Trump announces demise of Operation Unshit The Bed, aka 'Project Freedom'

On Sunday, Donald Trump announced Operation Unshit The Bed, a confusing plan that the White House decided to call "Project Freedom" for marketing purposes.

On Monday, the operation began. In our own coverage we noted the extreme lack of apparent planning in the plan: Aside from two US-flagged ships that were given a destroyer escort through the Strait of Hormuz, with the destroyers coming under Iranian attack but not, or so the U.S. side claims, sustaining damage, the plan for the rest of the 800 or so ships stuck in the Persian Gulf amounted to "Here's our rough idea of where the mines are, how about you all sail through and if it doesn't work out we'll avenge your deaths or whatever."

Iran responded by firing not only on the destroyers, but on other merchant ships in the region and on infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates, one of the nations most aggressively pushing the U.S. to continue the war.

Tuesday, the administration sent out putative Secretary of State Marco Rubio to defend this half-assed Trumpian attempt to goad ships through the strait. Ol' Boat Shoes was not, of course, able to provide a more coherent explanation of why maritime insurers should trust Trump's assurances that they should send ships through the strait when Iran was actively firing on ships that tried it. The most he could do was row to the podium, hurl a lot of weird and unfortunate insults at the Iranian regime, and float off again.

Have you ever before heard a supposed Secretary of State tell another government they "should check themselves before they wreck themselves?" No. No, you have not. Most human beings credentialed enough to take on the position would curl up and die of humiliation. Only Marco, the incredible shrinking man, could manage it.

"The top people in that government are insane in the brain," Marco opined at another point. We've noted before that this administration has uncannily managed to produce a team in which no cabinet member appears to know what their job is and instead random administration members are assigned to random tasks, game-show style; it seems Rubio now believes his job is World's Worst Rapper. He is Biggie Shoes, and he has a beef to pick with the ayatollahs and their, um, shipping tollas.

So that was Tuesday afternoon: Marco Rubio humiliating himself to defend a half-assed non-plan that had already failed within hours of its supposed start. Possibly while drunk.

He was rewarded for his efforts a mere four hours later, when Trump announced that he was calling off Operation Unshit The Bed for now, supposedly because "Great Progress" had been made in negotiations to unshit his sheets via multilateral agreement. Or something like that; mostly it's all lies and bullshit.

So as of Wednesday afternoon, that is where we are back to. Trump is back to once again signaling generic progress in getting Iran to accept his surrender, with the major sticking point being how much he has to give up to achieve some semblance of what the Obama-era agreement with Iran already provided—and whether Iran will be able to toll shipping through the strait for the indefinite future with the justification that its attackers pay for Iran's reconstruction.

Of course, these "negotiations" might turn out to be mostly a setup for another round of administration insider trading. funny how that keeps happening!

So here is our theme for today: How is it that the United States can find itself embroiled in what appears to be its worst act of military incompetence in perhaps all of its history, and yet continue to have shown zero serious attempts to limit the damage or rein in the incompetents responsible?

The short answer is, as always, that it's because we currently have with certainty the most corrupt Congress in the nation's history. No doubt about it; from billion dollar ballrooms to celebration of a violent coup attempt to the nonstop lawlessness and bribe-o-ramas infecting Republicanism's every crevice, the Johnson Congress is uniquely indifferent to corruption, sabotage, and ineptitude.

But there needs to be a more detailed explanation than that, because "Congress decided it didn't give a shit" is not by itself sufficient for the history books. What we're seeing here is a level of incompetence and fraud that would normally see half of the Pentagon summoned to testify to Congress. We are only now seeing the extent of the damage that has been done by Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio, and it is already staggering.

A U.S. official said that damage at the Naval Support Activity [in Bahrain] is "extensive" and that the headquarters there relocated to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, the home of U.S. Central Command. It is unlikely that the troops, contractors, or civilian employees will return to the base "anytime soon," the official said.

Two other officials said U.S. forces may never return to regional bases in large numbers, though no final decision has been made.

Indeed, Hegseth and Trump may have accomplished in a matter of days what anti-American movements in the Middle East have been unable to accomplish in decades: Driving U.S. military bases out of the region, both due to their now-proven vulnerability and to U.S. allies rethinking the wisdom of allowing the U.S. to stage attacks from within their borders, drawing them into each fight.

Rubio sniffed at the supposed "insane" Iranian leaders who are drawing out the war and preventing Trump from his planned triumphal escape, but Iran has at every point acted exactly as a rational actor would. Iran was known to have significant missile and drone capabilities, and the likelihood of at least some successful counterattacks was known to U.S. military planners from the beginning. Military strategists predicted that Iran could use the Strait of Hormuz as bargaining chip, blocking Gulf oil shipments and causing world economic chaos if attacked. All of it was known; all of it was planned for, in plans that Trump and Hegseth apparently lacked the patience to read.

Sanity can be measured in part by predictability; if an actor responds to an event in the same manner that most actors of similar savvy could be expected to respond, then they can hardly be called irrational. Insanity is attempting a dangerous thing that any knowledgable observer knows to be dangerous, and then acting angry and surprised when the outcome is exactly what had been predicted.

The Trump-Hegseth-Rubio execution of this "not"-war has been, to use Rubio's own term, insane. It started with an apparently Trump-headed belief that Iran, a significant regional military power, would respond to a major military campaign against it, the assassination of its top leaders, and a demand for "unconditional surrender" by taking no significant action. It was premised in part on the notion that if top Iranian government officials were killed, some of them in their homes and with their families, that the survivors would be more amenable to establishing relations with the United States rather than less. It was theorized that the Iranian population would rise up, in response to being bombed by an enemy force, and topple their own government.

At every stage of the supposed United States plan, civilian military leaders in the U.S. presumed that Iran would not respond in the way military experts predicted they would; at every stage, Iran did the expected, leaving U.S. leaders unable to competently respond.

Even now, the best administration plan for reopening the Strait of Hormuz amounted to "tell ships to go through and presume that Iran will not respond to or dispute the attempt." And it lasted less than 48 hours before being abandoned again, because it was an insane plan to begin with.

There is a reason that Operation Unshit The Bed could not be continued. The United States can certainly send destroyers into the Persian Gulf to escort ships, and those destroyers can be tasked with escorting unarmed ships through the strait. But Iran has more land-based missiles and drones than these destroyers have anti-missile and anti-drone ammunition, so such escort missions are operationally doomed the moment Iran proves a willingness to attack.

At every step, this same administration presumption continues: Iran will not do the thing that it is obviously in its best interests to do, because Captain Ballroom and his top cabinet hires believe their adversaries would not dare insult them by doing such a thing. Then the thing happens, and U.S. leaders are paralyzed, too confused to even put forward a response.

If there is an insane side to this war, it is the side that is treating a shooting war as if it were just another real estate con to be run.

It really can't be stressed enough that the administration's execution of this war is going to have catastrophic economic effects. Those effects are coming. Right now, international oil reserves are being drawn down in an attempt to insulate economies from the full price hikes that would be seen otherwise: Eventually, that oil will run out. Jet fuel price increases cost U.S. passenger airlines an additional $1.8 billion in March alone, a 56% increase.

Americans will not be protected against such shortages. U.S. oil producers are enjoying massive profits as European and Asian markets turn to American fuel sources as stopgap, with exports increasing over 20% from last year's levels. That's already squeezing U.S. markets.

“This is getting ugly for the administration,” said Robert Yawger, a commodity specialist at Mizuho Securities. “If gasoline gets to $5 they may have to pull the export ban card out.”

If the blockade of the strait continues, a JP Morgan report estimates that global oil supplies will fall to crisis levels by September.

All of this is going on, and the administration continues to sell the war as if it were not an unmitigated failure. They consider this a public relations exercise, not a military action. And they seem to think they can smug-grin their way through the Find Out stage.

Oh good. Soaring credit card debts. Always the sign of a healthy, not-already-in-a-recession economy.

There remains only one likely way out of this: Trump has been signaling his eagerness to surrender ever since it became clear the new Iranian government would press the fight, and it almost certain he will at some point decide he's had enough, sign whatever deal Iran is willing to give him, and announce it as a supposed great victory. It's what we're all expecting, Congress included. It is why Wall Street is continuing to pretend that everything is normal. Everyone is waiting to see which iteration of Operation Unshit The Bed Trump will declare good enough, and if it results in semipermanent Iranian control of the strait then he, for one, will not care.

But is there really no appetite at all for an accounting of how we got here? For how we entered into a military fiasco that makes the Bay of Pigs look masterful in comparison?

These idiots, likely high on the fumes of their risky but successful Venezuelan decapitation raid, launched America into a war with a regional power while ignoring every possible risk of that operation. These idiots confessed to not taking the single most consequential risk to the global economy into account, and remain flabbergasted as to how to even manage the subsequent American retreat.

That is the definition of insanity, Secretary Boat Shoes. And if this Congress is too corrupt to investigate it, hopefully a new Congress will not be.