A new blog post raises the essential legal account of last week’s escalation against Anthropic: the self-contradictory Pentagon ultimatum, the inverted Defense Production Act invocation, the bullshit “supply chain risk” designation against a domestic company whose offense was maintaining safety commitments.

Read it.

It made me want to pull a thread. The failing OpenAI immediately stepped in to slop up the contract. Worse tool, to do a worse job for more money, forced by corruption at the top.

I used to study this stuff in the failed states of post-colonialism.

Obedience Market is for the Dogs

The Defense Production Act was signed by Truman in 1950 to secure domestic production against external threats. It was designed for hostile foreign actors. Using it against an American company because it maintains necessary safety guardrails to function is horrible reversal of logic. Do you remove the brakes on a car to drive faster? No, the brakes exist to allow you to drive faster. Get it? Removing them slows you down or you crash. Authoritarians take emergency powers from one context, strip the conditions that justified them, aim them inward to weaken everything.

The “supply chain risk” isn’t Anthropic’s AI. The supply chain being secured is obedience. Anthropic refused to remove safety commitments. The Pentagon designated them a threat. OpenAI took the contract the same day. Every other AI company in Silicon Valley watched and saw their market evaporate like 1968 Prague.

America Knows This

People will reach for Nazi Gleichschaltung of forced coordination, bringing industry into alignment by making independence economically fatal.

Fair comparison, given Hegseth, But that gets the history backwards. As James Whitman documented in Hitler’s American Model, the Nazis studied American racial governance — Jim Crow, citizenship classifications, anti-miscegenation law — when drafting the Nuremberg Laws.

The domestic precedent is the second Ku Klux Klan at peak power in the 1920s. The Klan was fundamentally an economic coordination operation. You didn’t have to burn a cross to destroy someone. You boycotted their business. You pulled their contracts. You made sure everyone in town knew they hadn’t joined. The violence was backstop. The primary weapon was commercial: comply or become unviable.

The loyalty frame was called “100% Americanism.” Not patriotism as a value — patriotism as a compliance test. You proved loyalty by submitting to the organization’s definition of it.

Independent judgment was disloyalty by definition.

The Reversal

America built the toolkit for economic coordination as liberation. The Montgomery bus boycott. Lunch counter sit-ins. Divestment from apartheid South Africa. Labor strikes. All bottom-up — people withholding their own participation, directing pressure upward at power.

What we’re watching now is that toolkit inverted. Economic pressure, moral framing, safety language, coalition rhetoric — all developed as resistance tools, now aimed downward by the state against the people maintaining ethical commitments. “Supply chain risk” is the Montgomery boycott turned inside out. Same structure, opposite direction, opposite purpose.

The KKK understood this in the 1920s.

McCarthyism understood it in the 1950s.

Wrap top-down coercion in the language of collective good and patriotic duty, and it borrows the moral authority of movements that actually were. The administration isn’t boycotting Anthropic. It’s using wartime emergency powers to crush a company for its ethics, defunding the universities that educated the founders, and calling it national security. Every liberation tool has a shadow version. We’re living in the shadow.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) lost an availability zone in the UAE on March 1st due to “objects that struck the datacenter, creating sparks and fire.” The fire department cut power to the facility and its generators.

This is the first confirmed instance of a major hyperscaler availability zone being knocked offline by what appears to be kinetic military action.

The incident coincided with Iranian missile and drone strikes across the UAE, hitting airports, ports, and residential areas. When Reuters asked AWS directly whether the datacenter hit was connected to America attacking Iran, the company declined to confirm or deny.

The affected zone is mec1-az2 in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region. EC2 API errors cascaded beyond the struck zone, with networking calls — AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, DescribeNetworkInterfaces — failing across the region. AWS reported “positive signs of recovery” by the afternoon and estimated two to three more hours to resolution.

BC/DR Plan for “Objects”

“Objects” keeps the incident in operational language rather than appropriate disaster planning language. A hurricane hurls objects. An earthquake hurls objects. Standard business insurance and cloud service agreements typically exclude acts of war. If AWS called this debris or projectiles from an Iranian military strike it triggers force majeure clauses and potentially voids service level commitments across every customer contract in the region.

Going for Broke

The architectural promise of availability zones is isolation. One zone goes down, your workload fails over to another. That held for compute, partially. But control plane APIs leaked errors across zone boundaries, meaning customers couldn’t programmatically manage resources even in the unaffected zones. The region’s data plane kept running; the management plane didn’t.

Cloud providers have modeled for earthquakes, floods, power grid failures. The threat model for “your datacenter is in a country that just got hit with ballistic missiles” was always implicit in the Gulf region build-out. Now it’s explicit, despite the “object” language.

AWS built ME-CENTRAL-1 to capture Gulf state digital transformation revenue. The physical risk was priced into the infrastructure design with multiple zones and redundant power yet never into the sales narrative.

Customers selecting data sovereignty or latency centers now see the beginning of what Trump’s war mongering means for availability guarantees.

Repeatedly between 2011 and 2013, the same man warned that a desperate American president would attack Iran to save face, win elections, and cover for failed negotiations.

In a November 2011 Trump video from the Trump Desk in Trump Tower — resurfaced by SNL last night — Trump laid it out plainly:

Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective. So the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran.
— Donald Trump, Nov 16, 2011

Then the tweets started:

Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.
— @realDonaldTrump, Oct 9, 2012

Don’t let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get elected — be careful Republicans!
— @realDonaldTrump, Oct 22, 2012

I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!
— @realDonaldTrump, Sep 16, 2013

Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly — not skilled!
— @realDonaldTrump, Nov 11, 2013

Obama never attacked Iran.

Trump has now attacked Iran twice.

1. Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 hit nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
2. Operation Epic Fury launched February 28, 2026 — a massive U.S.-Israeli assault that killed hundreds of children and destroyed a girls’ primary school in Minab. It also killed Supreme Leader Khamenei with his senior military commanders, and struck targets across Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah. Three American service members are dead.

Both operations were launched as failures of active negotiations.

Both were launched without congressional authorization.

The June strikes were sold as “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear program. Eight months later the obliteration was admitted as a lie, and Iran was said to be rebuilding. The failure, which for months was angrily denied, suddenly became justification for attempting again, the operational definition of a forever war lacking decisive action.

Every accusation was a confession.

Every warning about Obama is a 13-year-old self-own: attack a country you failed to negotiate with, call it strength, dare anyone to stop you.

Hypocrisy requires some residual commitment to the principle being violated. This is plain lying and projection as operational planning, by broadcasting future actions while attributing them to political targets. It’s the same mechanism that drives every authoritarian escalation: accuse the opposition of the thing you intend to do, so that when you do it, the public has already been conditioned to see it as normal political behavior.

Trump told us his vision of a desperate president abusing Iran as if a 13 year old girl at Mar-a-lago. He looked into the camera and called hitting Iran, let alone underaged girls trafficked by Epstein, a show of weakness, incompetence, and cover for personal failure.

He was describing himself.

There is a recurring structure in imperial violence that historians recognize but policymakers pretend not to. The aggressor sets conditions it knows will fail, documents the failure, then uses that failure as authorization for the action it intended from the start. The failure is the product.

Reuters reported that over the two weeks preceding Saturday’s strikes, the CIA assessed that killing Khamenei would likely produce replacement by IRGC hardliners. That’s failure, not regime change. The intelligence community examined what a US intervention would trigger and found no scenario supporting the administration’s stated objective. None. The administration used the intelligence and discarded the assessment.

In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted publicly that “no one knows” who would take over if Khamenei was removed. The CIA’s own analysts confirmed that vacuum would fill with hardliners. Two branches of the administration told the White House there was no theory for what comes after, and the White House ordered the operation anyway.

This is bankruptcy as method.

The Structure of Predetermined Failure

An Israeli defense official told Reuters the operation had been planned for months and the start date set weeks ago. During that identical period, Trump dispatched Jared Kushner, a family member with deep Gulf state financial ties, whose diplomatic credentials begin and end with that relationship, and Steve Witkoff to conduct nuclear talks in Geneva. The Washington Post reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Israeli government had been lobbying Trump repeatedly to strike.

The negotiations existed to be seen failing. Trump told Axios he asked his team to compile every Iranian-linked attack over 25 years while writing his announcement speech — the speech for the attack he had already scheduled. One does not research justifications for decisions not yet taken. One researches justifications for decisions that need to appear reluctant.

This is how bullies operate. They engineer a provocation, perform patience, then claim they had no choice. The pattern is legible across centuries of colonial intervention: the ultimatum designed to be rejected, the treaty negotiated in bad faith, the diplomatic channel that exists only to be exhausted on camera. Saturday was a textbook application.

Congress as Just Audience for the King

Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave the Gang of Eight an hour-long briefing on Tuesday informing them an operation would “likely move forward.” He called again Friday night to say strikes would commence in hours but that Trump “could still change his mind.” The Armed Services Committees were notified after strikes began.

Article I of the Constitution assigns Congress the power to declare war. What Congress received was a phone call — the constitutional equivalent of being cc’d on an email after the building has been demolished. The distinction between notification and authorization is the entire substance of democratic accountability, and it was dispensed with by design.

The war powers resolution math was already dead before the first bomb fell. Senator Fetterman endorsed the strikes. Representative Gottheimer called restraint “signaling weakness.” An earlier Venezuela war powers vote had demonstrated the template: gather enough bipartisan support to appear legitimate, then engineer enough defections to fail. The vote happens, it fails, and the failure becomes retroactive consent.

The Targeting

Israeli intelligence detected Khamenei had moved a meeting with top aides from Saturday evening to Saturday morning. The entire operation — months of planning, weeks of performative negotiation, the congressional notification theater — pivoted around a single targeting window. Thirty bombs hit his compound.

Khamenei’s daughter, son-in-law, grandchild, and daughter-in-law were killed alongside him. The Times of Israel reported his son Mojtaba, widely expected as successor, also likely killed. Defense minister Nasirzadeh, IRGC commander Pakpour, security council head Shamkhani, all confirmed dead by Israel.

When you kill a head of state, his family, his likely successor, his defense minister, and his entire security council in a single morning, that is the elimination of a government and its line of succession. Historians have a word for this. Several, actually, none of them favorable to the perpetrators.

An Israeli strike hit an elementary girls’ school in Minab. At least 60 children killed (Update: over 160 dead). Two more students killed in a strike on a school east of Tehran. These will be filed under the euphemism of “collateral damage” — a term invented precisely to make the killing of children sound like an accounting error.

A Predictable Catastrophe

Iran struck US military bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. A missile hit a home in Amman. One person killed in Abu Dhabi. The US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain took a direct hit. Missiles pierced Israeli air defenses and struck Tel Aviv. Jerusalem’s holy sites were shuttered during Ramadan. Oil tankers reversed course at the Strait of Hormuz.

Saudi Arabia confirmed it was targeted despite explicitly telling Tehran it would not permit its airspace to be used against Iran. The kingdom called it “brutal Iranian aggression”. A Lebanese mother in Riyadh, who had moved to the Gulf because it was safer than Lebanon, told AFP she no longer knows what to do.

This too is the method. The bully creates the chaos, then points to the chaos as proof that more force is needed. Saudi Arabia lobbied for the strike that produced the retaliation it now condemns. The escalation ladder that policymakers insisted did not exist is being climbed in real time, exactly as anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of preemptive war could have predicted, and exactly as the CIA’s own assessment implied it would.

Trump told Axios he could “go long and take over the whole thing.” The CIA told him decapitation wouldn’t achieve regime change. He used their intelligence to find the target and ignored their assessment of what would follow. That is the policy. The intended outcome was always an Iran that justifies permanent intervention — the same outcome the United States has engineered, with varying degrees of transparency, from Tehran in 1953 to Baghdad to Tripoli to Kabul.

The failure is the product. Trump Airlines. Trump Vodka. Trump Steaks. Trump Casinos. Trump hitting children. It always was.