\u201cIt looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the opening of the classic O. Henry short story<\/a> The Ransom of Red Chief.<\/p>\n The tale, written in 1907, is the ultimate parable about the perils of trying to seize and control a hellion so devious, so maniacal, so awful that the captors become the captives.<\/p>\n The story is about two small-time crooks who think they can make some easy money by kidnapping a 10-year-old boy, the son of an affluent landowner in a sleepy Alabama town.<\/p>\n They underestimate badly. When they go to abduct the red-haired, freckle-faced boy, he is throwing rocks at a kitten and hurls a brick at one of his kidnappers.<\/p>\n \u201cRed Chief, the terror of the plains,\u201d as the boy calls himself, runs his captors ragged. He relishes tormenting the men and doesn\u2019t want to go home. In the end, they have to drop their demand for a $2,000 ransom, pay the boy\u2019s father $250 to take the demonic child off their hands and run for the hills.<\/p>\n US president Donald Trump went along with Israeli president Bibi Netanyahu\u2019s Panglossian case<\/a> for slamming Iran. It looked like a good thing, but wait till I tell you.<\/p>\n After nearly two months of tangling with the demonic Iranian leadership and its allies, Trump looks desperate to run for the hills. He constantly says he has defeated the mullahs and \u201cobliterated\u201d their military power, and yet Iran refuses to be subdued.<\/p>\n Trump says there\u2019s a new regime that\u2019s easier to deal with, but actually it\u2019s the same regime but worse \u2013 run by hardened, fanatical generals<\/a>. Iran has not turned over its enriched uranium, and negotiations are touch-and-go. The Strait of Hormuz, which Trump keeps insisting is open, is closed. Trump is blockading the Iranian blockade.<\/p>\n \u201cIran has proven to be far more resilient and resourceful than he was prepared for,\u201d Richard Haass, a foreign policy adviser for former US president George W Bush, wrote<\/a> in his newsletter, Home & Away. \u201cAlmost all the administration\u2019s assumptions have been proven wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Aside from the weakening of Iran\u2019s conventional military capability, Haass said: \u201cVirtually every other metric shows the United States, the region and the world to be worse off.\u201d<\/p>\n The Iranians are tormenting Trump \u2013 even as they out-troll the master troller, viciously mocking the president as a \u201cL.O.S.E.R.\u201d and Bibi puppet who wants to distract from the Epstein files.<\/p>\n One viral Iranian rap addressing Trump calls the conflict \u201ca trap you couldn\u2019t see. Welcome to the graveyard of your vanity.\u201d<\/p>\n Conceding that Iran is winning the meme war, Daily Show correspondent Ronny Chieng keened about Trump: \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of electing a cyberbully if he sucks at cyberbullying?\u201d<\/p>\n Now that Iran has flexed its power in the strait, Trump has to bargain with it to get back to where things were before.<\/p>\n He is pinioned in a weird nook and cranny of the planet that seems almost medieval, sitting next to a backward, villainous theocracy. And yet ships carrying more than 20 per cent of the world\u2019s oil must traverse the narrow passage to reach the Arabian Sea.<\/p>\n Trump, who grew overconfident after his adventurism in Venezuela, is being driven to distraction.<\/p>\n He got so rattled when the two American airmen were shot down, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey reported<\/a> in The Wall Street Journal, that he \u201cscreamed at aides for hours\u201d. Last month, Trump talked about the danger of becoming another Jimmy Carter, spiralling amid the hostages and a failed rescue with eight helicopters lost.<\/p>\n One of my first big stories as a reporter was covering those hostage families for a year and then going to West Point to see the hostages come home in 1981. So I had a front-row seat to the Iranians\u2019 ju-jitsu tactics, using 52 Americans in our embassy to gain leverage over Carter\u2019s presidency, reputation and re-election.<\/p>\n Trump tried to scare the Iranians with a profane post on Easter and a wild threat to destroy their civilisation. But Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq. The Iranian mullahs and generals are the terrors of the strait.<\/p>\n Trump has forsaken the one good Middle East policy he had: avoiding the mirage of quick wins while getting sucked once more into \u201cblood and sand\u201d, as he dismissively called it during his first term.<\/p>\n When he was running in 2016, Trump deemed the invasion of Iraq \u201ca big, fat mistake\u201d that destabilised the Middle East and cost too much, in money and lives.<\/p>\n But, seduced by the detestable Bibi, he got suckered into the blood and sand. Unlike W, who had the good grace to trump up a case for war, Trump let Bibi lead him by the nose into this one, blowing off Congress, our allies and many furious Maga acolytes.<\/p>\n Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reveal in their forthcoming book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, that the president brushed aside Gen Dan Caine\u2019s warnings that a war with Iran would drastically deplete US weapons stockpiles and jeopardise the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n