+ 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.
+ 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?
+ 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.
+ 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 try to reach an agreement. Now? Now it’s a catastrophe!”
“[Trump] didn’t have any strategy, any plan, any anything. There were also none of the right experts in the room. Instead, there were people saying, You can do this, you can do that, telling Trump lies. Look at the blockade. How pathetic is his blockade? You should have done it before, not after. Who thought that this blockade would make Iran capitulate? Come on! You don’t know the Iranians. It was obvious it wasn’t going to work.”
“a collapse of the Israeli doctrine regarding Iran. Not only a defeat, not only a fiasco. A collapse. Look at what Netanyahu promised this whole time. He said, Just give me the opportunity to attack Iran. And he got it, twice. He got the U.S. beside him with all that power, the satellites, the air force, everything, and what have we got? A more radicalized regime that can rush into a nuclear bomb and still have a conventional missile capacity. It’s a shit show because at the end of the day, everything that Netanyahu promised failed miserably. And now Senator Lindsey Graham is talking about normalization. Come on. How can you be this disconnected from the situation in the Middle East? Israel is perceived as more of a threat than Iran by some countries after this. How are you going to have an agreement while Israel is annexing the West Bank?”
“Leaving the nuclear deal with Iran was one of the greatest strategic mistakes of the twenty-first century, and maybe would qualify as one of the biggest of the twentieth century as well, if you were to include it. Look, it wasn’t an optimal agreement, but it had certain virtues, and the worst thing was that the U.S. actually left the agreement with no counter-strategy. And Iran has learned so much since the U.S. left the agreement, especially on enrichment.”
