Has Trump's Latest Blunder Moved Us Closer To War?

Does Donald Trump want a war with Iran? Or is he just too stupid to know that his latest blunder moves the United States much closer to an outright war with Iran? Either way, the Mideast, and the world, is a much more dangerous place because of his latest action.

It had looked like things might be settling down in Iraq. The protests that attacked the U.S. Embassy there were over and the protesters had withdrawn (without actually entering the Embassy or hurting any of the Americans there). A smarter president would have let things settle down. But Trump is not a smart man, and his narcissism would let him not react. He must look like he's a winner to satisfy that narcissism, regardless of how it might affect this country.

So he ordered the assassination of one of Iran's top generals (the man generally regarded as second in power only to the Ayatollah). Trump tried to excuse this illegal action by claiming it was in defense of the U.S., saying that general was planning attacks on U.S. personnel. That may have been true, but the assassination will not stop any planned actions, but probably will make sure even more and bigger attacks will be carried out.

Then it is likely Trump will want to retaliate, and Iran will again retaliate, and Trump will again retaliate. In other words, Trump has just assured that the cycle of violence will continue and probably get worse with each round. And this cycle will lead to a war. Trump claimed the attack was to prevent a war -- not start one. That's a ludicrous statement. You don't prevent a war by killing one of another country's leaders.

Here's what Dan Spinelli, writing for Mother Jones, says about the possibility of war with Iran:

Here’s how such a conflict could start and what it might look like: 

It might not take much for Iran to cross Trump’s red line—whatever that is.

Last week, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite component of the Iranian military, shot down an American drone, “in large part to prove they could do it,” according to Iranian officials who spoke with the New York Times. Trump’s initial response was harshly critical of the regime. “Iran made a very big mistake!” Trump tweeted on June 20. Hours later, he reversed himself and seemed to suggest the attack was literally a mistake. “I find it hard to believe it was intentional,” he told reporters gathered in the Oval Office. The shifting meanings “allow different people to hear what they want,” Maggie Haberman, of the New York Times, observed on Twitter. 

These contradictions, Trump’s habit of embellishing and outright lying, and the different pressures exerted by his more hawkish advisers make it difficult to determine where he will draw a firm line regarding Iran. National security adviser John Bolton, who with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and CIA director Gina Haspel, reportedly urged Trump to strike Iran last week, promised last monththat the US would “respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.” This week, Trump narrowed his focus but upped the stakes. “Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force,” he tweeted. “In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration.” 

It is not clear whether Trump’s red line refers to American assets or people, or whether it extends to Iran’s conventional army, its specialized Revolutionary Guards, or the proxies Tehran trains and funds across the Middle East, including the Houthi rebels in Yemen and several Shia militias in Iraq. These groups vary in their level of obedience to the Islamic Republic and have clashed with American troops in the past, with the Pentagon estimating in April that Iranian proxies have killed at least 603 Americans in Iraq since 2003. “Especially in Iraq or Syria, you could have a US fatality,” Colin Kahl, former national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, told reporters on a call last week. “It could happen intentionally if Iran feels squeezed or desperate. It could happen inadvertently because Iran doesn’t have complete control over its proxies.”

A conventional war isn’t likely, but if it happens, Iran has some strategic advantages.

Iran’s undisputed military strength is in its diverse and rapidly-improving array of ballistic missiles, which it has supplied frequently to its allies across the region. One of Trump’s persistent criticisms of the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration and other nations was that it did not cover Iran’s missiles and the regime has repeatedly countered international efforts to limit their production in recent years. In a war with Iran or one of its proxies, the United States would have to grapple with missiles capable of traveling at least 3,000 kilometers, according to the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Iran doesn’t have a lot of advanced aircraft,” says Thomas Karako, the project’s director. “Where they’ve put their money is in missiles that can target nearby bases.” 

Seventeen years ago, a $250 million war game conducted by the US military pondered the same possible conflict. That exercise, conducted in the lead-up to the American invasion of Iraq, simulated a war in the Persian Gulf, where American troops were promptly defeated. Nineteen US ships sank, including an aircraft carrier, according to political scientist Micah Zenko, who highlighted the war game in his book, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. Nearly two decades later, the circumstances have changed but the potential cost of another Gulf War remains high, particularly because of Iran’s continuing ability to navigate the narrow Strait of Hormuz.

The US Navy may far outstrip Iran in its number of sailors and diversity of carriers and boats, but the location of any maritime conflict would significantly benefit Iran, which prefers to fight the US as a scrappy underdog on its own turf. Iran has already demonstrated its ability to escalate tensions in the Strait by bombing at least six oil tankers in recent weeks. If the Strait remained open to commercial traffic, ships belonging to the United States or its allies would be vulnerable to attacks, especially if Iranian vessels were able to disguise themselves as civilian transports. The Strait’s narrow shipping lanes—only 1.6 nautical miles wide at certain points—would further constrain how quickly American war boats would be able to respond to attacks from Iranian submarines.

“You’re looking for small boats hidden potentially among plenty of civilian boats in an area that has a lot of commercial traffic,” says John Allen Gay, co-author of the book War With Iran: Political, Military, and Economic Consequences, making it difficult for the US “to achieve a really decisive result.” 

A conflict could escalate to the entire region.

War with Iran by necessity would almost have to involve its regional neighbors and adversaries, including Israel, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Russia. Iranian proxies could support Tehran by targeting US troops in Iraq or continuing to use their perch in Yemen to bomb Saudi Arabia, which is America’s close ally and Iran’s sectarian enemy. Then depending on the route American bombers take to reach Iran, they run the risk of angering Iran’s neighbors. “You’re either going to fly in over Iraq or fly in over parts of Syria which has very good air defenses,” Gay says. “That’s where the best Russian air defenses are.” Routing the attack through Israel and Lebanon might provide a workaround, but that could draw these countries into the conflict.

Then there’s the economic element. Oil prices would soar if the Strait of Hormuz were closed to commercial traffic. The impact at home might not be immediately felt, but the administration would likely want to avoid a hike in gas prices right before an election year. “In the event of a bigger conflict, at minimum you’re going to see a spike,” Gay says. Global oil prices have remained steady in recent weeks, in part due to the trade war between the US and China weakening demand. But after Iran shot down the drone, oil prices reached the highest pointin weeks. 

Trump has no exit strategy.

It’s easy to compare Trump’s actions regarding North Korea—ratchet up the rhetoric, saber-rattle for weeks, only to veer toward diplomacy—to what is happening with Iran. Several media outlets have done just that as this crisis with Iran has ballooned. There’s one crucial difference: in North Korea, decades of diplomatic outreach had failed to yield a preexisting deal, but with Iran a multilateral nuclear deal had been reached—and Trump ripped it up. And then he unilaterally expanded the terms of the debate way beyond the already difficult topic of Iran’s nuclear program. Trump and Pompeo have made 12 demands for Iran to meet—including ending its support for all regional proxies and halting its development of nuclear-capable missiles—which in their totality amount to what Wendy Sherman, the lead negotiator for Obama’s deal, told reporters the Iranians view as “not just regime change, but regime overthrow.” Then there is the open question of the war’s objectives: To stop a nuclear program, to attempt to force Tehran’s acceptance of all these demands, or to destroy the current regime and somehow remake the country? 

Iran continues to refuse Trump’s offers to negotiate, even as his administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy has devastated Iran’s oil trade. As part of its effort to eliminate Iranian oil exports, the Trump administration announced in April that it would no longer grant waivers to eight countries that had previously been allowed to import Iran’s oil temporarily, sparking immediate reprisals from Turkey and China. Roughly half of state spending in Iran is tied to oil revenues.

“That’s the Iranian red line,” says Gregory Aftandilian, a former Middle East analyst at the State Department who now teaches at Boston University. “Until America lifts the oil embargo, why should we enter into talks?”

Trump showed no signs of backing down on Tuesday when a reporter asked if he had an exit strategy planned in the event of war breaking out. “You are not going to need an exit strategy,” he replied. “I don’t need exit strategies.”

Kennedy Family Blasts Trump's Assassination Suggestion

(Photo of President Kennedy's funeral procession is from telegraph.co.uk.)

A few days ago, Donald Trump shocked the nation when he suggested some of his "Second Amendment" supporters might take care of Clinton if she is elected (i.e., kill her). The family of John and Robert Kennedy understands the horror of Trump's suggestion, and they replied to it. Here is the reply -- written by William Kennedy Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith:

On April 4, 1968, the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, Robert Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency in Indianapolis. Bobby conveyed the news of King’s death to a shattered, mostly black audience. He took pains to remind those whose first instinct may have been toward violence that President John F. Kennedy had also been shot and killed. Bobby went on, “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

That speech has crystallized into the single most enduring portrait of Bobby’s candidacy. Because it was extemporaneous, it conveyed directly, and with raw emotion, his own vulnerability, his aspirations for his country, and a deep compassion for the suffering of others. Bobby concluded his remarks that night by urging those listening to return home and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Those words mattered. While there were riots in cities across the nation that night, Indianapolis did not burn.

Today, almost 50 years later, words still matter. They shape who we are as a people and who we wish to be as a nation. In the white-hot cauldron of a presidential campaign, it is still the words delivered extemporaneously, off the cuff, in the raw pressure of the moment that matter most. They say most directly what is in a candidate’s heart. So it was with a real sense of sadness and revulsion that we listened to Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, as he referred to the options available to “Second Amendment people,” a remark widely, and we believe correctly, interpreted as a thinly veiled reference or “joke” about the possibility of political assassination.

Political violence is a terrible inherent risk to any free society. Dictators and strongmen like Vladimir Putin have an answer. They are surrounded and shielded by force at all times. They do not brook dissent. In democracies, we expect our leaders to be accessible and, by and large, they want to be. Inevitably, that makes them vulnerable and the loss of a leader at a crucial time impacts family, country, and even the world, for generations. Anyone who loves politics, the open competition of ideas and public participation in a free society, knows that political violence is the greatest of all civic sins. It is not to be encouraged. It is not funny. It is not a joke.

By now, we have heard enough dark and offensive rhetoric from Trump to know that it reflects something fundamentally troubled, and troubling, about his candidacy. Trump’s remarks frequently, if not inevitably, spark outrage, which is followed by a clarification that, in lieu of an apology, seeks to attribute the dark undertones of his words to the listener’s twisted psyche. This fools no one. Whether you like what he is saying or, like a growing segment of the electorate, you reject it, it is easy to grasp Trump’s meaning from his words. But what to make of a candidate who directly appeals to violence, smears his opponents and publicly bullies a Gold Star family, a decorated prisoner of war, and a reporter with a disability, among others? To borrow the words of Army Counsel Joseph Welch, directed at another dangerous demagogue: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The truth remains that words do matter, especially when it comes to presidential candidates. On that basis alone, Donald Trump is not qualified to be president of the United States.

Did The Feds Plot To Assassinate Peaceful Demonstrators ?

(The image above is from the website IBN Live.)

Did that headline shock you? Do you think it is outrageous to even think it could be true that our government was plotting to kill peaceful demonstrators? Well, there is credible evidence that it is true, and that evidence comes from the federal government itself -- specifically, the FBI. The information, gotten through a freedom of information filing, comes from FBI files -- and it shows that the government plotted to have leaders of Occupy Houston (an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street) shot sniper-style.

Unfortunately, we will never know who was involved in this outrageous criminal plot, because a federal judge has upheld the FBI's desire to keep that information secret. Frankly, I'm almost speechless over this matter, but fortunately my fried and fellow Texas blogger Perry is not. At his own blog, Brains and Eggs, this is some of what he had to say (and I agree with every word of it):

This isn't an equal opportunity tactic by the FBI -- as far as the courts have allowed us to know.  There have been no reported assassination plots against the leaders of Open Carry Texas, or Open Carry Tarrant County, or the ultra-conservative freaks who surrounded Cliven Bundy and actually pointed their rifles at federal agents.  There has been no arrest of the woman who forcibly interrupted the Muslim day at the Capitol, but there have been federal agents making inquiries of Keystone XL and fracking protestors.  There have been examples of law enforcement and gas industry representatives exchanging "intelligence" about these activists.

So it is revealed -- even as it is concealed -- that the peaceful protestors associated with Occupy Wall Street and its affiliate, Occupy Houston, are the ones who most terrify law enforcement and, by extension, those by whom they are employed and deployed to "serve and protect".  The people whose only weapons are a sign, a chant, perhaps a bullhorn, and the might of right on their side are the enemies, not the ones with guns threatening state lawmakers, or killing Muslim honor students, or the ones with badges shooting people because they are black, or poor or mentally ill or disabled.

They make federal judges quake in fear, federal agents concoct plots to assassinate them, their membership and communications are infiltrated in low- and high-tech ways, all because the power of social justice is considered a terrorist threat.  Those who feel the most threatened by a change in the social order gift them with military grade weapons and the legal authority to kill anyone they desire without the slightest accountability, all to ensure the authority of our overlords.  That would be the unelected overlords, those who make sure their pawns, lackeys, and stooges are elected.

This is the state of our union today.  It is not hyperbole.

It is increasingly doubtful that voting is going to change much of anything in this regard, and the fact that fewer and fewer people are voting suggests they are aware of the charade.  I'm still looking for some peaceful solutions to this state we have gotten to, but those options are narrowing significantly.

Something has got to give, and as Frederick Douglass said over 150 years ago...

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Texas "Birther" Threatens To Assassinate Obama

Those of us who live in Amarillo (in the Texas Panhandle) sometimes think we are so far from everywhere else that few people pay us much attention.   But one Amarillo resident has found out that we're not so far from the rest of the world that the United States Secret Service won't pay a visit to insure the safety of the president of the United States.

William Mattison, a 70 year-old Amarillo resident, recently wrote an angry e-mail to U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Clarendon).   The e-mail expressed Mattison's anger that President Obama had not released his "long-form Hawaiian birth certificate" (the short form, verified by the State of Hawaii, is shown above).   But Mattison wasn't content with expressing his anger, which is his constitutional right.  

He went a step further and in the last line of the e-mail he threatened to assassinate President Obama.   He said he was "considering assassinating" the president, and doing so would fulfill the oath he took when he entered the Air Force in 1958.

Thornberry's office reported the threat to the Secret Service.   Alison Lynn, Thornberry's communications director, said,   "Our office takes threats very seriously.   It's mandatory to report to the appropriate authorities."

The Secret Service paid Mattison a visit last Monday.   So far, no charges have been filed and the case remains open.   Mattison told the Amarillo Globe News,   "(The Secret Service) told me I had committed a crime, and I told them I did it on purpose.   I'm tired of having a president that refuses to make public his birth certificate."   Mattison said he expects to be arrested and wants to defend himself in court (although he would seek legal counsel to help).

It sounds like Mattison wants to turn a federal courtroom into a political circus to further his own fringe right-wing political views.   He is going to be sorely disappointed when a federal judge refuses to allow him to do that.   Politics, even fringe right-wing politics, is not a justification or legal defense against a charge of threatening to assassinate the president.

I know there will probably be some who think charges should not be entered against Mattison because of his age.   I am not one of those.   I think he should be charged, convicted and sent to a federal prison for five years.   He knew what he was doing was against the law and intentionally did it anyway.   If he's not charged this time, he might actually try to harm the president to get his show trial.

This "birther" nonsense has gone too far.   The president has already gone further than any previous president by authorizing the release of the short-form birth certificate, and the state of Hawaii has verified its authenticity.   There is no doubt to any reasonable person that President Obama was born in the United States.   Frankly, the whole mess is starting to stink of racism to me.

Another Plot To Kill Obama

It's now happened for a third time. Two men have been arrested for plotting to assassinate presidential candidate Barack Obama. Daniel Cowart (20) and Paul Schlesselman (18), self-described white supremacist skinheads, are currently in a Tennessee jail. They have been charged with possessing a sawed-off shotgun, conspiracy to rob a gun dealer, and making threats against a presidential candidate.

The men were arrested last week after an aborted robbery attempt, and their plot was uncovered during questioning by authorities. The two men were going to rob a gun store to get weapons and ammunition. Then they were going to shoot 88 African-Americans and behead 14 more (the numbers 88 and 14 are considered "special" by some white supremacist groups).

After that, they were going to try to kill Barack Obama. The plot they devised is kind of silly, but then most white supremacists are not rocket scientists. They were going to dress in white tuxedos and top hats, get in a car, and drive straight at Obama while firing out the windows. They expected to be killed in the attempt.

This is the third arrest for threats on the life of Barack Obama, with one being in Florida and the other in Colorado. I expect their will be more, and I hope the Secret Service is up to the task of foiling each and every plot. We've already had too many leaders killed in this country.

Maybe if the culprits in all these cases are dealt with harshly, it will prevent others from doing the same. I hope so.