“The war is over,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress last Tuesday, but it isn’t. In the Persian Gulf there is a sort-of ceasefire between the United States and Iran that is reluctantly observed by Israel too, but there are air strikes between American and Iranian forces around the Gulf on most days. […]
Tulsi Gabbard, the recently resigned/retired/fired US Director of National Intelligence, told Congress just two months ago that US intelligence agencies had concluded Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Indeed, she added, experts also determined Iran had not resumed its suspended 2003 nuclear weapons programme. However, Donald Trump said she was “wrong” His claim that “Iran
There are really two wars in the Middle East, and only one of them is paused. The US-Iran war has been stuck in a ragged ceasefire for more than a month, with the participants only indulging in occasional tit-for-tat strikes that Donald Trump likes to call “love taps”: fewer than five killed. Israel was part
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio should be careful what he wishes for. Donald Trump has speculated that Rubio could be “the next president of Cuba” after the US overthrows the Communist regime that has ruled the island for the past 67 years, and this week he suggested that this takeover might be done by
TACO! Of course. Trump always chickens out, but it’s a feature, not a bug. If his threats aren’t working, he will generally drop them and try something else. The man has always been a real estate developer: he was born into it, and he knows no other way of interacting with the world. It’s all
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.” Familiarly genocidal threats from Donald Trump, with the trademark mobster-style “NO MORE MR NICE GUY” at the end. Amazing
The US president, Donald J. (for Jesus) Trump, is a showman, and he knows how to keep the world’s attention by offering journalists shockingly good copy. He threatens a genocide: “A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight”. He writes “Fuckin’ Strait” on a presidential post. (Note the tastefully dropped ‘g’ in Fuckin’ to show that he’s
We don’t have to look very far to find a useful historical analogy for the current crisis in the Middle East. In 1967 Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli ships, and Israel replied with a surprise air attack that destroyed almost the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. Israel followed up with
Asked on Wednesday if he would reconsider his decision to pull the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Donald Trump said “it’s beyond reconsideration. I just think it should be automatic.” So that’s a definite ‘maybe’. He’s very cross at the moment, because not one of NATO’s 31 other members has
Still not four full weeks into the war, and already Donald Trump’s “short-term excursion” – decapitate the Iranian regime with a surprise attack and impose harsh terms on the defeated survivors – has morphed into a global economic crisis and a region-wide war that could destroy the wealth of all the countries on both sides