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  • Trump’s Iran War?

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

Donald J. Trump has threatened war with Iran.

The news outlet Axios’s reporter Barak Ravid had warned: “The Trump administration is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realize. It could begin very soon.”

America has undertaken the largest air power build-up in the region since the Iraq war 2003.

Other news outlets including the New York Times have reported that the military had given Trump the option to strike as soon as the last weekend.

Not only has the US Congress not authorized such a war, it has barely even debated it.

“There haven’t been any briefings about a military strategy,” said the Democratic House representative Ro Khanna, who is working with his Republican colleague T homas Massie to force a vote on an anti-war measure.

Most reporting indicates that the White House is planning for a campaign far more intense and sustained than last year’s bombing of Iran or the abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.

But we don’t know if Trump and his team are after regime change, and if they are, what they think comes next.

The NYT’s Michelle Goldberg wrote in an opinion piece: “This is how an autocracy goes to war, without even a pretence that the consent of the governed matters” (Feb. 21-22).

At the centre of the conflict between America and Iran is nuclear programme, which Tump claims he destroyed eight months ago, at the close of Israel’s 12-day war.

Back then, a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency found that America’s bombing campaign set Iran’s programme back by less than six months.

But to this day, a page on the White House website proclaims, “ Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated – and Suggestions Otherwise Are Fake News.”

Goldberg rightly notes that the administration apparently feels no need to justify a potential war to end a programme that it claims it already eliminated – a major contradiction!

The administration is also reportedly demanding that Iran curtail its ballistic missile programme and end its support for regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen [and those in Iraq].

It is unclear whether these demands are serious or simply a negotiating tactic, but they seem to be red lines for Iran.

“I don’t know whether it’s pretextual or genuine,” Rob Malley, Joe Biden’s special envoy for Iran, said of the Trump administration’s conditions.

Given that Iran was bound to refuse, he said, the Trump team’s position could be “simply part of a Kabuki game to be able to say, ‘We tried diplomacy’” (NYT).

So far the Iran’s missile Trump administration has scarcely bothered to elaborate the reasoning behind these demands.

After all, Iran’s missiles, and the militias it supports, threaten Israel far more than they do the United States.

 Stance at face value, it’s hard to square it with Trump’s America First campaign rhetoric.

Goldberg doesn’t think Trump would go to war to protect Israel.

Rather, she assumes Trump is driven by the same self-aggrandizing impulse that made him slap his name on the Kennedy Center.

He wants to put his stamp on the world, to be the president who rid the globe of three regimes that bedevilled his predecessors: Venezuela, Iran and Cuba.

He has subjected Cuba to a devastating fuel blockade.

“He is now enamoured with the idea that he will be the president on whose watch a number of regimes that have been viscerally anti-American for a long time will no longer be,” said Malley.

If that’s true, there are parallels to George W. Bush’s drive toward Iraq.

By many accounts, Bush wanted to outdo his father, to be the president bold enough to eliminate Saddam Hussein after others, like his father, had failed.

“His combination of narcissism and resentful insecurity made him think he could and should remake the world” (Goldberg).

The Iraq war’s most devastating consequences were, of course, in the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands of people died.

But the war’s wreckage also contributed to increasing derangement at home, including a resurgence of anti-semitism.

Should Trump push America into a needless war with Iran, the fallout would be worse.

Trump would, after all, be betraying his isolationist campaign promises for reasons no one quite understands in order to fight a war that benefits Israel (NYT).

Trump’s last two significant military interventions, in Iran and Venezuela, both went smoothly, perhaps increasing his confidence that he can bomb other countries without consequence.

But Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, fears this time may be different.

“You have a regime that is cornered and it is very likely to lash out, because it feels an existential angst.

Iran responded with restraint when Trump, during his first term, assassinated the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.

It also responded with restraint when Trump bombed it in June last year.

The administration might conclude from this that Iran is too weak to strike back.

Vaez thinks that’s a miscalculation.

Iran, he said, has concluded that “restraint only invites more aggression. And this time around, they want to respond, and they will respond, in a way that is marked not by restraint, but by recklessness.

By all accounts, Americans are not prepared to accept casualties in this arbitrary war, or to make any sacrifices at all.

In contrast, as Jack Hunter notes in Responsible Statecraft, in March 2003, a Gallup poll showed 72 percent of Americans supporting the war with Iraq.

In recent surveys, fewer than 30 percent of respondents back military action in Iran.

“Trump isn’t trying to persuade the country that war is in their interests. All that matters is whether he thinks it’s in his” (NYT).

The writer can be reached at: shashimalla125@gmail.com