By Branko Marcetic
NEW YORK: For the past two decades, disastrous Middle East wars have been synonymous with the name of Bush. The current US president seems determined to now make them synonymous with the name Trump.
It is widely understood that the US war with Iran that the Donald Trump White House is barrelling toward, and the regime collapse that seems to have become the unofficial goal of the Israeli government, would be terrible for everyone involved, and for the same reasons as the Iraq War was twenty years ago: massive civilian death in yet another Muslim-majority country that will inflame a new round of anti-American terrorism.
US troops and even civilians needlessly sacrificed as they become targets of reprisal in the region and possibly beyond; a violent internal power struggle involving ethno-sectarian violence and a tug of war for influence by foreign powers; and a flood of weapons and desperate, angry people leaving Iran’s borders that destabilizes neighbouring countries, nearby regions, and even the very same Western countries backing this war.
Trump himself knows all this very well because he watched it all play out with George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion and, taking the political temperature a decade’s worth of chaos later, used it to viciously pounce on Bush’s brother in the 2016 Republican primary. “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, alright? . . . [W]e can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty,” he said on the debate stage, shocking the Washington establishment. “We should have never been in Iraq, we have destabilized the Middle East.”
“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction — there were none. And they knew there were none,” he added for good measure.
This was the kind of talk in 2016 that earned Trump the furious hatred of Republican neoconservatives. “It was a disgrace,” lamented Fox News host Mark Levin at the time, who spent the rest of the race bashing Trump and vowing not to vote for him. “This guy sounds like Code Pink. . . . He sounds like a radical kook. . . . And there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” Nine years later, Levin is now one of the people who has reportedly personally convinced Trump to go to war with Iran, in between cheering for war in a TV studio and assuring everyone that defeating the country would be as easy as the famously simple and painless Iraq War.
Trump is now a fingernail’s length away from doing exactly what he bashed Bush for doing in order to kickstart his political ascent. Just like Iraq, the Iran war he’s poised to directly enter will be a war based on faulty intelligence and sold to the public with lies.
And they are lies, the claims that Trump and his political allies are making to justify going in. The charge that Iran is days away from producing a nuclear weapon, that this is even the goal of its leadership, and that preemptive war is therefore legally and morally justified is a lie — Bush’s same weapons-of-mass-destruction lie warmed over and lazily served up as if no one would notice. Aping Bush official Condoleezza Rice’s infamous line that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” pro-war Sen. Ted Cruz went on Fox News this Monday to warn that “if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, I think the odds are unacceptably high that we would find out with a mushroom cloud.” A high schooler tries harder to cover up plagiarism than this.
What’s more, everyone saying this knows it’s a lie. How can we be sure? Because the US intelligence agencies that your taxes fund to the tune of tens of billions of dollars have repeatedly said the opposite. Just three months ago, Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate committee that US intelligence “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.” This conclusion, by the way, has consistently been the same one US intelligence agencies have made since at least as far back as 2007.
Pro-war officials, both Democrat and Republican, have simply decided to pretend this never happened. Nearly every senator who was physically there and heard Gabbard has since gone on to misleadingly tell the public the exact opposite of what she told them. Trump himself was recently asked point-blank about what Gabbard relayed and replied, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.”
Nothing has changed in the three months since. Just yesterday, four sources told CNN that US intelligence assessments were still that Iran wasn’t trying to produce a nuke, and that even if it was, it would take up to three years for it to be able to do so. The same day, the Wall Street Journal reported that just before Trump greenlit Israel’s attack last week, US officials were shown the supposedly slam-dunk Israeli intelligence proving Iran was a nuclear threat, and found it utterly unconvincing.
So why is this happening, in spite of its overwhelming unpopularity, monumental risks, and the lives it will cost, including American ones? The answer, in short, is because of Israel and Trump himself. Israeli leadership, and current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu above all, has been pushing for war with Iran for decades, a war that everyone understands it can’t fight without the United States. Israeli officials right now are not even pretending their goal isn’t to get Trump to involve the United States directly and finish the job for them. Just like with Netanyahu’s enthusiasm for Trump’s terrible idea to occupy Gaza, the Israeli MO is to barge in and break everything, then make the United States pick up the pieces and pay for it.
But the buck ultimately stops with Trump, who in his brief time in office has proven himself, somehow, an even weaker leader than his feeble predecessor. Recent behind-the-scenes reports explaining Trump’s shift paint a picture of an indecisive president incapable of restraining Israel, and easily manipulated by war-seekers in and around his administration — so the same exact thing we had for the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency. The difference was, though he came very close to causing it, Biden had the modicum of nerve to at least veto Israel’s push for an Iran war.
Trump, by contrast, has actively enabled and facilitated it. Israel shared its war plans with Trump officials months in advance of its attack, which they were reportedly deeply “impressed” by, and Trump didn’t just greenlight the war but secretly transferred three-hundred precision missiles to Israel just days before it started it, which allowed Israel to immediately assassinate a spate of Iranian military leaders and scientists, on top of moving US military resources into the region to ensure Israel pays minimal cost for its reckless actions. This is not a matter of a US president simply going along with something he was powerless to stop.
But Trump’s responsibility for this situation goes well beyond these recent actions. The root of all this is Trump’s completely pointless decision in his first term to rip up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, commonly called the Iran deal, which had been working and had neutralized Iran’s enrichment program as an issue. That was followed by pitiless sanctions and his provocative assassination of a top Iranian general that came a hair’s breadth from starting war in early 2020, which together empowered Iranian hard-liners and made future compromise more difficult. His final, fatal mistake was, in the middle of negotiations to clean up the mess he had created and re-enter the JCPOA, to suddenly turn around last month and insist on the maximalist demand that Iran end all uranium enrichment: a poison pill pushed by Netanyahu that rolled back progress in talks.
It is no exaggeration that just about every brick of the road toward this war was laid by Trump over his two terms. And having laid it in place, he’s now strolling toward the dark pit at its end, dragging the country along as he prepares to plunge in.
There may still be a chance to de-escalate, even now. The US public and Trump’s own MAGA allies don’t want this war. Iranian officials were eager to make a deal before the war, and made clear to Trump they still were after Israel started this US-backed war, even signalling they would be willing to be more flexible in talks. His Gulf partners have reached out asking him to pressure Israel into the cease-fire that Iran is quietly calling for. All of it comes down to Trump, and if he has the backbone to slap down Netanyahu. And that’s exactly the problem. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: Jacobin
