A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or “federalize” the coming Congressional elections.
Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely; there are plausible vectors of terror; and the United States has let down its defenses.
Trump has already telegraphed the move. We know that he is obsessed with the fall elections, which his party will almost certainly lose by spectacular margins, and that he fears the accordant loss of power. This is clear from his own statements and actions. In a social post right after starting the war, he claimed (wrongly) that Iran had tried to hurt his cause in past elections.
We lack any other explanation for the war, at least from the American side. Trump is incoherent, and his administration is inconsistent. Much of what has been said about Iran is not true. The propaganda is contradictory. It is as though the war itself is not the main goal, but that it was simply important to somehow get the thing started.
War, famously, is the extension of politics by other means. But what are the politics? The president and especially the Secretary of Defense present the United States as a kind of war crimes central, a place where the rules do not apply. War crimes to do not win wars. Instead they provoke further war crimes and other retribution.
The Tehran regime is, so to speak, a convenient partner in the mutual provocation of terror. Iran is ruled by ruthless people with a record and a capacity for carrying out terrorist attacks beyond its borders. A terrorist attack on the territory of the United States might be a response by Iran or one of its proxies. Trump seems to have anticipated this, without seeming to care about loss of life: “Like I said, some people will die.” And if they do, he has his pretext.
Excerpts from the Nuremberg Opening Statement Robert H. Jackson Chief of Counsel for the United States Nuremberg, Germany November 21, 1945
Wednesday, November 21, 1945 marked the second day in the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), more commonly known today as the Nuremberg Trials. For the first time in history, military, economic, and political leaders identified as Major Offenders would be held to account for the actions of their government and military and its crimes against humanity and peace. Beginning the proceedings in the Palace of Justice on this, the second day of a trial that would not end for 293 subsequent days, was the opening statement for the prosecution delivered by American Supreme Court Justice and US Chief of Counsel, Justice Robert H. Jackson. Jackson’s opening statement, consisting of nearly 25,000 words and taking nearly three-and-a-half hours to read, remains one of the most famous and influential oratories in the canon of international law and criminal jurisprudence.
Appointed by President Truman and taking a leave of absence from the bench of the US Supreme Court, Associate Justice Jackson, along with other members of the IMT, labored for many months over the summer and fall of 1945 in an attempt to codify the legal precedents required to try individual members of the Nazi regime. Building off the framework of statements and declarations from the 1943 Moscow and 1945 Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, the task facing Jackson and the IMT remained a daunting one. All of the Allies agreed that Nazi Germany must be punished for the unprecedented nature of its crimes. However, it was also agreed that a predetermined ‘show trial’ was to be avoided to dispel as much as possible the idea of a vindictive victor’s justice. As such, each of the 22 Nazi defendants present at Nuremberg stood accused of one or more of the following four new categories of crimes outlined by Jackson and the IMT: “Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace,” “Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace,” “Participating in war crimes,” and “Crimes against humanity.”
Justice Jackson Delivering the Opening Statement at Nuremberg. Courtesy of the US Army Signal Corps. Katherine Fite Lincoln Papers, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum.
Just as the IMT strove to define the new legal landscape, Jackson spent months drafting his opening statement which not only introduced these new concepts of international law to the Nuremberg court, but also indicated to a worldwide audience that justice for the victims of Nazi aggression would be served. In his statement, Jackson’s tone was analytical, deliberate, and extraordinarily thorough. Jackson’s tone matched the basis of the argument for the prosecution which chose to rely on documentary evidence, eschewing possibly volatile eyewitness testimony. Despite his dispassionate approach, Jackson began by acknowledging that he well understood the momentous nature of the trial both for himself and for world leaders to come.
“The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
Speaking of the defendants, “twenty-odd broken men…their fate of little consequence to the world,” Jackson focused on the actions of the Nazi leaders rather than their identities. The defendants embodied and signified all of the evils of Nazism which must be extinguished lest they arise again in the future.
“What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life…. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.”
Justice Jackson Delivering the Opening Statement at Nuremberg. Courtesy of the US Army Signal Corps. Katherine Fite Lincoln Papers, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum.
For more than three hours, Jackson relentlessly made his argument, condemning the Nazi regime and its actions as criminal from the very moment of their inception to the arrival of their defeat. Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments and War Production, was both impressed by Jackson’s “grand, devastating address,” but also comforted somewhat “from one sentence in it which accused the defendants of guilt for the regime’s crimes, but not the German people.” At the conclusion of his statement, Jackson was honest in his assessment of human history, but also hopeful in his appraisal for humanity’s future.
“Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have “leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.”
Chief American prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson delivers the opening speech of the American prosecution at the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals at Nuremberg. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Gerald (Gerd) Schwab.
Seventy-five-years later, Justice Jackson’s opening statement at Nuremberg remains one of the most significant and one of the most often cited affirmations on the role and responsibility of international law and human rights. Jackson’s opening statement continues to serve as a foundation for the course of international law and international criminal trials to the present day.
The first international war crimes tribunal in history revealed the true extent of German atrocities and held some of the most prominent Nazis accountable for their crimes.
Editor: Clive Crook’s sedate commentary on the feckless and illfated attack on Iran opens with a first paragraph, that then metaticises, as if the first and its sucessor are mirrors of each other, with this ‘The immediate danger is a setback in financial markets that gets out of hand’
President Trump’s extraordinary gamble in attacking Iran and risking a wider conflagration in the Middle East dials up the economic hazards facing the US economy from “very high” to “extreme.” The point is, this new stress compounds a series of other severe pressures already facing the economy, which is now even more unlikely to emerge unscathed.
The immediate danger is a setback in financial markets that gets out of hand. In many ways, some such reversal was already overdue, given the apparent overvaluation of US equities, the weight that the administration’s tariffs had already put on the economy’s back, a still-deteriorating fiscal outlook and a stubbornly persistent rate of inflation. Now let’s add the possibility of spiking energy prices, interrupted trade flows and global political turbulence.
Editor: Mr. Crook does not explore the pressing question of Trump as the political creature of Miriam Adelson! Mr. Crook spends his time via my selections of the economic questions he articulates as pressing – yet Adam Smith in his ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ and his ‘The Wealth of Nations’ viewed these two imperatives as congruent with each other!
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Last week’s new inflation numbers were already cause for concern. The core producer price index, which excludes food and energy, increased by 0.8% in January, markedly higher than expected. Its main components feed into the Federal Reserve’s preferred metric, core PCE inflation.
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Last week’s new inflation numbers were already cause for concern. The core producer price index, which excludes food and energy, increased by 0.8% in January, markedly higher than expected. Its main components feed into the Federal Reserve’s preferred metric, core PCE inflation.
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Echoes of the 1970s: A lasting spike in oil prices would mean stagflation – higher inflation plus slower growth, a combination that the Fed is powerless to defeat.
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Even before the Supreme Court overturned the administration’s so-called reciprocal tariffs, the outlook for public borrowing was testing limits. Budget deficits at 6% of gross domestic product, even with the economy at full employment and comfortably quiescent interest rates, mean that public debt (already near records) will continue to grow faster than the economy. That’s what “unsustainable” means.
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To make good the shortfall, Trump has announced a new global tariff of 10% rising to 15% under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act; he also promised new “investigations” that could lead to new taxes under other authorities – actions that threaten to upend trade deals already made with numerous partners. In short, the court’s ruling guarantees two things: less revenue than previously expected, combined with even greater uncertainty about the future tariff regime.
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(The US has a big current-account deficit, financed by an equally big capital-account surplus, but no “balance-of-payments deficit” in the usual meaning of that term.)
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As long as import taxes can’t be relied on, and until Congress is forced to take budget control seriously, the revenue shortfall will worsen and maximum fiscal uncertainty will prevail. As a result, Washington will have little or no “fiscal space” to respond to a big economic setback with tax cuts and extra public spending.
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How much disruption can the US economy, for all its amazing strengths, absorb? The Trump administration’s trade and budget policies were already gambling with financial disaster. Now, with the Iran strikes, the White House has just doubled down again.
Editor: The reader might wonder at the fact that the Iranian Revovution was codified on February 1979 and it is March 3, 2026 : 43 years have elapsed: what might the reader think of the longevity of Iran, in historical terms? And that it is fighting a war against Israel and America, and doing so with dispatch!
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The rulers’ resilience is not just due to ideology. The regime is more complex than other Middle Eastern dictatorships and has more organisational depth. And it was always going to be a tall order to topple the regime from the air. But the extent of the appeal to the Shia tradition of martyrdom could yet be a factor in determining how long and how desperately the Islamic Republic keeps fighting and how many casualties Iran’s forces can endure. Around 1,300 Iranian soldiers have been killed in the first three days of the bombardment, according to a field report from a Kurdish human-rights group with a presence on the ground. Iranian officials acknowledge that their arsenal is no match for American and Israeli armoury. But ideology, they argue, can sustain a prolonged and asymmetrical war of attrition, just as in the 1980s when for eight years it drove hundreds of thousands to their deaths on the battlefield against Iraq.
An internet blackout makes public opinion hard to gauge. The loathing for Khamenei has surely not dissipated but those who once chanted death to the dictator are now indoors, sheltering from American and Israeli bombardment. Fear that their cities could be reduced to rubble like those of Gaza may also have swayed some against supporting the attackers. It has also galvanised ideologues, including the 6m Iranians Mr Mamouri estimates followed Khamenei’s fatwas, or religious opinions. And it has given a new lease of life to the regime’s anti-American and anti-Zionist slogans, of which most Iranians had tired.
Beyond Iran’s borders, the imagery of martyrdom resonates, too. Millions of Shias worldwide recognised Khamenei’s spiritual authority. Clerics with followers across the Shia world have declared a jihad to avenge his killing. In Karachi, in southern Pakistan, protesters attempting to storm the American consulate were killed; in Baghdad, in Iraq, crowds tried to breach security cordons near the American embassy. Iran’s allies abroad may be stirring. The Houthis in Yemen, which previously lobbed missiles at Israeli and Saudi Arabia and severely disrupted shipping in the Red Sea, remain poised. Hizbullah has resumed limited missile fire at Israel. Iraqi militias have struck near Erbil, the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, where American forces are based. Fears that a triumphant region-wide Sunni coalition—backed by America, Turkey and Israel—might again threaten Shia communities are prompting preparations for a broader sectarian conflagration.
The restraints that Khamenei’s “strategic patience” put on his hardliners are also gone. Since his death, Iran has attacked its Gulf neighbours with hundreds of missiles and drones. Iran-watchers predict they will ditch his fatwa against nuclear weaponisation, and seek to produce inter-continental missiles he opposed. The balance of power in Tehran has shifted accordingly. Before his killing, pragmatists had topped Iran-watchers’ lists of Khamenei’s likely successors. Hassan Khomeini, the reformist grandson of the republic’s founder, and Hassan Rouhani, the former president who negotiated the nuclear deal with America and other global powers in 2015, were front-runners. Both favoured a rapprochement with the West.
Instead, Alireza Arafi, the cleric elevated to the three-man committee that took power on Khamenei’s death, is an ideological hardliner. He was the head of al-Mustafa, the seminary in Qom that trains foreign students to export Iran’s revolution. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard, has also tightened its grip. It has replaced Iran’s border guards with its own forces in vulnerable provinces such as Kurdistan, and replaced its assassinated chief with Ahmad Vahidi, the first commander of the IRGC’s foreign arm, the Quds Force. He is accused of building up Hizbullah and orchestrating attacks against Jewish targets abroad. “He’s a very bad person, even worse than the one who was assassinated,” says Sima Shine, a former Mossad operative and Iran watcher.
Editor: This paragraph can be called by its actual name: ‘Wishful Thinking’ or better yet mendacity!
It is possible that, once the guns fall silent, Iran’s many resolutely secular-minded people will again assert themselves. A post-Khamenei—or even post-regime—Iran might yet seek reconciliation with the West. A pragmatic commander could emerge, intent on a smooth transition to salvage what remains of the republic’s considerable assets at home and in the Gulf principalities it has been bombing. Ethnic insurgencies on the periphery might fracture a defeated state. For now the war has postponed such reckonings. But by dying what his followers hail as a martyr’s death Khamenei may have prolonged the life of the system he built, even if he cannot save it.
Tom Friedman is the Political Twin of Bret Stephens!
To think clearly about Middle East wars, you need to hold multiple thoughts in your head at the same time. It’s a complicated, kaleidoscopic region where religion, oil, tribal politics and great power politics interweave in every major story. If you are looking for a black-and-white narrative, you might want to take up checkers. So, here are my four thoughts on Iran — at least for today.
First, I hope this effort to topple the clerical regime in Tehran succeeds. It is a regime that murders its people, destabilizes its neighbors and has destroyed a great civilization. There is no single event that would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s Islamic regime with a leadership focused exclusively on enabling the people of Iran to realize their full potential with a real voice in their own future.
To think clearly about Middle East wars, you need to hold multiple thoughts in your head at the same time. It’s a complicated, kaleidoscopic region where religion, oil, tribal politics and great power politics interweave in every major story. If you are looking for a black-and-white narrative, you might want to take up checkers. So, here are my four thoughts on Iran — at least for today.
Second, this will not be easy, because this regime is deeply entrenched and is hardly going to be toppled from the air alone.
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Third, we must remember that the timing of the end of this war will be determined as much by the oil markets and the financial markets as by the military state of play inside Iran.
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Fourth, we must not let this war to bring democracy and the rule of law to Iran distract us from the threats to democracy and the rule of law posed by Trump in America and by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.
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Editor: Reader there are only 1795 words left in Tom Friedman’s political chatter at full gallop. Yet Friedmans final paragraphs, awash in well worn platitudes resembles Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, well past rot!
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It is way too early to predict how this war will impact two critical 2026 elections — one in Israel and one in the United States.
For Trump it is simple. He does not want to see the word “quagmire” in any headline with his name in it ahead of the midterms in November. As for Netanyahu, I could imagine him calling for early elections to use the downfall of the Iranian regime to keep himself in power. But victory over Iran could also complicate his politics. Netanyahu has notched short-term military defeats over Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Iran, but he has not translated a single one of them into long-term diplomatic or political gains. To do so would require him to agree to negotiate again with the Palestinians based on a framework of two states for two peoples.
The opportunity for Israel could be enormous: If the Islamic Republic of Iran is either toppled or defanged, I have little doubt that Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and maybe even Iraq would feel much more comfortable normalizing relations with Israel — on the condition that Netanyahu does not annex Gaza or the West Bank, but agrees instead to a plan for separation and a two-state solution. Would Netanyahu rise to that opportunity? Would Israeli voters punish him if he doesn’t?
But I get ahead of myself. I expect by Wednesday there will be at least three more points competing in my head to make sense of it all, because this is the most plastic, unpredictable moment in the Middle East since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Everything — and its opposite — is possible.
Headline: Trump and Netanyahu Are Doing the Free World a Favor
Editor: Stephens applys both soothing and reviling tones to his critics
President Trump is being criticized from many quarters for his decision to join Israel in a war to topple the Iranian regime, which on Saturday yielded the killing of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The reasons vary.
It’s “a betrayal of the American people,” says Elizabeth Warren, who warns that the intervention risks dragging “yet another generation into a forever war.” It’s a betrayal of MAGA principles, says Marjorie Taylor Greene, who denounced Trump for putting “America last.” It’s unconstitutional, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, because it’s being conducted without authorization from Congress. It’s unnecessary, according to the writer Andrew Sullivan, who (quoting me, albeit misleadingly) thinks that Iran isn’t much of a threat and the war is being waged for Israel’s sake.
Editor: notice that Stephens becomes the victim of these toxic actors, its victimology is varian tones!
And so on. But one country where the United States and Israel are garnering broad support is the same country that’s being bombed.
Editor: What might a reader, listener, viewer make of the two reports not from Zionist Front Man Bret Stephens?
Dr Mohammad Marandi LIVE From Iran + Military Analyst Haim Bresheeth Zabner:
Editor: The next 696 words of Stephens self-serving political chatter, makes way for self-adutatory chatter, featuring himself as thinket, writer, expert, not to speak of his singular attachment to the Genocidal State of Israel!
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The United States is stronger when anti-American dictators have solid reasons to fear our wrath: It restores deterrence and, in doing so, makes diplomacy more effective. Israel and the Arab world are safer when Iran is weaker: Notice that, at least so far, Hezbollah, fearing for its position in Lebanon, has not joined the war against Israel. Finally, even if the regime doesn’t fall, it will be under heavy internal pressure to modify its behavior as a pragmatic concession to reality, much as Venezuela has under Delcy Rodríguez, its (hopefully) interim president.
That may not be the optimal outcome. But it’s considerably better than what came before.
Finally, the United States and Israel have taken considerable military and political risks to do the right thing. And that’s no small thing.
They have rid the world of an odious tyrant, and of several layers of his equally odious deputies. It’s odd that the same people who fault Trump for divorcing U.S. foreign policy from its democratic values now fault him for going to war for the sake of advancing democratic values. Still, millions of ordinary people around the world — not just in Tel Aviv or Tehran or Tehrangeles but also, perhaps, in Taipei and Tallinn — will notice that the United States, for its many warts, still stands for freedom.
My column has never been shy about denouncing either Trump or Netanyahu. It won’t be shy to criticize them in the future. But on Saturday this much-maligned duo did the free world a courageous and historic favor. It will be remembered long after the petulant criticism dies down.
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