America’s top generals have been as clear as they dare in warning Donald Trump off his latest military adventure. But the president wasn’t listening.
Eight weeks after sending helicopter-borne special forces into Caracas to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump has taken his warmongering to a new level with the launch overnight of “major combat operations” in Iran.
The Venezuela raid was well planned, limited in scope, and a clear military success, just the kind of stunt Trump and the former Fox News host who serves as his “Secretary of War” needed to fire up the troops in their new anti-woke army.
But Iran is a whole different matter. There’s a reason why, as Trump put it, the Iranian regime has been able to chant “Death to America” for the past 47 years as it targeted American forces and interests in the region through its network of terror groups and proxy militias.
The last time the United States tried to use military power to deliver regime change in the Middle East, with the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003, its forces were bogged down for eight years. The real winner of that adventure was Iran, which was effectively handed control of the new Iraq after the dismantling of the Baathist regime.
Of course, Iran has been massively weakened over the past couple of years. Hezbollah and Hamas, its main proxy forces, have been all but destroyed by Israel, and while an American bombing raid last June did not actually “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear program, as Pete Hegseth claimed at the time, it did set it back.
Reports from inside the White House say Trump’s military advisers, including Gen. Dan “Raizin” Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have warned the president against a full-scale attack on Iran, briefing not just that it could cost American lives but dangerously degrade already depleted weapons stockpiles. Trump dismissed a Washington Post report that Caine is “against us going to War with Iran” as “100% incorrect.”
It’s possible that Trump will walk away with an “easy” military victory, or that the Islamic regime, once prodded, could fall, as the president suggested in his video address from the White House. That will depend on Iran’s will and ability to resist the warfighting power of the United States and Israel and whatever allies they can persuade to join them in the ominously titled “Operation Epic Fury.”
But it’s far from clear why Trump had to go to war with Iran now, while his son-in-law Jared Kushner and New York property pal Steve Witkoff are still trying to bring the regime to heel. The massive military force gathered in the Middle East and Mediterranean was already sending a pretty clear message to the Mullahs.
In a text message last month to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump explained that since Norway had denied him the Nobel Peace Prize despite him supposedly ending at least eight wars, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”
When Trump first entered the White House in 2017, there was widespread fear that the nuclear suitcase would be following around such a volatile president. But he defied expectations and ended up being more cautious militarily than his Democratic predecessor as commander-in-chief, Barack Obama.
The great American peacemaker of the late 20th century was another second-term conservative president, Ronald Reagan, who clearly had an eye on his legacy as he joined with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to limit nuclear arsenals and call an end to the Cold War. Trump seems to have gone in the opposite direction in his second term: he wants to blow everything up, to test the limits of his power, as though a switch has flicked in his 79-year-old brain.
The peace president is bored of peace.
The post The Generals Said No but Trump Was Bored of Peace appeared first on The Daily Beast.
