Two decades ago, George W. Bush and his cabinet spent months raising support for an invasion of Iraq. Two days ago, the Trump regime attacked Iran without giving us any coherent explanation.
Saturday, the US and Israel began an air war against Iran. The widespread attacks had a variety of goals, but decapitating the government was clearly one of them: One early death was that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, an ayatollah who has been in power since the death of the founder of the current theocracy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989.
The first American deaths were reported yesterday: three service members who had not yet been named. Five more have been seriously wounded.
We have no idea how many Iranian civilians have been killed, but at least 175 of them appear to be schoolgirls.
It’s hard to know what to write about this, because we have been told so little. Comparisons to George W. Bush’s Iraq fiasco are everywhere, but this attack differs in one important respect: Bush spent months trying to raise public and congressional support for his invasion. Trump, on the other hand, has given no credible explanation. In retrospect, many Americans resented Bush’s deceptive propaganda, but at least he acted like our opinions mattered. Trump seems not to need either our approval or that of Congress. (The Constitution and the War Powers Act say he does need Congress’ approval, if things like that still matter.)
I remember where I was when Bush came on every TV network to announce we were going to war. Trump hasn’t bothered. He posted to social media an 8-minute video full of rhetoric and falsehoods, and never answered the questions “Why this? Why now?” Stylistically, he talked at us rather than to us — standing behind an official podium and hiding his eyes in the shadow of the visor of a USA cap.
Yesterday, he didn’t even send his people out to answer questions.
No senior Trump administration officials or cabinet members appeared on the Sunday show television circuit a day after the US and Israel began a major military operation in Iran, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. … The White House’s communications operation indicated that it would let allies on Capitol Hill do the talking, three people familiar with the discussions said.
Why would Trump want Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton to make the case rather than Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth or J. D. Vance? To me, the answer seems obvious: Republican senators aren’t official representatives of the Trump regime, so anything they say is deniable.
Trump has sent them out to lie to us, and doesn’t want to be answerable when those lies collapse.
Every hint of an explanation that we’ve been given so far is full of holes. We were told in June that the bombing raids then had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability. But only months later we have to attack again because Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon.”
As they made their public case this week for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States. All three of these claims are either false or unproven.
Of course, President Obama had already negotiated a plan to keep Iran from getting nukes, but Trump tore it up, promising a “better deal”. This war, apparently, is that better deal.
He told Iran’s military and police forces:
Lay down your arms. You will be treated fairly with total immunity. Or you will face certain death.
But there’s no way an air campaign can back that up. The Iranian forces would have to surrender to somebody on the ground, somebody with the institutional power to hold tribunals for some people but not others. Who is that?
Trump also claimed to be doing this for the Iranian people:
When we are done, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. … America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.
But yesterday he told the NYT
What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.
In Venezuela after Maduro was captured, his vice president took power and the entire regime remained intact. All they did was let Trump control their oil.
So much for the Iranian people.
In the absence of any plausible explanation from Trump, we’re left to imagine some other motive. Here’s the opinion of Phillips P. OBrien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland:
Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US government’s intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory. He has made the national interest entirely personal.
The pundits who look for personal motives have identified two:
- Trump attacked Iran to change the media narrative in the US. The testimony of the Clintons to the House Oversight Committee has raised the question of why Trump doesn’t testify. And polls show Trump’s party headed for a historic defeat in November, losing the House and possibly even the Senate.
- This bombing campaign is what Iran’s regional rivals get in exchange for a series of bribes to Trump and his family: the UAE’s half-billion-dollar investment in Trump’s crypto company; a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar; Jared Kushner’s firm getting $2 billion in Saudi money to invest despite their high management fees and lack of experience; an Abu Dhabi firm using $2 billion in Trump meme coins to complete a business transaction; and perhaps countless others that are still hidden behind the veil of Trump’s real estate and crypto-currency operations. Rachel Maddow says: “And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not, and that our American government hasn’t bothered to explain in terms that are even internally consistent, let alone rational and sound.”
A big, expensive distraction? A quid for the sheikhs’ quo? Trump may not like those theories. But if he doesn’t want them settling into the public mind, he needs to give us something better.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Greed and EPSTEIN!ipad
Trump is a narcissist and a sociopath (clinically speaking). He’s a cruel and violent man. He only cares about himself, certainly not the country. He craves adulation and power. His poll numbers continue to drop, partly because of the Epstein files, most recently the missing pages. If adulation is in short supply, as it seems to be apart from what he gets from his sycophants, then he needs more power. I imagine that having the entire United States military to command at his whim gives him a pretty good rush. And, if what he did in Venezuela is a good model, then plundering oil will be part of the goal. Iranian oil is higher quality than Venezuelan, so it will fill his coffers more satisfactorily.
I suspect the current orange playbook might look like this:
Have you noticed his signature on official documents? The last letters look awfully like “pf”. I suspect the last name was never officially changed. So what does that do to the legality of anything he has signed?
Absolutely nothing. A signature does not have to be anything specific, it’s just a mark that indicates one’s assent. As long as it’s recognizable as the mark of the signer, it’s equally legally valid if it’s perfect calligraphy or a smudgy inkblot or a literal X.
And you don’t have to sign by hand for it to be binding, either – you just have to have the intent to sign, so autopens are completely legally valid too as long as the person whose name they are signing in assents to the signature.
The only reason details and so on matter is in terms of being able to prove that the signer intended to sign, but until and unless someone can get Trump to admit he never saw a document with his signature on it, it doesn’t matter.
When will we know that we have won this war? Asked differently, what must objectively occur to tell us that?
Donald Trump owes the American people an answer, or at least the arc of an answer. “Arc” because timing is a reasonable uncertainty, but AN answer. A bundle of rationales is no answer at all. The President and his closest advisors on this — whoever they may be — owe us this now, before they continue this war and thereby escalate it.
Trump is ducking public appearances. This is no time for him to duck while American lives and our reputation and influence is so publicly at stake.
Yeah, a definition of victory is the least we should demand. Iraq and Afghanistan had basically two definitions of victory (deposing Saddam and eliminating Bin Laden as one, and ‘making a new friendly regime’ as the other) and we actually accomplished the first relatively quickly and could never accomplish the second…
Our last (still insane, still unjustified) Iran attack had a definition of victory of “destroy their nuclear program” and we maybe accomplished it? But this one … doesn’t even have that.
The best analysis I’ve seen so far on the timing of the attack on Iran is here at emptywheel. The two agents encouraging action were Israel and Saudi Arabia; the timing came from the CIA and Mossad.
Trackbacks
[…] This week’s featured post is “Why this? Why now?“ […]