Monday, March 02, 2026
Democrats Denounce Trump’s Iran Attack, but Subtle Divisions Emerge
Democrats Denounce Trump’s Iran Attack, but Subtle Divisions Emerge
“Democrats are divided over President Trump’s decision to strike Iran without congressional approval. While most oppose the attack, some support the administration’s goal of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. This division reflects broader debates within the party about national security and military intervention in the Middle East.
While most Democrats have opposed his decision, their responses reveal differences over Middle East policy and national security that loom over the party’s future.
Democrats have overwhelmingly opposed President Trump’s decision to strike Iran without seeking congressional approval. But in significant if subtle ways, the attacks have magnified fissures in the party over the country’s national security interests and America’s use of military force in the Middle East.
The questions many Democrats are raising over whether Mr. Trump was justified in launching the attacks deepened on Sunday after the first American casualties were announced by the Pentagon.
Yet even as they prepared to return to Washington to debate a military attack that could spur a broader conflict, tensions were emerging within the party over how stridently to oppose Mr. Trump’s use of force to achieve regime change and limit Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear arms.
And a small handful of Democrats, including some of the party’s strongest supporters of Israel, which conducted strikes alongside the U.S., have backed the administration’s operation.
The disagreements reveal a Democratic Party still searching for direction after its devastating defeat in the 2024 election. On issues from taxes to immigration to Israel, the party is remaking its views in real time, as Democratic lawmakers react to Mr. Trump’s aggressive use of executive power.
“We need to take a very firm, ‘hell no’ approach and not equivocate on it or suggest that some drawn out process would in any way justify what he’s trying to do,” said Representative Eric Swalwell, who is running for governor of California in a crowded primary. “In no world do I see this being acceptable for our values,” he said.
Mr. Swalwell reacted — like many in his party — to the strikes on Iran with furious opposition, accusing Mr. Trump of risking the lives of American service members without presenting evidence that America’s security was at risk.
But others took a more tempered approach, showing continued support for the decades-old bipartisan consensus that Iran poses a threat to American national security and should not be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.
They criticized the administration for launching strikes without consulting Congress, while also casting the Iranian regime as a uniquely dangerous actor responsible for the deaths of Americans and its own citizens.
“We can’t allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon,” Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday. But, he added, “this administration, my sense is that they did not go into this with any kind of strategic plan. It was an operation with no discussion about what comes next.”
Republicans, too, have been navigating internal political divides over the military attack, with a handful of prominent MAGA figures arguing that Mr. Trump has betrayed his promise to pull the nation back from foreign wars. The president, who appeared only briefly in public view on Sunday, made little effortbefore the attack to lay out the case for a military assault against Iran. Mr. Trump said in a video released on Saturday that his objective was “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”
As the attack injected another unpredictable element into an unsettled and volatile political environment, potential contenders for the party’s next presidential nomination offered a range of responses to the still-evolving conflict.
Some Democrats, including Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, criticized the repressiveness of the Iranian regime and insisted in the hours after the attack that it must not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, even as they slammed Mr. Trump’s approach, saying it endangered Americans and undermined the country’s national security interests.
But another group, including Representative Ro Khanna, of California, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive from New York, kept their focus squarely on Mr. Trump. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez charged in a statement that the president made “a deliberate choice of aggression when diplomacy and security were within reach,” accusing him of lying to the nation.
Such crosscurrents in the party date back more than two decades to the war in Iraq, when Democrats fractured over whether to authorize the invasion in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
That issue lingered into the 2008 presidential primary, becoming a major fault line in the tight primary race between then-Senators Barack Obama, who opposed the invasion from the start, and Hillary Clinton, who later characterized her vote for the war as a “mistake.”
Now, a number of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and the Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine, have referenced their service during those conflicts as they express their opposition to the Trump administration’s actions.
Mr. Gallego recounted the fear his mother felt when he was serving as a Marine in Iraq, an experience that he said left him struggling with post-traumatic stress syndrome for years.
“There’s nothing worse than seeing your friends die for a cause that is not in the national interest of this country,” Mr. Gallego said in an interview with CNN broadcast on Sunday. “There is no leadership right now that’s coming from this president, and we’re in the middle of dropping bombs right now, and men and women are dying.”
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut described the operation as a “disaster” and “illegal” on Sunday, saying Mr. Trump was involving the nation in a “quagmire” to distract from crises at home that would not result in a democratic Iran or the end of the country’s nuclear program.
Some strategists argued that the politics favor that kind of fierce opposition over the more cautious approach congressional Democratic leadership has taken.
“It’s very obvious to me that the hemming and hawing here around a haphazard regime-change war from a president at 38 percent approval rating is just nuts,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a top adviser to President Obama and now co-hosts “Pod Save America,” a liberal podcast. “People didn’t vote for it. They don’t want it. They don’t trust the guy executing it. It could not be more disconnected from the things they care about.”
Polls conducted before the assault indicated that a majority of Americans opposed the United States initiating a strike on Iran. But it’s unclear how they will react to an ongoing operation that resulted both in the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for decades and considered an enemy of the United States, and three U.S. service members.
A small minority of Democratic lawmakers argued that regardless of the politics and their distrust of the Trump administration, the strike was in the national security interests of the U.S.
Representative Greg Landsman of Ohio, one of a few of Democrats who defended the action in Iran, said he planned to vote against a resolution that would restrain Mr. Trump’s ability to continue the military operation.
Mr. Landsman, who is running for re-election in a politically competitive district in Ohio, said he hoped voters would respect his independence to support the broad mission of an operation that he believes is in the best interest of American national security.
“It’s not an easy position for me to take within the party, but it’s what I believe,” he said. “It has nothing to do with politics, which is what I think people expect when it comes to these big decisions.”
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.“
Iran conflict is Trump’s hour of reckoning — on many fronts
Iran conflict is Trump’s hour of reckoning — on many fronts
“President Trump faces a pivotal challenge in completing joint attacks with Israel on Iran without mass U.S. casualties and before Americans feel the impact at the gas pump. The situation is more complex than previous interventions, with fears of a prolonged war and potential consequences for the oil market. Trump’s decision to engage in a large-scale military attack with Israel has sparked backlash from some conservative allies and raises concerns about long-term U.S. involvement.
"Iran isn't Venezuela," former Pentagon official Michael Rubin, who served under the George W. Bush administration, told MS NOW.
President Donald Trump is facing a pivotal challenge: how to complete his joint attacks with Israel on Iran without mass U.S. casualties and before everyday Americans start to feel pain at the gas pump.
Iran is the latest, and most consequential, in a series of foreign interventions the president has undertaken with the aim of getting in and out before Americans suffer tangible consequences.
But on Sunday, Trump made it clear there is no quick off-ramp out of the Middle East. “Combat operations continue at this time,” Trump said in a six-minute video posted to Truth Social “They will continue until all of our objectives are achieved. We have very strong objectives.”
With a regime change move in Venezuela, Trump managed to skirt American military deaths while aligning with the country’s interim leader to profit off of oil sales. This time in the Middle East, the obstacles ahead for the White House are much more complex than last year’s one-and-done strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities or the capture of the former authoritarian leader of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro.
“Iran isn’t Venezuela,” Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official under the George W. Bush administration who has written books about Iran’s regime, told MS NOW, warning that Trump’s full-scale military assault on Iran “may be a foolish gamble.”
“Trump believes he’s found a magic formula where he can have regime change without all the messiness,” he added.
Iran’s longtime Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in targeted strikes on Saturday, but plans for his replacement are already stoking fears of a prolonged war in the Middle East.
Khamenei’s successor “may be even further to the right” and “more dangerous than the current regime,” Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told MS NOW’s The Weekend. “It would be naive for anyone to think that this operation is over.”
On Saturday, Iran launched a series of retaliatory counterattacks on U.S. military bases in the region, resulting in the first deaths of American military personnel. The Pentagon announced at least three service members had died, and several others were injured as part of their operation, known as “Operation Epic Fury,” to target Iran’s military assets.
Overnight, Trump warned of consequences for Iran’s latest threats about new attacks on his Truth Social account: “THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!” Later, in a separate post, he revealed that the U.S. “largely destroyed” Iran’s naval headquarters and destroyed at least nine of its ships.
Oil prices are set to spike this week after ships stopped moving through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for a fifth of the world’s oil. Trump, who loves to talk about low gas prices, now must ensure oil can keep flowing from the region before consumers — who are already wary of inflation — also stoke political backlash to the conflict. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC+, decided to increase oil production in a virtual meeting on Sunday despite disruptions to shipments in the Gulf.
Speaking with The Atlantic, Trump downplayed expectations about the conflict’s effect on the oil market, saying that the impact would only be “huge” if “things went wrong.” Trading reopens on Sunday night. “We’ll see what happens,” Trump added.
Trump also faces newfound fissures within his base. Some of his staunchest conservative allies, including commentator Tucker Carlson and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, have expressed deep frustration with the president’s decision to move forward with a large-scale military attack on Iran with Israel’s help. (Carlson on Saturday blasted the joint attacks as “absolutely disgusting and evil.”)
The president, for years, ran his campaigns for higher office on promises of putting an end to so-called never-ending wars. He even calls himself the “president of peace.”
In a national survey conducted by GrayHouse between Feb. 20 and 23, which was shared with MS NOW and recently presented to congressional Republicans, the majority of GOP voters surveyed, 86%, said they supported the U.S. using military force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
“The narrative that the Republican Party is fractured on this is overstated,” according to Landon Wall, a Republican pollster. “When voters see a decisive military operation that doesn’t spiral into a larger conflict, they view it as a success.” Still, he acknowledged, “Voters are cautious of forever wars. Obviously, there is a lot that can still happen.”
Trump’s standing is further complicated by the fact that he did not seek congressional authorization or public approval before taking the U.S. into a direct conflict with Iran.
Rubin, the former Bush administration Pentagon official, said,
“If we end up with a civil war in Iran, or if we end up with different factions gaining a hold of Iran’s radiological material or chemical weapons: It’s a whole different ball game.”
Compared to other military moves that have sparked similar backlash from MAGA loyalists in Trump’s first year, this conflict already poses the biggest threat to resulting in direct, long-term U.S. involvement. While the U.S. has financially supported Israel’s war in Gaza and Ukraine’s defense against Russia, American troops have never been directly involved — or killed in — either conflict.
Just one day after the Iran conflict began, that calculus has already changed in the Middle East.
Before the U.S. launched its strikes, Vice President JD Vance told The Washington Post on there was “no chance” the U.S. would be in a years-long conflict, describing himself as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions.” Nonetheless, in a video address to the nation without the White House press corps present, Trump laid out expansive goals in America’s undertaking of a “massive and ongoing” operation in Iran, including preventing Iran from destabilizing the region through its network of proxy terrorist groups, building up its missile arsenal, or obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Khamenei was the architect of militant groups informally known as the “Axis of Resistance” — including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza, as well as smaller groups in Iraq — that are aligned against the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia to protect Iran’s influence in the region. In an interview with MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell and Laura Barrón-López, Trump celebrated his death as “a great thing for our country.” He also referred to Khamenei, who also sponsored the slogan “Death to America,” as a “bad man.”
Iranians are celebrating the strikes as their hopes rise that it could precipitate the toppling of the oppressive regime over its people. Thousands reportedly died in mass protests that began late last year against the government and the country’s suffering economy. The president, in his call with MS NOW, repeatedly referred to celebrations by Iranian Americans occurring in Los Angeles, California, and elsewhere around the world.
The president ended his address to Americans with a message to the Iranian people. “The hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said. “Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
Lack of a clear Iran plan could suck US into a long conflict: ‘Where does this go?’
Lack of a clear Iran plan could suck US into a long conflict: ‘Where does this go?’
“Critics are demanding that President Trump outline his vision for Iran amid ongoing attacks and reports of American casualties. The lack of a clear plan has raised concerns about the US being drawn into a prolonged conflict. While Trump has expressed a desire for regime change, his approach remains unclear, leaving many questioning the administration’s objectives and the potential for a diplomatic resolution.
Donald Trump is under pressure to spell out his vision for Iran amid the ongoing attacks on the country and reports of the first American casualties since the launch of unprovoked US and Israeli military strikes.
Trump’s critics are demanding that the White House provide greater clarity about what comes next. Opponents and analysts say the lack of a clear plan outlined so far has created a danger of the US being sucked into a long-lasting conflict of the sort that Trump repeatedly vowed to avoid.
“If the administration has a game plan, they have yet to reveal it, frankly,” said Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow and Iran specialist at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
“He’s going to have to move in the direction of a bigger political project, which isn’t just the military part, but a deeper conversation in his administration about what sort of regime change they could bring about.
“Then it’s not going to be a campaign of four days or four weeks or even four months. It could be something much longer.”
Trump – who has repeatedly denounced the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a mistake – has been criticised for failing to publicly make the case for launching renewed attacks on Iranian installations after claiming to have “obliterated” its nuclear facilities in a series of strikes last June.
His brief remarks on Iran in last week’s state of the union speech referred to the threats from its nuclear programme and ballistic missiles but made no mention of regime change. He also said he would prefer to resolve the issues of Iran’s supposed military threat through diplomacy.
Democrats have voiced fears that the decision to attack Iran could be open-ended without a clearly stated goal.
“Where does this all go?” Jim Himes, the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee told NPR. “We can bomb Iran along with the Israelis for, you know, lengthy period of time, but in the service of what?
“Is the intention regime change? Because there aren’t many examples either of regime change affected through bombing, or, quite frankly, of American military forces actually doing regime change in a way that is satisfactory.”
Vananka warned that there was little prospect of regime change without the regime collapsing “under its own weight” in the face of popular opposition or the US putting “boots on the ground”, an option he suggested should be best carried out using intelligence assets rather than troops.
“A smart way [of implementing the latter option] would be intelligence led by the same people that the CIA has on the ground [that] revealed to them who were the senior leaders that are hiding, where they’re hiding, when they’re hiding.
“Use the same assets to start creating new set of political dynamics in the regime and essentially make people accept that this regime is gone, it’s not going to come back in the same way and essentially have kind of a political transformation along those lines. It requires a lot of investment, and it’s not even a sure thing that the US can pull that off.”
Steven Cash, a former CIA operations officer and now head of the Steady State – an organization of retired US national security officers – called the absence of a “what’s next” plan “very troubling” and suggested that Trump may be more interested in creating conditions to interfere in the forthcoming US midterm elections than regime change in Iran.
“One of the things that we have certainly learned from everything from the Korean war through the cold war, through Vietnam and certainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, is it’s not enough to start a war, you need to have a plan to end a war,” he said.
With the theocracy’s most powerful political figure and top cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, confirmed as having been killed – along with scores of other top regime figures – Trump has said those that remained were keen to talk.
“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” he told the Atlantic. “They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long.”
But in the middle of the attacks on Iran – and Tehran’s retaliation across the Middle East – that might not be easy.
Most of those involved in earlier negotiations had been killed, Trump said. “Most of those people are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone, because that was a big hit. They could have made a deal. They should’ve done it sooner.”
The comments appeared to support Vatanka’s view that the president “doesn’t have a plan for regime change” but is instead seeking a “weakened regime that doesn’t hurt anyone”.
“If he wanted regime change, there are plenty of opposition figures he can bring to the White House and say, ‘This guy is going to be the next ruling leader in Iran’,” Vatanka said. “He doesn’t do that, which leaves us thinking, maybe he’s still thinking to [make a deal with] same regime.”
But that notion could be blown off course by Iranian retaliation, which might force Trump to adopt a harder line to avoid looking weak.
Three US troops were reported killed and five were injured as Iran retaliated with a wave of strikes of its own on Sunday.
Trump gave explicit support for “regime change” in his video taped message announcing the strikes on Saturday, but provided little indication of how it should happen beyond urging the Iranian population to act.
“For many years, you have asked for America’s help,” he said. “Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”
Israel strikes Lebanon after Iran ally Hezbollah fires missiles over border
Israel strikes Lebanon after Iran ally Hezbollah fires missiles over border
“Israel launched airstrikes on Hezbollah-dominated areas in Beirut and southern Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah’s missile and drone attacks. The strikes, which killed at least 31 people, were in response to Hezbollah’s actions following the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The conflict has escalated, drawing Lebanon into the broader US-Israeli war with Iran.
Conflict spreads as militant group targets Israel over Ali Khamenei killing and IDF responds with Beirut strikes
Israel has carried out heavy airstrikes on the Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut after the Iran-backed Lebanese group launched missiles and drones towards Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
Residents of Beirut were woken by the sounds of about a dozen blasts at 3am as Israel struck three different locations in the south of Lebanon’s capital. Bombings continued into the late hours of the morning, with the area almost entirely deserted by the time of a strike at around noon.
The explosions rocked windows around the city and were heard from miles away. People heard warplanes and bombs being dropped as airstrikes were carried out over wide swathes of the south of the country, collapsing buildings in villages near Tyre.
At least 31 people were killed 149 injured in the strikes, in what Lebanon’s health ministry said was a preliminary toll.
Lebanon is the latest country sucked into the US-Israeli war with Iran, which in its third day has expanded to much of the Middle East. Iran continued to attack Gulf Arab states, with a drone hitting an Aramco oil refinery in Saudi Arabia on Monday morning. Overnight, a drone hit a UK military base in Cyprus – the first time that Iranian strikes have affected an EU state.
The senior Iranian official Ali Larijani said Iran did not want to attack states in the region but that it would continue to target them as long as they hosted US bases that were being used for staging grounds for attacks against Iran.
The US president, Donald Trump, who announced the start of the war against Iran as an operation aimed at regime change, gave contradictory statements over whether or not there could be a diplomatic off-ramp to the conflict.
Initially telling the Atlantic on Sunday that he was “ready to talk”, he seemed to later harden his position and in a video released on his Truth Social platform he said the fighting would continue until all objectives were achieved, vowing to “avenge” US troops killed so far.
Larijani, in a brief post on X, said: “We will not negotiate with the United States.”
It is unclear how deep the involvement of Hezbollah will be in the Iran war, as the Lebanese state seeks to restrain it from further involving the country in the regional conflict.
Hezbollah said in a statement it had launched a barrage of missiles and drones at the Mishmar al-Karmel missile defence facility near Haifa at around midnight in “retaliation” for the killing of Khamenei and “in defence of Lebanon and its people”.
Israel responded just a few hours later, hitting what it described as Hezbollah targets across south Lebanon, the Bekaa valley and the Beirut suburb of Dahieh. The Israeli military claimed the strikes on Dahieh had killed several senior Hezbollah officers.
“Hezbollah opened a campaign against Israel overnight and is fully responsible for any escalation. Any enemy that threatens our security will pay a heavy price,” the chief of the Israeli military, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, said in a statement.
An Israeli military spokesperson issued evacuation orders for 55 different villages and towns across Lebanon, warning people to get at least a kilometre away as they were near “Hezbollah operatives and facilities”. Earlier on Sunday, the Israeli military announced the deployment of 100,000 reservists, many of them along the border with Lebanon.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military, Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, said that thus far Israeli troops had not entered Lebanese territory, but were “prepared to do so” if necessary. The goal of the campaign was to “degrade the capabilities of the group”.
Streams of people began to flee Dahieh by car and by foot, and lines of cars began to form outside petrol stations in the southern city of Tyre as residents began to head northwards. The highways from Dahieh into the centre of the capital were gridlocked with scooters and cars driving over rubble and debris from the earlier strikes. In the south, people drove northwards on both sides of the highway.
Videos showed the tops of buildings in Dahieh engulfed in flames, while burnt out husks of cars lay at the feet of the crumpled buildings. As they scrambled to flee, witnesses reported seeing rocket barrages flying from south Lebanon towards Israel, in what seemed to be Hezbollah artillery volleys.
The memory of the 13-month war between Israel and Hezbollah that ended in 2024 loomed large in the minds of Lebanese. Fears spread quickly that Dahieh, the Bekaa valley and large parts of the south could be rendered uninhabitable as it was then. Israeli bombed those areas daily during the war and nearly 4,000 people were killed and a million displaced.
In the early hours of Monday, families and friends quickly devised plans for what they should do and tried to understand what exactly was happening, as the number of displaced people from affected areas in Lebanon grew.
Dozens of schools in the capital opened their doors to shelter the displaced families, while crowds of people sat in Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut.
Lebanon’s government quickly condemned Hezbollah’s decision to bomb Israel without consulting the state. Without naming the militant group by name, the Lebanese prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said he would “not allow the country to be dragged into new adventures”.
“The rocket fire from southern Lebanon is an irresponsible and suspicious act that jeopardises Lebanon’s security and safety and provides Israel with pretexts to continue its aggression,” Salam said in a post on X.
For weeks, Lebanese officials had scrambled to prevent Hezbollah from joining any potential war in Iran, as Israel passed messages to its Lebanese counterparts that any attack would draw a wide-ranging response against the entire country.“
Sunday, March 01, 2026
Who benefits from Trump’s war in Iran? The answer is disturbingly clear
Who benefits from Trump’s war in Iran? The answer is disturbingly clear
"There's no four-dimensional chess here. There's just the president, and what we know he's like.
This is an adapted excerpt from MS Now’s Feb. 28 special coverage.
Early Saturday morning, the United States started a war with Iran for some reason. Your guess is as good as anyone’s as to why the president of the United States did this.
In terms of pure rational deduction about what he’s doing here, we can rule out all the reasons he has said he is doing it.
Is Iran on the precipice of having ballistic missiles that can reach the United States? Absolutely not. The United States is very far from Iran. One might even say it’s a whole continent away, which means a missile launched from there to hit us here would have to be an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Does Iran have intercontinental ballistic missiles? No, it does not. And there is no known evidence, or even serious allegation, that it’s anywhere near developing one anytime soon. Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio has recently admitted that the threat is only that maybe one day Iran might have that kind of capability. One day. Just like you or I might one day learn to fly! Or to time travel!
This isn’t Venezuela. There’s no vice ayatollah who’s going to step in to take over the top job.
Is Iran a week away from industrial-grade uranium enrichment? That’s what the president’s diminutive real estate friend, Steve Witkoff, asserted this week when asked about the Iran talks he’s inexplicably part of on behalf of the United States, despite his only relevant experience and training being that he is an old real estate friend of the president. But no, Iran is not. Not only has there been no American or international evidence or intelligence made public that Iran is doing that, but even the Trump administration says it’s not happening. Rubio, at a press conference in Saint Kitts and Nevis on Wednesday, told reporters, “They’re not enriching right now.”
Have we just started a war with Iran because they’ve got some advanced nuclear program that’s rushing toward a bomb? Ask President Donald Trump, who insists that the last time he ordered the bombing of Iran, it “totally obliterated” the country’s nuclear program. So it’s hard to say that anything “totally obliterated” — gone, pulverized, erased from the Earth — is now suddenly there again, and so a war must start.
So it’s not that they’re gonna get us with ballistic missiles. It’s not that they’re enriching uranium, and we don’t like that. It’s not their nuclear program, which Trump says he obliterated.
The president has said a couple of times in recent days that he just wants the Iranian government to say the words that they’re not pursuing a nuclear bomb. The Iranian government, actually, has said that over and over again; they’ll say it whenever you like. So that does not appear to be the reason either.
So why has the president just started a war with Iran?
Is it because his heart bleeds, empathetically, on a human level, for the protesters in Iran who have been killed by their own government in January and February? Is it because Trump really feels for those people, and that his heart throbs with a passionate support for the right of free speech, the right of people everywhere to protest against their own government, and not face violence because of it? Is that what you think? If so, good morning, hope you’ve slept well for this past decade in which you’ve been dead to the world.
But suspend disbelief for a moment.
Just suppose that the reason the United States of America has just started a war with Iran is because — as the president said in his weird prerecorded video message early Saturday morning — he wants the people of Iran to rise up and overthrow their government.
And maybe they will. Maybe they will try?
But Iran is a huge country. It’s 92 million people. It’s more than triple the population of Iraq or Afghanistan when we started disastrous regime change wars with those countries two decades ago.
Iran has regular military forces, but it also has a huge Revolutionary Guard force that has, effectively, its own army, navy, intelligence service and special forces. It plays a huge role in the massive, suffocating domestic security services that are happy to terrorize the Iranian people in the best of times, and to massacre the Iranian people in the worst times. They have massive economic interests. They have a huge hold on multiple sectors of the Iranian economy. And, to state the obvious, they are not the kind of force that’s going to go poof when Trump’s airstrikes manage to kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian state media reported Sunday morning local time that the supreme leader has been killed.
But this isn’t Venezuela. There’s no vice ayatollah who’s going to step in to take over the top job.
If you voted for Donald Trump because you believed the hype that he was “America first,” that he was against foreign wars, that he was definitely against regime change wars… well, again, good morning, hope you slept well. But the president, in this case, says explicitly that this is a war we’re waging for regime change.
After the now-slain leader, Khamenei, who’s been in place since 1989, there’s no other person of that stature to just pop in place and say it’s done. And so if you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government — to organize very quickly into a new populist political force to rise up against, among other things, the security services there that have been massacring them by the thousands — you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate.
When you, Donald Trump, in your baseball hat, proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which Trump did not.
You might have taken steps to turn the internet back on in Iran so the people there could reach each other and the world, and so the world could reach them too.
You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform and put it in the hands of a soft-focus election-denier local news anchor most famous for proclaiming the fraudulence of American elections.
If this is a regime change war that Trump is seriously hoping the Iranian people will complete for him, there has been no serious or even unserious effort by the United States to make it possible for any uprising by the Iranian people to succeed.
And so why is this happening?
Well, cui bono? — who benefits?
It’s always useful to start with that question. In any country.
Who wants Iran bombed off the map, for their own reasons? Who are their rivals and enemies? Perennially, the Gulf Arab states, countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
You know, Qatar. The country that just gave Donald Trump a really, really nice $400-milion-dollar plane, a gilded flying palace for his own use both during his presidency and after?
And you remember the United Arab Emirates, structuring a recent, totally pointless crypto financial transaction so that $2 billion of it was stuffed into the Trump family’s otherwise worthless brand new crypto financial firm?
With this president, sadly, we keep learning over and over again that the easiest answer is the truest one.
And you remember the Saudis who stuffed $2 billion into the pockets of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, just as Trump’s first term in office came to a close? Enough people were alarmed about that they actually bothered to come up with an excuse for what made it OK. They said, don’t worry, Jared will never again work for the U.S. government; he’s never coming back to Washington, so we’ll never have to worry about having someone involved in U.S. policy who has also been given billions of dollars by Saudi Arabia.
Well, who was leading the negotiations on behalf of the United States with Iran before we just started this war with them? I mean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in Saint Kitts and Nevis. It wasn’t him. It was Jared Kushner, who was recently paid billions of dollars by Iran’s chief rival, sitting alongside Trump’s tiny real estate friend, Steve Witkoff, whose son recently sought to improve his family fortunes by going to Qatar to seek money from its sovereign wealth fund.
So it’s like if you were having a backyard dispute with your neighbor: “Hey, your new fence crosses into my property line; hey, that tree you just cut down was mine!” You’re having a neighborly dispute, and then the cops show up. And the cops break down your door with a battering ram, they arrest your whole family, ransack your house, and then bulldoze it. They tell your neighbor, “Hey, it’s done, you can take his whole back yard, you can take his house now.”
And as you’re trying to figure out why this has just happened, you come to learn that your neighbor has been paying huge bribes to the police in your town.
There’s lots of attention on Israel, and indeed Israel and the U.S. worked together in the bombing campaign against Iran in June, and again in this new war that started Saturday. But it is the Gulf Arab states who are all against Iran, who want Iran removed as their regional rival. It’s those countries that have been assiduously buying up members of the Trump family and the Trump administration with just astonishing amounts of cash in recent years, and particularly in recent months.
And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not, and that our American government hasn’t bothered to explain in terms that are even internally consistent, let alone rational and sound.
Why did Donald Trump just start a war with Iran? You tell me.
The New York Times editorial board wrote Saturday that in this second term, Trump’s “appetite for military intervention grows with the eating.”
It’s not that they have ballistic missiles that can reach us. It’s not that they have achieved some kind of breakthrough in nuclear enrichment. It’s not that they have or are about to have a nuclear bomb. It’s not about somehow supporting the Iranian people — or we’d be actually supporting the Iranian people.
Maybe it’s for oil, as the president daydreams himself into another 19th-century war fantasy of conquering foreign lands he doesn’t care about but would like to rob of their natural resources. Maybe he thinks Iran and its proud 92 million people will happily and easily become a new colony in an empire helmed by an American emperor.
Maybe.
But as this now becomes the seventh country he’s bombed since being back in office for one year, cui bono? — who benefits? — seems like a disturbingly easy question to answer.
With this president, sadly, we keep learning over and over again that the easiest answer is the truest one. There’s no four-dimensional chess here. There’s just him, and what we know he’s like.
This president appears to have grown his enormous and excited new appetite for military intervention during this term in office just because he thinks war is easy and exciting.
It earns him not only close attention but even occasionally plaudits from Very Serious People who are professionally inclined to believe that there’s some rationale, some strategery, some good thinking behind the start of every war.
It gets him a ton of attention. He gets to do it unilaterally — naturally, there’s no question that he would seek a declaration of war from Congress or even an authorization for the use of military force. It’s something he gets to do on his own say so in a baseball hat from home. It’s exciting, it’s controversial, it’s all about him, and — not for nothing — it’s the world’s greatest change of subject.
The airstrikes were launched on Saturday, a weekday and a school day in Iran. The internet’s off there. The government hasn’t advised its own people what to do, as American airstrikes hit multiple cities.
Donald Trump, as a private citizen, repeatedly said — in 2011, in 2012 and in 2013 — that then-President Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran in order to help his political prospects, in order to get re-elected.
Trump was wrong about that. Obama didn’t start a war with Iran. But we know why Trump thought Obama should do it. He said so. He said it would get Obama re-elected. We know what Trump thought would be the salutary domestic political effect of a U.S. president starting a war with Iran.
And now, facing domestic political disaster in this year’s elections, he’s done it himself."
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