Trump's War

The emerging picture of Iranian retaliation against American military bases across the Gulf suggests that the real military cost of Operation Epic Fury may be significantly higher than Washington has publicly acknowledged, with infrastructure damage, aircraft losses, and operational disruption now measured in billions of dollars.

Multiple U.S. officials, congressional aides, and individuals familiar with classified damage assessments indicate that Iranian strikes hit dozens of targets across at least seven countries in the Middle East, challenging early narratives that Tehran’s retaliatory capacity had been rapidly neutralized after the opening U.S.-Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026.

The strategic significance deepened when NBC News confirmed that an Iranian F-5 fighter jet successfully conducted a bombing run on Camp Buehring in Kuwait, penetrating layered American air defenses despite the presence of Patriot missile batteries, short-range interceptors, advanced radar coverage, and persistent regional surveillance networks.
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Camp Buehring in Kuwait occupies a central role in U.S. military logistics architecture because it functions as a major staging hub for force projection, sustainment operations, and pre-positioned combat support for American operations across the wider CENTCOM theatre.

So how does an old jet get through layered air defense and surveillance systems to drop good old bombs on an important American base?

Mister Art of the Deal

It's obvious that pulling out of the Iran Deal was a catastrophic decision by Trump. Yet that decision got far less media and political scrutiny than the Deal itself. https://t.co/UojD3XYJim

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) April 25, 2026

We are were we are because that Orange Self-Inflated Moron did what Netanyahu wanted ripped up the first accord, which Iran was abiding by, to get a better deal, which he never achieved. The original agreement took years of negotiation by professional diplomats. But after ignoring things for years, he fell again under the spell of Netanyahu, went to war, and when that all backfired, he didn't send diplomats to talk to Iran. No, he sent his corrupt son-in-law and his best bud, who is a corrupt real-estate guy and, allegedly, a Russian asset, much like Trump.

And no surprise, those two idiots were who the Iranians were talking to before Trump had Whiskey Pete drop bombs because, allegedly, neither Witkoff nor Jared the Wunderkind understood how to do their jobs.

Trump and Hegseth Fuck Up Everything; Logistics Ed.

They can't even supply our sailors and marines with decent food.

The article has photos of some of the shitty food being served up. Add to that, they're not getting mail.

Bad food and no mail will kill morale and retention faster than anything.

Our Master Negotiator

The Strait of Hormuz was an international waterway. No longer, Trump gave it to both Iran and Qatar. A $2 million toll will be charged for each ship transit, enforced by the Iranian military. Iran gets to keep their nuclear material. The Iranian regime remains. Iran gets sanctions relief.

Based on that, it's pretty clear that Trump lost the war. Other than bomb damage and lots of dead people, the Iranians are in a better geopolitical position then they were before the attacks began. America's reputation globally has taken more cracks. Leaders around the world have concluded Trump only cares about what you can do for him now and appeasing him is a fool's game. There's no working with Trump and that's finally sinking in.

We have spent the bodies of our troops and gone though a large part of our smart ordnance and lost some very costly aircraft for what, exactly?

And what is the over and under for us surviving for another thirty-three months of this insanity?

TACO Tuesday

While I am happy that the war is off, for now, I'd like to hear a lot more about this ten-point deal.

For if the Iranians are right (and that is a very big "if"), then this is a true Trump deal: Lots of stuff has been wrecked and he has lost, bigly. He painted himself into a corner with his mouth and getting out cost.

The Iranians get full sanctions relief, their military "supervises" the Strait of Hormuz, they get to keep their nuclear research program, we draw down our bases in the Gulf? That's the deal he made?

So Trump's deal with them is better for the Iranians than the 2016 deal he tore up and it only cost damn near shattering the global economy and about $100 billion to rebuilt our nearly-depleted smart-weapons arsenal and trashing our relationships with most of our allies.

He is one master negotiator. In his mind.

Dear Gulf Arabs: Send Your Own Kids to Die For Your Oil

Gulf allies of the United States, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are urging President Donald Trump to continue prosecuting the war against Iran, arguing that Tehran hasn’t been weakened enough by the monthlong U.S.-led bombing campaign, according to U.S., Gulf and Israeli officials.
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Officials from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain have conveyed in private conversations that they do not want the military operation to end until there are significant changes in the Iranian leadership or there’s a dramatic shift in Iranian behavior, according to the officials, who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

They can fuck all the way to off. They want this war to continue, then they should have their planes do some bombing. Send their own ground forces into harm's way.

But, knowing Trump, some freshly-created golden bauble and some cash will get him to send American soldiers to die for the white-robed cowards.

Rich man's war...

Once Again, War Gets Fought on the Backs of the Poor, Working and Middle Classes

Republicans are considering reductions in federal health spending to help pay for a budget bill containing as much as $200 billion to fund the Iran war and immigration enforcement.

Because it's unthinkable to increase taxes on big corporations and billionaires, the Republicans are going to push the cost of this war on those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Once again, the costs of war are folling on those least able to bear the burden.

The Unspoken Problem With Ending Trump's War

It is this: He cannot be trusted to keep his word. He tore up the last deal with Iran because he didn't like it. He'll tear up this one if some clown on Fox says that he should.

The Iranians are well aware of this.

There is a way around that, and that is by exchanging hostages. Trump could send Barron and Ivanka as hostages to the deal. Or he could send something he really values: The deed to Mar-a-Lago.

Welp, This Will Be Interesting

France's Finance Minister Roland Lescure revealed on Wednesday that between 30 and 40 per cent of Gulf refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed by Iran's retaliatory strikes following attacks by the United States and Israel, France 24 reports.

According to him, this has left a shortage of 11 million barrels a day on global oil markets. Lescure warned it could take up to three years to restore damaged facilities, and several months to restart those that were urgently shut down.

Which means that even if Bibi and Donnie's Most Excellent War stopped today, the ramifications will continue for years.

The best is yet to come, as the last ships that had left the Persian Gulf before the war started arrive at their delivery ports. This map shows global oil imports from the Guld and when the deliveries from the Gulf will end:

In a month, the globe will go from just feeling the price of oil rise to having actual shortages. In the US, we don't import a lot of oil from the Gulf, so we're not going to see much in the way of shortages. But oil is a global commodity and so is the pricing.

It's not just oil, of course. It's also aluminum, helium, natural gas and fertilizer. All of which will be in somewhat short supply, thanks to this war.

Meanwhile, the Orange Sundowner is blathering about attacking electrical generation and desalinization plants if Iran doesn't knuckle under. To say that doing that would be a war crime is beyond obvious. It's the sort of thing that his boss would do, another perpetrator of war crimes en masse.

That's Not Going to Buff Out

An E-3 "AWACS" was apparently destroyed in an Iranian missile attac on Prince Sultan airbase:

I don't know if it's an honest mistake, Gen. Sedgwick-grade arrogance or utter stupidity to put very high-value airplanes at a base within reach of Iranian missiles.

Wikipedia claims that the Air Force had sixteen E-3s in service. Losing one isn't good.

What One Normally Does in a War, Right?

Allow the enemy to sell products to help fund their war machines. That is what Trump is doing for both Russia and Iran.

The Orange Dimwit thinks that he's helping global energy markets, but what's at sea in those tankers probably amounts to a popcorn fart in the market. But what it does is put money in the pockets of hostile regimes to fund their side of the wars.

And Russia is hostile, make no mistake about that.

Meanwhile, Commandante Bone Spurs, who dodged the draft with an allegedly fake ailment and who reportedly threatened to disown his kids if they joined the military after 9-11, and who regards those who serve in the military as "suckers" and "losers", thinks that countries that won't help him clean up his mess are cowards.

Anone see Trump's youngest child or his oldest grandkids walking into a recruiting station lately? Or those of any of his Cabinet officers or advisors? No? I thought not.

ETA: And he's just fucking delusional.

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— George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 (@gtconway.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:51 PM

Israel is Just Fucking Stupid and High on Their Own Supply

Did anyone not expect this, other than delusional Bibi, after Israel bombed an Iranian gas field?

What was the military value of attacking an Iranian economic target, other than maybe making life even harder for the Iranian people, even if the regime does change? Do the Israelis beleive that hammering economic targets will win them any friends?

As for Trump, well, he's just completely ineffectual at this point. And he's just a disrespectful fuck. The families at the last dignified transfer wanted it to be a private ceremony, but he was not only having nothing of that, he's been using those solemn ceremonies to raise even more money.

Cadet Bone Spurs Isn't Afraid of Getting Other People's Kids Killed

Donald Trump is openly entertaining the possibility of putting boots on the ground in Iran.

Speaking with reporters at the White House Tuesday beside Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Trump sluggishly claimed that he wouldn’t be afraid to put the lives of American soldiers at risk in order to continue his nonsensical war.

“The Iranian regime has told Sky News that if you put boots on the ground in Iran, it would be another Vietnam. Are you afraid of that?” asked a journalist.

“No, I’m not afraid of—I’m really not afraid of anything,” Trump said.

But he sure was afraid sixty years ago when his dad allegedly paid a doctor to write a letter claiming Trump had bone spurs, so he wouldn't get drafted into the OG Vietnam War.

You can bet your farm and the minerals underneath that none of Trump's relatives will ever wear a military uniform, let alone be shot at in any of his stupid wars.

Perfidious Trump

When I was a child, one of the more heavily covered subjects in school was the Second World War. That was because it was the war of our parents, the school board, the senior administrators and the senior teachers (there were still a couple teachers around who remembered the previous war). One of the things that was always mentioned was the perfidiousness of the Japanese, who attacked while negotiations were ongoing.

Fast forward almost ninety years and it's the Iranians who are making the same point.

FOREIGN MINISTER ABBAS ARAGHCHI:We are only defending our- our people, from the you know, the- this, this act of aggression. And we don't see any reason why we should talk with Americans, because we were talking with them when they- when they decided to attack us, and that was for the second time. There is no experience- good experience talking with Americans. We were talking. So why they decided to attack us? So what is good if we go back to talk once again?

World Refuses to Clean Up Trump's Mess (Updated)

As of today:

UPDATE ON THE HORMUZ COALITION (Mon, March 16):

🇫🇷 France: REJECTED
🇬🇧 UK: REJECTED
🇮🇹 Italy: REJECTED
🇪🇸 Spain: REJECTED
🇯🇵 Japan: REJECTED
🇳🇴 Norway: REJECTED
🇨🇦 Canada: REJECTED
🇦🇺 Australia: REJECTED
🇩🇪 Germany: REJECTED
🇨🇳 China: NO RESPONSE
🇳🇱 Netherlands: NO RESPONSE
🇰🇷 South Korea: NO CONFIRMATION

Trump has been demanding that NATO step in, but as the Germans pointed out, Trump started this war and it is not NATO's war:

Stefan Kornelius, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, told reporters in Berlin that Germany will not participate in any military operations in the region.

“This war has nothing to do with NATO. It’s not NATO’s war,” Kornelius said. He stressed that NATO is an alliance focused on defending member countries’ territories, not intervening in conflicts outside its borders.

The Germans have also just pointed out that most of the NATO nations have small navies and their largest ships are frigates, they're not going to make a maningful contribution compared to the US Navy.

Even so, the surface Navy is little more than a pale shadow of what it was during the Cold War. All that's left are one class of destroyers and some aging cruisers. The large number of frigates that they had are long gone, without replacement. The littoral-class ships are a joke (something that I've been going on about for awhile).

But back to the point: Trump's style (if you can call it that) has been as well-thought as a toddler's. He breaks things and demands that others clean up his messes. Right now, he's not asking for help, he's demanding it, and the rest of the world is saying "thanks, but no." He's forgotten that most of those countries are democracies, their governments answer to their people, and, thanks to Trump's badmouthing and tariffs, they are not at all interested in sending their young people to help pull Trump's chestnuts out of a fire of his own making.

Bloody Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan seem to think that no matter what the outcome will be, it's going to be awful.

And he apparently doesn't understand that oil is a global commodity. Because he's either stupid or he believes that his MAGAt followers are.

The big winner in all this is Trump's boss, Putin. Russia gets to sell some of its oil at market price. And NATO relationships between the Trump Administration and the rest of the Alliance will be further strained. We'll be lucky if it can be repaired somewhat in 2029.

Admiral Painter was right.

Gee, It's Almost As Though Pissing Off the Rest of the World With Stupid Tariffs Might Have Its Costs

Operation Goat Rope apparently isn't going as well as the Donald thought it would.

President Donald J. Trump said Saturday that allied nations could deploy warships alongside the United States to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, signaling a potential multinational naval effort to restore shipping through one of the world’s most critical energy corridors.

In a post on Truth Social early Saturday, Trump said countries affected by Iran’s attempted disruption of shipping would send naval forces to operate with the United States.

“Many countries… will be sending war ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe,” Trump wrote.

The president mentioned China, France, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom as countries affected by the disruption, though no government has publicly confirmed plans to deploy warships to the region in response to the statement.

So, shall we recap? First, Trump goes after friends and adversaries alike with his ill-thought out and largely illegal trade war, raising and lowering tariffs on a whim. Next, without consulting with anyone else (including the countries who might take retaliatory fire) or trying to build a coalition, much less make the case to the American people, he begins a war with Iran. Then, to add icing to his cake of shit, he figures that airpower can win a war fast enough to prevent Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz. When people who might actually know things about that try to tell him or Pretty Boy Pete, they get dismissed because those two know it all.

But since that didn't work out, he now thinks he can demand that the rest of the world save him from his folly. Even if they wanted to, it'd take weeks for any meaningful deployment of warships from the Pacific Rim powers to get to the Persian Gulf, because it's really fucking far away from them.

I guess it didn't also occur to him that if they do come to save his ass, there will be a real price to be paid for it.

The bottom line is that Trump is a toxic mixture of arrogance and stupidity. And because of that, he's running a real risk of tanking the global economy. As much as he likes to tell everyone how smart he is, he'll go down as the worst president in American history and certainly the most corrupt.

Trump’s War Planners are Seriously Stupid Beyond Belief

Sheer, utter incompetence:

The Pentagon and National Security Council significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to US military strikes while planning the ongoing operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

President Donald Trump’s national security team failed to fully account for the potential consequences of what some officials have described as a worst-case scenario now facing the administration, the sources said.

Jesus Fucking Christ! How could anyone with even passing knowledge of the geography and military history of the region not know that the Iranians would try to close the Strait of Hormuz? This isn't hard, it's one step above knowing which end of a gun the bullets come out of. As far as war-planning goes, this is at "tie your shoes" level.

This is serious top-shelf incompetence, of the "people should be shot for that" grade.

A Legacy of Bitterness That Will Last For Decades

Thick black smoke was still rising in the sky, soot covered the streets and cars, balconies filled with black gunk, and the toxic air had filled the lungs as Tehran woke up after a night of airstrikes on the city’s oil depots on Sunday.

In messages and voice notes sent to the Guardian, people described the situation in their homes and on the streets, some calling it “apocalyptic”. With the sun blotted out, disoriented people in Iran’s capital had to turn on their lights to see through the gloom.

Four oil depots and a petroleum logistics site in and around Tehran were hit. Local authorities said six people were killed and 20 wounded at one of the sites.

Videos shared by citizen journalists showed massive flames over the Tehran sky overnight and smoke still billowing over the oil storage facilities. As rain poured down on the city of 10 million people on Sunday morning, authorities warned of toxic acid rain and many residents woke up with pain in their throat and eyes burning.

If the stated goal of the Trump Administration for this war, to persuade the Iranian people to push to change their government, poisoning the air over Iran's largest city, not to mention bombing a girls's school, are pretty boneheaded ways to do it.

The question now is who is driving the bus on this war. It's begging to look as though the overall commander is Netanyahu.

The Gulf Water War?

Iran has made it clear that attacking their water supplies will not go unanswered.

If they successfully hit a number of the desalinization plants in the area, a good part of the Persion Gulf region will become uninhabitable, for that's the main source of fresh water for a number of cities.

Not that Trump or Hegseth'll give a fuck. But those countries who have given Trump and Kushner large amounts of money might. And they might be really willing to talk to congressional investigators and DoJ's lawyers in 2029.

Feckless, Heedless, Incompetence: Hallmarks of the Trump Administration

He seems to have launched into his Big Beautiful War with no thought of the consequences for the global economy. This is from an opinion piece that is not paywalled:

Trump neither sought nor received congressional approval, much less international support, for his war. But perhaps the most shocking thing about his cavalier approach is that he seems to have had no idea that the Gulf would be a target. In an interview with CNN on Monday, he professed that Iran’s attacks on American allies in the Gulf were “probably the biggest surprise” — despite the fact that just about every country in the region had warned his administration that Iran would surely attack them in retaliation for an American assault.
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It is unsettling how often Trump affects astonishing indifference, as though the most powerful man in the world were merely a spectator to events he himself has set in motion — and who in any case has little investment in the outcome. But that curious passivity reveals a darker truth. Trump seems to believe that he, like his fantasy America, exists on a different plane, utterly untouchable by the swirl of global events. The devastating consequences of his actions are not just someone else’s fault. They are someone else’s problem, too.

Since Trump is big on "feelings" (he launched this war because he had a feeling, not hard intel or evidence), I'll give you one of mine: The natiional average for gasoline will be $4/gal by the end of the month, if not St. Patrick's Day. By Memorial Day, if not sooner, it will be over $5/gal. Those who have Priuses and other hybrids will look across the island at the gas station, as some guy cries about filling up his giant SUV or pickup truck and think "fuck your feelings".

Meanwhile, Trump and his minions are trying to shrug off the fact that his buddy Putin is helping the Iranians to target and kill Americans. One has to wonder why people still don't get that Trump, Gabbard, and Witkoff, among others, are owned by Putin. Republicans are basically cowards, just totally fearful of Trump and his stochastic MAGA terrorists.

And if Biden had said this, the Right would be screaming that he needs to be removed:

Trump: "Finally, we honor one more American soldier, a fallen warria of world. Of wars. And really, terra.” pic.twitter.com/7Ih78Rwdcp

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 2, 2026