The mousetrap motif plays a major role in tales and literature, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet who set one to find his father’s murderer, to Agatha Cristie’s famous play, The Mousetrap, that opened in London’s West End in 1952 and is still running today 30,000 performances later.
The mousetrap theme is ancient and enduring because the idea is so simple, yet utterly transparent. A trap is baited. Taking the bait leads to the victim’s entrapment or destruction, as anyone can later see.
Which is basically how we got into the Iran war.
No one expects mice to be smarter than the trap. We should, however, expect government officials to exercise more forethought than rodents. Alas, that is not always the case. That is why mousetrapping is a common tool of warmongering.
What was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s objective in mousetrapping President Donald Trump? Joe Kent, the former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, explains succinctly:
“It should be obvious by now that Israel’s goal was not to actually come up with a viable regime change plan, but to convince the Trump administration that they had a plan.
Israel’s primary goal was to get us into this war, knowing that once we were in it we’d have a hard time leaving. So far their actual plan is working.”
How would one bait a trap for Donald Trump? One of the most obvious baits is Trump’s boundless hunger for acknowledgement and praise. That hunger is why we have the Trump-Kennedy Center, the Trump Institute for Peace, the Trump Gold Card, Trump Accounts, TrumpRx, Trump-class battleships, and Trump’s signature on paper currency, and now even the proposed Trump $250 banknote bearing his likeness. There is even the proposed Arc de Trump in Washington. When asked who that is designed to honor, the president answered, “Me.”
Netanyahu has long played to the president’s vanity. He has been a gusher of flattery, telling Trump, “When others were weak, you were strong. When others were fearful, you were bold.” After the Twelve-Day U.S./Israeli war on Iran, Netanyahu presented Trump with a letter at a White House dinner nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize, something the president openly covets.
Netanyahu even posted an AI image of Trump receiving the award.
Operation Epic Fury soon followed, although it only followed Netanyahu’s soothing assurances, reported in an detailed New York Times account, that Iran’s ballistic missile program would be destroyed (didn’t happen), that Iran’s response to nearby U.S. outposts would be minimal (they weren’t), and that Iran would not be able to choke off the Strait of Hormuz (wrong again). A president less susceptible to Netanyahu’s blandishments might have remembered that he made the same kind of assurances about the Iraq War: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
The Times writers noted in a follow-up, “Mr. Trump’s decision to take the country to war was not driven by intelligence assessments or a strategic consensus among his advisers, which did not exist. It was driven by instinct.“
In other words, despite ample warnings, Trump took the bait.
War traps aren’t only set by a foreign interests. Warmongering domestic interests, in particular the Deep State, which I have described as the executive arm of the global American military empire, are practiced at it, too.
Regime change in Cuba was the Deep State’s obsession after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. In April 1961, the CIA pulled the trigger on an ill-fated scheme. It dispatched a ragtag militia to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. In doing so, the CIA and Pentagon were certain they had mousetrapped newly-inaugured President John F. Kennedy. Although the hastily assembled and ill-trained invasion force of about 1,400 Cubans was inadequate to the task, the plotters assumed that despite his clear refusal to commit U.S. troops, Kennedy would be forced to capitulate and intervene as they wished, under the duress of the invasion’s failure. Kennedy did not do so.
Even though Kennedy didn’t take the Deep State’s bait, its invasion still had dangerous consequences that I describe in my book Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole. The Soviet Union reacted to the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion predictably the following year by deploying nuclear missiles to Cuba. Dozens of missiles were installed; dozens more planned, along with at least sixty nuclear warheads, all within striking range only minutes from millions of Americans. The sequence of events took the world to the edge of annihilation, the most dangerous moment in human history. Yet the nuclear brinksmanship made the warlords, those seething at Kennedy even before the Bay of Pigs, practically giddy. The president said of General Curtis LeMay and the other chiefs, “They want a war, and they’re arranging things to get one.”
Since then it has become an article of faith among many well-informed Americans that Kennedy’s resistance to Deep State imperatives in Cuba and elsewhere in the Cold War was the proximate cause of his death.
Only the omniscient know what the long-term consequences of the Netanyahu/Trump Iran war initiative will be. But be wary of Trump being baited into something even more destructive, baited by the pure power drive that appears increasingly in his public outbursts. Even political operative Karl Rove, who himself lured the American people into the phony Iraq war using non-existent weapons of mass destruction as fear-bait, has commented on Trump’s increasingly unhinged rhetoric. “Making things worse are Mr. Trump’s erratic late-night missives,” notes Rove. “The president comes across more as a heckler at a UFC match than as a reassuring wartime commander in chief.”
But it is much more extreme than midnight heckling and renaming everything in sight after himself. Conflation with God is on the menu at the White House, too. Trump’s leading faith adviser Paula White-Cain insists that “to say no to President Trump would be to say no to God.”
This foreshadows the next bait, the next step beyond ephemeral vanity. Leaders have aspired to it throughout history: Immortality!
The urge to immortality justifies dominating and remaking the world. With that in mind, who can miss Trump’s apocalyptic outbursts? “Fire and fury like the world has never seen”; “A whole civilization will die tonight”; “Bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” Trump even blurted out in a recent cabinet meeting that “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up.” That is not a preferred way to talk to a putative ally like Oman. But Trump is in the grip of vainglory and cannot help himself.
Carl Jung warned that flirting with apocalypse can become a self-fulfilling prophesy:
“It needs only an imperceptible disturbance of equilibrium in a few of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world into blood, fire, and radioactivity.”
When heads of state take the bait, we are all trapped, whether we approve or not. Yet we are witnesses to grandiosity and psychic inflation that are taking us into the red zone of danger, while those in a position to do something about it, empowered by law to do so, dither.
Like Hamlet.
