Morbid Symptoms: War on Iran and the
Epstein Class
March 6, 2026
Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
On Saturday, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated military assault on Iran under the banner of Operation Epic Fury. The operation, involving large-scale air and missile strikes across multiple Iranian targets, marked another significant escalation since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023. Critics have since renamed the campaign “Operation Epstein Fury” or “Operation Epstein Files,” arguing that the sudden recourse to war appears designed to divert attention from a political scandal engulfing the presidential administration—one that, in their telling, dwarfs both Watergate and the sordid indiscretions that haunted the presidency of Bill Clinton.
During recent congressional testimony concerning Clinton’s relationship with the deceased financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna told reporters that she believed Epstein “was an intelligence asset running some form of honeypot operation.” For years, rumors have circulated regarding Epstein’s possible connections to intelligence services such as Mossad and the CIA, allegations he treated with a certain flippant irony in private emails with associates and fellow Jewish supremacists. Though many investigators insist that no definitive “smoking gun” has surfaced to prove such intelligence ties, the network of Epstein’s relationships with powerful figures remains undeniable, reaching into Trump’s political orbit as well as into the circles of foreign governments, including Israel.
It is therefore unsurprising that many observers now wonder whether Trump’s attack on Iran functions as a political diversion from the widening Epstein scandal. What is certain is that the president’s political fortunes have declined: his poll numbers have slipped, and Americans have grown increasingly despondent amid a worsening domestic economic climate. In his most recent State of the Union address, Trump—a man who has likely never pushed a grocery cart down a supermarket aisle—derided talk of an “affordability crisis,” having previously dismissed the rising cost of basic goods as a “hoax.” Meanwhile, revanchist attacks on political opponents, the federal invasion of Minnesota, an episode that left two Americans dead and immigrant communities terrorized, and the diminishing returns of white-supremacist rhetoric and policy have done little to arrest his growing unpopularity. The gradual release of additional Epstein files, reportedly implicating an expanding circle of elites and containing tens of thousands references to Trump himself and allegations implicating him in the abuse of women and girls, combined with the conspicuous absence of accountability, has only deepened public distrust toward what many now call the Epstein class—the insulated stratum of wealth and power that governs modern political life.
There is, indeed, a conspiracy. But its central purpose is not merely the concealment of crimes of sexual exploitation, abhorrent though they are. Such atrocities are themselves symptoms—grotesque manifestations of a deeper and more malignant disease. Epstein was but one among many actors, whether intelligence asset or merely a creature of wealth and impunity, who preyed upon the vulnerable while treating ordinary people as pawns in their conquest of power, whether acting on behalf of foreign states or private capital or both.
In this sense, the scandal reveals something larger: the moral pathology of capitalism in its decadent phase and the morbid symptoms of imperial decline. The American war with Iran serves no constituency except those who stand to profit from the destruction of yet another sovereign state that has resisted incorporation into the imperial order. Iran, like Venezuela or Cuba, poses no existential threat to the United States or its people. To strike such nations is not an exhibition of strength but a confession of weakness—a tacit admission that the American project, having exhausted the possibilities of reform at home, can imagine no alternative to crisis except war.
This piece first appeared on Red Scare.
Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
On Saturday, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated military assault on Iran under the banner of Operation Epic Fury. The operation, involving large-scale air and missile strikes across multiple Iranian targets, marked another significant escalation since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023. Critics have since renamed the campaign “Operation Epstein Fury” or “Operation Epstein Files,” arguing that the sudden recourse to war appears designed to divert attention from a political scandal engulfing the presidential administration—one that, in their telling, dwarfs both Watergate and the sordid indiscretions that haunted the presidency of Bill Clinton.
During recent congressional testimony concerning Clinton’s relationship with the deceased financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna told reporters that she believed Epstein “was an intelligence asset running some form of honeypot operation.” For years, rumors have circulated regarding Epstein’s possible connections to intelligence services such as Mossad and the CIA, allegations he treated with a certain flippant irony in private emails with associates and fellow Jewish supremacists. Though many investigators insist that no definitive “smoking gun” has surfaced to prove such intelligence ties, the network of Epstein’s relationships with powerful figures remains undeniable, reaching into Trump’s political orbit as well as into the circles of foreign governments, including Israel.
It is therefore unsurprising that many observers now wonder whether Trump’s attack on Iran functions as a political diversion from the widening Epstein scandal. What is certain is that the president’s political fortunes have declined: his poll numbers have slipped, and Americans have grown increasingly despondent amid a worsening domestic economic climate. In his most recent State of the Union address, Trump—a man who has likely never pushed a grocery cart down a supermarket aisle—derided talk of an “affordability crisis,” having previously dismissed the rising cost of basic goods as a “hoax.” Meanwhile, revanchist attacks on political opponents, the federal invasion of Minnesota, an episode that left two Americans dead and immigrant communities terrorized, and the diminishing returns of white-supremacist rhetoric and policy have done little to arrest his growing unpopularity. The gradual release of additional Epstein files, reportedly implicating an expanding circle of elites and containing tens of thousands references to Trump himself and allegations implicating him in the abuse of women and girls, combined with the conspicuous absence of accountability, has only deepened public distrust toward what many now call the Epstein class—the insulated stratum of wealth and power that governs modern political life.
There is, indeed, a conspiracy. But its central purpose is not merely the concealment of crimes of sexual exploitation, abhorrent though they are. Such atrocities are themselves symptoms—grotesque manifestations of a deeper and more malignant disease. Epstein was but one among many actors, whether intelligence asset or merely a creature of wealth and impunity, who preyed upon the vulnerable while treating ordinary people as pawns in their conquest of power, whether acting on behalf of foreign states or private capital or both.
In this sense, the scandal reveals something larger: the moral pathology of capitalism in its decadent phase and the morbid symptoms of imperial decline. The American war with Iran serves no constituency except those who stand to profit from the destruction of yet another sovereign state that has resisted incorporation into the imperial order. Iran, like Venezuela or Cuba, poses no existential threat to the United States or its people. To strike such nations is not an exhibition of strength but a confession of weakness—a tacit admission that the American project, having exhausted the possibilities of reform at home, can imagine no alternative to crisis except war.
This piece first appeared on Red Scare.
The Writing On Trump’s War Room Wall
Operation Epstein Amnesia
Rembrandt’s depiction of the biblical account of King Belshazzar seeing a hand writing the words “mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” on a wall.
Following the war criminality model of the Israeli Defense Forces, the US/Zionist bombing campaign on Iran is engaged in targeting hospitals, schools and private residences, slaughtering all who happen to be on the premises. The tactic, rather than demoralizing civilian populations, galvanizes contempt and the will to resist a foreign aggressor.
Think about it. While I opposed rightwing Christian evangelist’s retrograde (back to the Bronze Age) agendas if the air force of a foreign power bombed their megachurch in my vicinity, I would deem the death-from-above delivering aggressor an existential threat and would find myself, on a provisional basis, in alliance, with my political adversaries.
Every bomb dropped, causing death and destruction, strengthens the Mullah controlled government of Iran.
The true believers in the efficacy of so-called smart bombs are very stupid people.
As an example: a reporter to Secretary Of War(mongering) Pete Hegseth: “As you’ve said, there are a large number of US service members who are in harm’s way right now. What is your prayer for them?”
Hegseth: “First of all, my prayer for them is that I do pray for them… I pray simply for the biblical wisdom to see what is right and the courage to do it.”
How about the biblical admonition regarding “the writing on the wall,” piss-drunk Pete?
The “writing on the wall” episode in the Old Testament is a tale told in the Book of Daniel, 5, in which a disembodied hand of numinous origin, materializes during a feast/orgy held at King Belshazzar’s palace in ancient Babylon.
The hand of divinity scribes four words on the wall of King Belshazzar’s ornate banquet hall: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” (Aramaic: “Numbered, Numbered, Weighed, Divided”).
The Jewish prophet in exile Daniel interprets this as an augury of impending doom i.e., the imminent fall of the Babylonian Empire to the Medes and Persians.
The phrase has become axiomatic for: ignore looming reality at your peril. Withal, just hours before ordering his attack on Iran Trump attended a bacchanal of moneyed class excess at his Belshazzarian palace known as Mar-a-Lago.
At my son’s Hebrew school today, the class discussed the legend of Purim. Of course, the story is ahistorical; to wit, Queen Esther, the archetypal orphan rises to the throne of a great power, as told as dauntless hero figure for her courage and cunning in saving a besieged — threatened with genocide — Jewish people in perilous exile. Then there is Esther’s striking beauty providing a patina of glamour to the blood-drench story of royal court intrigue and denouncement that setting is ancient Persia, now present day Iran.
Today’s storylines remain being told with an equal lack of veracity. Unlike the tidy ending of the biblical yarn, the unpredictable consequences, engendered by the lies that enabled this war, await us.
“Esther and Mordecai,” painted around 1685 by Dutch artist Art de Gelder
A voice within me augurs that in the future the events transpiring in the Levant/Persian Gulf at present will not be celebrated, as, at Purim time, they were in the synagogue of my childhood, with children adorned in costumes of the royal Persian court and the baking of and indulgence in plum cookies and cakes.
The unfolding of events suggest, history will relate the war catalyzing the long overdue collapse of the US as a world-dominating power due to the unsurpassed idiocy and raging hubris of a wannabe US emperor man-infant and the beginning of the end of the Zionist ethno-supremacist state, war criminal enterprise.
So Trump, at Netanyahu’s command, has unloosed the dogs of war, and the snarling pack is peeing on his cackle inflicted leg. How long did Trump and Netanyahu believe they could commit mass murder with impunity? The Gods — i.e., the forces of life that cannot be controlled — strike down the hubristic, and this is particularly true of the God of War.
Israel is being afflicted with a world of hurt. Iranian missiles are raining down on Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. The Iranians have fired only a fraction of their arsenal. Israel has cornered and angered a dog of war with real teeth. This isn’t, as in Gaza, a war waged on women and children sleeping in tents, on emergency room doctors and nurses, on journalists and aid workers.
With Trump, he rained unprovoked death from above upon Venezuelan fishermen but now US soldiers have fallen in his war based on lies. The longer the war goes on, and the more hurt inflicted by Iran — the more Trump is going to long for the days when his biggest trouble was the revelations that remain hidden, for now, in the Epstein files.
Trump is a short con grifter. He lacks the depth, ability to reflect, and possess foresight insofar as apprehending all the variables in play in the dynamics of war. His proclivity, when things get rough, has been to declare victory and turn tail.
His main strength, tactic-wise, has been his cowardice. As a garden variety bully, he had an instinct to only pick a fight with those weaker or had no desire to fight. But as witnessed in Minnesota, when the citizenry, instead of rolling over and exposing their belly, collectively, growled and bared their teeth, Trump and his ICE bully boys turned tail.
The world is now taking note; hence, Trump, the shambling, over-reaching braggart, is the very emblem of US Empire’s undoing.
The current US/Israeli military campaign underway against the nation of Iran, Operation Epstein Amnesia, we are told involves an existential threat from a nation possessed of Weapons of Mass Destruction that poses an immediate danger to the forever blameless, forever innocent people of the US and Israel; hence, we are engaged in a massive bombing campaign upon the citizenry of an ancient civilization in behalf of their liberation.
Somewhere from the precincts of the distant past, ghosts of memory are being roused and are howling, “bullshit!”
Let’s query the people of Iraq, of Libya, and of Syria on the subject. The latter nation now has a US/Zionist installed government headed by ISIS head-choppers created by the US in their war of aggression against the people of the primary nation. As for Libya, they possess the freedom to be bought and sold in slave markets in public squares.
The US/Israelis just liberated over hundred Iranian school girls from this very life.
Of course the first words that come to mind when thinking of Trump would be: man of peace and good will…but never, on the doorstep of dementia, adult diaper-swaddled grifter, featured player in the Epstein files. The same is true with Trump’s war partner Benjamin Netanyahu…the description would never enter the mind: genocide-prone psychopath, with the eyes of a dead shark, perpetrator of massive crimes against humanity.
Perish such thoughts attempting to trespass, like fentanyl smuggling illegals, into the pristine precincts of our innocent and beautiful minds.
US/Israeli desperation is at the rotten, down to the root, military aggression against Iran. The source of the desperation: Recent polls reveal that large and growing numbers of the US citizenry now support the cause of Palestinians over that of the Israeli oppressors.
Thus Israel’s agenda, its standard operating procedure, is to sow destruction and chaos in the region. In this manner, the Israeli leadership believes their internal weakness will be mitigated by the destabilization of surrounding nations, as was the case with Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and now Iran.
But the goal is not regime change. There is not a significant number of US ground troops in the Levant/Persian Gulf region, and the killing of Iran’s supreme leader is not going to do the trick. The latter is not only a war crime but will strengthen the resolve of the Iranian citizenry. Then add to the resolve factor: the slaughter of Iranian school girls.
As for Trump, he is a weak man, inflicted by a howling inner emptiness, who, manically, compensates by perpetual preening and clownish boasting about his greatness.
Thus “Trump’s (risible) “Board Of Peace” goes to war. This has to be reality — because a writer of farce would cut the joke for being too on the nose.
Vincenzo Camuccini, The Death of Julius Caesar (detail)
