The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom noted that Trump appears to be workshopping the causes for his attacks on Iran and his goals for the war by talking to journalists.
As Meidas Touch summarized Carlstrom’s argument, he said: “[Trump] doesn’t sound convinced by any of it. He’s throwing spaghetti at the wall. Ultimately I suspect he just wants to say he ‘solved’ a problem that has vexed every American president since Jimmy Carter. But there’s no clear idea what that looks like and no plan for how to get there. And there are plenty of possible scenarios in which Trump declares victory and leaves the region with an absolute mess.”
Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted today that Trump, who watches the Fox News Channel consistently, appears to have shaped his attack on Iran in response to encouragement from FNC hosts. Gertz recalled that for decades, the FNC hosts Trump trusts the most have called for military strikes on Iran.
Last June, FNC personalities Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Brian Kilmeade urged Trump to bomb Iran and then lavished praise on him when he did. Hannity said the bombing would “go down in history as one of the great military victories.”
In the past weeks, Gertz wrote, the same figures have been urging Trump to attack. But their goal appeared to be the bombing itself. They expected an easy victory, without defining what that might look like. According to Kilmeade, the U.S. would “lose credibility forever” if it didn’t hit Iran. On Friday morning, Kilmeade said: “I hope the president chooses to go at it. We have been looking at these headlines for 47 years, and we have an opportunity to end it. And this president likes to make history.”
On Friday night, Levin told Hannity: “This president knows right from wrong. He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there’s only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this. We don’t need to put up with their crap. It’s time to put it to an end.”
On Saturday, after Trump had started the bombing, Levin said: “Donald Trump did what nobody else could do for half a century. How do you like that? And you know why he did it? Because he loves his country.”
Trump’s strikes on Iran could have had something to do with the increasing heat over the Epstein files or his fury that the Supreme Court struck down his tariff walls, which were central not only to his economic program but also to his pressure on foreign governments and companies to do his bidding. Possibly he was responding to pressure from Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, or both.
Whatever their immediate trigger, the strikes fall in line with the ideology of cowboy individualism that began to take over the Republican Party in the 1980s and which, under Trump, has turned into brutal displays of dominance. The old idea of a cowboy from rural America who cuts through the government bureaucracy that threatens his livelihood by coddling racial minorities and women has curdled into the notion that a leader can do whatever it takes, including violence, to force opponents to submit to his will.
In foreign affairs, that means smashing the international alliances built after World War II. One of the crowning achievements of that international order is the United Nations, constructed to maintain international peace and security by creating organizations that could provide a forum for diplomacy and stop countries from attacking each other. The U.S. currently owes the U.N. nearly $4 billion in unpaid dues as Trump seeks to replace the organization with his own “Board of Peace” that he alone controls. This month, the U.S. holds the presidency of the U.N. Security Council, enabling it to set the agenda. Today, Trump sent First Lady Melania Trump to chair the meeting, the first time a presidential spouse has done so.
Another of the crowning achievements of the post–World War II international order is the Geneva Conventions, which define the legal treatment of noncombatants in war. In his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to tell Senator Angus King (I-ME), who pressed him on the issue, that he would uphold the Geneva Conventions.
In the ideology that honors violent domination, Trump’s bombing Iran without regard for the Constitution or international law, when no president before him had done so, proves his strength. Hegseth illustrated that idea this morning when he said: “For forty-seven long years, the expansionist and Islamist regime in Tehran has waged a savage, one-sided war against America.” Hegseth, who was a Fox News Channel weekend host before becoming secretary of defense, tried to turn the administration’s military operation into a heroic stand in a silent war that had lasted for two generations.
Claiming the U.S. attacks on Iran that started this conflagration were defensive, rather than offensive, Hegseth claimed: “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump we are finishing it…. It took the 47th president, a fighter who always puts America first, to finally draw the line after 47 years of Iranian belligerence. He reminded the world, as he has time and time again…[i]f you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down, without apology and without hesitation, and we will kill you.”
Hegseth celebrated Israel and its strikes alongside the U.S., while he condemned “so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force. America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history…. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”
In this ideology, the dominance itself is the point: there is no other endgame.
But this ideology was always based on a myth that played well on television. Three days into the attack on Iran, there is increasing scrutiny of the assertions from government officials. According to Dustin Volz, Alexander Ward, and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal, lawmakers and experts say those assertions are “incomplete, unsubstantiated, or flat-out wrong.”
And as the conflagration spreads, taking the lives of now six of our military personnel, the administration is now discovering that the American people would like to know why we are engaged in what appears to be a war of choice, and why this approach to the world is better than the one that kept us safe for 80 years.
Today the State Department told U.S. citizens to leave Gulf states immediately because of “serious safety risks,” “using available commercial transportation.” But many of the airports in the region are closed, some because they have been hit in the fighting. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) posted on social media: “Dear [Secretary of State Marco Rubio]: You told Americans to depart now via commercial means when you know many airports/airspace are closed. YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY SCHEDULE U.S. GOVERNMENT EVACUATION FLIGHTS FOR THE STRANDED AMERICANS IN DANGER. Maybe you should have thought of a frickin’ plan first.”
Retired Major General Randy Manner, who is currently stranded in the United Arab Emirates, told CNN: “It seems to me that the purpose and mission have been shifting over the past few days and the past few weeks. Initially, it was to ensure that they could not continue to develop nuclear weapons. Now it’s about regime change, and then there’s so many things that are being piled onto the mission list, it almost seems like someone googled it before the brief, to throw everything…in the kitchen sink into it. So it’s a little bit disconcerting.
“And, in fact, one of the small things that does matter to tens of thousands of people here, as well as to their families: It’s a little bit disheartening and a little bit envious to hear that the BBC has announced that the U.K. government is actually arranging transport for the British citizens to be able to extract them, whereas here, for us as Americans, we feel abandoned. The State Departments have talked to two embassy personnel, two different embassies. They are in survival mode, quite frankly, because as we know, the administration reduced their budgets by almost one half over the past year. So this is a difficult situation for people who are not used to being in a combat situation. And that, of course, is, quite frankly, probably 99% of the travelers that are here.”
Former paratrooper and Army Ranger Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) also had something to say about the reality of war. “I learned, years ago, that when elites like Donald Trump bang the war drums and pound their chests in Washington, D.C., and talk about sending troops into the ground or into combat, he’s not talking about his kids. He’s not talking about all of his minions’ kids. He is talking about kids like me and the people that I grew up [with] in working-class areas, rural places around the country that have to pick up rifles, jump in the tanks or helicopters, and…do the tough work. Well, America is over it. America is over the three trillion dollars we’ve spent. The quagmires of failed nation building. The sending of our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters to enrich oil executives. America is over endless adventurism using our military. Because they want their infrastructure rebuilt. They want quality affordable healthcare. They want to be able to afford groceries. They want to be able to afford a home. They want to be able to send their kids to school.”
