Trump’s new plan for Iran doomed to backfire

In 2018, on the eve of the massive blue wave in the midterms that gave the Democrats a congressional majority, Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge for the first time that Republicans might actually lose. At a rally in Huntington, West Virginia, airport hangar, he told the ecstatic crowd, “It could happen. And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’” 

That is how the president strategizes. And let’s face it, it’s worked pretty well for him so far. 

Trump recovered his fortune by being rescued by a game show producer. Aside from being found civilly liable by a jury for sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carroll and being convicted of 34 felony counts in a hush-money case, he has managed to evade accountability for all of his crimes and abuses of power. Tens of millions of Americans even put him back in the White House after he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election and inspired an insurrection. He seems to think all this came about as a result of his strategic brilliance, or maybe his genetic superiority. But the fact is that it’s just plain old luck. Some people have more of it than they deserve, and he is definitely one of them. Over the course of his life, Trump has made decisions that would have destroyed the fortunes and reputations of anyone else. His greatest superpower is the ability to survive his own monumentally terrible judgement. 

Now, as he wages war against Iran in a widening conflict that is quickly engulfing the entire Middle East, Trump is putting that preternatural resilience to what may be its greatest test. The Islamic Republic is proving an able military enemy, and with only one ally — Israel — at his side and tepid public support, the president has no plan for how win or for what comes next. Apparently, he’s just going to “figure it out.” 

Part of that, the nation discovered on Tuesday, is an old method: using the CIA to arm and train unorganized opposition. The Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is in talks about arming Kurdish forces to lead an effort to “dislodge the regime.” According to CNN, the CIA is already engaged on the ground and Trump has been speaking with Kurdish leaders.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the rumors of a Kurdish insurgency “completely false.” But the New York Times reported that the CIA had already “given small arms” to pro-American Kurdish forces in Iran before the current war started in hopes of destabilizing the Islamic Republic. 

The CIA and U.S. military’s use of foreign militias has a long — and checkered — history spanning at least 65 years. The record shows that they have rarely had any positive effect, and most often, they have made situations worse. 

Throughout the Cold War and beyond, America attempted to overthrow governments or fight proxy wars that often led to wider conflicts or the imposition of regimes that were worse than those they replaced. Far too often, it was done for the same reason Trump is citing now with Iran — to install, or at least create the conditions for, a new regime that “we can work with.” And sometimes, that has meant having little concern for the country’s people or democracy.

Consider the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 or the Reagan administration’s support for the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista government. The former saw the CIA, in a plan that began under Dwight D. Eisenhower and was approved by his successor John F. Kennedy, training a group of Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro to make a secret landing in Cuba and fight their way to Havana, leading a popular uprising to topple the president. The group were captured immediately, leading to international embarrassment for the U.S. and for the young president, who took responsibility in public and, behind closed doors, vowed to never trust the CIA again. 

In 1963, the agency supported a military coup by South Vietnamese forces against Ngo Dinh Diem, the country’s president. The act, which was intended to stabilize the country in its fight against North Vietnamese communists, did the opposite, helping to transform America’s role in the conflict from advisory to an all-out war that left over 58,000 U.S. service members — and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian military and civilians dead.  

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, under successive Republican and Democratic administrations, the CIA supported Operation Condor, a network of right-wing dictatorships throughout Latin America including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. 

Then there are the more recent covert adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 1980s, the U.S. supported the Mujahadeen militants in their war against the Russians. Unfortunately, the Mujahadeen became disillusioned with their helpful allies and became the Taliban. That didn’t work out too well either. The CIA had been in Iraq in various capacities for decades before the first and second war, and they even went in prior to the 2003 invasion to — wait for it — establish contact with the Kurdish forces to secure their help. 

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But perhaps the most relevant precedent in Iran is the original CIA-backed overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the country’s democratically-elected prime minister, in 1953, which restored power to Reza Pahlavi, the last shah. This was done primarily to restore control of Iranian oil fields, which Mossadegh’s government had nationalized, to British energy companies. As with Afghanistan, this act sowed seeds of resentments and helped lead to the revolution in 1979, which got us to where we are today. 

The first days of the war have been chaotic, as Trump, members of his administration and his congressional allies have given competing rationales to justify the war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio seems to have landed on the doltish explanation that because Israel was planning to attack Iran, the U.S. had no choice but to join the campaign to preempt Iranian retaliation against American assets in the region. The implication of this slip was stunning: That America was a passive, secondary partner to Israel and could wield little influence over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For his part, Trump said on Tuesday he just “had a feeling” they were going to attack.

The administration has been all over the map, insisting that they were annihilating Iran’s nuclear program, which they previously claimed to have obliterated; degrading the regime’s missile capability; promoting regime change and supporting a popular uprising; and making sure Iran can’t project power in the rest of the Middle East. Trump even suggested the war was revenge for Iranian threats against him.

It’s impossible to be sure just why they chose to attack the regime when they did, other than the fact that Trump has almost certainly been persuaded by the likes of Rubio and long-time Iran hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that it will mean another path to glory. The problem is that they apparently forgot to plan what comes next. 

Trump has said that he hopes Iran will be another Venezuela, a simple decapitation mission in which the people who replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime’s supreme leader who was killed on Saturday in an air strike, would be eager to be bought off and do his bidding under threat of more bombing and carnage. But a problem emerged. Trump complained that the people he’d apparently been told were good candidates to become his puppets have all been killed. “I guess the worst case is we do this and then somebody takes over who is as bad as the previous person,” he said to reporters in the Oval Office. “That could happen.”

Indeed it could.

Trump exhorted the Iranian people to rise up against the government and threatened the authorities, telling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps via video they would get immunity if they laid down their arms. Who they are supposed to surrender to is unclear, to say the least, and how any of this could possibly come to pass without a U.S. presence on the ground is virtually impossible. While Trump has said that hasn’t ruled out sending in combat troops, it’s hard to imagine that he’s so far gone that what the Defense Department has dubbed Operation Epic Fury would be nothing compared to the fury unleashed by the American people if he launched some kind of ground invasion. 

We had better hope Trump gets lucky once again. Otherwise, the results of his and Netanyahu’s war in Iran are likely to be as successful as previous U.S. efforts at regime change have been — which is to say not successful at all.

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