Donald Chump has gone to war again. This time with Iran. THE NEW YORK TIMES notes, "The death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled his nation with an iron fist for nearly 37 years, raised the prospect of chaos and a power vacuum in an already turbulent region."
One of the strikes, reportedly launched by Israel, destroyed an elementary school for girls in the southern city of Minab, killing at least 85 people, Iranian semi-official outlet Tasnim News Agency reported — seemingly the first reported casualties of the conflict.
Iran retaliated with strikes targeting Israel and U.S. bases in numerous Gulf Coast countries, including in a strike on the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Many U.S. bases in the region were partially evacuated prior to the first U.S.-Israeli strikes.
[. . .]
In Saturday’s speech, Trump repeated numerous falsehoods, including statements that Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions” — a clear and blatant lie.
Rather, these attacks come in the middle of indirect negotiations between U.S. and Iranian officials on Iran’s nuclear program, in which Iranian officials have openly stated that they never plan to possess a nuclear weapon. On Friday, just hours before the strikes, mediator Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi said that “a peace deal is within our reach.”
“The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb,” Al Busaidi said in an interview with CBS News. More negotiations were supposed to take place next week.
Jon Wolfsthal (THE NEW REPUBLIC) offers:
The United States and Israeli strikes against Iran began only hours ago, but there’s already one clear lesson for the rest of the world: If you have a nuclear weapon, you are safe from potential U.S. attack, and if you don’t have a nuclear weapon, you are vulnerable. In 2018, President Trump violated a multilateral nuclear agreement—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran—that was working. Less than a decade later, he has decided with no sound legal or military justification to launch a barrage of military strikes with the apparent aim of toppling the Iranian regime. This is the clearest but by no means only example of a country without a nuclear weapon falling victim to illegal American military attack. The long-term consequences will likely be a large-scale increase in the number of countries who possess nuclear weapons, something that will undermine American and global security for generations to come.
Even before the U.S. detonated the first nuclear weapon in 1945, it has sought to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, recognizing that the more countries that have these capabilities, the more threatened the U.S. and global peace and security would be. That reality led the U.S. over the past 80 years to build up a global system of alliances, treaties, and legal norms that for the most part was successful in preventing the widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons. There are perhaps 50 countries in the world capable technically of building nuclear weapons, but only nine possess such weapons. They are the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Indeed more countries started nuclear weapon programs and then eventually gave them up than ever built nuclear weapons. This massive nonproliferation success story is unlikely to survive America’s attacks against Iran, and the future effort to limit proliferation is as cloudy as the true justification of Trump’s bombing of Iran, and what happens after the bombing is over.
Chump went it alone without Congressional approval or even debate. Senator Patty Murray's office issued the following today:
Senator Murray: “Congress must return immediately and vote to put an end to this war. Every Senator should be on the record, and Congress must assert its authority—the American people deserve to know which of their leaders supports another potentially bloody and costly war in the Middle East. I voted against the war in Iraq in 2002 and I urge every Member of Congress to join me in voting against a war with Iran today.”
Senator Murray: “I think back to the hours and hours of briefings and discussions before we voted on war with Iraq—none of that. President Trump is just blithely throwing American lives and taxpayer dollars at a vainglorious effort at regime change. What the American people want—we the people—that’s just an afterthought for this President.”
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, issued the following statement in response to President Trump engaging in war with Iran:
“President Trump promised to end wars—not start them. Congress must return immediately and vote to put an end to this war. Every Senator should be on the record, and Congress must assert its authority—the American people deserve to know which of their leaders supports another potentially bloody and costly war in the Middle East. I voted against the war in Iraq in 2002 and I urge every Member of Congress to join me in voting against a war with Iran today—stand on the right side of history.
“Iran should never possess a nuclear weapon, but there was a diplomatic agreement that was already in place to constrain Iran’s nuclear program that Trump tore up. And now just months after he claimed he had nearly obliterated Iran’s nuclear program, President Trump is shamelessly telling the American people that he’s started this war in self-defense. There are no concrete goals. There is no long-term strategy.
“I think back to the hours and hours of briefings and discussions before we voted on war with Iraq—none of that. President Trump is just blithely throwing American lives and taxpayer dollars at a vainglorious effort at regime change. What the American people want—we the people—that’s just an afterthought for this President.
“No one supports the brutal Iranian regime—but already this President’s reckless actions are triggering attacks on U.S. military bases. There is no clear endgame here and no guarantee that these strikes will mean democracy and freedom for the Iranian people or that the world will be any safer for it. The situation in Iran and the surrounding region could quickly spiral out of control, endangering our servicemembers and tens of millions of innocents.
“Leader Thune, whether you agree with this war or not, it is your responsibility to call the Senate back into session—I am calling on you to recognize the gravity of this moment and bring the Senate back. We are a democracy and our Constitution demands that Members of Congress debate and vote on this war for all the American people to see. No war with Iran.”
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Matthew Cooper (WASHINGTON MONTHLY) provides this context:
When President Donald Trump addressed the cameras this morning to announce the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, he put the theocracy’s nuclear program in his sights: “They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.” He denounced them for attempting to “rebuild their nuclear program” and “developing the long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland.”
What the president elides is that he scotched the nuclear deal that, imperfect though it was, provided monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear program and might have prevented this moment. He was trying to forge his own one through his son-in-law as recently as Thursday. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed by Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council (the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China) and Germany. The European Union also took part. The JCPOA was never intended to curb the Mullahs’ support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, or terrorists inside Iraq any more than the arms control regimes negotiated by American presidents from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan required the Soviets to abandon Eastern Europe or Communism. Instead, it had a limited purview. To unwind its nuclear program, Iran agreed to very low levels of enrichment of nuclear materials and an inspection regime that kept real human inspectors and sophisticated monitoring equipment at the country’s nuclear sites. In exchange, Tehran would get sanctions relief, including the unfreezing of certain assets. Hence, the infamous plane of cash dispatched to Iran for which Barack Obama received so much grief.
Did the JCPOA work? Not perfectly, and there were plenty of
Democratic skeptics of the program, including Senator Chuck Schumer and
former Senator Ben Cardin, who had chaired the Foreign Relations
Committee, both of whom voted against the agreement. What is certain is
that when Trump scuttled the accord,
the P5+1 signatories and key international monitoring bodies, such as
the International Atomic Energy Agency, lost their ability to assess
Tehran’s nuclear status. Iran walked away from it, too.
In the absence of any international nuclear monitoring in Iran, we’re blind, in a situation where the U.S. and Israel supposedly eviscerated the Shia regime’s nuclear program last year, but were apparently caught unaware of its build-back efforts and are striking again. One minute, the president is doing an end-zone dance about crushing Iran’s nukes. Months later, he is sounding like George W. Bush, standing before Congress, suggesting America’s enemy is getting close to launching nuclear missiles.
At THE NEW YORK TIMES, Linda Qiu fact checks Chump's assertions:
What Was Said
“That is why, in Operation Midnight Hammer last June, we obliterated the regime’s nuclear program at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.”
This is exaggerated. The United States last June carried out airstrikes targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, but government reports and other officials have not gone as far as Mr. Trump’s claims of total destruction.
The New York Times reported in the days after the attack that a preliminary assessment found that the strikes had sealed off the entrances to two of Iran’s facilities but had not collapsed their underground buildings.
John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, said last June that Iran’s nuclear program had been “severely damaged” by the airstrikes. Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told CBS that same month that the strikes caused “severe damage, but it’s not total damage.” And a Pentagon spokesman echoed that language last August, telling reporters that the strikes had “severely degraded” Iran’s capability and set back the program by two years.
The administration, too, took a more muted approach in assessing the damage. In the National Security Strategy, published last November with an introduction by the president, officials stated that the June airstrikes “significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.”
What Was Said
“Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland.”
This lacks evidence. Officials with access to U.S. intelligence told The New York Times this week that “Mr. Trump exaggerated the immediacy of the threat posed to the United States” by Iran’s missiles program. The suggestion that Iran was trying to build a nuclear bomb was also unsupported.
At THE NEW REPUBLIC, Michael Tomasky writes:
It’s so Donald Trump to do this in the middle of the night. It appears that Israel started bombing Iran around 1:30 a.m. East Coast time, and U.S. forces began about 30 minutes later. But 1:30 a.m. ET is 10:00 a.m. Tehran time—the Iranian people were up and about, and military bases were presumably humming and fully staffed. The people he most surprised here were his employers, the citizens of the United States.
And why would he want to do that? “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people,” Trump said in a brief (by his standards, anyway) video posted on Truth Social at 2:30 a.m. “Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world.” Later, addressing the “proud people of Iran,” he said that “the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”
But why now, and in this way? I’m not in Trump’s brain, but having regrettably spent numberless hours this last decade trying to plumb that brain’s moldy depths, I hazard the educated guess that he wanted to make the whole thing as outrageous to normal opinion as he could. That is, he knows the people who support him will back whatever he does whenever he does it. There’s little question that at Mar-a-Lago, Fox News HQ, Bari Weiss’s house, and other such nexuses of laughter and forgetting, they woke up dancing a little jig. Trump knows he can count on that.
There was no effort to build international support for this move nor was there any effort to build national support here in the US for it. Chump has lied that he's Mr. Peace and that he wasn't seeking wars and he's now started another one. He's built it on lies and lies also describe his 'plan' for Iran as Josh Marshall (TPM) points out:
The other point is that we’re hearing that the president means to overthrow the Iranian regime. But he’s encouraging the civilian population to rise up and overthrow the government. Those two facts say very different things.
First, that virtually never works. Even in the most unpopular and repressive governments, people seldom want to make common cause with a foreign attacker, certainly while such an attack is underway. But the bigger tell is that the White House clearly has no plan to overthrow the Iranian government. That’s not surprising. Overthrowing an entrenched state is a massive military undertaking. Encouraging the civilian population to rise up is what you do when you plan on dropping a lot of bombs and seeing what happens.
This gambit is no different from what the first President Bush did when he encouraged Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein after his armies had been ejected from Kuwait. It’s a punt which signals that the White House will cede control of the situation to forces it can’t control or even well-understand. It is, as the president now says, a war for regime change. And yet there appears to be no military plan to accomplish that. Only the hope that the civilian population will take the opportunity. So, putting the old military adage on its head, hope is the plan.
The attack on Iran ordered by Donald Trump and his war-crazed cabal is a massive political crime, illegal under international law and in direct violation of the US Constitution. It has been launched, in collaboration with the genocidal Israeli regime, without even the figment of authorization from Congress, against a country which has not attacked the United States and poses no threat to it.
Within the first hours of this criminal attack, at least 24 students were killed in an air strike on a girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran. How many thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands will be killed in the days ahead?
Only four days ago, Trump appeared before Congress and the American people to deliver his State of the Union address. Even though he had obviously decided to launch the war, he concealed his decision and barely mentioned Iran in the course of his two-hour rant.
Now, Trump, baseball cap on his head, announced his decision in the dead of night, while most Americans were sleeping. He has set the United States and the entire world on a disastrous course. This war will not solve the internal social crisis of American society, nor will it reverse the protracted deterioration in the global position of US capitalism.
At THE NEW YORK TIMES, Peter Baker offers an analysis which includes:
In his middle-of-the-night social media video announcing the opening of this new war, Mr. Trump laid out a bill of particulars against Iran going back nearly half a century, including its pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, its support for terrorist groups that attacked Americans and allies, the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the recent massacre of Iranian protesters. But he never explained why those aggressions required action now rather than earlier, or why his thinking evidently changed.
Nor did he reconcile his conflicting statements on the status of the Iranian threat. After joining Israel in attacking Iran last summer, he said that he had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program. He repeated that claim in last Tuesday’s State of the Union address, and again in his early Saturday morning video. But he did not clarify why it was necessary to strike a program that had already been obliterated.
He did, however, go further than ever in making regime change the goal, calling on Iranians to overthrow their leaders. “When we are finished, take over your government,” Mr. Trump said. “It will be yours to take.” He repeated that in a social media post Saturday afternoon announcing that the strike had killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader — “one of the most evil people in History,” as he put it.
But how Iranians should go about taking over was left unclear. Mr. Trump wrote that police and revolutionary guard forces should “peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves” — a remarkable notion suggesting that Iranian security officials would somehow team up with the same people they were gunning down in the streets just weeks ago.
The whole point of this war of choice appears to be Chump is hoping to distract from the economy, the Epstein Scandal and his war on immigrants. Christopher S Chivvis (GUARDIAN) points out:
Trump’s foreign policy is not guided by a coherent theory of order, deterrence or alliance management. It is driven instead by the demonstration of dominance, the creation of spectacle and the command of the news cycle. Military force, in this framework, is not a tool subordinated to strategy. It is the strategy.
His escalation against Iran comes as he faces mounting domestic pressure, for attacking the civil rights of US citizens in Minneapolis, amid renewed scrutiny surrounding the Epstein files, and just days after the US supreme court struck down the legal justification for his global tariff policy. In this light, the strikes function as a classic “diversionary war” – an attempt to hijack the global narrative and drown out domestic scandal with the thunder of cruise missiles.
In this effort, Trump is effectively riding the political currents of a US capital that has drifted toward confrontation. He knows that bombing Tehran remains an article of faith for the Republican rank and file, for whom “maximum” is the only acceptable pressure when it comes to Iran. Simultaneously, the Iranian regime’s own odious attacks on its citizens have served to soften Democratic resistance. By framing the escalation as a response to a uniquely repressive adversary, Trump has neutralised much of the domestic opposition that might otherwise constrain a rush to war.
Senator Alex Padilla's office issued the following:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) issued the following statement after President Trump launched preemptive strikes against Iran without Congressional authorization:
“This decision to strike Iran without Congressional approval stands in stark contrast to a President who promised to put Americans first and end foreign wars. At a time when millions of hardworking families face higher costs of living and skyrocketing health care to pay for tax breaks for billionaires, Donald Trump is now pushing the country toward a war that risks American lives without presenting a clear justification to the American people or any plan to prevent escalation and chaos in the region.
“The Iranian regime has oppressed its own people, and its state sponsored terrorism and nuclear ambitions pose significant risks to the safety of Americans and regional stability. We must work with our allies to counter those threats. Regardless of what the President may think or say, he does not enjoy a blank check to launch large-scale military operations without a clear strategy, without any transparency or public debate, and not without Congressional approval.
“The Constitution is clear, and Republican members of Congress must join us in holding this administration accountable and restoring Congress’s role in foreign policy.”
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The following sites updated:
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Chump's lies are all he has left9 hours ago
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Idiot of the Week9 hours ago
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Grifting Sarah Ferguson10 hours ago
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Talking with Barry Ritholtz16 hours ago
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Heated Rivalry20 hours ago
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Neil Sedaka22 hours ago
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SCREAM 723 hours ago
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