The median age of Americans is 39.2 years old. That means that about half of the population was under the age of 16 when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney invaded Iraq in 2003. They can’t be blamed for having little or no memory of the year-long campaign that the Bush administration waged to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein presented such a grave nuclear threat that we had no choice but to invade Iraq and overthrow his regime.
A large majority of Americans, in fact, probably don’t remember or don’t know that every word that Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Stephen Cambone, Karl Rove and (sadly) Colin Powell said about Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” was a lie. Eighteen months after the invasion, the Bush administration’s own team of inspectors found that there was no nuclear program, no stockpile of chemical or biological weapons, no long-range missiles. It was all a hoax perpetrated by cherry-picked intelligence, the repression of dissenting views in the defense community and waves of propaganda.
It is hard to believe now, but, as I wrote at the time, this campaign was part of the neo-conservative fantasy that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was so powerful that we could engage in serial regime change in the Middle East, toppling hostile governments and installing pro-Western democracies. "Change toward democratic regimes in Tehran and Baghdad would unleash a tsunami across the Islamic world," claimed one neo-con expert, Joshua Muravchik, in August of 2002. Michael Ledeen on September 2002, called for the US to launch "a vast democratic revolution to liberate all the peoples of the Middle East…It is impossible to imagine that the Iranian people would tolerate tyranny in their own country once freedom had come to Iraq. Syria would follow in short order."
Iraq was to be just the beginning of this dream. Thus, they had to convince the American people to go to war by any means necessary. The nuclear threat was the most powerful.
It worked. Our arguments against the war failed to counter this fear campaign. After the invasion, when I was the director of the nuclear program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I wrote with Jessica Mathews and George Perkovich what is still the most comprehensive report on what the officials claimed and what were the facts. We concluded, in short, that not one word was true.
It would be difficult to do such a report today for one simple reason: Trump hasn’t presented a scintilla of evidence that Iran represents an imminent nuclear or missile threat to America. He has skipped the laborious process of manipulating the intelligence, presenting false reports and assessments, of trying to convince the American people, the Congress, our allies and the United Nations that there was an urgent necessity to go to war.
Trump simply spins an ever-changing story about supposed threats to America, relying on friendly and compliant media to amplify his lies over and over. Most importantly, he has a slavish Republican majority in the House and Senate who parrot his lies and refuse to hold any open hearings on the war or debate an authorization resolution.
As part of his effort to consolidate Trump’s authoritarian rule, his Federal Communications Commission Chair Brenden Carr is threatening to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who “want us to lose the war” by reporting stories unfavorable to the administration. Trump is also aided by legions of well-funded groups backing the far-right government of Israel who are happy to support a war that they believe will destroy a country they consider the arch-enemy of Israel.
Truth is not a priority. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is so thrilled with the new bombings he crowed that war with Iran is something he has “longed to do for 40 years.” I can attest to that. I have been in Washington for over 40 years and I cannot remember a time when Netanyahu did not want to invade Iran.
His persistence paid off. He finally found an American president so stupid that he would do what every Republican and Democratic president since Ronald Reagan refused to do: start a pointless, enormously costly war with an adversary on the other side of the globe that, however odious, posed only secondary threats to America.
Trump is now stuck in an unpopular, inconclusive war like a bug on fly paper.
The war propaganda campaign once again lead with a well-tested lie: the nuclear threat. Trump shamelessly claimed last year that the bombing campaign the U.S. and Israel conducted over 12 days had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Most experts knew it was a lie, but Trump stuck with it. Yet, he then claimed we had to go to war again this year to destroy a nuclear program mysteriously risen from the dead. Now, he would get rid of it for certain by toppling the regime.
It hasn’t worked. As many experts warned, the Iranian revolution regime is deep, broad, well-armed and prepared for a war they have heard Israel and the United States threaten for decades. This is not like the one-man rule of Saddam in Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi in Libya: killing the leader does not end the regime.
Trump is now stuck in an unpopular, inconclusive war like a bug on fly paper. He faces two risky choices: Stop the War or Escalate.
Last week, I thought Trump would declare victory and stop the bombings. The quick toppling of the regime that he expected (and that Bibi likely whispered in his ear was all but certain to make him a legend) did not work. Trump and Bibi seem not to have planned for the closure of the Straits of Hormuz that is driving oil prices and fertilizer prices through the roof.
The war is now an anchor around Trump’s neck. It is hugely unpopular, driving prices of energy and food ever higher, and dragging down ever lower Republican chances of winning the November elections. It seemed like a good time to cut and run, claiming that even if he hadn’t changed the regime, the tens of billions of dollars spent on the bombings had “reduced the threat.”
I now think, however, that Trump is likely to escalate. Trump is moving ground troops into the region. Warships are carrying 2,500 Marines from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. The Pentagon has also canceled planned exercises for the 82nd Airborne Division, raising suspicions that they, too, could be deployed. Ominously, when Trump has moved troops into a region, as he did with Venezuela and with Iran last year, he uses them.
I spoke with David Corn, the Washington editor for Mother Jones magazine last week about one possible mission for these troops. They could try to remove or destroy the 440 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium that Iran has produced and which we believe is still stored in bomb-proof facilities deep underground. It would be a very high-risk operation but a president desperate to snatch some semblance of victory from this debacle may push a military now lead by Trump-friendly generals into doing it.
I hope you will watch the short video at the top of this newsletter. David and his team did a terrific job of turning complicated issues into a clear, concise presentation. For more details, please read his excellent magazine article, Trump’s New Nuclear Nightmare in Iran. “In short, with his war in Iran, Trump has created a big, possibly catastrophic problem,” David writes, “A half-ton of highly enriched uranium, which can be made bomb-ready, is somewhere…out there—available for use by Iran’s new regime or perhaps not fully secured and susceptible to theft or expropriation.”
I ran through the possibilities with David:
The United States either has to conduct some high-risk military maneuver where we would land people from the 82nd Airborne or an Israeli commando unit into the site at Isfahan and try to find the uranium, go down hundreds of meters underground, retrieve the uranium and pull it out or perhaps destroy it on site. That is a high risk proposition.
What you’re left with is really the only other solution — it is where we started: a negotiated deal. You have to get Iran’s agreement to secure that material, declare it, allow inspectors, and then either secure it under inspection or downblend it—the process in reverse, bring it down to a 3-percent or 4-percent level [for use as fuel]. That’s the only two solutions to this problem.
But will Iran negotiate with Trump? That is a huge unknown. I told David:
Almost all wars end by some sort of negotiation. If you project forward several weeks, it’s going to have to end. Usually there’s some sort of arrangement that’s made to end a war. With Donald Trump, who seems to be flying by the seat of his pants and making this up as it goes along, we just don’t know. But it’s possible that Trump has put us into the worst of all possible worlds. He’s made it impossible for us to have a negotiated solution to this. And we can’t use any military means to solve the problem. So we’re left in this worst of all worlds, which is Iran holding all the nuclear cards at the end of this war.
Trump and Bibi’s Iran War will go down as the worst planned war in history. Since it is highly unlikely that the Iranian regime will fall, the best case scenario is likely a bitter, entrenched Iran governed by Iranian Revolutionary Guard leaders and clerics more hard-line that those killed in the bombings but with reduced missile capabilities and a nuclear program set back years.
This government can rebuild those capabilities, however. Worse, it will likely still have the 440 kilograms of uranium and centrifuges sufficient to enrich it to weapons-grade within weeks. The war may convince Iran’s leaders that they should now build the Bomb.
It may also be a lesson that many other countries will draw. If you want to stop the United States or Israel from attacking, you better get a nuclear weapon.
