances with private companies, including social media giants.

When intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard resigned this past week, citing her husband’s health, the battle immediately began to shape the narrative — saying it was due to clashes with Trump over Iran, or being frozen out of the West Wing, or deep frustration with her own agency.

These stories all have one thing in common: they cast Gabbard as a martyr. But that isn’t what happened. If you look at what Gabbard actually did, the picture is less flattering.

She oversaw her agency’s National Counterterrorism Center’s move into purely domestic matters (contrary to its original design). The intelligence budget went up. The surveillance state tightened its grip on the American people, with Gabbard presiding over an intelligence community striking up alliances with private companies, including social media giants.

The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner is almost always this interesting, but guys from the Atlantic Council usually aren’t. In this interview, Danny Citrinowicz provides a very clear-eyed assessment of the Iran War, documenting Trump’s repeated blunders and the reconstituted Iranian regime’s come-from-behind win. Here are some of Citrinowicz’s key observations:

“We have to remember what happened on February 28th—that Israel and the United States launched this campaign to topple the regime. In fact, they ended up strengthening it. Opening the Strait is not an achievement, since its closing was a by-product of the war itself. The Iranians are going to get some money, and sanctions relief may come after the deal is signed, too. If they don’t get money from this, they won’t do it. So, in that regard, what we’re facing right now is a war that may have been a tactical success for the U.S., but is a strategic failure.” “I have to tell you something about the Iranian regime: They’re feeling so much in the driver’s seat that they’re not going to forgo anything. They have reached their limitations when it comes to compromising, and that’s where we are right now.” “[Trump] should have stopped the war after three days…he should have stopped the war and offered to negotiate. There was no purpose after that. After three days, we all knew that there was not going to be any regime change in Iran. So why continue the war? Stop the war, say you won, negotiate on nuclear, capitalize on the fact that they are in disarray, and........

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