Roaming Charges: Hail the Unconquering Hero!
Roaming Charges: Hail the Unconquering Hero!
Still of Eddie Bracken as Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith in Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero. (1944)
Why do we hunger so for vicious things?
Our wishes bend the statues of the gods.― Robert Lowell
Trump began his war on Iran during talks to prevent it. He said it gave him the element of surprise. His missile strikes killed much of the Iranian leadership, including some of the Iranians his team thought might govern the country after the bombing ended. One of his missiles hit a girls’ school, another hit the compound of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, one of the candidates Trump’s people had in mind to run Iran after they killed Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the Iranian religious leader who, austere as he was, preferred negotiation over confrontation.
Trump brushed off talk from some of his advisers that Iran would likely respond by shutting the Strait of Hormuz and attacking other Gulf States that had aided the US, either explicitly or covertly. His aides were right. He and Hegseth were wrong. Then Israel killed Iran’s top negotiators. Suddenly, there was no one left to talk to. Trump claimed that the Iranian military was completely destroyed. Iran responded by downing US fighter jets, drones and surveillance planes. It struck US military bases, ships and a CIA station house.
Trump claimed Iran had no leaders and its government was in a state of collapse. But the new regime quickly coalesced around Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, and took a more radical, uncompromising stance. Trump said the Kurds would invade Iran and arm Iranian dissidents. But the Kurds, burned one too many times by the US, declined. And after US and Israeli missiles hit neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, power plants and oil refineries, the Iranian resistance turned against the US.
The Strait of Hormuz was shut down. The price of oil shot up and Trump’s poll numbers sank. The global economy was sent into crisis. Trump asked the European nations he had refused to warn about his plans to go to war against Iran for help. They refused. Spain, Italy, France, Austria, and Switzerland went further. They either blocked or restricted the use of their airspace, landing rights or shared military bases for airstrikes on Iran.
His top intelligence advisors, Joe Kent and Tulsi Gabbard, either resigned or were pushed out. The CIA and the Pentagon began leaking stories to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that Trump had been fully briefed that Iran would likely respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Trump sent the FBI out to find the leakers and hound the reporters. More stories came about how the US had used half of its THAAD interceptor missiles to defend Israel, at $15.5 million a pop, while Israel held its own missiles in reserve.
Unable to extort former US allies to bail him out or bomb the Iranians into submission, Trump began to manipulate the market, announcing fake cease-fire deals one week, threatening to make Iran glow the next. The market spasmed up and down and people with inside knowledge, including Trump, who made over 3000 trades, cashed in.
The US kept bombing with Iran’s high-tech weapons to little strategic effect. Iran kept responding with low-tech drones, which got progressively more accurate in their targeting. Within two months, the US had largely exhausted its missile supply, while Iran was rebuilding its own Fateh-110 short-range and Shahab-3 medium-range missiles, repairing its missile launchers, and reinforcing the bunkers at its nuclear sites.
Chess not being Trump’s game (no one is quite sure what his game is), he responded to Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz by moving inexplicably to impose his own blockade, thus placing himself in check. He vowed to send the Navy SEALs to steal Iran’s uranium stockpile. He didn’t and they couldn’t have, anyway. Trump threatened to send the Marines to seize Karg Island. He didn’t and they couldn’t have, in any event. The Iranians took note. The price of gas continued rising. Farmers ran out of fertilizer. An airline went bankrupt. Trump shrugged. The costs of the war were peanuts to him.
Trump boasted that Netanyahu would do anything he asked him. Trump said he was in control. But the Israelis acted on their own. They did what they wanted, which was to deepen and widen the war, subverting every timid move toward peace by Trump, by escalating its attacks on Hezbollah, Iran’s ally in southern Lebanon. Fulfilling Thucydides’ prophecy, Trump had walked right into his own trap and Netanyahu, behind his cynical smile, helped to spring it.
Europe was against the war. Russia was against the war. China opposed the war. The global south opposed the war. The American public opposed the war. But Congress did nothing as Trump usurped its constitutional power, refusing even to invoke the War Powers Act. There was no one left to stop the war, which almost no one wanted.
Two months into the war, Trump was desperate to find a way out. He sent his negotiating team, led by JD Vance, to Pakistan. The Iranians rebuffed the offer. Vance came home in disgrace and out of favor with Trump, who now considers him a loser. Trump turned his affections toward Marco Rubio, who wants to invade Cuba, but keeps his distance from Iran, a war even he understands to be unwinnable, plugging his ears against the ravings of the Israel-lobby funded hawks in his own party, as Odysseus did the call of the sirens. So the negotiations were left to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two non-diplomats, whose negotiating style is predicated on the pursuit of their own self-interest.
Trump needs a fig leaf to end the war. He was willing to pay Iran billions to hand over its enriched uranium stockpile. This should be an easy win and could have been under Ali Khamenei, who seemed ready to make just such a concession to prevent war, before they bombed his home. After all, Iran doesn’t need it. There are other ways to acquire nuclear weapons, if it wants them. But at this point, Iran knows it holds all of the cards. Iran, not Trump, holds the fate of the global economy in its hands. Despite the death and destruction Trump and Netanyahu have inflicted, Iran is more powerful now than it was before the war. The cards it holds can’t be bombed away. The US would have to send hundreds of thousands of ground troops to come take them. To Trump’s credit, he’s too squeamish to endure the bloodbath such an invasion would inevitably engender.
Iran is now in the position to dictate the terms of any deal, not the man who hubristically considers himself the “artist” of dealmaking, though most of his deals, like this one, ended in ruins.
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+ On hearing word of a potential agreement between Iran and Oman to control the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump fumed: “Oman will behave just like everyone else, or we’ll have to blow them up.” Even Hegseth looks at Trump as if he’s gone totally bonkers, thinking to himself, “Didn’t I just explain to him that we’d don’t have enough missiles left in the stockpile pile to blow up Berkeley, never mind Oman?”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/29/roaming-charges-hail-the-unconquering-hero/
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