An Iranian flag stands in the rubble of a police station in Tehran on Wednesday.Majid Asgaripour/Reuters
There are plenty of reasons to worry about Donald Trump’s war on Iran, starting with the U.S. President himself.
This is, after all, a leader who appears to lack a moral compass, circumspection and democratic values. He has consistently abused his power by seeking retribution against his political enemies. His immigration purge tears a page out of the 20th-century fascist playbook.
Then there are the President’s own shifting, and often contradictory, explanations about what he hopes to achieve by launching the attack on Iranian targets that began in the early hours of Feb. 28. Hint: It might, or might not, entail regime change.
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And what about the oversized influence on Mr. Trump of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly had been putting pressure on him to spurn diplomatic efforts with Iran in favour of military action?
Yet for all those caveats, it is also hard not to see Mr. Trump’s attacks as the inevitable result of the Islamic Republic’s unwillingness to end its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, its sponsorship of terrorism across the region and its goal of destroying Israel. A series of U.S. presidents, including Mr. Trump in his first term, had given the Iranian regime countless chances to reform itself; it always responded with the metaphorical finger.
It was naive to believe that the latest round of negotiations between Washington and Tehran would lead to a different outcome. The Trump administration’s demand that Iran accept a “zero enrichment” policy – effectively ending its nuclear program – was a non-starter for the country’s theocratic leadership.
“We have to understand that Iran ultimately is governed, and its decisions are governed, by Shia clerics – radical Shia clerics,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this month, as the two sides embarked on talks. “These people make decisions on the basis of pure theology. … So it’s hard to do a deal with Iran.”
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What followed on Feb. 28 might be best described as neither a war of choice nor of necessity, but rather a war of opportunity. Israeli military officials had concluded, based on CIA intelligence, that there was a unique occasion to decapitate the Iranian regime as top officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gathered at the supreme leader’s above-ground compound in Tehran. The Trump administration decided the moment was ripe for a broader assault on the regime, which was already at its weakest point since the 1979 revolution, in the hopes of bringing it to its knees.
Punishing U.S. sanctions, domestic corruption and the diversion of oil revenues to finance terrorism abroad had left Iran’s economy in tatters. Israel’s post-Oct. 7 assault on Hamas and Hezbollah had severely downgraded Iran’s principal terrorist proxies in the region. The Iranian regime’s recent slaughter of thousands of unarmed protesters who yearned for change showed the depth of depravity of its leadership.
Academics might debate whether Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran violated international law or the power of Congress to declare war. But those are largely secondary details within the historical context of the death and destruction the Islamic Republic has brought to its own people and to the Middle East – and even to Ukraine, where Iranian Shahed drones have unleashed untold carnage.
Sooner or later, someone was going to have to stop the theocrats in Tehran.
“This terroristic, radical, cleric-led regime cannot be ever allowed to have nuclear weapons,” Mr. Rubio said on Tuesday. “They were willing to slaughter their own people in the streets. Imagine what they would do to us. Imagine what they would do to others.”
No one can argue that Mr. Trump launched this war to boost his approval ratings at home; the President’s foreign military interventions have angered elements of his MAGA base and independent voters who want him to focus on the domestic economy. The risk of a prolonged military campaign in Iran that yields inconclusive results now hangs over the Republican Party ahead of the November midterm elections.
Not even Mr. Trump seems to know what he wants to happen next in Iran. He has encouraged Iranians to “take over [their] government” and expressed hope that the police and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will “peacefully merge with Iranian Patriots” to oust the country’s theocratic leadership.
Yet, he has also raised the prospect of working with the country’s surviving leaders to change the regime’s behaviour, as he has been attempting to do in Venezuela after the arrest of Nicolás Maduro.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump evoked a “worst case” scenario, in which “we do this and then somebody takes over who is as bad as the previous person.”
Still, Mr. Trump is arguably doing what his predecessor(s) could or should have done years ago. Perhaps that is what most galls his critics.