The American ICE Age

The American executive, seeing their popularity evaporate and becoming increasingly anxious about losing power through democratic means in the upcoming midterm elections, are doing what they can to distract and terrify the population.

Since February 14th, American Congress has been at an impasse over funding the department of homeland security, resulting most visibly in unpaid airport security officers quitting by the hundreds and screening lineups with waits up to six hours causing travel mayhem. The solution? Send Immigration and Customs Enforcement — Trump’s secret police — to 14 of the country’s largest airports to “help”. During this partial government shutdown, ICE agents are paid; TSA agents are not.

The use of ICE agents in this scenario is not an accident. The impasse in Congress has the Democrats on one side demanding accountability for ICE, and the Republicans refusing to fund DHS until the SAVE Act is law.

The SAVE Act stands for the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” act and is a voter suppression tool designed to require presentation of proof-of-citizenship documents to vote, including a passport or a birth certificate. It is estimated that as many as 69 million women whose married names do not match their birth names will be disenfranchised by this bill, among many targeted groups that are less inclined to support MAGA candidates.

The link between the deployment of ICE and voting rights is not pure symbolism. It is, according to Donald Trump confidante Steve Bannon, a trial balloon for the deployment of ICE agents in this fall’s midterm elections.

Steve Bannon: ICE agents at airports are “test run” for midterm elections

While laying the groundwork to deploy the secret police to take over every-day security applications like airport screening, getting people used to seeing them everywhere ahead of elections they want to “protect," the Trump regime is, lest we forget, waging a full-scale war against a far-off country that American media and movies have spent years conditioning the people to see as the enemy. Blockbusters like Tom Cruise’s runaway success Top Gun: Maverick romanticise war with Iran while being careful never to name the country. Wikipedia’s plot description for the movie should sound eerily familiar:

The Navy has been ordered to destroy an unsanctioned uranium enrichment plant in an unnamed foreign country before it becomes operational. The plant, located in an underground bunker at the end of a canyon, is defended by surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), GPS jammers, fifth-generation Su-57 fighters, and F-14 Tomcats.

Iran is the only country in the world outside of the United States ever to have operated the F-14 Tomcat, after President Nixon sold 79 of them to the Shah in 1970, making the reference unmistakable.

Trump has long been interested in having a war with, well, anyone. He does not have a strong grasp of international politics, but he does understand that war is excellent at getting two things he likes very much: money and power. So when his two most capable kompromat-backed handlers, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pointed him toward Iran, it was not a hard sell.

At first it did not make sense to me why the Russians would want the United States to attack Iran, their reliable and steadfast ally in their own war against Ukraine. As the dumbest war waged by the dumbest president approaches its first month, the ambiguity in purpose, at least for Putin, has entirely melted away.

The wars in Iran and Ukraine are the same war. They are united. Breaking the back of the allies who are providing aid and intelligence to the Ukrainians has long been a priority for Russia, and convincing the Americans to attack Iran diverts resources away from Ukraine without driving Iran out of Russia’s partnership, as their interdependence necessarily deepens.

The key though has been in the Trump administration’s decision to relieve sanctions against both Iran and Russia in order to get control of the skyrocketing price of oil. The effect is obvious. Trump is allowing direct funding of both Iran and Russia’s militaries while draining America’s own coffers.

It should go without saying that the United States government asking their congress for $200,000,000,000 dollars, on top of the existing trillion-dollar-a-year military budget, to wage a pointless and unwinnable war against a powerful far-off adversary that exists as an adversary primarily due to American actions in the first place is deeply troubling.

This quagmire will be deep, and is part of a multi-generational tit-for-tat. After the Soviet Union supported North Vietnam against the United States, helping make it a disastrous quagmire for the Americans, the United States supported Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, making it in turn a disastrous quagmire that played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the west supporting Ukraine helping to make it a quagmire for Russia, Russia is supporting Iran in an effort to make it a quagmire for the United States.

But for Trump, none of it matters. He has his war. The worse it goes, the better it is for him. He needs the American people to be focused on and distracted by the war, and an air war alone won’t achieve that. Tens of thousands of American soldiers are headed to the Middle East in what is an obvious escalation in preparation for a bloody ground war for which Iran has been preparing for decades.

He needs Iran to push back, to focus the American mind on the escalating conflict, lest they see what his other hand is doing.

That, you may recall after getting distracted by several paragraphs on a war with Iran, is setting up his domestic security infrastructure to steal the fall elections, for which he is practicing at airports.