"Mission Accomplished" vs We "Totally Obliterated" Them

“Mission Accomplished” vs We “Totally Obliterated” Them

"It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE. 

…I think the ceasefire is unlimited. It's going to go forever." 

Trump to NBC News, June 23rd, before Israel & Iran breached the ceasefire.

"We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f--- they're doing. You understand that?" 

A frustrated Trump on June 24th as he was boarding his helicopter en route to a NATO meeting

Donald Trump is gloating with the full expectation that Iran will easily come to the negotiating table. He’s even come up with a catchy “Make Iran Great Again” (MIGA) mantra suggesting that Iran’s US-decimated nuclear program makes regime change a natural. First, there is no verified BDA (battlefield damage assessment), which only comes from human inspection of the bomb sites; we have no idea how badly we hit our targets. Second, there is the case of the missing 400 kg of fully processed enriched uranium, more than enough for a couple of warheads or bombs. Third, Iran’s leaders, no matter how badly they have been hit and humiliated, no longer believe a word Trump utters, thus making a direct diplomatic solution with the US a very vague, distant possibility. Fourth, even anti-regime protestors in Iran now back their government in resistance, suggesting that a nuclear bomb would be an appropriate response to the US… rallies of thousands of Iranian citizens are everywhere throughout the country. Iranian “unconditional surrender”? Not a shot!

Iran mounted a half-hearted strike on a US military base in Qatar… but stopped. The war was still hot. But then why did Isreal and Iran agree to a ceasefire? First, it was not a diplomatic rapprochement with the US; it was between Israel and Iran, brokered with Qatari help. Don’t expect underlying policies to change. Iran has been consistent in its total annihilation of Israel, and Israel declared the need to remove every vestige of an Iranian nuclear enrichment as part of its total commitment to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Both nations are most probably buying time to rebuild. Israel got the US involved in its war. Hallelujah! The knowledge of nuclear weapons and enough of the technology remains in Iran… but they have been seriously degraded. The ceasefire will stagger forward, because it serves both parties. The animosity remains.

Let’s take a little walk through history. George W Bush declared our mission to effect stability and a regime change in Iraq a “Mission Accomplished,” uttered on May 1, 2003, but our military mission in Iraq continued until December of 2021, 18 years later. The result: We pushed a Sunni-controlled Shiite nation directly into a permanent alliance with Iran, while pretending Iraq was still on our side. Adding Iraq’s complicity stretched Iran’s corridor of allies through Iraq, Shiite led Syria, and Hezbollah dominated Lebanon all the way to the Mediterranean. The United States continued to play “army” in Afghanistan to similar consequences, this time empowering Sunni radicals into permanent alignment against the United States. We have become a nation unwilling to have sufficient foresight to deal with a litany of unintended (but foreseeable) consequences.

While I am clearly not a fan of Donald Trump or his quest for autocratic control of the United States, he has made some good moves. For example, his meeting with the new President of Syria, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa (a former al-Qaeda “terrorist”), while lifting US sanctions on that country, was a bold stroke of viable diplomacy. His efforts to create détente if not entente between Israel and several Arab states were efforts in the right direction. But his blind support of an established autocrat wannabe, a war criminal in the eyes of most of the world – Benjamin Netanyahu who uses crises to avoid his corruption trial – has not served this nation well. Support is one thing, but letting a foreign leader set US policy is not acceptable.

Trump’s modus operandum is to skirt at the edge of defiance of courts and the Constitution itself, continue to dictate to his MAGA majority in Congress (and they jump at his every demand, banishing those Republicans who resist), punish if not crush any who oppose his will, and enforce his mandate without the risk of congressional review. Whether the US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites was effective or not remains to be seen, but his choice of a de facto declaration of war – despite his pretense this was not an attack on Iran, only its nuclear sites – while ignoring both War Powers legislation and the plain meaning of the Constitution giving Congress the sole power to declare war… was the unilateral action of an autocrat as commander in chief. On the morning of June 24th, days after our strike on Iran, there had not been any administration briefing of congressional leadership (just short presentation to GOP member) of what happened.

This also extends to his unilateral use of the military to squelch Americans opposing his immigration (and other) policies… often provoking peaceful demonstrations into violence as his masked and ID-impaired ICE operatives and their military servants arrest US citizens (holding someone until officers can arrive is an arrest, BTW). With nary a warrant in sight. As courts desperately try and leave Trump with the benefit of the doubt, their giving him an inch moves him beyond taking just the proverbial mile.

“On Thursday [6/19], President Donald Trump scored a temporary victory after an appeals court ruled that he can continue deploying the National Guard as part of his watch-me-play-fascist-on-TV response to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. The decision accepted Trump’s premise that conditions in L.A. permit him to take control of the guard—but it rejected his claim that such decisions should be entirely unreviewable by courts… That latter part of the ruling is important. It’s potentially something of an obstacle to his ongoing effort to assume quasi-dictatorial powers for himself—for now, anyway… Trump apparently processed only the first part. He posted the following, in a reference to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who’s suing to block Trump from taking over his state’s guard (emphasis added):

“‘The Judges obviously realized that Gavin Newscum is incompetent and ill prepared, but this is much bigger than Gavin, because all over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done.’

“In short, Trump seized on this mixed ruling to threaten to send in the National Guard anywhere in the United States if and when he decrees it ‘necessary.’ The scare quotes are mine, because on many fronts, Trump is testing how far he can get by inventing ways to claim such actions are ‘necessary,’ a power he and his advisers see as boundless… All of which highlights a deeper conundrum here: What can the courts—and the rest of us—do in the face of a president whose bad faith and willingness to concoct pretexts for abusing his powers basically have no bottom?

“The new ruling is not encouraging. The relevant law says Trump can federalize the National Guard only if we’re under foreign invasion or the threat of rebellion, or if the president can’t otherwise execute federal laws. A lower court had found, among other things, that Trump had not met this requirement—because what’s happening in L.A. does not come close to meeting those criteria.” New Republic, June 21st. Trump officials constantly refer to “liberating” American cities from their popular elected representatives and leaders. Think about how that concept fits neatly into “my way or the highway” autocracy.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if the Democrats continue to fight among themselves (progressives vs moderates) and fail to settle on those policies they both embrace while offering Americans an economic and political future that restores hope and optimism, get used to a punitive MAGA dictatorship founded on retribution… from here on!