The American people were under no imminent threat from Iran. Its government does not have nuclear weapons. It was no more threatening to Israel or any other US ally than it normally is. The decision this morning to attack Tehran, the capital, has nothing to do with “freedom for Iran,” as Donald Trump told the Post. He’s not going to “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy.” Why? Because that’s not the point.
The point is creating a made-for-TV war that makes Trump look like a big, tough war president. He’s doing this for transparently obvious reasons: things are going badly, very badly, for him at home. Freedoms are being violated. The middle class is being immiserated. There’s a general sense that the rich and powerful – the Epstein class – can act with impunity while everyone else pays the price. If Trump doesn’t change the subject, his presidency, and perhaps more than his presidency, will cease to be as it is once the Congress is turned over to the Democrats.
Trump believes Americans will rally around the presidency in a time of war, thus boosting his poll numbers among people who only pay attention to the news if there’s a war going on. This is not an Israel-Iran war. This is not a US-Iran war. Those titles give this moment too much dignity. This is little more than a political stunt, with the real consequences being murdered Iranians.
As such, it has to be as brief as it is spectacular to watch on Fox. There can’t be any US casualties, anyway not so many that it looks bad on video screens. He is making titanic declarations to suggest that he has an indomitable will to achieve objectives at any cost. “All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told the Post this morning. “I want a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.” But again, that’s just part of the performance.
As soon as something goes sideways, and it will go sideways given enough time, Donald Trump will chicken out. That’s why he will end it quickly – to prevent what is so far a carefully managed political stunt from blowing up in his face. He will accept any convenient reason to declare victory over Iran, even if victory falls short of “a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.”
I will defer to authorities on Middle East politics, but from where I’m standing, Trump today ended the democratic spirit that was rising up from the Iranian people. Iran’s government has been crushing dissent for months. Trump is acting like he’s enabling regime change, as if he were the Great Liberator. In reality, he’s justified more repression by an already repressive government. More than that, he’s undermining dissidents. Who’s going to be seen as American allies after the US bombed a girls school?
Indeed, Iran’s government benefits twice. Not only can it justify more, and more violent, crackdowns on individual liberty in the name of national security, it can also defeat “the Great Satan” with a lucky punch. Again, this is a made-for-TV war. Trump does not have the will to do what it takes to “liberate” Iran. That would require a generation-defining occupation of the kind that George W Bush attempted in Iraq in the 2000s. All Iran has to do is bloody Trump’s nose – bomb a base, sink a ship, humiliate the titan so that his titanic declarations seem farcical. They can declare victory, then go back to repressing their own people.
Because the point of all this is looking good on TV, Trump has overlooked the fact that he’s not in complete control. As someone wiser than me once said, the enemy gets a vote, too. Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly pretending to act like an ally, as if his top priority is Israel’s and America’s safety and security. In reality, what he needs is a continual emergency to stay in power to prevent him from being prosecuted and imprisoned for life. As such, he’s happy to provide cover to Trump’s stunt, as attacking Iran seems more justifiable in America if seen as defending Israel. But Netanyahu’s credibility in America is now deeply strained, to put it mildly, by the fact that he murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians. He’ll be all right if the Democrats in the Congress play along with him and Trump. What happens if they don’t?
Whether the Democrats do play along will be determined by how far they are willing to go in accepting Trump’s lies – if they accept that Iran posed such a threat to America and Israel, by way of possessing nuclear weapons, that Trump and Netanyahu were justified in triggering a conflict that could engulf the world. There is no reason the Democrats should accept those lies, given that Trump already said Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated.” If the Democrats decide against playing along, we might expect them to lump the president’s new illegal war with all other high crimes committed against the Constitution and the American people, so that a made-for-TV war intended to boost his standing with voters before the midterms becomes just another liability.
Not only for him but for Netanyahu, too. You could argue that but for the faith of the Democrats, Netanyahu would be in jail. His war crimes have put a wedge between the Democrats and the biggest pro-Israel lobby. That wedge could become permanent, as Democratic elites slowly come around to accepting the idea that Joe Biden’s position on Gaza cost Kamala Harris precious votes.
Moreover, Gallup found for the first time in 25 years that more Americans, not just Democrats, sympathize with the Palestinians more than they sympathize with the Israelis. Whatever the American consensus on Israel used to be, it clearly no longer is. The more Netanyahu exploits Trump’s vanity to stay out of jail, the wider that gap will get, to Netanyahu’s detriment.