Donald Trump’s Lawless Regime-Change War in Iran: No. Not in Our Name.

My cell phone rang at 3 a.m. I looked down to see that it was my wife’s Aunt Jan calling. She lives on the West Coast and is a bit of a night owl. I wondered if maybe she called by mistake, so I didn’t pick it up; I decided to wait and see if she left a message, which would signal intent. A minute or so later, sure enough, the little voicemail icon popped up. So I listened. I thought you’d want to know—the bombing has started. I called her back gratefully. Yes, I sure did want to know.

Right now as I compose this sentence, it’s four-and-a-half hours later, and I imagine people waking up across the Eastern United States to start their Saturdays: moms nudging their kids to get them ready for their basketball or soccer games; dads getting a jump on that trip to the Home Depot; the sales clerks and others who have to work on Saturdays rousing themselves and preparing for their days. And I picture them wiping the sand out of their eyes and picking up their phones or maybe flipping on the kitchen-counter radio and thinking: He did what?!?

It’s so Donald Trump to do this in the middle of the night. It appears that Israel started bombing Iran around 1:30 a.m. East Coast time, and U.S. forces began about 30 minutes later. But 1:30 a.m. ET is 10:00 a.m. Tehran time—the Iranian people were up and about, and military bases were presumably humming and fully staffed. The people he most surprised here were his employers, the citizens of the United States.

And why would he want to do that? “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people,” Trump said in a brief (by his standards, anyway) video posted on Truth Social at 2:30 a.m. “Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world.” Later, addressing the “proud people of Iran,” he said that “the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” 

But why now, and in this way? I’m not in Trump’s brain, but having regrettably spent numberless hours this last decade trying to plumb that brain’s moldy depths, I hazard the educated guess that he wanted to make the whole thing as outrageous to normal opinion as he could. That is, he knows the people who support him will back whatever he does whenever he does it. There’s little question that at Mar-a-Lago, Fox News HQ, Bari Weiss’s house, and other such nexuses of laughter and forgetting, they woke up dancing a little jig. Trump knows he can count on that.

But the people he sees as enemies: The New York Times, the radical left lunatics, those pinheads at Yale, Princeton, MIT, and the other universities that “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday were off-limits now to military personnel because they are “factories of anti-American resentment” … Trump wanted to double, triple the outrage among that set. Well, as might or might not again be said over the course of Operation Epic Fury, as this attack has been named: mission accomplished.

So here we are. I’ll make three more quick-ish observations and otherwise leave you to your Saturday.

First: Um, wasn’t this the antiwar president? How many times did Trump say, from 2015 forward, that he was against all these wars? Back in 2016, that it was Hillary Clinton, not him, who was the warmonger. That he was smarter than that. That the Iraq war in particular was dumb. Here he is on Meet the Press in August 2015, nary three weeks after descending that escalator: “And, as you know, for years I’ve been saying, ‘Don’t go into Iraq.’ They went into Iraq. They destabilized the Middle East. It was a big mistake.”

Trump scored endless political points, and won more than a few votes, by promising Americans repeatedly that he wouldn’t start wars. And now, what has he done? He’s launched another preemptive regime-change war, America’s second this century, if you’re counting; and he’s launched it against a country three times the size of Iraq and with a far more powerful army. Iraq, which was supposed to be over in weeks and pay for itself, took about four years to stabilize and cost north of $2 trillion. Iran, by the way, is the seventh country he’s bombed, and we know very well that Cuba’s on the list, too. You and I have always known that his word is worthless, but there are still people out there who’ll be shocked to learn he’s been lying. Oh well, better late than never.

Second: To put it mildly, to have done this with Israel is not, from a global perspective, a good look. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made Israel one of the leading pariah nations in the world. In fact, Google “pariah nation” and see which country turns up most. I know Jonathan Greenblatt would ascribe that to antisemitism, and there’s surely an element of that among many who see Israel in that light. But the vast majority of liberal, humanist, decent world opinion—the sort of opinion Israel used to court—ascribes Israel’s low status to its, and Netanyahu’s, actions.

Just Friday, Gallup released a poll. For the first time this century—and therefore probably ever—a majority of Americans declared themselves more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to Israel, by five points. Netanyahu is the author of that. And early signs here indicate that he’s still at it: The Iranian news agency (take it as you will) says that Israel hit a girls’ elementary school in Iran, killing 50 people. This operation—a joint regime-change war against Iran with the United States—has been Netanyahu’s most fervent dream for years. It’s hard to imagine that in capitals across the Middle East and indeed across Europe, it will be seen as anything other than Bibi having dragged Donny into his personal revenge fantasy.

Third: I caution against making predictions about quagmires. Who knows—the U.S. military is quite formidable and good at what it does, so maybe in two weeks or so, the Iranian regime will cut a deal. It already essentially tried to bribe Trump with “investment opportunities.” I would have thought that would have done the trick. Maybe Trump is just holding out for a little more. Or maybe what’s in those Epstein files is worse than we know.

Or maybe the regime will actually fall. That would certainly be something to celebrate, in the short term, until we see what replaces it. But without making predictions about all that, we can confidently make certain other predictions: MAGA will forget all about those antiwar promises; this war will be embraced by phony patriots as righteous, as God’s command, as all illegitimate wars are; and the domestic attacks on “enemies of freedom” will start soon, as soon as today. Which is all the more reason for the millions of us who see through all that to get out on the streets and say no, not in our name.