Operation Epic Fury” sounds like it was coined by a fourteen-year-old playing too much Call of Duty. In many ways, it’s a perfect fit for the Peter Pan that Donald Trump has running the Pentagon. Urban Wronski on the War of Donald’s Ear — how two homicidal maniacs borrowed one very willing ear, and launched a war.
Trump burned two C-130s on an Iranian runway, declared total victory, and is now threatening to demolish the power grid of 92 million people. Tonight is the deadline. Urban Wronski on the Easter debacle built on assumption, sustained by bluster, and ending in wreckage that no quantity of “WE GOT HIM!” can unbog.
Bryan Dawe is seated. John Clarke enters in a suit, slightly harried, carrying a reusable shopping bag with “ALBO” written on it in texta.
Australia sent troops to a war it hasn’t declared, through a base it won’t discuss, after a school massacre it can’t explain, while the Prime Minister assures us that transparency is everything. Clarke and Dawe, imagined for the age of Operation Epic Fury.
To make sense of Trump’s war on Iran, imagine a Russian
babushka doll. The outer layer is the story the Pentagon feeds
us. Inside it: petrodollar entanglements, Kharg Island
war-gaming, the strategic patience of Moscow and Beijing,
Netanyahu’s fantasy of the purifying blow. At the very centre,
smaller than it should be, is Australia. Urban Wronski opens
all six layers and does not like what he finds.
Lindsey Graham is evoking Iwo Jima. Iran is mining Kharg Island’s shoreline. Seven thousand five hundred US Marines are days away from the Persian Gulf. The war is 26 days old, has cost $18 billion, and the White House’s official position is that they need about a month to “get Iran by the balls.” Australia is calling for de-escalation. The crease in the trousers remains arrow-straight.
INTERVIEWER: Are we at war with Iran?
ALBANESE: No.
INTERVIEWER: Then why did they bomb our base?
ALBANESE: Because they’re Iran.
One interviewer. One Prime Minister. Forty-five satellite dishes, three submariners, one Wedgetail aircraft, a peace negotiation bombed flat, a hundred and seventy schoolgirls, and a pocket square without a mark on it. A political interview in the tradition of Clarke and Dawe.
Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration has no exit strategy, no agreed objective, and a secretary of defence who believes God has a plan for the outcome. Inside the fractures, the contradictions, and the slow drift toward a quagmire nobody in Washington will name out loud. By Urban Wronski.
They told you Iran’s missiles were being swatted from the sky. They told you the Iron Dome was holding, the Patriot batteries were working, US and Israeli air power was surgical and winning. They told you this on the ABC. They told you this on Sky.
They were telling you nonsense.
MIT Professor Ted Postol — the man who proved the Patriot missile failed in the Gulf War while presidents were claiming a 97 percent success rate — has now established that current intercept rates against Iranian missiles run at a few percent at most. The systems are depleting. The decoys are multiplying. The official story is, in his own carefully chosen word, a fraud.
The first casualty of war is truth. But the deeper insight, the one Phillip Knightley identified fifty years ago, is that the lies are not random. They serve purposes. And right now, they are serving purposes that Australians have every right to examine.
There is a peculiar kind of drama playing out inside the Trump Bunker of the Bizarre. Its theme? The accidental Armageddon. A government so witless it could not run a bath has launched the most ambitious US military operation in living memory — and nobody in Team Trump can agree on why, for how long, or what winning looks like. Urban Wronski reports in two parts.
The Albanese government gives us the mushroom treatment. Keeps us in the dark and feeds us BS. This week, while a US-Israeli war of questionable legality engulfs the Middle East and Pine Gap hums away in the desert night, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong delivered a bravura homage to John Cage: all performance, all silence, no content whatsoever.
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