Among the more ludicrous reactions to Donald Trump’s war on the Iranian regime (and it is his own personal war) was the sight of Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations condemning America and Israel for Saturday’s brutal assault on cities and installations across Iran. This was at an emergency meeting of the Security Council, which only exposed what a pathetic body Trump has reduced it to. Prattling on about peace and security and passing resolutions that nobody sticks to. It’s a total waste of time. Israel claimed that the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed by a missile launched into his compound, which the Iranians first denied before it was finally confirmed by state TV.
The response has been for Iran to lash out and launch its own barrage of missiles and drones at Israel, Dubai, the UAE and Kuwait.
Trump, who came to power in his second term promising an end to foreign adventures and only a few days ago announced his very own 'Board of Peace', has now ordered strikes on seven different countries, killed the leader of one nation and captured another.
The New York Times, in an editorial, described the weekend attack as "reckless" and said: "his appetite for military intervention grows with the eating." Trump behaves like a dictator, and like all dictators, he will eventually go too far and bring about his own downfall. The NYT add that the president could make a plausible case for intervention, but he hasn't:
"Mr. Trump is not even attempting this approach. He is telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.
"He instead treats allies with disdain. He lies constantly, including about the results of the June attack on Iran. He has failed to live up to his own promises for solving other crises in Ukraine, Gaza and Venezuela. He has fired senior military leaders for failing to show fealty to his political whims."
The action in Iran is said to have been after his indicted war criminal mate Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Trump it was a good idea. Under the US Constitution, it is the sole responsibility of Congress to declare war, but they weren’t even informed, let alone consulted or had their approval sought. Trump announced it in a video published at 2:30 am on Saturday morning.
The demented draft dodger is being manipulated by Netanyahu and Putin. He didn’t bother to monitor events in the White House situation room but flew to his Mar-a-Lago club for a relaxing weekend, presumably playing golf.
We have had several reasons for the widely expected attack, including that Iran posed an imminent threat to America, that they were close to developing a viable nuclear device and so destabilising the region, that Iran interfered in the 2020 and 2024 US presidential election and that it was to free the Iranian people from a brutal, oppressive regime. Negotiations to replace the nuclear deal that Obama negotiated and which Trump scrapped in his first term were ongoing with Omani mediators talking of progress the day before the strikes took place.
There is even a laughable claim that Iran was planning pre-emptive missile strikes on US bases! Shades of Nazi-like claims that Poland was shaping up to attack Germany in September 1939.
Some cynical observers also think it may have been designed to distract from the Epstein scandal or to create a crisis enabling Trump to cancel the mid-term congressional elections scheduled for later this year, which the Republicans are expected to lose. Nobody really knows because Trump hasn’t said, and his administration can’t articulate a clear reason until he provides one.
As the NYT says: "Mr. Trump’s failure to articulate a strategy for this attack has created shocking levels of uncertainty about it. The attack has succeeded in killing a brutal dictator, but it remains unclear what comes next. Mr. Trump has offered no sense of why the world should expect this regime change to end better than the versions in Iraq and Afghanistan at the start of this century. Those wars toppled governments but understandably soured the American public on open-ended military operations of uncertain national interest, and they embittered the troops who loyally served in them."
He had a perfect opportunity to explain his thinking on the issue in his State of the Union speech last week, but he didn’t. If the awful, blood-stained Iranian regime is toppled and replaced by some sort of moderate, secular, democratic government, it will be seen as a triumph, but it is a massive gamble. It could easily ignite a wider conflict in the Middle East
There is apparently no plan beyond hoping for a popular uprising. That is perhaps the only way hostilities can end quickly. Trump has effectively lit the fuse, stood back and invited the Iranian people to begin a D-I-Y revolution against a repressive government, but without a leader, a strategy or the arms needed. This can only lead to more bloodshed, and if that doesn’t succeed, it could be a very long war.
Oil prices are expected to increase after the Revolutionary Guard closed the Straits of Hormuz to shipping. Trump keeps boasting that petrol in America is under $2 a gallon when it’s well above that and is now forecast to reach $3 in the coming weeks.
Trump’s foreign policy - such as it is - appears to be nothing more than a series of knee-jerk decisions made without any deeper understanding of or assessment of their likely impacts, leaving a trail of devastation and increasing regional instability.
