Puzzled by this war? Who isn’t? Three theories:
1) War as a distraction from the Epstein revelations and all else going wrong with this Administration.
2) War for profit – to benefit the Arab friends of the Nameless One who’ve enriched him.
3) War to subvert democracy and justice – in America and Israel.
War as cover-up, war for hire, war to steal America: feel better yet?
Two insights worth sharing:
This is a multiday operation with planned “escalating strikes and off-ramps.” That means we’re in the opening hours of what could be a weeks-long campaign. Iran has made clear there are “no red lines.” Missiles are still flying at Israel as I write this. U.S. bases across the Gulf are under active threat.
The Iranian regime is monstrous. It has earned the hatred of its own people. Its collapse would be cause for celebration for millions of Iranians who have risked everything — and thousands who have died — for the freedom the Ayatollahs stole from them 47 years ago.
But the architects of this operation are not liberators. They are survivors. Netanyahu needs a war to avoid prison. Trump needs a war to avoid accountability. And both of them wrapped the biggest military gamble since Iraq in the language of freedom, while their own legal crises conveniently vanish from the front page.
Watch what they do. Watch who pays the price. And remember: when powerful men start wars, it’s rarely the powerful who bleed.
The claim that Iran was about to build a nuclear weapon has not been established. It is all the odder as a justification for war given that this administration has already claimed many times to have destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
The second American propaganda point is that the regime must be changed. This too is very strange, since opposition to regime change wars was supposed to be a core tenet of MAGA.
But who might be directly interested in Iranian regime change? …
Gulf Arab states who oppose Iranian power have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family. The United Arab Emirates invested in a family firm. The Saudis have provided numerous de facto gifts. And sometimes the gifts have been simply gifts. The Qataris gave Trump a jet. The list is very long.
And now — we are using military force to take the side of precisely the countries who have enriched Trump and his family.…
A war is a time when we will be told not to ask questions. But a war is actually when questions must be asked. And they must be asked in light of what we already know. The presumption created by the surrounding evidence is that this war could very well be about (1) subverting US democracy, (2) enriching the president, or both…
War does not create a clean slate where suddenly we have to believe the absurd just because a leader says it.
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