gracchusdixit

One of the most disturbing and at the same time ridiculous consequences of our nation’s illegal, faltering, and utterly unnecessary invasion of Iran has been the spectacle of the President of the United States hallucinating in public on a daily basis.  Like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s famous tale, Donald Trump has crawled down a rabbit hole, only to find himself in a topsy-turvy world where down is up, wrong is right, and failure is success.  

Alice, of course, entered her wonderland quite by accident and proved to be its one sane inhabitant.  Trump, on the other hand, jumped into his alternate universe deliberately, happily joining the ranks of its lunatic inmates, becoming a cross between the chaotic incoherence of The Mad Hatter and the unrepentant cruelty of The Queen of Hearts.

I have no idea whether the President of the United States suffers from dementia in a clinical sense, but he is clearly demented in the normal sense:  a madman who has lost his mind and with it all connection with reality.

He told us that the war would be over in “four or five weeks”.  The fifth week is already upon us, and there is no end in sight.  On the contrary, Marines and members of the 82nd Airborne Division are on their way to do God knows what.  

He told us, and continues to tell us, that the war has already been won, indeed that victory was accomplished “on day one”.  The last time I looked, victory in war requires one’s enemies to lay down their arms, capitulate, and surrender.  The Iranians have done none of these things and show no sign of doing so.

He tells us that the United States has achieved nearly all of its objectives but will not, or cannot, articulate what those objectives are.  When pressed, he changes his story from one day to the next, perhaps because he can’t remember today which story he told yesterday and has no idea which story he will tell tomorrow.

He insists that Iran’s political leadership and its military infrastructure have been obliterated, even as Iranian missiles and drones descend upon Israel and the Gulf states, Iranian counter-attacks have shut down major sources of oil and natural gas production, and the mere threat of Iranian military action has closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s energy flows.

He claims that the American military has all the resources it needs to continue this war “indefinitely,” when we are burning through stockpiles of expensive and complex munitions that will take years to replace, our navy has no fit-for-service ships able to sweep Iranian mines, and the Pentagon is raising the age limit of military service because it knows that any decision to put American “boots on the ground” would require more far more boots than we can presently fill.

He demanded that our NATO allies help open and police the Strait of Hormuz, huffed and puffed when they rebuffed his demands, and finally told us that we didn’t need their help in the first place.

He announced, and continues to declare, that “serious” negotiations for an end to the war are underway and that the Iranians are “begging for a deal”.  The Iranians, for their part, say that Donald Trump “is negotiating with himself, not with us”. 

Given all this, given his persistent dishonesty, increasing incoherence, and possible dementia, it must be asked:  Why would the Iranians—or anyone else, for that matter—trust Donald Trump’s promises or believe his Alice in Wonderful version of reality?

And yet, many people still do.  Not only that, they propagate the phantasy that Donald Trump possesses a level of shrewdness and savvy which the rest of us simply do recognize and fail to appreciate.

A recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal called upon Trump to “finish the job,” as if he ever knew what “the job” was in the first place, let alone how much blood and treasure it would take to complete whatever that “job” might be.

A recent commentary in USA Today asserted that, after decades of feckless muddle by Democratic presidents, Donald Trump has finally brought razor-sharp “clarity” to solving the problems of the Middle East, even though the only “clarity”we now have  is that Trump has no idea what he is doing.

Another commentary, in the right-leaning British newspaper, The Telegraph, argued that Trump  is playing a secret but sophisticated game of three-dimensional chess, which is actually intended to deprive China of Iranian oil, thereby hobbling the main geopolitical foe of the United States and the Western World writ large.  If that’s the case, then Trump seems to be confusing chess with tiddlywinks.  The only oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz at the moment is going to China, and as the United States fumbles and squanders what’s left of its reputation as a steadfast global leader, the Chinese are steadily picking up the pieces.

A soi disant expert on the Middle East who recently appeared on the liberal cable news channel, MSNOW, cited Donald Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal, to argue that his seemingly chaotic changes of mind and conflicting statements are, in reality, a deliberate, even a canny negotiating strategy, designed to keep the Iranians off-balance.  

The problem is that Trump didn’t write The Art of the Deal.  It was the journalist Tony Schwarz, who used his considerable skill to sugarcoat Trump’s shambolic incoherence with a faux-gold patina of purpose and intent.  Don’t blame Mr. Schwarz for this charade.  It’s what he was paid to do, and he did it well.  In the capitalist world we dwell in, there is little difference between Ars Gratia Artis and Ars Gratia Pecuniae.

Stripped of its faux-gold patina, the leaden truth about Donald Trump is that he has no plan, purpose, or intent other than self-glorification and personal enrichment.  Those who pretend otherwise—that he has some grand strategy in mind, that his tergiversations are anything but the twitches of impulse and toxic ego, that he is even remotely capable of clear, coherent thought—are either lying or have gone down the rabbit hole with him.  

Sadly, millions of ordinary Americans have already chosen to join Donald Trump in the alternate universe at the bottom of that rabbit hole.  No sane or decent person should follow them.