CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Roaming Charges: Mad Mouth, Bad Man; Mad Man, Bad Mouth

Album art for the cover of In the Court of the Crimson King (detail), by Barry Godber.

“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.” – Roberto Rossellini

“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”

If, in fact, the war is over (don’t count on it), then Iran wins by surviving two massive bombing campaigns by the US and Israel (both nuclear-armed states) in the last year. Iran wins even bigger by keeping the Islamic Republic in power under the control of a younger, more militant leadership with the Republican Guard largely intact. Iran’s victory grows larger when you consider that it keeps its nuclear research program and uranium stockpile. The victory becomes almost total when you factor in its ongoing control over the Strait of Hormuz and the fact that Trump was ready to call it quits in less than two months–not the 20 years it took to realize it had been defeated in Afghanistan.

It’s important for Americans who haven’t been paying attention to Gaza to understand that when Israel signs a “ceasefire” agreement, only one side is held to its pledge to cease firing. Since the ceasefire in Gaza, now supervised by Trump’s Board of Peace, Israel has continued killing 10 to 15 Palestinians–mostly civilians–a day, an ongoing slaughter mostly unremarked upon by the NYT, Washington Post, BBC or CNN. This week, an Israeli soldier shot a 3-year-old Palestinian boy in the head. Expect a similar dynamic to unfold in Iran, where the US is waging, if not a war for Israel, at least a war waged in the style of Israel…

Geographically, Iran is the size of Western Europe. It has at least 10 cities with populations of more than one million people–four of them are larger than Chicago. How many of these cities could most American politicians or media figures name? Two? That’s probably generous. With a populace of nearly 14 million people, Tehran’s population exceeds NYC’s by 5 million people. We have no idea who we are going to war against, why, or what civilization the leader of our country has vowed to destroy for all time…It’s a safe bet that in this instance ignorance won’t turn out to be bliss.

Ceasefire or not, the US has been openly conducting the kind of war it has largely funded its proxies to wage since Vietnam: a war of total destruction, targeting civilian infrastructure and civilians themselves. There’s no hiding behind “winning hearts and minds” platitudes anymore. The skeleton has come out of the closet and the madman has descended from the attic and is raving in the front yard. Yes, the lunatic really is on the grass. But out of the mouth of madness often comes uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that war crimes are only ever committed by losers and not by the imperial powers who kill and immiserate by the tens of thousands.

If you need a refresher course on what happens to a country after its civilian infrastructure has been obliterated by US weapons systems, I highly recommend watching Leslie and Andrew Cockburn’s devastating documentary for Frontline on the aftermath of the Gulf War, The War We Left Behind. Try not to cry or break something…(I did both.)

The Iran war is now costing upwards of $500 million per day, boosted by the loss of fighter jets and US radar and air defense systems, to a supposedly “obliterated” Iranian military.

Unit cost of a combat-ready F-15 Eagle, like the one shot down by Iran last week: $115 million.

Unit cost of an A-10 Thunderbolt, like the one shot down by Iran last week: $18.9 million

Replacement cost of E-3 Sentry AWACS destroyed by Iranian missile strike on Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia: $700 million to over $1 billion

It’s grimly ironic that, as much as Trump hated John McCain, and routinely ridiculed him as a loser, he’s now fulfilling the late senator from Arizona’s lifelong dream (which he probably took with him to his eternal submergence in the Phlegethon of Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell) to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran…”

The Beach Boys were to John McCain what the Village People are to Donald Trump.

The US having rapidly depleted its arsenal of “smart”  bombs, Tomahawks, THAADs and Patriot missiles in less than two months is a pretty clear indication that these weapons systems aren’t needed to “defend” the US from attack by other Superpowers, including Russia, China and, of course, Greenland. In fact, these weapons are “defensive” only against retaliatory strikes in response to US acts of extreme aggression. The ever-rising defense/war budget is one of the most ludicrous scams ever perpetrated on the American taxpayers.

Since Obama’s “Asian pivot” in 2012, the US has spent at least 260 billion dollars a year trying to intimidate China militarily, which is $20 billion more a year than China spends on its entire military budget. China’s military budget is less than 1.5 percent of its GDP, less than half the amount the US spends at 3.19% of its GDP–a figure that Trump and Hegseth want to dramatically increase next year.

If the Holocaust Museum really aspired to serve as a warning about all genocides, instead of just the genocide against European Jews, this maniacal frothing by Trump would be projected prominently on one of its walls.

Even Trump’s “ceasefire” post sounds like the inchoate ravings by one of the unfortunate characters in Samuel Fuller’s “Shock Corridor,” who is locked in a padded room, awaiting psychological readjustment through electrodes.

Trump spent much of the week vowing to escalate his war against Iran by deliberately targeting its civilian population. This obscures the fact that for five decades the US has been waging an almost equally destructive and unrelenting war against Iran through economic sanctions, which have also fallen most heavily on Iranian civilians, limiting critical medical, industrial, technological, and agricultural supplies. These sanctions, often marketed as being motivated by “humanitarian” concerns, are designed to immiserate Iran’s population, just as it has done to Cuba and other regimes that refuse to submit to its imperial dictates. It’s no secret why many Iranians have shouted, “Death to America” across the decades.

As Melania once cribbed Michelle Obama, Trump is now cribbing, checks notes, Curtis LeMay: “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next 2-3 weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong!” Once you’ve bombed a girls school and a girls volleyball team, you’ve proved there’s no moral restraint governing who or what you might target with your Tomahawk missiles and gravity bombs…

So Hegseth wasn’t just praying to Jesus to help him annihilate Iran, he was also praying that his broker could make him millions off of Operation Furious Trading:

“A broker acting for US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth explored a multimillion-dollar investment in a defence-focused exchange-traded fund in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, according to a Financial Times report. The broker, at Morgan Stanley, is said to have approached BlackRock in February regarding a potential allocation into its Defense Industrials Active ETF, a fund designed to capture growth opportunities in companies benefiting from increased defence spending. The inquiry was flagged internally at BlackRock, according to people familiar with the matter, although the investment ultimately did not proceed.”

“A broker acting for US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth explored a multimillion-dollar investment in a defence-focused exchange-traded fund in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, according to a Financial Times report. The broker, at Morgan Stanley, is said to have approached BlackRock in February regarding a potential allocation into its Defense Industrials Active ETF, a fund designed to capture growth opportunities in companies benefiting from increased defence spending. The inquiry was flagged internally at BlackRock, according to people familiar with the matter, although the investment ultimately did not proceed.”

Trump: “We’re gonna have to force ourselves upon them, which we have the right to do.” Is he talking about random women and girls or Iranians?

Maybe, the rising costs of cosmetics will turn the Mar-a-Lago-Face crowd against the Iran war…

Michael Cembalest: “In the ~160 years after the Civil War, US presidents fired 11 four- and five-star military officers. In Trump’s first 14 months, the White House has fired 9 of them.”

Trump may believe that climate change is a fraud. The ground troops he’s thinking of sending into Iran (one of the hottest landscapes on Earth) likely won’t, as an analysis from JP Morgan illustrates…

Trump: “You know who else didn’t help us? South Korea didn’t help us. We’ve got 45,000 soldiers in South Korea to protect them from Kim Jong Un, who I get along with very well. He said very nice things about me. He used to call Joe Biden a mentally retarded person.”

Unlike Iran, North Korea succeeded in manufacturing both nuclear weapons and medium-to-long-range missiles to launch them despite US sanctions. And Kim was literally firing ballistic missiles over US Naval exercises in the Pacific a couple of days after the US started bombing Iran without generating a bleat from Trump’s White House.

Only Trump would deploy US troops to a war zone and house them in hotels, thus making hotels legitimate targets for Iranian missiles…

Ken Klippenstein: “It’s hilarious that cable news relies on retired four-star generals to explain the exact problems they caused.”

The generals on CNN and FoxNews are professional taste-tasters, paid to eat up Trump’s poison to assure cable “news” viewers that they can swallow it, too…

They say Americans only learn geography during wartime. But more than a month into the war, the New York Times is apparently still a slow learner, given that it published an upside-down map of the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump: “I’m polling higher than anybody has ever polled in Venezuela. So after I’m finished with this, I can got to Venezuela. I will quickly learn Spanish. It won’t take long. I’m good at language. I will go to Venezuela. I’m going to run for president.” Any guesses on how many reincarnations it will take for Trump to learn Spanish, assuming he starts out again as a tapeworm in RFK, Jr’s brain, which may be a generous reset for him?

The exquisitely gifted exotic dancer Charm Daze, who US troops quite understandably shared Hegseth’s Iran war plans with during various performances, is the Julian Assange that the Trump administration deserves…

Charm Daze. Instagram: cgetsnakey.

Pope Leo from the Southside excoriated Hegseth, and other Trump mouthpieces, for calling on Jesus to help them kill Iranians: “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, ​whom no one can use to justify war. (Jesus) does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’.”

The Economist: “Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from oil sales each day as it did before American and Israeli bombs started falling on February 28th. It may be pummelled on the battlefield, but the regime is winning the energy war.”

Trump: “I would only say that we’re doing extremely well in that negotiation. But you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.” Trump admitting that the US used negotiations as a cover for “surprise” attacks on Iran, both a war crime and a deeply evil, or as JD Vance might say: “demonic,” thing to do.

Surely one of the wildest scenes in all of Western........

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