On the eve of a diplomatic breakthrough, the bombs fell. What followed was not a war of necessity but a war of choice, lobbied into existence, launched in bad faith, and paid for in civilian lives.
Category: Geopolitics & Security, Australian Foreign Policy, Middle East Analysis, Strategic Affairs, Defence & Intelligence
No Good Exit
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.
Don’t blame the organ-grinder; the monkey had a choice.
Trump didn’t stumble into the Iran disaster alone. Every catastrophe has its infrastructure – the courtiers, the flatterers, the transactionalists, the true believers, and the merely opportunistic who supplied the scaffolding. Bibi and MBS worked the organ grinders’ handles with professional dedication. But the monkey chose to dance. And in the corner, a daggy bloke from Cronulla was clapping.
No Exit
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play about three people locked in a room with an unlocked door nobody would walk through. He called it No Exit. He was writing about Operation Epic Fury seventy years before it happened. A forensic anatomy of a war built from mutual imprisonment, strategic miscalculation, and the fatal habit of assuming the other side thinks like us.
Trump’s Team at War With Itself
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.
Double Tap? Double Depravity
As US and Israeli forces use double-tap airstrikes to kill survivors and first responders in Iran, Australia’s silence makes us complicit. Pine Gap is in the kill chain. Anthony Albanese had three hours to decide. He chose wrong.
The Mushroom Treatment: A Government That Treats You With Contempt Cannot Be Trusted
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.
Trump’s Iran Blunder
Robert Reich knows Trump has no endgame for his Iran war. What he doesn’t see from inside the American story: the munitions arithmetic is catastrophic, the legal basis non-existent, and Canberra has made us part of it without asking a single question in Parliament.
The Tail That Wags the Dog: Israel’s War, America’s Blood
Three American soldiers are dead. A girls’ primary school in Minab is rubble. The Strait of Hormuz is under threat. Regional war has arrived — exactly as every credible analyst, diplomat and international lawyer predicted. Urban Wronski on how Israel wagged the most powerful dog in the world into the most dangerous Middle Eastern conflagration since Iraq 2003.
He Was Warned. He Knew. He Did It Anyway.
Trump was warned by Iran, by his own intelligence services, by international mediators and by members of his own Congress. The warnings were not vague — they were specific, on the record, and entirely accurate. Iran had agreed to a nuclear breakthrough the day before. Netanyahu lobbied for the strike. MBS made private phone calls urging it. US intelligence said there was no imminent threat. Trump attacked anyway. Now the region burns.
Urban Wronski Writes 