Donald Trump surrendered to Iran because he had no other choice after his personal illegal war failed

Trump's war with Iran will end with a surrender:

New York Times echo report by Nicholas Kristof

Trump declared in March (2026) that a deal to end his war with Iran would require “unconditional surrender,” but that wasn’t quite right. The preliminary agreement he just reached with the Iranian regime was more like a conditional surrender — by the United States. Yes, Trump surrendered but the Iranian world war he started has not opened the Strait of Hormuz.

In the past few days, various Republicans and war hawks have emerged, seemingly bewildered, to criticize the deal. “Trump has surrendered to Iran,” wrote Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas warned, “Giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea.”

The criticisms are correct: Trump's Iran deal is a major setback. It gives immediate relief to Iran, including the prompt unfreezing of billions of dollars of Iranian assets and later a 💲300 ❗ billion fund to help rebuild Iran. And it appears to open the door to Iran gaining at least partial control over the Strait of Hormuz, with the ability, 60 days hence, to charge fees of ships transiting the strait.

“This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” 😠😞lamented Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

Nevertheless, these denunciations miss the most important point. Trump’s fundamental mistake was not ending the war but getting into it in the first place.

At this stage, Trump may have been right to retreat and surrender by signing the useless memo, because, otherwise, he had no good options and continuing his war will surely cost more peoples' lives.

In fact, Trump's failed war of choice with Iran has already shattered the global economy and severely diminished the Republicans’ chances for election wins in the 2026, midterms.

The unpalatable truth is that Iran has won the Trump war, and that’s why it won in the negotiation. Trump dawdled as long as he could, because he realized any deal he could hope to reach would be a humiliation — but the failure of the war had left him with no good exit.

The lesson to be learned from this debacle is to avoid starting needless wars, to temper our hubris that everything will work out perfectly and to rely far more on diplomacy to solve global problems.

In this case, the hawks who were most determined to destroy Iran have done the most to strengthen it, and that should be a cautionary tale.

We had a solution — a highly imperfect one — to the Iran nuclear problem back in 2015 with President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. Iran shipped nearly all of its enriched uranium out of the country, limited enrichment and opened itself to rigorous inspections. But Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the hawks denounced it.

Obama’s Iran deal “was so bad,” Trump said in 2018, focusing on money that was returned to Iran as part of the agreement. Last year he said that he would “have never given them back the money” as part of a deal. He added, “I would have won that negotiation.”

Well, perhaps (obviously❗) not.

After Trump tore up the Obama deal eight years ago, Iran’s leaders predictably built up their nuclear program until they created a crisis. Trump probably could have secured a good bargain in February of this year (2026), on the eve of war, but instead he rashly began dropping bombs, without any exit strategy and, apparently, without calculating how he would respond to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

This lesson about avoiding needless wars is not a new one but apparently must be learned afresh by every generation. In the “Iliad,” Achilles lamented “this insane voyage” to wage the Trojan War, “fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes.”

Indeed, ever since Homer wrote about the Greeks’ attempted regime change in Troy, we’ve seen that the grander the military ambition, the more wary we should be.

The new (hmmmm....or,  is the old deal made new again❓) Iran deal punts serious questions ❓ (ahhh ya' think❓) about Iran’s nuclear capabilities into a further period of negotiations. 

Also, I fear one result of this Trump war is that Iran will be more likely to pursue nuclear weapons. In fact, my guess is that the 60-day negotiating period will be extended, that Iran will slow-walk nuclear negotiations and that Trump will be reluctant to accept anything that looks like the Obama accord. Then Trump will lose interest in the same way he seems to have forgotten about Gaza. 

There will be almost no appetite in America for another Iran war, and the newly empowered Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps will weigh whether to adopt North Korea’s strategy and try to build a nuclear arsenal to seal its regional primacy.

The cost of this war is a weakened America and thousands of lost lives, mostly Iranian and Lebanese but also those of 13 American service members. Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert on war financing, tells me that she believes the eventual total bill for this war — including repair of bases, replacement of munitions and years of benefits to injured veterans — is very likely to be $1 trillion. Instead of paying for Medicaid, college, child care or humanitarian aid, vast sums were squandered in the Persian Gulf.

Those whom we have betrayed the most are ordinary Iranians. In January, after the Iranian regime massacred thousands of its own people, Trump said, “Help is on its way.” Instead we have left Iranians to suffer under a more oppressive government — and with less hope for change. As a tribute to American indifference, the Trump administration this month reportedly deported an Iranian woman to the Central African Republic, a war-ravaged country that the State Department advises not to visit “for any reason.”

So, okay, by all means, denounce this failed Iran war surrender MOU agreement. But, the tragedy here is not Trump’s exit from his war, but the Iran war itself. It is a history lesson, that when you see a cast of overconfident hawks promising painless victory, always beware.

Donald Trump demands fealty from his evil cult but never reciprocates: Trumpism is Fascism

After crushing primary defeat in a primary, the Republican incumbent Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana used his concession speech to deliver a message about — and to — Donald Trump.

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Renée Graham

“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to,” the two-term senator said. “But you don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim the election was stolen, ... you don’t manufacture some excuse. You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”

What Cassidy also did was something he had failed to do since Trump returned to office — call him out publicly❗ Never mentioned Trump's name. But, only when his own political career was left in ashes was Cassidy willing to singe  Trump.

Cassidy has been a marked man since 2021, when he was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump after the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. At the time, Cassidy said, “Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.” In response to Cassidy’s vote, the Republican Party of Louisiana censured him.

But Trump, who turned the power of the presidency into a revenge fest, made no secret of his desire to get Cassidy, whom he called “disloyal,” out of Congress. 

In the Senate primary, he endorsed House Representative Julia Letlow, who received 45 percent of the vote and will face John Fleming, a Louisiana state treasurer, in a runoff on June 27.

As soon as Trump returned to office, Cassidy tried to get back into his good graces — only to discover that Trump doesn’t have any. But to appease him, Cassidy voted to confirm every member of Trump’s Cabinet.

That included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As a doctor, Cassidy knew that Kennedy was not only unqualified to be the health and human services secretary but, also, that he was an anti-vaxxer and a peddler of the junkiest junk science.

But with his vote, Cassidy, a staunch vaccine advocate, appeased Trump and gave Kennedy undeserved trust. That didn’t stop Kennedy from blaming Cassidy for the derailed confirmation of Casey Means, a so-called “wellness influencer” as surgeon general.

In a social media post, Kennedy said that Cassidy “once again did the dirty work for entrenched interests seeking to stall the [Make America Healthy Again] movement and protect the very status quo that has made America the sickest nation on earth.”

Whatever legacy Cassidy hoped to cement during his Senate tenure, his decision to help Kennedy become The Worst Health and Human Services Secretary™ in American history will overshadow all of it.

Cassidy learned what other Republicans, despite their stalwart sycophancy, have found when they thwarted Trump’s fragile ego — he will stop at nothing to destroy them politically.

A year after Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia congresswoman, heckled former president Joe Biden during his final State of the Union address in 2024, Trump excoriated her as a “lunatic” when she pushed for the release of the Justice Department’s files on convicted sex offender and former Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

(House Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky also demanded the Epstein files release, which landed him in Trump’s crosshairs. He faced a tough primary challenge on Tuesday against a Trump-endorsed candidate.)

Without Trump’s support, Greene declined to seek reelection. But she has continued to joust with Trump, and she has said that “MAGA has become a cult.”

MAGA has always been a cult. But not until Trump turned on Greene did she bother to notice. That’s typical of Republicans who only tend to buck Trump on their way out of the door — like Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is not running for reelection. His scathing cross-examination of Kristi Noem in March probably helped get her fired as Homeland Security director.

Having lost his shot at another Senate term, Cassidy should also behave like a man with nothing to lose. Perhaps his concession speech was a preview.

“Let me just set the record straight: Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans and it is about our Constitution,” Cassidy told his supporters. “And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”

Instead of a potential three-term senator, Cassidy is a cautionary tale for Republicans. He traded his conscience for capitulation to a man he knew was not qualified to be a leader. 

In search of his own self-preservation, Cassidy toadied up to a tyrant, placed Trump above country and the Constitution, and still ended up as a loser.

Dangerous Measles obviously follows RFKjr around like an interplanetary dust cloud

In West Texas, those red measles blotches on fevered skin are warning signs for the nation | Editorial Board opinion published in the Houston Chronicle, Texas❗

Measles is a preventable contagious virus

Senator Brian Schatz: RFK Jr., Whose Dangerous Lies Fueled Measles Outbreak in Samoa & Caused Preventable Deaths, is Unqualified To Lead HHS: Kennedy, in his words, but more importantly in his actions, has proven over and over that he is a unique danger to society.*

Houston Chronicle editorial writes: Coincidence❓ On the day when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was confirmed as this nation’s secretary of Health and Human Services, an outbreak of measles was continuing to spread beyond a small West Texas town like a parched-pasture grassfire. Coincidence it may have been this time, but the outbreak is also a disturbing reminder that an administration foolhardy enough to entrust this nation’s health to a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy-minded opportunist just might be ensuring that the outbreak also is a portent.

A measles epidemic in West Texas is unlikely to be the only health crisis this nation will face during the next four years. Even more serious ones will certainly follow. (Think tuberclosis in Kansas😨Kansas is currently experiencing an ongoing outbreak of tuberculosis i.e.,TB. The outbreak began in early 2024, and is primarily concentrated in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Although 67 cases are reported, more are not yet recorded.)

A the majority of the measles cases reported in Texas are in Gaines County southwest of Lubbock, although the disease is now spreading to neighboring counties. Most of those infected are children or teens; 16 have been hospitalized. The Texas Department of State Health Services is reporting 124 confirmed cases of measles in the ongoing outbreak in the South Plains and Panhandle regions. 

DSHS (Texas Department of State and Health Services) is working with local health departments in that area to investigate cases, provide immunizations where needed, and keep the public informed.

Additionally, DSHS issued a health alert Monday after a person with measles traveled from the outbreak area to San Marcos and San Antonio before they knew they were infected. Measles exposures may have occurred at several public locations during that trip.

Although measles is rarely fatal in this country, it’s one of the major causes of childhood death worldwide. Children under 5 are among those most at risk, as well as persons with compromised immune systems and those who are pregnant. Along with tell-tale red blotches all over the body, an infected person may experience high fever, diarrhea, pneumonia, deafness and brain swelling. It’s highly contagious.

According to the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), only five of the infected individuals in West Texas had been immunized with the highly effective measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Since not everyone infected shows up for treatment, the number of cases is likely in the hundreds.

The outbreak, the state’s worst in over 30 years, originated in Gaines County. Most of those infected are Mennonites, a Protestant religious group that’s been an integral part of the small community since arriving in the 1970s. 

Although the Mennonites do not set themselves apart like the Amish or other separatist groups that originated during the Protestant Reformation in 16th-century Europe, they are close-knit. 

Gaines County, population a little over 20,000, is home to a number of Mennonite congregations, as well as a Mennonite school and elementary school. 

Mennonites avoid medical care, including vaccinations, even though the church takes no official position on vaccines. Since Mennonite residents of the county, like their non-Mennonite neighbors, regularly travel to Lubbock to shop at Walmart or Costco, cheer on the Texas Tech Red Raiders or visit their doctors and dentists, the outbreak will continue to spread beyond the small towns, pancake-flat cotton fields and ranchland of this rural corner of Texas. Cases also are cropping up across the nearby state line, in New Mexico.

Texas public schools require children to have received certain vaccines before enrolling, including MMR, but parents can apply for an exemption for “reasons of conscience,” including religious belief. Last year, more than 13 percent of K-12 students in Gaines County received a vaccine exemption, among the highest rates in Texas, according to state data.

Meanwhile, the nationwide spread of avian influenza from chickens and other birds to cows and now to dairy and poultry workers is yet another sobering reminder that a relatively localized measles epidemic won’t be the last health crisis this country will face during the next four years. What a dangerous time for a vaccine skeptic, a man who’s neither a doctor nor a health care administrator, to be allowed to tinker like a shade-tree mechanic with the nation’s vast and intricate health care system. In tandem with an even more dangerous zillionaire authorized by a vaccine-skeptical president to make cuts in vital human services, Kennedy at the helm means that we’re asking for trouble.

What a time, as well, for a craven Congress to cede its constitutional prerogatives – including advice and consent regarding appointments – to a president who maintains that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” (“He” being himself, of course.) Ironically, those same elected representatives, servile to our aspiring Napoleon, are having to go hat – and pride – in hand to beg newly installed agency heads for money to save projects and programs vital to their state. Money they themselves appropriated!

It’s hard to imagine any other prosperous nation with a functioning health care system – our future 51st state to the north, for example – surrendering its programs, research and vital health services to Kennedy, who proclaimed a few years ago that “COVID shots are a crime against humanity.” He has said that vaccines have caused a “holocaust.” He has made a lucrative career off disseminating dangerous and false information about vaccines.

Although Kennedy during his confirmation hearing promised U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who’s also a physician, that he would not change the nation’s current vaccine regimen – including MMR – he’s already backtracking. He said last week that he intended to investigate vaccines for measles, polio and other infectious diseases. “Nothing is going to be off limits,” he said.

His comments came in the wake of thousands losing their jobs within HHS and other vital agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.

Journalist and author Daniel Smith, writing in the New York Review of Books during Trump’s first term – around the time our new HHS secretary was busy dropping off a road-kill bear carcass in New York’s Central Park and sawing off the head of a dead beached whale – warned his fellow Americans that the president’s support for the anti-vaxxers meant that “Children will get sick and die, needlessly and avoidably.”

Smith could not have imagined, we suspect, that a few years later that same president – “heedless and stubborn in his ignorance” – would jeopardize the nation by elevating a notorious anti-vaccine activist to a position that affects the health and well-being of millions of Americans.

So what do we do? What choices do we have, however limited, to protect not only vital federal agencies but also our nation’s health? For one thing, we can act locally (as long as funds hold out). South Plains Public Health District, for example, has four clinics in the Gaines County area. A bus that belongs to the Lubbock-based University Medical Center functions as a mobile clinic offering free testing for measles immunity. For now, local hospitals are prepared to handle the most serious cases.

We can continue to combat dangerous misinformation. "[Measles is] the most contagious infectious disease known to humans,” Dr. Amesh Adulja, an infectious disease physician at Johns Hopkins University, told CBS News. “And when we start to see measles outbreak, that's a sign that there is a chink in the armor of vaccination and the fact that it's preventable … This doesn't have to happen if we can get vaccination rates back to high levels again.”

We also can vote as if our health and well-being depend on the choices we make. The current makeup of the Texas Legislature suggests that we don’t take our choices that seriously. So far this legislative session, lawmakers have filed more than 20 bills that would weaken vaccination mandates. A House joint resolution authored by state Rep. Andy Hopper, R-Decatur, would amend the Texas Constitution to add a right to refuse vaccination. That kind of performative foolishness is an insult to Hopper’s constituents, indeed to every Texan.

The fact is – whether our lawmaker skeptics care to admit it – vaccines are safe, effective and necessary. Thanks to vaccines, measles, for example, was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. Now, thanks to declining vaccination rates, the disease is back. (Will polio be next?) If Trump, Kennedy and Texas legislators discourage vaccine use while wrecking our health care infrastructure, children will suffer. Lives will be lost.

The Gaines County outbreak is, indeed, a portent. It’s a sober reminder that we live together. In health, and in sickness.

*First measles death reported in Texas as Kennedy downplays the outbreak. 😠 At least 124 people have been infected in the fast-spreading outbreak. Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “we have measles outbreaks every year.”

Washington Post Echo- GOP health care repeal is a bad idea

Another GOP health-care bill proves - "bad ideas never die"- Washington Post opinion: blog "echo"

GOP health insurance "repeal bill" is a bad idea

Republican senators (will sadly) try one last time to repeal and replace Obamacare. (Obamacare was built on the actuarial analysis that spreads the cost of the risk of coverage throughout the population covered. Republicans want to slash and burn the benefits that helps the most needy who need coverage for pre-existing conditions.)

Opinion in the Washington Post

In fact, the latest bill, from Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), Dean Heller (Nev.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.), is about as execrable (ie "awful") as the others that GOP lawmakers previously failed to approve. The process by which Republicans would pass it would be as sloppy and partisan as the one to which senators such as John McCain (R-Ariz.) objected earlier in the summer. The outcome would be no less destructive.

The big difference now is the clock; the procedural window for passing a health-care bill along straight party lines will disappear at the end of the month, spurring Republicans to try one last time. 

That is a sad excuse to rush through — without even an attempt at bipartisanship and without a complete Congressional Budget Office assessment — a half-baked bill that would harm millions. Senators who objected to repeal-and-replace efforts before have no principled reason to change their votes.

The Graham-Cassidy proposal would cancel Obamacare’s major programs in 2020 and offer the states block grants instead. This plan at least does not include a massive upper-income tax cut, as previous GOP bills did, and it would seem to allow blue states to create and maintain universal or near-universal health coverage systems within their borders, even as red states went in a more conservative direction.

But the bill suffers from fatal flaws, even setting aside how red-state residents would suffer under the parsimonious health policies their governments would adopt. 

First, analysts project that it would scale back the money states would get over time, relative to what would have flowed their way under Obamacare. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a center-left think tank, estimatesthe shortfall would total $41 billion by 2026. The bill’s funding formula would, in general, shift money from blue states to red states. These factors would make it difficult for states that like their Obamacare to keep their Obamacare.

Second, the bill would seriously cut Medicaid, which covers the poor and near-poor, putting yet more burden on states to cover needy people — if states even try.

Third, the state block grants that would underpin the Graham-Cassidy system would end in 2027; that would breed uncertainty in the market, fear among patients and rancor on Capitol Hill.

Moreover, the bill would make it easier for states to erode important safeguards guaranteeing that sick people can obtain the care they need.
And that is the rosy scenario. There is a good chance that many states would fail to create brand-new health-care systems by 2020, in time to stave off the chaos that would occur after Obamacare’s carefully regulated and subsidized health-care markets disappeared. Establishing such a system is hard under any circumstances. Doing so under a tight deadline, without the administrative, technical and other help that federal officials currently provide, would be very hard, the Urban Institute’s Linda Blumberg pointed out.

Some Republicans want to pass this policy disaster before the end of the month, in less than two weeks. A last-minute committee hearing would be nothing more than a fig leaf disguising a reprehensibly partisan process in service of an unworthy bill.