Still Working for the Orcs
Today, the ever insightful Michelle Goldberg writes, in the New York Times, There’s No Escaping the Rot in This Justice Department. She observes,
In the face of Trump’s attempts to turn the Department of Justice into his legal praetorian guard, many career employees seem to think they can keep their heads down and wait out their new masters. “We are the mole people now,” one department employee told the New York Times reporter Devlin Barrett in his forthcoming book, “The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice.” But at a certain point, it may be impossible to serve both the cause of justice and an unjust government. …
The White House’s demands for political prosecutions “are putting career prosecutors into very, very difficult situations,” Barrett told me, forcing people to constantly ask where their red line is. Some in the Justice Department, he said, make a “Lord of the Rings” analogy. “Most of the people there can still do their jobs well and do good, meaningful work in law enforcement until the Eye of Sauron turns to you,” he said, meaning you get pulled into one of Trump’s vendettas. The problem is that even before that happens, you’re still working for the orcs.
The Importance of Leverage
Rest in Peace, and Well Done, Sgt. Davis
Your father made you quit school in the middle of the eighth grade, to work in the cotton fields. But farming was becoming increasingly unprofitable in the 1920’s. Soon, everyone in your family looked for some other way to earn a living.
As car ownership spread, you saw the increasing demand for auto repair services, so you and one of your brothers taught yourselves how to fix Model T’s and keep them on the road.
When World War II came, you were not eager to join the army, but you knew the danger our country faced. When Uncle Sam called, you did your duty. Soon, the Army discovered your mechanical skill and put it to good use. After D-Day, as the Army moved across France and into Germany, you and your platoon followed just behind the front lines, repairing the tanks, keeping the trucks on the road, and making sure the jeeps remained serviceable.
You understood that, whatever the personal cost and sacrifice, we had to defeat the Nazis.
In a time of danger and crisis, you did what you had to do, to defend our country and our way of life, and to make sure I grew up in a free society.
Well done, Sgt. Robert J. Davis, and thank you.
On this Memorial Day, we remember.
Schrödinger’s Iran Deal
Toward the beginning of the video, Rick Wilson—a serious person, who is not known to make things up—gives us some new and surprising information about the terms of the Iran memorandum of understanding.
I Love the Smell of Bullshit in the Morning
Concepts of a Deal
Today’s Wall Street Journal lucidly explains the situation:
Donald Trump has told US negotiators “not to rush into a deal” with Iran that would lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, saying “both sides must take their time and get it right”.
The US president’s remarks, in a post to his Truth Social platform, came a day after he suggested that an agreement was close, claiming it had “largely been negotiated”.
On Saturday afternoon, Trump said “final aspects and details” of a deal that would open the Strait of Hormuz were “currently being discussed” and would “be announced shortly”.
But his social media post on Sunday morning raised the possibility that talks would stretch beyond the weekend.
“The negotiations are proceeding in an orderly and constructive manner,” Trump wrote. He described the back-and-forth as the “exact opposite” of the two years of talks that led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that placed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme and from which the president withdrew the US in his first term.
In a subsequent post he said the deal “isn’t even fully negotiated yet”.
A senior administration official later said the Iran agreement would not be signed on Sunday, but there had been “progress” made towards a deal.
Enhance Your Political IQ. Watch This Video.
In the remote event you don’t know Mike Murphy, he’s an astute Never Trumper former Republican strategist.
Watch this video and you’ll get at least half a dozen useful insights on the current mess that is our political system.
An Adult Conversation About Iran and the Middle East, From the Brookings Institution
The Difference Between Actual Power and Just Killing People and Blowing Stuff Up
Today, the inimitable and indispensable Ed Luce of the Financial Times takes another whack at the piñata that Lydia Polgreen so eloquently struck in her recent N.Y. Times column.
Luce writes,
America’s ailing one-trick pony: Trump’s excessive faith in military power is squarely within the US tradition
Count the obliterated targets. Tally the corpses of senior leaders. Behold America’s military prowess. By any measure, Iran has taken a pummelling. Yet threats of more US strikes are yielding no concessions. Donald Trump’s threats, including bombing Iran into the Stone Age, have sounded empty since early March. Yet he keeps repeating them. Threatening a failed tactic over and over again and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.
It is rightly observed that America has a greater margin of error than any other power. The US has the world’s most powerful military and is flanked by vast oceans to its east and west and benign neighbours to its north and south. But such blessings can induce lazy thinking. Decades before Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, America picked up the habit of confusing its military superiority with an ability to impose its will on faraway lands. The only thing that is novel about Trump’s Iran war is the immediate obviousness of its bankruptcy.
Epic Fury is no departure from American tradition. When Trump was a young man pulling strings to escape military service in Vietnam — a privilege he shared with other future US presidents, including George W Bush — the Pentagon announced regular “kill ratios” of the number of enemy dead versus American. The Tet Offensive in early 1968 was heralded as a major US victory since so many Vietcong insurgents had been killed. In reality, Tet delivered a crushing political defeat to America since it conveyed the enemy’s iron will.
The Pentagon did not see it that way. Pete Hegseth, the US “secretary of war”, is a very different figure to Robert McNamara, the then secretary of defence. But his playbook is similar. In crude terms, success is judged by how many things and people America can blow up. Hegseth’s favourite words are “precision” and “lethality”. The similarity between Lyndon B Johnson’s Operation Rolling Thunder and Trump’s Epic Fury is almost exact. Just as LBJ used carpet-bombing of North Vietnam to prod elusive concessions in negotiations, Trump’s missile threats are wasted on Iran. As the Taliban used to say during the two-decade US military operation in Afghanistan: “America has the watches, we have the time.” The Taliban regained power five years ago.
Trump seemed to grasp the limits of America’s one-trick ponies better than most US presidents. His denouncement of Bush’s Iraq war was a key propellant of his 2016 hostile takeover of the Republican Party. The irony is that he is now riding that pony into the same old quicksand. Trump can run the gamut of America’s greatest hits in the same interview. One moment he is proclaiming mission accomplished as Bush did at an early stage of the Iraq war. The next he is dangling peace with honour, as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger branded America’s retreat from Vietnam. When his blood is really up he demands second world war-style unconditional surrender.
But his only way out is via sustained diplomacy on multiple fronts. On Monday he called off the next wave of strikes on Iran scheduled for Tuesday. He wanted to give the Pakistan-mediated talks another chance. At the forefront of Trump’s mind is that he must do better than Barack Obama did with his 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Nowhere in his mind, apparently, is the recollection that it took Obama’s negotiators 20 months to nail it down. The idea that much less knowledgeable US officials could do better in a few days is delusional. That Obama could have pulled off a serious agreement without once threatening to bomb Iran is inconceivable to him.
The lesson from Epic Fury is the same one that Obama drew from Iraq. Diplomacy should always be the first resort. There is no need even to mention US military power, still less to brag about it daily. To paraphrase a maxim, the military that fights best is that which fights least. The comforting take is to blame Epic Fury on Trump’s unique recklessness. But he is no aberration. Once you screen out his uniquely self-defeating verbal incontinence, you discern a Washington traditionalist. His approach is the reductio ad absurdum of one lost US war after another preceded by strings of victories on the battlefield.
As the world googles Thucydides and digests the emerging G2 China-US reality, the question is whether Washington is capable of reinventing itself. Better informed US figures than Trump are calling on him to “finish the job” in Iran. Had they learnt from the recent or distant past, they would be revising their advice. But that would require thinking. Good strategy is the product of intellectual humility. Trump’s lack of it puts him in plentiful company.
Goody Goody Gumdrop
Facing MAGA 