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Is Iran Flagging or Waiting to Pounce?
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Once again, Donald Trump’s rants on Truth Social,
Is debunked by the scale of the witch hunt he or his Crusader Secretary of War ordered up.
U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions, according to officials briefed on the move.
The investigators asked military officers and civilian employees on the Joint Staff if they disclosed classified information to members of the press, and about whether they provided information about diminished U.S. munitions stocks.
The polygraph tests were conducted in August after a flurry of news reports detailed diminished stocks of crucial munitions, including of long-range missiles and Patriot interceptors. The show of force appeared aimed at not just ferreting out anyone who may have shared information, but intimidating others who might do so in the future, according to people with knowledge of the effort.
Between 1,500 and 2,000 officers and officials work for the Joint Staff, which coordinates operations, policy and war plans with combatant commanders around the world.
This leak investigation would have been launched in the wake of the last time Trump tried to deny the reports coming from all around (as well as the reports about a spat with Whiskey Pete at Camp David about it).
But as I noted then, Trump had been warned. Trump told us he had been warned.
This particular episode is interesting more for the competing narratives that explain the sensitivity about whether Trump can convince Iran the US has a secret stockpile.
In WSJ, foreign policy expert Yaroslav Trofimev, repeats assessments that time is no longer on Iran’s side, because the US has finally succeeded in getting crude out Hormuz (though not yet matching pre-war levels, and Trofimev makes no mention of the cost of doing so).
By squeezing the Strait of Hormuz, both the U.S. and Iran expected to outlast their foe, believing time would work in their favor.
Now, it looks like the trend is moving against Tehran.
The U.S. naval blockade has prevented Iran from shipping any oil from the Persian Gulf since July. At the same time, despite Iranian drone and missile attacks, Washington has been able to assist Gulf Arab states in moving significant amounts of their crude through the waterway, keeping global oil prices from surging above critical levels.
“The Iranian blockade is more leaky than the U.S. blockade,” said Samir Madani, co-founder of the maritime intelligence firm TankerTrackers.com. “The Iranians just aren’t able to shut it all down.”
The strategic question of whether time will eventually work in favor of Washington—or the Tehran regime—has yet to be settled. Iran retains ways of escalating what has now become a protracted conflict, raising costs for the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. military’s ability to maintain the naval blockade for many more months is also uncertain.
But now it is clear that Tehran’s calculation six months ago, as it shut down the Strait of Hormuz and bottled up one-fifth of the world’s crude oil supply, proved erroneous. The move didn’t trigger a worldwide economic crisis or force President Trump to end the war on Iranian terms.
That judgement assumes that Iran’s goal was to cause a global crisis that forced Trump’s hand.
By contrast, two intelligence reporters describe, just a few stories away from the leak witch hunt story on the front page of the NYT, that Iran is actually pretty confident it understands the limits to US power.
Iran has grown more confident in its ability to attack targets in the Middle East and appears determined to continue the conflict for months to frustrate the United States, according to U.S. intelligence reports in recent weeks.
In many respects, the assessments reflect what has been observable on the ground as fighting erupted again after a period of relative calm. In the past week, Iran targeted ships in the Strait of Hormuz and American troops in the region, and U.S. forces struck inside Iran, killing military personnel and civilians.
The new exchanges have been limited so far. But the intelligence reports, according to people who have read them, suggest that Iran’s hard-line government might be contemplating a significant escalation.
Iran has emerged from months of the on-again, off-again war with a far better understanding of its military strengths and is more sure of its capabilities, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.
Neither story addresses the US missile shortages. Both acknowledge that Iran still has as a stash, and WSJ describes how the pause allowed Iran to stockpile more.
There’s no consideration in either of the extent to which Iran is simply planning on bleeding the US dry, possibly in conjunction with Russia and China. There’s likewise no mention that Whiskey Pete has attempted to steal money for infectious disease research because he has blown through so much money.
House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) has learned that officials at the Department of Defense (DoD) are working to divert billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to supplement the Department’s budget.
Without notifying Congress or the American people, DoD has signed an interagency agreement that could give the Department access to billions of dollars that Congress provided to NIH for critical biomedical research. These funds were provided to support research to develop treatments or cures for infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola, and other dangerous pathogens.
“This secretive attempt to siphon research funds away from NIH is outrageous. The interagency agreement needs to be terminated immediately,” said Ranking Member DeLauro. “These funds were provided for lifesaving medical research, not as extra money for the Department of Defense. It is no secret that the Department of Defense is facing enormous financial pressure because of President Trump’s war of choice with Iran. But the Trump administration cannot make American patients, families, and scientists pay the price. Circumventing Congress to divert money intended to help Americans who are exposed to HIV, influenza, tuberculosis, and other deadly diseases—and directing those funds to the Department of Defense—is beyond the pale.
I don’t know what will happen, nor whether Iran is just playing to get through the election or longer than that.
What I do know is that in Trump’s latest attempt to lie, he seems intent on claiming there’s a secret stash of missiles that sustained reporting says the US doesn’t have.
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