StayVasion

Did somebody say "mission accomplished"?

An operational timeline of a strike on Iran is displayed during a news conference with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Dan Caine and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon on June 22, 2025.

I can’t blame Trump or his Bob’s Discount Furniture cabinet of trusted advisors. It is very difficult to conduct war from 7,000 miles away in the time it takes to watch one episode of Tehran on Netflix.

So take care about vilifying these special-needs stewards of global stability. It’s not their fault if they’re stupid, ill-informed, stubborn, vain, religiously delusional and/or Fake Religiously cosplaying en route to a protracted nightmare. As warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu wrote almost three millennia ago in The Art of War, “What a bunch of fucking imbeciles.”

You can’t take away from them, though. It was certainly quick. No boots on the ground. No annoying parachutes or transatlantic voyages. It was like one of those Covid StayCations.

A StayVasion!

Saturday night, in his brief, poetic address to the nation and the world, the president declared triumph. Thanks to his genius in dropping a dozen 30,000-pound bombs on a mountain, he announced, “Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

It didn’t take long for the cognitive dissonance to kick in. Yes, the bombardment was a highly destructive blow to Iran’s uranium enrichment program and the centrifuges may be buried in rubble. But, believe it or not, Trump bragged about obliteration like he bragged about the biggest inauguration crowd in planetary history. There was absolutely no way for him or the Pentagon or the Israel Defense Forces to know what the explosions affected 300 feet of rock below the surface.

I mean, sure, we do know something (because it has been written about for 20+ years): that the bombs’ specifications do not cover such depths and such hardened protection. That expert uncertainty and skepticism about such an attack was in all of the papers, and certainly in all the intelligence briefs provided to the White House. But we can’t fault the president for not reading them. So much glare from Florida’s blazing sun on the golf course.

Actually, there were other totally not-secrets he had access to. His own Director of National Intelligence had testified to Congress three months ago that Israel’s estimate of Iran being weeks or months away from having nukes was off by approximately forever.

“Iran,” said Tulsi Gabbard, herself a Trump-cult freak, “is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”

Which is not the same as imminent. Reminded of the embarrassing conflict of narratives last week, Trump publicly and very delicately offered an opposing view: “I don’t care what she said,” he said. He had all the intelligence he needed from Jesse Waters and Mark Levin on Fox News.

Obviously, the intelligence community could be wrong. It still has egg on its face for the Bay of Pigs, Iraq WMD, Vietnam, 9/11, the fall of Communism and the 1979 Iranian Revolution itself. But can we agree that her testimony was maybe a red flag? And that Israel’s Captain Ahab Netanyahu is possibly egging Trump on to escalate Netanyahu’s personal Iran-nukes crusade war so he can stay out of jail, where he’s headed on corruption charges the moment he’s no longer Prime Minister — much as Trump had to be elected President to “totally obliterate” the several open-and-shut federal criminal cases against him? In other words, Wag the Dog II: The Persian Version. So now both of them, instead of jailbirds, are heroes!

Except for a couple of other little things. Iran, unlike MAGA, understands that everything from Trump’s mouth is a lie, and apparently didn’t buy the president’s “week or two” timeline. Many intelligence experts — and, what’s his name, Vice President JD Vance — believe that 1) the actual 60% enriched fissionable material was not at Mount Plutonium at all but at another storage site, where it was 2) carted away with some centrifuges to a third location before the bombing. Yes, it is entirely possible that the spectacular military success was the equivalent of vandalizing an abandoned house.

It also doesn’t seem to have dawned on the man who claims to be “smarter than the generals” that Iran would retaliate by closing down the Strait of Hormuz, the Panama Canal of the Middle East and the pathway for goods from around the world, including 20 percent of the crude oil. They teach that stuff at Wharton, but maybe Trump’s bone spurs were acting up that day. In any event, the upshot could be an energy crisis, disrupted supply chain for just about everything and a devastating spike of inflation. Truman Eggs saved Europe after WWII. Trump Eggs would be about $900 per dozen. Once again, that is not the same as “unconditional surrender.”

Furthermore, immediately after the attacks, the Ayatollah Khamenei announced that all bets are off in vulnerable Western countries, which is arguably concerning from the world’s most prolific exporter of state-sponsored terrorism. Never fear (though better late than never), those in charge of keeping civilians safe from attack are on the case. This just in from Secretary of Homeland Security and Fashionable Camo Gear Kristi Noem:

The ongoing Israel-Iran conflict brings the possibility of increased threat to the homeland in the form of possible cyberattacks, acts of violence, and antisemitic hate crimes.

Could it be that her imagination of retaliatory responses fails her? You don’t need 30,000-pound bombs to sow destruction. In September of 2001, about five guys in an Afghan cave killed 3,000 people with hijacked airplanes. That’s why one dashing and likeable gent went to X on Thursday posing the question that had eluded the Trump Administration: “Does nobody worry about deep-cover Iranian terror cells lurking all around the western world and their version of mutual mass destruction?” wrote me — and I was never secretary of anything. Not even Student Council. Four days later, it seems altogether possible that not surrender but catastrophe awaits.

So what can we take from this chapter in history to preserve in our hearts? I guess, really, it’s just the oratory, so reminiscent of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the early days of Nazi bombing:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Stirring, yes, but Winston was no Donald Trump. How can we as a nation not line up in pride, hope, patriotism and simple admiration for a Supreme Leader who can motivate us with language so poignant it seems as if plucked from a sonnet? Yes, this was his magical prose, channeling not Churchill, but the winning quarterback of every Super Bowl:

And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.

God, God, God. God help us all.