If Trump cannot admit error, how can America be extracted from his war?
Does anyone find comfort in comparing the Iran disaster with
two of America’s previous catastrophic wars?
Once, U.S. forces had been in Vietnam for only two months.
Then our involvement became unlimited and the war did not end until millions
were dead, over ten years later.
The Iraq war was just a few days shy of two months old when
Bush proclaimed: “Mission Accomplished!” Years of chaos, mass death and wasted
trillions of dollars followed.
But neither the Vietnam war nor the Iraq war revealed its
calamitous stupidity as swiftly as Trump’s war. Two months in, the American
people and our standard of living, along with the entire world economy, have
taken body blows.
Gasoline costs half again as much. Diesel has risen even
more. Aviation gas has doubled. Food prices will soon follow because of
shortages of key fertilizer ingredients – on top of Trump’s tariffs and the
shortage of farm workers because of deportations.
Trump insists, however, that all will soon be well. Gas
prices will “drop
like a rock” after the war ends, says the president.
Can there be anyone left in America who believes Donald
Trump’s promises on prices? This is the man who vowed in 2024 that if he were
elected, “prices
will come down and they’ll come down fast, with everything.”
“When I win, I will immediately
bring prices down.”
The same man who last year kept saying prices were down when everyone knew from their own experience that prices were up.
Two problems with his latest promise: First, Trump has no
plan to end the war other than demanding
Iran “cry uncle” and “give up.” But the Iranians are not convinced
they lost, and few owners of $100 million dollar oil tankers, carrying up to
$200 million worth of petroleum, are prepared to rely on Trump’s assurances of
safety.
Second, the previous level of oil exports from the Persian
Gulf will not resume when hostilities do end, and prices will not promptly
drop. As economists
say, oil prices “go up like a rocket and fall like a feather.”
World-wide oil inventories will have to be refilled, and oil industry experts point out that “high demand caused by replenishing the lost oil stock will keep prices elevated.”
Persian Gulf oil production suspended during the
conflict will
not immediately resume when it does end. Qatar, for example, provided
20% of the world’s supply of liquid natural gas. Their export facility was
damaged by Iranian missiles, and will take three to five years to be fully
brought back. Refineries
throughout the region have been damaged and oil wells that have been
shut down will take months to ramp back up
When will gas prices go back to pre-Trump War levels”?
Likely not
any time this year. It will require two years to recover lost
energy output, says the head of the International
Energy Agency. And the rise in energy costs will ripple through the rest of
the economy, pumping up inflation.
How did we get here?
Donald Trump and his government of feckless amateurs
believed the U.S. military would easily compel Iran’s unconditional surrender,
as easily as American soldiers kidnapped the president of Venezuela. Since
Trump surrounds himself with pretenders who know they must tell him only what
he wants to hear, he launched his war without weighing the actual risks.
“President Trump and his aides were caught
unprepared,” The Atlantic magazine reported,
“when Iran . . . retaliated by targeting shipping in the Persian Gulf region
and specifically through the Strait of Hormuz. . . The Trump administration
acknowledged in classified briefings, CNN reported last night, that it did not
make provisions for a closure” of Hormuz.
Iran struck back after being attacked? Who could have
guessed?
Iran had been a major source of military drones to Russia,
and Ukrainian and Russian drones had transformed the war in Ukraine. Hormuz was
a known
point of leverage. Still it did not occur to Trump or to War Secretary Pete
“Lethality” Hegseth that American naval and air power might not suppress Iran’s
drones and mines, giving Iran a choke hold on the Strait of Hormuz.
The perspective of Vietnam and Iraq has taught Trump
nothing. But the American people have learned from those experiences, and are
not swallowing Trump’s lies. Sixty-one percent disapprove
of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict and sixty-one percent
believe he
made the wrong decision in deciding to use military force in Iran.
Can public opinion and political reality force Trump to
reverse course? Trump’s need to call his debacle a success make that difficult,
and Trump may yet turn to committing war crimes in a desperate effort to make
Iran capitulate.
If members of his own party will not join in attempts to restrain
an increasingly frantic, erratic and likely impaired president, America’s
military may be forced to confront their duty to defy Donald Trump’s illegal
and immoral orders.
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You may also be interested in my road-trip novel / social thriller Mississippi Reckoning. Read an excerpt. Read the Progressive Charlestown review HERE.
