The United States is attacking Iran because Donald Trump was determined to drag us into war no matter what — and despite repeatedly insisting he would do the exact opposite.
So they finally did it. Of all the dumb, pointless wars the United States has waged in the Middle East, the one it launched today against Iran may go down as the dumbest and most pointless. This is a war that didn’t need to happen; even the man waging it doesn’t seem to know why he launched it.
Of course it was Trump who launched this war. Trump, the “peacemaker.” Trump, the “Dealmaker-in-Chief.” Trump, whose political ascent was built on attacking George W. Bush’s destructive war on Iraq; who warned incessantly his political opponent would start a war with Iran.
Trump’s entire MO this term has been to do the exact opposite of what he promised people he would do, whether trampling free speech and escalating internet censorship, or gutting Medicaid and Social Security and making people’s lives more expensive. Now he can add embroiling the United States in yet another bloody Middle East war to that list, the latest middle finger to the voters who may not have liked everything the president said or stood for, but earnestly thought he would at least keep this one promise.
Let’s be very clear about this: the United States is in this war because Trump was determined to drag the country into it no matter what. Mere hours before Trump launched it, the foreign minister of Oman, which was mediating the last-ditch talks on a nuclear deal that took place yesterday, revealed the enormous concessions the Iranians had made in negotiations: not just agreeing to not stockpile uranium, making it impossible to build a bomb, but diluting the uranium it currently holds and agreeing to full verification by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. These concessions would have gone well beyond what Barack Obama had extracted in his Iran deal, and they came paired with an explicit vow that Iran would never have a nuclear weapon — something that its leaders have constantly said over the decades, and repeatedly so over the past week.
Didn’t matter. Trump spent the week lying that the Iranians were refusing to make that promise, and in one of his last public statements before launching the war, lamented how they had supposedly failed to move far enough in negotiations. Trump had a deal if he wanted it, and one he could have spent the rest of his life bragging was better than Obama’s. But he didn’t want it.
There is no universe where this war serves the interests of the United States. The lives of thousands of US troops are now at risk, while a number of US bases in neighboring Gulf states have already been attacked in retaliation by Iranian drones and missiles, as the war has dramatically escalated and swept up neighboring states in less than half a day. There are signs that Iran plans to make good on its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes, and which at best would spike consumer costs and worsen the US affordability crisis Trump is already ignoring, and at worst would trigger a global recession.
And for what? The encircled, isolated, and faraway Iran poses no serious threat to Americans, who live oceans away and are protected by a military that is funded roughly forty times the sum that Iran recently spent on its own armed forces. In fact, now that the war is finally happening, war hawks are quite happy to admit that Iran is militarily way outmatched by the United States. This is precisely why the United States and Israel have gotten away with unprovoked attack after unprovoked attack on the country over the past decade, and faced only theatrical retaliation that, until last year, was carefully calibrated and telegraphed to let the regime save face while avoiding a war it did not want to fight.
Iran has no way of seriously attacking the US mainland, no matter how many times Trump and his lackeys lie that it does, nor does it have any of the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that, just like with George W. Bush’s fraudulent war in Iraq, are now being lazily invoked to justify this war. In fact, Iran is just the latest in a series of relatively weak, WMD-less states that have come into Washington’s regime-change crosshairs in the twenty-first century, which include Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and, more recently, Venezuela and Cuba — all while the armed-to-the-teeth North Koreans remain safe from US attack and Trump writes love letters to its leader. Like these other countries, Iran is not being attacked because it is a threat to the United States; it’s being attacked precisely because it isn’t one.
This is why Trump and every other neocon baying for this war have cycled through one rationale after another to justify war with the country this year. Remember in January, when Trump told us that the Iranian government needed to be toppled to protect the brave Iranian civilians being killed by their government? Now, the logic is flipped: the US military must kill these same Iranian civilians in order to topple their government.
And why does the Iranian regime need to be toppled? Last year, it was its nuclear enrichment program, which Trump claimed he had destroyed the first time he started a war with the country last June. Last month, it was Iran’s nonnuclear weapons, its stockpile of ballistic missiles. For the past week, Trump went back to banging the drum about nuclear enrichment, until this morning, when he decided that he was actually trying to bring democracy to Iranians — a task he swiftly got to by bombing an elementary school and killing nearly a hundred little girls.
The reason doesn’t matter, and Trump and the rest of the warmonger gang can barely even bother pretending it does. Reportedly, in a high-level national security meeting two weeks ago, Trump asked his CIA director and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their take on the broader US strategy in Iran, apparently forgetting that it is the president who sets the strategy and the military brass that simply put it into motion. Trump, in other words, has no idea what he is actually trying to achieve here, as we can already see from his shifting rationales, schizophrenic approach to negotiations, and that he’s already talking about “off-ramps.”
So whose interest does this serve? The obvious answer is a war-hungry Israeli leadership increasingly under the sway of a deranged, neo-Biblical fantasy of using the United States to burn the Middle East to the ground and annex whatever’s left. As CNN reported, the war has been launched on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Purim, which revolves around a Biblical story of a threat from modern-day Iran, which Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made heavy reference to in his statement on today’s attacks.
Israeli officials told Reuters that not only has Israel been involved in planning for this war for months, but that this highly symbolic date of the war had been picked weeks ago (a line since mysteriously scrubbed from the report with no explanation). If true, it suggests that not only has the past week of US diplomacy been a sham, but that this really is an Israeli war, outsourced to Americans to fight and die for. Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to get the United States into this war for more than thirty years, including repeatedly when the feeble, ailing Joe Biden was in power. Yet it was only once Trump took office that he got his wish, proving to be an even bigger doormat for the Israelis to wipe their shoes on.
With reports of the deaths of Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials, Trump will likely try to claim a quick victory here — maybe even use it as a way to extricate himself from the war he started. That might be easier said than done. Every other US-created power vacuum in the Middle East has devolved into civil war and lawless anarchy, and even the CIA predicted that what would follow Khamenei would be an even harder-line regime run by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Another possibility, total Iranian government collapse, could make for Libya-style lawless chaos on an even bigger scale, where the country becomes a breeding ground and safe haven for militants. In either case, Trump and all of Washington would face the choice of either involving the United States further and risking quagmire to ensure a transition that favors US interests, or simply withdrawing and letting what happens happen, which could mean future threats to US bases and Israel — potentially drawing the United States back in anyway. Trump launched this war based on the success of his abduction of Nicolás Maduro, but this is a very different operation against a very different country.
We don’t know what is coming next, and neither does Trump, as much as he hopes he can make a quick and clean exit from the events he has set in motion. We can say one thing for sure, though. Trump is far from the scourge of the neocons, as his most ardent fans had hoped and believed. Trump is the neocon-in-chief.
Great Job Branko Marcetic & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
