If You Thought Donald Trump Would Never Do This, You’re an Idiot
Are you surprised? If you’re surprised, frankly, you’re a fool. You understand nothing about politics and international affairs, and you bought into obviously dishonest propaganda about who Donald Trump is.
As of the morning of Friday the 13th, as fate would have it, it was about 90 percent likely that the president was going to join Israel’s war on Iran. That was the day, according to numerous news accounts, that Trump woke up to see the hosts on Fox News bleating about how tough Benjamin Netanyahu was (the bombing had started the night before). Trump’s social media posts that day made it obvious that he wanted a piece of that action.
Once those wheels start turning, history tells us that it’s the rare leader indeed who has the will to tap the brakes. There’s something about men and war; have you noticed? It was reported at the outbreak of the Iraq War that of the past 3,400 years of human history, our race had been completely at peace for only 268 of them.
Before going any further, I want to allow for the possibility that this might not end in disaster. First of all, no one wants a nuclear-armed Iran, so if these strikes actually accomplished that, then that’s a plus. Second, if this attack somehow topples 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei, that could end up being to the good, in theory anyway. Third, there is a chance it might not lead to a full-blown war, because Trump is crazy enough to nuke Tehran, and I’d imagine the Iranians know it. It’s for this reason that Iran might not retaliate on a massive scale. As Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay at the time) said of his pre-fight antics toward Sonny Liston, “Only a fool ain’t afraid of a crazy man.”
But Iran will retaliate in some way. There are 40,000 or so U.S. troops in the Mideast, stationed on bases in Iraq, Kuwait, Bharain, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Iran, according to globalfirepower.com, has the world’s 16th most powerful armed forces. The United States is number one, of course, but 16 ain’t too shabby.
Israel has degraded Iran’s military capabilities in the last 10 days, but the military resources at the regime’s disposal are still vast. Iran has 600,000 active personnel (it ranks eighth in this category), and a yearly mobilization potential of 1.4 million people. It has 551 aircraft, one third of which are fighters; 1,713 tanks; and enough submarines to rank it fourth in the world. And it has money. Before the war started, oil revenues were north of $50 billion a year and had risen steadily over the last few years. The government does run a budget deficit, thanks to sanctions and insane corruption; but then again so does the United States, so that’s a draw.
In other words, if this really becomes a war in the old-fashioned sense, it almost certainly won’t be a cakewalk. You may think I was joking above about Trump using nuclear weapons. I was not. As I wrote Friday, after The Guardian reported last week that nukes were off the table, the White House quickly told a Fox News White House correspondent that that wasn’t true. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Menachem Begin, and F.W. DeKlerk are among the heads of state who, their hawkish proclivities notwithstanding, never pushed the nuclear button; probably never dreamed of it. Can we be sure that we can say the same of Donald Trump?
This brings us back to the core of this—the big lie that Trump and his sycophants circulated during last year’s campaign that Trump was the antiwar candidate. Late last October, making the rounds of the Sunday shows, JD Vance touted Trump as the “candidate of peace.” A speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally put it even more bluntly: “A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney, and it’s a vote for war, more war, likely World War III, and nuclear war. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for a man who wants to end wars, not start them.”
That, interestingly enough, was Tulsi Gabbard—the current director of national intelligence whom Trump dissed more rudely last week than I’ve ever seen a president do toward a high-level appointee. Granted, she invited it to some extent, with that ill-advised video she made. But we shouldn’t forget: Gabbard was saying not what she believed, but what U.S. intelligence found—that Iran was not close to nuclear weapons capability. Trump chose to believe Netanyahu over his own intelligence services.
This is your “peace president.” He tore up a painstakingly negotiated settlement that was working and whose demise, thanks to Trump, led to Iran getting back into the game of nuclear enrichment. Then—to his partial credit—he seemed to be involved in serious negotiations of his own. But then Netanyahu moved his queen aggressively across the board, and Trump didn’t want to be stuck in back just playing around with pawns.
As I said above—this may all work out. If the Fordo nuclear facility has truly been destroyed, that’s a good thing for the world. But acts of belligerence tend to have unpredictable consequences. And we have a man in the White House who doesn’t read his intelligence briefings, has the emotional armature of an 11-year-old boy, thinks he’s a genius, and is not as dedicated to peace as his flunkies led you to believe last year. If you’ve learned anything this weekend, I hope you at least learned that.