Josh Marshall
A few quick thoughts on Trump’s military strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities, in no particular order.
Trump has referred to this as very successful and – if I’m understanding his statement – essentially done. I don’t think that’s how it works. My understanding is that there’s real uncertainty about how many strikes it would take to destroy especially the Fordow facility, which is buried deep in a mountainside. So I think we should be skeptical about how we know how successful this was. You need after action reports to have any sense of what actually happened. The geography here, the composition of the mountainside, how it interacts with these particular munitions. These are incredibly complicated and make outcomes uncertain. (I’m going from memory since we’re reacting to breaking news. So keep that in mind.) The US has conducted extensive testing on these “bunker buster” bombs. And there has been extensive planning going back a number of years on how this attack specifically would be carried out. The Pentagon produces and maintains war plans on almost everything. But this specifically has been planned out in great detail and over many years.
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Is There Fire Behind the Sergio Gor Smoke? 
I wanted to flag your attention to a story bubbling up in the MAGA world that may amount to something or may be merely entertaining. It turns on a guy named Sergio Gor, a 38-year-old who is in charge of the Presidential Personnel Office. He’s in charge of vetting presidential appointees, but with an apparently very Trumpian emphasis on evidences of political loyalty as opposed to more conventional kind of reviews. But it turns out that Gor himself has yet to submit what is called an SF-86, the standard form for appointees who need a high level security clearance. So the guy in charge of vetting political appointees has yet to submit his own materials to be vetted himself. Not great, but the kind of mix of incompetence and probable sleaze that’s pretty standard in Trumpland.
But now there’s a bit more.
Read MoreOur Executive Editor John Light discussed these hires already. But I wanted to share with you what we’re doing and how you fit into it. I don’t have to tell you that we are in the midst of a protracted national crisis. By some measures we’ve been in one for a decade. But I’m talking about the one that kicked off on January 20th and has continued, unabated and even accelerating, in various forms ever since. From the start of this we’ve been committed to upping and expanding our game, even within our limited resources, because the moment requires it. You’ve made that possible through your memberships and through your contributions to The TPM Journalism Fund. This week we added two new positions to our roster and two new members of our team. Allegra Kirkland, a TPM alum, has returned to TPM as a deputy editor. Layla A. Jones has joined us a reporter.
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Trump Has Never Been Anti-War; He’s Not Even Anti-War inside the USA
The idea that Trump or MAGA is in any sense “anti-war” is something between an absurdity and a misunderstanding. Kate and I had a good discussion of it in this week’s podcast. At one level it’s a simple fraud. Trump claimed he’d always been against the Iraq War at a time when the U.S. had been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. It was a helpful attack line and it was completely false. Trump wasn’t in politics in 2002 or 2003 and to the extent he said anything, like a lot of people, he was for it when it was popular and against it when it wasn’t.
During his presidency he signed off on the assassination/targeted attack that killed Qasem Soleimani; he heavily involved the U.S. in the Saudi war in Yemen; he maintained or expanded the U.S. fight against ISIS in Iraq/Syria. Those are at least a continuity with the Obama years and in key respects an expansion of it. The one arguable exception is the deal Trump made with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan — a bad deal which Joe Biden was saddled with and followed through on and was endlessly criticized for, by Trump more than anyone else. Afghanistan captures Trump perfectly — his one notionally “anti-war” position was continuity by definition. And he turned against it as soon as he was unpopular. Trump has gotten “anti-war” mileage out of his opposition to Ukraine aid. But that’s pro-Russia rather than anti-war.
Read MoreThe Reality TV reveal version of war-planning and everything that is going on right now in the White House is so crazy I don’t know what to say about it. I’m reduced to trying to piece together what the various parties to the conflict and those adjacent to it may want or be trying to accomplish. I think TPM Reader JS is on to something in the email I just published a few moments ago. To the extent Trump may look to the Saudis and Emiratis as to what to do they may want him to finish this. When I responded to JS I told him that I agreed but with a major caveat. Even in the Move Fast and Break Things MBS era I think being a Gulf royal means being scared. Luck and geology made them fabulously wealthy and in part because of that wealth able to sustain deeply archaic political systems in which they have close to absolute power. That status is precarious. It’s one thing to build an anti-Iran coalition or an anti-Iran alliance with Israel. Blowing up the Iranian state is a very different and profoundly dangerous and unpredictable proposition.
Read MoreFrom TPM Reader JS …
Read MoreI agree with your reader that MBS and the Emiratis will be an important influence in Trump. And of course they are saying in public what they’re saying, but the entire basis of the normalization with the UAE and the aborted one with Saudi was this. They wanted a bloc against Iran and its nuclear program.
TPM Reader MO shares his thoughts after PT’s …
Read MoreI want to present a third view on the question of what will determine Trump’s decision on Iran. I suggest that the key factor will be what MbS and the other Middle Eastern leaders tell him they want. Ultimately Trump’s interest is in what will enrich him most and here Saudi Arabia and the others have by far the most to offer. For Trump, there is no money to be made in Israel or in regime change in Iran. Corruption overrides everything for him.
TPM Reader PT has a counterpoint to my post from last night on the offer Trump can’t resist. I’m not sure whether I agree with me or with him. If nothing else PT hits key elements of Trump’s MO …
Read MoreI’m going to lay down a marker here: the US is not going to join the attacks on Iran. I say this because I think that Trump’s being driven by an entirely different dynamic than his desire to stamp his name on what looks increasingly like an “easy win.”
Let’s consider the context: just 3 days ago, Trump’s military parade was a bust and left him a laughingstock. Meanwhile, something like 2% of the population of the US turned out to protest his policies and his Presidency.
An Offer Trump Can’t Refuse
I’m seeing a lot of articles about Trump’s turn on Iran, how it’s in response to pressure from Israel, his evolving views. I think these are all either overblown or irrelevant. As I noted earlier, what’s driving Trump here is the hunger to get in on a “win.” It might be best to see it as a typical Trumpian branding exercise. Israel has got a product ready to go to market and they’ve offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it. But even beyond all that there’s something more. The U.S. has wanted to get rid of the Iranian nuclear program for a very long time. We’ve used coercive sanctions. We’ve engaged in espionage and sabotage. Barack Obama spent a huge amount of time putting together a diplomatic agreement to restrict it.
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Thoughts on Israel’s Iran Campaign and Donald Trump
I haven’t had a lot to say about Israel and Iran because I haven’t had a lot to add. But I want to suggest something about the possible entry of the United States into the war. These aren’t conclusions, more questions I’ve had and questions that help me frame how I’ve looked at what’s happening.
In the first couple days of this hot conflict, the conventional wisdom and reporting went from Israel doing this more or less entirely on its own, perhaps even interfering in U.S. diplomacy, to the idea that the apparent rush of diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran was actually a ruse concocted by Israel and United States to lull the Iranians into letting their guard down. At first this seemed to be what they call in the online world right wing “cope,” shoving Donald Trump back into the center of the story as He-Man hero when he had actually seemed marginal to the action. But then it started showing up in news reports. And from what I can tell at this point, it’s almost treated as a given, just part of the reported story.
This certainly may be accurate. But I’m not sure that it is. I think it’s also possible that the initial attack was fabulously successful in tactical terms (no one would deny that) and Trump basically wanted in on it. Because he likes success. In a normal administration, reporters might get a clearer read on what was real or what wasn’t. But this isn’t a normal administration. Much of “what the plan is” is an unknowable thing in Donald Trump’s head and a feature of the Trumpian personality cult is that once there’s an approved story, that is the story. Period. I could be right or wrong on my supposition here. But I’m not even sure if the people inside the administration actually know. In any case, I think there’s a pretty good chance the whole ‘we were secretly working together to lull Tehran into complacency’ is a complete fiction, an online MAGA speculation that the White House and Trump glommed onto and made real because it was convenient and helpful.
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