Here we go again. Switch out Saddam Hussein for the Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmed Chalabi for Reza Pahlavi and you have a fresh war for regime change in the Middle East, this time with Israel as America’s sidekick. With Operation Epic Fury, the American and Israeli bombing of Iran and push for regime change, the self-proclaimed “President of Peace” runs the risk not only of triggering wider upheaval in the Middle East, but also globally. Is this a new Sarajevo moment?
With Trump’s own generals having warned him that attacking Iran could be a debacle, he may have torched his own presidency
Unlike George W. Bush in 2003, who worked to bolster domestic and international support for attacking Iraq, Donald Trump has disdained the slightest effort to justify his war publicly. He never consulted Congress. He devoted a few cursory sentences to Iraq in his State of the Union speeches. His oleaginous representatives such as Steve Witkoff have mumbled about the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons within a week or so. At least Woodrow Wilson had the sinking of the Lusitania, unrestricted German submarine warfare and the Zimmerman telegram to justify entering World War One. And Trump?
If Omani foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, is to be believed, Iran was receptive to handing over its stockpile of enriched uranium and prepared to submit to intrusive inspections. This would have been a far better deal than the one that President Obama originally secured. Al-Busaidi tweeted on Saturday, “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined.”
Trump, though, was never interested in them. Instead, he appears to have embraced his inner neocon. He spoke about an “imminent threat” on Saturday. There was none. He said that “we repeatedly sought to make a deal.” No, you didn’t. Trump has been a study in shifting rationales for war, none of which amounted to a legitimate casus belli.
On Saturday, Trump upped the rhetorical ante by calling for regime change. Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been baying for war for decades, declared that “His speech will go down in history as the catalyst for the most historic change in the Middle East in a thousand years.” In waging a war by what Spectator editor Freddy Gray aptly calls “remote-control,” Trump is banking everything on an uprising in Iran itself – “take over your government,” he urged Iranians, very much in the vein of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. What a throw of the dice! If anything, Trump is likely to end up like the charismatic and penniless gambler Burgo Fitzgerald in Trollope’s novel Can You Forgive Her? whose insouciant motto is “you never know you luck till the ball stops rolling.”
Trump’s more ardent MAGA followers cannot forgive him. Take Curt Mills, the editor of the American Conservative, a magazine which first rose to prominence by opposing Bush’s rush to war in 2003. He was unsparing in his response, texting me that Trump’s attack on Iran is a “heinous day of betrayal for America First. This isn’t stabbing Trump’s original followers in the back. It’s stabbing them in the front.” With Trump’s own generals having warned him that attacking Iran could be a debacle, he may have torched his own presidency.
Other world leaders will be watching. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched phosphorous bombs against Ukraine this past week. He will feel emboldened to resort to even more drastic measures to terrorize it. Then there is China’s Xi Jinping. The path to conquering, or at least menacing, Taiwan has been further smoothed for him as well. Indeed, Beijing is surely elated that Trump has America’s military once more deployed to chase the mirage of successful regime change in the Middle East.
Trump’s move is based in the conviction that he can restore American primacy by dislodging the mad mullahs from Tehran. If, as seems likely, his venture goes awry, then Trump, and Trump alone, will have delivered a body blow to American power, prestige and predominance. This will be hardly the first that he will have bankrupted a going concern. That is something of a specialty of his. But the story of how Trump became George W. Bush on steroids will be the central one of his second presidency. It is no small irony that the president who vowed to end the forever wars in the Middle East may well have embarked upon a fresh one.
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