Opinion: ”
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
If it wasn’t clear before, it is undeniable now. President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started a war with Iran assuming that they would trigger quick and easy regime change. They vastly underestimated the staying power of Iran’s surviving leadership and its military capacity not only to inflict damage on Israel and America’s Arab allies but also to close off the most important oil and gas shipping lane in the world.This is imposing serious harm on the global economy, including the U.S. stock market, and Trump has no clue how to get out of the mess that he has created by starting a war without thinking through the implications.
It is actually embarrassing to watch the American president flip-flopping around, from telling us that the surviving Iranian leaders have pretty much agreed to his every demand, that the war is close to being over and Trump won, to admitting that he has no idea how to get the Strait of Hormuz shipping lane out of Iran’s grip. If America’s Western allies, whom Trump never consulted before the war, won’t send their armies and navies to do the job for Trump, then it’s too bad for them, he says: We have all the oil we need. That is, unless Trump decides to “obliterate” — his favorite word — Iran’s industrial base and desalination plants until Iran says uncle.
In short, we are watching what happens when you put into the Oval Office an impulsive, unstable man who ran for president largely to get revenge on his political foes. Then he surrounded himself with a cabinet chosen for its handsome looks and its willingness to put loyalty to Trump over loyalty to the Constitution. Add to that Republican majorities in the House and Senate willing to write him blank checks, and it all eventually leads to sloppy, undisciplined decision-making, including starting a huge war in the Middle East with no plan for the morning after.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTTrump is a man-child playing with matches — the world’s most powerful military — in a gas-filled room.
If all of that were not bad enough, we have a secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who holds extreme Christian nationalist beliefs and, last week, reportedly held a prayer session at the Pentagon in which he prayed for U.S. troops to deliver “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. … We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”
In other words, it’s now our religious warriors against Iran’s.
If this were not the leadership of my own country — and if Iran were not, indeed, the most destabilizing force in the Middle East and its transformation not a worthy goal for its own people and its neighbors — I’d just sit back and watch the show, savoring the spectacle of Trump getting what he deserves.
But it is my country. Iran going nuclear is a threat that could unleash nuclear proliferation all across the Middle East. And we are all going to get what Trump deserves.
What to do? Trump should set aside his 15-point peace plan — which would be ridiculously complicated to implement — and reduce it to two points: Iran gives up its more than 950 pounds of nearly bomb-grade highly enriched uranium, and in return the United States gives up on regime change. Both sides would then agree to end all hostilities. That is, no more American and Israeli bombing, no more Iranian and Hezbollah rockets, no more Strait of Hormuz blockade and, for darn sure, no U.S. ground troops landing in Iran.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT“We have to realize that what the Iranian regime wants most is to stay in power, and what the United States and Israel want most is for Iran not to have a bomb,” said John Arquilla, a former professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of the forthcoming book “The Troubled American Way of War.” “Both sides can get what they want most if they are ready to give up what they want second most.”
For America and Israel, second prize after eliminating Iran’s highly enriched uranium would be regime change. That doesn’t appear to be in the offing anymore, and Trump has already begun laying the groundwork for abandoning that objective. He told reporters on Sunday that given how the United States and Israel have now killed several dozen of Iran’s senior leaders, “it truly is regime change.” Iran’s leaders were “a whole different group of people,” who he said have “been very reasonable.”
Of course, this is ludicrous and a cover for the fact that the United States and Israel vastly overestimated their ability to topple Iran’s regime using air power alone.
The Trump team has reportedly been negotiating through Pakistan with the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has strong ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which appears to be the real power behind the scenes. The rump Iranian regime may well be ready to consider giving up its uranium in return for its survival.
Yes, a million problems would remain unresolved, but that’s what happens when you try to use force without any long-term planning to solve a wicked problem.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTBroadly speaking, a wicked problem is defined as a problem that resists quick fixes or permanent solutions. It involves numerous interdependent variables. Outcomes are never final, just better or worse, or good enough. Every wicked problem is essentially one of a kind, meaning there is no perfect, pre-existing template for solving one. And solutions often have irreversible consequences, meaning that you cannot easily undo a decision.
That is about the best definition of the Iran problem that I can think of.
While he may have never spelled it out in so many words, if you look at President Barack Obama’s actions vis-à-vis Iran, he clearly understood that it was a wicked problem and therefore the wisest course of action was to focus on the core American interest, try to secure that and learn to live with the other features of the problem, mitigating them as best as possible.
That was the logic of Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which put internationally verifiable limits on the country’s uranium enrichment program, and his decision to live with its growing ballistic missile arsenal and its cultivation of proxy militias in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq — which did not threaten America.
Obama’s Iran deal worked as designed. When Obama left office, the curbs on Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacities — verified by international inspectors — meant that Iran, if it broke out of the deal, would require at least a year to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear warhead, providing plenty of time for the world to react.
Nevertheless, Trump, at the urging of Netanyahu, unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018. But Trump never forged an effective alternative strategy to prevent Iran from securing enough uranium for a bomb. The Biden administration tried to clean up Trump’s mess, but could not get Iran to agree.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhen Trump came back to power, he again neglected to forge an alternative. So Iran went from being a year away from a bomb under Obama’s nuclear deal to weeks away thanks to Trump’s reckless withdrawal from Obama’s strategy without an effective replacement strategy. And now with this war Trump has made it a really, really wicked problem.
It’s why we need to keep this as simple as possible. America should extend assurances that we will end the war, leave the regime in place, stop destroying Iran’s infrastructure and even offer some relief from oil sanctions, if Iran turns over all its near weapons-grade fissile material and halts all hostilities from its side. Everything else gets postponed for another day.
Trump will be a very lucky man if the surviving leaders of the Iranian regime say yes. It’s a measure of Trump’s incompetence that they now hold his fate in their hands.”
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www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/trump-iran-war-nuclear-regime-change-peace.ht
Iran’s repressive regime has some 200,000 prisoners, including political dissidents, would-be reformists, recent protesters, civilians who ran afoul of religious codes and a handful of American and European hostages. They are held in a network of prisons, including the notorious Evin, as well as secretive detention centers within security and intelligence complexes. Many are the leaders of a nebulous protest movement that President Trump has urged to rise up and topple a regime in power for almost half a century.
So far, the war in Iran has put them in even graver danger.
Nearby airstrikes have shaken Evin, followed by toxic smoke and oily acid rain that blanketed Tehran after airstrikes destroyed fuel depots in the city. Inmates take shelter at the buzz of drones sweeping overhead.
At least seven security facilities that house detention centers have been hit in airstrikes, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite images. ”
Excerpt From
“The Iranian Prisons Where Bombs Are Threatening Dissidents and Americans”
Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Belle Cushing
The Wall Street Journal
https://apple.news/AVzHfSJd3T8mrdZlBnV_l6A
This material may be protected by copyright.
Prisons, late night, connection with war.
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Fired FBI agents file class action suit, claiming political retaliation. This suit is one of the broadest bids yet seeking accountability against the FBI Director Kash Patel, an Attorney General Pam Bondi for getting rid of employees who have run a foul President Trump.
On Tuesday, three fired agents took a new approach and sued Patel not just on the round accord, but on behalf of the proposed class of all FBI employees who have already been dismissed or
could be in the future for political reasons
Some lost their jobs because they refuse to fire subordinates because of their assignments and without having found in the evidence of misconduct, others were fired after kneeling during protest for racial justice in 2020 one agent resigned after claiming he was threatened with demotion for being friends with a former colleague, just favored by Mr. Patel. -
The Fayum portraits, Egyptian-Roman death masks are far more naturalistic than anything seen in the western hemisphere for many years after.
— Read on www.dailyartmagazine.com/lifelike-death-fayum-portraits-roman-egypt/ -
apple.news/ArOl7OPmNRkm1cYLsU8D1WA
“TEL AVIV — A surge of additional U.S. forces to the Middle East and President Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s energy infrastructure have set the stage for what U.S. and Israeli security officials increasingly see as the war’s possible endgame: a battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz and key energy installations.
Reopening the strait — a critical conduit for global energy supplies — has emerged as perhaps the paramount objective of a war that security officials now believe is unlikely to achieve goals that briefly seemed possible at the outset of the U.S.-Israeli military operation, including overthrowing Iran’s theocratic regime and putting a nuclear weapon permanently out of Tehran’s reach.
Instead, breaking Iran’s stranglehold on the strait could enable Trump to wind down the war
Excerpt From
“Trump threats, U.S. troop build-up raise specter of battle for Hormuz”
Greg Miller, Rachel Chason, Sammy Westfall, Heidi Levine
The Washington Post
https://apple.news/ArOl7OPmNRkm1cYLsU8D1WA
This material may be protected by copyright.
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apple.news/A5ncoYZaZQVyYkn6Dokyocw
“The Supreme Court on Monday appeared likely to embrace a conservative challenge to tallying mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, a move that could upend election procedures in states across the country as voters prepare to cast ballots in the midterm elections.
A majority of justices seemed ready to side with arguments by Republicans and Libertarians who told the court that federal election law preempts Mississippi from counting ballots that arrive up to five days after polls close as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.”
Excerpt From
“Supreme Court appears ready to limit mail-in balloting ahead of midterms”
Justin Jouvenal
The Washington Post
This material may be protected by copyright.
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Whitehouse Speech on Trump-Epstein-Russia Triangle Goes Viral – Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
— Read on www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/whitehouse-speech-on-trump-epstein-russia-triangle-goes-viral/this is an important read
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Companies House to strike off Zedxion Exchange after an OCCRP investigation found the firm used a stock-photo model to hide its links to sanctioned Iranian tycoon Babak Zanjani.
— Read on www.occrp.org/en/news/uk-to-dissolve-crypto-exchange-accused-of-funding-irans-revolutionary-guard -
Ever since it was pumped by commercial rigs from beneath the shores of Lake Maracaibo over a century ago, oil has been both a blessing and a curse for Venezuela. It has fueled boom times and bust times. It gave rise to an urban middle class — and then an echelon of elites who plundered the nation’s oil wealth, amassing billions as the rest of the country collapsed into poverty. In recent weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that a thirst for oil drove his administration’s controversial capture of former president Nicolás Maduro. With Maduro out and Trump calling the shots, the rules of Venezuelan oil are being rewritten once again, and the question, as always, is who is set to benefit. As the world waits to see what designs Trump and Venezuela’s new regime have on the country’s vast reserves of ‘black gold,’ OCCRP presents a deep-dive into the corruption that has warped the oil sector’s recent past with a new podcast, White Collars, Dirty Hands. From OCCRP and the Colombian production company La No Ficción, this investigative series follows exiled Venezuelan journalist Laura Weffer as she tracks down Carmelo Urdaneta, a former high-level official in Venezuela’s oil ministry who sits at the heart of a billion-dollar money laundering conspiracy.Over five episodes, the podcast unspools how millions of dollars were embezzled from the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), between 2014 and 2018 by a circle of insiders who spent the cash on real estate, yachts, and other luxury assets. As part of the investigation, reporters obtained a secret recording in which the mechanics of money laundering are revealed in extraordinary detail: Unaware that they were being taped, a coterie of financiers can be heard discussing precisely how they plan to move dirty money without drawing attention from banks and other financial institutions. Behind these financial tricks lies immense personal suffering; The series also traces the human cost of this corruption, including Laura’s own journey into exile and the voices of other Venezuelans who were battling a severe economic crisis at the same time that their stolen oil money was being “cleaned” by professionals abroad.
— Read on www.occrp.org/en/project/white-collars-dirty-hands
Law, Power, and Justice 