August 28 marks the beginning of the seventh month of a war Donald Trump began on a whim, waged incoherently and lost decisively. But in the demented, steadily shrinking Trump World, he is a hero. Yesterday, he proudly declared “Mission Accomplished” on his own Truth Social site.
Back on Earth One, Trump has failed to accomplish any of the objectives he set.
Trump promised regime change in a bizarre 1 a.m. video announcing the start of the war six months ago. He claimed that he would liberate the Iranian people. His war has instead strengthened Iran’s tyrannical regime; Iran’s people are suffering more than ever.
Although Trump, like George W. Bush, claimed an urgent nuclear threat justified his war of choice, Iran wasn’t close to building an atomic bomb. The war has set back Iran’s nuclear program, but left Iran with enough highly-enriched uranium, advanced centrifuges and knowledgable scientists and engineers to reconstruct its nuclear capabilities. There is no deal to contain it, and unlikely to ever be one.
Although Pete Hegseth, the worst secretary of defense in U.S. history, announced in April that Iran’s military had been utterly destroyed (he, too, claimed “mission accomplished”) Iran’s fleet of small patrol boats and its arsenal of missiles and drones threaten both Persian Gulf shipping lanes and the economies of neighboring states. Iran is a greater threat to the region than it was six months ago.
It gets worse.
The war has so depleted the military’s supply of both offensive and defensive munitions that officials say the stocks of Patriot missiles in Europe is “beyond critical.” U.S. allies in the Pacific doubt America’s ability to defend them. Ukraine is left defenseless against increased Russian missile attacks.
The war gave Iran two weapons more powerful than nuclear bombs: the ability to hold neighboring states at risk, and the ability to control one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. The Strait of Hormuz is now open to limited traffic (five ships passed through on Tuesday, compared to 120-140 a day before the war), but that is only because Iran allowed limited shipping to resume.
Trump has shattered America’s global credibility. “Trump has so damaged the core U.S. relationships with countries worldwide that he is seen more as a pariah than any American leader ever,” says former U.S. official and foreign policy analyst David Rothkopf. “Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started,” Robert Kagan wrote in The Atlantic. “That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.”
The war has also crushed the image of invincible U.S. military power. Not just that the U.S. was defeated by a nation that spends .7% of what the U.S. spends on its military, but Hegseth’s disregard for accepted rules of war and contempt for concern of civilian casualties has undermined the moral standing of the armed forces. August 28 is also the six-month anniversary of the U.S. bombing -of a school in Iran that killed 150 Iranian school girls. There has been no investigation of this and other war crimes; no one has been held accountable.
Trump’s negotiators-for-everything, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, produced a deal on June 17 that was so badly conceived and poorly written that it collapsed within a month. (Here, I have to point out that at the time, I warned, “there is no deal.”)
Trump is completely unable to articulate any strategic objectives for the war, any path to ending the war, or any plan for repairing the damage he has caused. He has retreated even further from the real world into a bubble of wrestling matches, car races, monument make-overs and renaming of lakes.
It is so bad that the administration’s pronouncements on the war are treated as a joke by all but the far-right media. Secretary of Treasury Steve Bessent enjoyed a few hours of air time on Monday of this week, announcing an economic “D-Day” that would (yet again) suffocate Iran through crippling sanctions. But he could not explain how the sanctions would work, which countries he would call to implement them, what the timeline was, how this was different from previous failed sanction attempts (including the “maximum pressure” campaign of the first Trump administration), or what the objective was. Regime collapse? Open the Strait of Hormuz? Get Iran back to the bargaining table?
By the end of the week, “D-Day” was dead.
Trump seems to believe that he can achieve through intensified economic strangulation what six months of war could not, Iran analyst Sina Toossi of the Center for International Policy, told The New York Times. But to do that Trump needs other nations - now deeply alienated by his actions over the past 20 months - to agree. Most importantly, China, which buys 90% of Iran’s oil, would need to cooperate. It has said that it will not, vowing to combat what it called "illegal, unilateral sanctions." By the end of the week “D-Day” was dead.
Iran has survived the U.S.-Israel war it long feared. Its economy is damaged, but the regime is more determined than ever to resist U.S. demands. “The capacity to hurt Iran is clear,” Toossi said. “The path from pain to capitulation or collapse is not.”
Trump’s real strategy seems to be to ignore the war. To let it drift unresolved past the November elections. Given the impulsive, fact-free nature of his rule, Trump could lash out again, ordering more fruitless strikes. Or the war could widen. Hostilities between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in Yemen could flare into full-scale war again. Iran could launch new attacks. None of this will change the basic calculus.
The Inevitable End Game
Realistically, there is no scenario where Trump wins this war. Most experts agree that Trump has lost and lost decisively. Though some of the same people who cheered him into war (many aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) continue to claim that more attacks and more sanctions can crush the regime, few credible analysts agree. Phil Gordon, who was national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, wrote recently, “Trump’s reckless war…has left the United States with no options other than different versions of catastrophic failure.” In other words, Trump will eventually retreat, leaving Iran the dominant power in the Gulf.
This failure was both predictable and predicted. I was one of dozens of experts and former officials who detailed the overwhelming difficulties of war with Iran in 2012, when Netanyahu and the neoconservatives tried to defeat the negotiated agreement with Iran that succeeded in shrinking and containing Iran’s nuclear program. Even in February, as Trump considered Netanyahu’s claim that the Iranian regime could be eliminated with one bold, decisive attack, U.S. intelligence officials warned of the risks, as reported by The Wall Street Journal this week.
Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard outlined assessments from America’s intelligence apparatus. According to people familiar with the meeting, she told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons. Tehran would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market. And it would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East, prompting questions about American resolve and reliability with allies.
U.S. military leaders echoed these cautions but failed the President and the nation by foolishly assuring Trump that they could overwhelm Iran. The Journal reports:
Trump listened but was ultimately swayed by Pentagon presentations of “decisive” options, U.S. officials said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine and Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, briefed the president several times on plans to strike Iranian targets, including using missile launchers, radar, weapons-production facilities, mine-storage sites and warships. The idea was to overpower the Islamic Republic and cripple its forces while Israel killed Iran’s top leadership…Hegseth and Caine replied on multiple occasions that they would navigate any complications.
Even today, Cooper continues to project rosy claims of military success. He claims in a video released on Friday that the Navy “got the job done,” clearing enough mines from the Strait to reopen it to ship traffic.
If the Democrats retake the House in November, at the top of the agenda should be to finally demand hearings on the failure of Cooper, Caine and other top military officials to understand the futility of war with Iran, to protect U.S. bases, to adequately equip, care for and protect the troops (19 killed, over 750 wounded), to avoid civilian deaths, and to explain why it may now be necessary to retreat from 15 or more bases in the region heavily damaged by Iranian drone and missile attacks. In these hearing we may finally learn the true cost of this war, likely soaring past $100 billion.
The man who would conduct these future hearings, Rep. Adam Smith, now the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, summed it up in a press release marking six months of failure.
It has been six months since Trump unilaterally launched his catastrophic war of choice against Iran and, so far, he has failed to achieve any of his administration’s constantly changing strategic objectives…Service members across all branches of the military have had to shoulder the burden of an unchecked and unprepared executive branch and the failure of congressional Republicans to do their jobs and exercise appropriate oversight of the Trump Administration…The American people, and a majority in Congress, have made it overwhelmingly clear that Trump’s war must end now. The longer Trump waits, the more likely the U.S. will find itself embroiled in another decades-long foreign conflict, which is precisely what Trump promised voters he would never do when he ran for office.
Could not have said it better myself.
BONUS: I discuss all this and more with SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah on his show today, Friday. Listen live at 6-9 pm ET on the Progressive Channel or watch later on YouTube.
Trump and his cronies are totally incompetent for their tasks and beside that they are very cruel bullies trying to intimidate every state they consider weak. Never before we have seen such an incompetent ungracious aggressive ignorant uncivilized US leadership. Most people hate to hate but this regime is so intolerable that a majority in Europe hates it and is hoping it will collapse as soon as possible.