"Anyone who tells you they know where it’s going is probably overconfident about their own powers of prediction."Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.
Just two days ago, the president who ran on the platform of ending endless wars in the Middle East may have started another one. President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of a motorcade in Iraq that had Iranian military leader General Qassem Soleimani in it, killing him. This strike was partly done out of revenge against a recent attack by an Iranian backed group in Iraq that left an American contractor dead, and partly because of the notion that Soleimani was planning an attack against US forces. In fairness to the Trump administration, Soleimani was commander of Iran’s Quds Force, which is the overseas or foreign expeditionary arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most significant and important branch of the Iranian military forces. He was also designated a terrorist by the US government, and is directly responsible for the death of American forces. On the other hand, this was an openly provocative act by Trump that essentially stands as a declaration of war on the country of Iran. While Iran certainly does not want an all out war with the US, some kind of retaliation is almost inevitable, which would lead to more attacks by the US in a deadly game of tit for tat with no foreseeable outcome.
The real tragedy of this is that the whole thing could have been avoided if Trump had just not thrown out the Iran Nuclear deal that had been negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015, which, it should be pointed out, was forged with several American allies who all opposed Trump's ending it. Although that deal had not tamed Iran's desire to dominate the Middle East, they had been living up to their end of the bargain to not make nuclear weapons. By killing the deal in 2018 and then instilling crippling economic sanctions against Iran, Trump made America an unreliable partner willing to throw out a treaty, and also hurt the Iranian people while giving their repressive government an easy scapegoat to blame for the people's suffering. It's possible that, even with his terrible policies on immigration and climate change, killing the Iran deal may turn out to be the worst decision made by this administration, especially because the main reason for it is Trump's childish desire to reverse every decision made by Obama and essentially erase him from the history books.
There is another thing at play here: Trump has been impeached by the House of Representatives and is about to face a vote to remove in the Senate. He is also facing a tough reelection fight this year, and his approval ratings have never gotten over 50% in his first term. By looking tough and taking out a Middle Eastern leader with a record of violence against the US, he may see a bump in the polls. He's already seen complete (and predictable) support from the right wing media, which will fire up his base, even though he ran as an isolationist. Also, calling for a headline grabbing military strike is the perfect way to distract the public from the pile of damning evidence against him in his impeachment (for instance, the administration is refusing to release multiple emails between White House aides about the withheld monetary aid to Ukraine at the heart of the investigation, which hardly appears to be the actions of a president with nothing to hide). This cynical view of a military action can, ironically enough, be traced back to Trump himself: back in 2011, when Trump was just another right wing conspiracy monger, he tweeted out twice that Barack Obama was going to start a war with Iran in order to win reelection. A year later he tweeted this absurd theory two more times! Although this obviously never came to pass, the fact that he would blurt out such ideas shows where his head is at when it comes to using a military action to win an election. The fact of the matter is that Donald Trump is a massive egotist who is terrified at the possibility of being a one term president, and if he sees starting a potentially disastrous war as a path to victory, he'll take it, with no regard to the lives lost on the way.
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