Roaming Charges: Trump’s Little Excursion Hits the Straits

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Desdemona Strait. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

I am the frightful thing that always follows you Liar, I am thy Nemesis I always knew one day that it would come to this – Motörhead, Liar

I am the frightful thing that always follows you Liar, I am thy Nemesis I always knew one day that it would come to this

Check out this paragraph from Tulsi Gabbard’s prepared text in her opening statement before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday:

As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer [July 2025], Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There have been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement.

There you have it. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence obliterated Trump’s case for going to war with Iran. Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium was destroyed last year and they’ve made no effort to resume the program. Curiously, however, Gabbard elided this paragraph during her live testimony before the committee. She claimed, under questioning from Sen. Mark Warner, that she skipped that crucial paragraph because she realized that she was “running out of time.” Her time in office is likely running out, as it should.

Gabbard’s deputy, Joe Kent, resigned from office this week, claiming correctly that Iran posed no imminent threat to the US. Kent should know. As director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center, Kent saw all of the intel that Trump apparently refused to take the time to read. Joe Kent’s no “think-tank pansy.” He’s a hard-ass former Marine who courted the votes of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists during his failed run for Congress in western Washington. But according to Trump, who nominated him for office, he always knew Kent was “very, very weak on security.” Funny, he hired him and didn’t fire him. Kent walked out of the Executive Office building on his own volition.

So we now have it from within the highest ranks of Trump’s own administration that the casus belli for the war on Iran was faked, in an even more blatant sham than the manufactured case for going to war on Iraq, a war Trump falsely claims he opposed from the beginning. But, like John Kerry, Trump was for the Iraq war before he was against it.

It’s worth reiterating that even before the June 2025 bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites, there’s evidence that Iran was intent on building a nuclear weapon (and a lot of evidence that it wasn’t), even though perhaps they should have, given that possession of a stockpile of nuclear weapons seems to be the only deterrent against getting attacked by the US or Israel. Just this week, North Korea was gleefully launching 10 ballistic missiles into the Pacific during joint military exercises by the US and South Korea without even a squeak of protest from Kim’s former pen pal, Donald Trump.

Again, Tulsi Gabbard said as much not long before Trump’s Operation of Midnight Hammer, testifying before Congress that “the intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” When asked about Gabbard’s testimony, Trump snarled: “I don’t care what she says. She’s wrong. My intelligence community is wrong,” But he didn’t fire Gabbard for being wrong and publicly contradicting him.

Trump, Rubio, and Witkoff have repeatedly claimed that Iran was merely weeks away from having not only a stockpile of enriched uranium but a nuclear weapon: “If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would’ve had a nuclear weapon. When crazy people have nuclear weapons, bad things happen.” (March 4) Trump has continued to push this lie in the last few days, as his war has gone south: “[W]e’re doing very, very well in Iran, knocking the hell out of them. And you have to do that. We can’t let them have a nuclear weapon. They were two weeks away — in my opinion, two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon.” (March 17) Once again, it’s Trump’s position that his own top intelligence appointees are lying about his lies about going to war against Iran.

Still, not many Americans bought what Trump was trying to sell. Support for the Iran war remains at around 40 percent. And the fog of lies began to rapidly dissipate when Trump’s little excursion ran aground on the Strait of Hormuz, shattering the global economy and unleashing chaos across the region.

In an interview with Medhi Hassan, Senator Chris Van Hollen claimed Trump was duped by Netanyahu into going to war with Iran:

They’ve had these constantly shifting rationales, and the reason they have to keep shifting them is because when they say that one thing was their goal – like getting rid of Iran’s nuclear capacity, they claimed – that turns out to be just not true….Netanyahu just a few weeks ago said he’d been waiting 40 years for an American president to join him in attacking Iran. And in Donald Trump, he finally found somebody stupid enough and reckless enough to actually do it.

Sorry, Senator, but this lets Trump off the hook. Iran has been on Trump’s targeting radar since Obama signed the nuclear deal. He assassinated Qasem Suleimani, head of the IRG’s Al Quds Force, in 2020 and bombed three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last June. As the Epstein scandal engulfed Trump, he began talking up another bombing campaign on Iran and the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores fed his delusion that he could pull off a similar pain-free operation in Iran, a delusion Netanyahu was eager to stoke, against all intelligence to the contrary.

Perhaps Trump will now replace Joe Kent with Newt Gingrich, who is very, very strong on security. So strong that Newt, the Edward Teller of our tormented times, advised Trump to drop 12 thermo-nuclear bombs on Iran to blast out a canal by-passing the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, someone with the guts to start a nuclear holocaust to prevent one.

“Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.” – Viktor Frankl

Knowing, however, hasn’t made much of a difference in the direction things keep going or slowed the accelerating speed at which we’re getting there…

During a White House press gathering with Sanae Takaichi, the new prime minister of Japan, Trump was asked why he didn’t alert Asian and European allies about the planned first strike on Iran. He snapped in reply, “We didn’t tell anyone about it because we wanted a surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan?” Then he turned to a visibly stricken Takaichi and said, “Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

What a bizarre comparison and an unconscious (presumably) admission of the criminality of the US surprise strikes on Iran. The parallel isn’t exact, however. Japan limited itself to attacks on a US military base, while Trump smart bombed an Iranian girls’ school.

Trump: “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

Sure, Don. It only happened in every war game about attacking Iran ever conducted by the Pentagon, CIA, DIA, Army War College and RAND…

Yet more proof that the Republican Party has turned into a Jonestown-like cult and would mindlessly disavow any previously held conviction and swig toxic Kool-Aid given them if their Supreme Leader ordered them to…

On Tuesday, Joe Kent resigned as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of Trump’s war on Iran. In his resignation letter, Kent wrote that Iran posed no threat to the US…

No one this high-ranking resigned from the Biden administration over abetting Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, which tells you a lot about the people who ran the Biden administration, most of whom should be hauled to The Hague.

Trump on Kent’s resignation: “I always thought he was weak on security. Very weak on security. It’s a good thing that he’s out.” Is this an admission that Trump spent more time evaluating the contestants on The Apprentice than he did on his National Security staff?

You don’t have to read too deeply between the lines of Tulsi Gabbard’s response to Kent’s resignation to get the gist: Trump does whatever the hell he wants, regardless of what we say, if he even bothers to listen.

The question is, why didn’t Gabbard walk out with Joe Kent? What does she expect to get out of this in the end, except an NDA she’ll be forced (or paid) to sign prohibiting her from saying what she really thought of Trump…

Nothing much will surprise me about Tulsi Gabbard, but I’m still curious as to what Gabbard gets out of working in the Trump administration. They’ve basically kept her in a closet for months. She doesn’t travel. She doesn’t make press appearances. She won’t even go on the friendly confines of Fox, where every question is set up for her like an at-bat during a T-ball game. She’s been kept out of White House meetings on Iran, Israel and Venezuela. No one inside the Trump decision-making circle seems to value or care what she has to say. What’s in it for her?

Here’s a passage from Trump’s National Security Strategy, released in December 2025, now no longer worth the pixels it was written on…

The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over—not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was. It is rather emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment.” Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program. We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without. The key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are........

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