Can Iran actually sink a US aircraft carrier? Well, maybe. Simplicius says no and explains why here. Fifteen minutes of detailed information to make his case. This video, on the other hand, lays out a different viewpoint. An interesting thirteen minutes why we might be finding out soon which theory is correct, and who loses the most.

What really connected with me are the multiple references in the video to the US striking Teheran’s power generation system which would plunge the city of ten million people into darkness for weeks, perhaps months, with many more times the number of deaths due to the outage than from the original strike. Yet, this is exactly what the West has constantly lectured Russia about with respect to Ukraine’s power system, calling the Russian strikes on the grid vicious and barbaric, designed to starve and freeze the civilian population into surrender. We don’t wage war on civilians, do we? Now, we are in the same boat and…crickets.

Why does this matter so greatly? Because Donald Trump is caught between a rock and a hard place¹, where every move he makes is going to be wrong. He can’t bomb Teheran’s power grid into “obliteration” without risking the destruction of the USS Gerald R. Ford and the loss of 5000+ personnel. He can’t back down because that will be seen by the Irani leadership and the rest of the world as capitulation to threats. If the carrier is sunk, he would have to choose between all-out war with the potential use of nukes and the risk of Russia and China becoming directly involved or calling off his dogs of war and slinking home with his tail between his legs. Either way, no matter which way, Trump loses. There is no “Art of the Deal” here. It is highly unlikely that he has never been in this position before in his entire life.

Which explains why he appears to be increasingly rattled and unhinged.

Oh, did I mention that he postponed the long-scheduled meeting in China with Xi Jinping for a month? Seems he needs to be in Washington to administer the war, his war, which was originally slated to last for only two days–between the stock market close on Friday and its opening bell the following Monday. Now he’s telling us that it will go on for at least another 30 days.

Hmmmmm. The best laid plans of mice and men…

I’ve given up trying to guess what he’s going to do next. I don’t think anyone knows for sure. Probably he doesn’t. Whatever it is, though, I am sure that it is not going to be good and pleasant for either America or the rest of the world. When I wrote a year ago that Trump was an orange-haired wrecking machine, I was putting it mildly. Today, it’s not looking quite as nice, neat, and tidy and, if I was to rewrite that article, it would have considerably more bite.

1. His situation is even worse than George W. (Dubya) Bush’s war in the same region, when he was caught between Iraq and a hard place, and the US spent more than a decade trying to figure out how to escape the situation. ↩︎