The thing that is amazing about this time in history is that everything is recorded. We’re all walking around with still and motion picture cameras in our pockets. Videos and tweets on social media may move quickly but they don’t disappear. They are archived. Which means that something stupid you say one day can come back and bite you in the butt on another. Or in another year. Or five. Tulsi Gabbard is finding that out today the hard way.
And they still fall for it in 2025 like it’s Groundhog Day for neocons. Trump could nuke Tehran while holding a “Peace Not War” sign and some folks would still call him the antiwar candidate.
— Ultramõrd Sillu (@suunasolkija) June 13, 2025
We have a complete fool in the White House at a time in history where regional wars abound. Israel/Iran just got added to the list. Here’s what the occupant of the White House (we don’t have a president, per se, only someone with that title and responsibility) has to say about that. (The top of this tweet says: “I gave Iran a chance to make a deal. I told them in the strongest of words, “just do it” but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done. I told them it would be much worse than anything….)
— JD Vance (@JDVance) June 13, 2025
This is what a peacocking moron sounds like. So where do we go from here? Here is some informed speculation from Thomas Friedman at the New York Times:
The full-scale Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure on Friday needs to be added to the list of pivotal, game-changing wars that have reshaped the Middle East since World War II and are known by just their dates — 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2023 — and now 2025.
It is far too early, and the possible outcomes so multifold, to say how the Middle East game of nations will be changed by the Israel-Iran conflict of 2025. All I would say now is that the extreme upside possibility (that this puts in motion a set of falling dominoes, ending with the toppling of the Iranian regime and its replacement by a more decent, secular and consensual one) and the extreme downside possibility (that it sets the whole region on fire and sucks in the United States) are both on the table.
Between these extremes still lies a middle-ground possibility — a negotiated solution — but not for long. President Trump has deftly used the Israeli attack to, in effect, say to the Iranians: “I am still ready to negotiate a peaceful end to your nuclear program and you might want to go there fast — because my friend Bibi is C-R-A-Z-Y. I am waiting for your call.”
Given this wide range of possibilities, the best thing that I can offer to those watching at home are the key variables that I will be tracking to determine which of these — or some other I can’t anticipate — is the most likely outcome.
First: What makes this Iran-Israel conflict so profound is Israel’s vow to continue the fight this time until it eliminates Iran’s nuclear weapon-making capability — one way or another.
Iran invited that, vastly accelerating its enrichment of uranium to near weapons grade. It had begun aggressively disguising those efforts to such a new degree that even the International Atomic Energy Agency declared on Thursday that Iran was not complying with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations, the first time the agency has declared that in 20 years. Israel has cocked its gun and aimed at the Iranian nuclear program several times in the past 15 years, but each time either under U.S. pressure or doubts by its own military, it stood down at the last minute — which is why it is impossible to exaggerate what is happening today.
Second: The big technical question I have is whether Israel’s bombing of Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities, like Natanz, which is buried deep underground, induced sufficient concussive shock to the centrifuges used to enrich uranium — and overcome their shock absorbers — to make them inoperable at least for a while. If nothing else, one has to assume that the Israeli strike most likely bombed the entries to underground facilities to slow down their work. The Israeli Army spokesman said Israel inflicted significant damage to Natanz, Iran’s biggest enrichment facility, but it’s less clear how Fordow, another enrichment facility, might have been affected, if at all.
If Israel succeeds in damaging the Iranian nuclear project enough to force at least a temporary halt to its enrichment operations, that would certainly be a significant military gain for Israel, justifying the operation.
Third: What actually interests me just as much is the impact this conflict could have on the region — particularly Iran’s longstanding, malign influence over Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, where Tehran nurtured and armed local militias to indirectly control those countries and ensure that they never moved toward pro-Western consensual governments. […]
Fourth: One of the things that has always struck me about Netanyahu is his strategic acumen as a player in the regional theater and his strategic incompetence as a local player vis-à-vis the Palestinians. It is because as a regional player his mind is for the most part unencumbered by ideological and political constraints. But as a local player in Gaza, for instance, his decision-making is not just influenced by, but dominated by, his personal political survival needs, his ideological commitment to preventing a Palestinian state under any condition and his dependence on the crazy right in Israel to stay in power. He has therefore mired the Israeli Army in the quicksand of Gaza — a moral, economic and strategic disaster — with no plan for how to get out.
Fifth: If you are asking yourself how this conflict might affect your retirement investments, the thing to watch most closely is whether Iran tries to destabilize the Trump administration by taking actions to deliberately drive the price of oil into the stratosphere — and create inflation in the West. For instance, Iran could sink a couple of oil or gas tankers in the Strait of Hormuz or fill it with sea mines, effectively blockading oil and gas exports. Just that prospect is already pushing up oil prices.
Sixth: How is Israeli intelligence on Iran so good that it pinpointed the locations of and killed its two top military leaders, not to mention a number of other senior officers? Of course, the Mossad and the Israeli NSA cybercommand, Unit 8200, are very good at what they do. But if you want to know their real secret, watch the streaming series “Tehran” on Apple TV+. It fictionalizes the work of an Israeli Mossad agent in Tehran. What you learn from that series, which is also true in real life, is how many Iranian officials are ready to work for Israel because of how much they hate their own government. This clearly makes it relatively easy for Israel to recruit agents in the Iranian government and military at the highest levels. […]
Seventh: If Israel fails in this endeavor — and by failure I mean this Iranian regime is wounded but is still able to reconstitute its ability to build a nuclear weapon and try to control Arab capitals — it could mean a war of attrition between the two most powerful militaries in the region. This would make the region even more unstable than ever, spiking oil crises and possibly prompting Iran to lash out and attack pro-America Arab regimes and U.S. forces in the area. That would leave the Trump administration no choice but to jump in, probably with the goal of not just ending that war but ending this Iranian regime. Then who knows what would happen.
It’s this last “who knows what would happen” that worries me a lot more than retirement income. Your 401(K) won’t do you much good during nuclear winter with contaminated food (what’s left) and water. If we had Biden in office, or anybody with a track record of understanding foreign policy, this wouldn’t be so worrisome. But we have a posturing clown with zero experience in government, beyond his four years of blundering through the last time and we have as his wingman a guy with two years of experience as the junior senator from Ohio. We have never been so naked and defenseless, experience and expertise-wise, as we are now in this country.
So what will happen? All that we can do is monitor developments as they occur and make educated guesses. Oh, and having a blackout drunk in the chain of command doesn’t sweeten the pot, either.
Not to worry about Noem. She’s already got the fake rack. A blonde wig with brown roots showing, brown tinted contact lenses and a few hours of fulfilling Trump’s sick Ivanka fantasy and all will be well.
What I fear is what happens in Iran if those ruling it are “taken out?” Baby Bush’s neocons who thought they knew sooooooo much more than daddy and his advisors that actually knew shit, and so did Bibi. The assumption that we’d be welcomed as liberators was true for all of about a week. It quickly turned from ‘thanks” to “get the fuck out of our country” and all the ensuing chaos and war. Iran is physically a much larger country and if you leave a leadership vacuum, that doesn’t mean people who WANT the whole Revolutionary Guard leadership from after the fall of the Shah will want anything to do with outsiders trying to direct them into becoming a democracy. We could well wind up with worse than we’ve got!
we just don’t know. However everyone should take a hard look at what happened in Iraq after Saddam was deposed. I for one am not comforted by the possibilities of ‘what comes next.’
Most frustrating than ignorance is an unwillingness to learn — except how to extort more money.