Iran, Biden, Trump: Senile and Braindead vs Senile but Demented

You may ask what is the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump? The answer is that Biden was senile and mostly braindead. Trump, on the other hand, is senile and demented. Since the people pulling the Biden strings were simply evil, the difference doesn’t usually amount to much. This time, however, it does amount to something. Biden’s people were never quite this lunatic.

The Mexican standoff with Iran is over. The missiles have been launched. The armada that many of us warned was not for “leverage” or “deterrence” has now been used for its obvious purpose: a direct American assault on the Iranian state.

A series of failed policy decisions by Trump led us to the brink. Now they have led us over it. The largest concentration of American air and naval power in the Middle East since 2003 was never assembled for theater. Nearly 100 aerial refuelers were not deployed to send a diplomatic message. Two carrier strike groups, including the $17.5 billion USS Gerald R. Ford, were not shuttled across the Atlantic for a photo opportunity. Fighter squadrons, cruise missiles, and long-range strike packages were positioned because a sustained air and missile campaign was planned.

And now it is underway. They have rolled the iron dice of war. We are told it is “limited.” We are told it is “surgical.” We are told it is “preemptive.” We have been told all these things before. The theory—recycled endlessly in Washington briefing rooms—is that precision strikes against nuclear facilities, missile production sites, command centers, and leadership compounds will shatter Iran’s will and fracture its internal cohesion. That enough explosive tonnage, delivered from a safe distance, can induce the “disintegration” of a country of nearly 90 million people. This is not strategy. It is magical thinking, powered by hubris and sustained by institutional amnesia.

Iran is not Serbia in 1999. It is not Iraq in 2003. It is not Libya. It is not Yemen. It is a continental-scale state with modern air defenses, hardened and dispersed missile forces, and a political culture shaped by decades of sanctions and external pressure. It has prepared for this moment for years.

And it has already begun to respond. The first waves of Iranian retaliation—ballistic missiles, drones, and threats against U.S. bases across the Gulf—confirm what every honest analyst understood: this will not be a one-sided display of American power. U.S. installations in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE lie within range. The carriers themselves are not invulnerable monuments but large, floating targets. Even limited damage—real casualties, a crippled vessel, a burning base—would transform the political landscape overnight. This is the part Washington never models honestly.

What is the end state? When does this war stop? After how many days? After how many sorties? After how many American dead? Does it end when Iran “capitulates”? What does capitulation even mean—dismantling its missile deterrent while Israel retains a reputed arsenal of hundreds of nuclear warheads? Agreeing to permanent strategic defenselessness? No sovereign state would accept such terms. Iran will not.

The American record in the region offers no reassurance. Iraq dissolved into insurgency and sectarian war. Libya collapsed into chaos. Afghanistan ended in humiliating withdrawal. The United States and its allies could not defeat Yemen’s Ansar Allah, despite sustained bombing campaigns that left American carriers worn down and in prolonged repair. Yet the fantasy persists: that this time, the bombing will work.

Behind this recklessness lies a confluence of interests that has little to do with American security. The military-industrial complex profits from multi-day operations and missile resupply contracts. The foreign-policy establishment thrives on permanent crisis. And Israel’s leadership has made regime change in Tehran a long-standing strategic objective, pressing Washington relentlessly toward confrontation.

The Gulf states, by contrast, have little appetite for a regional inferno. European governments fear refugee flows and economic destabilization. Oil markets are already reacting nervously to the possibility that Iran could threaten the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply transits. A serious disruption would not merely inconvenience consumers; it would convulse the global economy.

And hovering over all of this is domestic political rot. The Epstein revelations have corroded public trust in America’s ruling elite. Institutions that once commanded reflexive deference are now viewed with suspicion. In such an atmosphere, foreign war serves a familiar function: it redirects anger outward. It wraps compromised leaders in the flag. It converts questions about corruption into questions about loyalty.

The American press, as always, plays its assigned role. The tired narrative that Iran is “weeks away” from a nuclear bomb—circulating since the mid-1990s—has been dusted off once more. Dissenting voices are marginalized. Skepticism is conflated with disloyalty. The same media organs that misled the public about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction now solemnly assure us that this time the intelligence is solid. We have seen this movie before.

Trump has now done what even some of his predecessors hesitated to do: he has initiated a direct war with a large, regionally entrenched state capable of meaningful retaliation. He has moved from brinkmanship to bombardment. Escalation dynamics, once hypothetical, are now real. Each strike invites a counterstrike. Each counterstrike justifies a broader response. The logic of “credibility” and “deterrence” narrows the space for de-escalation. Leaders who promised a quick demonstration of strength may soon find themselves trapped in a conflict neither they nor their advisors know how to end.

Eisenhower warned that nations which measure security solely by offensive capacity distort its meaning. In 1939, Germany possessed unmatched offensive power. Six years later it lay in ruins. The lesson was not about moral equivalence but about strategic delusion: crushing force does not guarantee durable victory.

The United States has now chosen force over diplomacy once again. It has done so in a region already destabilized by decades of intervention. It has done so with an overstretched military, depleted munitions stocks, and a deeply divided domestic polity.

This will not be a clean demonstration of dominance. It will not be a tidy, televised triumph. It will be unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. And if the spiral widens—if oil chokepoints close, if regional actors are drawn in, if casualties mount—the architects of this war will plead surprise. But there was no mystery here. The buildup was visible. The logic was obvious.

The flames that were rising have now been ignited. And the empire that may be destroyed in the process might not be the one in Tehran.