Donald Trump’s doomed war in Iran

By attacking Iran, the United States has launched a war of choice based on false pretenses. Iran appears to have neither an active nuclear weapons program nor ballistic missiles that can reach Europe and the United States. Rather than make America safer, this attack further destabilizes the world’s most volatile region and sharpens America’s image as the world’s most aggressive bully.

Violently intervening in the affairs of another country makes sense under some circumstances. If a vital interest of the United States is at stake, if the intervention has a clear goal, if the American people support it, and if there is no way to achieve the desired goal through any other means, bombing could make sense. In the case of this attack on Iran, none of those conditions has been met.

There are no good outcomes to this manufactured crisis — not even for President Trump. His base is devoted to the Donald Trump who promised during his campaign to end “forever wars” and be a “peace president.” This war immolates that pretense once and for all. Trump may be hoping for a quick collapse of the Iranian regime and the emergence of a new one subservient to Washington, which might help him at the polls. That, however, is the least likely outcome of this misbegotten war.

Iran is the big country in the heart of the Middle East — four times the size of Iraq with twice the population. Its political system is not based on individual leaders, but on a complex and overlapping matrix of institutions that are deeply rooted in society. Even killing the Supreme Leader, every cabinet minister, every member of parliament, and every general would not be enough to bring down the regime. The most likely result of a decapitation campaign would be to propel the Revolutionary Guard to power, which would probably produce a regime more repressive than the mullahs have been — and more willing to develop nuclear weapons. The other possibility is civil war. An Iran in chaos is Iranians’ nightmare scenario. But it is the dream scenario for Israel, which played a decisive role in pushing Trump to launch this war.

Israel’s influence on Trump is not simply political. It is eminently financial. Supporters of Israel have given huge amounts of money to Trump — $100 million from Miriam Adelson alone. Since the Supreme Court removed limits on campaign contributions in its 2010 Citizens United decision, the American political system has descended into a form of legalized bribery. That is bad enough when corporations and billionaires use their mountains of cash to shape policies that favor them. It is even worse when campaign contributions lead the United States into war.

Iran’s leaders have calculated that they can survive a war and that they might not survive surrendering to the United States. That is based on resentment of foreign intervention that has been building in Iran since Russia sliced off pieces of its territory two centuries ago. It became especially intense after 1953, when the CIA organized a plot that ended Iran’s promising experiment with democracy.

Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized the country’s oil industry, which until then had been owned by the British. For that sin, the British and American secret services organized a coup to depose him. The United States placed Mohammad Reza Shah back on the Peacock Throne. He ruled with increasing repression until being overthrown in 1979. That produced the mullahs’ regime, which has spent decades working intently and sometimes violently to undermine American interests around the world. No American intervention of the 20th century produced such a powerful boomerang effect. Instead of taking it as a warning, Trump has launched another intervention that is likely to be just as self-defeating.

This war highlights the sobering reality that our political system allows a single person to launch conflicts that can devastate entire regions. America’s founders sought to prevent that by giving Congress the sole power to declare war. Congress, however, has refused to play its assigned role. A couple of congressmen tried to push through a resolution asserting that Trump could not bomb Iran without approval from Congress, but it was blocked by congressional leaders.

This war also shows how unable or unwilling the United States is to extract itself from the Middle East. Over the last quarter-century, the United States has been constantly at war there. The bombing of Iran could be seen not as a new war, but simply the latest battle in a long campaign that has already devastated Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. The idea of withdrawing military forces from the region and allowing the countries there to resolve their own problems seems anathema in Washington. We cannot let go of our dream of a Middle East run by leaders who kowtow to Washington. That is, in no small part, why no one born in this century has ever known a time when the Middle East was at peace.

Since bombing is unlikely either to entice Iran’s leaders out of their angry isolation or to produce a less repressive regime, could any other approach work? The best hope would be a negotiated deal like the one President Obama reached in 2015. Trump, however, is pursuing a foreign policy that is largely diplomacy-free. Iranians are its latest victims.

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.