(Dobbs) Correct Me If I'm Wrong, But This War Sure Feels Endless To MeHow seriously should the sultan of Oman take Trump's threat to "bomb the shit out of them?"
If I were the Sultan of Oman, I wouldn’t know what to think. According to Fox News, when its reporter asked President Trump yesterday in a telephone interview to comment on Oman’s talks with Iran about opening the Strait of Hormuz, his low-class answer was, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” This might not have surprised anybody, neither the language nor the threat. Back in late May, when Oman and Iran first sat down together and looked at sharing control over the strait and sharing fees from ships passing through, Trump declared at a Cabinet meeting at the White House, “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up.” So how seriously should the sultan take Trump? On the one hand, Oman is an ally of the United States of America. On the other hand, President Trump treats his allies like they are swine. On the one hand, the president fails to follow through on his threats more than he actually follows through. On the other hand, don’t get on his wrong side if he got up on the wrong side of the bed. Which appears to be where he got up yesterday. The day already was fraught with frustration. Not only are we coming up on six months of the war that Donald Trump started without a sane strategy to end it, but it was exactly 60 days since the president had sat down on June 17th, during a dinner with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles, and signed the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, better known as just the MoU. The purpose of the document, which Iran also signed, was to create a roadmap for an eventual end to the war. Its opening language was, “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, and their allies in the current war, by signing this MoU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts.” It called for a sixty day truce, during which the two sides would reach “a final deal.” Those sixty days were up yesterday. Without a deal of any kind. It also called for— it specifically called for— Iran to “conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman, to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.” Now Trump is condemning the dialogue, even though at the time he signed the MoU, the White House called it an “historic breakthrough” which would see the Strait of Hormuz open again and ensure that Iran never would be a nuclear power. That was then, this is now. Far from the first time, the president of the U.S. is reneging on a part of a contract. What else do you call it when he says “we’ll bomb the shit” out of Oman. When Donald Trump endorsed the MoU, the people around him claimed that it proved how he could end a war— even if a war of his own making— without it becoming the kind of “endless war” he has long denounced. Correct me if I’m wrong, but with no clear means of escape, this one sure feels endless to me. When Trump said yesterday in the Fox interview, “I’m not in a hurry,” he sure seemed to be moving in the wrong direction. Not just for the sake of ending an endless war, but for the sake of the 7,500 personnel in the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group who’ve been deployed for the better part of a year, and for the estimated 50,000 members of the military in the theater of war. The president would have us believe that there is plenty happening behind the scenes. He told Fox there are third-party backchannel talks with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Projecting strength he doesn’t necessarily have, he said, “They should put up the white flag of surrender.” But nobody told Iran. The Revolutionary Guard’s spokesman said, “There is no dialogue taking place between IRGC officials and the Americans.” He called Trump’s claim “merely fantasy.” Once again, we have to decide who to believe…. and reconcile ourselves to the fact that once again, it is probably Iran. They haven’t “won” this war, but neither has the United States. And what Iran has won is the crown jewel of the war: control over the Strait of Hormuz. So the president probably feels desperate. He should. He started a war, now he doesn’t have a path to ending it. At least not without giving up more than he has gained. Leave a comment President Trump claimed yesterday that November’s midterm elections in the United States “have nothing to do with my thinking.” But the longer the war drags on and the more Americans grow weary of the inflated price of food and gas, it worsens the November prospects of the president and his party. So that’s another claim that might properly be called “merely fantasy.” ******************************************************************************************************* A postscript about the president’s coarse language. Yesterday, Georgia’s Democratic senator Jon Ossoff made a snarky remark about a young White House staffer who is constantly by Donald Trump‘s side. She was among the few aides allowed to sneak off of Air Force One with the president before it left Turkey as a potential target for an Iranian missile. Her name is Natalie Harp. Ossoff’s remark about their relationship was not profane, it was not provocative, it was just snarky. So what does the White House serve up in return? Communications director Steven Cheung says this: “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.” We are conditioned by now to expect nothing better. Nobody ever told Trump, or the people who emulate him, that maybe kids are listening. Share © 2026 Greg Dobbs |