The Anti-weaponization Fund comes at the right time. It is worth spending $1.8 billion to divert the focus from the Iran War, the Economy, the high consumer price and interest rate. The diversion of heat is worth the price of such a tiny sum.
The president keeps contradicting himself, “flip flopping”, etc. He can do it because he has real power. He does it possibly strategically: he confuses everybody while letting his underlings working quietly behind the scenes to achieve MAGA’s goals. With each of his contradicting statements, an answer or reaction coming out from his ennemies may reveal something useful.
But the Iran War seems to show the weakness of the planning and the execution of the plan.
Why attacking Iran? The opt repeated reason is to prevent Iran from possessing atomic weapons. The rarely spoken reason is to keep it from becoming a dominant regional power, and probably the main reason because the first reason does not seem solid.
That region already has had two powerful countries possessing atomic bombs. India has long been Russia’s ally. Pakistan was the country that harbored, housed and fed Osama bin Laden, the most wanted deadly ennemy in the history of the U.S. Would another country along that shore possessing the weapon bother us? Yes, probably a little. The one who is nervous is Israel, with good reasons of course. But that is Israel’s problem. Strategically, we should have stayed on the sideline and let Israel conduct its fight. We would assist our ally but we should not fight its war. So the reason we initiated the Iran War has a lot to do with MAGA’s hubris. They wanted to claim the title of the champion, since Alexander the Great, who defeated Iran and brought it to submission.
Israel has proved its ability to collect accurate information inside Iran. The fact that it went in and occupied Gaza with relatively acceptable costs reinforced the belief that whenever Israel put its mind to work, the outcome would be postive. It was supposed to have all the suspicious nuclear weapon production facilities in Iran, an almost perfect estimate of the Iranian defense forces. It just needed the destructive power of the U.S.’s arsenal.
The U.S. could have provided Israel with the weapons and stayed above the fray and played the role of a peace maker. But the Young Turks advising the president disliked the idea that some other country had all the glory, and, considering MAGA’s tendency of holding grudge against its ennemies, beating Iran was irresistble to pay back its occupying the American’s embassy years ago.
It turned out Iran is not Gaza or even Lebanon. It has a land mass larger than France, Spain, England, and Germany combined, a population of 92 millions, and a history of fighting ennemies of all tribes since ancient times. As the U.S. and Israel have threatened to bomb them for years, the regime would have been too busy drinking and partying, things they don’t do, to not prepare for such reality.
Now we are in difficulty. Not that we could not destroy Iran with bombs, atomic if someone in the government liked the idea. The thing is we must come out on top without damaging the prestige and credibility of the nation, considering that our credibility, not just backed up by bombs, has been diminished somewhat.
MAGA has a lot of energy. It has engaged in many battles, at home and abroad. It has achieved many of its goals (I have written an article on the subject). But aside from enriching its allies, politically, socially, and financially, one is hard pressed to find where does it go from there. The immediate problem that people expect MAGA to solve is the Iran War, which has happened so suddenly and unexpectedly like a hurricane in Florida, an Act of God that people are unprepared and still trying to absorb what has happened.
That is a huge task. The Iranians are tenacious people. Before the war, their society my have been split between the hardliners and the moderates who wanted a better life for their people. When the foreigners decided to bomb their country ruining their cities and homes everywhere, killing their leaders without mercy, it is hard to expect their society not to come together. If anything, the war has hardened their resolve to fight.
And they are awakened to the Bob Dylan’s Truth: “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
JOHN P. LE PHONG
(This article appears on X, Facebook, and thelephongjournal.com)
