Excursion to Nowhere

Chimpanzees are notoriously bad at war planning.

Trump and his inner circle.

March 12, 2026

By Marc Cooper

Imagine a war in one of the most volatile places on earth run by a pack of chimpanzees and led by an angry, aging, and decaying Silverback ape. Actually, you don’t have to conjure that up, you can merely watch it on TV every day or read about in the papers.

Epic Fury is becoming an Epic Disaster. And after watching a decade of foolery led by Donald Trump why should this monumental clusterfuck surprise anybody.

Even Trump’s labeling of this abomination of a war as an “excursion” is in itself jaw-dropping. And not for the obvious reason which was to evade the War Powers Act. Nor just to trivialize wholesale death and destruction as some sort of Disneyland Jungle Boat ride.

It’s much worse. I can’t prove it but I would bet Ice Barbie’s makeup supplies that this rock stupid tub of lard who calls himself president actually meant to say “incursion” but his internal floppy disk storing his 600 word vocabulary just had no room for it and he mixed it up with the more familiar term excursion. Not that such frivolity has put off many of his fellow simians. South Carolina tree monkey Lindsey Graham has been so turned on by the pyrotechnics, swelling with joy from below his waist up to his pinhead he rushed to encourage local families to donate their sons and daughters to enlist in this holy war as soon as possible. Before donning their uniforms these young patriots would do well to ask Grandpa to fish out his old Country Joe and the Fish albums and do some rehearsing.

“And it’s one, two, three, four what are we fightin’ for? Don’t know and don’t give a damn!“

It’s as if Trump bought himself and his cronies a couple dozen of those Magic 8 Ball toys that give a different answer every time you turn it over.

One brave or very bored reporter actually counted up the reasons the administration has given for attacking Iran and as of Day Eleven totaled up twelve offered rationales.

Of course, there isn’t a real one other than a deluded but undiagnosed psychiatric patient who felt like beating his chest again after his magnificent victory in kidnapping President Maduro of Venezuela wanted to do it again. The most convincing theory I heard was from former Republican consultant Mike Murphy who speculated that Trump’s newfound aggressive expansionism is his childish payback for having wasted 2025 thirsting for the Nobel Peace Prize only to strike out. So what the hell, if he can’t win the laurels of being a peacemaker he’ll show them by becoming a 21st century Conan the Barbarian.

You know all this but it is worth repeating. He went ahead with this war without consulting Congress, or anybody else for that matter. Even his top military aides had warned him this might not be a great idea. But what do they know? I mean Trump witnessed that great French military parade in his honor and that left him little else to learn about war fighting.

He just knew he was right and that’s enough and that is always good enough. We no longer even have a functioning National Security Council often populated by a higher form of species who actually know things.

Now, major foreign policy decisions are made by Trump alone sitting on his gold plated toilet in the middle of the night in between insane tweet storms. The next morning, he might run them by the virtual governing junta of the half-dozen other morons and con artists who make up his inner circle who might add another out of this world thought to the decision he already made. You know, like Little Marco suggesting we did this because Israel made us do it. Or muscle-bound dummy Pete Hegseth saying if we kill a lot of civilians it might be bad PR so blame any mass murder of Iranians on Iranians.

Pretty fantastic how the administration cosplayers in the punditocracy have been lecturing us on the absolute tactical precision, brilliance and mightiness of the U.S. Armed Forces as Iran was set aflame by the most lethal array of weapons in world history.

Sorry if this sounds unpatriotic but this sounded and still sounds like a crew of boxing referees watching a 9th grade six foot 200 pound bully beating the snot out of a scrawny 6th grader a foot shorter and half his weight.

“Well, Walter, not since Muhammed Ali have we seen such tactical mastery. I mean that repeated stomping of this kid’s head while on the ground was sheer brilliance, no?” said one ref.
“Right you are Bob! But don’t underestimate that right handed sucker punch to the kidneys. Wow,” answered the other.

Turns out, of course, that such heralded precision precision and striking U.S. military intelligence failed to realize they were using outdated maps that showed a long closed military base having been converted into a girl’s school – now with about 150 or so fewer students.

Nor did Trump and his coterie of dolts figure out in advance that as a close Iranian ally, the Russians would be providing high quality intelligence to the Mullahs including, um, targeting. We also learn days later that some 150 Americans were wounded when Iran flew a couple of exploding drones into a northern Iraqi Air Force base where American troops were marshaled.

And those Iranian missile attacks launched against the 5 star hotels in neighboring gulf states was not just resentment over $52 breakfasts, but rather it was where U.S. officers were being quartered.

Some 20,000 American civilians, tourists, Vuitton fetihists, oil contractors and certainly some spooks were in the Gulf states when the war was started and no provisions were made to either warn them or, God forbid, evacuate them. And there has been no big fuss about that in the media like when Biden withdrew from Iraq and could not jam some allies on the departing planes, but within a few days opened an air bridge out of Kabul that rescued 140,000 people – a rather dazzling feat hardly ever noted.

Chimpanzees are notoriously poor at planning so nobody in the White House anticipated the easiness with which Iran would mine the Straits of Hormuz blockading much of global oil transport. That’s taking place as I write and the U.S. is borrowing minesweepers from other countries as Iran is busily planting more mines and munitions behind and in front of them.

The blockading of oil from Iran and Venezuela has been a bonanza for Vladimir Putin whose own kingdom is a major oil producer and is now filling the gaps and raking in the big bucks. A nice perk that will help pay for more war against U.S. ally Ukraine.

A consensus of experts agrees that it could take years to clear the mines and these first ripples of economic disorder seen in rising gas prices might just be minor foreshocks of a global energy/economic crisis.

The greatest error made by the Big Ape and his little chimp buddies was their total misunderstanding of Iran itself. Hey, here’s some peanuts, and listen up, guys.

Iran is not Venezuela. It is an ideologically saturated country of nearly 100 million people who have been predicting this and preparing for this conflagration since 1979. For sure, the government is despised by many, but Iran is still an Islamic Republic and Iranians are an educated and sophisticated public.

The Mullahs have been smart enough to build what they call a Mosaic Defense, dispersing power to more than two dozen centers from the top to the bottom of the country, and not concentrating it within a few blocks of some presidential palace as most dictatorships do.

There are 200,000 members of the elite Revolutionary Guard who I’m gonna guess are not big on surrender. They do not report to the regular army, which is another 300,000 soldiers, but only to the Supreme Leader and his fellow Mullahs. There’s also a quarter million Basij, local paramilitary forces sometimes written off as “militias” but who are, in fact, a brutal force in charge of quashing dissent and street disorder.

And Trump and his chimps actually thought this regime, which by the way, is ideologically committed to martyrdom, was going to implode if they bumped off the elderly Supreme Leader? He’s already been replaced by the even more hard line son of his.

And then there’s the proxies, the Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas and various Shiite militias among others. Underneath the headlines you’ll find this week that Israel has launched yet another offensive against Hezbollah, not just on the Lebanese border, but by bombing the capital of Beirut uprooting a staggering 700,000 civilians fleeing for safety.

With congressional Republicans mostly publicly mum on what the Boss Man has set off, they are privately and feverishly messaging him to find an offramp as soon as he can to not provoke a Blue Tsunami in November. Silverback apes are just about smart enough to read at least the outlines of polls. And this war is the first one in a century that begins with a majority of voters opposing it. Trump is perfectly capable of doing a big TACO and declaring the war is over and he won. He has hinted at that twice already. And all he needs to do it is an aircraft carrier, a microphone and a few TV cameras along with the ironed out Mission Accomplished flag used by George W. Bush.

I am not going to guess as to how and when this excursion will end. I’m sure of only two things. The regime that emerges from the war in Iran will be the same one in power today. And, second, it is not up to Trump alone when the war will end. The Iranians also have a vote.+++