Government of Carelessness

What's the plan in Iran?

So we may be on the brink of fighting our second war with Iran in eight months. Or maybe not, who can say? “We’ll see what happens,” as the commander-in-chief always says. I think he generally means he’ll see it on TV and he won’t be sure until then, and find out what his decision was at the same time as the rest of us do.

I mean this more or less literally: that his more gnomic utterances, especially the social media posts when he writes them himself, should be understood as oracular, like the words of a Sibyl, possibly drug-induced, but in need of interpretation. They represent Trump’s hopes, the thing he wants done, but in a way that can’t be understood directly, and that indeed he can’t understand himself. His lieutenants have to divine it for him, and put it into action, and then he’ll know.

In a way that’s not even particularly weird. It’s really nothing more than the familiar figure of the psychopath CEO, like Dilbert’s boss in the old comic strip when it was good (may its memory be a blessing!). It’s not so hard to interpret what he’s saying if you just remember that (a) it has a context, and (b) he’s a psychopath.

There was a delicious example in yesterday’s news, with the melodramatic AI image of the US hospital ship being sent posthaste to rescue all the suffering Greenlanders from their ailments (Greenland runs its extremely good single-payer healthcare on Danish lines with Danish assistance, of course). WTH was that about?

Turns out it was the US Navy that was unable to provide adequate care, for one of its sailors having a medical emergency aboard a submarine stationed off Greenland, so the Danish Coast Guard evacuated him to Nuuk for treatment, an utterly normal courtesy between NATO allies, but Trump, being a psychopath, seems to have taken it as a personal affront against him, a suggestion that there’s something wrong with his management. So he turned the accusation around to dash off the above text and got somebody to source the picture and post it, to demonstrate that the real medical neglecters are the Danish imperialists while he himself is the Man with the Healthcare Plan, or at least Concept of a Plan. Governor Landry comes in because he is, in his spare time (Republican governors of Louisiana don’t have that much to do, since they’re opposed to government in the first place, other than banning the dread Woke in schools and posting the Ten Commandments all over the place), the United States Special Envoy to Greenland, and thus the Trumpy flunkey best suited to carry out Trump’s wishes, whatever they may be, though he won’t be able to send a US hospital ship, since there are only two and they’re both out of commission at the moment. Nobody seems to know of a “hospital boat” but if it’s what it sounds like it might have trouble making it into the Arctic. I believe in this case no particular action is required—posting the meme casting aspersions on Greenland’s healthcare is all he wants.

In the case of Iran, the question has been what his goals are, or will be if he decides to strike, because there are a bunch of possibilities, but military action isn’t likely to achieve any of them; as Fred Kaplan says at Slate,

Does Trump want to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, dismantle its ballistic missile sites, pull down the regime, or simply threaten a combination of all three to pressure the Iranians to make a “deal”—but a deal to do what?

I know he said he “totally obliterated” the nuclear program back in June (in the US attack on the Fordow facility)—he was lying, naturally, but the attack did in fact inflict significant damage. Is it really worth a big and very expensive military campaign to chase down whatever enriched uranium and workable centrifuges the Iranians managed to salvage, and do the US forces have any idea where it is?

On the missiles, Kaplan writes,

In the brief Iran-Israel war last summer, 90 percent of Iran’s missiles were shot down or crashed before reaching their targets. But Iran launched 550 missiles, as well as 1,000 drones, and the 50 or so that pierced through the defenses inflicted considerable damage. It is not known how many missiles Iran has now—probably a few thousand. Manufacturing sites are concentrated and can be taken out fairly easily, but the missiles themselves are small and mobile. Many would survive an initial onslaught, and if Tehran’s leaders think their regime is about to be crushed, they might decide to launch a massive retaliation, bringing down their enemies along with themselves

and Saudi Arabia and other regional Sunni powers are asking Trump not to do it because they’re afraid of that; this time around, we won’t have them as allies (and ideological cover for the islamophobia).

The regime change idea is maybe the worst: it’s predicated on the recent horror of the January popular uprising in Iran, where the government lost its collective mind and killed an enormous number of protestors, at least 7000. The thing is, what happens if the US “takes out” Ayatollah Kamenei and his lieutenants? A joyous revolution like Ukraine’s in 2014 or endless suffering like Sudan’s? The recent experience in Venezuela offers an idea of where Trump might come down: the US kidnapped President Maduro and put him on trial on (possibly legitimate) drug trafficking charges, and then allowed Vice President Delcy Rodríguez to replace him—the regime didn’t actually change at all (and the election-winning rightwing opposition led by María Corina Machado was thrown under the bus, apparently out of Trump’s pique at her winning the Nobel Peace Prize instead of him, even after she gave him the stupid medal). But the US got control of the oil, for course, at least for the moment, though it’s early days, and the experience when Trump told the world he had cornered Syria’s oil at the end of 2019 or when a crew of his cronies tried to take command of Ukrainian natural gas around the same time (remember Rick Perry and the “three amigos”?) suggests it’s not that simple.

The “decapitation” of the Iranian government will certainly make things there even worse than they are right now, whether with a power vacuum and descent into anarchy like that in Afghanistan after the Soviets fled in 1989, or with the elevation of the Revolutionary Guards into a fiercer military dictatorship than that of the mullahs. We don’t know what his plans for Iranian oil might be, but we know he and his colleagues have a poor record of carrying those through. Trump doesn’t have any plan for Iran’s government any more than he does for Gaza’s, other than to delegate the question, same as Ukraine and Gaza, into the hands of real estate developer friends (Witkoff and Kushner) who are more or less as corrupt and ignorant as he is—and no sense of responsibility for the chaos he will have created (not that it would be a good idea to have US troops on the ground either).

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The reason Trump has any Iran policy at all, however incoherent the policy may be, is in the first place that people keep asking him what it is, and he has to say something or it won’t look right. Then, the Iran policy he’s most familiar with (from watching Fox News) is Barack Obama’s, to which he must offer an opposition, because it’s Obama’s (and because Fox says it’s bad, too, and so do Binyamin Netanyahu and Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman), but he had some trouble finding out exactly what it is, because he’s not merely a psychopath, he’s a psychopath with couple of intellectual disabilities, who doesn’t read well and hates listening to people talk about things he doesn’t know about—other than that Obama for some reason sent Iran a cargo plane loaded with “pallets of cash”, which was clearly the wrong thing to do (it was the negotiated settlement of $1.7 billion, well reported in other outlets, for money the US had stolen from Iran in 1979 plus interest, in cash because US sanctions barred Iran from making use of the international banking system).

Trump didn’t want to know anything about the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, and the Iran government, but he did want to say during the 2016 presidential campaign that it was “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into” and that “this deal, if I win, will be a totally different deal,” and so he did say that. But after he became president he didn’t initially do anything about it—I assume at least in part because his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, one of the more-or-less adults in the Oval and a backer of the European alliance for which Trump never had any affection, was able to stonewall or resist, but Trump found it very irksome that he was required to certify every three months that Iran was in compliance with the JCPOA (for no reason other than the fact that Iran was indeed in compliance with the agreement), and after doing it in April and July, he put his foot down in October and refused; in December, Tillerson came up with an awkward compromise in which Trump would “decertify” the agreement altogether but remain a party to it.

That did not save his job; Trump replaced him in spring 2018 with his Christian nationalist CIA director Mike Pompeo (and H.R. McMaster with crazy mustache John Bolton), who promptly helped him withdraw from JCPOA altogether and restored the lifted sanctions in what was billed as a “maximum pressure campaign” to force Iran to renegotiate the agreement, bringing in Iran’s missiles and support for militant groups in Lebanon and elsewhere—though Trump never did get around to starting negotiations (though he did fire Bolton, reportedly for opposing talks too strongly). He also ordered the drone assassination of the second most powerful person in Iran, the commander of Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, in early 2020, which greatly helped poison the atmosphere when Joe Biden succeeded to the presidency and attempted to restart negotiations himself, without success.

What Trump’s Iran policy is effectively is an Obama policy, like his policies on healthcare and maybe immigration and international trade: an effort to wipe Obama’s name out of history, like all the Black people whose names he’s been trying to eliminate from history textbooks and museums, and replace it with his own. But because he and his henchmen don’t really know how to do anything except campaign, it’s very hard to guess what will happen, nothing at all (as with the healthcare plan, perpetually just a fortnight away) being a real possibility. Basically nothing happened in North Korea in the first term, basically nothing seems to have happened in Venezuela this time, in spite of the taking down of sanctions on US oil companies, the country remains in deep economic crisis, per the International Monetary Fund, with terrible poverty, lack of basic services, and three-digit inflation.

Trump’s second term started off in Iran encouraging Israel’s side-dish war against Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis, seriously weakening Iran’s military resources, and participating in the Israeli war on Iran itself with the Fordow bombing, and reinstating the “maximum pressure campaign”, doubling down on sanctions in an unusually cruel way, as treasury secretary Scott Bessent cheerfully put it:

It came to a swift and, I would say, grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. There was a run on the bank. The central bank had to print money. The Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.... So this is economic statecraft - no shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here.

Besssent didn’t think it worth mentioninig the shots fired by the Revolutionary Guards at the protesting crowds, killing thousands, or the redoubled repression, worse than it’s ever been in 45 years of the Islamic Republic. Supposedly, the aim of the US program was to “compel Tehran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement while preventing its development of nuclear weapons and countering its regional influence,” i.e., to replace Obama’s JCPOA with a new Trump model, but the focus on the people rather than the regime suggested the sanctions were meant to impoverish Iranians to the point where they’d overthrow the regime themselves, and the regime’s murderous response when the people did “come out on the streets” in January makes me think the IRGC might have seen it that way too.

EDWARD FISHMAN [of the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations]: I think what’s different about the current Trump administration, and certainly this is reflected in Secretary Bessent’s remarks, is the degree to which they show very little concern about the humanitarian impact of sanctions.

NORTHAM: But Fishman says previous administrations tried to ensure that sanctions did not have undue impact on civilians.

FISHMAN: I’d say they weren’t always successful at that, but at least in their aims and in their rhetoric they tried to separate the fact that sanctions were targeted at the regime in power as opposed to everyday people.

Trump’s regime is a government of carelessness, with Tom and Daisy Buchanan and their vanity and irritability in charge of the world’s largest military, or maybe the Epstein class (I can’t get over what a ravenous social climber Jeffrey Epstein was, with his collection of intellectual eminences, even as he was an unspeakable monster to the daughters of ordinary folk, and how willingly many of the eminences accepted getting collected). People who let Trump do whatever he wants because he’s a star, or even find him amusing in his sibyllinity.

Iran isn’t just a bad government, it’s 90 million people. If you want to do something about it, that’s fine, but you have to think about it, especially think about them. If you can’t make yourself do that, you should stay out of it.

Michelangelo Buonarotti, Cumaean Sibyl, detail from the Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco, 1511,Vatican City, via Wikimedia Commons.