I’ve been just staggered this week
to hear some people—in a few cases, the exact same people—repeating the lines
we heard so often in 2002 and 2003: how the situation was intolerable, how the
country in question posed a direct threat to the United States, how action was
morally and strategically imperative, and how easy it would all be.
Here
was freshly minted Republican Senator Lindsey Graham in 2003: “It’s long past
time for Saddam Hussein to be replaced. President Bush used the only reasonable
option available to him and our nation.”
And here
was an older and no wiser Graham, having descended into the age of the lean and
slippered pantaloon, earlier this week: “It’s time to close the chapter on
the ayatollah and his henchmen. Let’s close it soon and start a new chapter in
the Mideast: one of tolerance, hope, and peace.”
You could sense the fever rising
midweek, when it felt like Donald Trump just might pull the trigger and unleash
his—actually, our—B-2 bombers on Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility. In 2002–03, as
the editor of The American Prospect, I watched slack-jawed while the
propaganda machinery of official Washington (and Beltway outlets including The
New Republic, where dissenters were
few) geared up for a war that was cooked up on specious grounds and during
which, alas, Iraqis did not lay rose petals at our soldiers’ feet. Because once
George W. Bush made up his mind, the Washington foreign policy establishment
decided collectively that when a president wants to launch a war, there’s
nothing to be gained by opposing him.
On Wednesday, I smelled the same
sulfurous odor in the air. I simply couldn’t believe that just 22 years after
we waltzed into Iraq, we were going to do … not the same thing, but something
eerily similar with potentially similar consequences.
Then, on Thursday afternoon, White
House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the world that the boss wanted two
weeks. If the boss were a deliberative, rational, mature man, we could welcome
this as reassuring news. But as the boss is Donald Trump, it means nothing. Two
weeks to the day from Leavitt’s announcement, as fate would have it, will bring
the Fourth of July—a good day for a peace deal but an even better day to go
bombs away! Imagine Trump, after that bust
of a military parade, having strafed Iran during the day and sitting back
and watching all those fireworks displays at night. Strength!
Trump 2.0 has ranged from being a
disaster to a comedy, a tragedy to a farce. But the one development that I’ve
watched with quiet curiosity—the one matter on which, if asked, I’d have told a
pollster I actually approved—was that Trump was seriously negotiating with
Iran. I did not, of course, approve of his abandoning the Obama-era nuclear
deal during his first term, but it was interesting that he was now pursuing
diplomacy. It was very interesting that he appeared to be willing to get
crossways with Benjamin Netanyahu. Until early this month, when Ayatollah
Khamenei refused the latest U.S. offer, it really looked like we were on track
for a deal (the sticking
point was whether a proposed international consortium for civilian uranium
enrichment be based within or outside Iran).
That was June 4. As everyone now
knows, talks were scheduled for the following Sunday, but that preceding
Thursday night, Israel started bombing, and Trump woke up Friday, turned on
Fox, saw them slavering over Bibi’s macho dice rolling, and the talks were
dead. They might be back on now. However we feel about Trump, that would be a
very good thing.
So: What is Trump going to do?
Given the apparent truism that Trump talks to different people, agrees with the
last person he talked to, reads nothing, and makes
an instinctual decision at the last second, it’s worth running down the
people he’s talking to and what they’re probably telling him:
- Steve
Witkoff. Trump’s Iran envoy’s qualifications for his position are
that he’s Trump’s old real
estate and golfing buddy. His batting average so far isn’t great—he was
supposed to secure a ceasefire in Gaza. Who knows, maybe he’ll prove to be a
modern-day Bishop Talleyrand on the diplomacy front. Or maybe he won’t. But at
least he’s surely telling Trump to give talks a chance. - Bibi
Netanyahu. We know what he’s saying. He’ll be sharing Israeli intelligence
aimed at telling Trump that a Fordo hit can be clean, quick, and low risk. And
it should be noted that there will be wealthy, right-wing Jewish Americans who
may have the president’s ear who’ll reinforce this message (Miriam
Adelson, Bill
Ackman, etc.). - Dan
Caine, Michael Kurilla, and John Ratcliffe. Respectively, they’re the head
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, head of the U.S. Central Command, and CIA
director. Trump loves Caine, whose made-up middle name is “Razin,” because he’s
out of “central casting” and because of his role in defeating ISIS. Of Kurilla,
an Israeli news outlet in April said he was
“the U.S. general Israel doesn’t want to strike Iran without.” Of Ratcliffe,
CBS News reported
Friday that he “has said in closed-door settings that Iran is viewed as being
very close to possessing nuclear weapons,” which is at least slightly at odds
with the less
alarmed intel assessment Tulsi Gabbard has been touting. Sure sounds like
on balance, this group will be urging that things go boom. - Steve
Bannon. We know that his is the most prominent voice urging Trump to slam
the brakes. He and Trump had lunch Thursday. Hard to know how seriously Trump
takes him. But his view does reinforce what appears to be Trump’s gut instinct
toward noninvolvement. - Fox
News hosts. Don’t we kinda feel that when all is said and done, it comes
down to what they’re saying on Fox News at decision time? Since odds are strong
that whoever Trump is watching is likely to be rattling the saber to one extent
or another, this isn’t the most comforting thought in the world.
One last point. The Guardian
reported
Wednesday that some in the U.S. military aren’t sure that our conventional
bunker-buster bombs could really do the job at Fordo and that only a tactical
nuke could do it but that Trump isn’t considering such a possibility. To which
a Fox News White House correspondent rejoined:
“I was just told by a top official here that none of that report is true, that
none of the options are off the table, and the U.S. military is very confident
that bunker busters could get the job done at Fordo.”
No options are “off the table” is
standard lingo in such situations. Still, even before I read about this, I had
been wondering. The United States reportedly possesses nuclear warheads as
small as eight kilotons (and as large as 300 kilotons). The bomb we dropped on
Hiroshima was 15 KT. Can’t you just hear someone saying to Trump: “Mr.
President, it’s really just a teeny little bomb—enough to do the job without
question, but not enough for the world to get into a big tizzy about”?
Of course you can. And this is the
point: Trump, no
principled pacifist, is literally capable of anything, from peacemaking to
nuking. His “opposition” to the Iraq War, somewhat ginned up after the fact,
had far less to do with principle than with some tortured combination of risk
aversion and his commitment to macho stagecraft (meaning that if you’re going
to do something, do it big—take their oil, level their cities, etc.).
Those two impulses exist in tension
within him. But no one should think for a second that any of it amounts to
principle. One or the other will win, based on his mood that day. And so I may
be sitting here a month from now, slack-jawed once again as the Washington
foreign policy establishment decides collectively that when a president wants
to launch a war, there’s nothing to be gained by opposing him.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
The post The Fate of the World Is Now in Donald Trump’s Hands. Gulp. appeared first on New Republic.
