Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead by 6ixStringJack

I've been batting nearly 1.000 with my opinions since before election day 2024.

I happen to agree with this one too.

All we get from the "news" these days is editorialism anyhow. We don't actually get any real news from anyone anymore. That's why we're living in two separate realities concurrently.

I live in the 3rd reality. The REAL reality.

Maybe some of you would like to join me there one day instead of posting the daily bullshit noise that means absolutely nothing in the long run.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, March 16, 2026 6:18 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I've been looking at oilprice.com

Interesting site, not sure how reliable or relevant it is, but curious to see what you think.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Monday, March 16, 2026 6:29 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I've been looking at oilprice.com

Interesting site, not sure how reliable or relevant it is, but curious to see what you think.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

I'll take a look at it. It's not something I can just give a cursory glance, and I just want to relax for the rest of the day.

On oil though, you might have noticed that every time the price of a barrel goes up, the Legacy Media makes a huge deal about it, but then they don't even mention how it's also gone back down in between the surges. They were screaming about it when it went over $110 per barrel, but no mention at all when it went back down to $88. And of course there is zero mention how we're nowhere near the prices during most of Joe Biden*'s administration.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 1:13 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Signifying Absolutely Nothing

Trump’s war of choice in Iran is a performance of horrific military strength that betrays a stark political weakness.

Fintan O’Toole | March 13, 2026

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/13/signifying-absolutely-nothin
g-iran-war-otoole/

In Donald Trump’s war on Iran, everything is meta except the bombs. At the point of impact, where buildings shatter and flesh is shredded, the war inhabits the material world of awful human consequences. But up to that point, as it exists in Trump’s mind, it seems to be a crazy historical pageant in which disconnected scenes from past American imperial misadventures are randomly reenacted.

It is apt that Trump’s declaration of war was disembodied: a prerecorded video message announcing a major combat operation that had yet to begin. Time in that video is completely distorted; events that are about to happen are referred to in the past tense. Throughout it gives the feeling of being in a time warp: Trump cited as a casus belli “the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel” in 1983. The forty-three-year gap between provocation and retaliation is a void between cause and effect into which all temporal logic vanishes.

In that eight-minute video, Trump performed what could be regarded as unconscious parodies of three different scenes from past wars. First, he defined his objective “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This replays, of course, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The George W. Bush administration carefully avoided the word “imminent,” but its rhetoric projected the illusion of clear and present danger. The UK government of Bush’s ally Tony Blair produced an infamous dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons against the West within forty-five minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.

The second parody was Trump’s message to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces: “I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms.” This echoes Bush’s warning in 2003: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” The film running in Trump’s head is a newsreel of Iraqi conscripts surrendering in droves to American forces, having decided that a rotten regime was not worth dying for.

Third, Trump evoked the idea of a mass insurrection by the Iranian people in the aftermath of a bombing campaign by the US and Israel: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” This too was an act of mimicry. In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Aircraft from a coalition of countries led by the US dropped leaflets calling on Iraqi soldiers and civilians to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”

To say that these are reruns is not to deny the novel elements in Trump’s warmongering. His boldest innovation is to invoke not past glories but past disasters, summoning the ghosts of the United States’ catastrophic interventions in Iraq. In the Republican primary debate in December 2015, Trump declared American and Iraqi deaths in that conflict to have been pointless:

“We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.”

It is hard to think of any precedent for a leader stirring the memories of a war he regards as a colossal waste in order to justify starting a new one.

More profoundly, Trump’s rhetoric diverges from its Iraq War templates in signifying absolutely nothing. It is in itself (though of course not in its consequences) entirely free of external referents in the real world. Trump, with that strange honesty of his, indicated this himself by the manner of his declaration of war. Such announcements have an established visual language of solemnity and moral magnitude: the live address to the nation and the world from the White House, the rows of five-star generals in the Situation Room, the military briefings, the sense of historic moment. Trump’s video and his schmoozing of guests at Mar-a-Lago on the night of Friday, February 27 (“Have a good time, everybody…. I gotta go to work,” he told the attendees), seemed as deliberately flippant as his dismissal of the likely deaths of Americans: “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.” (“That’s the way it is,” he said later, after the first US soldiers were killed.)

The word “important” was used the following evening: Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described the MAGA fundraiser that Trump attended on Saturday night as “more important than ever.” It was certainly more important than providing any rationale to the American people for their embarkation on another war. This is a war of choice, but it was presented to the American people more as a war of caprice, initiated in the festive atmosphere of a Florida resort and announced in cut-and-paste phrases from half-remembered conflicts.

The casual nature of the declaration of war matched the unmoored nature of Trump’s imperial cosplay. The rhetoric he seemed vaguely to be recalling had relationships to actual events. The “imminent threat” motif was, in 2003, a reckless and dishonest exaggeration. But there was at least the truth that Saddam had previously developed and used chemical weapons. The idea of enemy soldiers surrendering en masse was not fanciful—it happened in both Gulf Wars. The call for the people to rise up against their oppressors in 1991 had some substance: Kurdish and Shia opponents of Saddam had rebelled in the recent past and did so again.

But what recurs now is pure linguistic gesture—the second time as empty effigy. The idea that Iran poses an imminent threat to the US is not merely not credible—credibility is entirely irrelevant. In 2003 the Bush administration went through the motions of presenting a case that Saddam might have weapons of mass destruction and might wish to use them against the US. It was a bad case, concocted to provide the pretext for putting into action a preconceived plan: violent regime change in Iraq. But some people in the American and British administrations at least half believed it, and more importantly, they wanted other people—their own citizens and foreign governments—to believe it too. Some effort at persuasion seemed to be an accepted precondition for war.

This time, Trump can’t be bothered to lie, if by lying we mean stating a claim that is intended to deceive. No one in his administration believes in the imminent threat, and no one outside it is expected to believe in it either. “Imminent threats” here functions like a TV trope, a corny catchphrase—it might as well be “Follow that car!” or (in words Trump has actually used, in his belligerent demands that Greenland be ceded to him) “The easy way” or “the hard way!” It signals only that Trump is going through the motions of wartime leadership and that, at best, his followers should likewise go through the motions of being led into war.

Even while declaring war, Trump made a mockery of the supposed Iranian threat: “We obliterated the regime’s nuclear program.” Now its missile industry will “be totally again obliterated”—the “again” suggesting that he believes he had wiped it out before. And his characterization of Iran’s alleged intentions to rebuild its nuclear weapons program dissolved into bathos:

“We warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil.”

The imminent threat, then, comes from Bond movie villains who love doing evil but are crippled by chronic indecision, less Dr. No than Dr. Maybe. Trump made the ayatollahs sound risibly inept and hopelessly out of touch. The childishness of his expressions infantilized a genuinely vicious regime, painting it as more peevish than petrifying. Compared with the hair-raising language Trump has habitually used about immigrants in the US, his evocation of the Iranian menace was notably underpowered. He is good at conjuring monsters—this time he barely tried.

The idea that the Revolutionary Guard and Iranian armed forces should surrender their weapons in return for immunity is equally free of any objective correlative. It harks back to 1991 and 2003, when there were huge numbers of American and allied forces on the ground, in Kuwait and Iraq, to whom Iraqis could surrender. Whom now are they supposed to surrender to? A bomber pilot 50,000 feet above them? And who has the authority to grant members of the regime’s forces, who have committed atrocities against Iranians and foreign civilians, immunity from future prosecution? Trump told the Iranian people that their country is “yours to take.” How could they possibly take it without being free to act against those who have murdered and tortured with impunity, and how could it be theirs if crucial decisions about their future have already been made by Trump himself?

The most cynical of Trump’s retreads of the neoimperial past is his incitement of the Iranian people to rise up against the Islamic Republic. In echoing Bush’s call to the Iraqis in 1991, Trump was recycling a moment of great betrayal. Those Iraqis who believed America’s implied promise of support against Saddam paid for their naiveté with their blood. The US refused to give the rebels arms captured from the Iraqi regime’s forces, instead opting to destroy the weapons, return them to the regime, or (in a grotesque irony) give them to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The Americans had total dominance over Iraqi airspace but stood back as Saddam unleashed helicopter gunships on the rebels. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 Shias were killed, along with some 20,000 Kurds.

Even if young Iranians don’t remember what happened in Iraq thirty-five years ago, they certainly remember what happened in their own country earlier this year. On January 13 Trump posted a message to those engaged in mass protests against the regime in Tehran: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” He warned that there would be “very strong action” if the regime executed protesters. There was no action, and help was not on its way. The government massacred an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 protesters. This is the most gaping vacancy of all—Trump gestures toward two American incitements, one historic, one extremely recent. Both deployed words that were fatally empty of meaning.

These vacuities are part of a greater absence: there is no story. America’s wars beyond the Western Hemisphere have always been underpinned by grand narratives: making the world safe for democracy (World War I), defeating fascism (World War II), saving civilization from communism (Korea and Vietnam), upholding international law and the sovereignty of nations (Kuwait), responding to the atrocities of September 11 through the “war on terror” (Afghanistan and Iraq). Each of these stories had sufficient purchase on reality to command widespread initial (if by no means universal) consent. There seemed to be a cause large enough in its historic import to be worth killing and dying for. Even when, as with the invasion of Iraq, the stated rationale was quickly exposed as fraudulent, the drama of retaliation for September 11 and the reassertion of American power after the exposure of terrible vulnerability held their grip.

Insofar as Trump’s imperial posturing has a story line, it is supposed to be written in the National Security Strategy published in November. The tale it wants to tell is one of hemispheric hegemony: the US must control all of the Americas.1 Where does Iran fit into that script? Nowhere. Its significance is, in fact, dismissed in a few lines:

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.

Given that Trump never knowingly engages in understatement, this is a rare example of verbal deflation. The fake news to be discounted is those hyped-up headlines portraying Iran as anything other than a decisively weakened foe. Not only, moreover, is Iran less troublesome, but the whole region is becoming steadily less important to the US: “As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.” The broad scenario is one in which Iran is, at best, a minor blot in the rearview mirror as America’s interests move elsewhere.

There is no American narrative for this war because it is not primarily an American story. It belongs to Benjamin Netanyahu. He has long sought to frame the Iranian regime in the most extreme terms imaginable—as the successor to the Nazis. “As the Nazis strived to trample civilization and replace it with a ‘master race’ while destroying the Jewish people,” he said in a speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in 2015, “so is Iran striving to take over the region and expand further with a declared goal of destroying the Jewish state.”

As a political fable this is potent stuff. Doing a deal with a Nazi-like state in which it promises not to develop nuclear weapons—as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, together with Germany and the European Union, did that year—is delusional, since the supposed purpose of the Iranian state is, like Hitler’s Germany, the mass extermination of Jews. That deal had to be torn up, and in 2018 Trump duly withdrew the US from it.

But vile as the Islamic Republic may be, it is not remotely like Nazi Germany. The allegory serves a specific purpose: to preserve Israel’s monopoly on the possession of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Trump clearly doesn’t believe it, since his stated goal has been to make precisely the kind of bargain with Iran that the Nazi analogy is meant to preclude. The incoherence of Trump’s war aims is rooted in this gross discrepancy between his desire for a settlement with Iran—“We sought repeatedly to make a deal”—and Netanyahu’s vision of an apocalyptic battle in which the only possible outcomes are the binary opposites of absolute triumph or utter extinction. Trump’s playbook is The Art of the Deal; Netanyahu’s is the Book of Joshua.

There are, as a result, two different endgames for this war, one ultimately bureaucratic and diplomatic, the other existential. Trump started to threaten Iran again in recent months as a tactic for achieving the first. He has collapsed into the second, adapting Netanyahu’s existential dread as if it applied to the United States as much as to Israel. This means getting into a much more unbounded conflict than he seems to have imagined.

This is, in a sense, a proxy war, but one in which America is the proxy. It manifests overwhelming military strength but also stark political weakness. Marco Rubio’s admission that the US attacked Iran because it knew that Israel was about to do so—and thus feared that America would be a target of Iranian retaliation—depicts Trump not as a mighty leader but as a helpless follower. Instead of leaning on a rival boss, he is being led by Netanyahu into a generational conflict to remake the entire Middle East.

The dramatic first act of the war—the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and (according to Trump) another forty-seven senior officials “in one shot”—is a spectacular success that also exemplifies these contradictions. From an Israeli point of view, the more Iranian leaders killed, the better. Yet Trump told Jonathan Karl, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent, that his administration had identified possible leaders to replace Khamenei, but “the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” On March 3 Trump’s account tipped further into morbid farce: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead…. Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

In this telling, the war’s opening act was a literal overkill. Combined with self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth’s bizarre statement that “this is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change,” it suggests that from the very beginning America’s war stumbled over its intended limits. It was supposed to be a Venezuela-style operation in which the enemy leader was eliminated and replaced by a more compliant figure within the same regime. This new leader (of another oil-rich nation) would have been placed on notice that the US could and would kill him at any time if he disobeyed. Essentially, the Islamic Republic was to remain intact, except that now it would operate on license from Trump.

The terms and conditions of such a license most definitely do not include democracy or human rights. Hegseth has insisted that the objective of the war “doesn’t include nation-building or democracy building goals.” A free Iran is no part of the envisaged outcome. If the people were to rise up at the risk of being slaughtered, they would be doing so merely to put in place a government that would be free to maintain the same levels of internal repression and theocratic control, so long as its foreign policy remained acceptable to Washington. That is hardly a cause worthy of martyrdom.

Yet even this contradictory approach seems to have unraveled as soon as the war started. The old adage that no military plan survives first contact with the enemy has been given a new twist: first contact was not chastening but excessively efficacious. From the American point of view the almost instant wiping out of so much of the senior Iranian leadership raised the stakes beyond what Trump initially wanted. The limited goal of bringing the regime to heel expanded immediately into its unconditional surrender and potential annihilation. And this escalation occurred without the administration giving any prior thought to what the implosion of Iran might mean, either for its own citizens or for the wider region. Or what an unchecked air war directed by Netanyahu looks like: Gaza.

Here we see how the current problem of American military power lies not in its limits but in its virtual limitlessness. It is not just that the US military is vastly superior to that of any immediate battlefield opponent. It is that it’s untethered from the need to place a set of actions within a comprehensible story. For the first time in US history, American physical dominance is being fused with American political anarchy. Freed from all the entanglements that come with having to launch a ground invasion, air war can overfly not just morality and law but arguments, rationales, the calibration of risks to rewards and of suffering to satisfaction. Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends. Having ditched any larger claims (building democracy, fighting tyranny, advancing freedom), it is its own justification.

This cutting of the bonds that tie war making to grand geopolitical narratives is a kind of liberation. The agony of America’s post-1945 wars has been their gradual inducement of a sense of futility. The wars stop making sense, and thus the human and financial sacrifices come to seem pointless. What’s happening now under Trump is one sort of answer to the anguish and humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan in his first term. Wars can stop making sense only when they are supposed to make sense in the first place. They become pointless only when there is meant to be a clear point. Futility arises only when a stated goal is not being achieved in spite of all the anguish and effort. If there is no goal—or if, as now, there are so many contradictory objectives that they cancel one another out—nothing can be futile.

This negative logic is reinforced by Trump’s own psychological condition. The attack on Iran is what war making looks like in an authoritarian state: not politics by other means but the absence of politics by other means. It is another stage in the working through of a disinhibition that is both institutional (the Republican-dominated Congress refusing to fulfill its constitutional obligation to restrain executive power) and personal (the president’s combination of inherent narcissism with the effects of old age). As Trump told The New York Times in January, he regards himself as unfettered from all constraints except those of “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

One constraint that used to operate within Trump’s own mind was a squeamish reluctance to get blood on his hands, a fastidiousness about actual killing somewhat akin to his notorious germophobia. We know that this extended in his first term to the idea of bombing Iran. After the Iranians shot down an unmanned American surveillance drone in June 2019, he ordered retaliatory strikes. But when he was told there would likely be 150 casualties, he called the planes back. As he posted on what was then Twitter, “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights [sic] when I asked, how many will die.” Now the specifics of how many will die are no longer of concern to him: unnumbered deaths often happen in war.

It is obvious that making war is a useful distraction—for himself as well as for the world—from the Epstein scandal. But it is also now the purest form of self-pleasuring. Usually a president going to war is taking on burdens. Trump is shrugging them off, entering a state of weightlessness where all thought of consequences and all concern for mundane irritants like inflation and affordability are left behind. He declares war from his vacation home at Mar-a-Lago because it is a kind of leisure activity. Strikingly, in rebutting allegations that he will lose interest if the Iran adventure goes on too long, he used a term from his favorite hobby, golf. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” he told the New York Post. The yips are a sudden onset of nerves that cause a golfer to miss an easy putt.

What is weightless for Trump lies very heavy on the American republic. The anarchic nature of his war does not make it merely aberrant. The lurch from declaring fears about Iran to be mere media exaggerations to invoking imminent threat, from demanding the Nobel Peace Prize to luxuriating in lethality, is the essence of the autocrat’s monopoly on unpredictability.2 Self-contradiction is a test of loyalty: the sycophants will fall over themselves to justify the leader’s wisdom even when it is the opposite of yesterday’s wisdom. When the leader can make up a war as it goes along, his whims have become law.

Extreme violence is now a large part of this repertoire of arbitrariness. Trump has pushed domestic terror to the point where his agents can murder American citizens on the street without accountability. He is now pushing the use of overwhelming force abroad into a terrain where accountability becomes impossible because there are no clear objectives by which to distinguish purpose from pointlessness, right from wrong, success from failure. But what happens abroad does not stay abroad: one of the things Trump has never lied about is that for him the real war is on the home front. He is showing that he can declare it however and whenever he feels like it.

—March 12, 2026

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 1:36 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've been batting nearly 1.000 with my opinions since before election day 2024.

I happen to agree with this one too.

All we get from the "news" these days is editorialism anyhow. We don't actually get any real news from anyone anymore. That's why we're living in two separate realities concurrently.

I live in the 3rd reality. The REAL reality.

Maybe some of you would like to join me there one day instead of posting the daily bullshit noise that means absolutely nothing in the long run.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.

Pontificate means to express your opinions in a pompous, arrogant, or annoyingly self-important way. It is speaking at length as if you are always right and know more than everyone else, often acting like a "know-it-all".

Simple Examples:

"He loves to pontificate about politics, even though he never reads the news."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 2:24 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I think I know why Trump started this war now. But to reel back in history...

When Trump took over Venezuelan oil, it was clear he had an "inside man". Turns out (according to the WSJ) that inside man was Ali Moshiri, a CIA asset and former Chevron executive who had been embedded since the days of Hugo Chavez.

At the time, it seemed pretty clear to me that taking over Venezuela's oil was more about denying China (and Cuba) oil than it was about capturing the oil for our oil companies. Very much in line with Hong Kong company's forced sale of Panama port facilities.

It occurred to me that attempting regime change in Iran might have the same goal: denying China Iran's oil. But why did Trump think it was going to work?

It turns out that the CIA may have had an informant in Iran too: Esmail Qaani, a top general in Iran's Quds who managed to survive multiple decapitation strikes and who has been MIA for several days. Rumor has it that he had been IDd by either Russian or Chinese intelligence and was being used to feed false info to the Trump admin, which is why Trump was so confident that a decapitation would lead to military defections and mass revolt.

Look at the planned sequence of events:

Takeover of Venezuelan oil,
Takeover of Iranian oil....
Meeting with Xi Jinping.

It doesn't hurt that Trump's donors and advisors are rabid Zionists. Two birds, one stone.

What could possibly go wrong??

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 5:06 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A Top Official Just Quit in Protest of the Iran War. His Resignation Letter Reveals One of the Biggest Fallacies About Trump.

Kent has a long history of conspiratorial thinking that has twice cost him winnable congressional races.

By Jim Newell | March 17, 2026 3:47 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/03/joe-kent-resignation-lette
r-trump-iran-war-fail.html

Joe Kent, the Senate-confirmed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on Tuesday because he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.” It is the highest-profile protest resignation of the second Trump administration—during which there has been much to protest-resign over—and exposes the rift within MAGA over President Donald Trump’s keenness for warmaking.

Such a headline-grabbing move from an ideological ally of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, under whom Kent served, is welcome news to the war’s opponents. It should also be welcome news that Joe Kent is no longer serving in the United States government. Kent has a long history of conspiratorial thinking that has twice cost him winnable congressional races.

That’s on full display in his resignation letter. While it arrives at a conclusion held by a majority of Americans—what, exactly, is the point of this war?—the letter manages to absolve Trump of agency in his decision to strike. It suggests Trump had become changed, from the anti-war politician he once was to a manipulee of Israel. But he’s not the latter now, and he never was the former. Greenlighting the Iran war was a decision Trump made, free-thinkingly, based on how he’s always been, in pursuit of his own legacy.

Kent’s mistaken impression of Trump can maybe be explained a bit by his background. He is a former Green Beret who served 11 tours of duty, mostly in Iraq. His wife, who was in the Navy, was killed by a suicide bomber in 2019 during the war against the Islamic State. After the tragedy, Kent became more involved in politics.

He ran for Congress in 2022 in Washington, leaping at the opportunity to take down incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6 riots. He was successful in terms of taking down Herrera Beutler—but then narrowly lost the general election to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. (Two years earlier, in 2020, Herrera Beutler had carried the district for Republicans by 13 points.) Gluesenkamp Perez defeated Kent again in a 2024 rematch.

The double loss was largely attributable to Kent’s fringe-right views and ties. He was an election denier following the 2020 election, and had ties to white nationalists like Nick Fuentes and groups like the Proud Boys. He believes the FBI and intelligence community were involved in “planning/directing” the Jan. 6 riot, and suggested following the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on Trump that the Secret Service were either “in on” it or let it “happen.”

These views may have cost Kent two congressional races in a GOP-leaning seat, but they did earn him the favor of Tucker Carlson, Trump, and Gabbard, who hired him as her chief of staff at DNI before he was nominated to the NCTC. He was confirmed to that role last July in a nearly party-line vote in which all Republicans, excluding retiring North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, supported him.

Fast-forward eight months, and Kent portrays in his resignation letter a president who has been successfully coopted by dark and powerful forces that have led him astray from his previous anti-war commitments.

“Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” Kent writes. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.”

First things first: It’s a very welcome development in American political discourse over the last few years that people can criticize Israel without being immediately labeled antisemitic. But there is still a line. So who were these “influential members of the media” pushing this war? Is this the same media that’s getting yelled at every day by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for not loving the war enough? The same one threatened by the Federal Communications Commission into more enthusiastically waving its pompoms? It’s also fully ahistorical to say that Israel drew the United States into the Iraq war. That mythmaking was manufactured domestically.

Of course, it’s true that Israel lobbied Trump to attack Iran. But Israel has been lobbying American presidents for decades to take out Iran. Why did it only work this time?

President Trump is obsessed with besting other presidents, both Democrat and Republican, in part by doing things he felt they only talked about. Presidents have for decades called for regime change in Venezuela, so he abducted their leader. He is, at this moment, pushing to collapse the Cuban government, something presidents since John F. Kennedy have wanted. He took full credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, even if that wasn’t a politically wise thing to do, because no other Republican had been able to lock in the conservative Supreme Court majority he had. He’s trying to eliminate the Department of Education, something Republicans have used as a campaign line since the department was founded. He wants a deal to end the Ukraine-Russia war, even if the deal ends on bad terms, because President Joe Biden could not get one.

He has three years left in his term, and a lot of legacy bullet points he’d like to fill in. Taking out the Iranian regime, or the Iranian threat to American allies in the region, would be a biggie on that list. As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham—one of the war’s key proponents—repeatedly put it, toppling the Iranian regime would make him “Ronald Reagan Plus.” And so he’s doing it.

This has always been Trump’s psychological profile, and in his second term, he feels more comfortable in the job pressing previously unpressed buttons. It is not clear, as Kent writes in his letter, “that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” Instead, it’s that Iran hawks, including the current Israeli leadership, finally landed on a president willing to do it. This war is happening, for better or worse, because Trump is who Trump is—and what he wants to cram in during his few final years in power.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 8:37 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Based on reports from March 16-17, 2026, representatives for all four living former U.S. presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—stated that they have not spoken with Donald Trump recently and did not express approval for his actions regarding Iran.

• The Claim: During a lunch for Kennedy Center board members and later in the Oval Office, Donald Trump claimed a “former president" told him, "I wish I did it, I wish I did," in reference to military action against Iran.

• The Denials: Aides to all four living predecessors told CNN, the Associated Press, and NBC News that they had no such conversations with Trump.

• Details on Denials: An aide to George W. Bush confirmed they "haven't been in touch," a spokesperson for Bill Clinton denied the conversation, and an aide to Barack Obama stated no "recent conversations" took place.

• Trump's Response: When asked to identify the individual, Trump refused, saying it would be "very bad for his career" and later clarified, "it wasn't Bush".

Following the denials, multiple outlets reported that the conversation likely did not take place.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/17/politics/fact-check-trump-iran-war

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 11:15 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Based on reports from March 16-17, 2026, representatives for all four living former U.S. presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—stated that they have not spoken with Donald Trump recently and did not express approval for his actions regarding Iran.

They're all shit, so that's another feather in Trump's cap.

What now?

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 11:17 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:...

It occurred to me that attempting regime change in Iran might have the same goal: denying China Iran's oil. But why did Trump think it was going to work?

...

Yeah. I called that the other day myself. Even mentioned that I've never heard the Legacy Media say anything about that possibility too.

I believe my exact words were that Trump's plan was to bring China to heel.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 12:17 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:...

It occurred to me that attempting regime change in Iran might have the same goal: denying China Iran's oil. But why did Trump think it was going to work?

...

Yeah. I called that the other day myself. Even mentioned that I've never heard the Legacy Media say anything about that possibility too.

I believe my exact words were that Trump's plan was to bring China to heel.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.

That plan did NOT exist before Trump bombed Iran and wouldn't work if it did because everybody else in the world has less oil stored than China does.

Key details regarding China's crude storage:

• Total Capacity: Estimates vary but as of March 2026, storage is considered massive, with reports placing it around 1.2—1.3 billion barrels.

• Days of Cover: Most analysts estimate this covers roughly 110-140 days of net imports.

• Structure: Around 900 million barrels are held in state-controlled facilities (strategic), with another 400 million in commercial tanks.

• Recent Activity: China actively added to its reserves in late 2025 and early 2026, taking advantage of lower prices, according to Reuters and OilPrice.com.

• Storage Locations: Along with onshore tanks, a significant amount of oil is in floating storage (approx. 166 million barrels), particularly Iranian oil, according to CGEP and OilPrice.com.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 2:12 AM

Oh yeah? So what?

China uses 16.5 Million barrels per day. It also gets 91% of the 7 Million barrels that Kharg Island exports per day, which is 90% of Iran's total export output every day. And China was also getting 600k barrels from Venezuela every day.

Now it gets zero from both of those countries, which means that it's importing just a little above half as many barrels as it imported before 2026 started just from those two countries alone.

China will be burning through those reserves very quickly, and it will likely never get another barrel from Iran or Venezuela in the future.

You're a simple-minded moron who is only capable of thinking 15 minutes into the future, so I wouldn't expect you to be able to figure this one out on your own.

I guess I'll just staple another I Told You So to your forehead a year or so from now.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 3:22 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Nobody said the plan would work.

Neocons were convinced that once Russia was blocked from SWIFT it would fold. Or that Russian oligarchs would revolt et viola! Regime change!
Whooda thought Russia would turn it into a ghastly, attritional war??

Somebody in the Trump admin thought that if they decapitated Iran's government there would be a palace coup, et viola! Regime change! Whooda thunk Iran would turn it into a kinetic war?

The USA deep state thought they'd be fighting a financial and a political war, but whhoda thunk their targets would fight back kinetically and economically?

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 8:17 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh yeah? So what?

China uses 16.5 Million barrels per day. It also gets 91% of the 7 Million barrels that Kharg Island exports per day, which is 90% of Iran's total export output every day. And China was also getting 600k barrels from Venezuela every day.

Now it gets zero from both of those countries, which means that it's importing just a little above half as many barrels as it imported before 2026 started just from those two countries alone.

China will be burning through those reserves very quickly, and it will likely never get another barrel from Iran or Venezuela in the future.

You're a simple-minded moron who is only capable of thinking 15 minutes into the future, so I wouldn't expect you to be able to figure this one out on your own.

I guess I'll just staple another I Told You So to your forehead a year or so from now.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.

If China cannot buy crude from Iran and Venezuela, it will NOT just give up purchasing fuel. Instead, China will buy crude from other suppliers, who then won't be able to sell to, say, Japan/Taiwan/South Korea. China won't mind hurting those three. Trump cares even less than China about who he is hurting.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 8:20 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Nobody said the plan would work.

Neocons were convinced that once Russia was blocked from SWIFT it would fold. Or that Russian oligarchs would revolt et viola! Regime change!
Whooda thought Russia would turn it into a ghastly, attritional war??

Somebody in the Trump admin thought that if they decapitated Iran's government there would be a palace coup, et viola! Regime change! Whooda thunk Iran would turn it into a kinetic war?

The USA deep state thought they'd be fighting a financial and a political war, but whhoda thunk their targets would fight back kinetically and economically?

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

There are many reasons Trump wanted war. Here are some more:

Donald Trump, Petropresident
Follow the Gulf oil money
Paul Krugman
Mar 18, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-petropresident

Why did Donald Trump attack Iran? Did he believe that a quick victory would boost his poll ratings? Was he looking for a way to change the subject from the Epstein files and affordability? Was he seduced into war by the Israeli government?

The answer, surely, is all of the above. Bad decisions don’t have to have a single explanation. In fact, debacles on the scale of what we’re now experiencing usually have multiple causes.

But when I look into the larger picture of Trump administration policy — not just the attack on Iran but domestic policies, especially the administration’s seemingly irrational hatred of renewable energy and its determination to keep America burning fossil fuels no matter what — I keep coming back to the huge influence now being wielded by oil money.

I don’t mostly mean the domestic U.S. oil industry, although them too. The U.S. oil and gas sector spent large sums helping Republicans in the 2024 election, while giving very little to Democrats.

But what really stands out is the centrality of oil money from the Persian Gulf, money that has been crucial in two areas: Trump’s international economic schemes and his personal enrichment.

One recurrent theme in Trump’s economic speeches has been boasting about the size of the foreign investment pledges he has received as part of his tariff strategy. “In 12 months,” he declared in the State of the Union, “I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.”

Nobody knows where that $18 trillion number, which he uses all the time, comes from. The actual announced pledges by foreign governments to invest in the U.S. add up to only about $6 trillion, and many of these pledges are vague statements of intent rather than serious commitments. Indeed, the deal with Europe may well be unraveling in part because Trump’s tariffs have been ruled illegal.

But what’s especially interesting is who has made these investment pledges, such as they are:

Each of the major Gulf petrostates has pledged to invest more than the whole European Union, even though they have far smaller economies. Here’s another visualization:

So when Trump boasts about the foreign investment he’s bringing to America, the reality is mostly that Gulf petrostates have said — with dubious credibility — that they will make big investments. That puts his boasts in a somewhat different light, doesn’t it?

And then there’s Trump’s relentless use of his office to enrich himself and his family. As the New York Times editorial board has documented, Trump has raked in at least $1.4 billion since returning to the White House. The biggest single piece of that total is Qatar’s gift to him of a $400 million jet. Most of the rest has come from sales of cryptocurrency. We don’t know who the buyers of Trump crypto are, but it seems likely that Gulf oil money has accounted for a large share. The Wall Street Journal reports that an Abu Dhabi royal secretly invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial, the center of the Trump crypto empire.

Meanwhile Jared Kushner, the First Son-in-Law, has been acting as one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators on the Middle East while also raising large sums of money for his personal investment firm from investors in the region, especially the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund. That fund is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely believed to have had a critical journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered with a bone saw.

Why does Gulf oil money play an outsized role in U.S. corruption? Because petrostates, unlike advanced democracies, combine vast wealth with secrecy and a complete blurring of the lines between public office and private gain. So they’re better placed than anyone else to line U.S. officials’ pockets.

Foreign oil money, then, has been central to both the Trump administration’s economic schemes and Trump’s personal financial schemes. What has that money bought in terms of U.S. policy?

I’ve mentioned the Trump administration’s fanatical hostility to renewable energy. Like the Iran war, this hostility surely has multiple causes. Trump himself is still angry about the offshore wind farm that is visible from his Scotland golf course. Many MAGA types clearly think of wind and solar power as woke and unmanly; real men drill, baby, drill and burn, baby, burn. But suppressing alternatives to fossil fuels is also in the interests of governments and dynasties whose wealth is all about fossil fuels.

As the Guardian notes,

For decades, Saudi Arabia has fought harder than any other country to block and delay international climate action – a diplomatic “wrecking ball” saying that abandoning fossil fuels is a fantasy.

So the Trump administration’s energy policy can be seen as what Prince bin Salman would do if he were in charge. Is he?

Finally, about the war: As the bombing began, the Washington Post reported that foreign influence — and not just from Israel — played a role:

President Donald Trump launched Saturday’s wide-ranging attack on Iran after a weeks-long lobbying effort by an unusual pair of U.S. allies in the Middle East — Israel and Saudi Arabia — according to four people familiar with the matter, as Israeli and U.S. forces teamed to topple Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei after nearly four decades in power.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack, despite his public support for a diplomatic solution.

At this point bin Salman is surely regretting his role in promoting the war. But being corrupt and good at corrupting others is not the same thing as being smart.

Again, it’s a mistake to look for monocausal explanations of this debacle. But if you want to understand Operation Epic FUBAR, don’t forget to follow the oil money.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 8:57 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What is next? Will Trump torpedo supertankers? Great idea? Or is Trump stupid enough to do it?

Iran's oil exports continue as tankers cross the Strait of Hormuz despite conflict

By Doloresz Katanich with AP
Published on 18/03/2026 - 9:23 GMT+1

https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/03/18/iran-oil-exports-continue
-as-tankers-cross-the-strait-of-hormuz-despite-conflict

Iran keeps oil flowing, despite continued attacks aimed at one of the world’s most critical trade routes.

About 90 ships, including oil tankers, have crossed the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the conflict with Iran.

The country continues to export millions of barrels of oil despite the waterway being effectively closed — and Iran claiming it will attack tankers attempting to cross — according to maritime and trade data.

Many of the vessels were engaged in so-called “dark” transits, evading Western sanctions and oversight, and are likely to have links to Iran, maritime data firm Lloyd’s List Intelligence said.

More recently, vessels linked to India and Pakistan have also crossed the strait, as governments step up negotiations.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 12:22 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done

Allied leaders know that any positive gesture they make will count for nothing.

By Anne Applebaum | March 17, 2026, 3:35 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/trump-iran-war-allies/686423/

Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.

For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States. Surely, the foreign-policy analysts murmured, Trump thinks beyond the current moment. Surely, foreign statesmen whispered, he adheres to some ideology, some pattern, some plan. Words were thrown around—isolationism, imperialism—in an attempt to place Trump’s actions into a historical context. Solemn articles were written about the supposed significance of Greenland, for example, as if Trump’s interest in the Arctic island were not entirely derived from the fact that it looks very large on a Mercator projection.

This week, something broke. Maybe Trump does not understand the link between the past and the present, but other people do. They can see that, as a result of decisions that Trump made but cannot explain, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by Iranian mines and drones. They can see oil prices rising around the world and they understand that it is difficult and dangerous for the U.S. Navy to solve this problem. They can also hear the president lashing out, as he has done so many times before, trying to get other people to take responsibility, threatening them if they don’t.

NATO faces a “very bad” future if it doesn’t help clear the strait, Trump told the Financial Times, apparently forgetting that the United States founded the organization and has led it since its creation in 1949. He has also said he is not asking but ordering seven countries to help. He did not specify which ones. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way from Florida to Washington. “It’s the place from which they get their energy.” Actually it isn’t their territory, and it’s his fault that their energy is blocked.

But in Trump’s mind, these threats are justified: He has a problem right now, so he wants other countries to solve it. He doesn’t seem to remember or care what he said to their leaders last month or last year, nor does he know how his previous decisions shaped public opinion in their countries or harmed their interests. But they remember, they care, and they know.

Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any cards.” Trump ridiculed Canada as the “51st state” and referred to both the present and previous Canadian prime ministers as “governor.” He claimed, incorrectly, that allied troops in Afghanistan “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” causing huge offense to the families of soldiers who died fighting after NATO invoked Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, on behalf of the United States, the only time it has done so. He called the British “our once-great ally,” after they refused to participate in the initial assault on Iran; when they discussed sending some aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf conflict earlier this month, he ridiculed the idea on social media: “We don’t need people that join Wars after ?we’ve already won!"

At times, the ugly talk changed into something worse. Before his second inauguration, Trump began hinting that he wouldn’t rule out using force to annex Greenland, a territory of Denmark, a close NATO ally. At first this seemed like a troll or a joke; by January 2026, his public and private comments persuaded the Danes to prepare for an American invasion. Danish leaders had to think about whether their military would shoot down American planes, kill American soldiers, and be killed by them, an exercise so wrenching that some still haven’t recovered. In Copenhagen a few weeks ago, I was shown a Danish app that tells users which products are American, so that they know not to buy them. At the time it was the most popular app in the country.

The economic damage is no troll either. Over the course of 2025, Trump placed tariffs on Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea, often randomly—or again, whimsically—and with no thought to the impact. He raised tariffs on Switzerland because he didn’t like the Swiss president, then lowered them after a Swiss business delegation brought him presents, including a gold bar and a Rolex watch. He threatened to place 100 percent tariffs on Canada should Canada dare to make a trading agreement with China. Unbothered by possible conflicts of interest, he conducted trade negotiations with Vietnam, even as his son Eric Trump was breaking ground on a $1.5 billion golf-course deal in that country.

Europeans might have tolerated the invective and even the trade damage had it not been for the real threat that Trump now poses to their security. Over the course of 14 months, he has, despite talking of peace, encouraged Russian aggression. He stopped sending military and financial aid to Ukraine, thereby giving Vladimir Putin renewed hope of victory. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, began openly negotiating business deals between the United States and Russia, although the war has not ended and the Russians have never agreed to a cease-fire. Witkoff presents himself to European leaders as a neutral figure, somewhere between NATO and Russia—as if, again, the United States were not the founder and leader of NATO, and as if European security were of no special concern to Americans. Trump himself continues to lash out at Zelensky and to lie about American support for Ukraine, which he repeatedly describes as worth $300 billion or more. The real number is closer to $50 billion, over three years. At current rates, Trump will spend that much in three months in the Middle East, in the course of starting a war rather than trying to stop one.

The result: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared that Canada will not participate in the “offensive operations of Israel and the U.S., and it never will.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius says, “This is not our war, and we didn’t start it.” The Spanish prime minister refused to let the United States use bases for the beginning of the war. The U.K. and France might send some ships to protect their own bases or allies in the Gulf, but neither will send their soldiers or sailors into offensive operations started without their assent.

This isn’t cowardice. It’s a calculation: If allied leaders thought that their sacrifice might count for something in Washington, they might choose differently. But most of them have stopped trying to find the hidden logic behind Trump’s actions, and they understand that any contribution they make will count for nothing. A few days or weeks later, Trump will not even remember that it happened.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 4:11 PM