Trump’s war

For those of us who worked at the White House in the first stretch of this century, this war with Iran triggers any number of memory moments, with five-star generals telling the politicians what was coming, and what the President needed to understand as he pondered the likes of the Taliban in Kabul, Saddam Hussein in Bagdad, and the loathsome Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli. 

“If you’re in it, win it,” I recall hearing from one top commander in the days immediately after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Sobering to consider that the vast international coalition assembled to remove the Taliban thought the job was done within a matter of weeks of 9/11, only to watch the mullahs and their zealot followers return and humiliate the superpower in its chaotic exit from Kabul 20 years later.

“You break it, you own it,” said the late General Colin Powell, then-US secretary of state, when he so famously warned of the consequences of invading Iraq in 2003, inventing what he and his deputy Richard Armitage called the “Pottery Barn Rule.” Armitage, never a fellow to mince his words, told me years later that the president of the day, George W. Bush, was “as deaf as, maybe, a log.”

Fast forward to Barack Obama agonising over whether to intervene militarily in Libya some 15 years ago, and finally deciding on Operation Odyssey Dawn (where do they come up with these dreadful names?). In time, as Libya did not see a new dawn – rather a descent into civil war for power after Gaddafi – Obama was to lament the day he had closed his ears to the warning from his generals: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” The Libya chapter was, Obama concluded, “the worst mistake” of his presidency.

You just know that this time around, Donald Trump has not been listening to any of that – indeed not listening to anyone except himself, and by the sounds of it, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, who clearly nudged the Republican into action. 

This is Trump’s war, Trump’s choice, Trump’s adventure. And in typical Trump style, his advisers have let it be known that in launching this war along with Israel, he went against the advice of his lead general, one Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs-of-staff. “This is a war of choice, of Trump’s choosing,” says Chuck Schumer, Democratic leader in the US Senate. “He has no strategy, he has no endgame.”

The years teach much which the days never know. In the years before working as a White House correspondent, I was based in the Middle East, during a time of war between Iran and Iraq, then conflict over Lebanon between Israel and the Palestinians. An abiding lesson was never to underestimate Iran and its ruthless ayatollahs and their ability to make the old Persian empire anew by arming anti-Israeli, anti-American surrogates in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, let alone the Gulf States in their arena.

Or, for that matter, their capacity to launch terror here on the other side of the world, witness the horrific, Iranian bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994. Amazingly, given the carnage across the skies of the Middle East, and specifically Tehran, this past week, one Ahmad Vahidi – wanted by Interpol for the murderous AMIA attack – was promoted to be commander-in-chief of the all-powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guards, in the aftermath of Trump’s attacks that killed the Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei and so many of his inner circle.

So what is the strategy? What is Trump’s endgame? Well, for a start, he can forget the quickie recipe he employed so cynically in Venezuela, with that triumphant capture and extradition of erstwhile President Nicolás Maduro. “One and done,” was the talking-point that buzzed around his White House after that adventure. “This is the opposite of one and done,” noted The Washington Post the other day. “It may be a worthy fight, but likely to be an arduous one.”

The man himself sounds in two, if not several minds, about what the goal of this war is. He started by going for broke, coupling his insistence that Iran could never have a nuclear weapon with the call for the Iranian people to rise up against the Ayatollahs and implement their own regime change.

“I say to the great, proud people of Iran, that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” that was Trump’s line on opening night as he declared Operation Epic Fury (NB: the White House, clearly, needs better slugline writers). “When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations,” he told the Iranian people.

A few days into the back-and-forth conflict over the skies of the Middle East, and his focus was all about preventing Iran having the kind of ballistic missiles that could threaten the US mainland (“soon they could have missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America”), even though his claims are contradicted by his own intelligence apparatus. Still, he adds, as if needing to remind himself: "We're ensuring that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never have a nuclear weapon.”

No mention of regime change, indeed his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told us that Epic Fury was not “so-called regime-change war.” Thanks for explaining that just 72 hours into the operation, the goal is not what the boss said it was. But then, this is the boss who regained power in 2024 insisting on his re-election night: “I’m not going to start a war… we will measure our success, perhaps most importantly, by the wars we never get into.” So much for a policy agenda, right?

In short, this White House is probably making it up as it goes along. We can never underestimate the leader’s ability to turn a setback into a self-declared triumph. But the Middle East is a quagmire, in the decades that separate me from living there as a journalist we’ve seen so much bloody conflict with so little real change. In the days ahead it could well look like: “If you’re in it, win it.” Who knows if he ends up with: “You break it, you own it.” For sure, I suspect he’s never going to ask himself: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

Donald Trump is making history in Iran, for sure. Sad to consider, and sobering as we digest the daily messages from Washington, Jerusalem, Tehran, Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Beirut, London, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, etc., but he may not have even thought about the many lessons of such recent history.