The week's biggest, and most ominous, story was the Trump administration's decision to launch a "limited" missile attack on Iran, then the reversal of those orders minutes before execution. Here are some links:
Michael D Shear with others:
Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman/Thomas Gibbons-Neff: Urged to launch an attack, Trump listened to the skeptics who said it would be a costly mistake: E.g., Tucker Carlson, who pointed out that "the same people who lured us into the Iraq quagmire 16 years ago are demanding a new war, this one with Iran."
Zack Beauchamp: John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are the hawks behind Trump's Iran policy.
Peter Beinart: Bolton keeps trying to goad Iran into war.
Barbara Boland: Media, war boosters slam Trump for 'chicken' response to Iran: "The hawks are in their element today, screeching for air strikes and promising cake walks."
Max Boot: In Iran crisis, our worst fears about Trump are realized.
Marjorie Cohn: Iran had the legal right to shoot down US spy drone.
David Ignatius: Iran must escape the American chokehold before it becomes fatal: Not someone I look to for sane opinions, but this offers a sense of how Trump's administration has cornered Iran, leaving their leaders with few (if any) good options, and thereby ratcheting up pressure for greater violence. I didn't say "war" there because that implies that war is a future threat. Ignatius makes clear that the US has already started war with Iran, but for now is playing a "long game" by using ever-tightening sanctions to weaken and finally strangle Iran's leadership.
Jen Kirby: US-Iran standoff: a timeline: Start with Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal on May 8, 2018, and Pompeo's "12 demands for a new agreement for Iran" (May 21, 2018), and the imposition of a new round of sanctions, aimed at applying "maximum pressure" to cripple Iran's economy.
Taly Krupkin:
Jim Lobe: Trump has a $259 million reason to bomb Iran: An accounting of campaign donations from known Iran hawks.
Aaron David Miller/Richard Sokolsky: Why war with Iran is bad for Trump -- and America.
Trita Parsi: America's confrontation with Iran goes deeper than Trump.
Elham Pourtaher: For Iranians, the war has already begun: "In Iran, US sanctions are producing a level of suffering comparable to that of wartime."
Jason Rezaian: Iran is outmatched in its latest game of rhetorical chicken. But it might be too late.
Greg Sargent: Trump's Iran reversal exposes one of his most dangerous lies.
Matt Taibbi: Next contestant, Iran: Meet America's permanent war formula.
Michael G Vickers: To avoid a wider war, Iran must be deterred with limited US military strikes: Argues that Trump should be ordering more air strikes, citing Reagan in the late-1980s as an example of forceful deterrence (e.g., shooting down civilian Iranian airliners).
Anya van Wagtendonk:
Trump called off a military strike against Iran. The US targeted its computer systems instead. Contrast this with Iranian cyberattacks against the US are on the rise. Both sides at least given some consideration to consequences when it comes to shooting off missiles. Iran, for example, stressed than when they shot down a US drone, they allowed a manned aircraft accompanying it to pass safely. But neither side seems to worry about cyberwar turning into full-scale war. That strikes me as reckless ignorance: the fact is we know very little about the risks and consequences of attacking and terrorizing computer networks. It also seems pretty obvious that when the US attacks Iran, Russia, China, and others, the response will be counterattacks against civilian computers. As no one has more potential targets for cyberattacks, cyberwarfare puts Americans at far greater risk than anyone else. Given this, you would think that it would be in the interest of most Americans to negotiate protocols against cyberwarfare, but the war planners can't think that far ahead. They'd rather just press what they see as carefree advantages, regardless of future blowback.
Andrew Ward:
Why Iran is fighting back against Trump's maximum pressure campaign: Interview with Afshon Ostovar.
Iran shoots down US military drone, increasing risk of war: Update of the previously unreported story: "US flies military drones over Iran, increasing risk of war."
9 questions about the US-Iran standoff you were too embarrassed to ask: The questions aren't that unreasonable, although the answers could be sharper. Ward is only partly right that the run-up to war against Iran is different from Iraq. With Iraq, Bush led the propaganda campaign from the top, with his entire administration in lockstep, and they had very ambitious goals of invading, seizing power, and reconstructing Iraq under US control. Under Trump, the pro-war faction is smaller and, of necessity, more furtive and disingenuous. They haven't articulated clear goals (least of all a plan to invade and seize power -- Iran is, after all, a much more daunting target than Iraq and Afghanistan, and neither of those adventures are remembered as successes). Their more limited goal has been to sow discord and cultivate enmity, applying pressure to increase tension and provoke reaction in the hope that incidents like we've seen this past week will convince Trump to escalate hostilities.
Trump plans to nominate Mark Esper, a former combat veteran and lobbyist, as Pentagon boss: "He was a former classmate of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo [at West Point]." And, more recently, a lobbyist for Raytheon, and continues as an advocate of high-tech weapons systems aimed at China and Russia.
Brett Wilkins: The exceptionally American historical amnesia behind Pompeo's claim of '40 years of unprovoked Iranian aggression'.
Robin Wright: What will follow Trump's cancelled strike on Iran?
Ardeshir Zahedi/Ali Vaez: The US should strive for a stable Iran. Instead, it is suffocating it.
Some scattered links this week:
Zeeshan Aleem: Benjamin Netanyahu just unveiled Israel's newest town: "Trump Heights".
Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman: Trump campaign to purge pollsters after leak of dismal results.
Alexia Fernández Campbell: Congress has set the record for longest stretch without a minimum wage increase.
Igor Derysh: Joe Biden to rich donors: "Nothing would fundamentally change" if he's elected.
Glynnis Fawkes: Nineteenth-century novels, with better birth control.
Tara Golshan:
Bernie Sanders's free college proposal just got a whole lot bigger: "Sanders wants to cancel all student loan debt."
Are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders the same? The debate, explained. Not all that satisfactorily, but the two candidates offer a lesson in how distinct political traditions can converge on similar answers given our current set of political and economic problems. Early in the 20th century, people who thought that the system had to be changed could be divided up as progressives and socialists. (The populist party pre-dates this split, and had elements that went both ways, but isn't a very useful distinction these days. Later liberals liked to malign populists as bigots, which is why the term is sometimes applied to bigots like Trump today, who lack any affinity to populism.) With her focus on expanding the middle class and her near-obsession with policy reforms, Warren fits pretty clearly into the progressive tradition. Sanders, on the other hand, identifies with the working class, and still likes the idea of revolution (always qualified as "political" -- i.e., non-violent). Still, the practical effect of either winning is likely to be very similar, both because they agree on the key problems (much more equality, an end to war), and because their scope will be limited by more conservative Democrats in Congress. I should probably add that within this household, Warren is deemed less trustworthy on war and the military -- she did, after all, vote for Trump's military spending increase -- which is something that presidents have a lot of leeway to act directly on. Golshan doesn't see that much of a gulf there but, well, this is something we're pretty sensitive to.
Umair Irfan:
Elizabeth Warren thinks corruption is why the US hasn't acted on climate change.
Trump's EPA just replaced Obama's signature climate policy with a much weaker rule: Obama's "Clean Power Plan" attempted to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. New one is called "Affordable Clean Energy Plan." It's more affordable to power plant owners, by letting them burn dirtier fuel and release more carbon into the atmosphere.
Rebecca Jennings: Taylor Swift's "You Need to Calm Down" wants to be a queer anthem. It also wants to sell you something. You might find the video link inspiring, or at least amusing. I noted the "Get a Brain Moran" sign -- a thought I've had before, although to be fair the Jr. Senator from KS has more on top than most of his caucus (e.g., just voted against arms sales to Saudi Arabia).
Sarah Jones: E. Jean Carroll: "Trump attacked me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman." He's just one of many featured in Carroll's My list of hideous men. Related: Anna North: E. Jean Carroll isn't alone. That matters. Also: Laura McGann: Donald Trump is trying to gaslight us on E. Jean Carroll's account of rape.
Ed Kilgore:
Jen Kirby:
Former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi dies after collapsing in courtroom.
Patrick Shanahan withdraws from consideration as Trump's secretary of defense: For reasons more bizarre than the obvious reason for rejecting Shanahan: his career as a Boeing shill. Next in line is Mark Esper, comparably corrupt, his allegiance to team Raytheon.
Sam Knight: The empty promise of Boris Johnson: A portrait: "The man expected to be Britain's next Prime Minister makes people in power, including himself, appear ridiculous, but that doesn't mean he'd dream of handing power to anybody else." Hard to believe that whoever wrote that line wasn't also thinking of Trump, who may not be as sui generis as he'd like to think. Article mentions that Johnson is one of ten candidates in the race for Conservative Party leader. That field has been reduced to two now: Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, with Johnson still heavily favored. [PS: Or maybe not: Rebecca Mead: Will Boris Johnson's "late-night altercation" sink his bid to become Prime Minister?.
Ari Kohen: The GOP doesn't actually care if you call them 'concentration camps': "This bad faith criticism isn't based on a great deal of care for the feelings of Jews or a deep understanding of the Holocaust." Related:
Caitlin Dickerson: 'There is a stench': no soap and overcrowding in detention centers for migrant children.
Isaac Chotiner: Inside a Texas building where the government is holding immigrant children
Masha Gessen: The unimaginable reality of American concentration camps.
Anna Lind-Guzik: I'm a Jewish historian. Yes, we should call border detention centers "concentration camps."
EJ Montini: Joe Arpaio ran a self-proclaimed 'concentration camp' for years. Where was GOP outrage?
Andrea Pitzer: 'Some suburb of Hell': America's new concentration camp system.
Peter Beinart: AOC's generation doesn't presume America's innocence, where he notes that "for the first time in decades, the left is mounting a serious challenge to American exceptionalism." He admits that the 1960s new left did that too, even citing Noam Chomsky's 1969 book American Power and the New Mandarins, but he doesn't seem to have registered that Chomsky has written more than 100 books since then. [PS: for his latest, see Noam Chomsky: The real election meddling isn't coming from Russia.] While the Vietnam War did much to make Americans aware that their government habitually lied about its good intentions and covered up its misdeeds, even then one could not avoid awareness that the government had systematically oppressed Native Americans and African-Americans ever since the first Europeans arrived, or that the US had waged brutal wars of conquest against Mexico and the Philippines. Indeed, the historiography on all of these issues has grown steadily since the 1960s. Beinart's assertion only makes sense if, like him, you assume that the leading lights of "the left" in recent decades were the "liberal interventionists" of the Clinton and Obama administrations: people like Madeline Albright, Samantha Power, and Beinart himself (temporarily, at least, as when he wrote his first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror). Between Vietnam and the War on Terror, many Americans worked hard to forget their "barbaric" past (as Beinart quotes George McGovern putting it), which is what allowed the Clintons and Obama to try to reclaim the lost moral high ground. That those claims increasingly ring hollow is not just because the left has resurfaced as a force that can be talked about. It's also because the right, especially since Cheney started bragging about "taking the gloves off," has become perversely proud of American atrocities.
Eric Levitz: 10 takeaways from the Times' interview with 21 Democratic candidates: My takeaway from the article is "Elizabeth Warren is definitely to the right of Sanders on foreign policy."
David Lightman/Ben Wieder: Trump states and rural areas grab bigger chunk of transportation grant funds: Something reassuring about this bit of old fashioned pork barrel politics. I don't even mind the increased rural road funding, although the cuts elsewhere probably affect more people.
PR Lockhart: Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates gives Mitch McConnell a thorough history lesson on reparations. Related: Here's what Ta-Nehisi Coates told Congress about reparations.
Lili Loofbourow: The genius of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Sanders didn't just defend the president from the effects of his own statements; she offered herself as a kind of prosaic presence whose function it was to act like anything Trump did, no matter how shocking, was no big deal. She exemplified the stolid approval Trump wanted for everything from family separations to tax cuts for the rich. As her tenure ends, we can now see how much her reliance on reassuring phrases like "make a determination" -- and unblinkingly calling lies differences of opinion and hush payments not worth discussing -- provided a kind of muted laugh track to the terrible show being forced upon America. Rather than laugh at unfunny jokes, she loyally normalized despicable conduct.
David Nakamura/Holly Bailey: 'There's no accountability': Trump, White House aides signal a willingness to act with impunity in drive for reelection.
Ella Nilsen: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders had 2 very different answers to Trump's official 2020 campaign launch.
Alex Pareene: Give War a Chance: "In search of the Democratic Party's fighting spirit." Title is a sick joke -- Democrats have given war plenty of chances, and for a long while counted warmaking as one of their "core competencies" (as the MBA's like to put it). Subtitle is closer to the intended mark, but I still don't care for the imagery. (Fittingly, Elizabeth Warren, author of books like A Fighting Chance and This Fight Is Our Fight, is featured in the graphic.) What should be clearer is that Democrats need to find and stick to some principles ("worth fighting for" is a cliché hard to avoid here), instead of always trying to broker compromises with an opposing party that seeks nothing less than abject surrender. Pareene makes Biden out to be the poster boy for gutless, guileless surrender -- a task that Biden himself made easier last week in touting his ability to "work with" rabid racists like James Eastland and Herman Talmadge (see Jeffrey St. Clair for "a taste of the rhetorical stylings of James Eastland"; he also quotes a Biden "love letter" thanking Eastland for his help "to bring my ANTIBUSING legislation to a vote").
Kelsey Piper: Death by algorithm: the age of killer robots is closer than you think.
Andrew Prokop:
"We r all on the same team": read Sean Hannity's chats with Paul Manafort.
Trump's 2020 message: "Depraved" Democrats "want to destroy you": "Trump's polling isn't great. So he's using the one play he knows." No doubt there are people within the right-wing echo chamber who will embrace this message, but I have to believe that this kind of blanket slur campaign, especially pitched at such a hysterical level, won't travel well, and will start to make people question the sanity of the Trump campaign.
Joe Biden's controversial comments about segregationists and wealthy donors, explained.
Frances Robles/Jim Rutenberg: The evangelical, the 'pool boy,' the comedian and Michael Cohen: How Jerry Falwell Jr. fell in love with Donald Trump.
Aja Romano: Curtis Flowers was tried 6 times for the same crime. The Supreme court just reversed his conviction. Related: Jeffrey Toobin: Clarence Thomas's astonishing opinion on a racist Mississippi prosecutor.
Aaron Rupar:
Trump is trying to rewrite the history of his family separation policy before 2020.
Trump postpones ICE's planned deportation raids in 10 big cities.
Trump blindsides ICE with mass deportation announcement on eve of reelection rally.
Sean Hannity just demonstrated how not to interview President Trump.
Trump's interview with George Stephanopoulos, explained: "Donald Trump doesn't normally talk to journalists willing to challenge him. His big ABC interview illustrated why."
Trump's historic one-day fundraising haul, explained: "Trump raised nearly $25 million on Tuesday. That's a ton of money -- but it comes with some caveats." His days of "self-funding" are long gone. He may not know much, but it's hard not to credit him with a vision and knack for turning a political campaign into a massive funding resource.
Trump's 2020 kickoff made it seem as though he's running against Hillary Clinton: And why not, if she's the only Democrat he can beat?
Trump still refuses to admit he was wrog about the Central Park 5: Or anything else, for that matter -- especially if race is involved.
Timothy Smith: How Republicans stopped worrying about the right to vote: "The GOP launched a four-pronged plan in 2008 to undercut the American tenet of 'one person, one vote.' We're now entering the final phase."
Tierney Sneed: Will a Trump trade move create an election mess for overseas US voters? That's actually just one aspect of Trump plans to withdraw from the Universal Postal Union.
William Spriggs: We're less prepared for the next recession than we were for the last: You may recall that the economy entered a steep decline early in the 2008 recession very similar to the one in 1929, but unlike the Great Depression, the free-fall was stopped by "automatic stabilizers" like the unemployment compensation system that saved many families from ruin. Those automatic stabilizers have not been maintained during the post-2008 austerity, and that will let the next collapse hit even harder.
Matt Stieb: Six takeaways from Hope Hicks's House Judiciary testimony: One I believe is "Hicks said Trump's 'Russia, if you're listening' line was a joke."
Matt Taibbi: Trump kicks off re-election campaign: Get ready for 'Billionaire Populist II: The Sequel'.
David Wallace-Wells: Disaster upon disaster: Sample paragraph, relatively close to home (and by no means the most harrowing):
Last month, in the Midwest, 500 tornadoes swept through the region in just 30 days -- an average of 20 every day. The region is still underwater from historic flooding earlier in this spring, with some places deluged by seven feet of water and others issuing multiple disaster declarations in a single week. The Mississippi River has been flooding for three straight months; in Baton Rouge, the river rose past "flood stage" the first week of the year, according to Weather.com, 'and has been above that threshold ever since." In March, major flooding began in Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska -- and in Nebraska alone, damages are expected to reach $1.3 billion. The whole Midwest, the New York Times wrote, "has been drowning," and farmers are so far behind in their planting -- with only a fraction of corn and soybean crops actually in the ground -- that the whole year's harvest is in peril.
Li Zhou:
Kamala Harris wants to give every unemployed worker $8,000 for job training: Not a bad idea, but a special case stopgap, compared to universal right to free college education (including remedial high school and trade schools) would be a much broader approach, perhaps combined with extending unemployment benefits for full-time students.
The recent Republican blowback to trump judicial nominees, explained: Basically, some of Trump's nominees aren't bad enough for them.
Felt like making a rare political tweet today (tortured into fitting their character count limit, depending heavily on the reader's "cultural literacy"):
Another way Trump isn't Hitler: you can't imagine the latter announcing then postponing Kristallnacht two weeks. Real fascists made the trains run on time. Poseurs and wannabes flirt with evil, then make nice, like "good people on both sides." Vile, at least.
Other tweets I felt like saving:
@nycsouthpaw I wonder at Trump's dismal career. Assault after assault. Fraud piled upon fraud. An endless succession of victims churned up behind him like a ship's wake. Somehow cutting the web of consequence that ensnares and stops most bad men in time like a hull through so much blue water.