annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
Short excerpt from long read:
The U.S. Loses Its War Against Iran
There’s a lot to unpack in the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, and almost all of it is bad. Read on, if you dare.
Trump’s Defeat
The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, which began with little warning on February 28, ended with the American president signing a memorandum of understanding with the Iranians in Versailles, France — ironically, the site of the signing of the treaty that ended World War I. (I don’t know if you guys are history buffs or not, but that treaty didn’t work out so well.)
The terms of the memorandum of understanding are not quite an across-the-board surrender on the part of the United States, but they’re close. I suppose you can’t call it a wholesale surrender, in part because the U.S. government is paying retail prices in its concessions.
The Iranian regime gets to stay in power and receive a whole host of dispensations from the United States, and the U.S. gets little or nothing, and access to the Persian Gulf is now effectively controlled by Iran. . . .
As we have seen with this administration, repeatedly, personnel is policy. When you select an idiot to run the Department of Homeland Security, you get bad results at DHS. When you select someone with behavioral issues to run the Department of Labor, you get one embarrassing scandal after another. When you select a yes-woman who overpromises and underdelivers, you get a mess at the Department of Justice.
And when you select a Manhattan real estate guy who sees previous foreign policy experience as a liability to negotiate with the Iranian mullahs, you end up losing your shirt.
None of this spares the president any blame; after all, Trump’s the one who entrusted Witkoff with this duty, and Trump’s signature is the one on the memorandum. But when you have an administration thoroughly permeated by the philosophy that knowing a lot about a subject — or consulting those who do know a lot — is a weakness and a liability, you cannot be surprised when endeavors like a war against Iran go terribly awry and leave the United States in a weaker position than when it started.
By taking the Persian Gulf hostage, and with it, the world economy, Iran effectively won the war.
