U.S. President Donald Trump didn’t wait six weeks before declaring victory over Iran, but just a couple of hours.Carlos Barria/Reuters
On May 1, 2003, six weeks after the start of the invasion of Iraq, U.S. president George Bush took a victory lap. He landed on the aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, and told the sailors, freshly returned from war, that “in the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
The text of his speech was in fact cautious, acknowledging that there was still “difficult work to do,” and that “the transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time.” He said that American forces would have to “stay until our work is done.”
But all anyone would remember was the giant banner dominating the carrier’s flight deck, positioned directly behind Mr. Bush as he spoke. That sign was the text, subtext and pretext for all this. Its words loom over what followed in Iraq, which was disaster.
The banner said: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.”
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Donald Trump didn’t wait six weeks before declaring victory over Iran. The U.S. President waited barely a couple of hours. After U.S. planes struck sites in Iran, he went on TV last Saturday night to declare Tehran’s nuclear program “totally obliterated.”
The U.S. and its allies have been working for decades on ensuring that Iran never gets an atomic bomb, but now Mr. Trump was saying he’d dealt with all that.
Mission accomplished. Like no mission has ever been accomplished, possibly ever.
He has since refused to brook any dissent on this. When a post-attack intelligence assessment suggested that Tehran’s nuclear program was somewhat set back rather than obliterated, Mr. Trump, of course, attacked the messengers.
Cabinet stooges, led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were sent out to repeat that Iran’s atomic bomb dreams had been bombed into oblivion, and the file was closed. Mr. Trump even said that he wasn’t sure he wanted to negotiate anything with Tehran in regard to its nuclear program, seeing as it no longer existed.
A week ago, before all this, I asked whether Mr. Trump would FOMO or TACO: whether his fear of missing out on Israel’s military success would drive him to attack Iran; or whether he would make loud threats on social media but ultimately stand down because, per the acronym, Trump Always Chickens Out.
My hope was that he would credibly threaten FOMO – the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, which were unprotected after Israel’s demolition of Iran’s air defences – and that the Iranians would make major concessions to avoid such an attack. Mr. Trump’s announcement late last week that he would hold off on military action for up two weeks seemed to open that door.
If the tag team of threats and negotiation had worked, critics might have accused Mr. Turmp of TACO – but so what? He’d have achieved a long-standing foreign policy goal, without a war. That’s like hitting an eagle on a par three.
But it’s not what Mr. Trump did.
He chose to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. However, instead of pursuing the strategy until it achieved the objective of destroying the nuclear sites, and without even waiting to learn what the air strikes accomplished, he immediately announced that he had delivered victory and peace.
This was FOMO followed immediately by TACO, which adds up to TIS: Trump Invents Stuff.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doubles down on how destructive U.S. attacks had been on Iran's nuclear facilities.
The Associated Press
The President’s actions since the bombing suggest that his main interest is not in whether he “totally obliterated” the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb, but rather in selling himself as the guy who totally obliterated it. Mr. Trump is furious about unfavourable intelligence assessments because he doesn’t want objective assessments of objective reality.
Of course not. He wants marketing material. He wants to claim, “mission accomplished,” whether or not the mission was accomplished.
But by dropping a handful of bombs on Iran, and then dropping the whole matter, Mr. Trump likely reinforced the Iranian regime’s desire to acquire the insurance policy of a nuclear weapon, while possibly proving room to pursue it.
And by insisting that a ceasefire had to happen as soon as he jumped into the war, Mr. Trump did the Iranians a favour. If the U.S. had stayed out of the war, Israel would have continued pummelling Iran’s military and nuclear sites for many more days, further weakening the regime. It was Israel that Mr. Trump had to squeeze to accept the ceasefire, not Iran.
If Mr. Trump keeps the threat of further military action hanging over Tehran, diplomacy may have a chance to make progress on discovering and dismembering Iran’s nuclear plans. But for that to happen, the President would have to acknowledge that the job isn’t done. He’d have to lower the “Mission Accomplished” banner.