President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense (I refuse to use the word “war”) Sneaky Pete Hegseth have plunged us into a conflict with Iran that does not have a clear mission statement. The president, Mr. Hegseth, and others have tried to define the mission, and many explanations have been offered, some contradictory. In fact, on any given day, you may get a different answer depending on who you ask.
Even naming the conflict is fraught with confusion. Mr. Trump keeps using the word “War,” but that definition can’t be correct because Congress has not been fully briefed about the reasons that precipitated the action. That is an important provision of the War Powers Act, which is required for any such action.
What’s the Mission, President Trump?
In fact, judging by public statements from the Trump administration, it still is not clear what the mission is. On the first day after the bombing began, the president’s defense of the action was twofold.
- Regime Change
- Stop Iran’s imminent threat of launching nuclear missiles at Israel and the US.
However, these reasons were quickly denied by Trump administration officials. Hegseth said that regime change was not a goal and that the Iranian people would choose their own leader. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio clearly stated that Iran was not close to having nuclear weapons at the time of the attack. An overriding principle that has guided the action is the goal of destroying Iran’s entire nuclear arsenal. In reality, much like last year’s bombings, these attacks are merely a setback to their program.
So other reasons were trotted out to justify the bombings. One reason cited was to stop Iran from exporting terrorism to other countries. But this has quickly fallen by the wayside, as neither Trump nor his military advisors have mentioned this factor in weeks. Another rationale is that the attacks were launched to eliminate Iran’s capabilities to launch weapons of any kind at its neighbors or the US and its allies. And while the Iranian attacks have slowed, they are still launching attacks on neighboring countries daily.
Why Attack Then?
The answer seems to be that Israel was certain that Iran was on the verge of bombing their country, so they launched preemptive strikes at Iran. The US was pulled into the conflict at the insistence of Israeli leader Bebe Netanyahu, who made the case that after the attack started, Iran would blame both Israel and the US, so he persuaded Trump that he might as well join in.
That’s like saying, I am going to egg the house of the boy down the street, and you should help me because he saw us hanging out together yesterday and will assume we planned and executed the egging together. And President Trump and his advisors truly believed that the attack would cripple Iran’s offensive capabilities and that the Iranian people would rise up and overthrow the current regime, putting in its place a democratic one.
The State of Things
So, with US deaths and casualties rising and the cost of the war escalating, we can clearly see that Mr. Trump had no endgame in mind prior to his attack on Iran. In planning this, he and his advisors’ thought processes never went further than “bomb the hell out of them and watch the Iranian people overthrow their evil government.” The US has currently lost 13 service members in the conflict, with another 150 US service personnel injured during the action.
And we know from the Pentagon’s own reporting that Mr. Trump’s government spent $11.3 billion to conduct the “war” just in the first six days. And perhaps the saddest number is the 2,000+ people overall who have died in the conflict. So, Mr. Hegseth can run around yelling “fire and fury,” and “we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age.” But the sad fact is, hundreds of lives are being lost daily, so that the US and Israel can execute a conflict that has 0 endgame.
