Well, it never worked before, so let’s try it again. Only this time, let’s do it with a drunken captain at the wheel.
Israel has dreamed for decades of a splintered, broken Iran. Netanyahu has been grooming Washington for 30 years to swoop in and make it happen. After multiple presidents refused, Bibi finally found his bitch.
Re-obliteration
So what will our boy do now, with his shiny new war. He already tried the G.W.Bush “Mission Accomplished” gambit, last June, when he declared Iran’s nuke program “obliterated”.
This time, he struck a more informal note, posting a wee-small-hours video on “Truth Social” from somewhere in his country club. Sporting a baseball cap, in eerie darkness, he said a few words about this unholy folly.
Not quite an explanation, or an exit plan, or even an entrance plan, it was more like a grab bag of contradictory war canards. These included the
disappointingly unimaginative one about Iran being a hair away from nuclear capability. WMDs again? really? A surprising choice, given that it was immediately disprovable, not to mention, contradicted by himself last June.
The man seemed unable to get his propaganda straight. We also heard the classic “We’re trying to force them to negotiate.” This was slightly undercut by the fact that Iranians had been sitting around the negotiating table when the bombs started to fall.
Leaving no ploy unturned, we also got the moral rationale. “It’s the right thing to do,” intoned President Rectitude. Another golden oldie, the We-shall-free-the-people justification was deployed not only in the lead up to Iraq, but everywhere else Uncle Sam has tried to topple governments over the years.
The appeal to Iranians to rise up and throw off their yokes was particularly rich, coming from a guy who sends goons to shoot protesters in the face.
No Plan B
The last few days have seen our Commander in Chief uncharacteristically camera-shy. Reporters who got close enough to ask him about his military 
goals were instead invited to admire a new statue in the rose garden. Visitors to his social media were treated to a two-year-old post about Lady Gaga’s dad.
Surreal, yes. But horrifyingly, not really surprising.
As for his lieutenant, J.D.V. has been nowhere to be found. Why are these guys not even going through the motions? The simplest answer is the most likely one. None of them know what the hell they’re doing.
Don’t got to show you no steenking badges
Now comes the firestorm. As any military expert worth his salt could have foreseen (had Trump not fired them), Iran is not only retaliating, but escalating. The whole region is on fire, the body bags are coming home.
We have seen this movie before. Anyone who knows even a smidgeon of history knows that everywhere the USA has meddled in the Middle East, the result has been a hot holy mess.
But there are important differences now. This time we’ve got a mentally deteriorating, geopolitically illiterate game show host as Commander in Chief, whose experience with the Gulf States is limited to that of briber-bribee. As Secretary of Defense, we’ve got PeeWee Hegseth the bench-pressin’ little he-man. As advisers, he’s got lackeys whose only job requirement is avoiding annoying the boss with intel.
Contrast the lead-up to Iraq, when Cheney and Rumsfeld., evil to the core but wily, orchestrated a convoluted campaign of justification for Shock & Awe, for which it took a whole year to get the public onboard.
Trump & Co. just skipped that step. There’s been no debate, no discussion, no pretense of seeking Congressional approval.
Never apologize, never explain
Trump and his apologists seem utterly untroubled when their stated rationales on Day One are exposed as lies by what they say on Day Two, or even in their next paragraph. Either war spinning is completely beyond these guys, or they simply don’t care whether they are believed.
Whichever it is, they are no longer bothering with subterfuge. Contrast the tactics of the old-school CIA, whereby, if you were trying to overturn an undesirable regime, covertness was the whole point. Now we’ve got Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant going on a talk show, publicly crowing about a plan to destabilize the Iranian economy.
Consider the discreet diplomacy of traditional ambassadors. Now we’ve got that old hayseed Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist, going on Tucker Carlson and announcing outright that Israel should run the whole Middle East.
Let’s stop overthinking this
Naturally, the conventional media has been beside itself with shock — shock! — that Trump could so flagrantly contradict his No-More-Wars campaign promise.
This incredulity is ridiculous. Have we not learned, after ten years of this guy, that he has never cleaved to anything he’s ever promised? Ever?
The poor old New York Times still doesn’t know how to cover Trump. They bend over backwards trying to report each of his norm-shattering outrages with the sober conventions of journalistic respect (“Mr. Trump”). As if he were any other president. As if any of this were normal.
Let’s not overthink things. This man is not mysterious. He doesn’t operate in terms of policy or strategy. His motivations are far more primitive.
Big tough warfighter man
Trump is a simple creature. He ages but he doesn’t grow. 
We know his attacks are attempts to convey strength. He wants to be seen to win, especially when he isn’t winning. When he’s losing, he doesn’t course correct; he doubles down.
He’s especially dangerous when threatened, as he is right now, by the deep unpopularity of ICE, by disastrous poll numbers, by the affordability crisis that he has neither the will nor the wit to solve.
We know that his 180° turnaround on military adventures is straight out of the dictator’s playbook. Foreign affairs are where tyrants turn when domestic affairs become problematic.
We know that he is petty. He went after Maduro in part because the guy mocked his dancing. He refused to allow Machado the presidency because she didn’t give him her Nobel.
He didn’t get a peace prize so he’s going to ruin peace; just like he didn’t get an Emmy for his reality show so he’s going to ruin reality. – Stephen Colbert
He has an alcoholic’s personality, as Susie Wiles has said, and if we know anything about addicts, it’s that the kicks just keep getting harder to find. He only got a two-or-three-day high after Venezuela; then he needed Greenland. “Owning it just gives you a sense of satisfaction,” said he.
Pluto crowns the chart
And now he will own the war in Iran.
The astrological connections between Trump and the USA have been amply chronicled. He has used his superpower, distraction (Sun-Uranus in Gemini), with bedeviling effectiveness, synching it up with the American public’s penchant for being distracted (Trump’s Sun conjunct US Mars-square-Neptune). Each “obscene grift and atrocity slides neatly into the shit-flooded slipstream that is the American consciousness” (Shower Cap).
Iran is the most ambitious use of this superpower to date.
When the missiles struck Tehran on Saturday (listen to Frederick Woodruff’s analysis here), Uranus (explosions) was on the horizon, square Mars (war). Pluto was at the top of the sky.
Pluto governs death and destruction, as well as corruption and sexual abuse. Years ago, Steve Bannon predicted that Trump would start a war with Iran to turn attention away from Epstein. Indeed, the latest tranche of the files seems to have prompted a global-war-level reaction.
They implicate Trump in the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl.
