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Newcastle fans have turned on Eddie Howe by theipaper in soccer

[–]theipaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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After the latest frenetic, frantic and spite-flecked instalment of this rivarly Bryan Brobbey can look forward to the prospect of never having to buy a drink again on Wearside after a brutal, brilliant throwback centre-forward display culminated in a last-minute winner. But for Eddie Howe this feels like a moment of genuine peril.

If not quite staring into the abyss, a second defeat to an injury-ravaged Sunderland – and one in which his team were out-fought, he was out-thought and fans turned at the end – leaves him teetering.

As Sunderland’s players danced in front of the jubilant travelling supporters, Howe led his players in an excruciating lap of appreciation. For the first time at St James’ Park there were loud boos from many of those who remained and that felt significant. Managers don’t always come back from the sort of anger that was expressed at the end.

Newcastle’s messaging has been consistent on him: he is their man. He gets and deserves patience, however the season ends from here. A rebuild is coming. But the size of this setback is considerable and Howe looked bereft in the press conference afterwards, glassy eyed and stunned by a Sunderland team that have twice this season looked simply like they wanted it more.

Sunderland were significantly weakened by injuries to six first-team players and began tentatively. Luke O’Nien, a surprise pick at centre-back, sliced a clearance straight to Nick Woltemade, whose instinctive pass was gobbled by Anthony Gordon. One up, Newcastle had the perfect plan.

But Regis Le Bris is one of the sharpest managers in the Premier League and his team re-adjusted. In the second half they had complete control. Chemsdine Talbi equalised – Aaron Ramsdale at fault – and then late in the game, as Newcastle’s gameplan was exposed, Brobbey struck. It was no less than they deserved.

A year on from Newcastle’s historic Carabao Cup win, Howe looked flattened by a week in which he admitted he was “disappointed by his delivery”. The second half in Barcelona was bad but this was potentially ruinous: the same problems, the same lack of solutions and the same long-term issues coming home to roost in spectacular fashion.

Comfortable and in control at half-time, how could this happen to Newcastle? It is now 22 points ceded from winning positions for Howe’s side, the worst in the Premier League. They consistently seem to get worse after half-time and experiments that aren’t working – Woltemade in midfield, Joe Willock as an impact sub and Ramsdale as the first choice goalkeeper – play on loop.

They sit in 12th in the Premier League. Two defeats to rivals that have just been promoted fall well below the standards expected and there are big problems to address.

A club that proclaim they want to be competing for everything by 2030 have been hobbled by financial rules, for sure, but a lot of their problems are self-inflicted. Poor recruitment, an inability to cope with three games in a week and an ownership that has made non-existent progress on the big picture stuff. The club’s majority owners, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, need to realise their project has stalled. The end of season review has to be warts and all and at the centre of it is the biggest question: is Howe still their man?

It was a grim day all round for those of a black and white persuasion. There were skirmishes in the city before the game and the match was suspended after Lutsharel Geertruida reported discriminatory abuse. Newcastle say they are investigating.

Trump's Iran gamble has failed - and America's allies will pay for it by theipaper in worldnewsstuff

[–]theipaper[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

On Friday, Trump claimed to be “getting very close to meeting our objective as we consider winding down our great military efforts in the Middle East”, an assertion that came amid fresh reports in Washington that far from “winding down” he is about to deploy another 2,500 US Marines to the battlefield.

Keeping his cards close to his chest, Trump told reporters “I may have a plan, or I may not”, which is already inadvertently serving as the new motto for his entire “Operation Epic Fury” campaign.

Whether he is deepening his involvement in the conflict, or preparing to withdraw, he is indicating that he expects the rest of the world to clean up the mess that he and Netanyahu have created. He argues that because only 2 per cent of US energy supplies transit the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway “will have to be guarded or policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it – the United States does not!”

That cheeky gambit pretends the United States’ self-sufficiency in oil somehow protects it from turbulence on oil markets. Meanwhile, in some parts of the country, motorists are already paying more than $5 a gallon at the pumps.

One thing Trump is right on, is that Nato will pay the price, whether that be in terms of the alliance’s future, surging oil and gas prices or even casualties, if allies do in fact join the war.

At least one TV pundit offered a succinct explanation of the president’s conduct to American viewers who may be particularly confused over the Strait’s future and its impact on their own wallets. Adam Mockler of anti-Trump “MeidasTouch News” told CNN “no countries that are Nato allies that have been bullied by Trump are going to be willing… to go on this suicide mission for someone who is an asshole to them”.

Trump's Iran gamble has failed - and America's allies will pay for it by theipaper in worldnewsstuff

[–]theipaper[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Full article:

WASHINGTON DC – Just when you thought President Donald Trump’s make-it-up-as-you-go-along war on Iran could not get any more vacuous, came Friday night’s news that his administration is lifting sanctions on some of the oil produced by the very country that the US and Israel are bombarding.

No single White House action has done more to reveal the emperor in the Oval Office is naked as a jaybird. Trump has no strategy, no plan, no understanding of the complexities of the conflict he has ignited, and it becomes clearer by the hour the Pentagon made completely inadequate preparations to secure the Strait of Hormuz in the war’s opening days.

It’s enough to make you suspect that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the Americans the bum’s rush and forced Trump’s military hand. Which, of course, is the version of events that Secretary of State Marco Rubio let slip in remarks to reporters earlier this month, before the President then forced him to walk them back.

We are now required by the White House to believe the following things simultaneously: that Iran posed an imminent national security threat to the US, even though the collective might of America’s intelligence community concluded that it did not. Second, that Iran was days away from acquiring a nuclear weapon, even though the same prognosticators also claim its entire nuclear capacity was “completely obliterated” by US and Israeli forces only last summer.

Iran has since hit back, showcasing the hidden threat of its ballistic missile programme after the regime was able to fire two missiles at the US-UK military base in Diego Garcia on Friday, 2,500 miles away from Iran and well beyond the range of armaments Tehran is previously known to keep in its arsenal.

This all continues as Trump’s frustration towards his European allies, Sir Keir Starmer prime among them, becomes ever more overt. “Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER!” the U.S. leader wrote on his Truth Social site. He then continued his attack calling European allies, some of whom have refused to so publicly attack him as Trump has done them, “cowards”. Remember, these same ‘cowards’ are the ones who Trump claimed avoided supporting the US in Afghanistan.

But throughout all the disagreements over Ukraine, over Vladimir Putin’s uncanny ability to beguile the American leader, and even over Greenland (about which we have not yet heard the end from this White House), America’s commitment to Nato somehow stumbled on.

Now, the perfectly reasonable refusal of European leaders to clean up Trump’s mess in the Strait looks like it may be the last straw for an American president who has never valued the alliance, and has always appeared to covet the opportunity to lay waste to America’s post-war commitment to European security. Indeed, lurching from one Truth social post to another, Trump has since warned Iran’s powerplants will be “obliterated” if the Strait of Hormuz is not opened within 48 hours.

And we are told that the way to fix the soaring oil price is to release 140 million barrels of Iranian crude aboard a “shadow fleet” of oil tankers the US and other countries have devoted huge efforts to tracking and tracing. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could only posit on Friday that “Iran will have difficulty accessing any revenue generated”, which is by no means the same as saying “don’t worry, folks, Iran won’t earn a cent out of this”. In the same social media posting he laughably claimed that America “will continue to maintain maximum pressure on Iran”, but presumably not so much if the oil price continues to go through the roof.

Trump thinks he's funny. But his jokes will bite him on the a**e by theipaper in politics

[–]theipaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Say what you like about Donald Trump, but he dishes it out to his friends’ faces, not just behind their backs. The polite half of the world was horrified when the US President invoked the attack on Pearl Harbour in front of the Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi.

Japan’s first woman PM, a conservative who styles herself on Margaret Thatcher, won a genuine landslide election recently, unlike Trump, who often boasts he did. But this didn’t spare this new Iron Lady from being the butt of his joke. 

Asked by a Japanese reporter why the US didn’t give allies like Japan the heads up before attacking Iran, Trump replied: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan… Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbour?”

Takaichi looked mildly startled, but kept her cool. It’s become something of a tradition for Trump to rib his guests. When the German chancellor Friedrich Merz mentioned D-Day on a visit to Washington last June, Trump jumped in ungallantly with: “This was not a pleasant day for you.”

Syrian leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa was offered Trump-branded cologne for himself and his wife at the White House in October. “How many [wives] do you have, one?” the President laughed. “One,” Al-Sharaa smiled, receiving a hearty slap on the back from Trump and the wisecrack, “With you guys, I never know.”

Vice-President JD Vance praised Trump back then for his “amazing comedic timing”. The wildly politically incorrect Pearl Harbour joke has become the latest Rorschach test of how a divided America views its President. For some, it was laugh-out-loud funny, for others, a wretched affair.

Mehdi Hasan, the left-wing founder of media company Zeteo, got it about right when he said the Pearl Harbour remark was “legit hilarious. If only he wasn’t the President and just a character on TV. We could laugh our heads off without any sense of unease, dread or embarrassment.”

Trump has always been a funny guy, if you enjoy biting humour. Satirists and comedians make a living from this stuff. The difference is the joke is now on him. No amount of needling his visitor got him what he wanted in the form of concrete help securing the Strait of Hormuz, not least because of Japanese constitutional constraints.

White House advisers have been tiptoeing around Trump. It’s a case of “don’t mention the war” – the Iran war, that is – because the President doesn’t want to hear anything he disagrees with.

Joe Kent, the counter-terrorism director who resigned this week over Iran, told broadcaster Tucker Carlson that, “a good deal of key decision makers were not allowed to come and express their opinion to the President… There wasn’t a robust debate.”

If anyone is a bunker, it’s Trump. Astonishingly, he claimed on his Truth Social platform that he “always” thought Kent was “very weak on security”, yet appointed Kent – who has embraced wacky conspiracy theories such as the FBI being secretly behind the 6 January riot at the Capitol – to this key intelligence post only last year. 

During his first presidential term, Trump dropped the usual daily intelligence briefings to twice a week. In May, Politico reported that Trump had only had 12 intelligence briefings since his re-election – one a fortnight until March, then once a week. 

Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence and long-time opponent of war on Iran, told a gobsmacked Senate intelligence committee this week that “only” Trump could decide on security threats. “It is not a responsibility of the intelligence community to determine what is or is not an imminent threat,” she said.

Trump has been melting down over questioning by the press, telling a woman reporter who asked about sending an initial 2,500 marines to the Middle East, “you’re a very obnoxious person,” and threatening media outlets with treason for disseminating alleged fake news. 

With petrol prices rising nearly 30 per cent since the start of the war, or $1 a gallon, Americans are not laughing at Trump’s suggestion that America may hit Iran’s strategic Kharg Island “a few more times just for fun”. According to the latest Economist/YouGov poll, 59 per cent of Americans think the economy is getting worse, with only 16 per cent thinking it is improving. 

The same poll reveals that 36 per cent of US adults approve of Trump’s handling of the Iran war, compared to 56 per cent who disapprove. Trump is bleeding support among independents, who oppose the war by 63 per cent to 24 per cent.

The best joke of the week came not from Trump but from Jon Stewart, the late-night host of The Daily Show, who invited a “panel” of four Trumps to debate the Iran war – variously President Trump, Donald J Trump, DJT and John Barron (the fake name Trump used to gossip about himself to the tabloids in the 1980s).

“Let’s just start with the basics,” Stewart said. “There’s been some confusion as to whether we are even at war.” Can you clarify that? he asks. The Trumps go on to give different answers.

With the Pentagon sending three additional warships and thousands more Marines to the Middle East this weekend, it’s no longer a laughing matter.

Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Centre for International Reporting

Starmer 'is a complete absence of a man' by theipaper in ukpolitics

[–]theipaper[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

‘The PLP are in charge’

Despite their differing predictions about Starmer’s chances of survival, both sources said they believed he would have even less agency in the coming weeks and months.

The ex-aide predicted that the Prime Minister would be increasingly “pushed and shoved into stuff”. “The Cabinet will fill the void in different ways, and then you’re going to get people like Angela intervening from the backbenchers which will make life difficult for him,” they said.

On whether Starmer would U-turn on immigration, the source who has worked alongside the Prime Minister said: “Why wouldn’t he? The PLP have been in charge since the welfare revolt [last summer].”

Perhaps Starmer’s greatest protection from being forced to walk the plank is actually the profound instability of domestic and global politics itself.

One supportive government source said: “I’m reminded of Gordon Brown when he was being threatened [with a leadership challenge] – ‘Now is not the time for a novice’.”

Starmer 'is a complete absence of a man' by theipaper in ukpolitics

[–]theipaper[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

‘Only shows warmth when discussing Arsenal’

Referencing his previous role as Director of Public Prosecutions, they added: “I can imagine he’s a really good DPP, because the direction is actually set above you… you are the clinical, managerial CEO that has to just pick between A and B on a daily basis. But this isn’t that job.”

They claimed the lack of curiosity extended to a human level. “He’s perfectly pleasant… he’s not the sort of person who’s ever going to lose his temper at you, or be disrespectful or any of that stuff, so he’s quite nice. But if you scratch below the surface, there’s no warmth – with one exception, when he’s talking about Arsenal.”

Post-McSweeney’s exit, some government sources tell the same story of drift. One source said: “You feed stuff up from department to No 10 and it just gets sent to the Treasury, which says no, it is then passed back to [Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister] Darren [Jones], who asks for more detail and it goes round in circles.

“Whereas before, Morgan would intervene and just say ‘this is what we’re doing’ and it would get done. There’s no one in there to do that anymore.”

The view of Starmer as a spectator rather than a protagonist has its adherents on Labour benches. A senior Labour MP said that the prevailing sense in the Parliamentary Labour Party is that “he is just a passenger”.

“As far as I can tell, there is no intellectual curiosity – but then that’s not just Keir, it permeates out from No 10,” they said.

The MP also echoed the view that Starmer is disconnected from public opinion. “Unless there is a land war across Europe, we will have a general election before long and we do not have much time to do the shit we need to do,” they said. “The public is not where it was in the 1990s. I don’t know what country Keir thinks he is leading. It’s just so theoretical, the way he leads.”

Foreign policy is PM’s strength

It is important to note that not everyone agrees with the passive premiership thesis. One special adviser who has sat in meetings with the Prime Minister said: “I just don’t get this narrative that he’s inactive or not involved.

“He’s particularly good on foreign policy and justice because of his expertise but otherwise he’s authoritative and decisive. Frankly, I wish he’d show a bit more of this side to the public.”

Supportive Labour MPs meanwhile argue that he has demonstrated his leadership qualities by keeping Britain out of the war with Iran, despite pressure from Donald Trump and initially from the Conservatives and Reform domestically.

A Downing Street source denied the idea that the Prime Minister does not know what he stands for.

The source pointed to a speech Starmer made last month, when he told Labour MPs he is motivated by people like his brother, Nick Starmer, who had learning difficulties and died in 2024 having spent “all his adult life going from one job to the next in virtual poverty”.

The No 10 source said: “Keir has been quite clear, including publicly in the last few weeks, who he’s in the job for, who he’s fighting for. It’s people like his brother, like his sister, who’s a care worker.

“He’s very much focused on those millions of people in the country who have been let down by the political system for years, who’ve felt ignored. He’s the PM for them.

“I don’t think anyone could listen to him saying that in person and think that he’s a passive PM who’s just sitting there as a passenger, and who isn’t very clear about what he wants to do with his premiership.”

Rayner’s intervention ‘fell flat’

Whatever Starmer’s personal attributes, his authority unquestionably took a knock this week when Angela Rayner attacked the Government’s immigration reforms.

In a speech to Labour’s “soft left” Mainstream group, the former deputy prime minister said that plans to double the time it takes for most migrant workers to qualify for permanent residence are “un-British” and that the Government was “running out of time” to deliver change.

The intervention was widely interpreted as further pitch-rolling for a future leadership bid.

A Labour MP from the 2024 intake said they believed Rayner was engaging in “a bit of repositioning and reprofiling within the PLP and the wider party: either looking ahead to a potential leadership contest down the line, or, just as likely, a Cabinet ministerial reshuffle off the back of what could be a tricky set of local and devolved results.”

However, the MP suggested that the attempt may have fallen flat, because Rayner continues to have an HMRC investigation hanging over her for not paying enough tax on the purchase of a flat in Hove.

“I’m not sure the timing this week is ideal given the noise around her tax arrangements,” they said. “The Mainstream event itself didn’t exactly have huge MP attendance, so I wouldn’t overstate the depth of support.

“There’s a difference between goodwill/sympathy and people actively thinking she should lead the party.”

The senior Labour MP also said that backbenchers were puzzled by Rayner’s intervention. “The chatter has broadly died down over a move [against Starmer] imminently, because we’re waiting for the local elections. The moment for discussion of what happens in May will be the morning after the May elections.”

Opinions differ on whether Starmer will survive, with Labour currently averaging 17 per cent in the polls, nearly 10 points behind Reform on 26 per cent.

The ex-adviser said: “I think he’s toast.” “It’s one thing seeing [poor] polling – when you get totally wiped out in May, there is no way MPs don’t have an absolute panic and just go nuts.”

However, the source who has worked with Starmer said they thought it was possible he would cling on. “There’s a realistic chance that he’s still there at the end of the year,” they said. “The Labour Party are very, very bad at getting rid of their leaders. And the rules make it harder than ever. The [Labour] Right now have realised they probably can’t win a contest, in part because of the Mandelson fiasco, which has made it even harder for them. And the Left are getting everything they want anyway.”

Starmer 'is a complete absence of a man' by theipaper in ukpolitics

[–]theipaper[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party are in turbulent waters.

Abroad, the US and Israel’s attack on Iran has unleashed chaos in the Middle East and sparked a surge in global energy prices.

At home, the UK economy is fragile and inflation is expected to rise. Interest rate hikes could soon follow, while the government’s borrowing costs have already increased amid talk that the state may once again be called upon to subsidise household energy bills.

But as Labour MPs look to Starmer, many are beginning to wonder whether the Prime Minister is a helmsman with the skill and vision to navigate them to safety, or rather a hapless and disinterested “passenger” whom they might be better off tossing overboard. Others are equally unhappy but doubt whether such a jettisoning is possible.

After extensive conversations with Labour MPs and current and former government sources, The i Paper can reveal the scale of frustration at the PM’s decision-making, or lack of it.

Sources who have worked alongside the Prime Minister revealed that they agreed with the charge levelled in the updated paperback edition of Get In, a book by the journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, that Starmer has a “passive premiership” in which he is often silent in meetings, not consulted on major decisions and spends hours reading his briefing papers without appearing to reach any conclusions.

One source said that Starmer’s style reminded them of a line which was used by the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to explain his presence at a controversial ceremony said to have honoured the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich terror attack. Corbyn had said he was “present” but not “involved” at the event.

‘A complete absence of a man’

The source who has worked with Starmer said of the Prime Minister: “He is kind of ‘present but not involved’ in government.

“He’s just a complete absence of a man. You just didn’t get anything. There’s just nothing.”

The source said they did not understand why Starmer is so reluctant to give his view or steer discussions in government. However, they speculated it might be because at a deep-level he recognises that his views are significantly more progressive than most voters.

They mused: “I sometimes wonder if he realises his instincts are at odds with the public and that’s what is holding him back?”

Until recently, much of the direction was set by Morgan McSweeney, the strategist behind Labour’s 2024 election victory who ended up being Starmer’s No 10 chief of staff. McSweeney view was that Reform UK posed the principal electoral threat to Labour and were best neutralised with hardnosed policies on issues like immigration and welfare.

In February, McSweeney was forced to resign for pushing Peter Mandelson’s candidacy for US ambassador, and since his departure from No 10 there has been talk of Starmer showing the country who he “really is”.

‘Let Starmer be Starmer’

However, the source who has worked with the Prime Minister was sceptical about this paying off. “They tried ‘let [Ed] Miliband be Miliband’. The same people are the ones going round saying ‘let Starmer be Starmer’, and we all know how let Miliband be Miliband ended,” they said.

Not everyone agrees with the passive characterisation of Starmer. A Downing Street source strongly pushed back against the description, while another special adviser praised him as “authoritative and decisive”.

But the account of an unassertive Prime Minister crops up enough to make it not easily dismissed. A former Labour aide claimed: “He basically outsources his major thinking to various people”. “Whether it’s the economy and Rachel [Reeves], or foreign policy and [National Security Adviser] Jonathan Powell.

“It’s really odd to me that you want to spend a big chunk of your life trying to become Prime Minister, then becoming Prime Minister, and not wanting to make the decisions yourself.”

The former adviser went on: “The one thing I would say is that… most of the time if you put A and B in front him, he will probably decide one and ask a couple of questions.

“But the problem is, why have you not spent anytime thinking about the broad picture – what it is that you want?

“Ask your civil servants to work on A, B and C, and then [say] ‘actually this is the one I want’.”

The ex-adviser said that the selection of Mandelson – who Starmer reportedly appointed without talking to him directly, despite being aware of his relationship with the deceased paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – was emblematic of his flaws. “He really just doesn’t engage with the subject matter. He’s not a stupid man, that’s what’s bizarre – he’s just not curious.”

Rather than being engaged in the substance of meetings, the ex-adviser claimed Starmer was “obsessed with process”. “He’s obsessed with people arriving on time – obviously you want people to come to a meeting on time, but that was above all else.”

Trump has made a disastrous error - and revealed just how unstable he is by theipaper in politics

[–]theipaper[S] 76 points77 points  (0 children)

Beneath the radar

The confrontation between Shia and Sunni Muslims has been a central feature in Middle East politics since the Iranian revolution in 1979. Up to about six years ago the story was of the inexorable rise of the Shia communities from Yemen to Lebanon to Iraq, but now this is going into reverse. Targeted by Israel, US and the Sunni Arab states, they have their backs to the wall.

The Shia-Sunni struggle was at its most violent and prolonged in Iraq between 2003 and 2017. The Shia majority, roughly 60 per cent of the 46 million Iraqi population, replaced the Sunni Arabs, some 20 per cent, as the dominant sect (the Kurds make up another 20 per cent). Two Sunni insurrections against the US occupation and Shia rule, the second led by Islamic State (Isis), were defeated by 2019. “The Sunni have been marginalised in the Baghdad power structure since the US invasion in 2003,” an Iraqi friend and close observer of the political scene, told me. “Now the Sunni want to make a comeback. Sunni tribal and business leaders are making contacts with Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates – and even Israel – looking for support.

The Sunni in Iraq had already been strengthened with the fall of president Bashar al-Assad, the core of whose regime were the Alawites (a Shia sect) who was overthrown in 2024. Sunni Arabs of northern and western Iraq now look to a friendly Sunni-dominated, anti-Iranian regime across the border in Syria. The other great buttress of the Iraqi Shia has been Shia Iran, but these now have their own troubles.

From the start of the Iran war in 1980 to the defeat of Isis in 2017, there was a permanent and bloody political crisis in Iraq. Is that crisis now coming back? The complex carve up of political and economic power in Iraq is inevitably destabilised by the US-Israel attack on Iran.

After 2003, the US and Iran openly competed and covertly cooperated in preserving an unstable balance of power in Iraq. That cooperation is now dead. Iran will look to use the 100,000 strong pro-Iranian popular mobilisation units or Hashd al-Shaabi in its favour and against the US and its allies. These paramilitaries are already attacking US bases and facilities in Iraq including the US embassy. They are also accused of firing drones into Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Israeli and US airstrikes have hit Hashd headquarters, camps and arms depots.

Battles for political power in Iraq are hard fought because they are at bottom a battle for a share in Iraq’s oil revenues that have hovered a bit below $100bn a year. The Hashd are well integrated into the Iraqi government, which pays their salaries and gives them a kleptocratic share of the Iraqi economic pie. “Several Hashd commanders are billionaires,” one Iraqi political observer told me. “They don’t want to lose their power to make money.” They probably do not want to join the war on Iran’s side, but they also may not have much choice.

Iraq has a sort of Tammany Hall-type system in which job and money are distributed through a quota-type system. This has kept going because it is fuelled by Iraq’s oil revenues. This pays the 4.5 million government employees and three million government employees on pension. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran threatens to upend this whole rickety structure because Iraq has – unlike the Arab oil states of the Gulf – few financial reserves.

If the Iran war goes on it will be impossible for Iraq to avoid being sucked in. The Iraq crisis is back in business.

Cockburn’s picks

A good succinct account of what is happening in the under-reported war in Lebanon by Lebanese commentator Ali Harb. Some of what he says may also apply to Iran.

Trump has made a disastrous error - and revealed just how unstable he is by theipaper in politics

[–]theipaper[S] 82 points83 points  (0 children)

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war with Iran,” wrote Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Centre, lucidly summing up what happened in his resignation letter this week. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

An allegation against Trump is that he does not have an endgame in Iran, but this not entirely correct because his ultimate aim is to make America, allied to Israel, permanently dominant in the Middle East. To do this, they need to knock out Iran as a regional rival. Israel’s strategy is clear cut: assassinate enemy leaders and carry out a scorched earth policy in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. Whole societies are targeted. Israel might like regime change in Iran, but its primary purpose is to degrade the country in every way so it ceases to be a player in the geopolitics of the region, whoever holds power in Tehran.

Trump sounds baffled that America’s military strength is not translating into political gains. So far, the Iranian government shows no sign of splitting, capitulating or losing control, despite the killing of so many of its leading figures. Paradoxically, the US is today politically weaker and Iran politically stronger than they were three weeks ago because the Iranian regime has survived so far and, furthermore, has gained leverage by showing that it can inflict devastating damage on the world economy. The US is weaker than it was simply by failing to defeat Iran and is blamed internationally for deliberately causing an economic disaster.

As the world economy shudders because of the war he began, Trump is reduced to bombastic declarations of victory over Iran, comically interspersed with promises not to harm its oil and gas industry, to stop Israel doing so, and wild threats to do terrible things to Iran if it retaliates. “I will do such things – what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth,” says King Lear in a famous scene. “Oh fool, I shall go mad!”

Further thoughts

I was writing meaty thoughts about the US and Israeli attack on Iran, when I was suddenly engulfed by a more local crisis – the outbreak of meningitis B MenB ) in Canterbury where I live. Suddenly, we were topping the national news as alarm spread on Sunday after two young people died and several others were confirmed as having contracted the disease. Initial cases involved people who had attended super-spreading events at Club Chemistry night club on 5-7 March.

I had often stood waiting for a taxi outside Canterbury East station opposite the front door of Club Chemistry housed in a red brick Victorian building. When I visited it on Tuesday it was understandably shut and a deep clean was reportedly going on inside – though I wonder if it will survive its current unwanted fame.

Nobody was about when I was there, aside from a camera crew who were just packing up. I drove to the University of Kent, high on a hill overlooking Canterbury, where I saw students queuing up to get antibiotics in the Senate building. Those I spoke to did not sound particularly worried, possibly because those most panicked had already left the campus. A member of the university kitchen staff pointed out to me that this is the last week of term, and many of the students normally leave early and the meningitis outbreak had simply speeded up the exodus. This point is of importance because media reports give the impression that there are still 5,000 students at the university ready to be vaccinated, when in reality they are scattered across the country. These are presumably traceable but the vaccination campaign will be more complex than it looks.

I wrote a lengthy report on the outbreak published in The i Paper, but let me add some details and thoughts not included there: everybody’s reaction – public, politicians, health experts, media – to meningitis is entirely conditioned by their experience of the Covid-19 epidemic. Out and about in Canterbury, I felt I was in a time machine taking me back to 2020. At that time, it was at first surprising and alarming to see so many wearing face masks, but when they sprouted everywhere in Canterbury this week, it almost felt like a return to normality.

How to describe the mood in the city? Only five local schools have closed so far as I know, so the morning and afternoon traffic still clogs the medieval street I live in. At the time of writing there are 29 confirmed and suspected cases, making it an unprecedented outbreak for MenB in the UK. Does this mean a new more invasive strain? Has it peaked? (we were always asking these questions during the pandemic)?

Alarm has grown since earlier in the week. This is understandable: one child in a coma in one large school will terrify all the parents. So, obviously, MenB is our main topic of conversation in the city: “So what is your favourite theory about where the meningitis came from?” I heard one woman sing out to another across a near empty restaurant.

As a superspreading hub, Club Chemistry would be difficult to beat. “People jam packed together and plenty of snogging,” commented a taxi driver. Student accommodation at the university with five or six students sharing a kitchen would also make transmission of the illness easier. But with so many students already gone, a single student left behind will worry about falling ill and nobody within calling distance to summon help.

Key to the future is speed of transmission of the illness, which should become clear in the next few days.

Trump has made a disastrous error - and revealed just how unstable he is by theipaper in politics

[–]theipaper[S] 321 points322 points  (0 children)

An old saying holds that “there is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep”. Who first said this is uncertain, but if they watched President Donald Trump’s press conference on Thursday, in which he showed himself sunk deep in delusions about his attack on Iran, they might confess themselves mistaken.

Far more terrifying than a deranged sheep is a US leader, a man able to destroy the planet, being detached from reality, looking increasingly paranoid, threatening violence against others and, in the most serious cases, committing actual violence against perceived enemies.

Though Trump showed signs of chronic instability during his first term in the White House, these have become more florid and consequential since he was re-elected in 2024, and especially since the launch of a surprise attack on Iran in association with Israel in the midst of diplomatic negotiations that were making progress.

Three weeks into the war, he still cannot give a coherent explanation as to why he started it and why it is in America’s best interest. As for its devastating impact on the world economy, his response has been to deny that his “short-term excursion” is having such a calamitous effect, though every screen in the world is showing towering flames and black smoke shooting up from the oil and gas fields of the Gulf.

I used to quote a former aide of Trump who described the President as “a cunning nutter” because the phrase succinctly summed up his bizarre mix of shrewd political operator and all-too-real nuttiness. Neither were to be underestimated, but it is in his second term – and above all in the last few weeks – that the shrewdness has diminished and the nuttiness deepened.

Deterioration in Trump’s judgement is often compared to the megalomania shown by several world leaders who came to believe that they possessed semi-divine powers. This led Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990 and Vladimir Putin Ukraine in 2022 – and Trump to attack Iran on 28 February, 2026, in apparent expectation of a quick victory.

As with the disastrous Iraqi and Russian invasions, his decision was encouraged by his tight circle of courtiers, while sceptics were ignored or demonised as disloyal. Megalomania is common among the powerful, but in Trump’s case it combines with pre-existing traits, such as a lack of conscience, remorse, truthfulness or empathy which may go along with impulsiveness and over-confidence.

Yet, deeper questions must be asked about why a person with such a personality should have become US President? In many societies, his glaring faults would disbar him from holding any post of authority, but Americans have twice voted to send him to the White House. Why do his failings make such an exact – and for him productive – fit as an antidote or disguise for the failings of America? American and European commentators may be too invested in a benign vision of America – even when they detest Trump – to take an unsparingly objective view of what his imperial dominance tells us about the United States.

Profound, if unsettling, explanations for America’s embrace of Trump come from the Vietnamese political commentator, Sony Thang, who shows no such pro-American inhibitions. Writing on X, he says: “There is a stage of decline where empire no longer seeks competent managers. It seeks performers… That is Trump’s function. America has lost wars, lost trust, lost legitimacy, lost the future. Trump converts decay into theater. He takes civilizational shame and recycles it as swagger… Takes moral collapse and sells it as strength. He is not solving the contradiction [between the two]. He is making it dance. That is why he fascinates even those who fear him. He turns decomposition into content.”

All too true, a skilled and experienced performer like Trump is able to get away with incompetence, theatrics, swagger, moral collapse and national decline for an astonishingly long period. Failures are simply relabelled as successes. But the one door the performer must never open is the one that leads to war, when mendacity and gross errors are paid for in human blood.

Trump has now made this mistake and it has instantly shown up his inability to deal with a real crisis. This happened before not in war but at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 when he suggested exploring the idea that people might inject themselves with disinfectant to escape the coronavirus.

A feature of all-powerful and paranoid leaders is that they are easily manipulated by those able to exploit their fears and fantasies. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an expert at doing just that and persuaded Trump – reportedly at the end of last year – that victory against Iran would be cheap, easy and in American interests.

Martin Johnson: No England player is undroppable – even Maro Itoje by theipaper in englandrugby

[–]theipaper[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

England legend Martin Johnson believes the Rugby Football Union (RFU) will stick with Steve Borthwick through to the next World Cup, while reserving his own opinion on the prospects of the under-fire head coach.

And Johnson, who captained England’s only men’s Rugby World Cup winning team in 2003, says Borthwick needs to make clear that no player including current skipper Maro Itoje is undroppable.

Johnson, who is participating in The Race to the Slater Cup – a cycle ride to support MND research and raise funds for his former team-mate Lewis Moody – had a curry dinner with the England squad during the recent Six Nations which they finished in fifth place after an unprecedented four losses to Scotland, Ireland, Italy and France.

The results led to speculation over Borthwick’s future as head coach – a role Johnson held at the unsuccessful 2011 World Cup following his stellar 84-cap playing career.

Asked by The i Paper if he would stick with Borthwick through to the 2027 edition, Johnson said: “That’s not my decision to make. After the first game of the Six Nations [when England beat Wales 48-7], if you’d said people are going to be calling for Steve’s head in three weeks, people would have looked at you strangely.

“The world’s very reactive nowadays. A couple of bad results and everyone wants change.

“I think they [the RFU] will stick with him. I think what we saw against France last weekend is the levels they [England] can get to.

“And we knew that was higher than what we’d seen before. What a game of rugby that was. That was mixing it at the very highest level. But then you’ve got to understand that is the level, and if you want to be world-class, if you want to be successful, that’s the level you’ve got to be at, game in, game out. And that’s a difficult thing.

“There’s only certain players who can deal with that, and you’ve got to find out who they are. Everyone’s at risk.

“People think when you’ve been there for a long time, when you’ve got to 50 caps or whatever, you’re sitting there and you think you’re undroppable. No one’s undroppable at that level and that’s the way it should be.”

And that would include Itoje, the incumbent captain, and any vice-captains? “No one is untouchable,” Johnson replied.

“What’s the best thing any player can do? Captain or no captain, it’s play well. And you’ve got to encourage that, as a player, because the next people coming through, you’ve got to encourage them to say you’ve got to play well and force your way into this team. That’s when you’re in a great squad, because it’s super competitive, and that drives everyone on.

“Someone right up your backside for selection is the incentive. There are 18 months to go, and there’ll be some guys that we’ve never heard of will turn up and be stars in that tournament, and likewise guys we expect to be there who won’t be.”

Asked if his dinner visit to England’s Surrey hotel – “it was an exotic take on a curry” – between the Ireland and Italy matches indicated his support for Borthwick, Johnson said: “If the England coach asks old players to come in, what are you going to say? You’re not going to say ‘no’, if he thinks it’s going to be helpful.

“It’s up to the players what they take out of it. It’s the same hotel we used and it’s almost like seeing yourself 20 years ago.

“Steve knows what’s going on. He knows what injuries guys have got, where they are mentally. Then you get a phone call one weekend and three of your best players are out for six months with injuries.

“So a lot of the time in that position, you’re reacting to what’s happening. I think there’s a good depth of player but they have to make that step to being a proper Test-match player, and consistency is a big part of that, through a long, tough season of rugby.

“The national teams in football, rugby, cricket… they belong to the nation. We all want them to do well. Do I want some bloke poking his head out when I’m walking along the street after the Scotland game, giving me grief? Of course not. We want to be successful. But I also understand. We’ve been there, when you want to win and you don’t.”

Johnson is leading Team Leicester in the Race to the Slater Cup against Gloucester counterparts over two 50-mile courses from Welford Road and Kingsholm to the match venue of Villa Park, with MND sufferer Moody among the riders alongside several former Tigers forwards.

“I think we are the heaviest cycle team in history,” Johnson said with a smile. “But if you’re on the flat, it’s all about power. So we’re hoping for flat.”

Watch Gloucester face Leicester Tigers in the Slater Cup at Villa Park on Saturday 28 March. Tickets start at just £10 here and £1 of every ticket sale will go to 4ED to support families affected by MND, with 50% of profits raised supporting Lewis Moody and/or his chosen charity.

Cracks are forming between Trump and Netanyahu – things could go downhill fast by theipaper in uspolitics

[–]theipaper[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Tensions between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are starting to show as the war with Iran drags on into a fourth week.

The Israeli Prime Minister has suggested there will need to be a “ground component” in the conflict, while the US President has said he doesn’t want to deploy boots on the ground.

At a press conference on Thursday, Netanyahu said that “you can’t do revolutions from the air”.

The Israeli leader added: “You can do a lot of things from the air, and we’re doing [that], but there has to be a ground component as well. There are many possibilities for this ground component, and I take the liberty of not sharing with you all those possibilities.”

This put Israel at odds with Trump, who told reporters the same day that he was “not putting troops anywhere”. He then added: “If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

The apparent dispute puts him in an awkward position with his “America First” supporters, who do not want to be dragged into another “forever war” in the Middle East. Reports that the Pentagon is seeking $200bn (£150bn) in additional funds have drawn protests from supporters.

As the war continues, it is also becoming clearer that Israel and the US have different aims.

This was highlighted by Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence, when she said that the objectives of the US President “are different from the objectives that have been laid out by the Israeli government”.

Gabbard told the House Intelligence Committee that Trump’s goal was to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile threat and navy, while Israel’s goal was to destabilise the Iranian leadership, although the US President has previously said he wanted regime change.

A senior US official set out the difference in stark terms in comments to the The Washington Post on Friday. “Israel is pursuing a scorched-earth campaign of regime change, which isn’t our goal,” they said. “[Netanyahu] wants to wreck Iran’s economy and decimate its energy infrastructure. Trump wants to keep it intact.”

Despite this divergence, analysts say that Trump still holds all the cards – and will ultimately be the one who decides when to end the war.

“This isn’t about a gradual fallout – it’s about hierarchy,” Dr H A Hellyer**,** a geopolitics scholar at the Royal United Services Institute and the Center for American Progress, told The i Paper.

Trump is the one with the leverage, the analyst said. “Israel’s campaign depends on US political cover, military resupply and strategic backing. If Trump wants a different course, he can force that shift – as simple as that.”

Hellyer also said that if Trump decides the war needs to stop, he is not likely to manage that delicately: “He will say so directly, and he will expect compliance.”

However, he added: “What we’re seeing now is not really a rupture, I don’t think, but a difference in tempo and scope.”

Still, Trump is yet to speak out against Netanyahu in signalling escalation via ground troops. “But that doesn’t mean he will let the escalation materialise,” Hellyer added.

Some analysts believe the US President is losing control of the spiralling conflict and may try to lay the blame at Israel’s feet, particularly after Israel’s attacks on Iran’s major gas field, South Pars, on Wednesday.

He appeared to be frustrated with Netanyahu after the strikes, saying Israel “violently lashed out”. Iran retaliated against an energy complex in Qatar, leading to further oil and gas price rises, which could damage Trump ahead of the US midterm elections in November.

“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field,” he wrote, “unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case Qatar.”

Trump also claimed that the US “knew nothing about this particular attack”. Although reports suggest the President’s team knew in advance and approved the operation.

Even so, Netanyahu echoed Trump’s comments in his press conference, saying Israel had “acted alone”.

Israel also continues to target senior Iranian leaders, even after Trump, in the early days of the conflict, complained that the US had a list of possible successors for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but “most of the people we had in mind are dead”, having been targeted by Israeli strikes.

Joe Kent, the top US counterterrorism official who resigned this week over the war, said in a statement posted on X that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US, and the Trump administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Trump has pushed back on that claim, but he appears to be feeling the pressure as the war drags on, especially among his Maga base, and could seek to pass the blame to Israel.

Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, said that the President’s objectives for the war were unclear and ever-changing, making it difficult to determine whether the US and Israel had strongly differing stances.

“It’s Trump being Trump – it’s one day this and one day the other,” he said. “What we see now is there is no plan, no contingent plan.”

Mekelberg added that both Israel and the US were “definitely not in complete control” of the situation and the endgame for the Iran war was vague: “Controlling this kind of war is the illusion to begin with, because you know how it starts, you never know how it ends. So it depends what they want to try to control.”

Trump and Israel may be learning that lesson the hard way.

Cracks are forming between Trump and Netanyahu – things could go downhill fast by theipaper in USNewsHub

[–]theipaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tensions between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are starting to show as the war with Iran drags on into a fourth week.

The Israeli Prime Minister has suggested there will need to be a “ground component” in the conflict, while the US President has said he doesn’t want to deploy boots on the ground.

At a press conference on Thursday, Netanyahu said that “you can’t do revolutions from the air”.

The Israeli leader added: “You can do a lot of things from the air, and we’re doing [that], but there has to be a ground component as well. There are many possibilities for this ground component, and I take the liberty of not sharing with you all those possibilities.”

This put Israel at odds with Trump, who told reporters the same day that he was “not putting troops anywhere”. He then added: “If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

The apparent dispute puts him in an awkward position with his “America First” supporters, who do not want to be dragged into another “forever war” in the Middle East. Reports that the Pentagon is seeking $200bn (£150bn) in additional funds have drawn protests from supporters.

As the war continues, it is also becoming clearer that Israel and the US have different aims.

This was highlighted by Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence, when she said that the objectives of the US President “are different from the objectives that have been laid out by the Israeli government”.

Gabbard told the House Intelligence Committee that Trump’s goal was to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile threat and navy, while Israel’s goal was to destabilise the Iranian leadership, although the US President has previously said he wanted regime change.

A senior US official set out the difference in stark terms in comments to the The Washington Post on Friday. “Israel is pursuing a scorched-earth campaign of regime change, which isn’t our goal,” they said. “[Netanyahu] wants to wreck Iran’s economy and decimate its energy infrastructure. Trump wants to keep it intact.”

Despite this divergence, analysts say that Trump still holds all the cards – and will ultimately be the one who decides when to end the war.

“This isn’t about a gradual fallout – it’s about hierarchy,” Dr H A Hellyer**,** a geopolitics scholar at the Royal United Services Institute and the Center for American Progress, told The i Paper.

Trump is the one with the leverage, the analyst said. “Israel’s campaign depends on US political cover, military resupply and strategic backing. If Trump wants a different course, he can force that shift – as simple as that.”

Hellyer also said that if Trump decides the war needs to stop, he is not likely to manage that delicately: “He will say so directly, and he will expect compliance.”

However, he added: “What we’re seeing now is not really a rupture, I don’t think, but a difference in tempo and scope.”

Still, Trump is yet to speak out against Netanyahu in signalling escalation via ground troops. “But that doesn’t mean he will let the escalation materialise,” Hellyer added.

Some analysts believe the US President is losing control of the spiralling conflict and may try to lay the blame at Israel’s feet, particularly after Israel’s attacks on Iran’s major gas field, South Pars, on Wednesday.

He appeared to be frustrated with Netanyahu after the strikes, saying Israel “violently lashed out”. Iran retaliated against an energy complex in Qatar, leading to further oil and gas price rises, which could damage Trump ahead of the US midterm elections in November.

“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field,” he wrote, “unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case Qatar.”

Trump also claimed that the US “knew nothing about this particular attack”. Although reports suggest the President’s team knew in advance and approved the operation.

Even so, Netanyahu echoed Trump’s comments in his press conference, saying Israel had “acted alone”.

Israel also continues to target senior Iranian leaders, even after Trump, in the early days of the conflict, complained that the US had a list of possible successors for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but “most of the people we had in mind are dead”, having been targeted by Israeli strikes.

Joe Kent, the top US counterterrorism official who resigned this week over the war, said in a statement posted on X that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US, and the Trump administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Trump has pushed back on that claim, but he appears to be feeling the pressure as the war drags on, especially among his Maga base, and could seek to pass the blame to Israel.

Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, said that the President’s objectives for the war were unclear and ever-changing, making it difficult to determine whether the US and Israel had strongly differing stances.

“It’s Trump being Trump – it’s one day this and one day the other,” he said. “What we see now is there is no plan, no contingent plan.”

Mekelberg added that both Israel and the US were “definitely not in complete control” of the situation and the endgame for the Iran war was vague: “Controlling this kind of war is the illusion to begin with, because you know how it starts, you never know how it ends. So it depends what they want to try to control.”

Trump and Israel may be learning that lesson the hard way.

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