Slow-motion imperial decline

Richard Stengel is a former under secretary of state for "public diplomacy" in the Obama administration and once the editor of Time. "Public diplomacy" is a euphemism for image promotion by a country for its benefit -- by as much as possible making friends through soft, cultural power. 

Yes, just the sort of thing that the felonious Orange Toddler despises. Stengel has a harsh assessment of what the current president is doing to the USofA around the world.

... today’s unprecedented disengagement with diplomacy and our allies diminishes Brand USA. To call it a suicide pact is too strong, but it is a deliberate, conscious unraveling of the things that truly made America great.

What Trump is doing to America is a deliberate, slow-motion version of how Great Britain, one of the world’s great powers in the 20th century, became little England after the second world war. Within 15 years, an imperial hegemon became a medium-sized, more inward-focused European country concerned more with domestic economic recovery than foreign influence.

That is essentially what Trump is doing to America. Post-Trump, America will be a more domestic, inwardly focused nation, a country with fewer international connections and allies, but with an outsized, muscle-bound military, and always willing to do anything to make a buck. That is the fortress America of the 19th century, protected by two oceans and happily self-absorbed and insular.

No, we were never quite the shining city on the hill we thought we were. But, post-Trump, the United States will become little America. Smaller, meaner, less shiny. 

I found informative Stengel's evocation of a US analogy to the shriveling of Great Britain as a world power after 1945. A US imperial denouement is even happening in the same part of the world; the Suez Crisis of 1956 marked the end of Britain's far flung order. In that military flare up, the US Eisenhower administration prevented the Anglo-French-Israeli alliance from humiliating a nationalist Egyptian government; by fiat, the US preserved Egyptian sovereignty over the vital Suez Canal and signaled the end of Britain's worldwide reach.

Might we now see China play some similar role in our current Strait of Hormuz adventure? A flailing TACO Trump could use an intervention to get him out of the crisis he has made for himself and us all. An anxious world wishes there were an adult to step in ...

A low energy, dimwitted speech to the nation

What if an American president gave a speech and nobody cared? That's what happened last night. I almost never listen to Trump; his bleetings are not worth attempting to decode. But he's gone and launched a murderous war so I figured, I should. Thousands are dying under air assault by my country. Why? 

What a waste of time it was to watch this. The man is a floundering moron. And he looks like he could use a nap.

Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama communications guy, knows what he saw.

Typically, presidents follow a decision to go to war with a nationally televised address to explain the decision, call for shared sacrifice, and define what victory looks like. ... One month into the war, Trump finally gave a nationally televised address — but instead of offering clarity or rallying the country to the cause, he delivered an overlong, low-energy, rambling speech that served no strategic purpose. 

... Because the speech was so poorly written, it’s hard to identify any strategic rationale for giving it. To the extent there was a purpose, it was to declare victory. Instead, it read as an admission of defeat. ... 

Having started a war, Trump seems to intend to bomb some more and just walk away from a broken international oil delivery system, leaving passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz under hostile Iranian control. I guess we knew he didn't know how to read a map.

During the speech, Trump argued this didn’t matter to the United States:

The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future. We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it, and we don’t need it.

With Trump, the line between dumb and dishonest is always blurry — but this is a genuinely nonsensical statement. ...

Trump started this war and raised your gas prices. Ending it on these terms won’t lower them.

What Trump says doesn't matter here, because Americans can't be tricked into thinking gas prices aren't high. The fact that he thinks they can says a lot.

Pfeiffer knows well that slipping presidential approval rarely recovers during a second term.  

Trump’s numbers have been sliding for a year, but the decline has accelerated since the war with Iran began. A bounce-back is conceivable if the war ended and gas prices came down — but that would be a historical anomaly. Most second-term presidents never recover. They just amble off into the dustbin of history.

Trump’s path back to relevance looks especially precarious. The decision to go to war violated the two fundamental pillars of his political appeal — lower costs and no new wars. And as last night’s speech made clear, he can barely muster the energy to sell the war or save his presidency.

Trump has three more years to do possibly irretrievable damage to people and planet. The project remains: stop him as much as possible and envision a better future.

Say it loud: Trump is failing

I'm going to outsource this to that stalwart Democratic agitator Simon Rosenberg:

That Trump is no longer mentally competent isn’t really a question. For to understand how we got to where we are as a country you have to start by accepting that he is mad, and that he believes that he has the power to bend reality to his match his own imagined and fantastical world. 

... In many ways the central project of Trumpism is this daily construction and defense of this imagined world so dear to him; of maintaining the fiction of Oz; of the pretending that indeed the orange Emperor has no clothes. The “play’s the thing” Shakespeare once wrote. And so it is with the Trump regime. Every day.

The problem with all of this for Dear Leader, of course, is there is an objective world out there that he cannot bend to his malevolent will. People and nations have agency. Facts are stubborn things. ...

Trumpism has failed as a project because at its core it is mad, dismissive of truth and fact and reason, an imagined world at war with the real one. And the real one keeps winning, and Trump - and all of us - keep losing.

And now Trump has started a war he cannot escape that is alienating every possible friend and partner on the globe. And he wants $200 billion of taxpayer money for his murderous folly. Rosenberg outlines what Congress should demand before considering authorizing a penny:

Trump has becoming increasingly unstable, as has his regime. His utterances each day about the war are outrageously incoherent. ... we must make very clear what it will take to get our vote for this funding. Here’s my working list:

• End This New Gulf War, And Trump’s Global Imperial Ambitions

• Make Clear We Support Ukraine and Europe, Not Russia

• Roll Back The New, Illegal Tariffs

• Rescind The Trump Tax Cuts, Claw Back The Extra ICE Funding

• Make The US A Clean Energy Superpower, Fight For True Energy Independence, And Lower Energy Prices For The American People

• Keep Fighting To Rein In ICE, End Mass Deportation

• End the War on Science, Health and Public Health

• Demand the Resignations of Hegseth, Bondi, Kennedy

 Yes, I know, Simon, this is too much. We can’t ask for all that. My point is that something like this should be our agenda now; we have to stop playing defense, being tactical, and start going on offense, being far more strategic. Trump and his regime have failed, and it has begun to crack up. ...

That's a good list of demands; we need to begin to have one. I think Rosenberg is right; the time has come to leave tactical asks behind and demand it all. Dems will be bashed for "not supporting the troops .." if they balk on the $200 billion down posit for war, but we've been down that road before. No money for this illegal war!

Let's all see each other on Saturday, March 28 at NO KINGS.  And beyond.

We knew he was a crook. The latest Trump heist comes for us all.

The United States is not only failing to "win" but also actively losing Donald Trump's glorious new iteration of a Middle East war. 

Journalist and historian Garrett Graff explains:

... The Pentagon is telling Congress today an initial, partial tally of the monetary cost of the war (the cost in human lives, instability, and reputation is of course much higher): The first week of the war cost about $11.3 billion — an enormous number that is hard to even tally. To put that in context: It’s a number larger than the annual state budget of some 16 states, including Iowa or New Mexico and represents roughly the entire annual state budget of Nebraska, Oklahoma, or Alabama.

More than that, though, is how we as a nation spend money on war and “immigration enforcement” as if it’s endless, while skimping on all the expenses that actually help our fellow humans. We have already added this past year $150 billion to the defense budget — while destroying and dismantling the $35 billion we spent on the US Agency for International Development. 

As I wrote and investigated a couple weeks ago, the $52 billion construction and procurement budget for Customs and Border Protection is so large that it represents more than the defense budgets of Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Greece, Belgium, Romania, Denmark, and Norway combined.

The remaining money to spend this year that CBP has to spend equals the entire GDP of Estonia. 

I think a lot in moments like this of the 1953 speech by Dwight Eisenhower about the cost of war versus peace. 

 “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” [President Dwight] Eisenhower told a group of newspaper editors. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” 

What could $11.3 billion have bought us if we spent it here at home? A few data points: We spent in the 2020-2021 school year a total of about $21 billion to feed near universal school lunches and breakfast across the country during the pandemic — a life-changing educational investment for children. Or today: $11.3 billion would cover putting 1.4 million on Medicaid or into affordable housing — that’s the entire population of New Hampshire or Maine. 

Remember all of this the next time you hear a politician tell you there’s not enough money for this social safety program or that one. ...

I am confident we the people didn't make this grifting moron the president in the hope he'd crash our economic well-being. But here we are.

Excrement compounded

There's a tongue-in-cheek joke that our wars are how Americans learn what little we know about global geography. Apparently the Orange Toddler's latest Middle East atrocity is going to teach us about fertilizer.

From the NY Times [gift]: 

... War has a way of exposing vulnerabilities that arise from interconnection. Four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the world gained a wrenching lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries were substantial sources of wheat and other grains. Shortages of bread soon emerged from West Africa to South Asia.

... “It’s bad — there’s no other way of putting it,” said Chris Lawson, vice president of market intelligence and prices at CRU Group, a London-based research and data firm focused on commodities. “The world is highly reliant on fertilizer and associated raw materials supplied out of that region.”

... The latest upheaval in the Middle East does not affect the harvesting of grain, but its impacts for fertilizer may be even more profound.

... Some view the evolving crisis confronting agriculture as a warning sign about excessive reliance on a handful of fertilizer producers to satisfy humanity’s need for calories.

... The situation is acute for American agriculture. President Trump’s tariffs had already raised the costs of imported fertilizer, forcing many farmers to hold off stocking up. The White House exempted fertilizers from its latest tariffs last month. But millions of tons of urea cannot quickly be summoned from points around the globe.

India is uniquely vulnerable, given that it traditionally buys some 40 percent of its urea and phosphate-based fertilizers from suppliers in the Middle East.

As the world seeks other sources, the most obvious alternative is China. But the Chinese government, seeking to cushion its own farmers from the very sort of geopolitical turmoil now at play, last year imposed restrictions on the export of fertilizers.

... A sustained rise in the cost of fertilizer could force governments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to subsidize the cost of growing crops or otherwise watch food prices climb. That could add to debt burdens afflicting many lower-income countries.

The ignorance of the Trump clowns is no excuse.

• • •

Nor is ignorance an excuse for what US and Israeli bombing of Iranian oil depots has wrought. Bill McKibben tells the story of in pictures.

... here’s the Guardian reporting on what that feels like to the people living there

Speaking to the Guardian via voice notes, Negin – not her real name – an activist and former political prisoner based in the central-east side of the city, said the situation was “apocalyptic”.

“The situation is so frightening it’s hard to describe. Smoke has covered the entire city. I have severe shortness of breath and burning in my eyes and throat, and many others feel the same. But people still have to go outside because they have no choice. Many places reopened today, but closed again because it’s impossible to stay outdoors.”

They also heard from a woman, Mehnaz, who wanted to flee after the initial strikes Saturday night.

Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside … [I am] clueless whether to stay in or brave the flames and drive out while it’s still on fire. I don’t even have a mask.”

Fire and fury indeed -- to distract from probable child rape in the Epstein files?

The last rational man

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has spent a lifetime being alternately denounced for choosing to be himself by converting from Catholicism to Islam while young -- and also being admired as one of the most exciting, skilled, and durable basketball greats ever. Meanwhile, he's gone about his business of trying to be a thoughtful and rational man in an irrational nation and world.

As he does about most doings of his country, he has opinions about Iran and the Orange Toddler's war:

... When you step back and look at the full arc of the Islamic Republic, a pattern emerges. This is a regime that has survived by manufacturing enemies abroad and crushing dissent at home. It has used religion as a shield and a weapon, not as a source of compassion or justice. It has turned a country with immense human and natural resources into a place where young people dream of leaving, where talent is exported and fear is imported into every home.

The cost, both to Iran and the United States, has been staggering. Americans have lost loved ones in bombings and wars shaped by Ayatollah’s hand. Iranians have lost children to bullets, prisons, and gallows. The region has been destabilized by proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Millions of refugees have been created by conflicts in which the Islamic Republic has played a central role. And inside Iran, generations have grown up under a government that treats their aspirations as threats.

Iran is an ancient civilization with poetry, music, science, and philosophy that have enriched humanity for centuries. The problem is not Iran; the problem is a regime that has hijacked Iran’s name and used it to justify violence and repression.

A world without the Islamic Republic as a governing system would be a world where American families wouldn’t have to learn the names of distant cities only because their sons and daughters died there in attacks planned in Tehran. It would be a Middle East where one of its largest, most educated populations could participate openly in building regional stability instead of being used as cannon fodder in ideological battles.

And yet, in spite of all that, the U.S. cannot be the country that begins wars, or even conflagrations. We cannot become the world’s attack dog. We cannot simply march into a sovereign nation and take out their leader or system of government. 

Have we done that in the past? Have we begun and even sustained conflicts without going through the proper channels, also known as congressional support?

Yes we have. And it has never, ever turned out well. ...

Kareem puts me in mind of The Last Rational Man, a poem by Margaret Atwood. 

Yet cry out against war we must. 

Our Mad King ignites Iran and beyond

The key to understanding the Orange Toddler's excellent Persian adventure is to gaze at events from the appropriate distance. That distance is very far away for the noise and carnage. Don't be distracted by minutia -- minutia like a dead ayatollah, an obliterated girls school, a few crashing US planes. Looking closely and accurately doesn't inform; it merely confuses.

All there is to see here is death and destruction triggered by a stupid man trying to assuage his inadequacies and line his pockets.

Military and international relations scholar Phillips P. OBrien tells it as he sees it:

... Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US governments intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory.

He has made the national interest entirely personal.

... I cannot think of any other decision to start the use military force that comes close to the lack of support for these strikes. It might explain his desperation. Trump started this to have a win for him, but starting it as he has, he has made getting that win very difficult. It could lead him to get desperate.

... This is a president using the awesome power of the US military entirely for selfish reasons, killing Iranians and Americans to feed his own needs.

It is unlikely to end well.

We all, those still around, should be so lucky as to see it "end well," whatever that means. We live in the land of the Mad King who is also a whining Toddler.

It was pointed out a long time ago ...

 

There is no moral excuse for "a preventive war." The leaders of the Episcopal Church apparently understood that in 1952. This was the height of the Cold War during the national shock at learning that the US monopoly on nuclear weapons had not lasted forever, that the apparent  post-WWII US global hegemony faced a real competitor from the battle-hardened Russian Soviet Union. No excuse for preventive war in 1952. (This informative snippet flew by me by way of the Bishop of LA. John H. Taylor.)

 

No excuse now either, however awful the Mullahs have been for Iranians. Christian religious leaders today, mainline Protestant and Catholic, remind us of that. 

 

Trump has offered no plausible purpose or imaginable outcome for his war on Iran. The Washington Post reports that a combination of Saudi Arabia and Israel talked our gullible toddler into his Iran strikes. They point out: 

Now Trump will bear the risk of the bet he has placed: that a major military operation conducted from the air can achieve political goals on the ground. 

Retired General Mark Hertling knows a thing or two about wars. 

... The first night of a war is always the easiest night to make look clean.  ...  Degrading a regime’s capabilities is a military task; but replacing a regime, or trying to reshape its behavior through punishment from above, or compelling its people to rise up—those are strategic gambles that seem to rest on hope more than on a clearly articulated plan.

It is true that air campaigns can destroy things. What they cannot do, by themselves, is build political outcomes.

Pity the Iranians. Pity us all dragged into combat by foolish, greedy, vainglorious leaders. 

Once again a tin-pot quasi-dictator makes war

Pity the unhappy people of Iran, involuntary extras in evil men's fantasy theatrics. Or maybe I should say who are the target of an unconstrained little boy who likes blowing things up. 

Diana Butler Bass has re-upped a sermon from that uppity Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan from the beginning of George W. Bush's excellent adventure in Iraq. We know how that turned out ...

Our country is at war. One of the beatitudes, “Blessed are the makers of peace,” touches closely on our situation, which hovers between predicament and holy opportunity.

What indeed can it mean in such days as we endure, to be ‘peacemakers’? Not ‘just war’ theorists, not ‘pacifists,’ not, surely not war makers. But ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ ‘the makers of peace.’

The term in the original Greek, is disturbingly concrete, physical. One makes peace in somewhat the way one makes a table or a building, a school or a hospital, something useful or beautiful or both. We make peace in somewhat the way two people make a child. Makers of peace. The task is untidy, unfinished, laborious, always to be started anew....

There are always more idiots who think they can blow things up without consequence -- and without regard for dead children. And the task of a decent people is always the same: to make peace, not wars.

Two days ago, the historian Timothy Snyder offered his two most likely rationales for Trump's excellent little Persian war. He sees: 

... two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.

From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy. Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies....

At home, we know Trump's approval is cratering, so no wonder he needs a war. 

[From afar] ... who might be directly interested in Iranian regime change? Who has given it more thought than Washington? Insofar as there was any sort of foreign policy involved here, I suspect that it was that of countries that the Trump administration considers to be its allies in the region.

The basic structural feature of regional politics is a rivalry between Iran on the one side and Gulf Arab states plus Israel on the other. Given that this structural feature is a far more durable element of politics than the wavering and contradictory statements of the Trump administration, it is a good place to start. And where does it lead?

It leads to personal politics or rather personal gain. Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis. ...

The sheiks who pay the bribes to the Trump family are getting what they want. Most certainly, Bibi Netanyahu is getting what he wants from his dopey friends.

Let's hope this war stay "little." People far more knowledgeable than I doubt that "limited" war in the region is possible ... 

What's God got to do with it?

Everything for the evangelical, Pentecostal segment of Donald Trump's base which is cheering his extra-Constitutional attack on what he hopes is Iran's nuclear capacity. (Thirty-six hours after, experts aren't so sure he's done the damage he hoped to, but what does expertise matter, anyway, when you are a boy ordering a big bang?)

 

Polling before the strike on Iran showed only 16 percent of us wanted this. This is not like GW Bush's invasion of Iraq which enjoyed majority support for a hot minute in 2003. Now that Trump's done it, YouGov still finds 46 percent opposed, 35 percent in favor of the strikes. And just wait until it all becomes more complicated ...

Diana Butler Bass brings historical perspective to evangelical Christian enthusiasm for the Trump's bombs: 

To his evangelical base, Trump is fulfilling end times prophecies before their eyes. Moving the embassy [to Jerusalem in 2018] was but the first step in reorienting US policy toward prophecy. What is happening right now — with the US joining with Israel in this bombing — is nothing less than God's work, and they believe that they are the recipients of the long-awaited promise of Jesus' return.

... the MAGA "Jesus" and their particular prophecy tradition only dates to the mid-1800s. It was a completely invented theology about 200 years ago.

Yet that theological innovation has been one of the most wildly successful heresies in the history of Christianity in terms of spread and influence — mostly via Pentecostalism, the largest and most sustained global religious movement of the last century.

Modern Pentecostalism began among the poor and dispossessed and was originally influenced by progressive politics. Movements change, however. And partisans often wind up far from where they started.

In the last four decades, Pentecostals fully embraced both prophecy theologies (previously these theologies had been the purview of rather staid evangelicals and fundamentalists — most of whom eschewed Pentecostalism) and nationalist politics. ...

... Trump’s evangelical and Pentecostal supporters — the core of MAGA — are cheering. ... Bombing Iran secures Trump’s status as God’s man, the one sent to fulfill the prophetic promises that lead to the return of Jesus. While the rest of us are trying to discern signs of fascism, many American are discerning the "signs of the times."

We think Hitler. They think Jesus. We think of the innocent suffering. They think of the final judgment. We pray for peace. They believe that the Prince of Peace is returning with a sword. ...

For a deeper dive into this crackpot theology, I recommend Jemar Tisby: Bombs for the Apocalypse? Ted Cruz, Trump, and Evangelical End Times Theology -- How Dispensationalism Drives American Foreign Policy and Military Aggression. This is an accessible easy read, if delving into lunacy can be easy.

Normalization

I'm not willing to pretend that this was lawful.

Last week our new President delivered a 500 pound bomb "message."

Biden launched an air strike against the facilities of Iran-backed militias in Syria that have been launching rocket attacks against U.S. targets in Iraq. When asked today what message he was sending, he said: “You can’t act with impunity. Be careful.”

Uncharacteristically, a smidgen of me is sympathetic to what Biden claims to be doing here: he's emphasizing that, though he intends to put all he can into resurrecting the Obama-era "deal" that constrained Iranian development of a nuclear weapon, he's not taking lightly any adjacent provocations, especially threats to U.S. troops. Curbing an Iranian push for nukes is a good idea. And after a president who wouldn't do anything to respond Russia's putting a bounty out for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. president might need to take a stand. 

But it remains worth mentioning that if U.S. troops weren't blundering about in tangled conflicts in other people's countries, there would be less need for such a show of force.

And there doesn't seem much doubt that Biden is continuing one of the worst features of a lawless chief executive: presidents aren't supposed to make war without authorization from Congress. Senators know this and also have mixed feelings.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said Friday that Congress "must be fully briefed on this matter expeditiously," noting that "offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances."

Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations committee with Kaine, said that the recent strikes by Iranian-backed militias on Iraq bases were "unacceptable" and that he inherently trusts Biden's national security decision making ability. But he added that retaliatory strikes that are not necessary to "prevent an imminent threat, must fall within the definition of an existing" authorization for use of military force. 

"Congress should hold this administration to the same standard it did prior administrations, and require clear legal justifications for military action, especially inside theaters like Syria, where Congress has not explicitly authorized any American military action," said Murphy.

California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna reacted more bluntly.

"This makes President Biden the seventh consecutive US president to order strikes in the Middle East. ... There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization."

Here in the U.S. we don't think much about this (comes of being an empire) but this airstrike violated international law. So explains Rutgers Law professor Adil Ahmad Haque at Just Security:

The U.S. airstrikes almost certainly violated international law, for two basic reasons. The airstrikes did not repel an ongoing armed attack, halt an imminent one, or immediately respond to an armed attack that was in fact over but may have appeared ongoing at the time ... And the airstrikes were carried out on the territory of another State, without its consent, against a non-State actor (or two, or more)... These two reasons, combined, are decisive. It cannot be lawful to use armed force on the territory of another State when it is clear that no armed attack by a non-State actor is ongoing or even imminent.

It's very difficult for this country to understand that we can't claim to be essential pillars of "the international liberal order" if we ignore the legal apparatus that order has fostered when we find it convenient.

An appointment

No, not Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's V.P. I'll get to that I'm sure.

Rather, it's seems worth noting that the Trump regime has moved that nasty old cold warrior Elliott Abrams from its project of overthrowing Venezuela's government to its project of overthrowing Iran's government. 

Abrams should feel right at home working with and against Iran. In the late 1980's he was knee deep in the Reagan Administration's illegal plot to trade arms to Iran in return for cash to pay a right wing force to attack Nicaragua's then-leftist elected government. (Confusingly, Nicaragua now has an oppressive regime headed by the same tinpot caudillo, but that was then and this is now and Nicaragua remains on the USA's enemy list.) Abrams was convicted for lying to Congress; this country used to penalize its crooks. The crackpot Iran-Contra scheme was a foreshadowing of the private dealing and grifting that Republicans substitute for government when they get the power to do so.

Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post who knows more than a thing or two about Iran, having been held hostage in Iranian prisons for a couple of years during the Obama administration. He has a conclusion about U.S. policy toward Iran under Trump -- and also some suggestions should the world be so fortunate as to win a Biden administration. 

After decades of punitive measures directed at Iran under the still unfulfilled promise of defanging the Islamic Republic, the Iranian people deserve better from the U.S. government. And so do Americans. ... [Trump's last envoy] managed to play a role in worsening the lives of average Iranians, in part by promoting measures such as indiscriminate economic sanctions and travel bans. ...

If former vice president Joe Biden wins in November, he will have a chance to alter our current collision course with Iran. Biden would inherit a situation in which the United States enjoys significant leverage over Tehran, and he will have foreign policy advisers with years of experience working on these issues. He should take advantage of both, conditioning any concessions on real change that improves the lots of average Iranians. After all the harm we have caused them with nothing positive to show for it, the United States owes that to the Iranian people. ...

Not surprisingly, Rezaian also thinks a better U.S. government could do better at aiding any of our citizens so unfortunate as to be imprisoned in Iran.

Why U.S. elites are suckers for war with Iran

The U.S. policy elite, usually of both parties, hates Iran with a recurrent, near-maniacal, fury that is not shared by most of us.

I thought about this when I read that one response to the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Suleimani was a rush of queries to Google about a military draft. Are we being drafted into yet another war in the far off place we call "Middle East"? Seems so.

I've probably written this summary before but it seems worth repeating. What explains the endless elite animosity toward a country about which few of us think very often? I see three streams that intermingle.

Historic guilt
Persia -- modern Iran -- is unlike most of the countries we use and abuse in the so-called Middle East. Its boundaries are not some accidental affliction inherited from European colonial conniving after World War I as is true for most of the Arabic-speaking countries. Persia, an ancient Farsi-speaking Shiite Muslim land, was and is more or less what it has always been: a rich and diverse nation that is conscious of its history as the center of the civilized world when Europe was a feudal backwater.

In the aftermath of World War II, Iran was on its way to becoming a modern parliamentary democracy. British oil companies combined with a cowboy C.I.A. agent, Kermit Roosevelt, to overthrow its elected Prime Minister in 1953 and stick the unhappy Iranians with several decades of repressive, authoritarian rule led by the oil companies.

In 1979, Iranians -- left, right, and center -- rose up to take back their nation. Such eruptions are not neat and orderly and Iranians ended up with the Shiite Islamic rulers who still run the place. (Repressively, we should understand.) Along the way, nationalists seized the U.S. Embassy, grossly mistreated U.S. diplomats, and crowed over their dramatic escapade. Protection of diplomats is a real imperative of any international law-based system, but it's understandable that many Iranians didn't much credit the U.S. commitment to good behavior. The ensuing 444 day hostage crisis became a domestic political football in the U.S. and helped bring down Democratic President Jimmy Carter who looked ineffectual while Ronald Reagan wandered around beating his chest. (He was, after all, a celluloid cowboy.) For a slice of the U.S. elite, of which our current president is an exemplar,

If it’s always 1979, it’s always 1979.

David Graham

Iran remained hostile the U.S. while the U.S. remained hostile to Iran. During the entire 1980s, we encouraged and funded Iraq's Saddam Hussein in his war on the Islamic state, a murderous conflict that killed at least half a million combatants.

Iran didn't take U.S. hostility sitting down. In 1983 Iran almost certainly was responsible for helping Hezobollah, its allied Lebanese Shiite militia, carry out Beirut suicide truck bomb attacks which killed 241 U.S. military personnel, 58 French military personnel and 6 civilians. For a somewhat younger slice of the U.S. foreign policy elite, this was the opening act of a war with Iran they've never given up on. It's little remembered today, but that era's pseudo-cowboy president knew better than to be drawn into overt hostilities: Reagan quickly withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon.

In the years since, Iran and the U.S. have warred covertly with a few episodes breaking into public consciousness as when we shot down an Iranian civilian airliner and they supported and trained Shiite Iraqis fightings against the U.S occupation after 2003. Then again, sometimes these enemies have been temporarily on the same side as when Iran, in operations led by the assassinated General Soleimani, helped the U.S. find al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. Iran, too, wanted ISIS eradicated. This is a complicated part of the world -- a little much for monochrome U.S. thinking.

Our sick relationship with the state of Israel
In the U.S., relations with Israel are about domestic politics. Given the (more and more inaccurate) assumption that the route to the (tiny) Jewish vote runs through fealty to Israeli political aims, U.S. politicians have more often than not been onboard with Israeli demands we stand in for them in containing Iran. Israel does have something to worry about. Unlike their venal and repressive Sunni Arab neighbor states, Iran is a modern country of 80 million people, scientifically educated and capable of making a real threat if it came to hostilities. The Obama-era "Iran deal" was meant to walk back the threat of Iran advancing toward nuclear capability.

This wasn't good enough either for Israeli right wingers or our right wingers. They didn't want Iran constrained. They wanted the country obliterated. Trump did their bidding by violating the nuclear deal and thus pushing the region toward hot war.

And then there are our rapture-seeking evangelical Christian whack doodles ...
Apparently Secretary of State Pompeo is one of these, as is Vice President Pence. These nutcases believe that the Persians are tools of Satan and fighting them will bring on the battle of Armageddon, bringing back their weird version of a Messiah. Or some such. If they manage to start a war with Iran, they are just helping fulfill Biblical prophecies.

I cry: "Heaven preserve us!"

Once again, showing up for peace

The priest at the church I attend remarked to me one day, "you know, we can't expect people to show up out of a sense of duty anymore ..." As it happens, I don't go to church out of duty; I like the values and community I find there.

But when it comes to small, necessary, urgent, demonstrations against the latest U.S. imperial atrocity, duty is what gets me there. Sure, I see a lot of friends ... but must I go? Well, yes.

That said, rallying Saturday in San Francisco against escalating U.S. hostilities against Iran, was surprisingly interesting.

The good people of Code Pink set a theme that seemed to resonate generally:

We know what happens when the U.S. turns its military loose on some place we've decided we don't like: a lot of people -- mostly innocent of any crime -- die. And the unfortunate country ends up a violent failed state. The last 20 years have provided irrefutable evidence of this conclusion.

A slogan from several signs from slightly different tendencies caught my attention. One example:

And here's another:

In most any antiwar protest I've ever been part of those signs would have had a different slant:
"No war ON Vietnam" "No war ON Afghanistan" "No war ON Iraq"
Does the "No war WITH Iran" slogan reflect that antiwar people now understand that the countries we attack fight back? That our vaunted military might find itself someday retreating with tail between legs? This seems the most likely outcome after we make a cruel and horrible mess of Iran ... have the lessons of last 20 years (and of the last 50 years if we'd paid attention) begun to get through to the willing?

It becomes the task of the peace movement, once again, to spread the bad news that overkill is just that -- overkill from which nothing good comes.

One more sign that looked backward:

Actually, 2003 was a crime. But the connection is made.

Assasination in Iraq

H/t to Juan Cole who puts the U.S. assassination of a leading Iranian military leader (and also a thuggish terrorist) in its proper context. Tough times ahead.

It's good to see Democratic politicians largely pointing out the illegality of Trump's strike. The polarization here seems no different than about anything else under our quasi-fascist leader: Republicans kowtow obsequiously; Dems call for Constitutional virtues and norms deep-sixed by the Cheeto.

What passes for an Iraqi government is screwed from all directions, most obviously with its own populace.

Looks like John Bolton may be getting his desired war and have managed to get out soon enough to retain some shred of dignity. There is no justice.

When it comes to Iran, the U.S. press fails over and over

The great stare down is on again. The pawns are likely to get bloodied. Washington is ramping up its threats against Iran. Iran has continued to observe the Obama-era agreement not to build a bomb that Trump trashed on assuming office; Europe has tried to preserve what was a pretty good bargain. Meanwhile the Trump regime seems to be doing its best through economic sanctions and bluster to push Iran to break an uneasy peace.

Yeah -- we've seen this movie before in another oil rich nation adjacent to Iran. That didn't turn out so well.

The same anticipatory helplessness so many of us felt in the run up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2002-3 is back.

(Reuters) - Half of all Americans believe that the United States will go to war with Iran "within the next few years," according to a Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll [PDF] released on Tuesday amid increased tensions between the two countries.

A plurality of us (49%) disapprove, but most believe there's no stopping the dynamic at work. And most say they would rally round the flag if they believed Iran had attacked our forces in the region -- so the situation is ripe for a "Gulf of Tonkin incident" like the phony provocation used by Washington to jump into our Vietnam adventure. That didn't turn out so well either.

Meanwhile, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who until recently headed up the Defense Department under Trump and knows something of war, had some words of warning:

"The United States should buy time to keep peace and stability and allow diplomats to work diplomacy on how to keep peace for one more hour, one more day, one more week, a month or a year," Mattis said during remarks in the United Arab Emirates.

Task and Purpose

You probably hadn't heard that. U.S. news media apparently didn't think the guy who was at the top of our military until recently had something important to say. (The report is from a specialized military newspaper.)

U.S. major media seem incapable of delivering a serious, rounded account of US-Iranian relations. This failure is so acute that Andrew Lee Butters, a former Time magazine Beirut bureau chief now teaching at Yale, shared tough conclusions about professional failures in the Columbia Journalism Review.

The broad psychological takeaway of reading the news is inevitably that Iran is a threat. Even balanced appraisals of Iran—that note, for example, that the Iranian Revolution occurred in 1979 in part as a reaction to the American antidemocratic coup there, in 1953— get lost amid the noise of buzzwords like “terror,” “mullah,” “nuclear,” “proxies,” and “militias.” ... Even though the Trump administration pulled out of the nuclear deal that Iran had negotiated with the Obama administration—a deal that stopped Iran’s nuclear enrichment program—most headlines and talking points on air tell us that Iran is “threatening” to resume the production of nuclear material.

The US, it must not be forgotten, has done its fair share to threaten Iran: encouraging Iraq to invade Iran in the 1980s and kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians, invading Iraq in 2003 and soon after eyeing Iran, selling billions of dollars worth of weapons to anti-Iranian Middle Eastern autocrats, embracing a known anti-Iranian terror cult—the MEK—in the hope of fomenting a regime change. ... The Iranian government has much to answer for, especially for its role assisting the Bashar al-Assad regime in the murderous suppression of the Syrian democracy movement, which was once peaceful. But to counter Iran’s regional military power with the application of more American military power is neither moral nor practical.

I’m pretty sure that most of the reporters and editors at CNN, the Times, and NPR know this. And I’m sure that most of them know exactly what game the Trump administration is playing. But there is some deep-seated loyalty to something like “balance” or “objectivity” that is misplaced, and ends up looking like regulatory capture. ...

Why the amnesia and partisanship from the media? Perhaps because it’s hard to tell Americans that a country full of angry-looking men with black turbans and beards who have captured our diplomats and designed bombs that kill our soldiers have real, legitimate reasons to be angry and afraid of us. And perhaps because it’s hard even for those American reporters who know the Middle East to keep that unconscious bias from slipping into our copy, especially in headlines and photo choices. Raised on American exceptionalism, it’s hard to swallow that our misdeeds in the Middle East may not be exceptions, but an extension of American rule.

We seem only to learn what a shitshow we've made in foreign regions at the cost of other peoples' lives and countries.

Are we about to get John Bolton's war on Iran?

It's been a little over a year since that old war hawk tucked in as National Security Adviser to an ignorant, impetuous president. Having done their best to break up the alliance agreements that were keeping some uneasy constraint on ever larger conflicts in a dangerous region, now we're getting the sort of headlines we can expect from a rogue regime in Washington bent on catastrophe. "U.S. orders ‘non-emergency’ government employees to leave Iraq". "Skeptical U.S. Allies Resist Trump’s New Claims of Threats From Iran." Here the receding empire goes again ... ginning up a war to distract from our fractures at home.

The world knows better.

But European military allies have questioned whether the threat level against U.S. assets has shifted in recent weeks.

“We haven’t seen anything convincing yet, but tensions are definitely rising,” said one Western diplomat ...

Washington Post

... a senior British military official told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday that he saw no increased risk from Iran or allied militias in Iraq or Syria.

New York Times

Of course, in 2003, the world knew better as well, when the George W. Bush administration was making up "intelligence" to support its Iraq invasion. Fat lot of good that did millions of Iraqis and so many others killed or left with societies torn apart; fat lot of good that did the thousands of US military personnel murdered or maimed in service of monsters like Dick Cheney and John Bolton last time around.

Let's hope some combination of Trump's feral, canny timidity and world opprobrium hold the USofA back this time around.
...In terms of push back for peace coming from people within this big, confused country, the moment feels more like the awful days immediately after the 9/11 attacks than the eve of Iraq. Even then, a few of us knew our ignorant, overconfident government was on the way to making a hash of Afghanistan (how'd that turn out?). Two years later, by the eve of the Iraq war millions rallied across the globe against the disaster. And empire, led by the likes of Bolton, could not be deterred. The mass peace movement infrastructure that was laboriously built in the '00s has atrophied.

Oh sure, small dedicated historic peace organizations carry on honorably as they have for decades. In Congress, Win Without War has labored to reduce US support for the Saudi war on Yemen that is one of the world's current most extreme human atrocities.

But effectual peace agitation has to break into the actual existing political conversation if it is to achieve any mass heft. And that means, at this moment, making sure that aspiring Democratic presidents ALL put themselves on the right side of history, against a US attack on Iran.

Just Security launched a useful initiative yesterday. They reminded us that Democrats have been to this movie before.

Many Democrats still prominent in public political life voted against the [Iraq] war. Dick Durbin voted no. Bernie Sanders voted no. Robert Menendez voted no. Jack Reed voted no. Nancy Pelosi voted no. Ben Cardin voted no. Patrick Leahy voted no. Patty Murray voted no. Debbie Stabenow voted no. Ron Wyden voted no.

Many Democrats still prominent in public life voted for the war. Joe Biden voted yes. Chuck Schumer voted yes. Steny Hoyer voted yes. Eliot Engel voted yes. Adam Smith voted yes. Adam Schiff voted yes.

The Just Security petition aims to pressure these luminaries to get an impending threat of unnecessary, unwinnable war right this time around.

Most importantly, this initiative aims to pressure Joe Biden to get it right this time -- and to disqualify Biden for the Democratic nomination if he fails to oppose yet another US war. We'll see.

Iran: where Bolton and Pompeo get their payoff for playing dead

Monday's news that our tweeting President has turned his fire on Iran makes perfect sense.

“To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!” Trump tweeted.

I'd been wondering why renowned war hawks like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton were willing to work for President Appeaser.

Now it seems clear: if they pretend the man in the White House is capable of carrying out a foreign policy, especially in Russia, perhaps he'll give them the war they really want. For reasons that have always seemed obscure to me, the U.S. establishment has long lusted after using our military might to overthrow the government of Iran. Sure, the Iranian government is genuinely horrible to those of its own citizens, especially women, who want to move beyond theocracy. But that's not what the war fever is about. Maybe they really think they can "seize the oil." Or are they still bent out of shape because Iranians held some U.S. diplomats hostage 40 years ago? Or are they vaguely guilty that, when Iranians elected a free and fair government of their own, they sent the C.I.A. to oust it?

For sure, governments around the world are going to know how to interpret Trump's fawning over Putin and cozying up to Kim Jung Un -- it's safer to have nukes than not to have them.

Rumors of war in That Part of the World

E.P. has taken on the thankless task of surveying the carnage -- made in America, made by other powers, and homegrown -- in what we call the Middle East. With Trump running amok in other areas, we've tended to look away from the region that so inflamed our fears for the last 15 years. But we can't really. The consequences could be too dire.

With President Trump and his secretary of state now talking openly about a possible “escalation between us and the Iranians,” there is a real risk that some combination of the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia could initiate a war with Iran. If there’s one lesson to be learned from US wars since 9/11, it’s “don’t start another one.”

Read it all at the link.

Dire times

The difference between John Bolton and most of the rest of the cast of characters around our ignorant, fearful, impulsive president is that he actually believes that war can accomplish something in the interests of the United States. Even most of the generals don't believe that after nearly two decades of murderous futility. Bolton is a true believer in forever war. The POTUS is a small man facing escalating threats in a big job.

Expect war before the midterm elections ...