Trump's assault on Iran is a war without honour

Photo by Carlos Barria - Pool/Getty Images
Modern nations not facing a mortal threat rarely, if ever, go to war without a high-flying moral justification. Until now. Trump's justification for going to war with Iran is that he will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Period. No argument about the need to abolish Iran's cruel repressive regime. Nothing about human rights. Not a syllable about the glories of exporting democracy to an undemocratic land.
Instead, Trump addressed the country after the American attacks on Iran Saturday night and weirdly 'congratulated' Benjamin Netanyahu on 'erasing the threat to Israel' with American help. He ended his remarks by muttering, as if receiving an Academy Award, 'and I want to just thank everybody and, in particular, God. I want to just say, we love you, God.' He then declared, 'God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, God bless America.' No American president has ever led the country into war with such a lack of feeling, with such paucity of eloquence, with a piety so rote as to be transparently impious. But then again, no American president as divisive, undemocratic, criminal and inept as Trump has proven to be has ever led his country into war.
Yet the flat-footed, uninspired, no-nonsense businessman's approach to plunging the country into armed conflict is, no doubt for many, a relief after the golden liberal claptrap that accompanied the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The former was justified by oceans of dazzling liberal eloquence. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural speech: 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.' He wasn't talking about the Peace Corps. Just four months later, he began to stealthily increase the number of American troops in Vietnam.
Interventionist neoconservative foreign policy might be back in the news, but nobody does foreign intervention like the liberal elites. America might never have made war on Iraq if it had not been for the so-called liberal hawks at the time, most of whom worked in the media's most prestigious venues, where their tides of rhetoric justifying the invasion soaked the American psyche into compliant stupefaction. Liberal politicians followed suit.
By contrast, Trump has never said that there is anything spiritually or historically exceptional about America. What is exceptional is America's military and economic might. His heartland followers, many of whom lost loved ones to the liberals' starry-eyed infernos in Vietnam and Iraq, are sick of being sweet-talked into oblivion, from an idealising domestic policy that excludes them, to seemingly high-minded foreign policy that amputates their limbs and gives them a medal and a pat on the back. They are being enraptured into another foolish and unnecessary war now not by hostility to Iran's brutal regime. They are as gratified by Trump's transactional approach to war as they are by his transactional approach to politics and society.
Trump has likely been advised to prosecute a limited assault, as America did in the first Gulf war and later in Kosovo. Unlike then, he will strike exclusively from the air, and will keep to the air even in the event of inevitable retaliation. Unless a bomb or a gunman explodes in an American city. But then Trump would simply send in federal troops. Win-win, as they say about a successfully negotiated business deal.
The idea, if Trump indeed is being instructed in it, that he can fight a limited war in Iran from the air offers the narrowest ray of hope. The vicious, self-serving idealism that enabled the country to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003 guaranteed a blinkered momentum that offered no hope. The difference between then and now is profound. There is, for one thing, no 2025 equivalent to A Problem from Hell, which was published one year before America invaded Iraq. Samantha Power's Pulitzer-Prize-winning bestseller, written from some fantastical mental lair of easy indignation, excoriated America's refusal to prevent various genocides, and all but called for American military intervention in such situations.
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The chapter on Iraq, where Power painted a portrait of an inept and spineless US, unable to locate Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons, had the effect of shaming liberal elites into embracing the Bush administration's lies about the existence of 'weapons of mass destruction'. Power herself was at first all for the invasion. Weeks after it began, she told the LA Times: 'That's what's so great about the fall of Saddam Hussein. Now we can actually put our money and power where our might has been so far.' The tussle between Trump and Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, over whether Iran's nuclear capability was around the corner or years down the line was a ludicrous caricature of Power's depiction of the search for Saddam's chemical weapons, and of the later phoney hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Trump couldn't have cared less.
Of course the most important difference between 2003 and now was the attacks on 9/11. Not only had America never been breached in such a way before, but the threat of terrorism that seemed to increase after the attacks created a universal depression and unease. Pulverising Iraq under the cover of lofty rhetoric about liberation in the name of democracy satisfied the American thirst for morally unexceptionable revenge.
Eerily there is nothing like the pretext of a 9/11 behind Trump's bombing of Iran. But then there is also no American carnage, no invasion of 'aliens', no burning down of American cities, no antisemitic pogroms at universities. There are only Trump's fascinating lies, one being, as he said in his brief remarks to the nation, that Iran had killed 'hundreds of thousands' of people in acts of terror. Truth, the saying goes, is the first casualty of war. Peace, in Trump's America, is now the first major casualty of the death of truth.
[See also: Where have all the anti-war Democrats gone?]
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The Independent

27 minutes ago

• The Independent

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The Guardian

34 minutes ago

• The Guardian

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BBC News

36 minutes ago

• BBC News

Could this be the most significant Nato since the Cold War?

As the world holds its breath to see what happens next after the US launched direct attacks on Iran's nuclear sites, US President Donald Trump is expected in the Netherlands on Tuesday for a Nato will be Trump's first Nato meeting since being re-elected. In the past, he's made angry comments about alliance members freeloading off US security guarantees. European allies are desperate to prove him wrong. They hope to persuade him not to pull troops or US capabilities out of the continent."Relations with Europe have been so strained since Trump returned to the White House - over trade tariffs and more - that a few weeks ago, we weren't even sure he'd turn up to this summit," one high level diplomat - who spoke on condition of anonymity - told me."With Russia and China watching for western weakness, that would have been a disaster."But Moscow and Beijing may yet be able to bring out the popcorn. Nato's secretary general Mark Rutte designed this summit around Trump. 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It's unclear if the US would sign up to an end-of-summit declaration this week identifying Russia as the main threat to the Nato trust in the US as its ultimate protector has been shaken by Trump's seemingly softly-softly approach with Moscow, and by his heavy-handed pressure on Kyiv, as he's tried to end the war in on Friday night, you could almost hear European diplomats grinding their teeth, after Trump blithely justified the enormous 5% defence spending target he's demanded of allies, while exempting himself and the US from the commitment."I don't think we should, but I think they should," he said. "We've been supporting Nato so long… So I don't think we should, but I think that the Nato countries should, absolutely."Then again, Europe's leaders arguably should have been better prepared by now in terms of may be the bluntest and most unpredictable, but Trump is by no means the first US president to want to move military attention and investment from Europe to other priority areas, particularly the Indo-Pacific. President Obama was very clear about that back in 2011. The US has nuclear weapons stored in Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. It has 100,000 battle-ready troops stationed across Europe, 20,000 of them in Eastern European Nato countries, sent there by President Biden after Russia's full-scale invasion of continent could make up a shortfall in troop numbers, especially with Germany and Poland planning to significantly build up their ground forces over the next few years. But Europe's dependency on the US goes deeper, says Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director-general of the Royal United Services has relied on Washington for intelligence gathering, surveillance, air force capabilities and command and control. The US has performed a pivotal leadership role in Nato, bringing its members and forces are exactly the capabilities that are scarce and needed by the US military in Asia, says Mr Chalmers. If removed from Europe, they'd take a very long time to long ago, many Nato countries in Europe avoided building up continental capabilities, such as extending France's nuclear umbrella to other allies, for fear the US might say: "Oh well, you no longer need us. We're off!"But now, Europe is being forced to shoulder more security responsibility, not only to try to persuade Washington to stay - but also in case the US president decides to withdraw from Europe to a greater or lesser extent. No one knows what Trump's intentions are. Europe's Nato leaders were hugely relieved recently, when his administration announced that US Air Force Lieutenant General Alexus Grynkewich would assume the traditionally US-occupied Nato position of Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. That implied commitment to the defence Washington is carrying out its own military spending and defence review. Announcements are expected in autumn. It's thought unlikely there'll be any new US funding for Ukraine. And very likely that the 20,000 extra troops in eastern Europe will be the first US forces to be pulled out of the this, Poland says it will attend this week's Nato summit in a confident mood. In stark contrast to Spain, Warsaw believes it's leading by example - spending more of its national income on defence (currently 4.7% of GDP) than any other Nato member, including the US. It aims, it says, to build the most powerful land army in the Cold War, Poland lived under the shadow of the Soviet Union. The country neighbours Ukraine. It's not hard to persuade Poles that defence is a top politicians in countries further away from Russia, the argument is more challenging. Spanish media has been full of speculation that disagreements over defence spending could topple the country's precarious coalition government. Trying to both placate Trump by agreeing to his defence spending demands, while also sweetening the pill for more cash-strapped European leaders, Nato is proposing to split the 5% target into two parts: 3.5% of annual national income on defence, with a further 1.5% of GDP to be spent on "defence-related" issues, like expanding cargo sea ports in the Netherlands, for example, or France investing in cyber has the added bonus of bringing Europe into line with US military spending of 3.4% of GDP - a huge psychological landmark, says Camille Grand, former Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment at Nato and now defence expert at the European Council of Foreign however you play with the figures, we're talking about governments having to spend billions more on defence. The money has to come from new taxes - a method Estonia has been trying out - or more borrowing, which will be hugely expensive for countries like Italy that already have large amounts of government debt. Another option is a reduction in welfare spending - known as "guns or butter," or "tanks or pensions" its Strategic Defence Review, the UK recently stressed to the public the need for more military spending, but Mr Chalmers says neither Downing Street nor most other European governments have fully prepared their electorates for the trade-offs that huge new defence investments will timetable for reaching the 5% target is key. Nato allies have called for a 7-10 year window. Nato's Secretary General has suggested that could be too late. With Moscow's economy very much on a war footing, Russia will be able to attack a Nato country within five years, he says. Defending Europe isn't just about how much governments spend. As important is what they spend their money on.A big European weakness is that there are lots of duplicate and incompatible capabilities across the continent: reportedly 178 different types of weapon systems and 17 different makes of tanks in the EU alone, for example. Putting aside national defence contracts and pride, and pooling European resources in the name of efficiency, is yet another thorny debate that will likely be sidelined at this week's what definite outcomes can we expect?That very much depends on the man arriving in the Netherlands on Airforce ambassador to Nato says the meeting could be historic."A watershed moment" is how another high-level diplomat put it to me – and possibly "the most significant Nato summit since the Cold War": the moment Europe began to spend as much as the US on defence and to truly assume responsibility for its own security. BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.