“Many important subjects were discussed” when Donald Trump met at The White House early this week with Benjamin Netanyahu.
That’s a direct quote from Trump’s social media feed, where he posted a set of pictures meant to paper over a growing rift between the two leaders, whose strategic aims have diverged materially over the course of a war that’s entering its sixth month.
Tuesday’s chat was the first face-to-face meeting between the two since the American and Israeli militaries jointly attacked Iran on February 28. Initially, Trump said America’s involvement would conclude in “four to five weeks.” Tuesday marked five months since Ali Khamenei took his last breath.
According to various reports, Netanyahu had to work at it just to get an invite. Trump suspects, not irrationally, that the Israelis are trying to prolong the conflict and may be just as much to blame for the collapse of the June ceasefire as the IRGC.
“To secure an audience, the Trump administration pressed” Netanyahu to “show he was serious about advancing US-brokered peace talks in Lebanon,” unnamed officials told The Wall Street Journal. “Hours before the meeting,” the same article went on, Trump “appeared to bristle” at the notion that Netanyahu’s Pickaxe Mountain accusations are a ploy to rope the Pentagon into an even longer military engagement.
The Journal was referencing an interview Trump gave to Fox & Friends. During the chat, he was asked about Mossad’s assessment that Iran relocated scores of centrifuges into tunnels under another secretive mountain site in an effort to shield them from a prospective American attack. Some of those tunnels are deep enough that the bunker-busters Trump used in “Operation Midnight Hammer” wouldn’t suffice to destroy the equipment.
“I don’t need Bibi to tell me that. Bibi is telling me that because he wants me to stay involved,” Trump told Fox on Tuesday. “We’ll have to take out Pickaxe if [they] don’t make a deal.” Trump first mentioned the site during a July 13 interview with Hugh Hewitt, calling it “a possible target for a nice big fat shot.”
That’s the fraught backdrop for an unfortunate series of events on Wednesday, when the Guards launched what Trump described as a “surprise attack” on US assets and personnel in Jordan. Although the Jordanian military intercepted the missiles, it was a close call. Shortly thereafter, the US and Saudi Arabia launched joint strikes against PMF militias in Iraq, killing dozens of fighters.
As a reminder, the PMF’s an umbrella group constituted in part by Quds-funded militia. Those groups were instrumental in assisting US-backed efforts to rout ISIS in Iraq, but that was an alliance of expediency established based on the age-old “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” axiom.
Historically, the most powerful of those militias is Kataib Hebzollah, which was founded by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the legendary commander killed in the same US drone strike that incinerated Qassem Soleimani in January of 2020. If there were a Mount Rushmore honoring Iran’s defunct “Axis of Resistance,” Muhandis would be carved into it alongside Khamenei, Soleimani and Hassan Nasrallah.
The PMF’s relationship with the official Iraqi military is complex, to put it mildly. Generally speaking, Baghdad would prefer it if the constituent groups refrained from launching attacks against American personnel in the region, but there isn’t a lot Baghdad (where the Guards still exercise a lot of influence) can do about it. When it happens, US reprisals are generally frowned upon as violations of Iraqi sovereignty.
The joint US-Saudi strikes were a response to what Centcom called repeated drone attacks originating from Iraq. The country’s national security council on Wednesday condemned “all hostile acts, regardless of the party that carries them out” following an emergency gathering of security personnel. (You can bet someone representing the Guards was in attendance.)
In addition to militia members, the strikes killed “several Iranian advisors,” which means Quds operatives, according to Kataib Hebzollah’s propaganda arm.
Wednesday’s fireworks were a meaningful escalation. Now, the Saudis are bombing Iraq, which is in many respects still an Iranian client state more than two decades after the US invasion handed the Guards an opportunity to co-opt the nation’s politics.
Following the melee, Trump spoke again to Fox & Friends. “We’ll be hitting them hard,” he said, referring to Iran. Oil rose sharply.
Exactly what Kevin needed today. I am sure he loves it.
First of all, let me remind you that you’re quite possibly the greatest living writer in the English-speaking world. What happened to the early plan to arm the Kurds and let them march on Tehran? That idea must be getting a little support at this point. They could stop at Pickaxe Mountain along the way.
Regarding the Kurds,
“The next day, the CIA had done an overnight analysis (…) They did not think it was realistic that the Kurds would, you know, overthrow the regime”, Jonathan Swan on School of War Podcast, How Trump Decided to Go to War with Iran.
see also: “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran”, The New York Times
also, they were under surveillance: “(…) malicious tracking attempts came in the build-up to the US-Israeli assault on Iran in late February and continued in the early days of the war, when Tehran retaliated with missile and drone strikes against US forces and military installations around the region. (…) they believed actors linked to Iran had abused commercially available advertising databases to track phones in Iraqi Kurdistan.”
from “US military smartphones targeted through roaming and ad tech”, FT.com
“a war that’s entering its sixth month.”….my, how time flies when you are having so much fun….
We are quickly descending into what we could call a world war, although not yet a total war. Russia has invaded Ukraine and is using North Korean troops — along with Chinese electronics and munitions, and now Iranian oil — to support it. The U.S. and Europe have supported Ukraine with massive supplies of weapons and munitions. The U.S. and Israel are at war with Iran and Hezbollah, and international shipping in the Gulf and the Red Sea has been attacked and disrupted. Iran has launched successful attacks into: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq; along with targeting various assets in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE; and even limited strikes into Egypt, Syria, and Turkey.
The Houthis have launched attacks into Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have now launched attacks into Iraq. Israel has invaded Lebanon, and now Ukraine is targeting Russian bound ships in the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea, including (inadvertently?) attacks on Iranian oil tankers there. Russia also appears to be providing intelligence assistance to Iran. If the Russia vs. Ukraine conflict becomes any more entangled with the U.S./Israel/Saudi Arabia vs. Iran/Hezbollah/Houthi war — something that could garner more U.S. support for Ukraine — that would be a two-theater conflict involving some eighteen countries on four continents (not including China, NATO, or the individual countries of Europe). Don’t look now, but I don’t think this is still a simple ill-fated “excursion” that is likely to be settled by the midterms.
(Please forgive any errors I may have made in my description, but it was quite a lot to try and sort through.)
Agreed
Corrections and Retractions:
The Middle East is a region and not a “continent,” so that would mean that countries from only three continents are currently involved in the conflicts.
Do I hear four continents? The Prigozhin Pliunge may have dented the Wagner Group, but the African pipeline for “disposables” for Russia’s “meat assaults” remain much more alive and well.
As to another World War, thank God Mar-A-Lardo has stopped so many of the other ongoing regional Wars (capital W) that no one’s even heard about. In anticipation of the world’s realizaton of that “truth” and all of its already evident calming benefits, maybe we should be thinking about giving the Nobel Peace prize a new flag blue liner and a fresh gilding.
Great lead, H. Captured Trump’s intellectual essence in your first sentence.
Someone grab a napkin, we need a new plan: No group or country has claimed responsibility for the drone strike that hit the U.S.-owned gas storage tanker Energos Winter at Egypt’s port of Damietta.
I wonder what Trump’s gut his telling him?