Last weekend twelve B-1 bombers left Royal Air Force Fairford in a hurry and flew home. The President says this was no big deal. His Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, says the Pentagon is forever moving its resources to wherever they are needed. By Monday, American and British officials were admitting the rest. Commanders had specific and credible information that operatives working for Iran meant to fly drones at the aircraft, and at our airmen, from just outside the perimeter fence. Ukraine did something of the kind to Russia last year, with drones launched from trucks parked deep inside the country, and wrecked or damaged at least a dozen aircraft. So the bombers went. Fairford is in the Gloucestershire countryside, nearly three thousand miles from Tehran. It was built in 1944 to help put the Allied armies ashore in Normandy, and it has been on the American military map ever since. Eighty-two years on, the most powerful air force in history has been run off it by the fear of some men with a truck.

I have spent a good part of this year calling Donald Trump a liar and a fraud, and I voted for him three times before that, so I claim some experience of the subject. I now think those words gave him too much credit. A fraud knows what he is doing. He takes your money and he keeps it. What I see at Fairford, and in the wreckage of our bases from Kuwait to Qatar, is something no fraud would have allowed, because a fraud looks after the property he has stolen. The plainer explanation is the one his enemies offered from the first, and that people like me were too proud to accept. The man is stupid. I mean the word in a fairly exact sense, and I will try to earn it.

Start with what he has won, since he talks about nothing else. Iran’s navy is at the bottom of the sea. Its air force, which was fit for a museum before the war, no longer flies. The blockade has cut its oil exports to almost nothing: the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, says that not one barrel of crude has been loaded onto a ship since August 25, and Iranian officials now admit for the first time that the economy is hurting. I accept all of this. On the campaign trail these facts are offered as proof that Iran is about to fold, and any reporter who mentions the other side of the ledger is accused of spreading “fake news” and of disloyalty to the country.

Here is the other side. When the war began on February 28 there were thirteen main bases in the region used by American forces. Many were uninhabitable within weeks. Our people have been pulled out of Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. In Kuwait, six American service members died when a strike destroyed an Army operations center at Port Shuaiba, and Ali Al Salem Air Base and Camp Buehring were both hit. At Al Udeid in Qatar, the air headquarters for the whole region, the Iranians damaged an early-warning radar. A drone struck the communications equipment at Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Refueling tankers were damaged on the ground at Prince Sultan in Saudi Arabia. The troops driven off the bases were put up in hotels and office buildings with no protection to speak of, and the Iranians found out which hotels and hit those too. The CIA station in Saudi Arabia was struck, though nobody will say whether by aim or by luck. Some bases are in such a state that the Pentagon has little wish to rebuild them. Our bombers now fly their missions from the continental United States. Our carriers in the Arabian Sea are supplied from Diego Garcia, 2,200 miles away. The Navy cannot guarantee passage through the Strait of Hormuz or parts of the Red Sea, and keeping those waters open was the reason we were given, for half a century, for being in the Middle East at all.

So a country with no navy, no air force and no oil income has emptied the American position in the Persian Gulf and then reached into England. It did this with missiles, and with drones that cost about as much as a used pickup. Every government with reason to fear us has watched it happen. Dana Stroul, who ran Middle East policy at the Pentagon under Biden, says the Iranians are likely to conclude that Trump can be pushed around. I would put it less politely. They have concluded it already, and so has everyone else.

Now consider how he got here. In June of last year he sent bombers against three Iranian nuclear sites and announced that the program had been “obliterated.” Iran answered with a salvo at Al Udeid that it took care to announce beforehand. In January he had the President of Venezuela lifted out of his bed in Caracas. Each operation was over in a night, and each made him look like a master of war. He concluded that a third would go the same way. This is how a man reasons when he has won two hands and decides he has a system, and Trump of all people ought to know better, having managed to bankrupt casinos. A raid is something you do to an enemy before going home. A war is something the enemy gets to do back. He started the second in the belief that it was the first. Victory was promised in days, and then in five or six weeks. Three weeks in, he declared that Iran was totally defeated. Last week he said it would fold “right after the election.”

Look at the particulars, because that is where stupidity shows. He attacked a country that had spent thirty years building missiles and drones for the purpose of hitting the American bases on its doorstep, and he left those bases where they were, full of people, with no plan for where to put them when the missiles arrived. The hotels are the evidence for that. He demanded “unconditional surrender” from a nation of ninety million that he had neither the means nor the intention to occupy. Unconditional surrender is a demand you make with an army standing in the enemy’s capital. Made from thirty thousand feet, it tells the other side only that there is nothing to be gained by talking. The Iranians have understood. Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar of Texas A&M, writing this month in Foreign Affairs, describes their strategy now as constant escalation with no thought of compromise, and thinks they may even try to seize some of the bases we have abandoned. Above all, Trump measures the war by what he has destroyed, when wars are decided by what each side can still do. Iran can still do the one thing that matters to it, which is to hurt us where we stand. We have run out of ways to make it stop.

A clever scoundrel would have behaved differently at every turn. He would have taken the applause for June and quit while he was ahead. Failing that, he would have got out in the first month and called it a triumph, which is a thing this President can do in his sleep. The Italian historian Carlo Cipolla once proposed that a stupid man is one who injures other people and gains nothing by it for himself, and he thought such a man more dangerous than a bandit, since a bandit at least wants something and stops when he has it. By that test the case is closed. The country has lost its bases, much of its stock of precision munitions and six service members at Port Shuaiba. Trump has lost the movement that elected him. I can see that much from my own front desk.

His conduct since has been that of a man who knows something has gone wrong and cannot work out what. The Pentagon refuses to give Congress an estimate for repairing or replacing the bases, a bill that lawmakers put in the tens of billions of dollars. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut went to the Gulf this week to look at the damage and was refused entry to Al Udeid, under restrictions that Pete Hegseth imposed when the war began. When Hegseth spoke to the troops last week he said nothing about the lost bases. He talked about having the states compete for a vast new one at home, which is the game his chief was playing in Ohio with a space academy on the very weekend the bombers left England. You hide the bill when you think the bill is the problem. The problem is that there is nothing to show for it.

I should say where I stand, because readers of this site know that I am no friend of the American empire. In August I wrote here that the American Middle East should be allowed to die, and I have not changed my mind. My family never asked for any of it. My grandfather thought Senator Taft was right to vote against NATO and did not forgive Eisenhower for beating him to the nomination. My father thought the same way about Vietnam and lived to think it about Iraq. I was slower than either of them, as three votes for Donald Trump will show.

But they paid. Withholding from wages came in during 1943, the year before Fairford was built, and from that day to this three generations of my family have had the cost of the bases and the fleets taken out of their earnings before they saw the money. Nobody asked them. Al Udeid, the camps in Kuwait, the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters and the B-1s themselves, which date from the Reagan years, were bought with money taken from people like them on the promise that this was the price of safety. I think the promise was false. That does not change who paid.

I will also say this for the men who built the thing. They were often wrong and sometimes wicked, but they were not fools. They understood shipping lanes and fuel and what a base is for, and they did not start wars with countries that could reach their airfields. What they built has been inherited by men who know only that it is there.

Three generations of my family were made to buy a very expensive machine that none of them wanted. I would have sold it. I still object to watching it driven into a wall by a man running someone else’s errand. There is a difference between closing a business and being run out of it. Those of us who wanted the legions home wanted them brought home by decision, with the bases shut on a timetable, the equipment shipped back and the saving left in the pockets of the people who earned it. What we have is the other thing. The bases are gone and there is no saving. Senator Jack Reed of the Armed Services Committee says the cost of the war is still climbing by billions of dollars a month, and the Pentagon’s answer to losing its bases is to plan new ones. A withdrawal would have taught our enemies that we had gone home. This retreat has taught them that we can be driven, which is a lesson that will be tried on us again. We have the expense of empire and the humiliation of defeat in the same year, and I would once have said that no one man could arrange both.

That leaves the question of why. Stupidity explains how the war was lost. It does not explain how it came to be started, since even a stupid man needs someone to hand him the idea. No American interest has been named for this war that lasted longer than a news cycle. Iran had not attacked us. The nuclear program was the one he had told us he destroyed eight months earlier. There is, however, one government that has wanted the United States to make war on Iran for thirty years and has said so to anyone who would listen, and that is the government of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu was warning Americans about Iran in the early 1990s and has never stopped. When the war came on February 28, it came as a joint venture with that government.

I wrote in August that the undue influence of the Israel Lobby was the chief political force behind the war, and I will repeat what I mean by the term, because it gets misused. I do not mean American Jews, most of whom have never voted for this President. I mean what Professors Mearsheimer and Walt meant when they wrote the book that brought them so much abuse: an alliance of organizations and donors doing in the open what the sugar growers and the teachers’ unions do, with more money and better discipline. There is AIPAC, whose political committee spent on a scale never before seen in House primaries in 2024 to end the careers of congressmen who had crossed it. There is Miriam Adelson, who put about a hundred million dollars behind Trump that same year, and whose visits to the White House in his first term, along with what she and her late husband asked for when they came, he has cheerfully described in public. And there are the Christian Zionists in their millions, who supply the votes. I know them. They have been eating breakfast in my motel for as long as I have run it, and they are decent people for the most part who have been taught from the pulpit that American foreign policy is a branch of prophecy.

The Lobby’s defenders have one good argument, and I will state it for them. The Lobby has always been there, and presidents have not always obeyed it. Eisenhower went on television in 1957 and made Israel give back the Sinai. Reagan sold AWACS aircraft to the Saudis in 1981 over everything AIPAC could do. The elder Bush held up loan guarantees in 1991 over the settlements. All true, and it is my point. Every president is pushed, because pushing is what lobbies are for. It takes a particular kind of president to be pushed over. He has to be a man with no knowledge of his own to set against what he is told, who judges advice by the flattery it comes wrapped in, and who has filled his cabinet with men chosen on the same principle. With a president like that, influence turns into control. I know no other word for an arrangement in which one side pays and instructs, and the other goes to war against his own campaign promises and his country’s interest and cannot give the same reason for it two weeks running. Then look at where the Pentagon proposes to put the bases it has lost in the Gulf. It wants to build in Israel and Jordan. We have been run out of our own property in a quarrel that was never ours, and the plan is to move in with the party we were fighting for.

If I had thirteen properties and lost the use of most of them in seven months, nobody in my trade would spend long asking whether I was a crook. They would take the keys away. That is the judgment I am asking for, and the choice of word matters because the remedy differs. A crook can be watched or bought off. With a fool the only safe course is to take out of his reach whatever he is able to break. That means a Congress that insists on its power over war and gets the bill for the bases published, whatever Hegseth would prefer. It means building no new bases in Israel or anywhere else, and closing what is left, once the shooting stops, by our own decision and on our own schedule.

My grandfather’s wages were being docked for the war effort in the year Fairford was laid out. My father paid for Diego Garcia, and I have paid for my share of the B-1s. None of us wanted an empire, and all of us would have liked a say in what became of it. What I get is to stand at my front desk and watch on the lobby TV as it is abandoned a base at a time on the orders of a fool, for the convenience of a foreign government and the Americans who lobby for it. I never wanted the thing. I would still have liked to be asked before it was thrown away.