GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY OF A RECURRENT NIGHTMARE

 

First Junta of the National Reorganization Process (left to right) Massera, Videla, Agosti

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’etat that preceded a nearly eight-year nightmare known as “El Proceso” (National Reorganization Process) in Argentina. This date, March 24^th, 1976, is an important one for me since I, along with my superiors and colleagues at the Buenos Aires Herald lived those times first-hand, and up close and personal.

I’m commemorating this historic anniversary in the best way possible. I’m in Buenos Aires, and attended a special ceremony of the Argentine branch of PEN Club international—an esteemed organization of writers and journalists worldwide—to honor my friend, mentor and former boss, Robert J. Cox. Although none of us at the Herald back in those times would have bet a plug nickel on our chances for getting far into middle age, let alone entertaining any chance of seeing old age, incredibly, Bob is now a very lucid and active ninety-two-year-old, and I’ve reached the ripe old age of seventy-six. No one is more pleasantly surprised than the two of us.

Cox speaking at PEN Buenos Aires

The honor bestowed on Bob Cox at the PEN was for “defense of free expression and human rights.” It is well-deserved. And it wasn’t the first international award that he has received for his courage and professionalism in those dark days. Few newspaper editors in history have risked as much as Bob and the Herald did during that bloody military regime.

Recalling that first day of the new regime in particular, my memories are vivid. We had been expecting  a military uprising for several days before it happened. In fact, given Argentina’s history, which for  nearly half a century by that time, had been characterized by pendulum swings between shaky democracies and spontaneous coups, we found it rather amazing that it hadn’t happened sooner, since the country had, quite literally, descended into chaos.

Already for two years by then—coincidentally, my first two years as a newsman at the Herald—the left and right of Peronism, following the death of the movement’s iconic leader, General Juan Domingo Perón, had been busy trying to kill each other off.  Perón had sought to model his last wife, Isabel Martínez, after his late wife, Eva Duarte de Perón—who had been just as iconic as Perón himself and, depending on which side of the political spectrum you came from, was both the most revered and most hated woman in Argentine history. It didn’t take, of course. Isabel was no Eva. Evita was unique and an incredible if short-lived populist firebrand.

José "El Brujo" López Rega

Isabel was utterly incompetent, and even before Perón returned from nearly eighteen years of exile in Spain to once again become the constitutional president of the Argentine Republic, she had fallen under the spell of Perón’s private secretary, José López Rega, a Rasputin-like character known as “El Brujo” (the Sorcerer), who had convinced Isabel that he could imbue her with the living spirit of Eva Perón.

Instead, he merely manipulated Isabel, who had succeeded Perón as president, and, through her, ran the country. This is a totally subjective description, however, since from  an objective viewpoint, Isabel Perón was completely incapable of governing the country, and  what López Rega “ran”, was Argentina into the ground. By the time of the coup, hyperinflation had reached seven hundred percent a year. Prices literally changed by the hour. And seeing the writing on the wall, López Rega had already fled the country eight months before the coup took place.

He would manage to live in hiding abroad for a decade, until his arrest in the United States in 1986 and his extradition to Argentina which, by then, was living under a stable democracy. He would die in prison in Argentina, awaiting trial for his many crimes.

López Rega’s shadow-government was basically a criminal association. He headed up a clandestine paramilitary organization known as the Argentine Anti-Communist alliance, or Triple-A. A retired Federal Police corporal—who would promote himself to police commissioner-general —López Rega had no tools for governing and, instead, surrounded himself (and Isabel) with people who were just as lawless, ineffective and bloodthirsty as he was. The Peronist left and mafia-style Peronist labor unions were vying with him for control of power, as the country was descending into economic and political chaos.  With, as I say, prices changing by the hour, the government of Isabel Perón was constantly signing compulsory monopoly-money-style pay hikes, decreed under Peronist union pressure by both Congress and the Casa Rosada (government house) in a futile attempt to help workers keep pace with rampant inflation. It was, in a word, utter pandemonium.

Meanwhile, it was López Rega’s Triple-A that would initiate what, under the military, would later on be known as Argentina’s Dirty War. By the time that bloodbath was over nearly a decade later, thirty thousand people in Argentina would be “missing” and/or murdered. But López Rega’s brief but ruthless chapter in this history would account for more than six hundred of those disappearances and deaths.

The only reason the last truly Peronist government tottered on for as long as it did was thanks to a maneuver between López Rega and Senate President Italo Luder. Bundling Isabel off to the country in Córdoba Province “for health reasons,” Luder took temporary control of the government and, in one of his first acts, declared a “state of siege”, a modified form of martial law in which, under the terms of Luder’s proclamation, the country’s military was given a free hand to “annihilate subversion.” It was actually a carte blanche to kill or jail everybody the far-right had ever felt like getting rid of.

There’s a problem—I mean other than the obvious one—of giving the military free rein to do as it pleases, beyond the bounds of the Constitution and the rule of law. And that is that in a situation in which an administration rules by force rather than by law, it is the military that outguns everyone else. Inevitably, then, there came a time when the Armed Forces decided to cut out the middleman (or woman, as it were) and take over government themselves. That’s precisely what happened on March 24^th, 1976.

There was word before the coup took place of unusual activity on the military bases surrounding Buenos Aires and near other major cities. Hours before the coup took place, we knew that armored vehicles were rolling toward the Capital.

Cox at the Herald, circa 1976

Funny story. Bob, as editor, had inherited a Government House correspondent who was more of a bureaucrat than a journalist. It didn’t cost much to keep him there and it saved having to send somebody to pick up daily government press releases, which were of little use anyway, except to get the “official story”. The guy’s name was Goyena. He was a descendant of Pedro Goyena, a 19^th-century legal expert, journalist and politician. 

Goyena would come in at the end of his day, say hello to everyone in the newsroom, go to Bob’s office, wish him a good evening and drop off the government handouts. Then he would bid us all goodnight and leave. He was the bearer of the official story and was otherwise clueless about and completely uninterested in what was actually going on in the country.

So, on the night of the coup, Goyena breezes in, looking dapper as always in his three-piece suit. We are all hard at work gathering information, reading cables, talking to contacts, etc. A real hive of frenzied activity as the coup approached.

Just as Goyen is reaching Bob, who is standing in the doorway of his office reading a wire service cable, I ask him to tell me what’s going on at Government House. He turns and answers, “Nothing, chief. Not even a fly is stirring.”

Bob and I both stared at him in disbelief, our mouths hanging open, wondering how a man could sit in the press room at the center of government all day and not have a clue what was going on.

Oblivious, Goyena hands Bob the press releases as usual, smiles, bids us all good night, and is gone. Bob and I just stood there looking at each other and shaking our heads. Right after that, I sent a sixty-point banner headline to the shop that read: TANKS ROLL ON BUENOS AIRES.

March 24, 1976, Buenos Aires, Casa Rosada

But I mention this because Goyena’s reaction to the impending coup wasn’t all that atypical. Quite a large segment of the population was content to bury their heads in the sand, and act like nothing was wrong, that it was just business as usual, and no business of theirs. Years later, Cox would write in an editorial that perhaps the hardest job of a good journalist was attempting to tell readers things they didn’t want to hear about subjects they preferred to ignore. It was a brilliant analysis of reality under martial law in Argentina.  And I think it’s an apt analysis of what’s happening in far too large a segment of the population today in my native United States, where authoritarianism is alive and well once more.

When I left the paper well after midnight the night of the coup—I didn’t have a car yet then—there was no public transport and the streets downtown were full of Army trucks  and swarming with armed troops. I had to walk many blocks to find a renegade cab, trying my best to dodge the checkpoints that had been set up. I saw soldiers standing guard over long rows of mostly men who were face-first up against walls, legs back and spread, being patted down and their IDs checked by NCOs and platoon officers. Some of them were unceremoniously loaded up on trucks and driven away. Most of the troops armed with FAL assault rifles were conscripts—nervous, frightened young guys, barely more than boys. It was a dangerous climate, I finally caught a cab with a nervous, suspicious driver, about twenty blocks from the Herald and was able to safely reach my midtown apartment in the wee hours of the morning.  I took an immediately dim view of where this was heading.

This scene and many more from those times have been replaying vividly in my head recently as I’ve watched news footage of federal agents and paramilitary thugs acting with impunity and outside of the law in major opposition cities throughout the US. It is chilling to think that the horror I experienced and reported on in Argentina fifty years ago is today taking place in real time in a country once considered the greatest democracy on earth—my country.

The Herald’s response in the beginning was the same as that of most of the rest of the country, except for the far-left fringe. The lawlessness and bedlam of the Isabel Perón/López Rega regime had been so all-pervasive that having the patriarchal power of the Armed Forces step in and “make things right” seemed like the only quick solution.

Still, Bob Cox in his editorials, and we in the news coverage at the Herald were very careful not to praise the military. We took the attitude that the National Reorganization Process should be just that. That is should basically “take out the trash” and start over with a clean and pluralistic democratic society. We wanted to believe that it was a caretaker regime that would reestablish constitutional order. This would quickly be proven an erroneous assessment.

But I recall that, in one very early editorial—I think the first one after the military arrested members of the Peronist regime and took over—Bob talked about the former government’s having died of its own accord and that now all that was left to do was to remove the corpse. It was a powerful analogy that underscored the very real gravity of the situation.

Bob and Dan, 2026, fifty years after.

I think perhaps because of his thinking of Economy Minister and “Chicago boy” José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz (Dr. Joe in Herald lexicon) as a serious and internationally respected economist, and of his own friend and attorney Walter Klein, who seconded the minister, as an honest and decent human being, Bob was at first willing to give the regime the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to trust that their intentions were honorable.

However, it didn’t take long for Bob to realize that while the head of the Junta, General Jorge Rafael Videla, was disseminating the message that the last thing the military wanted was to rule indefinitely—that they were just there to reestablish constitutional order and make the country safe for democracy again—the new regime was, in fact, simply doubling down on the brutal tactics of the former one. And they were doing so with much greater military efficiency and non-partisan ruthlessness. The Triple A hadn’t disappeared. It had merely been absorbed, placed under “new management”, as well as being vastly expanded under the military regime.

Bob very soon started employing a tactic (almost a ruse) to keep the Herald on a tightrope above the fray. On the one hand, he praised the new regime’s economic initiatives under Minister Martínez de Hoz and Walter Klein as Economic Coordination Secretary. On the other he was sharply critical of continuing clandestine paramilitary activity including an ever-mounting tally of disappearances and murders.

I recall when he first met Videla, only shortly after the coup. I asked Bob what impression he’d had. They were already calling Videla “The Pink Panther” behind his back because of his striking resemblance to the cartoon character. Bob said he reminded him more of a rabbit with its ears laid back so you might want to pet its head. That perception was short-lived, however.

At first Videla tried to get Bob to believe that disappearances, murders and torture being reported to us were simply a big mistake. Videla’s consistent message was, “We give specific orders, but can’t always control how they are carried out.” But no one who had ever been in the military, which both Bob and I had—I in the US Army, and he in the British Navy—could be very easily convinced by that argument.

After the same horrific things not only kept happening but also increased by leaps and bounds, the next time Bob was in a meeting with the general, and Videla reiterated the lies about not being able to control the plainclothes paramilitary’s action, Bob caught the president off guard by responding that in the beginning he was willing to accept that excuse, but that since then, the government had done nothing to rein that sort of behavior in, and, on the contrary, state violence was expanding exponentially. Videla’s excuses, Bob insisted, were no longer valid or believable.

As a result, there began to be a much frostier relationship between the paper and the regime, and Bob’s editorials reflected that. This was true not just of the Army, which was the dominant force, but also of the Navy. I recall once, after Bob wrote an editorial about the increasing role of the Navy in repression, he was summoned to the office of Junta member Admiral Emilio Massera. Bob arrived promptly for the appointment in the early evening, his busiest time of day at the paper. Massera kept him cooling his heels there for more than an hour. When Bob asked the Admiral’s aide to remind Massera that he was waiting, Bob was told to be patient, that the admiral knew he was there.

Eventually, Bob made it clear that if the Admiral wasn’t going to see him soon, he would have to leave because he had work to do. After a brief consultation, the aide said the Admiral would see him now. When Bob was ushered into the enormous inner office, Massera was seated at a table with a number of other men, who seemed annoyed at the interruption. With little or no prelude, Massera turned to Bob and said, “I don’t want to appear in your newspaper anymore, Cox. I don’t want you to even mention my name.”

Bob started to protest that since Massera was one of the three most powerful men in the country, that request would be impossible to fulfil. Massera repeated, “not even a mention, Cox.” And Bob was ushered out. Of course, Bob being Bob and the Herald being the Herald, he came back to the paper and immediately wrote an editorial about Massera.

News editor Andrew Graham-Yooll announced he was leaving shortly after the coup. I have a feeling that the disappearance of his friend, novelist Haroldo Conti, was a factor. It was shortly after Conti was snatched—and subsequently murdered—that Andrew got word that he was on a list for execution. Very likely the same task list Conti had been on. He had long been receiving telephone threats and finally decided to take them seriously, packing up his family and moving to London. Andrew would later write that when he told Cox he was leaving, Bob had said, “You can’t! I need you.” But then apologized for having been insensitive to Graham-Yooll’s plight.

Andrew would continue and even intensify his campaign against the regime from Fleet Street. But he would no longer be at the Herald for the duration of the dictatorship. Bob, almost immediately after that, promoted me to a news editor post and had me overseeing both the International Desk (known at the Herald as the “the Night Desk”) and the City Desk, but brought in a Herald alumnus, Andrew McLeod, who had been living in Brazil, to actually run the Night Desk post that I’d been filling since 1974, and take the day-to-day pressure of that job off of me to free me up for local news coverage, where Andrew’s absence had left a gaping hole. It was during this period, from 1976 until Bob’s forced exile toward the end of 1979, that our friendly boss-employee status was transformed into an intensive working relationship and a clearcut friendship.

It was self-affirming that Bob was putting his trust in me. Although, in reality, he had little choice. That became clear to me when he one day said, “Since Andrew is gone, The Telegraph is looking for someone to be their Buenos Aires stringer. I thought of you.”

I accepted, and it was from that point on that I took an ever-increasing role in reporting what was happening in Argentina to the world. And every new free-lance contact I made as a  correspondent was thanks to Bob. Former Herald reporter David Hume, who was leaving Argentina after receiving credible death threats, handed his ABC Radio News string over to me, as well as The London Daily Express for which he had been free-lancing. When McGraw-Hill World News moved their Buenos Aires full-time correspondent Ernie McCrary to Río, Bob and I took over that Buenos Aires string together as well, until Bob found he didn’t have the time for it and left it to me entirely. McGraw-Hill had fifty specialized publications (including Business Week), and I found myself writing regularly for four or five of them that were interested in certain aspects of the regime.

Bob wrote for several very major international publications, and once left me on call for them while he was on vacation in Europe. That was how I ended up covering an important international story for Newsweek, when an Army task unit sought to arrest People’s Revolutionary Army chief Mario Santucho, a move that ended up in a gunbattle in which both the leader of the Army unit and Santucho died. Suddenly, without realizing how it was happening, I’d become the international free-lance correspondent I’d always dreamed of  being, and I had Bob to thank for it. That made me work all the harder to be a good writer and reporter, because I was grateful and didn’t want to let Bob down. He was, in a very real sense, my mentor. And remains so to this day.

Meanwhile, my job at the Herald was ever more demanding, and I found myself leading the same kind of fast-pace life that I’d always observed in Bob and Andrew, playing international correspondent during the day and working at the paper all night, catching a few hours of sleep whenever I could. Despite the tragedy of those dangerous times, it ended up being the most exhilarating chapter of my life, and I’ve never found anything to match it since, in terms of self-fulfillment. We were actually accomplishing something. We were writing a piece of history, day by day, on which no one else was reporting as thoroughly as we were.

Far too many others weren’t lucky enough to make it through that entire period unscathed.  At least a hundred journalists would perish. Many other journalists, academics, actors, writers, artists and intellectuals in general would go missing. And by the end of the first year of the Proceso, Videla’s interior minister, General Albano Harguindeguy, was making it clear that the Proceso was there to stay. The ballot boxes, he said, were well stored, and that’s how they would remain until the military decided it was time to get them out again.

That turned out to be nearly eight years after the coup. And the only the only thing that accelerated the regime’s demise—despite growing popular dissent—was the military’s attempt to remain in power by carrying out the military occupation of the Falkland Islands, known in Argentina as La Malvinas. There had been a diplomatic dispute between Argentina and Britain for a century and a half over those South Atlantic islands, and the Proceso reasoned that taking them over militarily would cause Argentines to rally round the flag and give the faltering regime a new lease on life. What they never counted on, oddly enough, was a British military response that would lead to a bloody and tragic ten-week war.

In other words, the Falklands/Malvinas were where the military regime went to die. In a very real sense, the tragedy of that war nevertheless led to a true celebration of democracy following some of the darkest years in Argentina’s history.

Neither dead nor alive...'disappeared'

Throughout the long, dark years of the Proceso,  foreign correspondents, prompted by Cox and the Herald, would ask Videla repeatedly, “What about the missing?” But it would be in answer to a renowned local journalist, José Ignacio “Nacho” López,  that General Videla would, in 1979, finally provide a response to that question that was as cynical as it was chilling, and as definitive as “disappearance” itself. Videla would tell López, “They are an unknown, they have no entity, they are neither alive nor dead. They are ‘disappeared’.”

 The golden anniversary we mark today should be a tribute to the thirty thousand missing and dead. It should be in remembrance of brave human rights activists who struggled and died, of intellectuals murdered because the regime felt ideas posed a threat to its existence, of third world priests, seminarians and nuns executed for the “crime” of serving the poor and destitute. And it should be a tribute as well to my friend and mentor Robert Cox for ensuring that the Herald reported in English what other local media were silencing in Spanish. And a tribute to him as well for inspiring those of us who stayed and carried on the fight for truth for the next three years after he himself was forced into exile. 

In the end, however, this fiftieth anniversary of the Proceso should be a time of reflection for Americans like me, because the similarities to what happened back then are striking within the context of what is happening in the US today, where a two-and-a-half-century democracy, once considered the greatest democracy on earth, is fast-descending into despotism and chaos.

I can truly say that I’ve seen this movie before, and I know how it ends. No day better than today to renew my commitment to telling people my experience, telling them what I have been part of, and what I have lived through, in the hope that they wake up before having to see that same nightmare through to the bitter end. 

 

YOU KNOW HOW ATROCIOUS IT’S GETTING WHEN…

 Never thought I would hear the words "Ann Coulter hit the nail on the head" come out of my mouth. But when a far-right ideologue calls out Trump for human rights violations, you know how bad the situation is getting.

From US Democratic Socialists:

Right-winger Ann Coulter nails Trump with a question that makes him squirm: Suppose Iran dispatched operatives to Mexico, where, from the Texas border, they fired a missile at an American base and, unintentionally but carelessly, demolished a nearby American school, killing 175 people.

Then, what if they then blew up fuel depots, showering a chemical rain on residents? Then struck homes, schools and clinics, as Iran's leader warned that death, fire and fury would so pulverize America that it could never be rebuilt?

In that case, President Trump and all of us would howl at outrageous attacks on innocent civilians. And we'd be right.

– Ann Coulter

Every MAGA supporter who hasn't burned their hat yet should reflect on this.

 

TRUMP’S WAR OF IMBECILITY

 

Last week, chickenhawk warlords Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth were using the word “war” every other sentence, repeating over and over their confession to launching an unlawful war on Iran.  Now Trump is referring to it as “a short excursion”.

Before the markets tanked and gas prices shot up (the only two things he had going for him in the economy), Trump was talking about an Iran war that would end only in “unconditional surrender”. It’s a term he must have heard in a movie, because it is clear he has no idea what it means. The last time the US demanded or accepted unconditional surrender was at the end of World War II, when both Germany and Japan were on their knees and had no choice but to accept the terms of surrender as written by the Allies, and then only after a devastating war that cost the world 60 million lives and unquantifiable treasure. Judging from his most recent acts, Trump seems keen on repeating that experience.

But Trump is really in no condition to be discussing any sort of surrender on Iran’s part. Even though the US and Israel can admittedly inflict devastating damage on an Iran that was still sitting at the negotiating table when it was treacherously attacked, as things stand right now, Iran has the upper hand. For one thing, for the past half century, Iran has controlled the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil is shipped. Under new management since the first US-Israeli airstrikes in this phase of hostilities killed the reigning Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, Iran's new leadership has promised an "energy war", which, between that regime’s drone and missile strikes on the energy infrastructure of neighboring US Middle East allies, and its concentrated defense of Hormuz, has the potential to bring not only the US economy, but also economies worldwide to their knees.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that the overriding trait of the Trump regime, from the president down, is supreme and arrogant ignorance. In recent days Trump has boasted that “no other president had the guts to attack Iran.” In real-world terms, the fact is that no president before Trump was stupid enough to attack Iran directly. If Trump thought attacking Iran was going to be a weekend walkover like the performative invasion he carried out as a prelude in Venezuela, he has another think coming. The same is true if he committed the crass miscalculation of thinking that the Iranian theocracy would bow down, deal with him, and hand over the oil in order to stay in power the way the Maduro regime, minus Maduro, did in Venezuela. Iran is a whole other animal.

Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world in terms of both territory and population (92 million people). It is also home to one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, dating back to the seventh century BC. Throughout its long history, Iran has lived through every sort of invasion and revolution imaginable and has learned from every one of those experiences.

Beyond the Trump regime’s unsubstantiated claims that Iran had missiles that could reach the US, or that it was about five minutes from inventing a nuclear warhead, Trump has used regime change as an excuse for targeting that country, pretending concern for the severely repressed and harshly governed Iranian people. After the first devastating airstrike—in which one of the first US hits was on an elementary school, where nearly 170 people, mostly little girls ages seven to twelve  were slaughtered—Trump began calling on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their repressors. But in neither of his terms as president has Trump lifted a finger to help Iranians make that any sort of real possibility. And indeed, free-thinking Iranians have every incentive (though not the means) to want to break the chains of what is truly a murderous regime.

If the US—indeed, if Trump— had actually been interested in a humanitarian-based regime change, Washington would long ago have been providing intelligence, training, arms and funding to Iranian pro-democratic revolutionaries. Instead, Trump has started an impromptu war that promises to make the lives of Iranians even worse than before in every aspect, and on the sole say-so of his Middle East puppet-master, Bibi Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s goal: Middle East hegemony for Israel, even at the risk of starting a world war. Trump’s goal: Oil…and a major distraction from the persistent Epstein files, which have Trump worried about more than “just” being perceived as a pedophile. Those are the goals. And the people be damned. Indeed, the world be damned.

Heading up the post-ayatollah’s regime is Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba. The 56-year-old heir to the Khamenei regime isn’t an ayatollah, which is a religious rank he has never attained. He is, instead, an enforcer—by all accounts, the man behind the murders of thousands of Iranian protestors seeking a democratic opening in recent popular uprisings, which the Trump regime has basically ignored, except as a prop to justify the president’s own ends. Khamenei is inextricably linked to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. If we compare the IRGC to something more familiar historically, this would be like Hitler's SS—or perhaps, on a lesser, more pedestrian scale, Trump's ICE in the US.  As soon as Mojtaba Khamenei was named Iran’s new leader, the IRGC pledged allegiance to him. Iran-watchers say there is a dual message behind this: It means that the IRGC is loyal to Khamenei as long as he is loyal to them. In other words, as long as their interests are the same—maintaining the regime and opposing the United States—Mojtaba commands the IRGC and, conversely, the IRGC is where all of the new leader’s power lies. As I say, they are inextricably linked.

There is a theory among analysts that, had the US simply waited out the 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei until he died of natural causes, there might well have been a greater chance for a semi-democratic opening in Iran, with political moderates demanding greater autonomy after the ayatollah’s 36-year reign. Clearly, that was nothing that concerned Trump. With his foolhardy “excursion” into an illegal and illegitimate war of aggression, we’ll never know, because a huge wave of nationalist fervor has now coalesced in the face of foreign attack, and by submersing the country in war, Trump has not only not weakened the regime, but has strengthened it.

Now on a war footing, the all-powerful IRGC is bound to tighten its grip, and the ayatollah’s son, motivated by Islamist radicalism, raw nationalism, and now, a thirst for vengeance, will take a hardline stance both in terms of war strategy and on any eventual negotiations. In other words, Iran will very likely be unwilling to negotiate, unless it can do it from a position of strength and getting major concessions.

Trump stupidly and ill-advisedly thought that he could bend Iran’s will with an air-war and no boots on the ground. He didn’t even listen to the warnings of his sycophantic chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, when he reportedly tried to admonish the president that going to war with Iran was a losing proposition. Trump obtusely thought it was a military decision and that he was qualified to make it. It wasn’t and he wasn’t. It was always “about the economy, stupid.” And in the process, Trump has painted a terrorist target on the backs of every American living anywhere in the world, including the United States.

Perhaps that is why, after all the “unconditional surrender” bluster, Trump is now saying, “We’ve already won!” He is clearly realizing, at least at the back of his mind—despite his pernicious narcissism’s preventing him from admitting it—that he has made a terrible mistake, one that, at the very least, could cost him the midterms, and at worst, could get him impeached (again), while sweeping the US and the rest of the world into a global conflict. In Trumpspeak, “We’ve already won,” means, “I need an off-ramp quick.”

In watered-down assessments, on-the-fence politicians and Big Media commentators alike are choosing to use the euphemistic term “war of choice” to describe American military action taking place in Iran on the sole say-so of one man: de facto US dictator Donald J. Trump. Let’s be clear. It is not a “war of choice”. It is a war of aggression. Every bit as much so as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but unjustifiable to an even greater degree, since Iran is not a neighbor of the US, nor was it seeking to join an alliance against the US. It was, then, not at all within the fast-fading US superpower’s immediate sphere of influence. Or in other words, though these lawless acts by both Putin and Trump are equally illegitimate, even as rank imperialism goes, Trump’s un-consulted, unauthorized and unhinged war of imperialistic aggression on Iran is even a greater stretch than Putin’s illegal war of aggression on Ukraine.

Although (or perhaps because) the Trump regime is a lawless centralized government that refuses to obey the law on principle—be it constitutional, federal, state or international law—it is still worthwhile noting what international norms dictate regarding wars of aggression, since these rules are the gold standard for international peace and justice set following World War II. And the fact is that international law unequivocally prohibits wars of aggression, deeming them the "supreme international crime."

More specifically, such wars contravene the UN Charter and are classified as a violation of international peace, as well as a crime against humanity. Under international law, those crimes trigger individual criminal responsibility and State accountability. That is to say, American critics accusing Trump of starting “a private war” (and I include myself here) are missing an important point. Namely, that if a despot like Trump starts wars of aggression, it’s not enough for Congress to shrug and say, “This is Trump’s war. He didn’t ask us, so he owns it.” Under international law, if the other branches of government permit Trump, by omission, to pursue wars of aggression, the US as a whole becomes accountable, and therefore subject to any international consequences that may occur. That is to say, everyone participating in this illegal war on Trump’s say-so is responding to unlawful orders.

Growing numbers of traditional European allies are warning the US that they are taking an entirely defensive stance with regard to the war. Some have made it clear that they will not allow the US to launch new attacks from their territories, even when there are American bases on their soil, while others are indicating that they will defend their own assets in the Middle East, but will not allow themselves to be dragged into a war that they weren’t even consulted about, and that is illegal from the get-go.

While European governments have so far shown their shock and displeasure, they have, nevertheless, tiptoed around the unhinged US authoritarian leader as best they can, while holding emergency meetings to talk more about a coordinated response to the new reality that caught them on their back foot, and left them scrambling. It is obviously not business as usual for our Western allies. Who among them would ever have thought that they would one day have to be having the kind of discussions about the US that they used to only apply to the Soviets and then to Putin? But in the Era of Trump, everything is, as the saying goes, ass over teakettle.

US allies in the Middle East, meanwhile, have been much more outspoken in their criticism. Countries in the Persian Gulf region that have shown restraint in their relations with Iran up to now, have become targets of Iranian attack through no fault of their own. They are angered by the fact that the US-Israeli joint attacks on Iran have made them targets by mere association. And they are complaining to Washington that they weren’t even warned in advance so that they could prepare for the veritable deluge of surprise drone and missile strikes being rained down on their territories without permitting them to mount an adequate response.

Gulf-state officials say that the US has also focused entirely on defending US and Israeli troops while leaving the sitting-duck neighboring countries to fend for themselves. At least one Gulf-state official said that in his country, the stock of interceptors is “rapidly depleting.” Gulf officials are stonewalling when questioned by the international media, but reports point to surprise and anger in government circles in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which all feel betrayed by the Trump regime. Bottom of Form

While official reactions by the Gulf nations have been less than forthcoming, some public figures have made clear their view that Trump has allowed Israeli Premier Bibi Netanyahu to buffalo him into a needless Middle East war. The country most upset by this would appear to be Saudi Arabia, which is also one of the most anti-Israel nations in the region.

Saudi Prince and former intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal told CNN last week, “This is Netanyahu's war. He somehow convinced the president (Trump) to support his views.”

As such, in the world view, the US has become a rogue state that is unpredictable for allies and enemies alike. And both are hedging their bets. 

Perhaps that will be the epitaph for the Era of Trump when its history is written. The time when America went from being the leading nation in worldwide stability and security, to being a loose cannon bent on worldwide chaos and destruction.

 

A FEW LIKELY CONSEQUENCES OF TRUMP’S WAR OF SELF-CONVENIENCE

 

Americans learned through Donald Trump’s Truth Social propaganda network this past weekend that we are at war with Iran. That’s right. Both the president and his “Secretary of War” (that’s how they like to dub the US Department of Defense) are referring to it as such. And in doing so they are tacitly admitting to yet another overt violation of the Constitution by this regime.

The fact is that the current autocratic American head of  State has long since decided to dispense with the Constitution, the rule of law, international law, and the US justice system. Trump has also decided basically to do away with Congress, saying repeatedly that “he doesn’t need Congress.” Of course, if he weren’t acting as a de facto ruler, whether he thinks he needs Congress or not isn’t the issue, but rather that the Constitution dictates that he must work with Congress as a co-equal power. Shamefully, the skimpy GOP majority in the Senate and House are letting him get away with trampling the Constitution, their authority, and their duty to the American people.

And so, the GOP has become complicit by omission (among other blatant constitutional violations), in permitting this president to launch an unauthorized war, which is both domestically and internationally illegal. A war which promises to have truly seismic consequences both domestically and worldwide. It is—as much as any war launched to date by Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin—a war of aggression that, among other things, is as illegal as Putin’s Ukraine invasion, in terms of specific not only US laws, but also international laws and the Charter of the UN, of which the US is a founder, signatory and member of the Security Council.

These violations are made even more flagrant by the fact that the US was involved in direct peace-related negotiations with the Iranian theocracy when Trump’s regime launched the surprise attack. Indeed, there was optimism last Friday from Oman Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi who had been tapped by Washington to mediate in US talks with Iran. In Washington to meet with US Vice President JD Vance, Albusaidi told the CBS News program Face the Nation that,  "If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing (on) a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before. If we can capture that and build on it, I think a deal is within our reach." He estimated that a finalized accord could be reached within three months.

Clearly, then, the Trump regime duped Iran—much in the same way that Putin had pretended to negotiate with Ukraine while regrouping and planning a major new offensive—by lulling it into thinking negotiations were advancing well, while never seriously entertaining a peaceful solution. It should be recalled that these latest negotiations were just reaching a semblance of the Iran Nuclear Accords finalized in 2015, after intensive negotiations between Iran, the European Union and the Obama administration. That pact was hailed as a major achievement that promised to bring Iran back into the concert of nations. But during his first week in office in 2016, Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of those accords in a move that was a slap in the face not only to Iran but also to US allies in Europe. As a result, that agreement collapsed.

The US airstrikes were as much a surprise for Americans—including Congress—as for the Iranians and the rest of the world, since in Trump’s State of the Union address a week ago, Iran got barely a mention, while negotiations were continuing. But on Saturday, just four days later, the first devastating air attacks were launched. Now, more than a thousand people have already been killed in this war that Congress never authorized.

Perhaps the Americans most taken by surprise were the at least 500,000 (some estimates say as many as a million) US nationals who currently reside in the Middle East. They had no advanced warning whatsoever from the US government. There was no evacuation plan in place, and there still isn’t. Some 300,000 of those Americans reside in numerous countries currently under alert as a result of Trump and Netanyahu’s obviously unplanned and ill-prepared attack.

The US “strategy” for getting those US citizens out of harm’s way became clear this week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an advisory through consular offices urging Americans in the region to “get out now.” It was the kind of evacuation order issued for random weather phenomena—except with a lot less advanced notice. Basically, no advance warning. Nor was any suggestion made as to how hapless Americans at the mercy of their own government were supposed to accomplish that task. Consular advice to the stranded Americans is, basically, to get out however they can because they’re on their own.

Indeed, in most of the area where Americans reside, there is currently no air service, and the entire region presents a huge hole in the sky if you observe the map of international air routes. Advisories to maintain airspace closed are currently in effect for  Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Those are all areas where aviation advisories are warning operators not to fly until further notice due to the risk from missiles, air defense systems and interception activity.

Current validity for the advisory runs to March 6^th, but could easily expand as military operations develop. So this is the situation: Hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas have merely been left stranded,  and to their own devices by the US government, as autocrats Trump and Netanyahu wage their private war of convenience, with no knowledge of or concern for the probable results, which appear bleak indeed. This has the potential to make the much-maligned Afghanistan withdrawal—agreed to by Trump in his nefarious deal with the Taliban and inherited by President Joe Biden on whom the GOP would heap all the blame—look like a Saturday picnic in the park.

The ones who were quickest on their feet and the most savvy travelers probably figured out that the only alternative early on would be to head north any way they could and connect via Caucasia and  Afghanistan (an iffy choice at best), or to head south and grab an air link through Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But those routes are now under very heavy demand, and are also becoming vulnerable.  

So all of that rhetoric about Trump being the president who would “keep Americans safe”…well, not so much. And whether anyone realizes it or not, the Trump regime just put all Americans at greater risk at home and all around the world, as the potential for random attacks by Islamist sleeper-cell and lone-wolf extremists just burgeoned exponentially.

But these dire situations appear almost minor compared to the mind-bogglingly major potential consequences to the world order of this mindless and unauthorized act carried out by the Trump-Netanyahu “mutual admiration society”. First, it should be noted that while Iran was indeed at the center of the ever-ongoing power struggle among three Middle East superpowers—the other two being Israel and Saudi Arabia—it posed no imminent threat whatsoever to the United States.

Let me say that again. Despite Donald Trump’s recent bloviating about Iran’s possessing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and about how it was a minute away from having a nuclear weapon, there is absolutely no credible intelligence to suggest that either of these things was true. In fact, the “nuclear threat” argument flies in the face of what Trump told the nation just last June when the US, at the behest of Bibi Netanyahu, flew joint missions with Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities out of existence. It was Trump himself who assured Americans that, thanks to that devastating bombing mission, Iran’s nuclear enrichment and development capacity had been “totally obliterated.”

So does Trump now want us to believe that, after a scant eight months, Iran’s nuclear team went from being “totally obliterated” to getting back up and running and on the verge of boasting a home-grown nuke? Really? If so, the US should, perhaps, hire them instead of trying to bomb them out of existence because they would appear to be world-class miracle-workers.

This was, without a doubt, at least from the US point of view, a completely avoidable and, clearly, an inadvisable move on the part of Washington. And, as Washington was in the midst of negotiations with Iran—even if by its sham “diplomatic” team consisting of the president’s son-in-law and his old real estate buddy, neither of whom have any diplomatic credentials at all—Trump would also have been well-advised to tell Israel to stand down.

John Brennan, the highly-respected 25-year intelligence veteran, former CIA director, and former head of US counterterrorism under Barack Obama, says he believes the plan for these attacks on Iran “was all hatched by Netanyahu”. He indicates that, just as Netanyahu did last June, he managed to talk Trump into it.

Rubio appeared to confirm this theory, though he later denied it, when he told reporters that Israel was on the verge of attacking Iran and the Trump regime realized that, if that happened, Iran would strike back at not only Israel but also at US military targets in the region. As a result, Trump decided to preempt the Israeli attack, and that’s why the US is now at war.

What? In other words, what he was saying is that US foreign policy is a mere reaction to Israeli foreign policy? That is to say, Bibi Netanyahu is dictating US military actions abroad? If that’s the case, there is something very wrong with this picture.

But this isn’t just about that. This is also about both Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu trying by any means to stay out of court and out of prison. Trump, as usual, went off half-cocked and with no plan, no contingencies, and no regard for the consequences, simply because he needed yet another big diversion to take attention off of the bane on his regime—the Epstein files. It is not likely to be a coincidence that this military action—which has very real potential to spark a world war—comes just as revelations are emerging about a DOJ plot to cover up or completely destroy evidence of criminal behavior on Trump’s part linked to the Epstein Affair—including his alleged rape, assault and battery on a minor who was 14 at the time. 

As Trump’s defense team leader Pamela Bondi, who masquerades as attorney general, is coming under increasing pressure to comply with the law, and release the millions of still missing files, and as more and more obstruction allegations are accumulating against her, the president’s plausible deniability is on ever shakier ground. Among files that have seen the light of day, and which are being reported on by the independent media, this was all predicted by an unlikely observer: Jeffrey Epstein. In communications with far-right political idealogue Steve Bannon in December of 2018, Epstein held out the possibility that Trump would be fully capable of starting a war with Iran if threatened with revelations about his dark past. Specifically, Epstein speculated that if Trump felt cornered by political pressure, he would trigger a larger conflict, such as bombing Iran, to create a crisis and rally public support.

In separate exchanges with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and attorney Reid Weingarten, Epstein described Trump as “borderline insane.”

When Bannon seemed unconvinced that Trump would go so far, Epstein wrote back saying, “You guys need to understand that he is psychotic... if I go down, I'm taking everyone with me. Cornering a rat, never a good idea”.

From Bibi Netanyahu’s standpoint, the advantage is twofold. On the one hand, he was taking advantage of a passive moment in Iran as the government continued to negotiate. Strategically, he saw a chance to actively strengthen Israel’s position as a regional superpower while dealing a devastating blow to Iran’s regional power.

On the other hand, for Netanyahu as for Trump, this aggression and the initiation of a new conflict provides a great distraction at a time when the war on Gaza is losing momentum and when he is increasingly under pressure to negotiate an end to the hostilities. His personal vulnerability is the ghost of corruption charges that are still pending against him in the Israeli courts, in which he could end up not only losing his political power but also his freedom. It is a win-win short-term move for Netanyahu, and he very well knew that, given Trump’s situation, getting the US to go along was likely to be an easy lift. Turns out, he was right.

Meanwhile, the enormous collateral effects of this overnight initiation of a major conflict in the Middle East are not easy to summarize or predict, and I will be writing a great deal more about them as events develop. But here are some foreseeable consequences:

1.  The death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, marks a major geopolitical rupture. It promises to cause upheaval not only in Iran but throughout the Middle East. It will profoundly affect not only Iranian politics and geopolitics but will bring seismic effects in energy markets, global trade, shipping and Middle Eastern security as a whole, with the entire region suddenly becoming a potential war zone.

2.  Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are acting as if, with a few airstrikes, and the targeted executions of some key players in the theocracy and military, the US has freed the Iranian people from the cruel theocratic dictatorship that has ruled them up to now. If that was the plan, they obviously know nothing about Iran or that regime.

The theocracy has already reestablished its authority, choosing a new supreme leader, and is backed by the powerful and slavishly loyal IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), which is likely to be even more ruthless in crushing dissent, after killing thousands of people while Ali Khamenei was still alive. Underscoring this are reports that the new Ayatollah is  Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the US-slain leader. Mojtaba Khamenei is much more radical than his father, has close ties to the IRGC and is thought to have been in charge of much of the repression that the Iranian opposition has suffered in recent years.
US Middle East military experts like retired General Mark Hertling and security experts like Brennan are making it clear that no regime change will take place unless there are American boots on the ground. And then, only after major and prolonged fighting. Regime change, in other words, cannot be effected from the air and will likely involve the US in another forever-war in the Middle East.
Beyond all of this, the sad news for common everyday Iranians taking Trump at his word and hoping that this is the end of their theocratic nightmare, is that Trump has said publicly that he will be employing “the Venezuela template” in Iran. This is, of course, a contradiction in terms, since Iran and Venezuela are radically different countries and cultures. But on hearing the false hope that Trump is extending to them, Iranians need to look at what he did in Venezuela. He blasted strategic targets in the capital city of Caracas, snatched President Maduro and his wife and spirited them back to the US. Then, he blithely returned power directly to Maduro’s regime, in exchange for oil, while ignoring the winners of prior elections that Maduro had voided. Venezuela remained, and still remains, a dictatorship ruled by the same harsh de facto regime that was in charge before US intervention, with Maduro’s vice president simply moving to the presidential office.
Venezuelans were duped and Iranians will be duped as well. If Trump can strike a largely commercial (oil) compromise with Khamenei’s son—by making him an offer he can’t refuse—the regime will remain in power, and the Iranian people will be worse off than ever before.
Had the US really cared about the people of Iran rising up and shaking off the chains of the Islamic theocracy, it would long ago have been backing anti-regime guerrilla movements in that country with intelligence-sharing, training, money, arms and military advisors. Because without that kind of backing, no regime overthrow would ever be possible. But the US learned long ago to be careful what you wish for, since, short of setting up a US-backed puppet regime—something which history tells us never works in the long-run—there is no way to know what sort of government would follow this one, or whether it would align itself with the US which has a long history of unpopularity in Iran.

3.  Another contingency is that prolonged fighting could lead to a much weakened Iran that would slip into the sort of chaos some other Middle Eastern countries did following the Arab Spring. In that case, a power vacuum could form and government could become fragmented with the help of bad actors seeking to destabilize the area. That is the sort of action that might well be backed by far-right Israel, with Trump-backed Netanyahu taking advantage of a debilitated Iran to continue to bolster Israel’s military dominance in the region—the far-reaching consequences of which would be the further destabilization of the Middle Eastern region as a whole.

4.  A fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Hormuz Strait—a narrow neck of water that connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman. A significant share of liquefied natural gas (LNG) also moves through that strait. Iran, to a very large extent, currently controls that passage, and has, in the past, also used its Houthi allies in Yemen to aid it in that task. In the immediate term, disruptions to shipping traffic in the Hormuz Strait will cause oil and shipping, shipping insurance and container prices to spike. Experts indicate that sustained disruptions could fuel worldwide inflation and spark a corresponding worldwide recession, with the hardest-hit areas being Europe and Asia, but also with development progress in Southeast Asia and Africa being strangled.

5.  At least one expert in international law has described US worldwide actions under the Trump regime as “the great unraveling” of international law. Through his complete disregard for both international and domestic norms regarding the use of force, and with regard to the sovereignty and self-determination of nations—principles that have governed Western foreign policy since the end of World War II—Trump has basically instituted piracy as his regime’s foreign policy. In a US policy speech that Secretary Rubio made at a world security forum in Munich a few weeks ago, he faced off against criticism of the unprovoked US attack on Venezuela and on fishing boats in the Caribbean as actions unconstrained by law and “necessary leadership” in a fractured world order. This was huge, in that it signaled a US policy shift from the rules-based postwar order to one of might-makes-right, in which the US is simply doing what it does because it can, and because no one else can stop it.
Add to this a statement this week by the DOJ’s Hegseth, in which he said that the US would be applying “no stupid rules of engagement” in its unauthorized war on Iran, and America has just joined the Nazis in applying the same sort of Hitlerian policies that Germany pursued during World War II.
In other words, the Trump regime is bent on turning back the clock to a world where the most powerful regimes make up the rules as they go along and the rest of the nations are rendered vassal states.

Donald Trump was supposed to be “the president of peace”. At least that’s what he told us when he was trying to make Democrats out to be warmongers. But then again, if there is one thing that is consistent about Trump, it is his complete disconnection with truth and sincerity. Sometimes, it is hard not to see his attacks on Venezuela and Iran, his threats against Mexico, Canada and Greenland, and his verbal and economic aggression against our Western allies as anything but retribution against the world for not recognizing him as “a man of peace.” We know that, from his first day in office in 2016, he coveted every one of his predecessor Barack Obama’s virtues. What he couldn’t destroy with the stroke of a pen, he wanted to garner, without ever doing the hard work of earning the honors bestowed on others who did.

Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating. I saw with my own eyes, as did you, when he made a big deal out of accepting a made-up consolation “peace prize” created as a bespoke ego stroke by the FIFA world soccer entity. And when he whined about not getting this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, for all the made-up wars he’d “solved”, until winner, Venezuelan opposition political activist María Machado, offered him her medal to shut him up—and he became an even greater embarrassment than usual to the people of the United States by actually accepting it. And then, after his illegal invasion of her country, had the audacity to back the very regime that had repressed, cheated and jailed Machado.  

Could Donald Trump be that shallow and vindictive, you ask? Short answer: Yes. Definitely. The man has all the depth of a pancake griddle and the moral character of a wharf rat.

Many of the often salt-of-the-earth type people who bought Trump’s false promises and barefaced lies, and voted for him (twice), are the very same people whose families produce the military personnel who actually fight America’s wars. These relatives of military members voted for Trump in part because he promised to keep their sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters out of harm’s way.

It didn’t seem to matter to them that he had called America’s heroes “suckers and losers” or that Trump—a five-time draft-dodger from the Vietnam conscription era—had stood on the hallowed ground of Arlington Cemetery and asked, “What was in it for them? ” They simply bought his vow to be “the president of peace”, to bring the troops home, and end America’s forever-wars on Day One. They believed that he would use America’s Armed Forces for the purpose for which they were meant: to ensure US defense, not to go off to foreign lands to start forever-wars of aggression. They too have been duped.

In this latest action in Iran, after news of the first fatal American casualties was released, Trump confirmed that US service members have already died and that more will likely die or become casualties in the future, but added, “that’s what happens in war.” He said it as if he’d had nothing to do with it, when he had, in fact, personally and without Congressional authorization, lit the fuse for another forever-war that was completely avoidable. And in doing so, had painted targets on the backs of every US service member currently deployed in the Middle East. His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shrugged the casualties off with yet another cliché, saying, “War is hell.”

“That’s what happens in war.” The subliminal message to MAGA supporters who voted for the “president of peace”? Soldiers get killed in wars. That’s a fact. Get over it.