They never learn. Once again, a bellicose US president has unleashed overwhelming military firepower to force a sovereign nation to its knees. Once again, blatant lies and exaggerated claims are being propagated to justify the attack. Duplicitous American diplomacy became a fig leaf for premeditated aggression. The cautionary advice of allies was spurned. The UN, international law and public opinion were ignored. Democratic consent is lacking. And once again, there are few defined goals by which to gauge success, and no long-term plan.
Now, as in the past, the predictable result of today’s renewed, expanded and apparently open-ended US-Israeli aggression against Iran will be instant, spreading chaos. Civilians will be killed, children orphaned, families torn apart. Regional turmoil and international oil-price panic will follow the Iranian retaliation that has already begun, and which may be backed by Tehran’s Hezbollah and Houthi allies. New hatreds will be seeded, terrorist vendettas sown. The west’s foes will rejoice. And almost nothing of enduring value will be achieved. That was the bitter outcome of the failed US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, it’s Tehran’s turn to reap the whirlwind.
How dismaying – how unforgivable! – that those past lessons have not been learned. How incredible that an elected 21st-century American president still believes it’s effective and permissible, let alone moral, to dictate to the world from the barrel of a gun. By what conceivable right does the US behave in this way?
While there are certain differences, the similarities between Donald Trump’s siege of Iran and George W Bush’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq are striking. Both crises fit a wider pattern of ultimately unsuccessful, costly US interventionism dating back to Vietnam – and the 1953 CIA-led Iran coup. Trump promised to avoid foreign adventures. Surprise! He lied. Anyone who believes he has radically changed the way the US engages with the world should review this sordid saga of post-1945 imperial hubris. In this, he’s no different from his predecessors.
Trump is unusual in that his self interest is so evident. Though he said today that he wants “freedom” for the Iranian people, and for Iran to be a place that’s “safe”, he’s no Woodrow Wilson, who justified plunging the US into the first world war in 1917 by saying “the world must be made safe for democracy”. (It transpired Wilson meant democracy in Europe, not in the colonial empires of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.) After attacking Venezuela in January, Trump baldly admitted he just wanted the oil. Yet in other respects, what’s happening now feels very familiar.
Like Bush, Trump manufactured a crisis, founded on falsehood, and effectively cornered himself. He is hostage to self-imposed expectations, having confounded his own false claim to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities last year. Like Bush and his accomplice, Tony Blair, Trump deliberately inflates the threat. His unsubstantiated State of the Union claim that Tehran’s ballistic missiles could “soon” reach US territory recalls notoriously false US and UK claims about Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s claim to have mounted “pre-emptive” strikes is misleading, too. There is zero clear evidence Iran was about to attack. On the contrary, it was desperately hoping to preserve the peace after last June’s damaging US-Israeli onslaught.
Speaking on Truth Social, Trump claimed Iran has repeatedly failed to renounce nuclear weapons. Not true. The regime, from the supreme leader down, has repeatedly done that over 20 years. Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said again last week that Iran “will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon”. There is claim and counter claim, but the fact is that, neither the US, UN inspectors nor Israel’s ultra-hostile leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, have provided proof that Iran plans or wants to build nukes.
Prior to the attack, Trump refused to define his aims despite Arab and European allies’ fears of regional conflagration. Now his stated demands border on delusional. He says he is seeking to “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear facilities (again), destroy its ballistic missiles, destroy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (or accept its unconditional surrender in return for “total immunity”), and somehow also destroy Iran’s allied proxy forces in the region.
Trump is also openly encouraging the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government, having previously declared that regime change is “the best thing that could happen” and promised “help is on its way”. But he doesn’t say how that change can be achieved without deploying ground troops, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, occupying the country for years, and fighting open-ended insurgencies – and no such US deployment is on offer. When George HW Bush made a similar appeal to Iraqis following the 1991 Gulf war, a mass slaughter of the Shia Muslim population ensued, carried out by Saddam’s undefeated regime.
“This will be probably your only chance for generations,” Trump said as he called for a national insurrection. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond.” Yet there are good, sensible reasons why no previous president has done something so reckless in Iran. And it’s certainly no “gift”. It’s an irresponsible invitation to anarchy and mayhem. It could trigger the fracturing of the Iranian state into its many ethnic and religious components and a catastrophic civil war drawing in regional states. If so, that’s on Trump. That’s the height of foolishness.
“Trump poses an exponentially greater danger to Americans and the world – not because he is a historical anomaly but rather because he reflects the worst impulses from the American past,” warned Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, in a recent essay. Trump typified the entrenched problem of vainglorious American exceptionalism. “What innate confidence in our own special character leads the US government to try to control a world that does not want to submit to our will and does not believe in our supremacy?” Rhodes wondered. “We are now entering another spasm of aggression cast as necessity.”
For the second time, Trump has offered negotiations to Iran while obviously planning an attack. It’s now evident this week’s negotiations in Geneva were a charade. Nor is there any sign Trump and Netanyahu, having set out their maximalist objectives, will break off the attacks soon. To do so would suggest failure. Trump wants to be the president who finally avenges US humiliations during the 1979 Iranian revolution, who brings Iran back into the western fold. He also wants a “win” to impress November’s midterm voters – one that revives his poor approval ratings. As for Iran-obsessed Netanyahu, he wants the impossible: guaranteed security for ever, on Israel’s neo-colonialist terms.
It’s unclear how this dangerous, ill-considered intervention may end. Although “leadership targets” (meaning the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his close associates) are reportedly being attacked, a sudden government collapse remains improbable at this point. It follows that the regime, though wounded and reduced, will continue to pose serious, and possibly greater, domestic and international challenges. Iran cannot be bombed into functioning democracy. The defiance of the west that it represents cannot be talked away in social media posts. As long as Khamenei or designated clerical successors are in charge, vicious repression and regional troublemaking will persist.
Common ground nevertheless exists, on which peaceful coexistence could be built. Concepts of democratic self-determination, political autonomy, individual rights and adherence to moral principles are anathema to control-freak authoritarians such as Trump and Khamenei. But not to their countries’ peoples. Like a Persian emperor, what “King” Donald really wants from Iranians is capitulation, tribute and homage. He demands a similar fearful fealty from citizens at home.
Despite all the hate-mongering, mutual ignorance and disinformation, the vast majority of Americans and Iranians are on the same side. Their common foe is tyranny. Their leaders are the problem. There is no need for this fight.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
