ANOTHER WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

 

After going back and forth on the issue, President Donald Trump announced yesterday that the American military has bombed three different locations in the country of Iran with bunker busting bombs, aimed at ending that country's nuclear weapons program.  This all out assault is in many ways the culmination of decades of aggression between the US and Iran, and while this isn't the first time that America has launched bombs against Iran (Trump already did that back in 2020 when he ordered a  bombing raid that killed Iranian military leader General Qassem Soleimani, although he was in Iraq at the time) it does mark an attack on a much larger scale than has ever been made before.  It was an attack that only America could have made, because Iran's nuclear sites are so far underground that only those huge bunker busting bombs can reach them, and only American planes are big enough to carry those bombs. 

In many ways, this attack was classic Trump in that he essentially declared war on Iran without even bothering to worry about congress, despite the fact that the Constitution states that only congress can officially declare war.  As always, Trump sees himself as above the law.  It also shows how childishly impulsive he is; just last Thursday he said he would give Iran two weeks to decide whether or not to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and then he bombed them two days later.  Some negotiator! 

America's history in Iran is a long and complicated one: back in 1951 the country elected Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister.  He attempted to nationalize the nation's oil reserves, and in 1953, at the behest of Western oil companies, the CIA overthrew his government and placed the Shah of Iran  in power.  He ran the country for 26 years before he was overthrown in 1979 and the country turned to religious fundamentalism, which has held an iron hand over the people of Iran and a hatred of Israel and the US ever since.  

While the idea of a nuclear armed Iran is frightening, especially given the brutal rhetoric Iran's religious leaders have made about Israel,  there's still some debate about just how far Iran's nuclear weapons program was in the first place.  Earlier this year, Trump security advisor Tulsi Gabbard testified in congress that  the US intelligence  community "continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”  When asked about those comments, Trump blurted “I don’t care what she said."  Gabbard would later amend her comments to the president's, but the fact that she stated them before shows that there are definite questions in the intelligence community about how just far along Iran was in building a nuclear weapon.

Because he has the mentality of a toddler and tends to believe whatever he's just heard, Trump's move towards the bombing can clearly be seen to be the result of the many recent conversations he's had with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who ordered his own military to begin bombing Iran just days ago.  Ever since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, Netanyahu has lead an all out war not only on Hamas targets in the Gaza strip, but also in other countries and inevitably in Iran.  These attacks have hurt Iranian proxies in the Middle East, and many commentators have opined that Netanyahu, seeing Iran at its weakest point in years, has made misleading statements about the  threat of Iran's nuclear weapons program to push the US into this bombing.  (It should be pointed out that before the 2004 Iraq war, Netanyahu made numerous comments about how overthrowing Saddam Hussein would help stabilize the Middle East, which were eventually proved as false). 

Sadly, this whole thing could have been avoided: in 2016 then President Barack Obama, after 18 months of negotiations, signed a deal with Iran that lifted some sanctions against it in return for a halt on its nuclear weapons program.  While Iran did continue to support terrorist groups in other countries, it did live up to its end of the bargain on the nuclear deal.  When Trump came into office in his first term, he initially tried to prove that Iran was cheating on the deal, and then when that didn't work, he threw the deal out anyway in 2018, operating on the notion that everything Obama did was bad.  And while he recently attempted to make another deal with Iran, its clear to see how that went.  And so the man who ran for office claiming that he wouldn't get the country into any more disastrous wars in the Middle East, has now lead us into just such a war that could end disastrously! And just how much the strike has delayed Iran's program is also debatable; not surprisingly, much of the Iranian nuclear material has been moved to avoid the strike, although obviously much of it couldn't be moved.  At best this strike will only delay the program for a few years, and with no deal in place Iran could easily start all over again, perhaps leading to even more bombings in a seemingly endless cycle of violence. 

The big question now is how will Iran respond to this?   While Iran's military is obviously smaller than ours, there are any number of ways that it could strike back, and there are around 40,000 US soldiers stationed around the Middle East, who now are all targets.  Iran could also do something like trying to block shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which would hurt the availability of oil.  On the other hand, this all could lead to a new deal with the US that limits future nuclear development, which would, of course,  be the best case scenario. Either way, how this will all turn out is impossible to guess at this point.