"World War III Is Suddenly
Emerging Out of Trump's Quagmire"
by David Haggith
"You've not heard me make a claim like that before as I am not one to jump on the WWIII bandwagon every time the US incites more war; but this week all the chemistry of the Iran war changed. According to what CBS News reported on Friday, the US and Israel are going to significantly intensify the Iran War this weekend with planned bombings of Iran’s energy infrastructure. Trump has indicated this will be the harshest bombing campaign to date against Iran’s infrastructure. However, that is barely the beginning of this detailed account of the sudden moves toward WWIII in the Middle East.
Of course, Trump has promised a greatly intensified war like that many times, specifically saying he’ll blow up all of Iran’s energy infrastructure and end their civilization, and then he’s chickened out just as many times on the supposed basis that Iran was dying to make a deal, which Iran never appears to be dying to make. He appears to do that as a way of trying to cajole Iran into making a deal, but it never works, and Iran has been telling him and the US since long before this war that pressuring them to make a deal with military threats never will result in a deal. So far, they have been right about that, too.
Iran has already warned that, if the US and/or Israel go after its electrical plants or its bridges, as both have often threatened, then Iran will go much more seriously after Arab refineries and other oil infrastructure. That is clearly more than a threat because they already have. Through their proxies they did some of their most significant damage against Saudi Arabia’s refineries and port facilities this past week, knocking the largest plant in the world out of production for repairs.
Axios says Trump is still considering the attacks to be made within days, but hasn’t given the final go so far … but that was the early story. According to CHX, there was discussion about trying to conclude the strikes before financial markets open Monday, out of concern for how the bombings will affect the US and global economy, though no firm endpoint was locked in. That’s the piece most relevant to whether Trump will order the attack… he is trying to compress a strike on Iranian energy infrastructure into a weekend window specifically to get ahead of the oil-price and market reaction - which is an implicit admission of how severe they expect the energy-market fallout to be.
The proposed attack was discussed at a Cabinet meeting that Trump held Friday at Camp David… and CBS wasn’t alone - CBS News and the Wall Street Journal first reported the potential strikes, with the WSJ framing it as Trump having ordered strikes to force Iran to “surrender,” and Trump saying at the Cabinet meeting “We’ll be hitting them very hard… at some point they’ll say we just can’t take it anymore.” So the CBS energy-infrastructure reporting is corroborated by WSJ and Axios - this isn’t single-sourced. (“Trump Mulls Strikes on Iran’s Oil and Power Infrastructure” by Larry Johnson)
Here is a snapshot, giving some additional details about what CBS wrote: U.S., Israel preparing to bombard energy-related targets in Iran, sources say "Washington - The United States and Israel are planning what would be one of the harshest bombing campaigns to date against energy infrastructure targets in Iran, multiple sources told CBS News, with strikes possible throughout the weekend. There was some discussion about trying to conclude by the time financial markets open Monday because of concern about how the bombings will affect the U.S. and global economy, but an end point wasn’t locked in….
A joint operation would mark Israel’s return to combat operations which it had halted during the U.S.-brokered truce. Iran has not hit Israel since the memorandum of understanding fell apart and the U.S. restarted combat operations in early July. An Israeli official told CBS News: “Israel is unaware of a decision to restart full military operations, nor has been requested of Israel to join any military actions against Iran.” “I think we just want to win,” [Trump] told the press when asked about reviving diplomacy."
Energy infrastructure including power plants and refineries would likely be targeted, two of the sources said….When Mr. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met earlier this week, Netanyahu briefed him on three options for the war, including military strikes focused on land resupply routes, a senior Israeli official said. Netanyahu also met with Defense Secretary Hegseth. The U.S. has already struck bridges in this conflict that were dual-use - used by the military and civilians - a U.S. official said.
There were high-level U.S. discussions Friday about cutting electricity across Tehran, but no decision had been made as of Friday afternoon The US President also added: “We’re going to be hitting them very hard because it’s our turn to hit them. They know it’s coming.” (“Donald Trump to launch new strike on Iran ‘this weekend’ as WW3 fears soar”)
There are some discrepancies in the report, but it does fit almost seamlessly with numerous other reports that emerged earlier in the week, which I’ll now go over to show how the whole week appeared to be marching in the direction of a re-intensified war that is suddenly taking on the actual characteristics in the Middle East of World War I, though we should never trust Trump too much on these threats because he backs off almost as often as he makes them, wishing to keep believing he can threaten Iran into a deal. Some of the reports in The Daily Doom today will lay out that particular folly and why it will never work as well as how the president, himself, sounds like he is coming to the end of his rope with plans that have not brought anything that looks to anyone like victory.
Iran rejects Trump’s ceasefire: The worsening situation this week started when Iran flat-out rejected Trump’s latest ceasefire request - the pleading for a deal that came AFTER the MoU fell all apart - even though Trump had just claimed a few more times Iran was dying to negotiate. It would appear they were dying to die, not to negotiate, because they intensified their fighting considerably in order to swat off Trump’s new ceasefire proposal with a harsh backhand to make it clear they absolutely will not have anything more to do with Trump, as they have already stated. Now, they said it with actions!
One report preferred to cast the situation we devolved into this past week as “Trump is panicking as Iran has rejected Donald Trump’s ceasefire… Trump was begging for a ceasefire. Iran said "absolutely not.”
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