[As has become our practice, this Iran war post launched before complete. We expect to be done by 8:00 AM EDT. If you are an early arrival, feel free to comment but do refresh your browser and re-skim at 8:00 AM]
While the Administration, or at least Trump, is ratcheting up its denialism of how badly things are going in the Iran war to new registers of vehemence, most media outlets and pundit are only selectively registering Iran’s dominance, militarily and economically, and what that means for where things are headed. It’s striking to see the resistance to coming to grips with the radical change in the world power structure, as well as the high likelihood of abrupt decays in the material conditions of nations and most citizens. It reminds me of a classic story I have often cited:
In the Indian epic Mahabharata, Yudhisthira goes looking for his missing brothers, who went searching for water. He finds them all dead next to a pond. In despair, but still parched, he is about to drink, but a crane tells him he must answer some questions first.
The last and most difficult: “What is the greatest wonder of the world?” Yudhisthira answers, “Day after day, hour after hour, countless people die, yet the living believe they will live forever.” The crane reveals himself to be the Lord of Death and, after some further discussion, revives the brothers.
We are in the early stages of the death of a settled order upon which what passed for prosperity and international security depended. But contrary to the Mahabharata, there is unlikely to be a divine figure who will give selective relief, despite feverish beliefs of evangelicals and Zionists otherwise. Hence the widespread, reflexive aversion to stare in the face of what looks to be coming.
It would be exceedingly difficult for the US and Israel to claw their way back from the disaster they have created for themselves and their allies and hapless fellow travelers, even charitably assuming Israel recognizes sooner rather than later that its position has become untenable. The only way out for the West is regime change in Washington. There is no path for negotiation even if Trump and Netanyahu were to have Damascene conversions. The repeated duplicity of both belligerents means this war will be a test to destruction.
We’ll note the pervasiveness of delusional thinking as warranted in our updates below, but consider these vignettes:
Former ambassador to Saudi Arabia makes many important observations, but two stood out for me:
This Administration has the most incompetent Cabinet in the history of the United States
Iran has reached the same conclusion as Russia has in Ukraine, that this war will be settled on the battlefield
And as John Mearsheimer flatly says in a new interview on Aljazeera (see at 3:45) “We’re not going to win this war with Iran.”
Contrast Freeman’s views with Katuyila, who is also a former diplomat, in The Iran Files II: Why This War May Still End in Constrained Negotiations. I hate to turn Katuyila into an object lesson, since he has provided fine analysis, but consider his inability to adapt his views to the radical and obvious breaks with the past. From his post:
The archival record, however, reveals a consistent pattern in US–Iran relations: even during severe confrontation, successive American administrations continued to explore the possibility of engagement. Pressure and negotiation often unfolded simultaneously rather than sequentially. History therefore suggests that even a war as intense as the present one may eventually give way to another attempt at diplomacy. The crucial question is under what balance of leverage it will resume. If the current war convinces Iranian leaders that their system has absorbed direct military pressure while imposing costs of its own, Tehran will arrive at the negotiating table with greater leverage than in previous crises….
The archival record therefore reveals two dynamics operating simultaneously. Coercion and engagement have repeatedly unfolded in parallel rather than sequentially, while negotiations themselves remained narrow and carefully bounded by domestic constraints on both sides. The present war may therefore alter not the structure of diplomacy itself, but the balance of leverage within it.
This is the linchpin to where his perspective is wildly off:
This was not improvisation. It was institutional behavior.
There is no “institutional behavior” under Trump. Trump, as he declared in his infamous New York Times interview, is a unilateralist, checked only by his warped sense of morality (in reality, also as his tariff TACO demonstrates, when he encounters forces he deems more powerful, but even then, he recalibrates rather than reversing course). Trump set out to wreck critical US organizations and the rule of law as inconveniences to his exercise of will. That started in Trump 1.0, when among other things, his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, gutted the ranks of seasoned officers.1
And we have seen DOGE as cover for gutting Federal bureaucracies, Trump seeking to fill the top ranks of the US armed forces with apocalypse-loving evangelicals (Larry Wilkerson has been describing this for some time), the attacks on US universities, because crippling PMC power centers that might challenge Trump is more important than preserving US leadership in the sciences and our veneer of intellectual primacy.
The one factor that may blunt Trump’s overwhelming need to dominate2 is the fact that, in Myers-Briggs terms, he is also an extreme P,3 as in “perceiving” type, confirmed not just by his pathological flip-flopping, but also by the fact that he is regularly influenced by the last person that spoke to him. Ps hate hate hate making decisions; they experience a sense of loss in shutting down options.
So it seems as reasonable a guess as any with Trump that he will not make any big moves until he meets with Xi in a summit that starts on March 31, in light of this tweet:
The fact that he listed China first suggests that Trump is laboring under the delusion that China can be pried away from Iran due to the harm it is believed to be suffering from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Recall that Iran has lived up to all of its promises of how it would prosecute the war. One was that it would close the Strait for at least two or three months. China no doubt got that memo. Recall that in addition to stockpiling oil, it may also have stockpiled diesel as it did before the 2008 Olympics (the demand for crude to refine into diesel was one of the factors that drove the price to $147.50 in July 2008).
As an aside, some of the Administration’s allies are beating a quiet retreat. Hindustan Times, in Trump’s Strongest Ally Crumbles Under Mojtaba’s Plan, Italy’s Iraq Retreat Signals IRGC Victory? pointed out that Italian forces had pulled out of Iraqi Kurdistan and were also shrinking their presence in other front line areas of the Middle East.
It does appear that a plan to use convoys to force open the Strait of Hormuz had not yet gone away. Recall that a few days ago, shipping maven Sal Mergoliano reported with dismay that such an operation could not start before the end of March, which he regarded as catastrophically late, and then only at 10% of old normal transit levels. From the Wall Street Journal today in Trump Wants to Secure Hormuz. Here’s What It Would Take.:
One option to clear the way for escorts would be a more-intense use of air power to hunt and destroy Iranian missiles and drones before they could be fired at ships in the strait. Another would be to use ground troops to seize the territory around the waterway.
This is nuts. First, there is no apparent consideration that Iran has been using underwater drones, ironically apparently adapted from those Ukraine used against Russia in the Black Sea. It also fails to acknowledge that another vector for Iran to attack the ships is from caves honeycombed in the cliff. Pray tell, how do you take that out from the air?5
And of course Iran would still retain the last-ditch move of mining.
But the Journal continues:
In an escort operation, U.S. warships, maybe in conjunction with allied navies, would travel through the strait alongside oil tankers to clear mines and fend off Iranian attacks from the air as well as from Iran’s “mosquito fleet” of small, fast-attack boats.
Experts estimate it could take two ships per tanker, or a dozen ships to guard convoys of five to 10 tankers, to have the necessary air defenses. The short distances involved make shooting down missiles and drones much more difficult….
Other military experts have proposed other aircraft, such as the Marines’ Harrier Jump Jet, as an option to support the escorts…
Delays caused by security measures and the number of available warships would reduce tanker traffic through the strait to 10% of its normal level, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a leading shipping analysis firm.
At that rate, it would take months to clear a backlog of more than 600 international trading ships stuck in the Gulf.
Yours truly has said that if the US proceeds with this plan, and Iran destroys the naval vessels and tankers as expected, this would be the event that would conclusively demonstrate that Iran holds all the high cards and the world was set to endure compounding, difficult-to-unwind damage from a continuing closure of the Strait of Hormuz. If Mr. Market has not sobered up before then, one could expect this defeat to trigger a financial market panic.
Trump is still toying with the idea of going all the way up the escalation ladder:4
To turn to more to the kinetic war, the BBC’s live blog headline is back to optimistic messaging:
Mind you, the pounding of Iran is still very much underway:
And in fairness, the BBC did report in its live feed yesterday that an Iranian missile hit the US embassy in Baghdad.
Bloomberg gives above-the-fold treatment to the deterioration of the US position in Iraq in US Calls for Americans to Leave Iraq ‘Now’ as Attacks Mount:
The US Embassy in Baghdad told Americans on Saturday to leave Iraq immediately following a series of attacks targeting US nationals….
Iran-aligned militias have repeatedly attacked the International Zone in central Baghdad, the embassy said. The area around the Erbil International Airport and the Erbil consulate have also been subject to repeated attacks, according to the statement, in apparent retaliation for US-Israeli strikes against Iran.
“Do not attempt to come to the embassy in Baghdad or the consulate general in Erbil in light of the ongoing risk of missiles, drones, and rockets in Iraqi airspace,” the embassy said.
This reversal is even more striking when you realize that the International Zone is the famed, and supposedly extremely well fortified Green Zone. Consider also:
A Janto Ka update overlaps with our discussion above of Trump’s plea for naval assistance but also includes the Iran campaign against the UAE:
Israel may also be starting to recognize that it has bitten off a lot more than it can chew and the US will not be able to rescue them. Some kinetic war updates:
Alon Mizrahi points out that rumors are swirling in Israel over Netanyahu’s apparent absence; he argues that his recent public appearance was AI based on his vocal timbre and apparent level of energy. Note that I was able to immediately identify the AI videos of Yanis Varofakis as bogus based on its voice.6. Note our reader raspberry jam, who is something of an expert on AI pointed out, that the video was genuine based on the the fact that handled some of the questions with too much in the way of emotion. But perhaps this was a real video sexed up with AI or other tools?
In any event, independent of what you believe about the Netanyahu’s status, Mizrahi detects that the officialdom is coming to grips with something serious being amiss….which could be as simple as running out of interceptors. Key points from his latest talk:
Where is Netanyahu? What happened to him? The man has been conspicuously absent for a couple of days already…the fact that that establishments, the institutions that are in place to provide us with information about what’s really going on, whether it is the governments or the media, the fact that they are doing much more concealment than sharing and exposing only adds to the tension…
And we understand that something is not going right. Because if things were going their way, they wouldn’t be hiding things. They would be sharing things. They would be taking pride in showing off. But they are not doing that. They are becoming more nervous and more restless. ..
[After discussing why he thinks the Netanyahu talk was AI] But when he didn’t appear for this security briefing and Israel Katz, the Minister of Defense, gave this briefing, And when you can see how Israeli seniors, I mean, high ranking officers and politicians look worried, look gray, look out of energy. …
I mean, It looks like they have been hit in a way they cannot deny and conceal anymore to themselves. They are still denying and trying to conceal it from the rest of the world. But something about the music has changed. It’s not the same.
Usually Israel always talks with arrogance, with stupidity. It’s the performance of arrogance, but the content of stupidity. Because they always talk about what they are going to do, like there’s no one to counter them. There’s no one to work against them. There’s nothing that can happen that can sabotage or derail their ambitions and their plans.
This is the Israeli way of thinking and doing stuff. But it’s like something about this cracked. in recent days, and I didn’t know what was the, I still don’t know for sure, but I know that something happened. Something important, something broke. Now, what I had in mind is perhaps Iran was able to neutralize Israeli Air Force bases, which is Israel’s strategic long arm. And maybe Iran was able to hit it and destroy some of it. neutralize some of this strategic capability. Or maybe the interceptors were running low, but just today Israel suddenly publicly admitted that they were running out of interceptors…and a major ground operation in Lebanon is being discussed, which Israel cannot carry out, because he doesn’t have the means, the manpower, he doesn’t have the ability. Hezbollah has turned northern Israel into hell, the border areas. They cannot assemble forces properly, and the people are fatigued, and there are sirens nonstop. And there are drones and missiles and it’s practically hell. It’s almost impossible.
And I think that this is why Israel is trying to negotiate a settlement with the Lebanese government, with French mediation.Simply because they know they cannot do this, especially if they assemble a big force of 100,000 soldiers or so and try to send them into Lebanon, Israel itself becomes fully exposed.
What happens if an intifada breaks out as I expect it to begin? But not now. It’s going to take a little more, a few more weeks. So they know they can do this, but amid all this very important, very strategic set of considerations, Netanyahu is absent and is not mentioned…So none of this is like a definitive proof….But this is very sus. This is very unusual for the head of state to suddenly disappear at such a crucial juncture for this war,…And it is especially weird when Israeli media doesn’t even mention this. They are not saying anything about this, about all the rumors, and they are all on Twitter. I mean, they see what the whole world is talking about, but no one is mentioning these rumors.
Finally, to the escalating US efforts to keep too much reality from getting to the great unwashed public. Recall we showed a Janta Ka update that included an extended clip of Pete Hegseth hectoring the press, quoting headlines and then providing his substitutes for how they should have read to properly show the US as winning. Now this:
Keep in mind that the FCC does not license networks or print media but local broadcast licensees. Some are owned by the big networks but Nexstar and Sinclair are the biggest owners of local broadcasters. Mind you, anyone who pushed back in court would be sure to win, but self-censorship is the easier and more profitable course of action.
We’ll stop here for today. See you tomorrow!
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1 From a 2017 New York Times article, Diplomats Sound the Alarm as They Are Pushed Out in Droves:
In a letter to Mr. Tillerson last week, Democratic members of the House Foreign Relations Committee, citing what they said was “the exodus of more than 100 senior Foreign Service officers from the State Department since January,” expressed concern about “what appears to be the intentional hollowing-out of our senior diplomatic ranks.”
2 From Ben Panga in comments:
I grew up with a bullying delusional narcissist and have also had professional reasons to learn plenty about them.The need to remain (in their own minds) like a winner/strong/loved etc is the defining trait. It supercedes all other motivations. Threats to this illusion are terrifying to them, and they will do anything to avoid it. It’s literally more frightening than death. Preservation of the ego’s fragile delusion is everything.
When reality finally humiliates them, when the mania runs out of options, hiding and deep depression happen.
I worry that, ex a coup, Trump will be in a situation where he sees the choice as between 1) very public humiliation 2) nukes. Even if no nukes, the public failure/humiliation that is building will cause him to lash out in very erratic ways.
There’s a story that always stuck with me from Trump’s childhood about his younger brother Robert (who Trump constantly tormented) dumping a bowl of mash-potato on Donald’s head during a family meal. Trump by this time had already been conditioned by his sociopathic father never to be weak, and always be a killer. Trump was the chosen child and he watched as brother Fred was often humiliated by father Fred.
Until one day Trump was the one to be humiliated.
Per Mary Trump (via her substack):
By this time, Donald was a pro at teasing and belittling his little brother and, as was often the case, Robert started crying hysterically and screaming for Donald to stop. Donald, of course, wouldn’t and nobody could get him to—especially not my grandmother for whom, even then, Donald had a fair amount of contempt. He didn’t listen to a word she said, and even telling him to wait until his father came home had no impact on his behavior,
In the midst of the fighting and yelling and sobbing, my grandmother started setting the table and bringing the food in from the kitchen. As things continued to escalate, my dad, in just a fit of frustration, did the only thing he could think of to do to make Donald stop: He picked up what must have been the quite massive bowl of mashed potatoes that my grandmother had just put on the table and he dumped it on Donald’s head. Robert immediately went quiet and Donald was speechless.
And, probably worst of all for him, everybody, except Donald, of course, started laughing. They were laughing their heads off, and Donald knew they were laughing at him. It may have been the first time, at least consciously, that Donald felt that awful feeling of humiliation, and there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t laugh it off because, even then, he wasn’t capable of laughing at himself. I think it some ways, this is the source of his grievance , the source of his always feeling that everything is against him and life is completely unfair—which sounds absurd because among other things, it’s completely untrue.
The bowl of masked potatoes ended Robert’s suffering, at least that night, but it also set Donald’s into motion. It was the source of his terror of being humiliated. And he developed some very strong armor and defense mechanisms so he’d never feel that way again.
Also relevant:
These 7 stories from Mary Trump’s book show Trump’s deep-rooted, strained relationship with his family (Business Insider, not archived)
Inside the ‘dysfunctional family’ that gave us Trump, according to his niece (Guardian)
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BP: I work with these kinds of childhood patterns, and help people make sense of them and fix them. I’m really good at it and it’s the one area that I really trust my reads and understanding.
Trump had a load of conditioning about what “winning” looks like from him his father, but the mashed potato story is key.
I continue to believe that the way to understand Trump’s actions as an adult, is to see them as efforts to not feel the humiliation he felt that day. It supercedes everything else.
Currently the Iranians are firing the world’s biggest bowl of mash-potato right at Donald’s face, and the whole world will see it land.
3 Myers Briggs is controversial in some circles, but the CIA uses it as part of its recruitment process, as did and maybe still does JP Morgan. It does seem a good guide to how people behave in organization.
4 Reader Arkady Bogdanov supplied this cheery detail in comments:
I hate to point this out, but you are speaking of the effects of nuclear airbursts, and are neglecting nuclear groundbursts. A small groundburst is FAR worse, and far more persistent, than an airburst, when it comes to fallout. Groundbursts are typically reserved for the destruction of critical infrastructure- hardened industrial sites (and by sites, I mean cities where industrial production is concentrated) and…..areas known to have large military or command, control, communications bunkers. All of the important military sites in Iran are underground, and all of the Israeli leadership is hunkered down in bunkers. The reason for all of this is that a detonation in contact with or below the surface generates shockwaves that travel through the ground, rupturing anything in nearby ground surface and surprisingly deep (depending on geological/soil/amount of water saturation in the soil). Foundations are pulverized, water, sewer, and gas pipes get ruptured/collapse, buried electrical lines get severed/shorted, and subsurface cavities, such as bunkers, tend to have their roofs pushed down onto the inhabitants (unless engineered for such a strike, which is unlikely due to the costs).
Airbursts tend to cause fires and cause casualties, but preserve a lot of hardened (concrete and steel + buried) infrastructure, especially as you move outward from the hypocenter, where survival rates greatly increase for both living things and man made objects, at least the hard stuff.
I live under the likely fallout pattern for Pittsburgh, and every time tensions rose, I worried, because it was always agreed that Pittsburgh, due to the concentration of the steel industry, would be slated for a groundburst. I saw an article a couple of years ago that stated that that would no longer be the case, and I remember feeling actually relieved- A silver lining to de-industrialization, I suppose.
Anyway, groundbursts produce far more fallout due to the dust and debris that is thrown into the atmosphere- almost all of which will be contaminated, and much of this will be products with longer half-lives (I believe this is due to the high energy particle flux near the center of the detonation being able to more easily interact with more solid matter, instead of the gasses of the atmosphere.
5 Given Iran’s fondness for using old equipment when it is fit for purpose, and that the ranges from the cliffs to ships would be short, they could even use good old fashioned artillery rather than fancy drones.
Anyway, just wanted to point this out, as it is an important part of the discussion when it comes to fallout. Groundbursts are going to be used against hardened C3 targets, and concentrations of heavy industry. Population centers and non-hardened military sites (airbases/naval bases) will get airbursts.
6 Varoufakis uses more of his vocal range than the AI versions of him did. He is also more animated. The AI versions had a somewhat flat affect.