Donald Trump and maga Republicans must call the Iran war what it is- World War III in Iran caused by inept Trumpism

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: Trump is at war with Iran.

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Jonah Goldberg.

What is my evidence❓

Turn on your TV. U.S. forces, working with Israel, killed the supreme leader of Iran and many of his top aides. We sunk Iran’s navy and destroyed most of their air force. We bombed thousands of military sites across the region. President Trump, the commander in chief, has demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran. He routinely refers to this as a “war.” Pete Hegseth, 🤢who calls himself the secretary of war, also describes this as a war daily, such as last week when he said, “We set the terms of this war.”

The truth that we are at war is so simple, only politicians and lawyers could make it seem complicated.

Indeed, a slew of Republican legislators insist we’re not actually at war. House Speaker Mike Johnson: “We’re not at war right now. We’re four days into a very specific, clear mission and operation.” Florida Rep. Brian Mast: “Nobody should classify this as war. It is combat operations.” South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham: “I don’t know if this is technically a war.” Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin: “This isn’t a war. We haven’t declared war.” Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: “Strategic strikes are not war.”

Pearl Harbor was a strategic strike too.

Then there’s the claim that we’re not at war with Iran but Iran is at war with us. This is half true, insofar as Iran has been committing acts of war against the U.S. since it took our embassy staff hostage in 1979. But waging a war in response doesn’t make it any less of a war.

One is tempted to invoke George Orwell’s “1984,” in which the existence or nonexistence so literary is at play. This is (mostly) legalism run amok.

The main reason congressional Republicans reject the W-word is simple. If it’s merely a “combat operation” or “strategic strike” in response to an “imminent threat,” then the president has the authority to do it without congressional approval. If it’s a war, then it’s arguably illegal and unconstitutional within the framework of the War Powers Resolution or the Constitution itself, because under the Constitution declaring war is the sole responsibility of Congress. And the last thing this Congress wants to do is take responsibility for anything.

This at least partly explains why Trump insists he had a “feeling” Iran was about to attack us. He has even suggested that Iran was just weeks away from having a nuclear weapon and that he prevented an imminent “nuclear war.”

The War Powers Resolution — nominally rejected by every president since it was passed in 1973 — was intended to restrict the president’s ability to use force without Congress’ consent. It backfired. It says the president can respond militarily to threats as he deems necessary, but then must go to Congress within 60 days for approval to continue hostilities. The result: Presidents have a free hand to wage war for roughly two months, unless Congress stops them.

But congressional Republicans don’t want to stop Trump. That’s tactically defensible, if you believe this war was necessary. But the tactic forces Congress to say, in effect, “Don’t believe you’re lying eyes. This isn’t a war.”

For those who only vaguely remember what they learned in high school about the War Powers Resolution — or for that matter, the Constitution — this riot of legalism only fuels confusion.

But, there’s another factor driving the evasion. Trump made the idea of staying out of “forever wars” a central tenet of America First. There’s no textbook definition of “forever war” — always a ludicrous term — so you can understand why some people believed it was code for “Middle East war” or just plain war of any kind. 

Moreover, the irony is that Trump could make a plausible case that this war is allowable under the Authorization to Use Military Force George W. Bush received in 2001. But symbolically, that would mean Trump is continuing Bush’s “forever war.”

Regardless, Republicans aren’t just under a legal clock to get this thing over with, but a political one too. Polling shows that Americans, including many Republicans, have no thirst for a long conflict, which makes sense given that they were not asked to prepare for this war at all. Hence, the insistence that this war will be short and tidy.

The problem is that Iran knows this. Which is why they don’t have to win, they just have to ride out the bombings until the public or Trump loses patience with this very real war.

X: @JonahDispatch

Donald Trump and maga Republican giving cult followers multiple choice fake reasons for the Iran World War

Echo opinion letter published in the Los Angeles Times:

Iran isn’t going to give Trump the unconditional surrender he wants.

Is Donald Trump's World War with Iran a war to end Iran's nuclear capabilities forever, or is it a war to liberate the Iranian people, or is it a religious war meant to finish what the crusades failed to do❓  Multiple choice.

To the editor: Donald Trump is demanding that Iran give up its sovereignty, and surrender unconditionally, to the United States (“Trump demands ‘unconditional surrender,’ role in picking Iran’s next leader,” March 6). 

Unfortunately, that will not be an option for Iranian leadership.

Trump’s war is costing American taxpayers nearly $900 million per day. Donald Trump ordered the attack on Iran while peace talks were ongoing. We attacked Iran before it attacked us. (Maine Writer, IMO, "Peace talks" were a ruse.)

Trump’s unilateral decision to attack Iran was a planned coordinated action, in collaboration with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and was done without notifying the Congress of the United States.

Trump’s unilateral decisions are affecting more than 300 million Americans and the lives of millions of men, women and children in the Middle East. Imagine that: one man having unilateral decision-making power satisfying his ego with the idea that he can attack sovereign nations with impunity, replace their leaders and appoint leaders who will bend the knee, allowing Trump to control that country’s destiny.

Just so Trump knows, if anybody is brave enough to tell him, how Iranians are warriors, and many would die before surrendering. 

Donald Trump has only created a war that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will likely be fighting for years to come.

From Donald Peppars, in Pomona, California

A War Still in Search of a Mission

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are stoking the fires for World War III in Iran and the Middle East without authority to wage war

Eight minutes❗⏲️

Echo opinion published in the New York Times by David French

That’s the length of Donald Trump’s social media video announcing his (World War III) war with Iran. He didn’t go to Congress. He didn’t obtain a U.N. Security Council resolution. Instead, he did perhaps the most monarchical thing he’s done in a monarchical second term: He simply ordered America into war.

I take a back seat to no one in my loathing of the Iranian regime. I am not mourning the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike on Saturday. 

My anger at the Iranian regime is personal. Men I knew and served with during my deployment to Iraq in 2007 and 2008 were killed or gravely injured by Iranian-supplied weapons deployed by Iranian-supported militias.

But my personal feelings don’t override the Constitution, and neither do anyone else’s. As I mentioned in a round-table conversation with my colleagues, I’m worried that all too many people will say: Well, in a perfect world Trump should have gone to Congress, but what’s done is done. That is exactly the wrong way to approach this war.

Here’s the bottom line: Trump should have gotten congressional approval for striking Iran, or he should not have struck at all. And, because he did not obtain congressional approval, he’s diminishing America’s chances for ultimate success and increasing the chances that we make the same mistakes we — and other powerful nations — have made before.

To make that argument is not to sacrifice our national interests on an altar of legal technicalities. Instead, it’s to remind Americans of the very good reasons for our country’s constitutional structure on matters of war and peace.

The fundamental goal of the 1787,  U.S. Constitution was to establish a republican form of government — and that meant disentangling the traditional powers of the monarch and placing them in different branches of government.

When it came to military affairs, the Constitution separated the power to declare war from the power to command the military. The short way of describing the structure is that America should go to war only at Congress’s direction, but when it does, its armies are commanded by the president.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this constitutional structure is that it creates a presumption of peace. Our nation cannot go to war until its leaders persuade a majority of Congress that war is in our national interest.

This framework applies both to direct declarations of war and to their close cousin, authorizations for the use of military force, such as the authorizations for Desert Storm in the first gulf war, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq.

But the constitutional structure, when followed, does much more than that. It also helps to provide accountability. To make the case to Congress, a president doesn’t just outline the reasons for war; he also outlines the objectives of the conflict. This provides an opportunity to investigate the weaknesses of the case for the conflict, along with the possibility of success and the risks of failure.

I’m getting a disturbing sense of déjà vu for example, from the idea that degrading regime forces from the air will give unarmed (or mostly unarmed) civilian protesters exactly the opening they need to topple the Iranian government and effect regime change.

By the end of Desert Storm, the United States had devastated the Iraqi military and inflicted casualties far beyond anything that Israel or the United States has inflicted on Iran over this March 6-7, 2026 weekend. When the Iraqi people rose up, there was a wave of hope that the dictator would be deposed and democracy would prevail. But Saddam Hussein had more than enough firepower — and enough loyalists — to crush the rebellion, retain power for more than a decade and kill tens of thousands of his opponents.

The Iranian regime deserves to fall, but I’m concerned that we’re creating the conditions for more massacres of more civilians, without offering the protesters any reasonable prospect of success.

But, if the regime does crack, there is no guarantee that we will welcome the eventual results. From Iraq to Syria to Libya, we’ve seen how civil war sows chaos, fosters extremism and terrorism and creates waves of destabilizing migration.

In a real public debate before a real Congress, these points could have been addressed. The administration could have prepared people for the various contingencies, including casualties and economic disruption. Instead, near the end of Trump’s cursory speech on Saturday, he said, “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

Well, yes, that’s certainly true. But that’s not the full extent of the risk — not even close. The American people needed to hear more. They deserved to hear more.

There was a case for striking Iran.

As my colleague Bret Stephens has argued, the Iranian regime is evil, hostile to the United States and militarily aggressive. It has engaged in a decades-long conflict with the United States. Beginning with the hostage crisis in 1979 — when Iranians seized and held American diplomats and Embassy employees for 444 days — Iran has conducted countless direct and indirect attacks against the United States.

Iranian-backed terrorists are responsible for the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983, that killed 241 Americans. Iranian-backed terrorists killed 19 Americans in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. Iran-backed militias killed hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq.

Since the second Iraq war, Iranian-backed militias have continued their attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. In fact, it’s fair to say that Iran’s efforts to attack and kill Americans have been relentless for decades.

Beyond its attacks on Americans, Iran is one of the most aggressive and destabilizing regimes in the world. It has supported Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — three of the world’s most powerful terrorist militias — it has attacked Israel with ballistic missiles, and it has supplied Russia with drones to use in its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Iran is deeply repressive at home. It stifles dissent, deprives women of their most basic human rights and massacres its own people by the thousands when they protest against the regime.

If you’re going to list foreign countries that should not obtain access to nuclear weapons, Iran should be at or close to the very top. Blocking Iran’s ability to develop and deploy nuclear weapons is among our most vital national interests.

But there was also a case against an attack.

As my newsroom colleague Eric Schmitt has reported, General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump that there is a high risk of casualties and a risk that a campaign against Iran could deplete American stockpiles of precision weapons — at the exact moment when we need those weapons to deter any potential Chinese maneuvers against Taiwan.

In addition, Iran may now believe that it should not restrain its response to an American attack but instead prioritize inflicting as many casualties as possible on American forces (and perhaps even on American civilians). Iran has already lashed out at multiple nations in the Gulf. Its attacks haven’t inflicted much damage so far, but it’s too soon to simply presume that Iran won’t be able to hurt the United States or our allies. (Dear Mr. French- "Aaaah....😧what allies❓")

And, if we suffer those losses without eradicating a nuclear program that Trump already claimed to have “obliterated,” without ultimately changing the regime (in spite of the death of the supreme leader), or without even protecting civilian protesters, then for all practical purposes, we will have lost a pointless, deadly war.

Don’t let anyone tell you that modern presidents simply don’t go to Congress, that we’re trying to impose a standard on Trump that we didn’t impose on anyone else. In 2002, the Department of Justice told President George W. Bush that he had “sufficient constitutional and statutory authority to use force against Iraq,” even in the absence of a direct congressional authorization or a new U.N. Security Council resolution. Yet, Mr. Bush pressed for (and obtained) an authorization and a resolution anyway, just as his father did when he went to war with Saddam Hussein, during Operation Desert Storm.

Regardless of any person’s feelings about Operation Iraqi Freedom (I supported it then and still do), when our troops went into combat, they knew they were supported by a majority of the American people. They knew politicians on both sides of the aisle had voted to send them into battle.

Now, many millions of Americans are bewildered by events. There is no national consensus around the decision to deploy Americans into harm’s way. There isn’t even a Republican consensus. There’s only a personal consensus, the personal consensus of a mercurial man so detached from reality that he actually reposted on Truth Social an article with the headline “Iran Tried to Interfere in 2020, 2024 Elections to Stop Trump, and Now Faces Renewed War With U.S.”

Are Trump’s conspiracy theories making him more amenable to war❓

In 1848, at the close of the Mexican-American War, a first-term congressman named Abraham Lincoln wrote:


Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

Those words were true then, and they’re true now. No matter what he thinks, Trump is not a 👑king. But, by taking America to war all on his own, he is acting like one.

P.S. Senator Susan Collins where are you❓

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth continue to violate the Constitution now using religion to justify the illegal war in Iran

Reprinted from The Other 98 percent social media page site here.
Article is at this site here.

28 Democrats just demanded an investigation into Pete Hegseth (Whiskey Pete) after hundreds of troops reported commanders pushing end-times Christian fascism as justification for the Iran war.
Reps. Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, and Chrissy Houlahan led the charge, requesting DoD Inspector General Platte B. Moring III investigate reports of commanders "invoking religious prophecy and apocalyptic theology to justify the United States' military actions in Iran."

Lawmakers want to know whether Hegseth's "extreme religious rhetoric has metastasized into segments of the military chain of command" in ways that violate the Constitution and DoD regulations.

What triggered this? Over 200 service members across 50 installations and every military branch filed complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reporting that their commanders told them the Iran war is divinely ordained, that Trump was chosen by Jesus to bring about Armageddon.

Seriously❗

Hegseth sponsors a weekly White House Bible study and has enshrined evangelical Christianity at the uppermost levels of the U.S. military. His monthly Pentagon prayer gatherings have featured Doug Wilson, a far-right Christian nationalist who has defended slavery and called for America to become a theocracy.

The Democrats laid out six specific areas for investigation, from whether commanders violated DoD religious neutrality policies to whether whistleblowers faced retaliation. The Pentagon offered no direct response when asked about the complaints.

The Constitution is crystal clear: service members swear an oath to defend a secular republic, not to carry out anyone's end-times fever dream.

If the Secretary of Defense is turning the world's most lethal fighting force into a Christian dominionist project, that's not just a policy failure, it's a national security crisis, potentially even a global one.

Maine Writer Response: This radical religion strategy failed during the Crusades, Hitler invoked this as justification for the “final solution” and he failed, the Spanish Inquisition built a torture campaign around this myth but think about how many thousands of lives were lost to prove this strategy is never going to work❓ 

Meanwhile, the whack-a-mole reason behind this war changes with the ocean tides. Was the purpose regime change❓ Is this the fulfillment of Netanyahu’s long wished for war❓ Is the purpose to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities or is the purpose to bring Christianity to this eons old Iranian civilization❓ Multiple choice! Just my opinion❗

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are sending American young people into war without a purpose

Echo opinion letter published in Bakersfield.com:

egomaniacal old man

On Saturday morning (February 28, 2026) we listened as Donald Trump tell us how our military took out leaders of Iran's military regime. This is from a president who promised no more foreign wars if he was elected. Then came Venezuela. Now Iran. Iran retaliated. Three American servicemen died. Five more were seriously injured. Others were "slightly" injured. The next next thing we hear is the president telling us to expect more U.S. casualties. "People die in wars" were his exact words. (Pentagon now reports six military service people were killed in Kuwait but there have to be more causalities especially in Bahrain, where the Navy Supply depot was attacked by Iran.) The Pentagon identified six U.S. Army Reserve soldiers from Iowa*, from the 103rd Sustainment Command killed by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait on March 1, 2026. The fallen service members are: Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, Capt. Cody Khork, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan, Maj. Jeffrey O'Brien, Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, and Sgt. Declan Coady. These six young people are the victims of preventable deaths caused by Donald Trump's illegal World War III. There was no purpose or plan or warning to help them prepare for the attack that killed them.

How many of our young men and women will be asked to put their lives on the line so that this vain, egomaniacal old man can look powerful? Donald Trump couldn't care less about our national security, our welfare, or peace in our world. He only wants to be feared. He threatens the world and plots revenge against anyone he considers a political enemy (whether they are or not). And, he doesn't care how many of us are going to be asked to sacrifice our children to achieve his psychotic dream.

How long is it going to take Congress and the Senate to grow a backbone and start listening to their constituents? (Senator Susan Collins where are you ❓)


I am just so glad that l and my son are too old to wear a uniform and my grandchildren are still too young.


I ask God to protect all our fine young service people at this critical time. Hopefully someone will come to their senses before this whole debacle comes to an end.

From Michael A. Cariker, in Bakersfield, California

*Six U.S. Army Reserve soldiers killed in a March 1, 2026, drone strike at the Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait were all assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command based in Des Moines, Iowa.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans deliberately reneged on the opportunity for a negotiated nuclear disarmament in Iran

One Crucial Reason We’re Talking About Boots on the Ground in Iran. (Maine Writer question❓How many body bags will be needed❓) New York Times Editorial by W. J. Hennigan and Masimo Calabrisi:

Somewhere in the mountains of Iran lies a hidden stockpile that is poised to define the future of America’s war against the theocratic regime: 18 to 20 scuba-tank-like canisters, each of which contains up to 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium, the main material for making a nuclear weapon.

Iran spent decades and billions of dollars amassing that material, prompting Democratic and Republican presidents alike to insist America would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Iran’s nuclear program has been severely damaged by U.S.-led air attacks over the past nine months. American officials and experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency believe the uranium has nonetheless survived.

That leaves no good options for a very urgent problem. The United States and Israel could dispatch special forces teams, with nuclear experts embedded in them, in the hope of finding, securing and removing or destroying the canisters, perhaps with the help of local insurgents. There have been few attempts to secure a nuclear program in the middle of a war, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how things could go terribly wrong.

The latest conflict, deliberately or otherwise, has forced the uranium issue to the fore, setting off a showdown over Iran’s nuclear future and a scramble to secure its components. If President Trump ends the war without getting control of the canisters, Iran will almost certainly speed toward going nuclear. Grabbing it, on the other hand, would entail huge risk and the inevitable deployment of American or Israeli ground forces.

“They have to deal with this,” said David Albright, the dean of Iran nuclear analysts and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank. The stockpile gives whoever emerges in power after the war “a residual nuclear weapons capability,” he said.

Diplomacy is the other approach. Weeks of bombing might force Iran to surrender its enriched uranium and other elements of its program. Intermediaries from Oman suggested recently that Iran might be willing to go this route, but that was before the latest attacks began. This is also not a new idea. One way or the other, America and Iran have been negotiating over this question for more than a decade.

The United States and Israel believe most of the highly enriched uranium is in a tunnel complex outside the city of Isfahan, which has not been the target of major bombing attacks during this campaign. “We’re always highly focused on” the uranium, the under secretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, said at the Council on Foreign Relations on March 4.

After Donald Trump’s decapitation of much of Iran’s leadership, the security of the stockpile is at risk. Converting the highly toxic material in the canisters into the metal for a weapon is probably beyond the abilities of terrorists, but rogue forces might view it as a decent insurance policy amid the chaos of war. The regime might try to disperse the canisters around the country for safekeeping. Iran has retained other parts of its nuclear program despite the relentless air attacks, and no matter what, the scientific knowledge underpinning the effort can’t be bombed away.

Donald Trump’s war against Iran triggered the most consequential nuclear moment in the Middle East in a generation. It’s no exaggeration to say the future of the region may well depend on whether the United States, having triggered the crisis, is successful in finding and securing the stockpile. Representative Bill Foster, Democrat of Illinois, who attended a classified briefing with administration officials on Tuesday, said Iran does “not need to enrich further to make a usable nuclear weapon. It’s true that what they have can’t be launched atop a missile, but unfortunately there’s different ways to deliver such a weapon.”

he confrontation over Iran’s enriched uranium has been building for years. Unlike in Iraq two and a half decades ago, when American intelligence agencies incorrectly argued that the country had a secret nuclear program, there is no doubt about Iran’s nuclear stockpile, which has been independently verified by the I.A.E.A. The organization significantly ramped up monitoring the country’s nuclear program in 2003.

Under the 2015, nuclear deal negotiated by the President Obama administration, Iran agreed to limit the enrichment of its uranium to less than 4 percent purity until 2030, in exchange for sanctions relief. The agreement was significant because it lengthened the breakout time it would take for Iran to produce a nuclear weapon to more than a year. Trump abandoned the deal in 2018, and within years, the Iranians began enriching their uranium beyond 20 percent, well higher than could be justified for civilian or scientific use, the I.A.E.A. reported. By the time the United States started its attacks last June, which were designed to debilitate Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran had amassed an estimated 970 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity.

That brought Iran within days of producing the 90 percent uranium necessary to fuel devastating nuclear weapons. Even 60 percent enriched uranium, when converted to metal, can be used for a crude weapon with roughly the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Shortly after Trump’s June attack, Iran kicked the I.A.E.A. inspectors out of the country, and the agency’s head, Rafael Grossi, has said he can no longer say for sure where the enriched uranium is. He assumed it remains at Isfahan, but he said at a March 2 news conference that “we hope it has not been removed.”

Knowing where to find the material is just the first challenge. Mr. Foster said after the classified briefing on Tuesday that the administration did not answer whether it had a strategy for dealing with the problem when it started the war. “We did not hear any plan from the administration to seize it, destroy it or make it subject to international inspection,” he told The Times.

The United States and Israel have the capability to secure Iran’s nuclear materials; this is one scenario in which there could be boots on the ground. Elite commando units among America’s special forces train to conduct high-risk operations to detect, seize and neutralize chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear threats. The United States maintains a system, called the Mobile Uranium Facility, that allows American scientists to quickly characterize, stabilize and package uranium. It’s made up of several shipping containers that can be loaded aboard military cargo planes and sent anywhere in the world from its current location in Tennessee at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Israeli special operations forces units have been training toward a mission to seize Iran’s nuclear material for more than a decade, according to several former U.S. government officials. 

Israel’s ability to conduct such raids came into public view in September 2024, when commandos stormed a Hezbollah facility in Syria, rappelling from helicopters to get to rooms that were buried deep in a mountainside. “Putting troops on the ground to remove this material is an option,” said Richard Nephew, an Iran nuclear expert who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “But it’s highly risky.”

Securing the nuclear stockpile after the bombs stop falling would be much easier. The United States and the United Nations have experience in such operations. Even then, it would be a daunting challenge to account for Iran’s nuclear material in all its forms, as well as whatever remains of centrifuges and related equipment involved in the program. “The list of objectives gets long fairly quickly,” said a former Iraq weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States devised a disarmament program that stretched across 15 sovereign states, involving 30,000 nuclear weapons and an estimated 40,000 tons of chemical weapons. The lesson there was that securing the nuclear material was only the start. It will be important to have a full accounting for the machinery, technicians and scientists involved to prevent problems popping up elsewhere. “What we don’t want is a post-Soviet Union environment where people with nuclear expertise are in the wind,” said Corey Hinderstein, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s deputy administrator for nonproliferation in the Biden administration.

The biggest obstacle to the peacetime approach — beyond the fact that the United States and Israel continue to attack Iran around the clock — is the Iranian regime itself. Trump launched the war amid negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. (IOW the negotiations were a ruse❗) That would make talks based on trust hard to restart. And after years of on-again, off-again diplomacy and enormous military attacks, Iran’s leaders might well have concluded that their only true guarantee for staying in power is to acquire a nuclear weapon as soon as possible.

There is a third possibility, of course. The war could end with Iran’s nuclear capabilities intact. That outcome looks even less appealing now than it did over the past few decades, in which one American president after another swore to prevent it. The regime’s track record of targeting the United States and its allies around the world would only get worse with the protection a nuclear arsenal would provide.

In a war filled with open questions, the fate of the Iranian uranium canisters is a terribly concrete determinant of what the future holds. The nuclear question is likely to be the most consequential one, however it is solved. That may be the most reckless part of Trump’s attack on Iran: forcing a final resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue with no clear path to success.

Comment from Norman Barnes in Seattle:  What a mess this all is now. It’s worth remembering that it was Netanyahu who was the biggest opponent of the nuclear deal negotiated in part by the Obama administration together with Iran which included key European nations.  And despite the fact that inspection of Iranian facilities showed they had abided by the agreement, it was

Netanyahu who goaded and prodded Trump into foolishly abandoning it. And here we are. It will take more than special operations missions to take and hold sites where Iran may have uranium buried.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans got little advantage trying to steal Venezuelan oil but no mention at all made about Iran's vast supply

 Why Hasn’t Donald Trump Mentioned Iran’s Oil❓ Iran possesses vast oil resources holding the world's third largest proven oil reserves behind Venezuela (where much of the oil is not yet accessible due to antiquated technologies) and Saudi Arabia.

Echo essay published in The Atlantic:

Oil in Iran

Usually Trump encourages the seizure of natural resources as repayment in war. By Vivian Salama and Jonathan Lemire

In 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) to topple Iran’s elected prime minister, the American public was told a familiar story: Communism was creeping in, the Cold War demanded vigilance, and the United States could not afford another Moscow ally. But beneath the neat narrative of containment was a more tangible obsession—oil❗. Iran’s enormous reserves were not merely a strategic asset; they were a prize.

Seven decades later, as military action once again engulfs Iran, a different president occupies the Oval Office—but the same obsession hangs in the air. Donald Trump rarely considereds a foreign conflict without musing, sometimes bluntly, about what the United States might take in return for intervening: Iraqi oil. Syrian oil. Venezuelan oil. Seizing valuable petroleum or other natural resources as repayment for American blood was a central tenet of Trump’s worldview long before he took office. 

Yet, while bombs fall on Tehran and tensions have gripped both Washington and the Middle East, Trump has not uttered the line that once seemed to come so easily: We should take the oil.

The omission is striking. For Donald Trumpp, who has treated natural resources as both leverage and loot, Iran’s oil fields would appear to be the ultimate temptation. 

Iran has nearly 209 billion barrels of proven crude-oil reserves, making up about 12 percent of the world’s total. Seizing Iranian oil, and combining it with what could come from Venezuela, would add to U.S. energy dominance and deprive China of a vital supply of fuel. But, Donald Trump has resisted discussing it, at least publicly. 

Even if Trump is no student of history, is it possible that, in the long American romance with other nations’ petroleum, some lessons of 1953, flicker uneasily in the background❓

The question of Iran’s oil hovered over the early days of the current conflict, with Trump-administration officials anxiously watching gas prices rise. U.S. and Arab officials told us that the president has been advised to focus his public comments on the military mission—particularly given the gravity of a conflict that has already resulted in U.S. casualties. “He knows it’s all very sobering,” one senior Arab official said. “It’s bigger than Venezuela.” (Like others we spoke with, the official requested anonymity to candidly discuss policy deliberations.)

Trump and his top advisers have hardly been consistent in their messaging. The administration has offered shifting explanations for why it teamed up with Israel to target Tehran (Iran was on the verge of attacking U.S. assets! Trump was pulled along by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu!) and has been just as muddled in articulating its goals for the conflict (on one day, top officials said the U.S. was not looking for regime change; on the next, Trump said he wanted a role in determining Iran’s next leader). Yet a president known for going off script has remained remarkably disciplined in avoiding any mention of oil.

Iran threatens to stretch to weeks or months. In Caracas, the White House found a willing partner in Nicolás Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who cooperated and gave the U.S. access to that nation’s oil. In Iran, the regime continues to fight even after losing its supreme leader. There’s no sense who his successor will be, much less whether he would be amenable to the U.S. plundering Iran’s resources.

Although Trump stayed quiet (for now) on trying to gain control of Iran’s oil, his White House is struggling with the economic fallout from the war. For months, the West Wing has had difficulty explaining away stubbornly high prices but has been able to celebrate the low cost of gas. (Trump does so frequently, including in his State of the Union address.) But the attack on Iran—and Iran’s subsequent targeting of the Persian Gulf’s energy sector, including the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil passes—has sent crude costs up by nearly $10 a barrel, lifting gasoline prices higher than when Trump took office. The president has been publicly blasé about price spikes, telling Reuters yesterday that “if they rise, they rise.” But White House officials, already daunted by bad polls ahead of the midterms, have considered a number of ideas to counteract the increase, they told us, including a temporary holiday on the gas tax and deploying the military to defend energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

Despite economic worries—which were exacerbated by a surprise bad jobs report—White House officials have publicly stuck to their non-oil-related goals for the conflict. Those include preventing Iran from ever having a nuclear weapon, wiping out its navy, and eliminating its ability to be a staging ground for terrorists.

When U.S. forces seized Maduro from Caracas in a dramatic raid back in January, Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club, and detailed his intention to send American oil companies back to Venezuela. He wanted to reclaim the riches of projects past—and make a lot of money for both the U.S. and a newer, friendlier Venezuela. Trump promised that doing so would drive down the price of gas, and in the days that followed, he had harsh words for oil companies that objected to new supply potentially flooding the market. The president also warned that if the head of Venezuela’s interim government objected to his plan, that person would face a similar fate as their imprisoned leader. The U.S. showed no deep interest in exploring Caracas’s democratic potential or calling for fair elections. Trump seemed solely fixated on Venezuela’s oil and minerals.

Trump’s approach to Venezuela echoed his stance on the 2003, Iraq War. Although he is now loath to acknowledge it, Trump supported the invasion in its first months, before it turned into a quagmire.

During his 2016, campaign, Trump promised to end the so-called endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and pledged to avoid any new Middle East entanglements. But even as he denounced George W. Bush for starting the Iraq War, Trump criticized him for not seizing Baghdad’s oil—which, he said, would have been fair repayment for the U.S. occupation of the country.

Trump has long mocked Bush for ruining his presidency by invading Iraq, and his administration over the past week has sought to downplay any parallels between Bush’s misadventures and its own attack on Iran. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters that the U.S. was not looking to pursue the nation-building exercises of the past, emphasizing that the Trump administration intends for this operation to be quick and efficient. But wars do not follow scripts, and there are already signs of a prolonged struggle. The current regime is still in power, although it’s unclear who is in charge, and Tehran has pummeled its neighbors with rockets and drones, straining America’s ability to defend its allies. U.S. Central Command is asking the Pentagon to send more military-intelligence officers to its headquarters to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days—and likely through September.

(History included here is new information to me. If I was about to declare war on Iran, and Donald Trump has definitely started World War III with his illegal assault- this is just the kind of spot on intelligence I would expect to understand before making the same mistake over again. Definition of "crazy": "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" a popular, non-clinical proverb.)

Two years before the Eisenhower-ordered coup, Iran’s nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, moved to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, taking control of British-run oil resources. That incensed Britain and threatened Western economic interests. Britain and the U.S. together framed Mosaddegh—who opposed communism—as a potential Soviet ally in the Cold War to justify intervention. Key Iranian military officers, bribed and instigated by the CIA, stepped in to arrest Mosaddegh and suppress his supporters, and the pro-U.S. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was restored to full power. Virtually overnight, the abrupt change in leadership gave the U.S. and its oil companies significant access to Iran’s oil wealth.

U.S. influence helped shape Iran’s oil arrangements for much of the shah’s reign, though the nature of that relationship morphed over time and was often intertwined with broader Cold War geopolitics, but it had unintended consequences. Iran leveraged its oil wealth to pursue its own economic goals, particularly in the 1970s, and the relationships with foreign companies shifted. This would fuel much of the anger against the U.S. when Iranians protested in the streets to overthrow the shah during the 1979, Islamic Revolution. The U.S. role in Iran’s coup—code name Operation Ajax—wasn’t confirmed until decades later, by Madeline Albright in 2000. But in a private diary entry dated October 8, 1953, Eisenhower explicitly wrote that the restoration of the shah was a development “that we helped bring about.” He noted that the actions were “covert” and that the U.S. would be “embarrassed” if the plot ever became public.

There is little subtlety about Operation Epic Fury, right down to its name. Trump, bolstered by his success (❓ what success- nothing changed) in Venezuela, has reveled in killing Iran’s supreme leader and is drawn to accomplishing things that his predecessors could not. The oil is tempting. But American intervention in the Middle East can yield unintended consequences for presidents. Bush is a cautionary tale, one that Trump knows. But so is Eisenhower.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans never learned the prophesy: Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it in Iran

Echo opinion letter published in the CAPTimes, in Wisconsin:

Donald Trump learned nothing from previous Middle East wars.

Dear Editor: Republicans and Donald Trump madly continue their faulty reasoning and a total lack of cultural and political knowledge about other countries, hoping to bring democracy to the world while treading on our own Constitution❗.

George H.W. Bush in 1991, wanted to take out Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (b.1937-d.2006), bringing democracy to Iraq and hoping the people would rise up and grab democracy as we know it. 

Do you remember how that went❓ Kurdish and Shia people tried to gain power, and around 30,000 were killed, according to George Packer, Atlantic writer.

Then, George W. Bush, in 2003, launched a war against the mythical weapons of mass destruction as he tried to destroy Saddam Hussein quickly, although it took much longer and killed many of our military. (Reported over 4,400 U.S. military killed in failed Operation Iraqi Freedom.)

Again, in 2026, with faulty information, Trump and his crazy Cabinet think they can take out the rulers of Iran and Venezuela, and the people will create a lovely democracy like ours and live happily ever after while Trump and his family and band of billionaires make money off the oil at our “defense” expense. 

Note the price of gasoline, Mr. Affordability❗

Trump, make up your mind*(check my postscript on X/) about which excuse you are using this time to kill thousands of Iran civilians and our military personnel while there is no guarantee for the outcome.

From Linda Bernhardt in Platteville Wisconsin

*https://x.com/julianawriter/status/2029645679547568558?s=20

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Ahmed Hassan  أحمد حسن زيد

@Ahmed_hassan_za

·

Mar 4

US Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Trump: "This is a religious war, and we will determine the course of the Middle East for a thousand years."

From

غزة 24 | التغطية مستمرة

Juliana L'Heureux

@julianawriter

Wait

@FoxNews

First it was a war to end Iran’s nuclear bomb threat (but Iranians did not have a nuclear bomb) then a war to free the Iranian people who are now slaughtered by the thousands by American bombs & now it is a religious warIs this a trick multiple choice question