And so Trump has backed off from his deranged genocidal threats against Iran that would and should surely constitute war crimes that alarmed even some of his supporters. He, as usual, claims success that he got a ceasefire but it is not at all clear what he got. Iran has issued a 10-point plan for a ceasefire not only contains many things that the US had rejected previously, but demands new ones.

Danny Citrinowicz, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, has offered a sobering assessment of the outcome of America’s five week war, saying the conflict was launched with “sweeping promises: regime change in Iran, the dismantling of its missile and nuclear programs, and preventing it from threatening the Strait of Hormuz.”
“And where are we now?” he asks.
The regime is still firmly in power.
Its missile capabilities are damaged still intact
It still holds roughly 440 kg of uranium enriched to 60%.
And in return?
A ‘controlled’ reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, something that wasn’t even truly closed to begin with.
Let’s be honest: this is not a strategic victory.”

Observers are suggesting that Trump was desperate for an exit ramp after his blustering painted him into a corner and so seized on this as a way out, until the next time he feels like issuing an apocalyptic threat.

So how and why did Trump blunder into this war. The New York Times had a long article detailing how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed Trump into attacking Iran during a meeting at the White House on February 11, assuring him that it would be easy to topple the Iranian leadership and replace it with one friendly to the US,

At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell. Among those featured was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who had tried to position himself as a secular leader who could shepherd Iran toward a post-theocratic government.

Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces and accelerating its collapse.

Mr. Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It seemed to land well with the most important person in the room, the American president.

Sounds good to me, Mr. Trump told the prime minister. To Mr. Netanyahu, this signaled a likely green light for a joint U.S.-Israeli operation.

So Trump was made to think that this would be a cake-walk and signed on. This sounds drearily familiar. Remember how we were breezily told that the Iraq invasion would be so easy and that the people would welcome the US troops with rose petals when they entered the country? Those ‘petals’ turned out to be landmines and IEDs. Proponents for war always oversell the ease of the operation and the benefits that would accrue and Netanyahu pulled the same stunt here with Trump. But some of his close US advisors were far less sanguine.

The U.S. officials assessed that the first two objectives were achievable with American intelligence and military power. They assessed that the third and fourth parts of Mr. Netanyahu’s pitch, which included the possibility of the Kurds mounting a ground invasion of Iran, were detached from reality.

When Mr. Trump joined the meeting, Mr. Ratcliffe briefed him on the assessment. The C.I.A. director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister’s regime change scenarios: “farcical.”
…

The president then turned to General Caine. “General, what do you think?”

General Caine replied: “Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.”
…

As the small team of advisers who were looped into the plans deliberated over the following days, General Caine shared with Mr. Trump and others the alarming military assessment that a major campaign against Iran would drastically deplete stockpiles of American weaponry, including missile interceptors, whose supply had been strained after years of support for Ukraine and Israel. General Caine saw no clear path to quickly replenishing these stockpiles.

He also flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risks of Iran blocking it. Mr. Trump had dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before it came to that. The president appeared to think it would be a very quick war — an impression that had been reinforced by the tepid response to the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

So basically the Israelis sold Trump a bill of goods and the military and civilian advisors around him, who suspected that it was going to be a mess, did not push back hard enough once they saw that Trump was on board with it, because anyone who goes against what Trump wants ets fired.

At the February 11 meeting, apart from the Netanyahu delegation, the administration members consisted of the following.

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, sat at the far end of the table. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who doubled as the national security adviser, had taken his regular seat. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who generally sat together in such settings, were on one side; joining them was John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, who had been negotiating with the Iranians, rounded out the main group.

The gathering had been kept deliberately small to guard against leaks. Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea it was happening.

In subsequent meetings, only Trump officials attended, including JD Vance who had been out of the country on February 11 and so missed the meeting with the Israelis.

One aspect of news reports like this is that it is based on what people at the meeting told the reporters. The number of people who attend such meetings is very small, consisting of a handful of top advisors and it is supposed to be highly confidential. So clearly someone is leaking but who? They will only leak on ‘deep background’ which means that they cannot be alluded to in any way, by euphemistic titles such as ‘senior advisor’ so one can only guess. If past experience is any indication, the people who leak tend to be those who fear that the whole thing may go sideways and want it to be known that they at least had the foresight to have reservations. From my reading of the article, it points to JD Vance or Caine or Wiles.

Meanwhile, it looks like Netanyahu is already being blamed for this catastrophe.

The US intelligence community’s verdict that Israeli predictions of regime change and revolution in Iran were “farcical” turned out to be correct. The Israeli assessment that the war would last at best a handful of days, at worst a handful of weeks, was woefully wide of the mark.

Even two days ago, according to Israel’s Channel 12, Netanyahu was pushing Donald Trump not to agree to a ceasefire. For a day, the US president issued his genocidal warnings to Tehran and then buckled, by some accounts sidelining Israel in his deliberations.
…

The reality is that Netanyahu gambled everything on his war and in his failure to secure the fall of the theocratic regime, the seizure of Tehran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, or meaningful state degradation, Israel’s global standing – already massively tarnished by its actions in Gaza, where it has been accused of committing a genocide – has been damaged.

On the security side, despite Trump’s claims, the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has been strengthened as Tehran – for now, at least – has achieved its primary aim of simply surviving a month-long onslaught by two of the world’s largest military powers.

The attacks have left a wounded but still intact regime, with significant military assets, which is likely to pursue rapid rearmament as it seeks opportunities to retaliate.

Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing attacks in southern Lebanon also appears hubristic, given that Israel’s declared intention to carve out a new security zone puts its forces in direct conflict on the ground with Hezbollah fighters who have historically proved adept at fighting on their own terrain.

Seen in this context, Israel’s horrific and unwarned-of mass airstrikes on Lebanon seem like a punitive act of displacement, having been thwarted in Iran.

Trump always looks for scapegoats when things go badly for him. Netanyahu could be in his crosshairs.