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Roaming Charges: Muscle For Brains

Pete Hegeth seeking divine authority for US airstrikes on Iran.

For reasons that are not mysterious The weak are sent to the wall They have reservations in heaven Down here, they’re not so fashionable Save me from the people who would save me from my sin They got muscle for brains – Gang of Four, “Muscle for Brains”

For reasons that are not mysterious The weak are sent to the wall They have reservations in heaven Down here, they’re not so fashionable Save me from the people who would save me from my sin They got muscle for brains

– Gang of Four, “Muscle for Brains”

The Iran war is a war of choice. But that doesn’t tell us much, does it? All wars are wars of choice. The questions are: was it a necessary choice? Was it a good choice? Was it a rational choice? Were the consequences considered? Who made the choice and why? We still don’t know the answers to these questions.

The Iran war is a war of aggression, launched by two nuclear powers against a non-nuclear nation that has been weakened by years of economic sanctions, targeted assassinations, industrial sabotage and cyber-attacks. This is a war of aggression that was initiated during bad-faith negotiations by the US, where diplomacy was used as a cover for a looming bombardment. The gloating over the ease with which US and Israeli airstrikes decimated Iran’s leadership was appalling, given the circumstances under which it occurred. Wars of aggression are crimes. But who is left to enforce international laws? If you can get away with a genocide, as the US’s war partner has done, every conceivable atrocity is fair game. Israel turned Gaza into rubble and still the bombs fall.

What is the objective? To destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities? To kill the Ayatollah? To topple the Islamic Republic? To emasculate the Republican Guard? To de-industrialize Iran? To wreck the Iranian economy? To “liberate” Iranian women? To spark a revolution? Who knows. Probably not Donald Trump. He claims he’ll “feel it in his bones,” though surely he meant his bone spurs.

The US generals don’t seem to have much of an idea, even though nearly 40% of the US military is now zeroed in on Iran, burning through billions of dollars of weapons every week. If we take the bombastic Pete Hegseth at his word, it’s to “rain death and destruction” on Iran and Iranians without much, if any, discretion on who is being killed or what is being destroyed. That sounds about right to me.

The timid Democrats have criticized Trump for not having a “plan,” as if having a plan would legitimize his criminal war. But they do have a plan and the plan is maximum destruction. The plan is for a spectacle of bomb-blast light shows and mass death. One of the first kill shots was an attack on an Iranian girls’ school that murdered 200 people, including teachers and students. Helluva way to liberate women.

Trump tried to blame the girls’ school strike on the Iranians, saying they’d somehow acquired a US-made Tomahawk cruise missile. Even the Pentagon wouldn’t back up this murderous lie. The school was on the target list. Bad intelligence? Not if the intelligence came from the Israelis, as it likely did. As we know from Gaza, the Israelis targeted schools as if they were ballistic missile batteries.

US airstrikes destroyed Iran’s Russian-supplied air defenses within the first couple of days of the war. Since then, the US and the Israelis can bomb at will, the only risk being an F-35 encountering a little rain or wind that might send it into a tailspin.

Every bomb now is being dropped on a defenseless population. And every bomb from now on is likely to turn that population, even those violently opposed to the rule of the Mullahs, against the bombers. For a war waged by two hyper-nationalist countries, the attackers don’t seem to realize that nationalism cuts both ways, that each bombing of a school, hospital, mosque, factory, desalination plant, or historic site solidifies the bombed in support of their country. And this isn’t just any country: this is Iran, this Persia, this is one of the oldest, proudest and most sophisticated civilizations on the planet. It’s a nation with a long cultural memory and it won’t soon forget the day the US and Israeli missiles hit four oil refineries and the skies of Tehran rained Black Death over a city of 13 million people.

Pete Hegseth boasted that there “will be no quarter given.” What does that mean? It means prisoners of war will be killed. It means the injured will be killed or left to die. Hegseth is a creep, but his fustian outbursts provide clarity on the sadistic objectives of the war. “We have only just begun to hunt,” Hegseth crowed. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” Close the door, put out the light! Hegseth dismisses war crimes as an artifact of woke lawyers and seems eager to have the troops under his command commit every one on the books. No wonder he wanted to court-martial Sen. Mark Kelly for appearing in that video advising US troops to disobey illegal orders.

Trump has never spent much, if any, time considering the consequences of his decisions in business, sex or politics. In fact, he brags about going on his gut. But making a bad bet on a steak company, mail-in university (diploma mill), porn star or casino is one thing. Wrecking the global economy by dismissing the likelihood that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked reflects a kind of hubristic madness that makes Hitler’s decision to invade Russia seem sound by comparison. But Trump learned in business that the costlier his mistakes, the more likely he was to get bailed out. He’s rarely paid a personal price for any of his blunders. Now he’s in the position of begging countries and leaders that he has ritually humiliated and deprecated as part of his tiresome political schtick to come to his rescue and help calm the chaos his impulsive and criminal war has set in motion. He may well find he’s bombed himself into a crater this time so deep there’s no clear path out, no easy fix, no insurance policy to shield him against the political and economic shockwaves he has unleashed.

The blowback from this war will be intense and is likely to last for decades, assuming the planet has that many years left. The war has already spread across the Middle East to Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen. The oil shock from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has jolted an already wobbly global economy. Soon, refugees will be pouring out of Iran and Lebanon. In choosing to go to war aligned only with Israel, the US will inherit its pariah status across the Muslim world and beyond. Trump doesn’t seem capable of learning lessons, but he may soon find out that it’s easier to impulsively choose to start a war of aggression than to decide when and on what terms the war ends.

+ Trump on Iran’s leadership: “These are bad people. They go out shooting protesters. You’re a protester, they shoot you right through the head. This is an evil group of people.” Who will tell the family of Renee Good?

+ Substituting muscle for brains, Pete Hegseth makes Donald Rumsfeld sound like Von Clausewitz: “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies. Yet some in the press just can’t stop.  People look at the TV and they see banners, headlines — I used to be in that business, I know everything is written intentionally. For example, a banner — ‘Mideast War Intensifies.’ What should the banner read instead? How about, ‘Iran increasingly desperate,’ because they are. Or more fake news from CNN. CNN reports that the Trump administration underestimated the impact of the Iran war on the Strait of Hormuz. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better…The only thing prohibiting transit in [Hormuz] right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”

+ Draft evading President, now thinks he’s Attila the Hun, although Attila rode with his marauders and wasn’t nearly this sadistic (or stupid): “I, as 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so.”

+ In an echo of Bush and Cheney ignoring the CIA’s memo of August 6, 2001, that “bin Laden Determined to Strike the US,” Trump blew off warnings from his intelligence agencies that Iran was likely to retaliate for a US attack by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, telling aides that they’d never close the oil tanker passage with him in charge. Trump apparently based his fatal miscalculation on the advice of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who offered that Iran hadn’t blocked the Strait during the 12-day war last summer.

Wright: “Fortunately, the US produces more oil than we can consume. We’re a net oil exporter. So overall for the US economy, this isn’t bad news.”

Apparently, Wright drank so much fracking fluid to prove it was “safe” (it’s not) that he is no longer capable of realizing that people are looking at the price per gallon tick up as they drive down the street from gas station to gas station? (Nationally, gas prices are 30 cents a gallon higher than last week and 80 cents higher than last month.)

+ WSJ: “Think about the Red Sea: Six months after the Houthis stopped the attacks, and traffic has not normalized. It’s all about perception of safety. And we are far away from that.”

+ Trump is the ultimate–to put it in the second-grade language he might understand–”wuss,” the smack-talking bully who cowers before a punch is even thrown. He goes it alone. Predictably fucks it up. Then demands that the countries he habitually disparages come to his rescue.

+ The UN refugee agency UNHCR said on Thursday that up to 3.2 million people in Iran have been displaced by the war. “This figure is likely to continue rising as hostilities persist, marking a worrying escalation in humanitarian needs,” UNHCR said in a statement. It added that most have fled from Tehran and other major cities toward the north of the country or rural areas.

+ Bahrain’s large Shia population is ruled repressively by a Sunni dictatorship, enforced by the US and its Gulf allies. The war on Iran has reignited the popular resistance in Bahrain. “U.S. sources confirm Bahrain has brought in Jordanian anti-riot troops to suppress protests over Washington’s war with Iran and the kingdom’s role hosting U.S. military. It’s the first time since the Arab Spring that Bahrain has called in foreign forces.”

+ The Pentagon estimates that the first week of the war with Iran cost $11.3 billion. In the first 72 hours of its attack on Iran, the US military used more than $5 billion worth of missiles and bombs.

+ New polling in Italy shows 69.5% of Italians believe Italy should follow Spain’s lead and deny the use of U.S. military bases on its territory. Only 15.9% disagree.

+ Jason Hickle: “The US bombing of schoolchildren in Iran is the biggest single US massacre of civilians since My Lai. The Israeli bombing of Tehran’s oil storage constitutes the biggest single act of chemical warfare against a civilian population in history.  Grotesque new depths of barbarism.”

+ According to Axios, Trump rejected an offer from Vladimir Putin to move Iran’s uranium to Russia.” They wanted the spectacle of bombing the hell out of the country.

+ German Chancellor Merz said the US and Israel appear to have “no common plan” for bringing the war against Iran “to a swift and convincing end”.

+ “Plans?” What plans? Who needs a friggin’ plan? Don’t you know plans are woke, man?

+ Claudia  Sheinbaum: “I oppose the U.S.-Israeli war axis. Bombing schools full of girls is a crime, not defense.”

+ Trump: “We did a little excursion. A couple of weeks, a few weeks of excursion, had to take an excursion, but it’s doing well. We had to take a little trip to get rid of some evil, very evil people. The market is holding up well. I figured we would be hit a little bit, but we were hit less than I thought and we will be back on track in a pretty short while. Prices are coming down substantially, oil will be coming down.”

+ Will Trump make Hegseth rename the Department of War the Department of Excursions?

+ Wag the Pedophile’s Dog! A new poll shows that the majority of Americans (52%) believe Trump launched the Iran War to distract from disclosures about his role in the Epstein scandal. The Washington Post labeled this a “conspiracy theory,” while the ADL denounced it as “anti-semitic.”

+ Lindsey Graham, Senator from Tel Aviv: “I will be with Israel until my dying day. To all of the isolationists, forget it. I am not with you. I am with Israel.”

+ New survey finds that 46% of American voters, including a majority of independents, believe Donald Trump is more responsive to Netanyahu on the Iran war than Americans, which is an incredible number for someone who claims to pursue America First policies…

+ Ted Cruz: “As we sit here right now tonight, the threat of terrorist attack is higher now than it has been for decades. There’s two causes of it. Number one, Joe Biden … “

+ Last week, Jon Stewart, who some liberals want to run for president, did a really stupid segment claiming Iran was simply firing missiles in every direction, hoping they’d hit something. In fact, Iran’s targeting has been fairly precise, hitting US embassies, a CIA station house, radar systems, THAAD and Patriot missile batteries. Yet on the first day of the war, the US’s “smart” bombs hit a girls’ school, killing more than 165 civilians….

+ Spain’s government has approved the removal of Ambassador Ana Salomon from Israel, as a response to escalating tensions over Gaza and Israel’s war on Iran. Spain leads, who will follow?

+ Gianmarco Soresi: “It isn’t a war? It’ll be a war when Trump can claim he stopped it.”

+ Joe Rogan: “It just seems so insane based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on ‘No more wars, end these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

+ A week into the Israeli/US war on Iran and 53% of Americans oppose the war, 74% oppose sending US troops to Iran, including 52% of Republicans…

+ A week into the Israeli/US war on Iran and 53% of Americans oppose the war, 74% oppose sending US troops to Iran, including 52% of Republicans…

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