Some events are unforeseeable. The current conflagration with Iran wasn’t one of them. Donald Trump first tried to ingratiate himself into the Republican Party by fixating on the purported threat of Iran; you can find tweets to this effect dating all the way back to 2011, when he toyed with running for president during the 2012 primary cycle. To inject himself into the Republican bloodstream, Trump adopted the twofold strategy of harping on Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and fulminating about Iran.
Then he ran for president in 2016 and continued fulminating about Iran. He co-organized a rally with Ted Cruz in September 2015 to rail against the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), which he said was the worst deal of all time, in part because it allowed Iran to maintain low-levels of uranium enrichment. He pledged to withdraw from the deal. Then he was elected president and promptly initiated the process of withdrawing from the deal, despite his own Secretary of State certifying that Iran was in compliance. By 2018, he officially withdrew from the deal, warning that it had somehow empowered Iran to “threaten American cities with nuclear destruction.” He proceeded to institute a policy of “Maximum Pressure” on Iran, with the intent of crippling its government and impoverishing its population, so as to destabilize the society and eventually bring about regime change. The sanctions continued to intensify even during COVID, when they hindered Iran’s ability to import medical supplies.
In June 2019, Trump said he was minutes away from bombing Iran. By December 2019, Trump, along with Mike Pompeo, manufactured a crisis whereby they connived to assassinate Iran’s top general Qasem Soleimani by drone strike. The administration invoked the 2002 Authorization for Use of Force Against Iraq as their legal justification. So, the same legal architecture to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was resuscitated by Trump to justify a drone-strike assassination of Iran’s top general in 2020 — supposedly because Soleimani was on a diplomatic mission to Iraq. But the precise logic never really had to make sense. Republican senators such as Mike Lee, who has since become much more “based” and therefore less concerned with Constitutional limits on presidential war-making powers, said at the time that the Administration’s intelligence briefing on the strike was so bad as to be “insulting.” Trump threatened to bomb 52 Iranian cultural sites — the legacy of ancient Persian civilization. Iran fired ballistic missiles at a US military installation in Iraq, inflicting at least 109 troops with traumatic brain injuries.
Hellbound and Down 