We were waist deep in the Big Muddy
The big fool said to push on

-{Pete Seeger

On April Fool’s evening, the U.S. President, who has been comparing himself to Jesus, finally gave a speech in which he attempted to win support for his and Israel’s disastrous and failing war against Iran. He failed miserably, but his minions and military remain obedient even as their war is fueling epochal global transformations.

Lies may have outnumbered contradictions. President Trump apparently has yet to appreciate Abraham Lincoln’s admonition that “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Among others, oil and stock markets saw through the flimflam. Energy prices soared once again while stock markets from Manhattan to Manila took a dive.

One has to wonder when the billionaires behind Trump, Vance, and their mandarins will conclude that it’s time to pull the plug, to insist on U.S. regime change via the 25th amendment, for Congress to refuse to pick up the bill, or for the generals, admirals, and troops who have tolerated Secretary Hegseth’s white nationalist cheerleading to say NO!

And if they don’t, it’s up to us to end the nationally self-destructive war on Iran and the rest of the world.

Some version of textual analysis may be in order. So, taking it from near the top of Trump’s teleprompter:

  • Operation Epic Fury targets “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.” The Iranian state and its surrogates have certainly engaged in murderous terrorist operations. But it has been outdone by the United States, which has killed millions of innocent people from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs, through the Vietnam and Southeast Asian War, to the special military operations against El Salvador, Iraq, Libya, and most recently Venezuela. Not far behind are Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and its ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon.
  • “In these past four weeks our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield, victories like few have ever seen before.” Despite battlefield victories, the United States is losing the war. Trump is caught like an insect in a spider’s web. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed to all except countries willing to break with the U.S. and Israel and deal with Teheran. Iran continues to torment Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf states with missile and drone attacks, and prospects for an actual U.S.-Israeli military victory over Iran grow further beyond reach with each passing day.
  • “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is being decimated…” Yes, the Revolutionary Guards have suffered serious losses, and their command-and-control systems are no longer what they were on February 28. But its surviving leaders are more hardline in their commitments than was Ayatollah Ali Khamani, and they now call the shots in Tehran. While Trump’s battlefield triumphs have been real, they come in the more than two-thousand-year-old tradition of pyrrhic victories.
  • “We have by far the strongest military anywhere in the world.” Perhaps. But there are eight other nuclear-weapon states, and a lesson that Iranians and people in other nations are learning is that, like North Korea, one way to ensure that you are not attacked by the United States is to have a retaliatory nuclear arsenal. More, as Ukraine is teaching Putin’s Russia, we are in the midst of another “revolution in military affairs.” Terror and power on the battlefield and wars against cities are being murderously equalized by drones, cyber and by other relatively affordable weaponry.

In fact, it has never been all about military hardware and muscular warriors. Knowledge of history, geography, and culture can be as, if not more, decisive. Think in terms of Alexander the Great and others failing to conquer Persia, of Iran’s geographical advantages along the Strait of Hormuz, the power of Persian nationalism, and resistance to Crusader Christianity that has endured across the ages.

  • “We are getting along incredibly well in the production and sale of amounts of oil and gas.” Let’s assume that it’s been a long time since Donald Trump filled his car’s gas tank, if he ever did. And Narcissist that he is, Trump hasn’t registered other nations’ rage at the skyrocketing costs of energy. Cuba isn’t the only country that is experiencing Trump-induced blackouts. And wait until the scarcity of fertilizers that are not making their ways down the Hormuz Strait takes its toll on grocery bills across the U.S. and worse, deadly famines in the Global South.
  • “Operation Epic Fury is necessary for the safety of America and the security of the free world.” So much dishonesty in one sentence!  Free world? ICE and Border Patrol brown shirts are terrorizing our neighbors. Science, health care, and freedom of speech are all under serious attack. The U.S. is ranked 51st in terms of being an electoral democracy, and that was before Trump and his MAGA allies launched their campaigns to disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters.

On the subject of safety, Trump seems to have forgotten that back in June, he claimed that U.S. and Israeli air strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Further evidence of his short-term memory loss. His refusal to read his intelligence briefings may be one reason he didn’t honor the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. Recall, too, that the Oman mediators of the Witkoff/Kushner-Iranian February negotiations reported that significant progress had been made and that an agreement was in reach. That was before our Dear Leader launched a war for the second time in a matter of months while in the midst of peace and disarmament negotiations.

  • “For these terrorists to have nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat.” See the above and add the probability that Trump’s failed war of aggression will further undermine the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and will fuel growing demands in Iran and other countries nations to become new and terrorizing nuclear weapons states. 80% of South Koreans want their country to have nuclear weapons. China warns that Japan has sufficient plutonium stockpiles to build 5,000 nuclear weapons, and if Iran goes nuclear, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt will not be far behind.

There is also the reality (facts are difficult for Trump) that as Daniel Ellsberg, Barry Blechman, and this author have documented,* on as many as thirty occasions during wars and international crises, the U.S. has prepared and/or threatened to launch first-strike nuclear attacks to ensure their dominance.Each of the other eight nuclear weapons states have made such preparations and threats at least once. There are, in fact, no good hands to hold nuclear weapons. And as Japan’s A- & H- Bomb sufferers warn, “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”

  • “I terminated Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.” By all accounts, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was successful in containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions UNTIL Donald Trump abrogated the treaty during his first term. Note too Trump’s use of President Obama’s middle name to insinuate that his loyalties lay elsewhere.
  • “…their race for a nuclear bomb…They were right at the doorstep.” A bald-faced lie. Iran’s highly enriched uranium was – and remains – deeply buried under rubble in Isfahan and Nantanz.  As a wise South Korean colleague said this morning, no one anywhere in the world is taking what the United States says seriously. In the diplomatic equivalent of going from zero to sixty in record time, Trump is transforming U.S. hegemony into U.S. isolation.
  • “There would have been no Middle East and no Israel now.” Note that Israel is in fact a nuclear weapons state, and that during the 1973 October War, Golda Meir threatened to use of the country’s “Temple Weapons” to force open the floodgates of U.S. weapons and spare parts. Had Israel had accepted and built on the momentum of the 1991 Madrid summit and negotiated a two-state agreement with the PLO rather than insisting on expansion, colonization, and apartheid, the Zionist state would have been more widely accepted as legitimate across Southwest Asia and beyond.
  • “The United States has never been better prepared economically to confront this threat.” Why then is the president saying that funding for Social Security and Medicare must be cut to pay for the war? Why has the manufacturing sector lost and not gained jobs during Trump’s second term? Why has “affordability” become the defining issue as we approach the mid-term elections? And why are many of the world’s nations dumping their treasury bonds?
  • “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait…We don’t need it.” The New York Times has the answer: “…the interconnectedness of global energy markets means that any restrictions on traffic through the waterway create economic shocks felt around the world. Economists warn the effects on inflation and growth in the United States and elsewhere will compound if disruptions persist, making the reopening of the strait a key issue for the global economy.”
  • “…we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly…We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.”

If we are on the verge of winning, why the need to escalate the war? Is “them” the majority of the Iranian people who have opposed but are incapable of removing their unrepresentative and repressive government?

Trump and Netanyahu’s regime change has failed. History demonstrates that aerial bombardment alone cannot win regime change. Iran’s highly enriched uranium is inaccessible to an invading military. Aerial destruction of Iran’s oil infrastructure and desalination plants will result in tit-for-tat destruction of Saudi and GCC infrastructures. And destroying desalination plants, which will devastate Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States far more than Iran, leading to untold numbers of people dying from thirst, would rank as among the world’s worst crimes against humanity.

Finally, forget the idea of a ground war. Sending in the Marines and Special Forces to seize Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure or to dig for Tehran’s highly enriched uranium will leave US forces vulnerable, sitting ducks for Iran’s drones and remaining missiles. Such an invasion will leave Trump and the United States in something far worse than a quagmire.

The Big Fool is leading our nation and the world ever deeper into the desert version of the Big Muddy. Resistance and envisioning how we reconstruct constitutional democracy and our nation’s place in the world are the only ways forward.