From TPM Reader PT …

As I’ve thought about the suddenness with which this war started, and the abject lack of thought that went into it, I wonder the following:

Was it the irreproducible chance at a decapitation strike that triggered this whole mess?

My thinking is this:

The US and Israel aren’t actually prepared for the war in Iran, though they are getting there. At that moment, they get an unbelievable piece of intelligence: all the top people in the Iranian government are going to get together, in person, in a non-hardened location. Clearly none of these folks saw “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” or they would have known better. 

I’ve written a few posts now about a simple fact that is so apparent in news coverage that it is almost hiding in plain sight: the entire discussion of President Trump’s war with Iran right now is not how close he may be to achieving whatever his war aims might be. It’s the impact of the conflict on global energy prices and how this may impact the cost of gas in the U.S. and thus Trump’s electoral fortunes in November. We now have two closely reported articles which make clear that this wasn’t even a contingency that the White House planned for.

This passage is from a new CNN article which comes after a similar one in the Times ….

Donald Trump may have started his war with Iran with the aim of regime change. But it has quickly became a battle over control of the global oil futures market. Iran may have few, if any, conventional weapons it can use to block, retaliate against or bloody the United States. But it has the ability to menace, if not close, the Strait of Hormuz. And that means the ability to trigger a global energy and economic crisis that may force the United States or at least its president — synonymous for the moment — to relent. What’s both fascinated and confused me is the response of global oil markets to the crisis, which seems based on at least a short-term willingness to credit Trump’s public comments as having some strong relationship to reality, which of course is absurd.

Let me give you at least a few examples of this.