The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Mort Rosenblum
During the 1980s, I taped a New Yorker cartoon above my desk. A well-coiffed network TV anchor said something like: "Owing to budget cuts, here is some guy to guess about a few things happening around the world."
That is not so funny today. When distant guesswork piles atop outright propaganda, facts and context are quickly lost. It is hard to fathom how thoroughly a deluded, ignoramus American president, callous and cruel, is crippling our embattled planet.
The main lines are obvious. Donald Trump alienates allies but toadies to authoritarians who pump billions into his coffers. His flip-flops spur China to prepare for the worst. His unrequited bromance with Vladimir Putin puts Ukraine and Europe at grave risk.
Trump's addiction to fossil-fuel funding hastens climate collapse. He deepens hatreds among people condemned to hellish limbo by draconian immigration crackdowns. His denial of COVID-19 caused countless deaths. Foreign aid cuts are killing millions.
And in the Middle East, we see the extremes of a maxim as old as Aeschylus. In war, truth is the first casualty.
Iran posed no direct threat to America in any foreseeable future. Now it does, big time.
Potential calamities are beyond description, and the rising price of fuel is the least of them.
Trump raised hopes by telling Iranians under harsh mullahs' rule that help was on the way. But it wasn't. There was no regime change. Airstrikes killed the supreme leader and a lot of others. They were replaced by younger zealots eager for vengeance.
It was a needless act to draw attention from troubles at home by a shirker with no empathy for fighting forces he treats like toy soldiers or blameless victims of "collateral damage."
To understand today, go back to Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas terrorists burst out of Gaza to commit savage slaughter and take hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu hit back hard, as George W. Bush did after 9/11.
Neither focused only on the actual perpetrators and their motives. In Bush's case, that was folly. It led to the 20-year Afghanistan war and an unrelated Iraq war that created far more America-loathing terrorists than it eliminated. But Netanyahu had a plan.
He had spent decades resisting demands for Palestinian autonomy. This was a chance to bury that idea. Iran's hardline mullahs funded proxy guerrillas who deviled Israel's borders. And then Iran began to enrich uranium for short-range nuclear missiles.
In 2015, Barack Obama rallied China, Russia and European powers to defuse tension with Iran. Monitors ensured no uranium would be enriched to dangerous levels. Sanctions were lifted to allow a more moderate Iran entry into the wider world.
Pushed by Netanyahu, Trump scrapped the Iran accord in 2017. Now the two old cohorts, with differing imperatives, have together set the region ablaze with devastating impact across the globe.
Trump's indulgence toward Israeli extremists is already sparking virulent attacks against Jews everywhere, even those who want peaceable coexistence with Palestinians. His scorched-earth approach to Iran has made America a pariah in much of the world.
Last week, his first address to the nation on Iran was a 19-minute ramble by a distracted old man: blatant falsehoods, ludicrous self-flattery, contradictions and blood libel. His threat to demolish civilian power and desalination plants would be war crimes.
"We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks," he said. "We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.
That is straight out of the Crusader days, warfare by siege and sword. Without truth tellers to chronicle facts, victors took home the spoils, then wrote their own self-serving history. These days, B2 bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles do a lot more damage.
Trump has no plan. He says the Hormuz Strait will magically open. America doesn't need Iran's oil. NATO allies should show some backbone and just steal what they need.
Netanyahu also wants to cripple Iran into a toothless, failed state unable to attack Israel, and he is waging a second war to push Hezbollah farther back into Lebanon. But he artfully manipulates the message.
In grandiose ceremonies aimed largely at U.S. Republicans, Netanyahu likened Trump to Old Testament heroes who delivered Hebrews from oppression. He speaks as if he himself is a modern-day Jewish pope.
Judaism does not work that way. Netanyahu is simply an elected politician, fighting corruption charges to stay in power. Israel is a Jewish homeland meant to be shared with other faiths, not some sort of Vatican.
And he controls the message by banning foreign reporters from Gaza and applying heavy pressure, if not outright censorship, from those within Israel and the West Bank.
Christiane Amanpour cut to the core in a CNN exchange with an Israeli official. She asked why journalists have been barred access to Gaza since the 2023 Hamas attack. He said that was to keep them safe. She replied: "We're war correspondents."
Gutsy young Palestinians with makeshift body armor made themselves journalists overnight. They covered death and suffering among their own families. Israel was responsible for two-thirds of 129 press workers killed in the world during 2025.
Inevitably, their reports were mostly emotional eyewitness accounts with background details hard to pin down among buildings pounded to rubble. International agencies concur with Gazan authorities that the Palestinian death toll is above 73,000.
Had reporters and photographers from trusted news organizations been allowed to document facts and watch the war at firsthand, my guess is that Middle East mayhem would have been far less tragic, and substantive peace talks would be making progress.
For now, anything is possible. We are all guessing at a distance. But now as attention shifts to settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, hard truth is taking shape.
Authorities apologized to CNN's Jeremy Diamond, who soldiers held at gunpoint while viciously beating his cameramen. But he kept video and audio rolling as troops told him in Hebrew how they were stood off to side, letting mob justice take its course.
As for Iran, it is too early to say. But whatever Trump does or doesn't do, I expect this will be a long haul. Watch mortreport.org for dispatches on how it plays out.
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