Trump's Iran War: And the Big Fool Says to Press On

We were waist deep in the Big Muddy
The big fool said to push on
—Pete Seeger

On April Fool’s evening, the US president who has been comparing himself to Jesus Christ finally gave a speech in which he attempted to win support for his and Israel’s disastrous and failing war against Iran. He failed miserably, but his minions and military remain obedient.

Lies may have outnumbered contradictions. President Trump apparently has yet to appreciate Abraham Lincoln’s admonition that “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Among others, oil and stock markets saw through the flimflam. Energy prices soared once again while stock markets from Manhattan to Manila took a dive.

One has to wonder when the billionaires behind Trump, Vance, and their mandarins will conclude that it’s time to pull the plug, to insist on US regime change via the 25th amendment, for Congress to refuse to pick up the bill, or for the generals, admirals, and troops who have tolerated Secretary Hegseth’s white nationalist cheerleading to finally say one simple word: "No."

And if they won’t, it’s up to us to end the nationally self-destructive war on Iran and the rest of the world.

Some version of textual analysis may be in order. So taking it from near the top of Trump’s teleprompter:

• Operation Epic Fury targets “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.” The Iranian state and its surrogates have certainly engaged in murderous terrorist operations. But it has been outdone by the United States which has killed millions of innocent people from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs, through the Vietnam and Southeast Asian War, to the special military operations against El Salvador, Iraq, Libya, and most recently Venezuela. Not far behind are Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and its ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon.

• “In these past four weeks our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield, victories like few have ever seen before.” Despite battlefield victories, the United States is losing the war. Trump is caught like an insect in a spider’s web. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Iran continues to torment Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf states with missile and drone attacks, and prospects for an actual US-Israeli military victory over Iran grow further from reach with each passing day.

• “The Islamic Revolutioary Guard Corps is being decimated…” Yes, the Revolutionary Guards have suffered serious losses and its command and control systems are not what they were on February 28. But its surviving leaders, are more hardline in their commitments than was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and they now call the shots in Teheran. Trump’s battlefield triumphs have been real, but they come in the more than two thousand year-old tradition of pyrrhic victories.

• “We have by far the strongest military anywhere in the world.” Perhaps. But there are eight other nuclear weapons states, and a lesson that Iranians and people in other nations are learning is that, like North Korea, one way to ensure that you are not attacked by the United States is to have a retaliatory nuclear arsenal. Moreover, as Ukraine is teaching Putin’s Russia, we are in the midst of yet another “revolution in military affairs.” Terror and power on the battlefield and wars against cities are being murderously equalized by drones, cyber attacks, and by other relatively affordable weaponry.

Warfare and battlefield victories have never been all about military hardware and muscular warriors. Knowledge of history, geography, and culture can be as if not more, decisive. Think in terms of Alexander the Great and others failing to conquer Persia, of Iran’s geographical advantages along the Strait of Hormuz, the power of Persian nationalism, and resistance to Crusader Christianity that have endured across the ages.

• “We are getting along incredibly well in the production and sale of amounts of oil and gas.” Let’s assume that it’s been a long time since Donald Trump filled his car’s gas tank, if he ever did. And Narcissist that he is, Trump hasn’t registered other nation’s rage at the skyrocketing costs of energy. Cuba isn’t the only country that is experiencing Trump induced blackouts. And wait until the scarcity of fertilizers that are not making their ways down the Hormuz Strait takes its toll on grocery bills across the US, not to mention deadly famines in the Global South.

• “Operation Epic Fury is necessary for the safety of America and the security of the free world.” So much dishonesty in a single sentence. A free world? ICE and Border Patrol brown shirts are terrorizing our neighbors. Science, health care, and freedom of speech are all under serious attack in the United States under Trump. The US ranked 51st in terms of being an electoral democracy even before Trump and his MAGA allies launched their campaigns to disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters.

On the subject of safety Trump seems to have forgotten that back in June he claimed that US and Israeli air strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Further evidence of his short-term memory loss or historic dishonesty—take your pick. His refusal to read his intelligence briefings may be one reason he didn’t honor the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. And recall that the Oman mediators of the Witkoff/Kushner-Iranian February negotiations reported that significant progress had been made and that an agreement was in reach. That was the before our Dear Leader launched a war for the second time in a matter of months while in the midst of peace and disarmament negotiations.

• “For these terrorists to have nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat.” See the above and add the probability that Trump’s war of aggression will further undermine the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and will fuel growing demands in Iran and other countries nations to become new and terrorizing nuclear weapons states. Then there is also the reality that—as Daniel Ellsberg, Barry Blechman, and this author have documented on as many as 30 occasions during wars and international crises—the US has prepared and/or threatened to launch first-strike nuclear attacks to ensure their dominance.

Each of the other eight nuclear weapons states have made such preparations and threats at least once. There are, in fact, no good hands to hold nuclear weapons. And as Japan’s survivors of US atomic weapons warn us: "human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”

• “I terminated Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.” By all accounts, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was successful in containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions UNTIL Donald Trump abrogated the treaty during his first term. Note too Trump’s use of President Obama’s middle name to insinuate that his loyalties lay elsewhere.

• “…their race for a nuclear bomb…They were right at the doorstep.” A bald-faced lie. Iran’s highly enriched uranium was—and remains—deeply buried under rubble in Isfahan and Nantanz. As a wise South Korean colleague said this week, no one anywhere in the world is taking what the United States says seriously. In the diplomatic equivalent of going from zero to sixty in record time, Trump has transformed US hegemony into US isolation.

• “There would have been no Middle East and no Israel now.” Note that Israel is in fact a nuclear weapons state, and that during the 1973 October War Golda Meir threatened to use of the country’s “Temple Weapons” to force open the floodgates of US weapons and spare parts. And, if Israel had accepted and built on the momentum of the 1991 Madrid summit and negotiated a two-state agreement with the PLO rather than insisting on colonization and apartheid, the Zionist state would have been more widely accepted as legitimate across Southwest Asia and beyond.

• “The United States has never been better prepared economically to confront this threat.” Why then is the president saying that funding for Social Security and Medicare must be cut to pay for the war? Why has the manufacturing sector lost and not gained jobs during Trump’s second term? And, why has “affordability” become the defining issue as we approach the mid-term elections?

• “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait…We don’t need it.” The New York Times has the answer: “…the interconnectedness of global energy markets means that any restrictions on traffic through the waterway creates economic shocks felt around the world. Economists warn the effects on inflation and growth in the United States and elsewhere, will compound if disruptions persist, making the reopening of the strait a key issue for the global economy.”

• “…we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly…We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.”

If we are on the verge of winning, why the need to escalate the war? Is “them” the majority of the Iranian people who oppose but have not yet been able to remove their unrepresentative and repressive government?

Regime change has failed. History has demonstrated you can’t bomb a country into regime change. Iran’s highly enriched uranium is inaccessible to an invading military. Aerial destruction of Iran’s oil infrastructure and desalinization plants will result in tit for tat destruction of Saudi and GCC infrastructures. And destroying desalinization plants, leading to untold numbers of people dying from thirst would be among the worst possible crimes against humanity.

Finally, forget the idea of a ground war. Sending in the Marines and Special Forces to seize Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure or to dig for Tehran’s highly enriched uranium will leave US forces vulnerable, sitting ducks for Iran’s drones and remaining missiles in something worse than a quagmire.

The Big Fool is leading our nation and the world ever deeper into the desert version of the Big Muddy. Resistance and envisioning how we reconstruct constitutional democracy and our nation’s place in the world are the only ways forward.