Will America’s ground invasion of Iran begin in the early hours of tomorrow? Everybody knows, by now, that Trump likes to initiate action late on Fridays, after the markets close. And late last night, the so-called Pentagon Pizza Watch channel – which monitors late-night food orders from the Pentagon for evidence that something big is afoot – reported a surge of activity, leading to all sorts of prediction-market bets that a new military operation would start this weekend.
Of course, with so much money to be made on war gambling – there’s now a Polymarket “situation room” bar in Washington, DC – the odds of someone trying to dupe the markets are short. Even Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is “aware” of the Pizza Watch account and has said: “I’ve thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off.” The times they are a-strangin’.
The fear in Washington is that the Iran war has now spiraled out of Trump’s control
Still, there’s little doubt that the Pentagon is busily preparing a “final blow” assault – a massive land, sea and air attack designed to crush Iran’s defiance. The question is whether Team Trump’s negotiations with Iran – conducted through Islamabad in Pakistan – will make enough progress to pause the next phase of military escalation. Sources suggest that Trump is growing “bored” of the war and wants to bring what he calls his “little detour” in the Middle East to an end so that he can focus on the domestic agenda again, and boost his party’s increasingly slim chance of success in November’s midterms.
But the fear in Washington, and every other western capital, is that the Iran war has now spiraled out of Trump’s control, and he can’t necessarily end it even if he wanted to. In such a scenario, an imminent US-led land war becomes ever more likely.
On Monday morning, Trump announced that America is “very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great military efforts in the Middle East.” That caused a major lift in the markets, as traders jumped on the cheering possibility that the global energy crisis could soon be resolved.
Last night, Trump issued another statement on his Truth Social: “As per Iranian Government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction by 10 days to Monday, April 6… Talks are ongoing and, despite erroneous statements to the contrary by the Fake News Media, and others, they are going very well.”
But if that post was meant to buoy the financial world, it did not succeed. This morning all the major indices are sliding. The White House is keen to stress that, while its official social media channels have been posting crazy memes and AI war-slop, the President’s pronouncements on Truth Social remain more substantial statements of fact.
But the world doesn’t necessarily see it that way: investors and analysts are increasingly looking more at what the Pentagon is doing and less at what the Commander-in-Chief is saying.
Meanwhile, amid the hectic news cycle, huge stories are failing to attract sufficient attention. On March 9, it now emerges, “multiple waves” of unauthorized drones swarmed over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, forcing a shelter-in-place order at the site from which B-52 bombers have been setting out towards the Middle East. The speculation is that such a sophisticated drone operation could only have been carried out by the Chinese, either as reconnaissance on America’s war machine, or as a threat to US military chiefs.
At the same time, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, did not attend Trump’s Cabinet meeting yesterday, amid widespread reports that she feels sidelined and humiliated over Operation Epic Fury, which she opposed.
Large parts of the DC establishment assume that Gabbard’s role is now untenable, and that she must soon follow her ally Joe Kent, who last week resigned from the administration in protest at the war. But while Gabbard may have been quiet, she has been busy. Just the News reported this week that her agencies have come across intercepted “Ukrainian government communications discussing a plot to route hundreds of millions of American tax dollars earmarked for clean energy in the war-torn country and move them to the United States to enrich then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee.”
Through USAID in Kyiv, then, a scheme may have been hatched to funnel American funds for Ukraine back towards Biden’s re-election effort, presumably because Ukraine knew a re-elected Democratic president was far more likely than Trump to keep up the flow of aid towards Ukraine.
The shocking report comes at a particularly delicate moment for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is trying to respond to Trump’s latest peace plan to accommodate Vladimir Putin. Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner have been heavily involved in both the war in Iran and the move towards peace and rapprochement with Russia over Ukraine – it’s understood that the former is meant to be a complicated prelude to the latter. Now, however, the question of which comes first has become a live issue.
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
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