On October 30, 1974, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali met at the 20^th of May Stadium in Kinshasa, Zaire in the long awaited Rumble in the Jungle. Foreman, 25, undefeated and the heavyweight champion, was the heavy favorite. They fought for eight rounds, Foreman attacking the 32-year-old Ali, attempting to knock him out, throwing hundreds of punches. In the eighth round, an exhausted Foreman attempted to trap Ali against the ropes. Ali, employing what he called his “rope-a-dope” tactic, continued to dodge Foreman’s punches. Instead, Ali landed a flurry of punches of his own, knocking Foreman to the canvas, and winning the fight.

Ali had taken some blows, but he remained on his feet. He again was champion.

And, so, after five weeks of intensive bombing of thousands of targets by the combined air and naval forces of the United States and Israel, costing billions and depleting the American supply of advanced weaponry, the governing mullahs of Iran are still in power; they still possess a thousand pounds of enriched uranium; they still have a lethal supply of drones and perhaps missiles. And they control the Strait of Hormuz.

The President and Secretary of Defense are claiming a resounding victory, but to outsiders it seems like the hollow kind. It’s hard to see what has been won. Indeed, in some respects, Iran seems to be in a stronger position than it was before the bombing started. Iran has a strangle hold on the Strait of Hormuz, and the best military minds can’t seem to come up with a way of breaking that hold.

Meanwhile, the bombing has cost the United States 13 men and women dead, more than a thousand Iranian women, men and children killed, and billions of dollars America can’t really afford.

The current President reportedly is contemplating further reducing health benefits and other social programs to pay for the rearmament of American armed forces. Those benefits and social programs already have been severely reduced to pay for the tax cuts for the super-rich.

On top of everything else, Donald Trump’s mental health has finally become a topic of serious discussion. Some members of the media have also finally stopped discussing him as though he is a normal, rational if somewhat eccentric person. He simply is not. If you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing, you also need not be a mental health professional to recognize lunacy when you witness it.

Even if Trump were totally competent, who wants to be associated with a president who threatens genocide: “We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong,” Trump said in a speech to the nation on April 1. We haven’t mentioned the excessive, embarrassing rhetoric from Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “we’re negotiating with bombs,” Hegseth said; destroying civilizations, Trump said; giving no quarter, from Hegseth; suggesting using weapons of mass destruction, or pursuing actions that amount to war crimes.

Had Trump attempted to pursue those goals, he would have put the military into the awkward position of following the commander-in-chief’s directives by obeying unlawful orders, for disobeying and running the risk of  a general court martial. This is a commander-in-chief, by the way, who avoided serving when called because of supposed bone spurs.

The American military, by all accounts, has performed admirably and professionally throughout this “excursion” (as Trump calls it), but it’s fair to ask, “What was the point?” The American public was never given a clear explanation for why this exercise was undertaken. We needn’t wonder why congressional approval was never sought. Public outrage most likely would have doomed that approval, and rightly so.

What made the venture even more pathetic was Trump’s clear frustration with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, something reportedly he thought unlikely, and his pathetic attempts to get other countries to get it reopened. Trump reportedly thought that the war would be short and dismissed the idea that the Strait would be closed. (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html?searchResultPosition=1)

Here’s some more payoff from the Iran excursion. America apparently has only one ally—Israel. The Arab Gulf countries may (or may not) be sympathetic bystanders, but they have provided little in the way of help. America’s traditional allies—Great Britain, France, Canada, Germany and the other NATO members—are thoroughly estranged, a result of Trump’s hostile, insulting, dismissive behavior toward them. Russia and Iran have apparently profited from the war, a result of America’s easing the sanctions on their oil to lower oil prices. The economy of the United States, and perhaps other countries across the world, may be hit by recessions, inflation, shortages, etc.

More intangibly, we have presented ourselves as a muscle bound military power with a profane clown for a leader who acts rashly and winds up making situations worse than before he acted.

Some victory.