Operation Keep Trumpanyahu Out Of Jail: it’s unclear one moment, nuclear the next

The first few days of Operation Keep Trumpanyahu Out Of Jail have cloaked the Middle East in the fog of war, making pronouncements and predictions unwise. Still, a few things seem to be becoming slightly clearer. The first is that the people of Iran have been freed from a brutal and tyrannical government, and may well have been freed from all government entirely.

According to Donald Trump, the US had been sizing up some possible puppets to install, but he and Benjamin Netanyahu had accidentally killed them, telling ABC “it’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” In other words, there is now a strong possibility that, if the Israeli-US war effort goes as planned, the people of Iran will soon be freed not only from tyranny but from things like running water, electricity and the chance of rebuilding a functioning country. Second, given that Iran was in the middle of negotiations and had reportedly acceded to most of the US’s demands when it was attacked, it is now also clear that every country in the world needs a secret nuclear weapons programme, and pronto: American diplomacy might not be worth paper it’s written on, but at least the Los Alamos gadget will always have your back.

Iran’s mistake, of course, was to have a weapons programme that was not only semi-secret but also semi-metaphysical, able to exist and not exist, or, indeed, to expand and compress time-space, depending on who was looking at it and how they were polling at the time. Last year, for example, having been Just Months From Having Nuclear Weapons™ since the 1980s, Iran had its ability to enrich uranium “completely and totally destroyed”, to quote Trump. In his state of the union address last week, however, Trump revealed that Iran had once again started rebuilding its weapons programme, implying that it could rebound at an absolutely terrifying rate and — wait, we have breaking news: Iran has rebuilt and developed a nuclear arsenal since … Saturday?

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Here’s CBS, recently bought by the ardently pro-Israel centibillionaire Ellison family, tweeting that Sunday’s episode of60 Minuteswould feature an interview with the son of the deposed shah (Trump’s fourth place, perhaps?) discussing “what happens to Iran’s nuclear weapons”. Geez, I suppose you live and learn. Still, before we get too anxious we should remind ourselves that US technology isn’t omnipotent.

Yes, the Pentagon has just signed a deal with OpenAI to do what rival tech giant Anthropic refused to — potentially allowing the US to build a vast surveillance network at home while also developing robots that select targets without needing a kill order from a human being — but let’s not forget that even though the US can find a mullah in his loo in Tehran, it still hasn’t developed the technology to find a paedophile in government. There is also very little chance that US media will make things any clearer in the coming weeks. Consider, for example, NBC’s interview on Sunday with Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, during which an American journalist asked him how, if building missiles that could reach the US was a self-avowed red line for Tehran, it could justify attacking US military bases in Gulf states.

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