Has it been 72 hours yet?

By my watch it’s the third day. How to explain what Trump has been up to in the Mideast? He’s been doing what he always does. Working for the deal he wants after all the rhetoric and bluster and the moves and countermoves are done. 

What did he want? The safety of Israel, which is our only agent of Democracy in the Middle East. An end to the killing as soon and for as long as possible. And most of all, he wanted Americans to be as safe as possible from the deliberate and collateral damage inflicted by crazy people in the greater Islamic world.

What were the obstacles he had to overcome? 1) Irrational, incredibly violent emotions on both sides, by Israel and by Iran and the organizational instruments it has used for 45 years to attack, terrorize, and otherwise intimidate Israel and its few real allies in the western world. 2) A seriously degraded U.S. intelligence capability, lacking both the political will and the human on-the-ground resources to discover What the Hell was really going in behind all the fake news reports and globalist agendas of a lethargic bureaucracy of spies who had no spies in their employ. 3) A rising international wave of antisemitism that has infected enough people in power (official, academic, and grass roots) to assist Israel’s enemies in surrounding that nation with constant hostility and pressure while they fight for survival.

When does perception become more important than reality? When most of the public discourse about a thing is lies or misrepresentations in service to a narrow political agenda. And when the reality beneath the lies is too little known to produce any certainties. Case in point. We are presently the victim of three days of lies and misrepresentations about both the true status of Iranian nuclear development efforts and the efficacy of the massive American assault on known nuclear facilities in Iran. The political polemics have all been about perceptions, not reality. How can we know this? Because the internal controversies about  the positions taken by Trump’s diverse policy opponents are flagrantly contradictory. If Iran was not working at breakneck speed to build a bomb, then the question of how effective the American air strike was is irrelevant. And if there really was a huge nuclear development underway, how could the determination to obliterate it still be inconsistent with an America First agenda? The perception vs reality farce is evident in the fact that both sides are going out of their way to find Trump culpable for the situation we are in now, regardless of what the facts of the end result. Which happens to be an uneasy Ceasefire between the two major combatants, with no American boots on the ground marching toward Iran. Impeachable? Worthy of breaking ranks with the Trump administration and finding a more MAGA replacement?

The lefties claim Iran never presented any apocalyptic danger, despite two generations of “Death to America” proclamations and innumerable terror attacks killing the enemies of Jihad all over the world, including the United States. Now Iran is the victim because they were attacked by Donald Trump.

The MAGA dissidents want to have their cake and eat it too. To them, America First suddenly means no use of the military for any reason except controlling anti-American thugs in American cities and at the border. Not rejecting military violence, mind, just confining it to the geographical vicinity of  North America. Implicitly, they are also rejecting the notion that military solutions are sometimes entirely appropriate and laudable in the Middle East (assassination of Suleimani, termination of ISIS… was OK, preemptive bombing of Iranian WMDs… not OK), but only if the contemplated violence passes muster with the personal line-item veto they somehow believe they were granted by the election of Donald Trump. Why isn’t it OK this time? More perceptions. They believe the spin by the formerly hated NYT/WAPO megaphone that this crisis was fabricated by Netanyahu to keep himself in power. They also prefer to believe that Iran is so far away from the U.S. that no Iranian ICBM will ever be able to reach their homes and families in this lifetime. Not our problem. Tell that to your infant grandchildren.

Why we’ve been subjected to hotheaded debates about whether Iran ever sought nuclear weapons, and whether Trump got gulled into a foreign mess that has nothing to do with us, and on both sides, whether this has been, therefore, a huge self-aggrandizing tempest in a teapot ginned up by The Donald for more personal publicity.

All of which is completely beside the point. What was Trump doing? He was doing what he does to get control of the situation. The 72-hr rule is there for a reason. There can be days of rhetoric from Trump in service to his negotiating tactics that tell us not much about where he intends to wind up. Was he flip-flopping about regime change? Was he dissimulating about how sold he was on diplomacy being the only real way of resolving the problem? Was he being dangerously divisive about the degree to which he was prepared to use American military force against the sovereign nation of Iran?  Was he talking out of both sides of his mouth on these and other topics in the buildup to the status at the present moment? Yes. He wasn’t talking to Congress or the American people. He was talking to the power players on the scene and keeping them off balance while he got his ducks in a row. He wanted the mullahs alternately hopeful and scared, hopeful and in fear for their lives. He wanted Netanyahu just cautious enough  to do the hardest thing for him to do, follow the lead of the guy who’s paying the bills. He was also talking to the fools on every side in the media. “We can’t tell what he’s going to do. OMG. He doesn’t know what he’s planning to do. We have to figure it all out and tell everyone where to hide from this wild card President…”

Time to take a step back and acquire a more useful perspective than nitpicking every Trump statement one day at a time.

Think about what he was working with. (Try at least.) What did he have and what didn’t he have? Have nots first. He didn’t have good intelligence about Iran from own massive community of U.S. spies. They gave up trying to infiltrate Iran with their own undercover agents decades ago. He also was receiving the eavesdropped and other electronic intelligence from professional veterans of the Deep State, whose loyalties were firm enough, but more to the neocon money-making war machine than to nonprofit hands-off stability. But he couldn’t fully trust Israeli intelligence either, which — though stuffed with info from deeply buried and highly effective Israeli infiltrators — had to filter their intelligence through Israel’s own Deep State political bureaucracy. (Not nearly enough attention is ever paid to the fact that Israel is a very socialist nation with all the carelessness about truth usually entailed by same; they have gotten away with it thus far because Israelis tend to work hard even at confiscatory tax rates and live with an existential threat into which some reality must be allowed to intrude.) In other words, there was no way to be sure that Netanyahu, who had been ranting that Iran was months or days away from the bomb for two decades, was telling the truth about the current level of Iranian nuclear technology.

At some point, probably very early in the process, Trump realized that it wasn’t facts but perceptions he had to deal with most urgently. He would have to bomb either the Iranian nuke project out of existence or the perception that there was an imminently dangerous Iranian nuke project out of existence. In terms of the real prospects for a moderately long-lasting peace, the nuke/no nuke question was irrelevant. Ending the fear was the indispensable priority. Planning for the military mission began when he had reached this realization, probably early in the negotiating process.

What he needed in the interim was to demonstrate as loudly as possible his preference for a negotiated solution while providing the Israelis as much time as possible to take out Iran’s conventional warfighting capability, with special emphasis on decapitating the military and terror leadership of the mullahs. He also wanted to send contradictory messages to the mullahs, by turns inflaming their paranoia and tempting them with the possibility of concluding the crisis with their usual negotiated set of lies acceptable to the UN, Western Europe, and the Arab world. Everyone knew they would be lies, but accepting them for now had become an honored tradition in Middle East politics, because it made western liberals feel like peacemakers and western neocons an excuse to start promoting the next necessary war to fend off the dreaded but permanently impossible two-state solution with a smaller bag of highly profitable blood oranges.

Thus, at various times, Trump was certain peace could be negotiated at a conference table, concerned that Iran really was perilously close to a working nuke, firmly opposed to regime change, and leaning at key moments toward regime change as a distasteful but conceivable strategy. Trump knew that all the ranters and ravers on all sides would take from his various statements of position whatever they wanted to, whatever served their own appraisal of what needed to be done and whether he would ultimately do anything at all. Don’t forget, history was all on the side of  ‘not doing anything’ because western leaders always come up limp when there’s a chance their actions will be perceived as Islamophobic. Confusion is always a prime contributor to a “do nothing” scrap of diplomacy intended to save face, not solve the problem.

But Trump was always going to bomb the Iranian nuclear project. Netanyahu had to have known that or figured it out well before it happened. The mullahs apparently didn’t figure it out, which was the whole point and the whole explanation for why the American attack was not fired on before, during, or after the strike.

Why did Trump erupt so angrily when Israel attacked Iran in force after the Ceasefire was declared? Because he forgot that this was Trump’s show, Trump’s carefully conceived plan to rescue Israel and the world from the dangerous, irrational fear of an impending nuclear Armageddon. Netanyahu also forgot that for Trump America First means America First. Always. If regime change and the monstrous chaos of orchestrating another bout of doomed externally orchestrated nation-building was what Netanyahu had in mind, he had better have forgotten it before Trump got on board Air Force 1 in the next five minutes. No need for nation-building nonsense when POTUS was facing for another dreary session of setting NATO straight about what America wants in Ukraine after having paid for the whole sickening, bloody mess thus far. Cleaning up that mess was going to involve more than enough nation-building for everyone. Why Europe would finally have to get out their checkbooks and start paying for the mass death and destruction they had cheered on over their Ouzo aperitifs in peaceful sidewalk cafés. 

In a particular stroke of genius, Trump dropped an F-bomb in his tirade. Which gave the cretins of the lefty media and the MAGA purists something to tut tut about while POTUS proceeded with his business among the Euroweenies. “Eff them too.”

Well, that was that 72 hours. Now it starts all over again. MTG probably needs to go change her panties and Rupert Murdoch may want to postpone the next meeting of the Bilderberg Group’s Middle East War Lobby (MEWL) at Lindsey Graham’s $50 million estate (technically owned by a trust in Switzerland) just offshore from Myrtle Beach.

From here, the smart people will continue to bicker about the satellite photographs of acres of rubble. They’ll see what they want to see. It doesn’t matter. The objective has been achieved. The specter of an internationally dangerous Iranian nuclear power has been crammed into a walk-in closet under many tons of broken stone. The apocalyptic fear has been laid to rest. A residue of unease about dirty bombs in urban subway restrooms no doubt remains, but there is always a residue of fear among the fearful and the vigilant. If the whole ceasefire things comes unstuck, Trump will find a way to glue it back together again. He is already lining up more carrots and sticks at the UN Security Council if Iran balks at the inevitable.

MAGA does have a problem though. With me. Time they started earning the man they elected President of the United States. If you’re wondering whether I’m talking about you, I am. This is no time for the Lily-livered. If the term fits, here’s your new hat (Leave the old one in the dumpster…) Thank you.