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International, International, Middle East, Politics, Republican Party, Trump, US

Revealed: Trump Likely to Send Ground Troops to Iran

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Trump knew Americans would die and went to war anyway; former presidents say Trump lying about phone call, CBS journalists walk off the job

Raw America
Mar 17

Three weeks into a war that nobody voted for, the stories breaking this morning are not about battlefield victories. They are about a president who knew exactly what was coming, lied to your face about it, invented a former president who never called him and whose own allies are now privately warning that ground troops in Iran may be inevitable. And through all of it, CBS News is bleeding journalists and replacing them with Bari Weiss, while the FCC chairman rattles sabers at any broadcaster who covers the war honestly.

Trump Knew. His Own Intelligence, Officials Say So.
Donald Trump stood before reporters and said nobody, not one expert, not one intelligence official, could have predicted that Iran would retaliate against U.S. allies across the Gulf. “We were shocked!” he said.

Sources with direct knowledge of the pre-war intelligence assessments told journalists Monday that is flatly untrue. Iranian retaliation against military assets and allied targets across the region was not guaranteed, but it was, in the words of one source, firmly “on the list of potential outcomes.” Two additional sources confirmed that Trump was also specifically warned Iran might attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz. His own press secretary has since confirmed he received those briefings and chose to proceed anyway.

Iran was not exactly secretive about its intentions either. Less than ten days before the U.S. launched strikes on February 28th, Iranian officials sent a letter to the United Nations stating explicitly that all bases and assets of any hostile force in the region would constitute legitimate targets in the event of a military attack. That letter is a public document.

More than 1,400 Iranians have been killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes, including dozens of children killed when a U.S. missile struck a girls’ elementary school in the southern city of Minab on the first day of the war. Thirteen American service members are dead. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Gas is near four dollars a gallon with midterms approaching. And the president is telling the American public he had no idea any of this could happen. His own intelligence community is telling you otherwise.

When a president can lie about what he knew before sending Americans to die and face no immediate consequence for it, we’re not just talking about one bad actor. We’re watching what happens when the guardrails of democratic accountability have been quietly dismantled, one norm at a time. That’s the thing about lies in wartime. They don’t just mislead. They kill.

Every Living Former President Says Trump Lied About That Phone Call
On Monday, Donald Trump claimed not once but twice that he had spoken with a former U.S. president who told him he wished he had attacked Iran himself. He refused to say who it was, adding that revealing the name would be bad for the person’s “career, even though they have no career left.” Later in the day, he hinted strongly it was Bill Clinton, describing the mystery caller as a member of the opposing party who happens to like him.

Within hours, aides to all four living former presidents, Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, told multiple news organizations that their bosses had not spoken with Trump about Iran. Not one of them. The call did not happen.

This matters beyond the embarrassment of it. Trump used this fabricated endorsement to defend a war that has killed 13 Americans and more than 1,400 Iranians. He also repeated his long-debunked claim that Iran was two to three years away from a nuclear weapon it would have used against Israel and then the United States, a claim contradicted by his own intelligence agencies. The president is constructing a fictional justification for a real war, and when pressed on the details, every piece of it falls apart.

We’ve seen this before. Presidents who need a war to stay popular have always needed a story to go with it. From the Gulf of Tonkin to weapons of mass destruction, the pattern is the same. What’s different now is that the lie got fact-checked within hours by the offices of four former presidents, and it still didn’t matter to a significant chunk of the country. That’s not a Trump problem. That’s an information-ecosystem problem, and it’s one of the deepest threats to self-governance this country has ever faced.

Trump’s Own Allies Are Warning This Could Mean Boots on the Ground
The most alarming story of the morning comes from inside the White House itself. Sources close to the administration are now privately warning that Trump has lost control of this conflict’s trajectory and that the only remaining path to saving face may involve deploying American ground troops inside Iran.

The core problem is the Strait of Hormuz. Keeping oil shipments moving through the strait against sustained Iranian attacks almost certainly requires seizing Iranian territory on the ground. One White House insider put it plainly: “They decide how long we’re involved, and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.”

A second source said the situation has fundamentally changed. “The terms have changed. The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

Some of this is a direct consequence of Trump’s own choices on the first day of the war. By assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei along with senior commanders and family members, the administration may have made Iranian capitulation politically impossible. The new Supreme Leader is Khamenei’s son. His father was killed in a U.S. strike. His mother was killed in a U.S. strike. One White House source asked the obvious question out loud: “Do you think he’s going to be more or less reasonable?”

The “America First” coalition that cheered this war three weeks ago is now quietly panicking. Republicans heading into midterms are watching gas prices climb and a war with no exit. This is what happens when you launch a military campaign without a plan.

This is the oldest and most tragic story in American foreign policy. Young men and women end up dying not because a strategy succeeded, but because a president can’t figure out how to stop without losing face. And the people who’ll pay the price for that pride are not sitting in the White House. They’re sitting in forward operating bases and in families across this country, waiting for a phone call they don’t want to get.

CBS News Is Walking Off the Job, and Bari Weiss Is the Reason
Dozens of CBS News 24/7 staffers are expected to walk out today in the first labor action of Bari Weiss’s tenure running CBS News. The streaming unit’s workers have been negotiating with management since February over wages, overtime protections, and severance. After letting their three-year contract expire without a deal, and after management proposed annual raises of just 1.75 percent in a period of significant inflation, the 60-person unit delivered a strike pledge.

This is the same CBS that has lost anchor John Dickerson, correspondent Scott MacFarlane, CBS Mornings boss Shawna Thomas, and others who quietly exited rather than work under Weiss’s direction. Weiss told staff at a January town hall that CBS has been too focused on its current audience and needs to shift toward, in her words, “the center, the center-right, and the center-left.” Staff say the real message was simpler: get on board or get out.

The striking workers are fighting for basics. Overtime pay for twelve-hour weekend shifts. Severance protections ahead of a pending $110 billion merger between CBS’s parent company and Warner Bros. Discovery could mean another wave of layoffs. Union representatives say editorial interference, political pressure, and layoff threats have all become existential concerns since the Paramount Skydance merger closed. The workers walking out Tuesday are not making a political statement. They are trying to protect their jobs and their profession. The fact that they have to fight Bari Weiss to do it tells you everything about what CBS News is becoming.

A free press isn’t just a nice thing to have in a democracy. It’s the mechanism by which citizens hold power accountable. When billionaires buy the newsrooms and install editors whose job is to sand off the edges, they aren’t just changing the product. They’re dismantling the early warning system. These CBS workers walking off the job today aren’t just fighting for a paycheck. They’re fighting for the idea that journalism is still supposed to serve the public, not the people who own it.

Constitution, Politics, Republican Party, US, World

Raging at Media, Pete Hegseth Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

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He wants “patriotic” coverage of the Iran war. He doesn’t understand: In a democracy, coverage that asks difficult questions of the government is itself “patriotic.”

By Greg Sargent (TNR)

Pete Hegseth wants to live in a world in which the American military can drop bombs on scores of schoolchildren and not face serious media scrutiny over it. And he just might get that world soon enough.

That’s the only way to understand the defense secretary’s extraordinary outburst on Friday morning. He lashed out at news organizations, criticizing headlines that aren’t sufficiently laudatory of American military successes in the Iran War.

“I know that everything is written intentionally,” Hegseth said of the media, referring to his own previous stint as a Fox News contributor, thus seemingly admitting that Fox, at least, does deliberately skew coverage. He faulted numerous headlines, insisting that rather than report things like “Mideast War Intensifies,” the press should instead be “patriotic” and write headlines like “Iran Increasingly Desperate.”

The visibly angry Hegseth also ridiculed a CNN story reporting that Trump’s war planners “underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz.” He added: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

That’s a direct reference to Paramount CEO David Ellison, who is acquiring CNN after taking over and creating a more Trump-friendly CBS. In short, Hegseth openly relishes future oligarchical control of the media to ensure more dutiful amplification of his propaganda.

Where to begin? First, Hegseth is playing games around that CNN story. He claimed it’s “patently ridiculous” because Iran “always” threatens to choke off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. He fumed: “CNN doesn’t think we thought of that.”

But much of the CNN report details how officials underestimated Iran’s willingness to act on the threat of closure. It also details how Trump officials failed to sufficiently plan for the consequences of closing it, and why that insufficient planning took place. It’s obviously true that this happened. Media scrutiny of those failings is what Hegseth actually objects to.

Then there’s Hegseth’s claim that a “patriotic” press should primarily pump up American battlefield wins. This essentially demands that the media dispense with its adversarial role toward power. We don’t have to look far to see how malicious this demand truly is.

Take the reporting on the bombing of an Iranian elementary school with scores of children inside who have reportedly been killed—a central event in this conflict and potentially one of the worst atrocities in modern memory. On February 28, the day the war started, The New York Times painstakingly laid out evidence suggesting the United States was likely responsible. It followed up with more. Reuters disclosed that American investigators also concluded the U.S. role was likely. The Associated Press revealed that the bombing might have reflected faulty intelligence. All this reporting was careful and nuanced.

Hegseth is irritated with that scrutiny too. On Friday, he confirmed that an investigation of the bombing is underway but added this absurdity: “We’re not going to let reporting lead us or force our hand into indicating what happened.”

So let’s state this clearly: A key reason we want media scrutiny and fact-finding is precisely that it will, in fact, put pressure on official inquiries like this one. Hegseth suggested the military can do this itself. But remember, Trump blithely declared early on that Iran had bombed its own school. Then he admitted to reporters that he’d said this without knowing the facts. As Jennifer Rubin notes, it’s ironic that this admission too was shaken loose by more of the skillful media questioning that Hegseth disdains.

At the best of times, we can’t depend on government officials to hold themselves accountable. That’s the reason for innovations like independent inspectors general. Under Trump, there is even less reason to trust the government to do a good-faith accounting, given his boundless contempt for the truth.

But Hegseth wants a world in which a horror like this can unfold, and rather than the media digging in hard to ferret out known facts on a moment-to-moment basis, we all just sit back and let his handpicked investigator tell us what happened—at some point down the road.

The biggest scandals in U.S. history, such as Watergate, have played out in a cat-and-mouse way, with the press corps’ digging putting pressure on other institutional actors to do their part in ensuring that the truth wins out. During wars especially, we want to know if officials and combatants are adhering to rules, laws, and codes of conduct, given the awesome power of the U.S. military—and the tendency of war to produce unspeakable horrors.

Which brings us to the ultimate point here: Hegseth himself has declared open contempt for “rules of engagement.” Compounding the hall-of-mirrors effect, we don’t know what this has even meant in practice. As the Times’ Charlie Savage notes, there are many unanswered questions about the role Hegseth’s laxness played in the school. bombing:

What standards of certainty were imposed on planners for the strikes for vetting and validating potential targets? Does Mr. Hegseth’s repeated statement that he gave the military “maximum authority on the battlefield,” compared with the practice in past wars, mean the standards were formally lowered? Whatever the rules were on paper, did such comments contribute to a culture of moving faster and with less care—of “no hesitation,” in his words—among the planners, resulting in negligence or recklessness?

You can draw a direct line from Hegseth’s disdain for rules of engagement right to his contempt for the role of an adversarial press. He apparently doesn’t want those questions answered, either: Once CNN is taken over by Ellison (whose CBS is a network that Hegseth happens to like), there will be less scrutiny and more hagiography—by Hegseth’s own telling.

Hegseth is not disguising any of this. He wants the press to elevate American battlefield triumphs, something he chooses to call “patriotic.” But real patriotism requires demanding that the country live up to higher ideals. Hegseth’s conduct reveals exactly why we don’t want networks like CNN to fall into the hands of his preferred media masters, not why we do.

https://newrepublic.com/article/207760/pete-hegseth-iran-war-patriotic-media-coverage?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=critical_mass

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in Arlington, Virginia, on March 2