Martin Jay
Trump's plan, according to Washington insiders, is to go ahead with a massive bombing campaign of Iran immediately after the midterm elections.
Trump has a plan - oh yes he does - for a new strike on Iran. That is, of course, if the Iranians don't get wind of it and go ahead with theirs. Oops.
In recent days, a number of mainstream media outlets in the U.S. have revealed that Trump has signed off a massive arms deal with Israel, sparking fears that the U.S. president has lost all contact with reality as he prepares for a third round to the so-called Iran War.
According to a number of reports, the Trump administration is preparing to sell Israel a $2.8bn package of 907kg (2,000-pound) bombs, the largest single sale of the munition in recent years, according to reports by The Washington Post and other agencies.
The deal, considered to be a first of its kind ever, is funded through Foreign Military Financing - a mechanism in which Washington provides the money Israel then uses to buy U.S. weapons - and is believed to be 40,000 bombs: 20,000 MK-84 general-purpose bombs and 20,000 BLU-117s, a thermally coated variant of the MK-84 designed for safer naval storage, along with I-2000 Penetrator warheads built to strike hardened, underground structures.
The news has apparently alarmed a number of pundits who follow the Middle East and are sceptical about Trump rescuing himself from further humiliation as he heads towards the midterms with his own ratings at a record low.
"How big is this shipment?" Tucker Carlson wrote on X in a lengthy post. "It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force's attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That's 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel."
Although not a military expert, Carlson said that these bombs would kill many innocent civilians.
"An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile," Carlson said. "It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapour. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the U.S. military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians."
Trump's plan, according to Washington insiders, is to go ahead with a massive bombing campaign of Iran immediately after the midterm elections, where he is expected to at least lose one of the two parliamentary houses in the U.S. political system, weakening his ability to go ahead with mercurial foreign policy forays. His thinking is that such a huge amount of destruction will make a difference in what so far experts are calling the 'Iran War', which all agree he has spectacularly lost - with gasoline prices in most U.S. states now well over $4 USD and a domestic economy in the doldrums, all due to the U.S. attacks on February 28th spectacularly backfiring.
Yet there are at least two worrying issues about the plan. The first one is pretty obvious. The lack of surprise about the attack should, of course, be a major worry for military planners in the Pentagon, who are concerned that the 'all or nothing' last-resort tactic now that Trump is looking at - sending in ground forces at the same time as the big attack - is going to result in hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans dying, if such a plan goes ahead. If the secret is no longer a secret - and perhaps we should assume it was leaked, as too many Americans are worried about Trump's sanity and don't want to be part of his insane ideas about going to war with Iran - then Tehran must be planning not only to stop those missiles getting off the ground, but to do much, much more harm to U.S. forces and Israel before the midterms. There is a growing group of pundits in D.C. and in Beirut who believe that Iran is planning a major strike on Israel and U.S. forces just before the midterms kick off, having maximum impact on Trump at the polls. Tehran's goal, they say, is that Trump loses both houses, which would mean an inevitable impeachment process having immediate effect.
The other issue which D.C. insiders are fretting over is the low number of interceptors which are in the region, and the response from those who support Trump. The response goes something along the lines of: "Well, sure we're low on them, but we wouldn't need them in the first place if we don't go in hard and take out Iran's ability to launch their own missiles in the first place." And so the assumption is clear. In Trump's latest hare-brained idea, he believes that these 'super bombs' that the U.S. have will strike so hard at Iran's military infrastructure, but even its electricity grid, that it will neutralise its army and its strike capability.
There can only be one conclusion that can be drawn by this latest thinking, which is that Israel has struck again and hit the jackpot the second time around, and convinced Trump that this 'massive attack' strike is a winner. It is possible they have also convinced him that Iran is in the process of making a nuclear bomb - something that they can present with no evidence whatsoever, as the only single institution which could verify this, the IAEA, cannot of course enter Iran now. One has to wonder about the mindset of GCC countries' elites, given that in recent days Trump refused to bomb the Houthis on behalf of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince's pleas to his old friend, Donald. We are at the stage now that regional experts are speculating that such regional leaders are hoping for a massive U.S. defeat so the air can be cleared and a new regional world order can begin, while the Saudis rebuild their economy, which is in shatters and has reached a point of desperation where its leaders are looking at emergency IMF loans just to pay government salaries.
Saudi's daily oil export via its own pipeline which crosses the peninsula from east to west pumped out 7 million barrels a day when operating, which represents 44 percent of the country's GDP. With that gone, GCC leaders are realising that the future has to be without the U.S., which was always a massive liability and has cost them dearly. We underestimated the Houthis, yes. But we also underestimated how juvenile and immature Trump is, and how far he can go to nurture his own insecurities and foibles.
He has pushed the Iranians to their limits, and the rumours are that they see no point whatsoever wasting any time talking deals with someone so dishonest and duplicitous, and are considering one fatal blow. This could be Israel and its entire military infrastructure, or it could be a U.S. carrier. Such a move redefines the word 'game changer' and would certainly wake up the American people that Trump is destroying their empire at a speed no one thought possible. It will be their Suez moment.