We begin today with Bernd Ulrich of the German weekly Die Zeit (translated for World Crunch by Irene Caselli) stating that Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities shows “the West” still has not learned the lessons of nearly 80 years of interventions in the Middle East.
It is not the fault of some mythical traits — real or imagined — of the “Orient.” No, there is another reason that things in the Middle East tend to turn out differently than expected, that actions produce unintended and often overwhelmingly negative consequences.
It’s not a mirage, nor the shimmering heat, nor the buzzing bazaar that’s to blame — it’s the West itself, repeatedly falling into the same traps. It has interests in the region, but no real interest in the region. [...]
No one yet knows whether these mega-bombs dropped from mega-bombers will achieve their intended effect — a “nuclear decapitation” — or set off entirely different and even more disastrous chain reactions. In such cases, humility would be a wise counselor. But humility has been the one thing conspicuously absent from Western policy in the Middle East for the past 80 years — or longer. Needless to say, for someone like Trump, “humility” is a foreign concept.
As I was doing this APR, the news broke that all parties have agreed to the cease-fire.
Needless to say…
More understatements.
Stefano Stefanini of the Italian daily La Stampa (also translated by Irene Caselli of World Crunch) thinks that Trump simply wants to cut a deal and with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s help.
ROME — Donald Trump wanted to pull the U.S. out of the Middle East’s “forever wars.”As of this weekend, he became the president who started the very war his eight predecessors — from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden, and even himself in his first term — had consistently avoided: a direct conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Since its theocratic regime was born in 1979 with an anti-U.S. and anti-Israel manifesto — put swiftly into action with the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran — the relationship has only deteriorated. And yet, no American president ever opted for a direct military clash with Iran. Not even during George W. Bush’s neo-con crusade to “remake” the Middle East.
So, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not wrong when he claims — with no small amount of self-interest, considering Trump followed the Jerusalem-written playbook to the letter — that Trump will go down in history for this intervention. Not as the president who promised his voters “no more wars,” and not as the Nobel Peace Prize winner who could match Obama’s legacy. But as the president who made a decisive turn in U.S. foreign policy, shifting balances across the region and beyond.
What those consequences will be is still uncertain. The fingerprints of this military strike point in four clear directions: diplomacy downgraded to pressure tactics; a strategic blend of timing and opportunism; disregard for European and Western allies; and a tacit understanding with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo thinks that we need more facts and analysis before determining how degraded Iranian nuclear capabilities might be.
The President has repeatedly said the Fordow nuclear facility was “obliterated”. Clearly that is a party slogan rather than any kind of factual analysis. We’re now getting the first after-action reports out of the Pentagon and Israel which speak of the Fordow facility appearing to have sustained “severe damage” but not being destroyed. One thing that struck me last night was the US assessment that helped prompt this attack which, reportedly, was that the entirety of the Israeli assault had pushed Iran’s program back roughly six months. That’s pretty paltry in terms of any great change in the strategic outlook. I note that because we should wait a significant period of time before we conclude – if the evidence ever merits it – that the US has somehow put the Iranians back to square one in their ability to build nuclear warheads.
We should remember that you can’t destroy the quest to create a nuclear weapons (or more specifically the quest to have all the parts and knowledge to do so on short notice) with bombing alone. If you take the logic of this action on its own terms it has to set the stage for negotiations or effective deterrent. In other words, one option is you hopefully destroy a lot of what Iran has spent years building. With that done, you hope they are more open to an agreement that gets them to verifiably agree not to work on the building blocks for nuclear warheads because you’ve demonstrated that the costs are too great. Or perhaps with this demonstration you make clear that any rebuilding effort will be met by another similar or more devastating attack. So they give up on the effort because they decide it’s not worth it or simply hopeless. You’ll always destroy the work before it gets to completion.
Yeah, I don’t trust anything coming out of the American regime.
The logical follow-up to Josh Marshall’s opinion is the reaction of Dan Rather and Team Steady.
Trump did not have solid evidence Iran was building a nuclear bomb. Nearing the time when they might be able to build one is the best that can be said. Similar, although not identical, to the situation when George W. Bush didn’t have hard evidence that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction. Bad intel back then led to a war that lasted eight years and killed nearly 5,000 Americans and reportedly 200,000 Iraqis. No WMDs were ever found.[...]
...Trump claimed victory, saying the U.S. bombings “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. No evidence has been given, and a bomb damage assessment has yet to be released. This administration is not known for truth-telling, so a wait-and-see approach is justified.
Using satellite imagery, the Israeli military’s initial assessment is that Fordo, the main nuclear site, where the U.S. dropped at least six bunker busters, was damaged but not destroyed. Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved equipment and uranium from the site prior to the bombing.
All this means that Saturday’s attack was not a one-and-done as the president would have us believe. Add to that Trump’s changing tune on regime change. Initially he said the goal of the bombing was “destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity.”
Arman Amini writes for The Diplomat looking at the squeeze that an Iranian refugee crisis could put on Central Asia.
A large-scale Iranian refugee crisis could send millions eastward through Afghanistan and into Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in particular. Although these countries share historic affinities with Iran, both face serious constraints in their ability and willingness to absorb a major influx of people. Neither has a well-developed asylum system or significant international support infrastructure in place to handle a sudden surge.
Iran’s population exceeds 90 million, and if even 10 percent of the population is displaced, it will rival the largest refugee movements of the century. Recent regional migration analyses have focused on Iranian migration toward Turkiye or Europe, but a growing number of Iranians could instead turn east, especially if routes through the Gulf are blocked or militarized. Eastern corridors may appeal more to those with familial connections to Central Asia, or those seeking less expensive and politically risky destinations. [...]
If Iran’s western neighbors close their doors, and access to the Gulf is constrained, the Afghanistan-Tajikistan corridor could face congestion. Informal crossings, smuggling networks, and spontaneous encampments could emerge quickly, placing immense pressure on already vulnerable communities. Host governments may respond by tightening borders, deploying security forces, or restricting humanitarian access, and resentment may build among local populations and within fragile state systems.
Former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob writes for his “Stop the Presses” Substack eight suggestions for American news media covering the war in Iran.
With Donald Trump deciding on his own to take the U.S. into an illegal war against Iran, here are eight things the news media should keep in mind.
1. Don’t sanitize the impact on human beings.
I was nation/world editor at the Chicago Tribune during the Iraq War two decades ago. I saw how newsroom executives hated to show pictures of dead and wounded people, especially civilians. I’d hear comments like, “People don’t want to see that when they’re eating their corn flakes in the morning,” as if that should be a standard for news judgment.
Such attitudes motivate editors to hide the awful facts about war, performing a public disservice. That kind of coverage makes people think warfare isn’t as bad as it is – and in doing so, it makes people more willing to support war.
Also, the media should be wary about marveling too much about weapon systems. These are not great achievements of mankind; they’re killing machines. And war coverage should not be like an adventure movie. Don’t depict it as glamorous or entertaining,
Remember: War is ugly. The coverage should be too.
Chris Geidner of Law Dork looks at the horrific U.S. Supreme Court decision saying that the Trump regime can deport anyone deportable anywhere in the world without providing notice.
On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees — with no reasoning — issued an order allowing the Trump administration to provide no notice to people it is deporting to a country with which the person has no connection and where the person could face great danger.
Justice Sonia Sotamayor, writing for herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a damning dissent.
“In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach,“ Sotomayor wrote, noting people who were wrongly deported to third countries — even in violation of the district court’s injunction in the case before the justices, Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. “Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied. I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.“ [...]
In practice...Monday’s order means the administration can send anyone who is deportable — meaning there is an order of removal in place as to them — anywhere that the government decides it wants to sent them, regardless of the dangers that a person might face if sent there and without any right to challenge that decision.
Adam Mahoney of Capital B News notes that federal data indicates that black migrants are being disproportionately deported and subjected to solitary confinement.
One of the most underreported aspects of life for Black undocumented migrants can be summed up in one statistic: They’re deported at a rate four times more often than their numbers would suggest, according to an analysis of federal data by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.
The analysis showed that while Black migrants make up 5.4% of the undocumented population in the U.S., they make up 20.3% of migrants facing removal based on criminal convictions. [...]
This stark disparity exists despite data that shows all migrant populations commit crimes at similar rates.
And it feels especially acute as millions of Black migrants are at heightened risk of detention and deportation. According to the analysis, one study found that 24% of the people in solitary confinement were Black migrants even though they make up less than 4% of detainees in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
Paul Krugman writes for his self-named Substack that rural America will be devastated by the Big Oo-gly Bill.
First, consider the shape of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. (I think it’s important to call it by its ludicrous official name, as a reminder of the extent to which Republican members of Congress have become North Korea-style sycophants.) The final details haven’t been settled, and there’s still an outside chance that the whole thing falls apart. But it’s almost certain that there will be savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, programs that disproportionately help Trump-supporting rural areas.
Let’s talk about Medicaid first, a program that is far more important than most affluent Americans tend to realize. Almost 40 percent of children are covered by Medicaid, with some of the highest percentages in deep red states like Alabama and Mississippi. Medicaid pays for 42 percent of births in America. And more to my point, Medicaid covers a higher fraction of the population in rural than in urban counties. So deep cuts in the program will hit Trump-supporting regions especially hard.
The same is true for OBBB’s deep cuts to food stamps.
The damage will be magnified by Republican plans to cut Medicaid spending by adding work requirements. We know from repeated experience that such requirements don’t actually lead to significant increases in employment. What they do instead is block access to health care by creating bureaucratic hurdles for beneficiaries — hurdles that rural Americans, often burdened by limited formal education and inadequate internet access, find especially hard to overcome.
Finally today, as New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor appears to have tightened considerably, Maya King of The New York Times looks at the political ramifications of Black New Yorkers leaving the city.
Even as New York’s population decreased during the Covid-19 pandemic before bouncing back this year, most reliable surveys of the city’s demographics show that the proportion of Black residents has remained largely unchanged. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, an annual nationwide assessment of demographics, found that New York’s population of Black residents was roughly the same as it was 20 years ago, though that population now skews older.
Still, New York’s suburban counties, which show a sharp uptick in Black residents, are perhaps the strongest evidence that the city’s Black population is changing and may be decreasing.
And in corners of historically Black neighborhoods around New York, community leaders and residents alike say they have noticed real political and demographic shifts that stand to threaten the endurance of New York’s once-ironclad Democratic coalition, long bolstered by the millions of Black voters who are vital to the party’s successes.
Have the best possible day that you can everyone!
