War on Terror Nightmare Arrives As Trump Bombs Iran

Edited by Sam Thielman

OF COURSE he was going to bomb Iran.

In 2020, President Trump assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the most important military strategist of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian restraint, not U.S. strategy, and definitely not anything calling itself principle, kept the War on Terror from finally reaching its white whale in Teheran. 

No more. 

I was coming back from helping one of my best friends pack up his late stepfather's apartment in Queens when I saw that Trump had deployed additional B-2 bombers, capable of dropping the massive GBU-57s that can destroy hardened, below-ground installations like the nuclear facility at Fordow that was one of the three sites the U.S. bombed this evening. Lots of media coverage hedged about what the deployment meant, saying it could just be a maneuver to pressure Iran into "returning to the negotiating table," as if the negotiations had been anything over than a cover for an Israeli bombing that always had full White House backing; as if the issue in the "negotiations" was anything other than forcing Iran to surrender its right to enrich its own uranium for civilian nuclear energy; as if there was any actual diplomatic resolution available.

The nightmare is here. Twenty-four years after the Islamic Republic attempted a post-9/11 rapprochement that the Bush administration rejected, nine years after Iran fought ISIS on the ground in Iraq while the U.S. provided de facto air support, and seven years after Trump violated the nuclear accord with Iran known as the JCPOA, the War on Terror has reached perhaps its most terrifying moment yet. It has done so under the leadership of a madman who on Wednesday boasted of his unpredictability, saying with an air of self-satisfaction that "nobody knows what I'm going to do." The fate of perhaps millions of people was in the balance when he said that. The day before, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the G7 Summit in Canada that "nothing… suggests [Trump's] about to get involved in this conflict." 

Time will tell whether this was deception, wishful thinking, willful blindness or intelligence failure on Starmer's part. But many people, at home and around the world, convinced themselves that Trump wasn't going to join Israel's war, as if there has been a single day since October 7 when Israel's genocide and regional aggression lacked the support of the United States, and specifically of Donald Trump. The White House's Wednesday statement that Trump would decide in two weeks was greeted with an exhale by many people, several of whom DM'd me upset or incredulous when I posted on Instagram that we had just seen last week that his timelines are ruses and formal U.S. entry into war was in the cards. To them I can only say that REIGN OF TERROR is on sale at affordable prices in multiple formats. 

Not for a day in Trump's political career has he been interested in peace. People with his politics are never interested in peace. Domination is what they are interested in, particularly after they sign onto wars of aggression in Iraq that turn into fiascoes. Cultivating humiliation and fueling revenge is what they are interested in, rather than the peacebuilding efforts found in addressing the imperial and material root causes that seeded the fiascoes. Paying attention to that distinction is a good way to determine who is actually interested in peace.

The Islamic Republic was born out of a vengeance for U.S. imperialism in 1953, and quickly inflicted the humiliation of the hostage crisis upon the United States. They added additional humiliations, painfully felt by many Iraq War veterans, surely including the current secretary of defense, by taking advantage of the Iraq occupation to kill and maim the U.S. troops that were now on their western border. There is a War on Terror context to what happened today, but that isn't the only context. The American desire to destroy Iran is as old as Hulkamania. 

For the past week or so, MAGA has been engaged in a discourse war between its militarist wings and its restrainer wings. Each are attempting to claim the mantle of True MAGA for its side. This is a political battle and the restrainer wing has lost. But the fact that either side could claim MAGA for its competing preferences is what we call a "clue." Nativism can yield many things, but it will never yield peace. There is too much latent militarism within the conception of the American project that MAGA favors for it to ever do so. The side claiming to be for getting out of wars abroad applauds as Trump sends the Marines to Los Angeles to backstop masked men kidnapping working people out of Home Depot parking lots. There is no satisfaction to be had here, but the total humiliation of the fraud Tulsi Gabbard will have to do. I hope everyone who believed Gabbard was a peacenik feels as stupid as they've always looked. 

Where is the antiwar party in America? It is in neither the Republican nor the Democratic Parties. Earlier this month, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer all but called Trump a pussy for allegedly "folding" on Iran. "Iran is a sworn enemy of the United States and can never be permitted to become a nuclear-capable power," began a statement on Friday from House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Starting from a false premise will never yield a valid conclusion. Jeffries went on to make a procedural point about who gets to start a war—Congress; though that ship sailed in 2001, with apologies to 1973—and then a fantasy point about "aggressive diplomacy resulting in a longer and stronger agreement," when it was plain to see that the diplomatic pantomime of Trump and envoy Steve Witkoff manufactured the crisis. 

Never did—never would—Jeffries or Schumer say the words that Americans overwhelmingly demand: No War With Iran. 

I am tempted to write Tell me how this ends, a quote from then-Major General David Petraeus as the invasion of Iraq unfolded. Whatever Petraeus the military officer thought about the wisdom of invading Iraq, this time around, as a partner in one of the biggest private-equity firms, he's fully in favor of bombing Iran. It's totally different from invading Iraq, he recently told the New York Times, because this time there's no invasion. That's an irresponsible distinction. Regional wars need not involve occupations to be bloody disasters. Petraeus is an architect of the network of U.S. military installations around the Middle East that tonight look like targets. Even before the bombing, the Houthis, fresh off their Red-Sea victory, threatened to hold U.S. ships at risk again. 

And no one knows how this can end. The Israeli defense minister, dropping the veil from the nonsensical pretext that all this was about a phantom nuclear weapon, said that killing Ayatollah Khamanei—"preventing his existence"—is "one of the operation's goals." The Israelis, now with the Americans formally involved, are going to attempt to collapse the Islamic Republic. Supported by the Biden administration last summer, they decimated the Axis of Resistance, and would never miss the opportunity to attempt total victory. The Jerusalem Post editorialized on Wednesday that Trump should not only destroy the regime, but

Forge a Middle East coalition for Iran’s partition. Encourage long-term plans for a federalized or partitioned Iran, recognizing that Khamenei’s theocratic regime cannot be reformed. Offer security guarantees to Sunni, Kurdish, and Balochi minority regions willing to break away.

This ought to be taken seriously. The shattering of Libya and Syria over the past 15 years should be a reminder that the territorial integrity of Iran is not guaranteed. An Iran that cannot project power if it fractures into ethnically driven statelets serves Israel's goals, and that will sound more pleasing to American ears than the prospect of an occupation. 

But remember that this war did not start today. It did not start on October 7, it did not start in 2020, it did not start in 2028, it did not start in 2003-11, it did not start in 2001, and it did not start in 1979. It started in 1953. It started when unchecked American aggression, driven by capital's demand for oil and anticommunism, toppled an Iranian government. Remember that in the days ahead, when our leaders seek to topple another. 

Where will this lead next? Who will finally stop it? How many must die before it stops?