Modern nations not facing a mortal threat rarely, if ever, go to war without a high-flying moral justification. Until now. Trump’s justification for going to war with Iran is that he will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Period. No argument about the need to abolish Iran’s cruel repressive regime. Nothing about human rights. Not a syllable about the glories of exporting democracy to an undemocratic land.
Instead, Trump addressed the country after the American attacks on Iran Saturday night and weirdly “congratulated” Benjamin Netanyahu on “erasing the threat to Israel” with American help. He ended his remarks by muttering, as if receiving an Academy Award, “and I want to just thank everybody and, in particular, God. I want to just say, we love you, God.” He then declared, “God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, God bless America.” No American president has ever led the country into war with such a lack of feeling, with such paucity of eloquence, with a piety so rote as to be transparently impious. But then again, no American president as divisive, undemocratic, criminal and inept as Trump has proven to be has ever led his country into war.
Yet the flat-footed, uninspired, no-nonsense businessman’s approach to plunging the country into armed conflict is, no doubt for many, a relief after the golden liberal claptrap that accompanied the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The former was justified by oceans of dazzling liberal eloquence. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” He wasn’t talking about the Peace Corps. Just four months later, he began to stealthily increase the number of American troops in Vietnam.
Interventionist neoconservative foreign policy might be back in the news, but nobody does foreign intervention like the liberal elites. America might never have made war on Iraq if it had not been for the so-called liberal hawks at the time, most of whom worked in the media’s most prestigious venues, where their tides of rhetoric justifying the invasion soaked the American psyche into compliant stupefaction. Liberal politicians followed suit.
By contrast, Trump has never said that there is anything spiritually or historically exceptional about America. What is exceptional is America’s military and economic might. His heartland followers, many of whom lost loved ones to the liberals’ starry-eyed infernos in Vietnam and Iraq, are sick of being sweet-talked into oblivion, from an idealising domestic policy that excludes them, to seemingly high-minded foreign policy that amputates their limbs and gives them a medal and a pat on the back. They are being enraptured into another foolish and unnecessary war now not by hostility to Iran’s brutal regime. They are as gratified by Trump’s transactional approach to war as they are by his transactional approach to politics and society.
Trump has likely been advised to prosecute a limited assault, as America did in the first Gulf war and later in Kosovo. Unlike then, he will strike exclusively from the air, and will keep to the air even in the event of inevitable retaliation. Unless a bomb or a gunman explodes in an American city. But then Trump would simply send in federal troops. Win-win, as they say about a successfully negotiated business deal.
The idea, if Trump indeed is being instructed in it, that he can fight a limited war in Iran from the air offers the narrowest ray of hope. The vicious, self-serving idealism that enabled the country to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003 guaranteed a blinkered momentum that offered no hope. The difference between then and now is profound. There is, for one thing, no 2025 equivalent to A Problem from Hell, which was published one year before America invaded Iraq. Samantha Power’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning bestseller, written from some fantastical mental lair of easy indignation, excoriated America’s refusal to prevent various genocides, and all but called for American military intervention in such situations.
The chapter on Iraq, where Power painted a portrait of an inept and spineless US, unable to locate Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons, had the effect of shaming liberal elites into embracing the Bush administration’s lies about the existence of “weapons of mass destruction”. Power herself was at first all for the invasion. Weeks after it began, she told the LA Times: “That’s what’s so great about the fall of Saddam Hussein. Now we can actually put our money and power where our might has been so far.” The tussle between Trump and Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, over whether Iran’s nuclear capability was around the corner or years down the line was a ludicrous caricature of Power’s depiction of the search for Saddam’s chemical weapons, and of the later phoney hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Trump couldn’t have cared less.
Of course the most important difference between 2003 and now was the attacks on 9/11. Not only had America never been breached in such a way before, but the threat of terrorism that seemed to increase after the attacks created a universal depression and unease. Pulverising Iraq under the cover of lofty rhetoric about liberation in the name of democracy satisfied the American thirst for morally unexceptionable revenge.
Eerily there is nothing like the pretext of a 9/11 behind Trump’s bombing of Iran. But then there is also no American carnage, no invasion of “aliens”, no burning down of American cities, no antisemitic pogroms at universities. There are only Trump’s fascinating lies, one being, as he said in his brief remarks to the nation, that Iran had killed “hundreds of thousands” of people in acts of terror. Truth, the saying goes, is the first casualty of war. Peace, in Trump’s America, is now the first major casualty of the death of truth.
[See also: Where have all the anti-war Democrats gone?]
Content from our partners
Related
