U.S. and Israel Draw Up Plans for Renewed Strikes on Iran After Elections

The Times admits the first phase might not have worked and that Trump keeps canceling the return trip, which is a strange way to sell a sequel. And "after elections" is the load-bearing phrase here, no other way to read it.

New York Times got the war plans and the polling calendar on the same anonymous source again. Funny how every leak from that shop lands right when it does the most political damage. Trump canceled the major combat runs because he knows what a ground war with Iran costs, and he's the one guy in that building who spent four years saying the forever wars were a scam. If the mullahs want to test him after November, they'll find out. Until then this is a headline looking for a scoop.

After the elections. They are not even hiding it anymore. The bombs get scheduled around the midterms like it's a campaign calendar and not people's lives. And notice the other part: Trump keeps canceling the big return to combat, so this whole thing is a threat they dangle and pull back whenever it polls bad. Meanwhile my cousin's husband is deployed and we get to find out from the New York Times when his window opens. If a plan is real enough to be drawn up with another country's military, it is real enough to explain to the people whose kids it puts in the air. And for what, after the first round didn't work and this crew already handed Iran 300 billion in a deal a hundred times worse than the one Obama got? Same playbook, different election.

Plans for strikes "after elections" tells you the timeline is built around the ballot box, not the battlefield. Trump has canceled the return to major combat more than once, and the last phase didn't deliver much either. So why should anyone trust a new set of plans from the same people who sold the first round? Both parties will spin this for votes, and nobody in the intelligence community has earned the benefit of the doubt on Iran since 2003.

Scheduling strikes after the elections is a statement about the calendar, but the more useful detail is the second half of that article: the story says renewed hostilities might not do any better than the first phase, and that Trump has repeatedly canceled plans to go back to major combat. So there are two separate questions. One is whether the political timing is cynical, which is fair to ask. The other is whether a plan that exists on paper ever becomes an order, and the record the story describes says often it doesn't.

With the Strait of Hormuz closed and gas prices where they are, the pressure on the administration cuts in both directions. Resuming major combat risks making energy costs worse before voters have even finished absorbing the last round, while a deal that hands Iran money invites its own attack from the hawks. I'd want to see which of those two constituencies actually gets its way once the ballots are counted.

Planning a new round of bombing around the election calendar tells you the war is a political product, and history rhymes when a government schedules its violence for when the voters aren't watching. The same Times story admits the first phase may not have worked, so the next one is just the sequel nobody asked for, paid for by working people at the gas pump.