The News You Need on Tuesday, May 12th, 2026.
As planes crash and collide, Sean Duffy hits the road for a corporate-sponsored family vacay, Epstein considered Trump a role model and other news you need today.
Mr Neoconservative Thinks Trump’s War on Iran is A Catastrophe
The Atlantic
Scott: Bob Kagan was the ideological brains behind Dubya—George W. Bush’s—decision to launch a massive invasion of Iraq and bring democracy to the Fertile Crescent.
He’s no shrinking violet, for sure. But the Iraq War seems to have administered a dose of reality to him about what the US military alone, or in concert with allies, can accomplish in the Middle East.
Kagan issues a withering assessment of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, and scrutinizes with some care how Trump got there, saying he was misled by Benjamin Netanyahu and should have listened to any of the serious analysts—including the Israelis for that matter—about what could and could not be accomplished.
Entering into a war without clear objectives and a clear strategy is never a smart thing to do, but in this case, it’s easily the most calamitous of many grave military misadventures the United States has had in the Middle East so far. Beyond this, no modern American president has suffered a military humiliation of this magnitude and consequence.
This will be Trump’s historical calling card.
It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored…
Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure…
Iran remains in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The common assumption that, one way or another, the strait will reopen when the crisis ends is unfounded. Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante. People talk of a split between hard-liners and moderates in Tehran, but even moderates must understand that Iran cannot afford to let the strait go, no matter how good a deal it thought it could get. For one thing, how reliable is any deal with Trump? He all but boasted of replicating the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by approving the killing of Iran’s leadership amid negotiations. The Iranians cannot be sure that Trump won’t decide to attack again within a few months of striking a deal. They also know that the Israelis may attack again, as they never feel constrained from acting when they perceive their interests to be threatened…
The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight. The questions this raises about America’s readiness for another major conflict may or may not prompt Xi Jinping to launch an attack on Taiwan, or Vladimir Putin to step up his aggression against Europe. But at the very least America’s allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts. The global adjustment to a post-American world is accelerating. America’s once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties.
The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians
Charles: There is a terrible resurgence of antisemitism all around the world.
The ministers in the current Israeli government are more responsible for that resurgence than anyone else.
Any report that omits that fact is missing the lead of the story.
Nick Kristof has spent decades documenting sexual violence in multiple war zones. In his latest piece he mentions that 100,000 women may have been raped in the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia a few years ago, and “mass rape is now unfolding in Sudan.”
But his subject this week is the pure evil which has infected this Israeli government. Its actions are humiliating to every decent Jew who believes it is our first duty to never behave the same way as our oppressors.
Instead of setting a humane example, this Israeli government has adopted the worst behaviors of its enemies. Government ministers believe Palestinians are animals.
There is no other way to explain the genocide they have committed in Gaza and now Lebanon, and the sexual violence Kristof has documented in Israeli prisons. The Times columnist writes:
In wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children—by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.
There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”
What does this standard operating procedure look like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to the ground.
“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners…
By one count, Israel has detained 20,000 people in the West Bank alone since the Oct. 7 attacks, and more than 9,000 Palestinians were still being held as of this month. Many have not been charged but were detained under ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a respected American organization, surveyed 59 Palestinian journalists who had been released by Israeli authorities after the Oct. 7 attacks. Three percent said they had been raped, and 29 percent said they had endured other forms of sexual violence.
How does this kind of violence happen? Decades of covering conflict has taught me that a combination of dehumanization and impunity can propel people into a Hobbesian state of nature.
The blunt reality is that when there are no consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are taught to scorn as subhuman.
For decades the behavior of the Nazis provided the strongest proof of that “blunt reality.”
Kristof continues:
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, told Kristof he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians. But he added, “Do I believe it happens? Definitely. There are war crimes committed every day in the territories.”
One Palestinian prisoner from Gaza reportedly was hospitalized in July 2024 with a tear in his rectum, cracked ribs and a punctured lung. Investigators obtained a prison video purportedly showing the abuse. The authorities detained nine reservist soldiers — but Israel’s right-wingers erupted in outrage, with a mob of furious protesters, including politicians, breaking into the prison to show support for the guards. The last charges against the soldiers were dropped in March, and last month the military approved the soldiers’ return to duty.
Netanyahu hailed the dropping of charges as the end of a “blood libel.” “The State of Israel must hunt down its enemies—not its heroic fighters,
“Where the hell are you?” Netanyahu asked the international community after October 7, 2023, demanding that it condemn sexual violence committed by what the Israeli government has called the “Hamas rapist regime.”
Hamas has indeed brutally violated human rights. Israeli officials should look to their own violations as well—in particular at what a 49-page United Nations report last year called Israel’s “systematically” subjecting Palestinians to “sexualized torture” committed with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership.”
Think of it this way: The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?
We want everyone to do better, especially the big legacy outlets.
Scott: Discussion and coverage of politics in the United States in our major print and broadcast media outlets is somewhat crippled. It really follows a ‘he said, she said’ perspective with their generally being two official viewpoints—the Democratic and the Republican, the red and the blue, a liberal and a conservative.
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