Iran War Update: Not to alarm anyone, but have we considered that Donald Trump may be the Antichrist

Trying to summarize the state of Donald Trump's new war with Iran keeps proving to be exceedingly difficult. Not because the events themselves are complex; on the contrary, events keep playing out pretty much exactly as military, economic, and diplomatic experts predicted they would.

No, what's been uncanny about each day's developments is Trump's own ability to always choose the worse option, at every new point in which he is presented with one. And it goes beyond the usual Trump incompetence, the incompetence that allowed him to bankrupt a casino, or the incompetence that has had him forever grasping for the cheapest grifts—mail-order steak, branded bottled water, a ridiculous fake "university"—when his big enormous brain can't come up with any better ideas for how a supposed billionaire is supposed to do his bidness.

Mere incompetence would lead to unpredictable decisions. Some would end up good, some bad, others a wash. There would at least be accidental victories, here and there, just by luck of the draw. That is not, however, what Donald has actually been delivering. Every day, every evening, the man finds himself with a new tactical or strategic decision to make, in this war of his own choosing—and always chooses the worse choice. He always chooses the path that will make the resulting energy crisis much worse. Always the choice that will harden Iranian resolve, escalate the Iranian responses, boost international terrorism, and cause the most worldwide economic destruction.

We have long thought Trump's poor decision-making to be evidence of a nearly unbounded incompetence, but as Trump's little war keeps escalating, we have to admit that there may be more to it than that. Incompetence would not result in the worst of multiple options always being picked; sheer luck would preclude it.

No, what Trump has is something different. Trump's ability to make everything he touches worse is so consistent that probes the boundaries of the supernatural. He empowered Elon Musk to destroy the world's most effective humanitarian aid program, causing deaths that will number in the millions. He chose Robert Kennedy Jr. as his proxy in the fields of health and medicine, and Robert quickly began dismantling the technologies that hold back new plagues.

His aides are now literally parading around in clown shoes, as each worst possible choice burns their departments to ashes around them. And now, a new war seemingly launched from an old man's gastric dreams has quickly escalated to the level of existential global crisis. For nothing.

Listen, I don't even believe in "the Antichrist." At this point, though, it's almost more implausible to believe that a single repulsive man-child could so effectively unleash war, famine, pestilence, plague, and $5 gasoline without some sort of supernatural assistance.

Is there a blood test that would solve this riddle? Is there some question a reporter could put to him that would prove, for certain, that this man is not a lump of brimstone-stinking evil summoned from darkling realms?

Because if there is, we should get on that, and the sooner the better.

Having said that, here's a muddied update on current events:

The Strait of Hormuz

...remains effectively closed, and will remain closed for the foreseeable future. With successful attacks on a handful of ships in the last week, Iran has shown its capability to strike ships and ports throughout the Persian Gulf; whether or not individual captains do or don't want to risk travel through the strait is of little consequence compared to whether maritime insurance providers want to take the same risks, and so far there's been nothing coming from Washington or elsewhere that might persuade them to make the gamble.

The profit from a single oil shipment is substantial, but not when weighed against the now-proven threat of losing an entire supertanker. So it ain't happening.

This was always the key danger posed by a major attack on Iran, one known by every player because it's been bloody obvious and a repeated and explicit Iranian threat. Trump and his top aides appear to have unilaterally dismissed such warnings based on their own gut instincts, which it should be noted are the same gut instincts that have half the cabinet wandering around in oversized clown shoes for Dear Leader's personal amusement.

The calculations, though, are simple. Iran doesn't need to damage every boat heading in and out of the gulf, or even half of them, or even one in a hundred. It just needs to prove a capability and willingness to destroy some, at which point the major shippers and their insurance companies run their numbers and decide that no, actually, they would rather not spin the Wheel of Fiery Death until that risk has passed. Iran proved it has such capabilities, so the boats aren't going through.

That's bumped oil prices to $100 a barrel, and some experts have warned that even $200 per barrel is possible if the gulf remains closed for an extended period. Whoops.

And this is where the fundamental asymmetry comes in. To close off the gulf and inflict the sort of serious global pain that might cause a U.S. retreat and a begrudging new world acknowledgement of Iranian sovereignty, Iran needs only to show a continued capability to target a few ships. There is very little the U.S. can do to assure ships can always cross safely, however, and every such option is both tremendously expensive and an opportunity for Iran to lure the U.S. into a far more painful conflict.

Providing a military escort for each tanker wanting to risk passage? That would require hundreds of U.S. military ships, and each of them would become targets for the same drones and missiles threatening the tankers themselves. Casualties would be inevitable.

Halting Iran's ability to deploy those drones to begin with? The most realistic plan to do that, and it's still not very realistic, is a ground invasion and the seizure of ... the entire Iranian coastline. Which now brings U.S. troops into the most advantageous possible position for Iranian drones and missiles hidden elsewhere.

Trump has managed to put the United States military in the precise no-win situation military planners had long feared. For as long as the Iranian military still has drones and missiles to deploy, Iran can set the terms of the U.S. engagement. Either the U.S. commits massive resources to rooting out every last Iranian weapon, or Trump eventually declares an imaginary victory and runs away, leaving Iran squarely in charge of whether and when the oil spigots get turned back on.

Did I mention clown shoes? Clown shoes, baby.

Fortunately, the worst scenario has not yet come to pass. Iran benefits from the strait being open as much as anyone, with Iranian tankers still freely coming and going even as the gulf's other tankers sit parked for fear of attack. So long as Iranian oil can continue to flow, it is not in Iran's interest to completely shut off the strait by flooding it with mines. Mines don't discriminate; they don't care which flag a ship is flying.

The ability to export its own oil is the only thing keeping Iran from mining the strait indiscriminately. So long as Iran's primary export hub, on Kharg Island, remains operational, it's not likely to happen.

Kharg Island

Yeah, so: Funny we should mention that.

Oh. Goodie. That's Donald Trump on Friday, announcing via social media post (as one does) that he had launched "one of the most powerful bombing raids in the History of the Middle East," which "obliterated every MILITARY target" on the island.

Now, both of those things can't be true, of course. Either it wasn't one of the most powerful bombing raids ever, or it didn't only obliterate "MILITARY" sites, because—you know what, never mind.

Even after emphasizing that he had graciously allowed the island's oil infrastructure to remain untouched, he immediately followed up with a threat to destroy it next, if Iran didn't stop cruelly having agency of their own. He's continued to make similar threats, further escalating the possibility that the war will devolve on both sides into mass attacks on Gulf oil infrastructure and an extended, possibly very very extended, global oil crisis.

And that is because Trump is a child, and not a good child but one of those "bad seed" children with glowing eyes and an immaterial wire in his head connecting him to Hell's central switchboard. The man genuinely doesn't give a damn what damage he does, so long as he feels personal emotional gratification.

So that's the new major escalation on our side. Well, one of them.

Trump rails against the world

Having thrown himself into a perfectly foreseeable quagmire entirely of his own making, our Donald is now doing what Donald does every time he does something catastrophically stupid: He's demanding that everybody else in the world come fix things on his behalf.

And, as always, it is deeply embarrassing. The United States will never live down these humiliations. We will from here on in be treated as a nation of belligerent idiots, and from here on in we won't be able to argue against it. We have a whole legislative branch that in theory operates as a check on any theoretical mad king who would turn this nation into his masturbatory plaything; they could put a stop to all of this with no more than a day's notice; they instead seem to have misplaced themselves. There's no coming back from that.

If the demand that the United Kingdom, in particular, pop in to do an abstract something that will reopen the strait sounds a bit odd, it's because a week ago this same ignorant goofus was publicly mocking the UK and warning them that "we will remember" yada yada yada.

God, what a dipshit. I mean that sincerely. I will never understand what kind of person can remain a Republican after watching this clown-painted pedophilic vulgarian careen from tantrum to tantrum each and every day of the week. This whole country is suffering from a gas leak.

More to the point, Trump still doesn't seem to understand that if he wants the help of all the countries that he has relentlessly abused since first gliding down that tacky gold escalator, he has to at the very least present them with a plan that is, at minimum, achievable. What are these nations supposed to do, on our behalf? Escort tankers? That only puts their own warships in the line of fire. Join the U.S. bombing campaign, the one they were never consulted on in the first place? Not bloody likely.

There's the whole problem: There's not just a plan, there's no concept of a plan. Nobody wants to send their navy to Donald's "let's all get shot at" pajama party.

Instead, Trump is once again just lashing out, whining and enraged, looking for a solution to the problem he insisted wouldn't be a problem because, again: Evil Clown Child.

Or, possibly, Evil Clown Antichrist, here to hasten the collapse of the whole damned world.

Can the shipping crisis get worse? It can definitely get worse

Presented without comment:

We'll add one comment: This, too, was not unforeseen. For years, Iran has spent substantial resources on building allied and proxy groups throughout the region. The odds of an unprovoked assault on Iran not devolving into a wider regional war were never more than trivial.

U.S. ground troops are now on their way

Keeping with our theme of Donald Trump always choosing the worst of all possible paths, there are now U.S. ground troops headed for the region.

What will they be doing? It's unclear. It's possible that they're being sent there for no better reason than to become missile bait, given the tactical clusterbungling we've seen in every other White House decision.

A Marine expeditionary unit with 2,200 Marines aboard three U.S. Navy amphibious ships is being ordered to the Middle East, according to two U.S. officials.

The 31st MEU is permanently deployed to Japan and operates in the INDO-PACOM region, but it is now being ordered to head to the Middle East.

When it comes to the task those 2,200 Marines will be charged with, speculation is rampant. One likely scenario is ... hoo boy. A decided escalation.

U.S. airstrikes have forced the Iranians to forego their larger naval vessels and deploy fast boats carrying mines that can evade aircraft. These boats would likely launch from an archipelago of islands closer to the strait.

With the arrival of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit from the Indo-Pacific region in the coming days, the Pentagon will be able to quickly launch raids onto the islands with infantry Marines who will have logistics and air support, said a retired senior defense official with knowledge of the unit’s capabilities.

In this plan, Marines would be staged just off the Iranian coast, ready to launch immediate amphibious assaults if Iranian mine-laying boats or other military assets are detected. That means setting those Marines down on a beach, having them shoot whatever needs shooting, and retrieving them afterwards.

You will note, however, that this is precisely the sort of small-scale U.S. incursion that Iranian strategists have been attempting to goad the United States into. Ambushing U.S. ships and troops gets exponentially easier the closer those assets are to Iranian soil, and Iran's wartime strategy is not to fight the vastly superior U.S. military face-to-face, but to use opportunistic small strikes to inflict military and economic damage where it can.

The Iranian belief is that the U.S. administration, particularly this U.S. administration, won't be able to stomach the sinking of even a handful of ships, much less a successful strike against U.S. ground forces. They may be quite willing to deprioritize attacks on Gulf shipping if Trump is going to present them a much more favorable and more symbolically significant target.

Unfortunately for the soldiers involved, Trump too may consider the death of a few hundred U.S. soldiers to be a small price to pay in exchange for letting ships slip by the strait. The man quite conspicuously does not give a shit.

Israel now readying major ground invasion of Lebanon

Israel is continuing to use Trump's war to full advantage, launching continued military strikes in Lebanon in what now appears to be the preparatory steps for a full and "massive" ground invasion of the country.

Israel is planning to significantly expand its ground operation in Lebanon, aiming to seize the entire area south of the Litani River and dismantle Hezbollah's military infrastructure, Israeli and U.S. officials say. [...]

"We are going to do what we did in Gaza," a senior Israeli official said, referring to the flattening of buildings Israel says Hezbollah uses to store weapons and launch attacks.

Israel claims to have full U.S. backing for the ground assault. The U.S. is ... not denying it.

So there's your wider regional war.

There is a lot to be said for the theory that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played Donald Trump like a flute, in luring the U.S. into a regional war that Netanyahu has been clamoring for over the last quarter century. Netanyahu has successfully manipulated U.S. governments since the Iraq War, and hasn't been subtle in his own attempts to boost American hardliners (Republicans) while acting as foil to Democratic presidents. The two things the man does well are (1) manipulating U.S. leaders and (2) being crooked as sin, if you believe the still-ongoing Israeli indictment against him.

What's next?

If I'm remembering right, the next step is for U.S. forces to deploy to the plains of Armageddon, ushering in the apocalypse—which is sure to raise gas prices above $8 a gallon, I'll tell you that much.

Short of that, however, Donald Trump is faced with the same decision he has been faced with this whole time. Iran's military may be shredded, but Trump has managed to construct a scenario in which he is not in charge of what happens next. Even if he declares victory and runs, Iran has plenty of reasons to continue their campaign against Gulf shipping until they extract new promises from neighboring states to disallow future U.S. military incursions from their soil.

What would U.S. victory look like, now that Trump has launched his baffling new war? Nobody can say. There isn't a scenario for U.S. victory here, only options that leave the nation less respected, less militarily capable, and less diplomatically consequential than it was even two weeks ago. It's chaos.

Given Trump's ability to discern and pursue whatever course of action is most sure to damage America, we can only speculate that he's going to task several thousand marines with protecting the entire Persian Gulf, it's going to be a clusterfuck, and a lot of people are going to die while he slouches around golf courses working up the courage to turn tail and abandon the whole operation.

But even that's still probably underestimating how much the man loves damaging this country, so he'll probably come up with something worse.