The Twelve-Day War
No, I did not underestimate Donald Trump.
Note: I wrote most of this yesterday. I woke up this morning, looked at the news, and wished I’d spent the time writing about our wicked betrayal of Ukraine. I’ll write about that in the coming days.
On underestimating Trump
A few days ago, our reader Spin Owsley asked me in the chat1 what I thought of this article by the American-Israeli economist Russ Roberts,2 who is now the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. It’s titled, ‘I underestimated him.”
“Him” is Donald Trump, of course. At first, Roberts writes, he merely underestimated Trump’s “political genius.” But he has now concluded Trump’s acumen goes far beyond politics. Trump’s recent accomplishments in the Middle East have caused him to appreciate the value of Trump’s “otherworldly” boldness:
… What Trump has accomplished in the Middle East over the last two weeks is something I couldn’t have imagined and I don’t think many others could either. Even now, he’s being underestimated. And the same is true of another master politician, Bibi Netanyahu. What they have accomplished together is extraordinary. What they have accomplished could not have been scripted in advance in anyone’s wildest dreams or nightmares.
… The last two weeks, what Trump has cleverly called the 12 Day War, will be talked about and written about for ages.3 But the military success is just the beginning. Trump and Netanyahu have re-made the Middle East. And they’re just getting started. You underestimate them at your peril.
I replied to Spin in the chat, briefly. But I’ll elaborate here.
1. It’s a bit premature, no?
None of us know, or can know, what Trump has accomplished in the Middle East. This is a judgment that only time can render. Americans (and Israelis, too), know very well that it’s easy to be elated by the successful first days of a conflict. Things can look very different when all is said and done. If you’d asked me to evaluate the success of our intervention in Iraq on the day the statue of Saddam Hussein came tumbling down, my answer would not have been what it is today.
If it is hard in general to see where a violent conflict is leading, it’s even more hard to assess whether Trump’s handling of Iran warrants such a panegyric, because the assessment necessarily hinges on things we obviously don’t yet know. A short list:
We don’t know whether the regime was truly planning to build a nuclear weapon. I certainly don’t, anyway. I sure have my suspicions, but that’s all they are.
In March, Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. She said Khamenei had not authorized this, even though Iran was clearly enriching uranium to higher levels. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said: Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear bomb.
Gabbard subsequently claimed that “President Trump was saying the same thing that I said,” which obviously he wasn’t. Many have seized on this as evidence that Trump was deluded or lying. You’ll never lose money by betting that this is so, but the inconsistency is no special reason to think it, nor is it a reason to believe, as many do, that Gabbard was right the first time.
Appealing to the CIA’s judgment about this would be a risky proposition. Their record with questions like this, around the world, has been dismal. Behold the catalogue:
We missed Stalin’s Bomb. We couldn’t produce an accurate timeline for Soviet nuclear development. We failed to grasp that the Soviets were able to advance quickly through espionage, by learning from captured German scientists, and from advantage they had in knowing, for sure, that it was possible.
We missed India’s, too:
We got Pakistan’s enrichment timeline wrong:
We misread Argentina, first missing its enrichment program altogether, then failing to appreciate that the program had been abandoned.
After the first Gulf War, we were shocked to discover that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program was far more advanced than anyone had suspected. (We now know that the Israeli attack on the Osirak reactor did not set back his nuclear program. It triggered it.)
We were shocked again in the second Gulf War, when we discovered Saddam Hussein no longer had a nuclear program at all. It had been a bluff.
We suspected North Korea might to build nuclear weapons, but we had no idea whether they could pull it off, or what the timeline might be. We later figured out that they’d built the Bomb—but we couldn’t figure out how many:
We couldn’t figure out what was happening in South Africa:
We correctly assessed that China had a nuclear weapons program, but again got the timeline wrong. The Air Force thought they might test a device as early as 1961. (The first test was not conducted until 1964.)
Subsequently, we did quite well in tracking Chinese nuclear tests, but our estimates of Chinese progress toward deploying ICBMs were wrong. (We thought they’d have them by 1971; their progress was in fact much slower.)4 The document below was written in 1968:
We got Israel’s intention to build nuclear weapons wrong, too. By 1967, we’d figured out that Israel’s Dimona facility was not, as we’d been told, “a textile factory.” But we concluded nonetheless that Israel hadn’t embarked on a nuclear program. (In fact, they’d already built the Bomb.)
By 1969, we were certain that Israel was rapidly building the Bomb. (They’d already had it for two years.)
A point worth noting: By 1975, the CIA firmly believed that Israel had nuclear weapons. But when Congress asked the State Department whether it had “knowledge” of an Israeli nuclear program, this is how they replied:
As this suggests, it would be naive to assume that our intelligence community shares what it knows with Congress in a spirit of full candor. If this is true under normal circumstances, it’s even more true of an intelligence community directed by Tulsi Gabbard, under a Trump Administration, at that. Gabbard fired the most senior officials in the top analytical group in the intelligence community for producing a report that said Tren de Aragua did not take orders directly from the Venezuelan government. Intelligence analysts are under acute pressure to tailor their reporting to the president’s agenda. Everything they say these days must be understood in this light.
It’s hard for a director of intelligence to be shadier than Tulsi Gabbard. She has a long history of spreading lies that serve Iran’s interests and Russia’s. No one knows why. Recently, she produced a video warning of our imminent nuclear annihilation, complete with a lurid depiction of a nuclear bomb detonating over the Golden Gate Bridge. She accused “political elite warmongers” of “carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they’re confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families.”5
That seemed to be too crazy even for Trump, who has reportedly frozen her out.
If your memory extends back more than 30 minutes, you know that our intelligence services do a bit better than a Ouija board on questions like these, but not much. It’s not because they’re lying.6 It’s because this is a beastly difficult thing to assess. Other governments don’t want us to know the answer, and they take great precautions to hide from us what they’re doing. It’s particularly difficult to figure out what’s going on in Iran. Iranian culture is not readily legible to us and Iran is a dangerous place for our spies. Gauging that regime’s intentions has never been our strong suit.
The CIA does not have magic powers. If its judgment about Iran’s intentions was initially incorrect, it may be due to the inherent difficulty of assessing something as vaporous as an intention, which in Iran’s case resides in the soul of an 87-year-old mullah who doesn’t text us when he has a change of plans. If you were willing to believe Gabbard when she said, in April, that Iran did not intend to build a Bomb, you should be willing to believe her now when she says they did. If you strongly believe the early Tulsi but not the later Tulsi (or vice-versa), you’ve simply found evidence that confirms what you already believe.7
Another thing makes this question exceedingly difficult: It’s not true, as some say, that a country would only enrich uranium to 60 percent to build a nuclear weapon. You would do exactly the same thing if you sought to persuade your adversaries that you could build a nuclear weapon, and you very well might if they don’t give you what you want.
Iran, as critics of our involvement have pointed out, has been “on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon” for two decades. If it hasn’t built one yet, it’s clearly not for lack of knowledge or ability. Why has it been dawdling for so long? It’s possible that Khamenei believed that so long as he had a latent nuclear program, no one would try to Gaddafi him. It would be something close to a nuclear deterrent, with a bonus: It could intermittently be used as a bargaining chip.
This strategy definitely works. Iran successfully used it to recover its frozen assets. Had they not had a nuclear program, we’d have said we can’t return the funds because they’ll spend every penny of it on terrorism, which is exactly what they did. So it’s possible their whole nuclear program was a bluff, like Saddam Hussein’s pretense of having a nuclear program in the run-up to the second Gulf War. I think this unlikely, but we can’t exclude the possibility.
If so, the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities could prove, in time, to be one of the worst decisions in the history of American foreign policy—or even in history. It could be the event that convinces Khamenei, or his successors, that nothing short of a completed nuclear weapon can guarantee the regime’s security.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that Khamenei will conclude the nuclear program was sheer folly—one that very nearly cost him not only his regime but his life. He may simply be too frightened to try again. We don’t know.
This point should be obvious, but it seems to elude people: None of us know what Khamenei is thinking. We can’t know. We don’t even know what people who share our own culture think, still less what Khamenei thinks or might think in the future. When the CIA reported that it did not believe the regime planned to build the Bomb, it was, necessarily, a low-confidence judgment, whether or not they described it that way. Before the war, Khamenei was the only one with the authority to make that decision. He alone knew his true intentions. He may not have confided them to a soul. Human beings can’t read minds. What kind of intelligence could prove that this regime was intent on building a bomb, as opposed to intent on appearing to be building a bomb? There is none.
But unless we know the answers to all of these questions, and we can’t, we can’t say confidently that Trump made the right decision. And that is just the beginning of the list of things we don’t and can’t yet know.
We don’t know how much of the program was destroyed by Israel and our MOPs, and therefore don’t know how long it would take the regime to rebuild its nuclear program.
We don’t know if it will try to rebuild its nuclear program.
We don’t know whether the US will keep bombing Iran if they keep working on their nuclear program.
We don’t know whether the regime will collapse.
We don’t know who will succeed Khamenei when he dies.
We don’t know what would happen if Iran did build the Bomb. Many of us suspect they would use it. I do. Of all the regimes in the world, this is the one I think most likely to break the nuclear taboo. But that doesn’t mean I think it is guaranteed to do so, only that I find it more likely than I do the idea that the UK, for example, would start a nuclear war.
We don’t even know who, by then will be in the White House, or whether by that point we’ll have already nuked ourselves by accident. (I mean: Look at us these days. You know that’s possible.)
Nor can we say that Trump’s decisions seem sound given the information he had, because we have no idea what information he had. If there is significant intelligence about the regime’s capabilities and intentions, it’s classified. We’re only seeing the shadows of this story, like the captives in Plato’s cave.
These points—all of them—are self-evident. But we’ve become so violently partisan and aggravated that we seem to have lost all sense of our epistemic limits. Everyone on the Internet seems to know that Trump made the right—or the wrong—decision. They are absolutely certain of it. They have no idea what they’re talking about, but why should that be an impediment to screaming your head off on Piers Morgan?
Epistemic immodesty is often accompanied by a pathological inability to accept doubt or complexity. We’re bickering furiously about whether the nuclear facilities were “obliterated” or merely “severely damaged,” as if we could possibly know and as if this question mattered. It doesn’t. What matters is whether Trump’s decisions did more good than harm—in the long run—and we just don’t know yet. And we can’t.
2. I’d have done it, too.
All of this said, my instinct is that his decision to order the strike on Iran’s nuclear installations was the right one. It’s the decision I would have made.
But I’ve been wrong before. I’m not dispassionate. The Iranian regime is the embodiment of everything I loathe: It’s tyrannical, theocratic, obscurantist, cruel, fanatical, barbaric, misogynistic, and antisemitic. Its cruelty to dogs alone would be sufficient for me to despise it. The mullahs have been threatening us with death since I was eleven years old. I won’t pretend that I don’t find it enormously satisfying when they get whacked. Every molecule in my body says, “Enough already. We’ve put up with this since 1979. Flatten them.” But all this proves is that if we were to put the regime’s intentions on trial and I were the judge, I should recuse myself. Good analysts look at evidence, not their instincts.
But for fun, let’s say we go with my instincts. My instinct is that they’ll think twice, if not a thousand times, before spinning those centrifuges again. Israel has proven its ability to do devastating damage to Iran. The United States has shown that occasionally, we can still be roused from our slumber, and even if our attention span is brief, just a few seconds of our attention is deadly.
My instinct is that the world is better off for having seen this. We’ve done everything in our power, in recent years, to persuade our enemies they have nothing to fear from us. We’ve given the world the impression of being so consumed by our hatred of one another that we have ceased to remember the wider world, so risk-averse that our military is just for parades, so clueless that we can’t distinguish between friend and foe, so distractible that we never finish what we start, and so childish that we’re incapable of electing serious leaders. We couldn’t have devised a foreign policy more likely to transform the world into a Hobbesian free-for-all if we’d been trying. It is good that we’ve done one thing to offset that impression.
Russ Roberts has the same instinct, but takes his conclusions much further:
… The military achievements are dwarfed by the geopolitical impact. With a single flawless bombing mission, Trump has changed the world’s perception of the United States. Iran, China, and Russia all understand that at least under Trump, the US is willing to project military power beyond what were once the perceived parameters of “America First.”
No. That’s way too far. Trump’s strike most certainly did not undo all of that failure. Far from it. If it had, Russia would not have immediately launched its most murderous bombing raids on Ukrainian civilians since the start of the war, secure in the knowledge that Trump would not object. Trump even cut off the weapons Ukraine desperately needs to save the lives of its civilian population.
The strike did, however, show adversaries that they can’t be certain that we will always betray our allies and allow ourselves to be bamboozled by our enemies. Iran was clearly certain of this before. They were so persuaded it was TACO time that in response to the IAEA’s censure, they grandly announced they would begin work on a new, “secure” nuclear installation and upgrade the centrifuges at Fordow. You wouldn’t do that unless you felt confident that your adversary was infinitely patient. If you perceive even a small chance that the US might be roused to action, it will change your risk assessment, and that’s got to be for the good.
3. If those are my instincts, why won’t I say, “I underestimated Trump?”
Because I didn’t.
I’m happy to say that he surprised me by making that decision. I’m happy he did, too: It’s a dangerous thing to have a president universally mocked for chickening out. It may prove to be an immensely significant decision. I understand why Russ Roberts is exuberant. I’d love to join him in saying, “I underestimated Trump. He’s a strategic genius.” I’d feel so much better if I believed a genius was at the helm. But it’s not true. Believing so is an act of self-deception none of us can afford.
My judgment of Trump is unchanged. He’s no strategic genius. In fact, his abilities are so limited that he may be described, without exaggeration, as cognitively disabled. He’s the most ignorant and uncurious leader any of us have encountered, in life or even in fiction. He’s showing early signs of dementia. Above all, he is severely—and dangerously, and incurably—mentally ill.8 None of this is made less grave—and none of it less dangerous—because he made one good decision (perhaps), however important that decision proves to be.
What are the odds that he will continue to make good decisions? Dim. Look at Ukraine. Look anywhere else, really. Since ordering that strike, he has continued to imperil the American economy, its constitution, and its future. His judgment in every other arena of foreign policy has been almost inconceivably bad. It is terrifying and utterly unacceptable that he has the power to launch nuclear weapons. For our security and that of everyone on this planet, we must immediately impeach him.
I know we won’t. But my God, we should.
This may sound absurd to readers who, like me, feel immense relief that he struck Fordow and who think the decision may have prevented a nuclear holocaust. But let’s be real about the way he made that decision: It was just luck. An impulse. Would you have been at all surprised if he’d TACOed?
I don’t for a second believe the story we’re being fed about a carefully executed deception campaign in which Trump and Netanyahu did some kind of highly coordinated kabuki dance and Trump masked his real intentions with a pretense of incoherence and indecision. He’s not capable of that. What you saw was what we got. If JD Vance or Tucker Carlson had been the last person to have his ear, he wouldn’t have done it. I give credit to Netanyahu for grasping that he should be the last person to whom Trump spoke. He flawlessly executed a basic Trump-management plan. (But I don’t give him extra credit. Manipulating Trump is child’s play.)
It is simply a mistake to conclude from this that Trump has a strategy or a policy, still less a doctrine. He has no larger goal. He has no vision. His insatiable hunger for attention and flattery dictate everything he does and every decision he makes. If you’ve concluded that there’s a brilliant strategic mind hidden behind an affectation of ludicrousness, it’s because the human mind is determined to impose order on chaos. He’s ludicrous, for real. His mind is a synaptic mess. When you see a pair of fireflies blinking in a bottle, don’t mistake it for Morse Code.
We can’t bear the idea that sometimes major events in history happen for no good reason. It’s hard to bear the thought that monumentally significant decisions like those Trump made last week—decisions that shape the world—are the product of some idiot’s impulsiveness, not the greatness of a larger-than-life figure. It even seems ungrateful to describe him this way, as if I’m depriving him of his due. I’ll give him his due: He did the right thing (I suspect), and it mattered.
But we must not conclude that because (for once) he did something right, he should stay in that office. He should not. He’s utterly unfit to discharge the responsibilities of the presidency. He’s not just unwilling but incapable of thinking intelligibly about our national interest. His time horizon is limited to the next five minutes. He’s surrounded by the most incompetent, unqualified, and sinister misfits our country has ever produced. He can’t distinguish what’s true from false, what’s real from fantasy, and as you’d expect of someone like this, he has done and will continue to do irreparable harm to America and the world. Grateful though I am that he might have made the right call, he must be removed from that office, and quickly, above all because the crisis is not over. The odds that Iran will respond by becoming a peaceful and cooperative signatory to the Abraham Accords are vanishingly small. I don’t say “never”—the region is known for miracles—but that’s sure not where I’d put my money. Trump is highly unlikely to keep making the right decisions. Expecting him to do so is like expecting the coin to come up heads fifty times in a row. Look at Ukraine.
It’s just too dangerous, under these circumstances, to have in office a president who can’t handle the truth and ensures no one will ever tell it to him. Consider Trump’s reaction to the leaked DIA assessment suggesting that Fordow may not have been wholly obliterated. I don’t think we can put too much stock in that assessment, but this is the key point: Trump’s illness is so acute that he could not accept the possibility that something he’d done might be seen as less than perfect.
What if that report was correct? Would he believe more compelling information to the effect that the nuclear program might soon be reconstituted? Or would he decide that the news—like the news that he lost the 2020 election—was fake? Would he order another strike? Or, having decided that Iran “no longer has a nuclear program,” would he do nothing as the threat gathered?
If you’re at all honest with yourself, you know that you have no idea. You know that you can’t trust him to do the right thing. The only stable thing about Trump is his mental disorder. That is the only aspect of his character we can trust. His absolute need to deny any information that threatens his false self is consistent, unchanging, and immutable. He is unable—not unwilling, but unable—to admit mistakes. Doing so would threaten his ego defenses so profoundly that he would decompensate.
4. Where credit is due
About this, Roberts is right:
Let’s start with military execution. For 12 days, Israel dominated Iranian airspace. They did not lose a single plane to Iranian attack or to pilot error or mechanical malfunction. The Israeli Air Force killed military leaders with precise targeted attacks often on a single unit in a large building. They took out military leaders and nuclear scientists in ways we probably will not learn about for a long time. Phone calls brought leaders of the Iranian air force to a meeting where they were all killed together. Somehow, nuclear scientists were killed by their cars exploding. By the end of the war, Khamenei was alleged to be in a bunker communicating only with pencil and paper, not knowing who to trust. He may not be alive.
Israel destroyed command centers, headquarters, and maybe just for the fun of it, the clock that was counting down to the planned destruction of the state of Israel in 2040. Israel bombed and damaged centrifuges and nuclear stores at Fordow, Natanz, and Istefan. They physically took in hand the backup copy of the nuclear archives. Israel had already destroyed the first copy in an earlier attack. The execution of these attacks was flawless and clearly reflected not just extraordinary advanced planning but a devastating penetration of Iranian leadership circles which must have been and remains deeply unnerving to the leadership that is still alive. Because of inside information, the removal of top military and scientific leadership was accomplished with very little civilian death.
All of this is true, all of it is astonishing, and this is where credit is due. Our contribution was likewise excellent: We spent years figuring out the physics and building the MOPs.9 That B-2 is no slouch of a technical achievement, either. I agree with Pete Hegseth that our pilots deserve credit, too.10 Well done, American pilots. I’m grateful to you.
Years of work, planning, discipline, and forethought went into making both Israel’s operation and ours successful. Not a bit of work, planning, discipline, or forethought went into Trump’s decision to say, “Let’s do it.”
Let’s admire the people who really pulled this off. They earned it.
5. Not bold. Just nuts.
Roberts believes there’s a special rapport between Netanyahu and Trump:
… The similar arc they have both traveled probably creates a shared sympathy. They are both realists without stars in their eyes. They see the world in similar ways. It’s clear now that they have worked together for the last few months preparing what we have just seen.
That’s not clear to me. Roberts is unduly impressed by the spin. When I see Netanyahu looking at Trump, I don’t see a man considering a kindred spirit. I see a man obsequiously flattering someone for whom he feels utter contempt. It’s embarrassing to watch.
Roberts also concludes that Trump is astonishingly brave:
But there’s something else, more evident in Trump than in Netanyahu. And that’s a willingness to be bold. Foolish people claim that Netanyahu dragged Trump into this war to satisfy a lifelong desire to get America to hit Iran. But that misreads the reality that Netanyahu couldn’t even drag himself into a war with Iran until now. I think October 7th and its aftermath changed him. Here in Israel, Netanyahu had been seen as excessively cautious. Those days are over.
But Trump’s boldness is otherworldly. Off the charts. What I mean by boldness is to do something that just isn’t done, that everyone knows isn’t done, that everyone is telling you can’t be done or shouldn’t be done. He floats bold schemes that are so outside the box the world takes them as humor. Canada could be the 51st state! Greenland would be nice to have! Let’s build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it!
These aren’t provocative or creative policy ideas. These are insane ideas. And until it happened a few days ago, so was the US bombing of Iran.
No, it wasn’t. We worked on those bunker busters for years precisely because we figured we’d one day have to do this. Many American presidents would have capitalized on an opportunity like this: Israel gave us an easy, low-risk shot. The only president I can imagine passing up such an opportunity is Biden, honestly. Even Obama might have taken it.
Roberts is right to say that Trump’s schemes for Canada and Greenland are insane. But bold? Give me a break. They’re just insane. Voicing them has been deeply destructive to the United States.
6. “Unconditional surrender?”
As Israel attacked his nuclear sites, Khamenei gave this speech:
He looks well to me, unfortunately. He isn’t suffering from cognitive decline. He’s speaking clearly. He’s dignified. He looks tired, but he’s 87 and the IDF is busy pulverizing everything he’s ever worked for, so that’s normal.
Notice his focus on Trump’s “unconditional surrender” tweet. We’ve become so accustomed to the President’s habit of saying the first idiotic thing that pops into his head that we’ve almost ceased to notice how idiotic it is for the President of the United States to do this.
Trump claims that he wants a deal with Iran. “Unconditional surrender” is the opposite of “a negotiated deal.” So why would he write that? Perhaps he heard the phrase in a World War II movie and always wanted to say it. Perhaps he got carried away with excitement. He certainly didn’t ask anyone familiar with Iranian culture (or human culture, for that matter) whether using that phrase would be helpful or harmful to the aims he claims to be pursuing. Its effect, however, was wholly predictable.
Unless you suffer from a severe deficit in your theory of mind, you know that if you don’t mean to force “unconditional surrender” on your adversary, it’s asinine to say that you do. After the Allies made the decision to accept only the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, Churchill gave a speech in the House of Commons. His intended audience was the Axis. He wished to discourage them from fighting to the death.
“The term ‘unconditional surrender’” he said, “does not mean that the German people will be enslaved or destroyed.”
It means however that the Allies will not be bound to them at the moment of surrender by any pact or obligation. There will be, for instance, no question of the Atlantic Charter applying to Germany as a matter of right and barring territorial transferences or adjustments in enemy countries. No such arguments will be admitted by us as were used by Germany after the last war, saying that they surrendered in consequence of President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.”
Unconditional surrender means that the victors have a free hand. It does not mean that they are entitled to behave in a barbarous manner, nor that they wish to blot out Germany from among the nations of Europe. If we are bound, we are bound by our consciences to civilization. We are not to be bound to the Germans as the result of a bargain struck. That is the meaning of “unconditional surrender.”
Does Khamenei know this? No idea. Does Trump? No. Whether Khamenei knows this or not, he understands—as does everyone in Iran—that an unconditional surrender is one without guarantees, reassurances, or promises. No country would accept such a demand absent a credible threat of utter annihilation. We dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan before they surrendered unconditionally. When Trump declared a cease-fire, he took unconditional surrender off the table.
To make a deal, you have to persuade your adversary that his interests are better served by accepting a deal than continuing to fight. If this is true in the abstract, it’s even more true if the adversary is Iran, because Iran’s is an archetypal shame-honor culture. (They’re still burning with humiliation about the Arab conquest of Pars in 651.) It’s not unimaginable that Khamenei would accept deal in which he gives up his nuclear program and we permit him and his regime to survive. The Ayatollah Khomenei drank no less a “cup of poison,” as he put it, at the end of the Iran-Iraq War. But it’s a good bet Khamenei would prefer death to the humiliation of accepting something called “unconditional surrender.”
Watch the video carefully. He’d choose to die, first. So would many Iranians. The Iranian people may utterly loathe him, but Khamenei knows they’ll be damned if they “surrender unconditionally” to anyone. (Remember, too, that in shame-honor cultures, aggression restores honor.)
Trump impulsively handed Khamenei a lifeline of enormously powerful propaganda: “They want Iran on its knees.” Khamenei didn’t have to make that up, either. Trump really said it. Are Iranians supposed to grasp that one isn’t meant to take the President of the United States literally? That’s asking a lot.
If you’re wondering how significant this is, here’s Khamenei’s first speech since the shooting stopped:
He warms up by quickly congratulating the nation on their victory over the “fallacious Zionist regime,” which was “practically knocked out and crushed under the blows of the Islamic Republic.” He says the Islamic republic “slapped America in the face,” and US strikes didn’t do “anything important.” In fact, the US only intervened to save Israel from being “completely destroyed.”11
Perhaps grasping that this wasn’t his strongest line of attack, Khamenei then launches into the rest of his speech, all of it focused on Trump’s tweet:
The key point I wish to emphasize in my speech is this that in one of his remarks, the President of the United States declared that Iran must surrender. Surrender! The issue isn’t about enrichment or the nuclear industry anymore. It’s about Iran surrendering. Needless to say, this statement is too big to come out of the US president’s mouth.12
For the great country of Iran—a nation with such a history, such a rich culture, and a steadfast national determination—any talk of surrender is nothing but a mockery in the eyes of those who truly know the Iranian people. But his statement revealed a certain reality, which is that the US has been actively opposing and trying to harm Islamic Iran from the very beginning of the Revolution. And each time, they come up with a new pretext. One time, it’s human rights. Another time, it’s defending democracy. Then, it’s women’s rights. Sometimes it’s uranium enrichment, and at other times it’s the nuclear issue itself. Or it’s the matter of missile development. They bring up all kinds of pretexts. But at the core, it all boils down to one thing, which is that they want Iran to surrender. The previous administrations never openly stated this because it’s something unacceptable. It isn’t justifiable by any human logic to tell a nation that they must surrender. That’s why they were disguising this objective behind other titles and pretexts.
This person let the truth out. He showed this reality that the US will only be satisfied with Iran’s surrender and nothing less. This is a crucial point. The Iranian nation must know that the core of the conflict with the US is over this point. The US is greatly insulting the people of Iran, and such a thing will never happen. It will never happen.
The Iranian nation is a great nation. Iran is a strong, vast country. It possesses an ancient civilization. Our cultural and civilizational wealth is hundreds of times greater than that of the US and other similar countries. Anyone who expects Iran to surrender to another country is spouting nonsense that will surely be ridiculed by wise, knowledgeable people. The Iranian nation is noble and will remain noble.
This is why Trump can’t be trusted to handle this crisis. It isn’t over. Making one good decision isn’t enough. Handling this requires the wisdom of Solomon. Perhaps we got lucky, and our strikes persuaded the regime it must never touch uranium again. But we absolutely don’t know that yet.
“Patience and persistence,” John Bolton wrote in a piece for The New York Times, “are required to stifle such a dogged proliferator like Iran.” Trump has neither. It’s likely that the President will need to make many more grave decisions about Iran, and get every one of them right. Trump won’t do that. He can’t.
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Roberts also achieved pop culture immortality when he wrote Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek—The Original Economics Rap Battle, a video to which I’ve appealed many times to explain the basic conflict of ideas.
Astonishingly, the 12 Day War is already out of the headlines, eclipsed by the Diddy verdict, and, I assume, out of mind for most outside of the Middle East. —C.
In this, she appeared to be echoing a recent guest on Tucker Carlson’s show, one Catherine Austin Fitts, who worked for the George HW Bush Administration. Fitts claims that the US government has secretly spent US$21 trillion to build underground bunkers designed to shelter the elites in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. They are, apparently, powered by a mysterious energy technology. “If you look at a lot of the really fast ships, flying around the planet, they’re not using classical electricity,” she offered.
The idea that George Bush lied to the world about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is now accepted as a truism. But Bush was mistaken, not mendacious. Since the inauguration of the nuclear age, we’ve been wrong about these questions more often than we’ve been right.
I notice a tendency in the public to believe the government possesses a source of infallible information. Many would prefer to believe that powerful people have access to a secret source of truth, even if this forces them to believe that their leaders are also malignant, in so far as they refuse to share that truth with the public. The alternative is accepting that our leaders, like the rest of us, make decisions based on flawed and fragmentary information, which is why they so often do it poorly. That idea is seems to be too frightening for them to accept.
My distrust of her is so profound that I believe she was lying in both instances, though I admit this poses logical problems.
I make the case for this claim here:
Did you know there’s a smart fuse on the MOP that detects voids on its path downward—like rooms—so that it can explode at the optimal point? I do think we probably obliterated Fordow, although perhaps not “completely and totally,” since some parts of the site were buried 300 feet deep and the maximum distance that bomb can reach is 200 feet.
Though I do wish the Administration would stop going on about what an amazing accomplishment this was and how heroic our pilots are. It would be so much more effective if we conveyed the chilly message that dispatching a fleet of B-2s halfway around the world to drop the most monstrous bomb since Little Man is nothing to us—our pilots do it fifty times before breakfast as a light warmup.
Iranians who contacted Iran International via their submission line were unpersuaded. “The fact that Netanyahu walks among his people without bodyguard and this shameless coward is sending videos from a rat hole says everything,” one wrote.
Perhaps this means, “He bit off more than he can chew?”
Very good Claire, as usual. However, as to George W. Bush being mistaken and not mendacious, in the law we have a concept known as willful ignorance: ignoring reality so that you can proceed on a predetermined path. Only W knows what he knew, but it was clear for months what he was going to decide, evidence or not.
Thank you Claire - a lot of this is like a book written ages later - 👏💐💐💐👏
just what the armada of equipment rescue trucks was all about is missing and leaves me a wee bit unsatisfied 🙃😉🙃