Conversation
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The Iran Disaster Will Likely Be Job One
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WaPo did a story about the investigations Democrats would like to do if they win the House. It’s a decent list:- Trump family looting and corruption (building on this running tracker House Oversight Dems have done), including contracts won by Trump’s failsons, his IRS “settlement,” and his conversion of Truth Social into an insider trading scam
- Giveaways to supporters, whether in the form of pardons or mining and gas deals
- His replacement of American landmarks with tributes to himself, including the no-bid contracts that have destroyed those landmarks
- ICE, including Lewanoemski’s corruption, the death rates in ICE concentrations camps, and goon misconduct
- Various abuse of power in the government, including politicizing intelligence
- Politicized prosecutions, including the weaponization fund
- Coercion on private companies like Apple and Google to pull ICE apps, law firms to do free work, and quid pro quo for propaganda for regulatory approval for the Warner deal
- Epstein Epstein Epstein
- Foreign policy issues, including the replacement of career diplomats with Trump’s son-in-law and his developer buddy and the role of crypto investment in that deal and Trump’s acceptance of the Flying Bribery Palace from Qatar
This is, admittedly, a list designed to gin up support in advance of the midterms; in two places, the WaPo notes that Trump obstruction may make it very hard to pursue some of these investigations (at least via traditional methods, I would add). I don’t expect Democrats to share how they plan to bypass Trump’s obstruction.
But there’s something that’s is barely mentioned that I think does deserve some focus: Iran. It is mentioned, three times, in these contexts:
The politicization of intelligence:
Rep. Jim Himes (Connecticut), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said there has been a purge of intelligence officials who have contradicted the president, including the authors of an assessment that undercut Trump’s rationale for deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process and a report that found limited damage from U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites last year.
The aforementioned use of conflicted family members in lieu of actual diplomats and then — in the same section on foreign policy — “other:”
Trump’s close adviser Steve Witkoff, and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner have served as leading peace negotiators with countries including Iran, Israel, Russia and Ukraine, even without formally joining his administration.
[snip]
Other Democratic targets include the Board of Peace, a multinational group meant to end conflicts; the new presidential plane gifted by Qatar; tariffs and trade deals; the Iran war; military intervention and strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in Venezuela; and the redevelopment of Gaza.
Again, I have no problem with this list, as a pre-election talking point. But I suspect Iran may be a far more urgent issue, if it doesn’t become one before then. That’s because Iran seems to be playing for strategic advantage, with the help of Russia and China.
Mid-week last week, Philips OBrien vocalized something I’ve been obsessed about: Iran can do great damage to the US, strategically, by forcing it to use PATRIOT interceptors even with relatively innocuous attacks on US partners in the region, effectively bleeding out the US.
Iran has no interest in just sitting back and letting the US strangle its trade with no response. The Iranians seem to want (quite sensibly from a strategic point of view) to both impose itself on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and to bleed the USA of vital military equipment. They have one particularly vital area that they are clearly aiming for, to denude the USA of Patriot interceptors.
This is all part of an Iranian ability to opt for sideways escalation, a phrase I have been using for a while. That is by attacking facilities in US partner states in the region, which force the US to expend weapons such as Patriots, to defend them. In that way, even successful US interceptions end up weakening the US position.
On the evening of September 8 we had a prime example of this sideways escalation in operation. Jordan said that evening Iran had fired 20 ballistic missiles at it, 18 of which had been intercepted (and claimed that the other two failed to hit their target). If normal US protocol had been followed, and two patriots had been fired at each incoming missile, that means 36 more Patriots were used on just this one interception mission. That seems, unfortunately for the US, a gross underestimate. The skies over Jordan were full of Patriots, and different OSINT accounts are indicating that at least 60 patriots were fired in the operation (some say up to 100, but I would stay with the lower figure).
Presumably, both Russia and China would be happy to sustain Iran for some time if they can guarantee that the US will complete the process of shooting its wad. If that happens, the US will be left helpless against certain kinds of attacks, and Iran and Russia and possibly even China can launch offensive attacks on US targets.
Meanwhile, Iran’s clients in Yemen have succeeded in a two-fronted attack on the Saudis — hitting both their pipeline to the Red Sea and taking control of a key island in the Bam al-Mandeb — the very strait DOD shot its wad trying to reopen in early 2025, after discussing the “strategy” behind doing so on Signal.
Sal Mercogliano explains why this is important (and how expensive this has already made shipping).
And in his weekend post, OBrien returns to how suddenly things are going south for the US in the Middle East and speculates that the US refused Saudi Arabia’s request for help responding to the Houthis because the missile shortages make it impossible.
what we are seeing is a weakening US, having to abandon its key strategic and economic allies, as its flounders around running out of munitions and losing advanced equipment fighting Iran.
The US might (and arguably should) never recover from this disaster, at least in the eyes of its once allies and partners in the region. The idea of US military might has sustained the US for almost 80 years in this area. What states like Saudi Arabia did, was outsource much of their security to the USA based on the assumption that not only was the USA strong, but also that it was reliable.
The Saudis purchased such masses of weapons from the USA not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they believed that this meant that if they were faced with real peril (like they are now) that the US would come to their aid.
Now, the USA is too weak to do so. What the Saudis are experiencing will also accelerate a move away from military dependence on America from other states in the Gulf. The US destroying its own strategic position was something I worried about in this August 2 piece in the Atlantic (Gift link). However, it has happened far more quickly than I imagined.
In its actions and military failures of the last six and a half months, the American Age in the Middle East seems to be unravelling at an accelerating rate.
Importantly, this will have increasingly urgent repercussions domestically. Diesel is already over $6, a record high, which puts pressure on truckers and therefore on all the goods they ship. Trump already significantly emptied the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, so he has fewer ways to intervene to insulate American consumers from rising prices. And all that’s before additional instability that Iran, at least, seems determined to attempt before the election.
Tomorrow, Iran and some countries (though not all) from the Gulf Cooperation Council will hold talks that could lead to a separate solution — or at least, add to the pressure on the US to capitulate to Iran.
Yes, underlying all this is the scandal that Jared and Witkoff didn’t understand the least little thing they were discussing in their last bid to forestall this war and likely hope to profit off any “deal” to end the war. Underlying this all is the corruption that drives every single thing Trump has done in his second term.
But the Iran War will not only provide a way to get to the corruption, it will present the kind of humiliation and — increasingly likely — not just short term economic pain but long term structural readjustment. It will also provide a way to demonstrate that white supremacists fuck everything up.
Most of all, it may create the kind of emergency that Democrats must prepare to exploit before the Disaster Capitalists get there first and before the white supremacists who got ass-handed move to scapegoat someone else.
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