It's Excursion!

It’s war (again)! Or it’s excursion (again)! Whatever it is, it sure seems like we’re back at it. The US and Iran are, again, trading missiles. People are dead, including three Indian nationals aboard a tanker hit by the US. Thousands of Iranians are without water after the US hit a drinking-water reservoir. Half an hour ago or so, the president posted that the “US will be hitting Iran… VERY HARD tonight!” So much for the 37 or so peace treaties Trump announced over the last few weeks.

I can’t say I’m surprised. With this war, Trump tied himself a Gordian knot. He can’t meet his stated objectives (elimination of Iran’s ability to secure a nuclear weapon, open the Strait, destroy their military, regime change, etc.) without boots on the ground but he can’t put boots on the ground without destroying himself politically, along with destroying American lives literally.

Mahmoud Illean/AP

Also in his social media post, Trump wrote – in all caps ‘natch - “at some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Karg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their oil and gas markets,” but, according to people who understand these things in ways that I and our president do not, that’s not possible without landing thousands of soldiers on Iranian soil. I hate to question the wisdom of our Commander-in-Chief, but his strategy is starting to sound a little half-cocked.

(I am NOT going to make a Stormy Daniels/half-cocked joke here so you will have to insert your own.)

A couple days ago, JD Vance assured us the Iran War would not become a quagmire. If the president follows through with his threat to seize Iranian oil production and infrastructure, I don’t see how it could become anything but. Of course, the only person worse at predicting the future than myself is JD Vance, so now you’ve got two idiots predicting two opposing outcomes. The difference is that only one of those idiots has at least some power to mitigate the terrible outcome, a power he will not use if it means getting sideways with The Boss.

Hint: the idiot in question isn’t me.

As terrible as what’s going on in Iran, I’d like to conduct a little thought experiment: consider all the false starts, lies, half-measures, and incompetence that got us to this point in Iran. Now expand that to the whole of government.

That’s what we’re dealing with in this current administration. We see it in RFK’s bizarre behavior at DHS. We see it with K$H’s FBI. The Department of Justice is a farce. Is every department is facing this level of amateurism, corruption, and neglect? One can only assume yes. The Iran War is simply the cleanest illustration because it’s so visible. One can obfuscate and lie about obscure regulations buried in legislation or what’s happening to detainees in closed-off immigrant detention centers, but it’s a lot to harder to do that about ships and airplanes – particularly when they’re getting shot at.

Perhaps JD Vance’s assurances that we won’t enter a quagmire are apt because we’re already in one. That quagmire is domestic, a nation unable to move forward because one of its two political parties has decided to not only blow up other nations but our own. We’re living through a profound act of self-sabotage. To whom do we even compare it? Putin’s Russia, for all of its corruption, is a nation whose economy is approximately that of Texas. So, I guess multiply what Putin is doing by 50?

The whole thing would be hilarious if it wasn’t so depressing. And boy howdy, is it depressing. In the short term, we can expect more uncertainty. More suffering. But it’s ok because the UFC is putting on a carnival for Trump’s 80^th birthday, the functional equivalent of a West Wing bouncy house for America’s bestest boy. Meanwhile, the midterms loom, and we can only hope the administration bring the same level of competence they bring to everything else to their attempts to rig the elections. If so, we may just end up having free and fair voting. And if that happens, perhaps we have some chance of arresting this freefall before we go full splat.

We are no longer, as Joan Didion wrote in 1968, slouching towards Bethlehem. We are instead sprinting toward some vertiginous future, accelerating even as we blow through the various warning lights. The question is no longer whether we’re moving in the wrong direction – 67% of Americans already believe that. It’s whether anyone still has the courage to stand in front of the stampede.