War on Iran: Enter the War President

 DONALD TRUMP’S REALITY WHERE HE CAN bully his way through a confused and fragmented world and things more or less work out for him is currently having a close encounter of the third kind. With Iran.

An easy win in Venezuela, last year’s bomb­ing of Iran’s nuclear sites which came at no domestic and inter­national cost, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s relentless exhortations apparently made Trump and his key ad­visers confident they could trigger regime change, rearrange Iran, and lance a gathering threat. The Iranian people who came out in great numbers in January against the regime would do the rest. Except they didn’t, and there was no organised opposition which a defecting segment of the regime could join. Last heard the CIA was trying to arm Kurdish groups to spark an uprising.

The war aims of America and Israel don’t coincide. Trump pri­marily wants to remove Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile threats. He has shown a willingness to talk to whoever takes over and he finds it “amazing” that everyone who could potentially be a leader winds up dead. Such is the success of the operation, he gave the war effort 15 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Trump wants to wrap up before the markets tank and head­lines turn nasty and disperse his “armada” in four to five weeks. Netanyahu has a much bigger appetite to continue the war—he wants the many layers of succession built into the system decimat­ed. In other words, he wants real regime change and 82 per cent of the Israelis back him, according to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute. Years of messaging on Iran is internalised by the people.

Trump may yet succeed in his most ambitious venture—reor­dering the Middle East in favour of the US, Israel, and Arab allies. Or he may get consumed by the complexities that undergird the region. For now, Arab nations have moved from neutrality to sup­porting the joint US-Israeli war against Iran. European countries, barring a few, are biding their time but are generally supportive. China, Iran’s strategic partner, condemned the war and accused the US of pushing the region to the “brink of a dangerous abyss.” It has also given Tehran cover at the United Nations and provided critical satellite intelligence just as Beijing did to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor.

For India, home to one of the world’s largest Shia populations, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The war has already come too close for comfort with the US sinking an Iranian destroyer 40 kilome­tres off Sri Lanka’s coast that had just left Indian shores after an international fleet review. Of the 180 sailors on board IRIS Dena, 80 are dead and the death toll is expected to rise.

New Delhi is doing what it does best—walk a fine line among the warring sides, urge restraint, and stress the importance of sovereignty and territorial integrity. The fate of 9.3 million Indi­ans in the Middle East hangs in the balance. Their hard-earned money accounts for 38 per cent of the $125 billion India gets in remittances. But India also made its preferences known—Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Israel, a top arms supplier and technology partner, four days before the war started with the US military build-up in full flow in the background.

IRAN IS NOT VENEZUELA

As the war expands, Iran has shown its ability for precision strikes, spreading the pain to neighbours and unleashing a surprising amount of its own fury against Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion. Five days in, Iran had struck 11 US military facilities, two embassies in the region and several civilian targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Some say the worst is yet to come—Iran is deliberately using older missiles and drones first to deplete US and Israeli interceptors and will send more advanced weapons as the war continues.

Be that as it may, the might of the attackers is greater and will outlast Tehran’s hidden arsenal even if US officials have been talking about depleting stocks. Apparently, Pentagon generals weren’t enthusiastic about this war but they were overruled.

 Trump knows he needs to find a way to quickly declare victory. If for nothing else, then for the oil and stock markets.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. The war was supposed to be short, decisive, and historic where the US would liberate the people and leave. In the video announcing “combat operations”, Trump told the Iranian people, “When we are finished, take over your government. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

But the streets in Iran remain relatively quiet, a dispersed regime has escalated the war, attacked neighbours, and gone as far as to target a British air force base in Cyprus. Even though Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s top leader, was killed along with 40 others on the very first day, the ruling structure did not disintegrate. The decen­tralised command was soon sending hundreds of ‘suicide’ drones, causing havoc from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

For Iran it is a matter of survival and the more the remnant regime can drive up the cost in terms of US casualties, damage re­gional oil and energy infrastructure, and disrupt the “safe haven” economies of Gulf nations, the closer it comes to establishing that Iran is not Venezuela or Cuba or Lebanon or Grenada.

Trump is sobered and somewhat nervous as the war blows through expensive US inventories in a match against cheap drones called Shahed. The political and economic costs at home are rising. The president had to admit that more Americans may die within hours of starting the war.

MAD MAGA

The MAGA faithful are restive. They have one fundamental question: Why? Prominent voices in the movement are talking of “open betrayal” and of America getting mired in another “end­less war”. A backlash is in the making and will grow in direct pro­portion to the number of American casualties and the length of troop deployments.

MAGA believers have grown on a diet of Trump worship—they think of the supreme leader as a peace dividend unto himself, one who will bring back jobs and factories from the dead. But a slow real­isation is dawning that Trump is as prone to military interventions as other presidents. This is his eighth operation following those in Venezuela, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, Iraq, and a previous strike on Iran last June. The name change from the Department of Defence to the War Depart­ment should have been a clue.

The metamorphosis from “president of peace” who loathed America’s “Forever Wars” to a war president was gradual and rests on a combination of opportunism and legacy-building instincts. Top officials have had to deploy circular logic to stress that Iran posed an “imminent threat”. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statements show the war was almost forced—the US knew that Israel planned to attack which would provoke Ira­nian retaliation against US bases in the region which in turn would result in American involvement: “We were not going to sit there and absorb a blow…”

With every passing day, the rhetoric in Washington is getting louder, coarser and rage-heavy, espe­cially that coming from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He has vowed to deliver “death and destruction all day long” once US and Israeli warplanes control Iran’s airspace. His fiery words don’t exude confidence but frustration as the politi­cal narrative runs away and all is lost in the battle at home—the midterm elections in November.

Trump officials have also invoked 47 years of “Death to Amer­ica” chants by Iran’s hardliners, US diplomats being held hostage for 444 days after the 1979 revolution, roadside bombs in Iraq that killed hundreds of American soldiers, the attack on a Marine bar­racks in 1983, and other acts of terror linked to Iran’s regime as extra justification for the war. In fact, Trump is “ending” a war that Iran started, not starting one, they say.

Democrats have dubbed the expanding conflict a “war of choice” and strongly questioned the legal basis while also leaving them­selves wiggle room by denouncing Iran’s regime for all its sins. They agree that Iran should not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons but a president cannot declare war without Congressional authori­sation. Past presidents from both parties have done that and the huffing and puffing is political theatre.

Democrats were still pushing a war powers resolution which aims to stop the military campaign and rein in Trump. The resolu­tion failed in the Senate but even if it passes the House, the votes are simply not there to counter Trump’s veto which will surely come. In the end the show will end up being performative but Democrats, who are expected to take over the House in the midterms, can still flag it as a point in their favour.

PAST PRESENT, FUTURE TENSE

The big question facing the war makers and the war affected: What comes next? A better order or chaos? It is impossible not to remem­ber the fate of Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya no matter what the pol­ished versions of history claim. Not one of those regime-changing, democracy-bringing, rights-enhancing, prosperi­ty-unleashing wars produced a better outcome. In fact, results were uniformly worse. Iran is unlikely to break the dismal pattern.

“A wounded tiger will be a far bigger regional threat,” a former Indian ambassador opined. “A failing state engages in terrorism—like Pakistan. A message will go out that Muslims are being tar­geted by kafirs. It takes only two or three ‘martyrs’ to blow themselves up and cause huge damage.”

The US will prevail but it is likely to leave a more dangerous world behind.