Mullah, Mullah, You’d Better Stall, Says the Dumbest One of All
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 8
Today’s post on The Raspberry Patch is the 78th since standing up this Substack on January 4, 2024. Nearly all of the posts have been long-form essays on a single theme, and that includes the 46 Age of Spectacle posts. Today’s post is more blog-like, less focused around just one main idea. Not that it lacks seriousness, or ideas, or references back to themes that regular TRP readers will, hopefully, recognize. But it is more skim-worthy because it jumps around a bit from topic to topic. I won’t mind if you skim, largely because many of you won’t be able to help doing that (see below), and anyway I won’t know, will I? But just to be a little playful, I’m not going to signpost what’s coming.….
Before we get started in earnest, as earlier promised, I tell TRP readers when I’ve published outside of this Substack. I wrote a gloss on the March 28 post—“Firehose Authoritarianism and Gnostic MAGA: Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 5” for my friends in Singapore: “The Trump 2.0 Administration’s First Eighty Days,” RSIS Commentary 073/2025, 9 April 2025. The RSIS Commentary piece, weighing in at only 1,300 words, is a bit updated by dint of reality continuing to pour forth, in this case tariff “Liberation Day” of April 2. But only a bit; TRP readers needn’t take pains to seek it out.
פרייַנד גוטער אַ איז בוך אַ [the words are backwards....I can't fix it]“A good book is like a good friend,” wrote Charlie Lovett—children’s playwright and Lewis Carroll expert—in his 2014 book First Impressions. “It will stay with you for the rest of your life. When you first get to know it, it will give you excitement and adventure, and years later it will provide you with comfort and familiarity.” Thus did Lovett elaborate—wow, try saying that ten times fast……—a well-known Yiddish saying, except that the Yiddish is not a simile but a full-fledged metaphor. Well right; but Lovett and the Yiddishists were talking about books other people wrote, not a book he himself or they wrote. And that’s a distinction with a difference.
So then, speaking of The Age of Spectacle manuscript, I’m now going through the entire thing one more time, on screen. I’m making myself go slowly so I can think straighter, and so hope to straighten out some of the still-odiferous messes I made along the way, and hoping as well to thin the writing, getting rid of complexities and distractions not necessary to the argument. I thought fixing Chapter 1 was particularly challenging…..until I came to Chapter 2. It’s been time-consuming—one reason this post reads the way it does—and sometimes frustrating, but I’m not giving up. The main reason I’m set on finishing is that, day by day, week by week, month by month, the argument works to account for the realities of American politics and foreign policy we are seeing roll out before our eyes. I am also accumulating what writers know as “I told you so” moments, and the prospect of more lifts my morale to plod onward. (Two such moments are shared below.)
Everything written by one’s own hand looks different when we go through seriatim from the beginning to the end, instead of parachuting into various sections to add ideas, sources, and so forth. We get a sense of flow and logical order that way; the process chosen sizes the reward. Anyone who has struggled to write a book knows the feeling. I’m getting that feeling again these past few days, and I’m down with the flow so far, except I already recognize the need to boost up the very end of the book. I have an idea of how to do that, and I will hint at it here not this week but next.
When I’m done going through the manuscript on screen I plan to then edit through a printed-out copy, as well, to polish further. Tres expensive as printer ink has become, I need to do it because being both old and selectively old-fashioned I see things on paper differently than I see them on a screen. You do, too, as a passage in the AoS manuscript itself notes: You tend to skim on screens in F and Z patterns, as they are called, remember? The undetectable but real flickering of the screen speeds you up; remember that, too, as a detail of how our stone-age brain on screens works? Yet it’s true: Digital natives are not as affected by the distinction between paper and screen as much as those of us who once thought that IBM Selectric typewriters, the ones with the narrow white correcting ribbons, were the greatest things since sliced rye loaves.
“Told You So” Times Two
Earlier this week news broke, and it broke all over the place from the New York Times to Ha’aretz and lots of places in between, that the Israeli government has been eager to attack Iran’s budding out nuclear weapons-related facilities—said credibly to be only months away from producing weapons-grade nuclear materiel in sufficient quantities to marry to a delivery system—but the Trump Administration blocked it from doing so. How? Well, without going into too many details, Israel’s military size and reach make conducting a major attack of that sort a lot harder without U.S. help.
One reason is straightforward enough: The distance between Israeli military airfields and Iran’s Natanz nuclear complex is about 2,000 miles, and the political geography makes clear that overflying Jordan and Iraq is necessary for Israeli attack aircraft to get to and return from targets. Israel has a peace treaty and still decent enough mil-mil relations with Jordan, despite the harm the current Israeli government has done to that relationship, to make that not a very big problem. To overfly Iraq, however, U.S. influence is, well, useful.
More important, the distance a plane must fly to conduct an operation determines the ratio of how much ordnance it can carry since, basically, the more fuel weight it has to lift the less ordnance punch it can carry and deliver. So if the target is relatively far away you need more planes with less ordnance per plane to do the job than would be the case were the target closer. Using so many planes in an attack mission would leave Israeli air space much less well defended. Israeli forces do not need U.S. aircraft to attack Iranian targets, but U.S. intelligence collection and missile-defense capabilities are critical to defending against counterattacks on Israeli civilian population centers. The two militaries have worked out over many years, and have updated as necessary, the kinds of technical meshing cooperation needed to make an attack doable on reasonable terms of risk. Some elements of this cooperation have been recently demonstrated to work pretty well when Iran tried to attack Israel with missiles and drones.
But of course it’s more complicated than that, a lot more complicated. Even if U.S. planes are not involved in an attack the United States will be implicated in that attack politically and diplomatically anyway. There are obvious potential costs here—diplomatic strains, whipping up terrorist morale, and others—but also potential compensatory benefits if the operation succeeds by reasonable measure and hence impresses. Success would strengthen reputation, mutual alliance trust, and hence future deterrence.
But all that is a function of the goal, which must be reasonable to achieve such benefits. Israeli planners have not been contemplating a complete take-out of the Iranian nuclear program, for that is beyond possibility at this point without Israel using its own nuclear weapons to do it—not in the cards, not yet anyway. So it comes down to how much risk, military and political, is worth taking to set back Iranian efforts a year or so. Experts even within as well as between countries can disagree here; reportage in the public domain suggests that U.S. officials are more skeptical of the benefits and more concerned about the price to be paid than are most Israeli experts.
I said this is complicated, right? So consider in addition to the military-technical side of the matter the geopolitical side. Iran has been weakened in recent months by: the whacking down to size of its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza—Hizballah spectacularly so and Hamas depressingly so by means of brutal protracted off-again-on-again pounding; by the sudden shocking loss this past November of its longtime Syrian ally, which provided Iranian connectivity to Lebanon and, with it, the Russian loss of Tartus, its naval base on the Eastern Mediterranean; and by Russian distraction and exhaustion in dealing with Ukraine.
The combination of American analysts thinking that an attack on Natanz is riskier and less likely to accomplish a clean, crow-worthy success, and the presumed greater pliability of the Iranian regime to a new negotiated deal, is what has led U.S. officials to choose diplomacy over a military attack….for the time being, and so stopped Israeli military action.
This is not an entirely unreasonable conclusion, and it is not something necessarily unique to the Trump 2.0 Administration. A Harris Administration, had there been one, might well have done the same head-scratching drill and come up with the same reasoning leading to the same choice. But that’s where the hypothetical similarities between what is and what might have been end.
Like all bullies everywhere and at all times, President Trump’s chest-bumping bluster hides his inner cowardice. He is utterly risk-averse when it comes to a fight, unless he can punch down at weaker parties. As already noted in a previous post, bullies always hate most those whom they fear least.
Trump cannot punch down without fear of pain against Iran, or so he supposes. Why? Because the Iranians are ruthlessly predatory and stealthily amoral, a combination that Trump, by dint of his own business practices, understands intuitively better than most people. The Iranian regime reportedly considered assassinating Trump during the 2024 campaign, or so anyway he believes. He removed security protection from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and others not because he doesn’t take seriously Iranian threats against their lives but rather because he does take them seriously. That’s the kind of guy he is. So he must figure that if Tehrani goons can whack some people in Washington—as they have been doing from time to time around the world for many years now—maybe they can finish what Thomas Crooks messed up in Butler, Pennsylvania back on July 13.
So Trump is scared to involve the U.S. military in an attack on Iran for selfish personal reasons; there may be other reasons, too, but they just don’t move him, qua malignant narcissist, the same way. And he wants a Nobel Peace Prize, just because Barack Obama got one, and even though Trump is wholly ignorant of the fact that he has less than nothing in common with the folks in Oslo who decide these things. You get Nobel Peace Prizes for doing diplomatic deals that prevent violence, not for starting wars—even Trump knows that.
So now here is the problem, which is special to the Trump 2.0 Administration. The Administration’s foreign/national security policy record thus far is a perfect mash-up of the stupid and the amateurish. It is also acutely process defective, as described in the April 11 TRP post. Neither Trump nor his appointees to high office, with the possible exception of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, trust or are willing to listen to experienced government military and diplomatic experts on such matters. So President Trump, very much unlike a President Harris, will trust his eruptive gut, or equally experience-free amateurs like Steve Witkoff, to make key decisions. This prospect does not inspire confidence that the Iranians will not play Trump as have the Russians and the Chinese.
What to make of all this if you are a responsible Israeli official? If I were trying to see into the mind of such an official, I would reason that no matter how many aircraft the Trump Administration deploys to al-Odeid, Diego Garcia, and other bases, Trump is more fearful of the Iranians than the Iranians are of him. So then how is Trump going to leverage Iran’s relative weakness to negotiate a better deal than the one Obama got and that Trump tore up at the start of this first term?
If I were that official, I would also recall Trump’s sudden convening of direct U.S.-Hamas negotiations in Qatar concerning Gaza, without warning or credibly debriefing the Israeli government on what occurred there. That broke trust, and gave Hamas a useful legitimacy token in return for…..nothing.
Yes, nothing, for I, as an Israeli official trying to figure all this out, would remember that whatever really happened in Doha the hostages were not released, notwithstanding Trump’s outsized but stunningly vague threats to rain down hell on Gaza, and no Hamas concessions were cashed in. (No Nobel there either, Donnie.) That broke confidence as well as trust.
I would remind myself and others, too, that the credibility of a joint Israeli-U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear program facilities, intricately planned over many years and over several U.S. Administrations for initiation en extremis, is what has most likely deterred an Iranian nuclear breakout up until now. It has not been technical limitations alone that have defined the Iranian posture; the mullahs have for the time being been willing to sit contentedly with the status benefits of their crafted only-a-screwdriver-turn-away positioning without the liabilities of being included in several other countries’ strategic targeting plans. Other U.S. associates in the region, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, even Iraq and Turkey, have understood and appreciated the power of this deterring Israeli-U.S. posture. But if trust and sound process in the Israeli-U.S. relationship falls victim to the inanities and insanities of the Trump White House, that joint-deterrent posture will suffer and its power will wane. That would simply piss away the clout of having by far the superior military hand.
We are talking coercive diplomacy here, not the kind that goes on among allies and friends: The way to drive down Iranian demands is to threaten them credibly, as in, “Yo dudes, concede this point and that….or else.” But why should Iranian officials take those threats seriously when all they have witnessed since January 21 is the Trump Administration blustering and then backing down or doing clown flips: multiple times now on tariffs; on pressing Russia to end the war against Ukraine by, um….pressuring Ukraine--huh?!?; withdrawing Article V protection for U.S. NATO allies; giving away in return for nothing the U.S. hand on defending Taiwan—hell, Trump can’t even effectively cow Denmark or Canada. The Administration did strike the Houthis, but only as a FONs operation; it has displayed no theory of victory over them. Reputation in international politics is seamless, and so far the Trump Administration’s behavior is more a portent of self-deterrence than it is a recipe for successful coercive diplomacy viz Iran.
So if you are a responsible Israeli security policy official, and you are privately adding together the loss of confidence in the integrity of the U.S.-Israeli alliance relationship as principal leaders exhibit acute distrust of each other, with the likely decay of technical understanding and both geopolitical and diplomatic competence in the upper political echelons of the U.S. government, you are concluding: Yikes.
OK, so finally we come to my “I told you so,” or rather to I indirectly told the Israeli Prime Minister so. Here is a small chunk what I wrote in TRP on October 2, in the second part of my essay “How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down”:
If he has any brains left at all, Netanyahu should not relish a second Trump presidency, since Trump’s manifest risk aversion and contempt for the military makes him a very uncertain partner for a possible joint U.S.-Israeli attack against Iran. If Netanyahu can still think straight, and if his real motives do not concern the favor of American supporters like the Falic family, Biden as lame duck before Inauguration Day and Harris after it—she with Jewish husband, Jewish National Security Advisor, and Jewish Deputy National Security Advisor—will commend themselves as far superior potential partners en extremis.
Note that at the moment the Biden-Harris Administration has put in place in the region not just the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group (since switched out for the USS Truman, on its way as I write) and the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier battle group, but also the guided-missile nuclear submarine USS Georgia, with its 154 Tomahawk Land-Attack Missiles (T-LAMs) with ranges of 1,600 kilometers—suitable for destroying each and every Iranian oil terminal structure on Kharg Island from the USS Georgia’s currently deployed position. Would a theoretical second Trump Administration, in office from January 2021 to date, have done similarly? Given Trump’s erratic reasoning powers, encyclopedic ignorance, and resentment of all who offer him military advice, one could reasonably doubt it.
Well, here we are about six and a half months later. Trump got elected and has been inaugurated as President. And where is the USS Georgia today as the Administration presumably prepares to orchestrate a would-be successful coercive-diplomacy negotiation? It is at its homeport of King’s Bay Submarine Base, in Georgia (of course).
The best that can be expected from a U.S.-Iranian negotiation under current conditions is an eventual sotto voce admission of failure—as seems to already be the case with the Ukraine-Russia ceasefire effort, which just yesterday Secretary Rubio admitted wasn’t working out so well, suggesting that the U.S. government might have to “move on” to other priorities. That describes how “just one day” turned into “not at all” under the Trump watch—and of course the White House sent Little Marco out to deliver the news……not so much as a single all-caps word on Social Truth.
If that is the case, we might get an adjusted sanctions regime against Iran, and perhaps new secondary sanctions. But sanctions have not and cannot prevent the Iranians from making progress in building a bunch of big bombs. They can only cause pain and so, all else equal, constitute an incentive for the mullahs to slow roll changes in Iran’s overt military posture until, Macawber-like, something turns up to change their calculus of risks and rewards. Sanctions cannot solve this problem; they rather incline to anesthetize awareness of it.
The worst that can be expected is very, very bad: the successful negotiation of a vague and counterproductive agreement that would de facto protect Iranian technical-military progress, and so ultimately have the effect of persuading an Israeli government—any Israeli government—to roll the dice and attack Iran alone. That operationally difficult attack may or may not succeed, and if it doesn’t Israeli deterrence posture would be severely eroded. Fear over where that level of deterrence erosion might lead could even persuade an Israeli leadership that it has been left with no choice but to use nuclear weapons to solve its Iran problem. Even well short of that any major Israeli attack on Iran without coordination with the U.S. government, and against its explicit wishes, would likely do the kind of harm to the bilateral relationships that so many have warned of over the years but that has never fully come to pass. This time, it would come to pass.
Oh, that other “I told you so.” This one we can keep short. Just two days ago President Trump said that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s tenure “cannot terminate fast enough.” Trump has so far stopped short of trying to illegally fire Powell. He is trying to pressure him instead into lowering interest rates before Powell thinks it is wise to do so. All of this is related to the bond market tumble following the Chinese riposte to Trump’s idiotic April 3 tariff “Liberation Day” antics.
My sense is that Powell will not roll over for Trump. However one reckons the quality of his judgment as Fed Chairman—I do not reckon it so high, but that’s really neither here nor there at this point—he’s made it clear that he will not be moved from his appointed tenure schedule as Fed Chairmen. With the Supreme Court now having twice lately defied the White House—the 5-4 vote on USAID and the 9-0 vote on Señor Garcia—Powell may have decided to pile on for a worthy cause, to wit: Trump may decide to fire him if he does not yield, and Powell may well show up for work anyway. Then we would have something a little like a replay of what happened in 1868 when Secretary of War Edwin Stanton refuse to be fired and barricaded himself in his office, daring President Andrew Johnson to do something about it.
In any event, I did predict a set-to, on April 4, and we’ll see how it develops. I still think that Trump’s insistence on lowering interest rates is related to a prospective campaign to de facto devalue the U.S. dollar. Here’s how I put it two weeks ago.
. . . there is another way to gain advantage over trading partners if driving down barriers to American exports via tariff threats is not the intended use of those tariffs. We can always depreciate—a.k.a. further debauch—the dollar, making American exports cheaper, at least until the current system of floating exchange rates adjusts through consequent depreciations of other currencies so that their relative value compared to the U.S. dollar doesn’t get too far out of whack. . . I think it’s a better than even bet that this is exactly what the Administration is planning as a complementary strategy with the tariffs. To do this, however, it will probably be necessary to oust Jerome Powell from the Fed and replace him with someone trained to lick Donald Trump’s shoes, or maybe some other part of him—possibly Kevin Hassett, currently head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. . . . Anyway, so much for the Fed’s statutory independence if this happens. Will Republicans in the Congress complain? Can pigs whistle?
מצבה/ מַצוּבָה ,πυραμίς ,פִּירָמִידָה
Tonight is the eve of the 7th day of Passover, so I thought to end today’s post with a short homiletic comment. I’ve not written anything of this sort here in TRP since March 2024 [“Joseph and Esther,” The Raspberry Patch, Substack, March 22, 2024]. So, hey, why not?
As everyone knows, the premier symbol of ancient Egypt is the pyramid. What most do not know, however, is that the word is not Egyptian but Greek πυραμίς (pyramis). Alexander the Great chose the name, which is a kind of conjugation of Greek words for “pile of wheat cakes.” The old Egyptian word for a pyramid is mer, sometimes transliterated as myr. Four hieroglyphs have been discovered for this word, each specifying a different kind of pyramid.
The pyramids of Egypt, under any name at all, are not mentioned as such in the Book of Exodus, nor are they mentioned in the Hagadah. Israelite slaves built store cities for Pharaoh, Pithom and Raamses. [Exodus 11:1) There is no mention of Israelite slaves working on building pyramids, Charlton Heston notwithstanding. Why? Well, one possible reason is that since the pyramids we think of when we hear the word were tombs, it might be that Egyptian priests banned the use of non-Egyptian labor in building them. Another totally different sort of reason has been suggested by James L. Kugel and other scholars, but that explanation takes us far from the homiletic tense, so to speak [See Kugel, How to Read the Hebrew Bible (Free Press, 2007), especially chapter 13] so we’ll not go there.
In modern Hebrew, the term for a pyramid is just a transliteration into the Hebrew alphabet for the sounds that make “pyramid”: פִּירָמִידָה. Not very interesting. Interest perhaps lies elsewhere.
Another Hebrew term used for a pile or a stack of something is מַצוּבָה (matzuvah). (A form of the same root is used to name a cemetery headstone מצבה (matzeyvah)—the spelling is the same except the “vav” is left out. The reason is that ancient burials were completed with heaps of stones, which is why it remains a custom that when visiting a grave one places a stone on top of the headstone before leaving.)
Now look at the word, spelled מ, צ, ו, ב, ה—mem, tzadiq, vav, bet, hey. Take out the vav-bet and you get mem-tzadiq-hey, מַצָּה—matzah—flat bread, Passover bread, the so-called bread of affliction (and that’s no joke, as all those who have had the pleasure of enjoying the Jib-Jab “rap” on matzah know).
The homiletic point? The Rabbis juxtaposed the symbol of Egypt, a mighty pyramid, with a flat bread, to show the main difference between us: They were powerful, oppressive, and arrogant—and they thought their leader was a god. We, the Hebrews, were slaves, demeaned and degraded—and our leader was a stutterer who was, or became, the most humble of men. But thanks to the Holy One, Blessed Be He, we were liberated and the hosts of Egypt were drowned in the Red Sea.
Is that all? Almost. Look again at the word מַצוּבָה. If we remove the ב we get מצוה (mitzvah), which means commandment or obligation (not “good deed,” for those poorly educated or misled types who have this wrong). What ennobles Jews who are true to their faith and traditions is not power, not the ability to dominate others, not giving in to the temptations of random arrogance when things chance to go right. No, what ennobles Jews are the commandments of our Torah. That, a book, a mere scroll, is to Jews what pyramids were to Pharaoh and the ancient Egyptians.
The same applies, I dare say, to all high and mighty men and women who think that “might makes right” is the real, unchanging way of the world. (Anyone in particular come to mind, perhaps?) On Passover we remember, we reflect, and we know that this is not true.