The warnings came, but most chose to ignore them, believing that Trump was bluffing and using the military threat as a negotiating tool, typical of a bully who has little if any diplomatic verve. Very few of the community of commentators, including the author, could actually believe that Trump would be so stupid as to start a war with Iran with so many factors stacked against the U.S. and Israel, ensuring they would not come out of it well. But Alastair Crooke’s prescient words just a couple of days before, warning of the “momentum of war,” will be remembered for years to come. The machismo, chest-beating, and deplorable insecurity of weak, middle-aged men who never fought in war themselves, who are determined to serve their own political agendas while using uneducated young men as lambs to the slaughter, finally gave way to reason.

Of course, the so-called peace talks that the U.S. was conducting with Iran were phony, and these strikes were proof of that. The first strike from Israel, a cowardly and disgusting bombing of a school killing over 50 kids, is typical of Israel and might have been Netanyahu losing his patience and wanting the show to get started. It might also have been a test of sorts, to see if Iran would respond in an immediate way, showing no leniency towards U.S. posts throughout the region. But just as the strike is a shameful provocation, so too is the way western media refuse to frame the event correctly. Perhaps Trump’s own State of the Union speech, which hilariously claimed that Iran was about to attack western countries with a nuclear weapon, set the tone for extreme parody.

No one wants this war except Israel. No one in the West supports the initiative, and so Trump stands isolated. But as hours pass during Saturday and we watch Iran’s response, we are seeing no follow-up from the U.S. What we seem to be experiencing is a phony, smaller war which might be used as part of a propaganda campaign to justify a later strike from the U.S. Most of what we are reading in western newspapers is a systemic, prolonged baptism of lies, based on a 30-year narrative that “Iran is weeks away from producing a nuclear bomb,” and so we shouldn’t believe that, by contrast, the media are going to report on it accurately.

As America wakes up on Saturday morning, it will be Trump, though, who will be asked by reporters whether he was aware of the strike or whether he indeed signed it off. This trick question, which he can’t come out of well, might give us a clue as to what happened while he was sleeping, although the American public, as naive as they are, might well believe that he was unaware of the Israeli strike on the school. The rest of the world will not swallow it, especially given that he posted a speech on Friday night on his own social media platform warning Americans that there will be loss of life.

What is really interesting is how the response from Israel and the U.S. has been stalled, which might indicate that Trump wants a completely different style of engagement with Iran than previously in June of last year, which was an intensive attack lasting over 12 days, which finally ran down ammunition stocks for both Israel and the U.S. Experts point out that a new war with Iran which follows a similar pattern would have to be stalled at around a week or so. Does Trump figure that a longer, drawn-out war, which will take him right up to and beyond the midterm elections, might work for him? And so a much slower and measured war, which was initially seen as an ace of Iran’s, could be a way for Trump to stay in office while keeping the Israelis happy. It’s hard to see clearly what the objectives are, but few if any believe that the war is for America and Americans.

Jeffrey Sachs sums it up well on social media. “It may be because of what’s in the Epstein files … it may be blackmail, it may be corruption … but it is not about America’s interests.”

Quite feasibly, it could be all three. But certainly, Trump appears to be trapped by Israel as he brushes aside any kind of democratic process, ignores international law, and has a shocking disregard for diplomacy on a scale which few can even imagine. Where is the moral ground in killing 36 little girls in their school when even Trump himself, in his social media rant, talks of destroying Iran’s missiles? This is not the Trump we know. Has Bibi taken over the U.S., lock, stock, and barrel?