On Wednesday, May 6th, Donald Trump announced that the war with Iran was just a glitch. Thank God, I was afraid it might be something serious. I mean, the thousands of Iranians who we bombed into oblivion are all dead, so they probably thought the war was at least moderately serious. The Arab countries surrounding Iran, the ones the Iranians have been bombing, probably think the war is at least somewhat serious, but no one cares what they think, least of all Trump. The multiple nations whose oil supplies for the year are stuck on ships unable to navigate the strait of Hormuz may think the war is serious, but Trump won’t agree unless he can figure out a way to make a couple of billion bucks off it.
The war was certainly never important enough to Donald for him to do the work necessary to figure out the proper way to end it, so he just didn’t. Now, we are stuck with jammed-up shipping lanes, a rogue nation halfway between the means to build a nuclear weapon and the possibility of being bombed into oblivion by the powers who are nervous about them having one.
Trump never did the homework that would have informed him of the proper way to conduct a war and plan for the inevitable peace that would follow. Right now, there is no plan to achieve any of the goals that led him to start this war. The little stuff, like crushing the possibility of Iran ever having a nuclear weapon or taking them out of the terrorist business permanently, float in space like an errant moon shot. Trump, because he’s always looking for a way to squeeze a buck out of every situation, might also be looking for a way to take control of Hormuz or figure out a way to replace the current Iranian government with a more cooperative one.
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Rachael Maddow, perhaps my favorite TV commentator, was on the other night doing what she does so well, just pointing out how massively inefficient the Trump administration is at everything it attempts.
Trump made it quite clear when he campaigned that he looked at the Department of Justice as a service organization, whose job it was to do his bidding. It wasn’t that he missed the DOJ as being an arm of the three-tiered government described in the constitution. He never even looked at it that way. He needed someone to do his legal dirty-work and he figured, why not the DOJ? They’re already on the payroll. And he has proceeded to use the DOJ exactly that way. Like every agency, government or private, DOJ has its share of hacks, but it also had a significant number of dedicated public servants who prided themselves on being just that, and when those individuals realized that they were being prostituted by the president to do his illegal, legal handiwork, they started quitting, which enabled Trump to replace them with a workforce that was both scrupulously loyal to him and grossly inefficient.
How can I say that? Well, let’s start with the ICE prison system that has been set up by the Trump administration around the country, which is being attacked by peaceful protesters because of its inhuman conditions. DOJ has tried to step in and hold the fort while opening more facilities. but they are so non-functional that they have been unable to open more facilities just as a number of those already operational are being closed. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The DOJ is a legal entity staffed mostly by lawyers, a very technical job, very much dependent on minutia. Trump has replaced those who have left the department with non-functional loyalists who basically can’t read or write. An example of this can be seen in the DOJ’s feeble attempt to defend the installation of one of their ICE run prison camps in Merrimack, New Hampshire. They sent the documentation, spelling out how great this prison in New Hampshire was going to be for the economy of Oklahoma! But that’s not the only one. Wired magazine recently did a rundown on how the DOJ is doing handling various legal actions based on Trump administration involved projects.
In May, in a letter sent to the Colorado Secretary of State, the DOJ requested access to “records pertaining to the 2000 federal election,” when they actually needed records from the 2020 election. In August, the DOJ sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State seeking voter records that cited the wrong provision of the Help America Vote Act. In January, the DOJ filed a lawsuit in the wrong federal court in Georgia, and the judge dismissed the action. In February, the agency filed a lawsuit seeking the New Jersey voter rolls in which they misspelled Governor Mikie Sherrill’s last name five out of eight times. In March, it was revealed that lawyers of the DOJ spent months emailing the wrong address while seeking information on voter rolls in Oklahoma. Also in March, a judge in Washington state demanded to know why Voting Section lawyers had improperly served their lawsuit and missed a crucial deadline. In another filing in late February, lawyers seeking sensitive voting data misspelled the words “voters,” “emergency,” and “United States.” in a single filing. Trump’s attempt to remake the DOJ into his personal law firm has had definite successful results, all leading to the ultimate destruction of our vaunted legal system.
The justice Department hasn’t scored a single court victory in over 30 of the lawsuits it has filed to force states and the District of Columbia to turn over sensitive personal data on voters. These guys just can’t get it done, and almost by themselves they are destroying a legal system that has been the model for excellence for the rest of the civilized world.
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I haven’t agreed with Lindsey Graham in a long time, but this weekend I finally saw things his way on one essential point. Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. It’s clear that the mixture of stone-cold killers and religious fanatics who currently run that country are far too crazy to be given any kind of power, and nukes are pure power. So, what do we do? I think we pick out a couple of more targets, targets specifically attached to nuclear weapons and the Strait of Hormuz, and take them out. Iran is in no position to stop such a strike, and letting them think they can just makes them more obstreperous and unreasonable. To kind of quote some writer from my youth, the Iranians are so far down it looks like up to them. It hasn’t, however, made them any more reasonable. Leaving something on the table for them has just given them the mistaken impression that they have a chance to win the physical conflict and that being unreasonable is an advantage for them. The reality is it will only get them killed.