Do Not Ask for Whom the Bell Tolls, It Tolls for Thee
That’s Ernest Hemingway.
My morning Guardian announces, “Trump warns ‘clock is ticking for Iran’ to reach peace deal. We are restarting our coverage of the US-Israeli war on Iran and Israel’s war on Lebanon. Donald Trump has issued an extreme warning to Iran to quickly agree to a peace deal with the US or face devastation.”
It was Albert Einstein who admonished that “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” is the definition of insanity.
My sources say if you mean literally “how many times,” the answer is probably well over 20 major public warnings in the past year alone, and far more if one counts speeches, Truth Social posts, interviews, and repeated formulations of the same threat.
Einstein is silent on defining ‘over and over,’ but we can presume Mr. Trump has exceeded the quota. As for ‘whom the bell tolls,’ it certainly doesn’t seem to be Iran, as they still have not run out of ammunition, their process for leadership succession is far deeper than Trump’s and, although they have been illegally attacked and lost a very large number of civilian casualties, their army remains intact and they continue to control the Strait of Hormuz.
Mr. Trump is fond of reminding his political and military opponents that “they have no cards,” as if international negotiations was a poker game. If that be true, one need look no further than Ukraine standing off the entirety of Russia, with nothing other than sheer determination of will, to disprove the opinion.
On the other hand, by his own metaphor, Trump went to China with no cards, and returned embarrassingly empty-handed.
He joined Israel in illegally attacking Iran, with all the cards in his hands: the largest military on the planet, backed by its similarly potent navy, and a willingness to expend what Harvard by war-budget specialist Linda Bilmes estimated the real wartime cost to be approximately $2 billion per day, with eventual long-term costs potentially exceeding $1 trillion.
That’s a lot of cards by any poker-player’s count, and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
Prior to this exercise in insanity, the Strait was open to all world oil shipments, the American navy was satisfied to illegally attack unarmed speedboats in international waters, 10,000 Marines were elsewhere and the only serious grumbling about Iran came from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
Iran had pissed him off by, apparently, providing aid and military support to Palestine, where an internationally recognized genocide was underway, as well as Lebanon, where one was anticipated.
Box-score at the moment, one international criminal avoiding prosecution by a thread in Israel, and an American president naming everything in sight for himself, and ruling as a dictator by Executive Orders, as well as already convicted of 34 felonies in New York State prior to taking office.
How many cards in how many decks does it take before the world cries ‘foul.’
Hemingway could never have conceived of so many bells tolling.
It may be well past time to ask for whom they toll.