Trump Has Been Trumped!

 

Well, once again I don't have anything very original or in-depth to say about the war, but I do feel the need to post about it so here goes.

No TACO jokes

Yes, I have made a few myself, but in the end the point of TACO jokes is to goad Trump in persisting in a course of action that hurts him more than it hurts us -- tariffs, for instance.  This war is a different matter altogether.  While it would be good to have a leader with basic common sense, failing that I would rather have a leader who makes disastrously bad decisions and then backs away when they don't work out so well than a leader who makes disastrously bad decisions and keeps doubling down.

I will also say that when I fearfully peeked at the news over Tuesday, I came away with the distinct impression that a whole lot of people expected a TACO.  The markets were unhappy, but by no means panicked.  The top story on AOL was about Samantha Guthrie.  All sorts of normal news was being covered as if no disaster was at hand.  

The JCPO (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action)

There has been a lot of talk about Obama's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPCOA) -- the nuclear deal he struck with Iran, which reduced Iran's uranium enrichment, shipped most of its enriched uranium out of the country, and allowed intrusive inspections to ensure compliance.  Did it pave the way for war, or did abrogating it make war inevitable.  I don't think either.

Look, I am just going by my memories here and not doing extensive research.  But my clear memory is that the usual suspects -- Netanyahu, John Bolton, and the other warmongers -- were warning that Iran was on the verge of nuclear weapons, making cataclysmic predictions about what would happen, and loudly calling for large-scale bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities as the only option.  Admittedly they did sometimes distinguish between bombing and war by saying they were not calling for ground troops.  I even heard a revival of the old 1979 song, "Bomb Iran."

Then Obama and John Kerry came up with a proposal to actually keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons and they were outraged. I thought then and think now they were angry that their war was thwarted.  Of course, they gave other excuses like that the JCPOA did not make Iran give up missile or support for armed proxies and included some sanctions relief.  And they were outraged when Obama responded to their criticisms by defending the agreement instead of immediately conceding they were right and backing out.  But above all, they were outraged by the suggestion that rejecting the deal made war more likely.  How dare anyone call them warmongers just because they had been demanding war until the deal was struck?  

So, no, I don't think war was inevitable when Trump abrogated the deal.  We managed to get by for quite a few years with neither the deal nor war, and without Iran developing nuclear weapons.  But I do think that critics of the deal wanted war all along. Certainly that was the view of  Netanyahu, who proclaimed that it was Munich 1938 and that avoiding war now would only lead to a worse war later.

A different WWII analogy

Netanyahu may have thought the JCPOA was Munich and WWII must necessarily follow.  His decision to launch this war put me in mind of another WWII analogy -- Japan's actions.

My father likes to say that the Japanese got into a land war with the world's most populous country and found they couldn't win, so they started a naval war with the world's richest country.  Put that way, it sounds crazy.  But the Japanese blamed their inability to subdue China on interference by the US.  They thought that by bombing Pearl Harbor they could knock the US out of the war and finally beat China.  Needless to say, they seriously underestimated the US industrial base!

Well, in case nobody noticed, Netanyahu reduced Gaza to a pile of rubble and killed some 50,000 people out of a population of 2.3 million -- over 2% of the total -- and still couldn't root out Hamas.  Neither their brilliantly executed decapitation of Hezbollah, nor pounding much of southern Lebanon into rubble managed to root out Hezbollah.  Netanyahu blamed this on Iranian backing and thought he would go to the source.  It does not appear to have occurred to him that if he couldn't uproot an entrenched militia in a territory of 2.3 million people right on Israel's border, it might be even harder to root out the entrenched government of a country of 92 million people hundreds of miles away and well outside the reach of Israeli ground or even naval forces.

Trump was trumped

Up till now, Trump has run is foreign policy on the "madman theory."  If you act crazy enough, people will be afraid of you and stay out of your way.  It helps if you really are crazy.  Well, this time Trump ran into someone even crazier than he is.  It didn't go well for anyone.

We don't know why he backed down

It could have been outcry by MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.  Or rumored reports of military lawyers pushing back against Trump's plans to focus on civilian targets.  Or rising gas prices and a falling stock market.  Or fear of the cycle of escalation that could follow any attempt to take down the Iranian power grid.  Or maybe he just got bored and wanted to move on.  

Am I the only one who suspects Trump sent Vance out of the country to keep him from invoking the 25th Amendment?

What next?

My guess is that Trump is thoroughly tired of this war and wants out.  And if he wants out, we will get out.  It is also clear that the cease-fire is operating sort of like the Gaza ceasefire or the ICE drawdown in Minneapolis -- extremely slow and incomplete, sometimes more a reduce-fire than a ceasefire, but ultimately a significant decline in violence.  It was also clear even before the ceasefire that Iran was quietly tiptoeing away from blocking the Straits of Hormuz into something more like controlling which ships it allowed access and charging for passage.  I may be over-optimistic here, but I do think all sides are exhausted and this will slowly sputter out into an uneasy truce with only sporadic violations.  I do not share the insane optimism of Wall Street, which thinks everything is back to normal now.  There has been real physical damage to oil infrastructure.  I certainly couldn't predict how long it will take to repair, but it seems safe to assume, not overnight.

In terms of proposals, the two sides seem hopelessly far apart, each making wholly unreasonable demands.  This is not great but not necessarily fatal.  Negotiators can keep fruitless talks as long as they want so long as the shooting stops, or at least substantially diminishes.

In terms of domestic politics, once we get out of the war, I imagine it will be soon forgotten by friend and foe alike, and Trump's approval ratings will improve somewhat.  But probably not by a lot, given that gas prices will probably take some time to come down.

Bad, Bad Leroy Brown

It's a strange thing, but when my fears and anxiety about Trump and our country's future were at their strongest, one of the things that most seemed to calm me down was endlessly watching the video of "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown."  I never quite understood what seems so soothing about the song, but now it finally comes to me.  In some corner of my mind, Leroy must have represented Trump, and the song was reassuring because eventually Leroy is defeated.  (Not that the man who beat him was necessarily any better).