TACO Trump Scuttled Iran Attack

How has Trump failed? Let me count the ways. He backed down from yet another fake ultimatum demanding Iran acceptance of his peace terms.  The alternative, or so he threatened (once again) was to “bomb the hell out of them.”

In the midst of the disaster that is his presidency, there is one silver lining.  He never holds to a steady course in anything. He’s as erratic as a pinball machine, bouncing from one topic to another and one ultimatum to another.

Whatever he does or doesn’t do has nothing to do with him.  Instead he attributes his TACO changes of heart to others. He’s always changing course as a favor to friends and allies. That’s the case here.

Trump didn’t back down from his ultimatum to resume bombing Iran for any of the reasons he claims. Not because Iran is close to making a deal. Not because his Gulf allies purportedly begged him to do so. It may be true that they don’t want a resumption of hostilities because their infrastructure is being pummeled by Iranian missiles.  But Trump follows his own dictates and is rarely influenced by the opinions of others.

The truth is much more likely that his support is cratering in multiple national polls, largely because of the quagmire the war has become. Instead of decapitating Iran, installing a puppet regime, and dismantling its nuclear program, his air offensive has failed. Iran remains bloodied but unbowed, the nuclear program is damaged but not destroyed, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed.

The Trump-Netanyahu war of aggression is a disaster.  One that anyone could have told him would fail as conceived.  Instead, he permitted himself to be dragged into this war by Netanyahu, who himself harbored delusions about the chances of success.

As the NY Times writes:

The existence of the effort, which has not been previously reported, was part of a multistage plan developed by Israel to topple Iran’s theocratic government. It underscores how Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel went into the war not only misjudging how quickly they could achieve their objectives but also gambling…on a risky plan for leadership change in Iran that even some of Mr. Trump’s aides found implausible.

…At the outset, Israel envisioned the war unfolding in several phases, starting with air assaults by the United States and Israel plus the killing of Iran’s supreme leaders and the mobilization of Kurds to fight Iranian forces, according to two Israeli defense officials familiar with the operational planning.

Then, the Israeli plan foresaw a combination of influence campaigns carried out by Israel and the Kurdish invasion creating political instability in Iran and a sense that the regime was losing control. In a third stage, the regime, under intense political pressure and the weight of damage to key infrastructure like electricity, would collapse, allowing for what the Israelis referred to as an “alternative government” to be established.

One of the first major phases which failed was that the Kurds wanted no part of the plan.  They had been burned by past promises of US support in earlier uprisings, and put no faith in similar assurance in this case.  As a result, Israel and the US had no boots on the ground and no means of influencing internal developments or implementing the battle plan. How do the Mossad and CIA determine that a supposed ally will follow a plan the devised, without confirming it is committed to it?  This was a huge intelligence blunder.

Israel’s grandiose plans once again failed:

Other than the air campaign and the killing of the supreme leader, little of the plan played out as the Israelis had hoped, and much of it appears in retrospect to have profoundly misjudged Iran’s resilience and the capacity of the United States and Israel to exert their will.

In fact, it’s astonishing how misguided was Israel’s strategic plan, devised by the vaaunted Mossad:

David Barnea, Mossad’s chief, told associates in several discussions that he still thought that the agency’s plan, based on decades of intelligence collection and operational activity in Iran, had a very good chance of succeeding had it received approval to move forward.

The only positive to come out of this fiasco, is that the US backed out before it turned into an outright catastrophe.  Now instead of that, it faces a ‘mere’ quagmire.

Ahmadinejad: planned puppet

Despite longtanding friendly relations with Reza Pahlavi and repeated indications that Israel sought to install him on the Peacock Throne once the Iranian government was toppled, apparently an entirely different plan was afoot.

Intelligence officials recognized that Pahlavi had minimal internal support inside the country.  His father had wreaked havoc during his reign and killed thousands in a failed bid to forestall his overthrow.  Iranians may have hated the clerical regime, but they wanted nothing to do with a return to monarchy.  That US and Israeli intelligence, which purportedly had infiltrated every element of Iranian society, did not recognize this was once again a failure of monumental proportions.

Instead, they chose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as their alternative puppet.  They knew he had broken with the Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, so he was an opponent of the regime.  But they erred in believing that Ahmadinejad has any support inside Iran.  He had been placed under house arrest and lost any political infliuence he once had.  THough initially he agreed to this plan, after his home was bombed by Israel in a vain attempt to free him from house arrest, he got cold feet.  Yet another miscalculation and intelligence blunder.

The result of all this is that Trump’s approval rating has sunk to a record low of 37%, while current polls indicate that Netanyahu’s coalition would fall 10 seats short of the 60 votes needed to return to power.  However, 43% of Israelis expressed no preference when asked which government coalition they preferred.

The result of their hubris is that their political dominance and legacy has been tarnished, likely beyond repair.