NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL TODAY:
The preliminary deal ending President Trump’s four-month war with Iran is welcome but brings with it hard truths. Mr. Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war. He prosecuted it recklessly and in open defiance of the law. The United States is emerging weaker — militarily, diplomatically and economically — and will pay strategic costs for years to come.
The details of the deal are unclear, but the announced framework suggests that Mr. Trump has won few of the terms he insisted that he would. It is a humiliating comedown for him and the nation he leads.
Since the war began, he has said the United States would achieve “total and complete victory” and that Iran must agree to “unconditional surrender.” He suggested that regime change would occur. He said that Iran would be permitted “no enrichment” of uranium and that “the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried” near-bomb-grade nuclear material that it already holds.
None of this appears to be true. Iran’s hard-line government remains in place. The specifics of the nuclear agreement will apparently be negotiated over the next two months, but the terms seem likely to resemble those of a 2015 deal that President Barack Obama negotiated and that Mr. Trump canceled in 2018. He described the Obama agreement as the “worst deal ever” and said it put Iran on “a route to a nuclear weapon.” He criticized it for failing to force Iran to stop supporting terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and for loosening economic sanctions. Yet his destructive war seems likely to leave him with a similar deal.
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I did not check my mail this morning before I posted about Trump's Memorandum of Understanding with Iran. This is from Dave Miller, and it relates to this post, so I'm inserting here:
"President Trump lost.
The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week.
The United States is left weaker—diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally.
The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. Despite that, the president was so desperate for the war to end that he repeatedly backed off his threats—allowing Iran to call his bluff—and upbraided his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for responding to attacks in the region in a manner that jeopardized the negotiations."
The above is from Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic.
Before you all go crazy on your keyboards, here's the salient question for us today.
Is anything Lemire wrote untrue?
If your answer is yes, tell us exactly what that is and why.
To help you consider the above question, here's a list of the earliest goals POTUS Trump enumerated for the Iran War.
Unconditional Surrender & Regime Change... Unfulfilled.
Abolishing Nuclear Ambitions... Unfulfilled.
Obliterating the Missile & Drone Industry... Partially fulfilled.
Annihilating Naval and Air Power... Mostly achieved.
Reopening the Strait of Hormuz... This is harder to ascertain. Before the war, the Strait was wide open. Once it was closed, it became an additional goal. Before the war, up to 3,000 ships a day were transiting there. No one knows when we will, if ever, reach that number again.
"Thank you for your attention to this matter!"
--D. Miller
Thanks, Dave!
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In reality, of course, Trump and his extremist, right-wing allies almost always makes things worse. There was absolutely no need to kill the accord that the U.S. and four other nations negotiated with Iran 10 years ago, which was successfully constraining that country's nuclear ambitious. But Trump killed it because, IMO, he's a racist who has sought to nullify any and all former President Obama's achievements, and because Netanyahu, a documented war criminal, has never wanted an accord with Iran.
Trump unleashed DOGE to eliminate federal "waste and fraud," but very little of either was uncovered, and his cronies fired thousands of federal workers who had to be rehired when administration clowns realized that their expertise was needed. His tariff program was a chaotic mess. He lied about the Kennedy Center being in bad shape so that he could mess with it and then shamefully angled to steal its identity---which led to nobody wanting to perform there anymore.
Ayup. The nation continues, as well as the rest of the world, to see exactly what losing looks like.
ReplyDeleteIn February, Iran had no nuclear capability, because it was "totally destroyed" the previous year by US and Israeli strikes, according to the Trump Admin. There is no way a country can rebuild and reconstitute a nuclear program that had been totally destroyed in 9 months.
ReplyDeleteIt is not possible.
In February, Iran was facing crushing sanctions from the US and a host of countries and the Strait of Hormuz was open to transit, with no issues.
13 now dead American service men were serving and looking forward to one day being reunited with their families.
The US stocks of defensive arms and missiles were plentiful and our reputation around the globe was, while not sterling, not decimated.
Now all of that has changed.
In addition, the US and the world economies are being turned upside down.
And for what?
The agreement, or MOU, as multiple outlets have reported, is at best, a tepid return to where we were in February. Except it is not. It will open the floodgates of $$$ to Iran and bring them into the world of nations, granting them their long craved legitimacy.
The US is in worse shape internationally as a result of this war. Israel is in a horrible place as it relied on the words of POTUS Trump to finish the job with Iran. The likely result will be the downfall of Bibi, a strong US ally in a hard part of the world and a US abandonment of Israel by the US.
I'll wait for the evangelical folks to digest that.
This might be the biggest foreign policy blunder and geopolitical realignment of our lifetimes. And not for the better.
Thanks President Trump.
Well, on the other hand if the ultimate realignment results in holding Zionist Israel and their butcher Netanyahu responsible for the suffering and destruction of Palestine and areas of other Arab countries it might be a good thing.
ReplyDeleteDave, you mentioned the 13 dead American service members. We mustn't forget the 150 school children killed that the Administration STILL has not admitted responsibility and regret for. It's not just the US in worse shape, it is every country.
ReplyDeleteI can never remember who I mention this to, but I have four blogging friends in various areas of Canada, along with blogging friends in Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand. They have ALL been affected by trump and the meaningless war. Especially those in Australia and New Zealand. Such small countries have small oil/gas reserves. Gas prices have skyrocketed and neighbors are pooling together to run errands to save on gas. I mean it's one thing for the US to be affected by our own insane administration. It's a whole nuther thing to be so affected by some madman halfway across the world...
Possum... That's 150 known innocents in Iran dead. How many other innocent war dead are there? If a country had inflicted this much mayhem on France, Italy, Canada, Bolivia or the US, we'd be screaming that the leader who ordered such an attack should be captured and tried for war crimes against humanity.
DeleteNikki Haley wrote on social media that "if this is true, Iran wins," adding "there should be zero sanctions relief day one." Ben Shapiro called the deal a "disaster" that does not achieve the actual goals on Fox News. And a GOP congressional aide told reporters the emerging details of the deal flat out "suck," with the silver lining being that at least the Strait of Hormuz gets reopened.
ReplyDeleteSo you've got trump mocking Obama for a fraction of the money his own deal may be handing over, with no clear nuclear enrichment commitments locked in, and his own party openly calling it out as worse than the original. Feels like the same old playbook, attack the last guy for doing what you're about to do, but bigger, all while embarrassing the country on the world stage in the process.
Shaw... 100%, Iran has won this war. Prior to the war starting in February, here's what we know...
ReplyDeleteAccording to disclosures made by Omani Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi on February 27, 2026, Iran had conceded to the following terms…
Elimination of Highly Enriched Stockpiles: Iran agreed to irreversibly downblend and downgrade all of its existing highly enriched uranium to the lowest possible civilian-use levels.
No Future Stockpiling: The Iranian delegation committed to a permanent cap that would prevent the country from ever building a stockpile of weapons-grade enriched uranium again.
Full UN Verification: Tehran agreed to restore unhindered access and full verification protocols for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to prove compliance.
Now what are we getting? Nothing close if the MOU is anywhere close to what we are all hearing publicly.
Our president, the POTUS, has made the biggest strategic foreign policy mistake in recent history. And his party, the GOP, has remained largely silent, for fear of alienating people like Geeez, Mustang, Sam Huntington and others who emulate the HMS Mothership sailors.
This is a freakin' disaster. The US has surrendered. We lost a war we started.
There's an axiom in criminal law fare... never ask a question in court to which you don;t already know the response. The war corollary is this... never attack a country unless you've defined beforehand what will constitute victory and have decided that you will do whatever it takes to see it through.
Total surrender.
Regime change.
The end of Hezbollah.
The end of the Iranian nuclear program.
Complete destruction of their war fighting capability.
How have we done?
The silence of our kayfabe multi-personality friends/trolls has gone eerily silent.
ReplyDeleteWhy? Because no matter what anyone thinks of the people posting info, the facts do not change. You can't refute the facts. They are on display for all to see.
And when people are forced to deal with, you know, facts, trolling seems a little too juvenile, even by their normally childish standards.
I chose not to publish -FJ's recent posts because they were about Black intelligence vs. White intelligencwe and IQ scores. I stated I would NOT engage in that discussion because it is complex and neither -FJ nor I have the expertise to discuss that.
DeleteAs for Trump's colossal blunder with Iran, I've not seen anything in Comment Moderation from -FJ and his personas, nor, I might add, from skudrunner, who for years never let us forget about "the pallets of cash" Mr. Obama sent to Iran (that "cash" was Iran's money).
Skud is curiously silent about the billions and billions of $$$ that Trump just handed to the Iranians to end a war he started.
Shaw... musing on money. Iran can now start selling oil and looks to get about 8 billion. Now, the US did release 1.7 billion under Obama to settle a legal dispute from 1979. That was flown to Iraq in cargo planes and is the frequently cited money that ppl like Skud and Geezers always complain about.
DeleteIran now looks to receive a windfall because they can sell oil on the open market since the Trump Admin has agreed to end economic sanctions on them. The annual projected amount of oil money is about 60 billion.
Then there are frozen assets, which estimates put in the $24-$100 billion range.
Then there are the reconstruction funds. That amount is $300 billion. While not directly providing the money, effectively, the US is guaranteeing that amount to Iran, pledging to get our partners in the region to pony up.
Also, there is only a 60 day moratorium on Iran charging fees for passage through the Strait of Hormuz. After that, all bets are off.
So let's recap... 6 months ago, Iran was under sanction by the US and the UN. It could not sell oil. It did not control the Strait. It did not have access to its frozen assets. It was not part of the world community. It did not have either, at least according to the Trump Admin, a nuclear capability or a nuclear weapon.
Now within 30 days, it will have billions. It can start rebuilding the military facilities the US bombed, because we've stated numerous times "we are not bombing civilian sites". Because it has demonstrated it can close the Strait, it now has total control and any challenge to that can be met with ballistic missile attacks on the oil facilities of our allies. In a matter of weeks, the billion dollar spigot into Iran will be turned on and for the first time in decades, they will be flush with cash.
All courtesy of the Trump Admin.
Somehow, the US after "winning" a war, got the short end of the stick in this "negotiation".
The Art of the Deal...
Yup, Iran won the war. The cost of trump's losing the illegitimate and illegal war that NEVER should have been started by the USA is huge. But hey, the Moron in Chief trump is happy with his loss. So, mission accomplished.
ReplyDeleteAs his MAGA sheeple hail his disaster as a big win by their Fuhrer.