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Trump 'doesn't have a plan' for his war on Iran. And the MAGA base is splintering
00:22:43
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A
Only six days since the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, the destruction is mounting.
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More than 800 people have been killed, including Iranian school children and American service members. What will it take to stop this war? And what might compel Donald Trump to
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end it if he can?
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I'm Samantha Selinger Morris, and you're listening to the MORNING Edition from the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald Today International and political editor Peter Harcher on Trump's tactics and how his MAGA base is responding. It's March 5th.
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A
Welcome, Peter, back to the podcast.
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C
Always a pleasure, Samantha.
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Okay, well, listen, it's been a few days since we last spoke about Iran, so can you briefly just take us through how far the chaos and violence has spread since the war began over the weekend?
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Well, after decapitating the regime in Iran, the Americans and Israelis have continued to bombard Iranian targets. The Iranians have fired back and tried to hurt US Bases and interests wherever possible.
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These details just breaking and that vision just coming into the newsroom now. But this was a suspected Iranian drone which has hit the US Consulate in Dubai. It is on fire, as you can
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see, from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, increasing that pressure. And the IDF has said that it's
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now operating in southern Lebanon after Hezbollah
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fired rockets into Israel.
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Panic, chaos and injuries at the Dubai airport overnight, shahed drone striking a luxury hotel in Dubai's Palm Jumeirah. Oh, my God.
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Casualties have been concentrated mostly In Iran, some 800 so far as we can tell. According to the Red Crescent, 10 Israelis, six dead American service personnel, 52 Lebanese. We shouldn't be surprised about this aspect because the Iranians promised to do this. They promised that they would retaliate against the US And Israel. But they also said that they would hit other Gulf states that were siding with America. And they have. They've hit every Gulf state. I don't think it's intelligent strategy for the Iranians to start bombing and droning, if that's a verb, all the Gulf states, because it only alienates them and brings them into a war they were trying to stay out of, apart from the fact that it's crippled global aviation because so much of it passes through the uae. Plus, of course, the effect of the Iranians closing the Strait of Hormuz has been to push up the global oil price. So far, the effect has been around about 10%. So it's not catastrophic by any means. So that's an aspect of the whole economic aspect, which is then translated into modest, so far contained stock market damage and investor damage around the world as well. So that's the state of play around about now.
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And there's still a lot of chaos. You've just written, many people have written because there's so much chaos around what's actually what this war is all about.
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Right.
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But you've actually spoken to two people with, it has to be said, inside knowledge about what wars can accomplish and specifically about how Donald Trump thinks about military strategy. So what did they tell you about what Trump, you know, very well might be thinking now and whether this is indeed about regime change, as he has sometimes said it was. And then sometimes, of course, he says it's about completely other matters, as do members of his cabinet. It changes by the day.
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Yeah, well, there's chaos about his intentions and ultimate outcome because he sows the chaos. He is the one who continuously changes the rationale. On Saturday, he told the Washington Post, I only want freedom for the Iranian people. He said that's the only thing he wants.
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To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered, don't leave your home. It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.
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But on other occasions, he said he wanted to preempt an Iranian strike on the US Or Israel.
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This was our last best chance to strike what we're doing right now and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime.
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He said he wanted to prevent the proliferation of nuclear technology and fuel beyond Iran. He wanted to change the regime in Iran. He wanted to replace the head of the regime in Iran. So this is why there's so much confusion. So I thought, well, how do we make sense of this? So, yes, I talked to the geopolitical strategist John Bolton, who was Donald Trump's national security adviser for a year and a half in Trump's first term. Bolton is a well known Republican hawk diplomat adviser who for 25 years has been urging American presidents to assault Iran. And now that he's getting his way, he's worried that Trump is about to bungle the whole thing. And so I put to him, what is Trump's plan? You worked with him. He's talked about all these issues many times with Trump when he worked for him. He said, I don't think he has a plan. He said, there is no plan. And evidence for that partly is the continuously changing rationales that Trump offers. And of course, Trump saying that, you know, on the Saturday, he said it could be over in Two or three days. And then the next day he said it's four or five weeks and any variation in between. He also said on Saturday the Iranians are ready to talk and I'm ready to talk to them. But the Iranians.
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While the bombs are flying.
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Yeah, while the bombs are flying. But then, you know, it hadn't even been 24 hours.
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Yeah, but negotiations don't tend to go well when bombs are flying.
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Well, Mick Ryan, the other, the military strategist I talked to, retired Australian general and a widely respected military strategist and commentator, he said that to him, the Iranian retaliation looked like what he called a dead hand retaliatory strike. And this was a doctrine that was adopted during the Cold War. In the event of a nuclear strike that wipes out the leadership, there is a pre programmed retaliatory set of strikes that proceed almost automatically because it's called dead hand, because the leader is dead. And so a preset series of retaliations occurs. And he said that's what this pattern of Iranian retaliation looks like. He said there's no point talking to the Iranians while that's going on. And he said there's certainly no point sitting down with them and they're talking to you about their intentions and there's missiles screaming overhead. So these are the, this is the array of Trump rationales, Trump timetables all conflicting with each other. Another piece of evidence that John Bolton offered in arguing his point that there is no plan. Trump just has no idea what he's doing. Minute to minute is the chaos in the oil market. Bolton said to me, and I didn't have space to use this in my column, but he said to me that all of the endangerment to oil facilities and to oil transiting through the Strait of Hormuz was entirely predictable, had been anticipated and war gamed by the US Military in all sorts of scenarios for decades and should not have come as a surprise to anybody. He said, but there's obviously no plan because we see nothing out of the US and then in the last 24 hours, we heard Trump say, oh, well, there's a problem. Well, the U.S. navy will escort vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. So this sort of ex post facto reaction to try to patch up problems, which really were quite foreseeable. So I'm afraid that the bad news is that somebody who knows Trump is thinking the Iran scenarios and the entire backstory says Trump has no idea what he's doing. And Mick Ryan separately came to the same conclusion. He said the initial military Phase, which was led by the Israelis and followed by the Americans, he said was exquisite. As a professional military planner, he said, I would call that exquisite in its precision and timing and effect.
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Yeah. The military intelligence that obviously they acquired in order to know where all those leaders were going to be.
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Yes.
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Yeah, it was incredible in that sense.
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Yes. So, you know, the Israelis have long had a global comparative advantage, shall we call it, with intelligence. The Americans have long had a global comparative advantage with delivering large quantities of firepower. The two came together with great effect in the first 24 hours. Mick Ryan gave him credit. He said that was exquisite. He said, but the question is, what comes next? And that's the hard part. He said, there's no evidence of a plan. He said, the important part now, and this is a military man, a career army officer here speaking. He said, the critical part is the politics, the economics and the society. There is nothing happening there. Trump, the administration isn't briefing the Congress. Nobody's talking about it.
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Well, I wanted to ask you there about geopolitics, Peter, because. And especially with what you just said about the Straits of Hormuz and how it could have been foreseen that the Iranians were going to shut this off as a way of obviously retaliating. Because some analysts are actually saying that Trump's desire in starting this war, obviously along with the Israelis, was to starve China of the cheap oil that it gets from Iran, that this was a geopolitical strategy to shore up America's global supremacy. Because so much of China's economy relies on the crude that it gets from Iran. Something like 14% of its born crude comes from Iran. Do you think there's any credibility to that, or is that just giving Trump way too much credit that he would have had this geopolitical strategy?
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Yes, I think this is a part of a syndrome of experts who really know their subjects. To look at the Trump chaos, it's like a rosarch test and superimpose on that inkblot their own expertise and understanding of the world. I think this is a classic example in this great muddle and befuddlement in the Trump mind. In the Trump planning or the absence of planning, people seek order and understanding. And so they impose their own structured thinking and academic learning and expertise and see in it maybe what they would do or trying to make sense of it. I don't think there's any prospect that Trump has actually considered that in any sort of thought through way. Everything he does, whether it's tariffs, missiles, you name it, is ad Hoc and all that's done. If you think about China and oil, Trump is trying to discourage countries from using Russian oil because the US and others have sanctions on Russian oil to punish them for their invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine. But by creating a shortage and a price hike of oil coming out of the Persian Gulf, that is just pushing China and India into buying more Russian oil. Now this is a great gift to the Kremlin. This is a great gift to the Russian war machine. Dmitry Peskov, who's the chief spokesperson for Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, was gloating on social media. $100 a barrel of oil here we come. After the break, Candace Owens, a MAGA influencer of some notoriety. She has described this not as the so called Operation Epic Fury. She calls it Operation Epstein Fur.
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What kind of chaos do you think this could still unleash? I was thinking about something that I heard Thomas Friedman say the other day. He is the Pulitzer Prize winning political writer and he said just the other day on what's happening in Iran, the opposite of autocracy isn't democracy, it's chaos. So we've seen what happens when the US Invades, say Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya and often far worse regimes either come about or it's just absolute chaos. So what do you think, Peter?
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Well, it was the US Led invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, the futility, the failures and the enormous cost that turned the US As a whole, as a polity against the use of warfare where it's avoidable. That's why Barack Obama used to say I'm the president who ends wars as a contrast with Bush and his predecessors. That's why Donald Trump in his inaugural said I'm not going to start any wars, I'm going to end wars. He's called himself the president for peace. That is because the costs have been so horrendous. Afghanistan, the US was there for 20 years and the Taliban is back in control. So what was the point of the bloodshed? What was the point of the cost at the chaos? The wounded veterans who were still suffering from amputations, PTSD and all the rest of it. Then there was Iraq, where you know, again, tremendous initial bombardment followed by a series of half assed, half conceived, badly executed plans resulted in eight years of losses. The US Leaves as a consequence an unintended consequence of the US Led combat. We see ISIS take over a large chunk of the country, form a caliphate and start exporting terrorism. With that sort of a history of strategy and failure to plan, it's no surprise that there is great skepticism about what the US Strategy is next. But it is a surprise that the failure of any evidence of real strategy, mind you, if Trump does succeed with the Israelis in removing this regime, if they can somehow engineer a more benign and reasonable responsible government, Donald Trump will be hailed as a great hero. Part of the difficulty with these sort of events, with wars is that anything is possible.
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Well, I guess let's talk about that then, the prospect for regime change, because we know that the Trump administration has actively undermined any opposition that could rise up against the Islamic like Trump has taken money away from Iranian human rights monitoring groups. And Kari Lake, who's a MAGA superstar within Trump's camp, she's cut funding to the Open Technology Fund Agency, which is dedicated to providing virtual private networks and satellite access to Iranians. We also know the Voice of America, which was a local radio station in Persian language, which could give Iranians access to non propaganda, essentially to information that's been cut back. So isn't it quite a leap, I guess, to think that there could be regime change here? Or am I just being pessimistic?
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C
Well, the Ayatollahs have been, as far as we can tell, very successful in destroying and splintering any potential opposition. As far as we know, there is no organized opposition in Iran. So it's a difficult place to start. But there are some opposition figures. We know that, for example, from the fact that the US was able to smuggle into Iran 6000 Starlink satellite terminals to help the Iranian opposition continue to have communications and to get around the communications blackout imposed by the regime. So somebody's receiving those and somebody's using those. And in fact, John Bolton's point was, he said the main emphasis today for the US and its ally really only got the one which is on the ground, is Israel really need to be talking to the opposition, negotiating with the opposition, trying to help and assist and boost the opposition, because the opposition uniquely has an ability to work inside the country to find any fissures or differences between the different elements of the Iranian regime and try to pick it apart if, if in fact that's possible. Because if the regime is going to fall, its security apparatus or its political leadership or both need to fracture. At this stage, you don't see the security apparatus starting to fracture in any way. There's a frisson of excitement that a single prison allowed some political prisoners to walk out without explanation. That's a long way from either the, the regular army or the Revolutionary Guard from splintering.
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And I guess Peter, just to wrap up, I want to ask you what you think the political price I guess, could be for Trump in all of this. I mean, this war might go on for a very long time. I've been seeing analysis that the Iranians will try to prolong the war as long as possible in order to drive up the cost of the war for Trump, American casualties, the price of oil we've just mentioned, so that he can destroy. They can persuade him to declare victory and just go home. Now, when we last spoke just a few days ago, I think it was only about a quarter of Americans who were in support of the war. I can't imagine that's going to go anywhere but down, assuming that tragically more American service members are killed in this conflict. So could this be the thing that really damages his power in the United States? Like, what are the MAGA base feeling about this and other Republicans?
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Well, it's similar to Trump's tariff policy that was essentially imposing a cost on American consumers to pay more for their goods so that Trump could use the fiscal space that created to give a tax cut to the rich. So it's a direct transfer of wealth from American consumers to wealthy taxpayers. With this one, what you see with the inflationary effect taking effect through the price of oil and lng, but also will flow onto the price of plastics, polyesters and others as well. What you're going to see there is again an inflationary increase, which is a direct transfer of wealth away from the American consumer. That can't help Trump's domestic standing. The two big domestic problems he's got that are proving insurmountable for him. One is inflation and the cost of living. That's the number one concern for most Americans. And he's been unable to do anything concrete about that except to try and talk it down, which doesn't work. And the second is the Epstein case. Again, it just doesn't go away. And he's mishandled that pretty horribly. And that really rankles with the MAGA base. Candace Owens, a MAGA influencer of some notoriety, she has described this not as the so called Operation Epic Fury. She calls it Operation Epstein Fury on the basis that it's a Trump attempt to deflect and distract from his problem with the Epstein files and the ructions that's created within the MAGA base. So the MAGA base is splintering on this. The entire American population is paying the price again for Trump policy. The longer this goes, as you say, the more likely that price will go up for the American public, not to mention the taxpayer cost of the actual waging of the war.
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And also I would suggest those who join the American military are disproportionately from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. So there's going to be young soldiers who are often not well off. And I, I just, I wonder how that will play with Trump's base as well. Again, this sheltering the elite and then, you know, the sort of less well off paying in every way.
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Well, this is a common syndrome with militaries everywhere and especially with the US Military and the recent deployments we've seen in this century. It would be completely politically suicidal for Trump to put ground forces into a Iran because that would guarantee a large number of American troops being killed, which would indeed inflame opinion. Opinion is not with Trump on this. It would turn savagely against him. So if he succeeds, as I said, if he succeeds, he'll be hailed as a hero and that might get him a few brownie points. But it's hard to see this as a big domestic political winner, particularly the longer it goes on and the higher those costs run.
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Well, we're lucky that you are commentating in this space, so thank you so much, Peter.
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Always a pleasure to chat to you, Samantha.
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In other news today, Australian researchers have developed an AI tool that can predict breast cancer in women who have been given the all clear in traditional screenings.
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And the data is in.
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Despite government incentives, property investors have piled into the Australian housing market in the past five years, while first home buyers have fallen. And a hit TV series has created a new generation obsessed with the style of the late Carolyn Besieged Kennedy. Experts explained why her minimalist look deserves another look. You can read more at theage.com au or smh.com Today's episode was produced by Chee Wong. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. And our podcasts are overseen by Lisa Muxworthy and Tom McKendrick. If you like our show, follow the Morning Edition and leave a review for
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us on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening.