Let’s Hope America’s Dumbest War Doesn’t Become Its Most Tragic

As we barrel toward the ninth week of this two- or three-week war, virtually all of the reporting and most of the commentary is focused on the strategery of the moment: who really controls the Strait of Hormuz, when the ceasefire might actually end, what Donald Trump might do next. That’s all understandable. But it also means that this is a good time to take a step back and summarize exactly what Trump has done here, because if we look at it from 30,000 feet, we see exactly what so many of us knew was dangerous about putting this unstable and petty and frankly stupid man back in the Oval Office.To put it in a phrase: He and he alone created the conditions that made war possible. He and he alone created the chaos that, he then told the American people and the world, made war necessary. Imagine the mayor of a town where there were acute ethnic or racial tensions taking office and inheriting a fragile but holding truce between the antagonistic parties. He then annuls that truce, calling it weak and fraudulent. Tensions, predictably, flare up again. And the mayor sends in armed agents to disarm the minority. And while he’s doing it, he threatens to destroy their entire culture and compares himself to Jesus, while the man in charge of the military operations constantly invokes God and Jesus as being on his side.That’s what has happened here. Trump backed out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Barack Obama and five other nations had negotiated with Iran. Was it perfect? Of course not. It was a compromise, with an enemy that hates the United States. But it capped uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent—far, far short of the level required to make nuclear arms—until 2030. Most provisions expired in 10 years (2025). Still, that’s not nothing. Experts agreed that it was working, and Iran was abiding by its terms, and it left it for a future administration to pick up the baton.Trump, far from picking the baton up, threw it in the incinerator. The JCPOA ran to around 160 pages. The chance that Trump actually read it is zero. In fact, the agreement, minus the annexes, was only 18 pages. And still, we know to a 99.55 percent certainty that the chance Trump read even those 18 pages is zero. Those 18 pages were agreed to by Obama. That was all Trump needed to know. So he withdrew from the agreement in May 2018. He imposed stricter sanctions and announced a policy of “maximum pressure.” Oooh, tough! Amurka, baby!But what happened? The other signatory nations tried to hold things together, but without the United States, everyone knew that was a joke. Iran very quickly increased its enrichment. By 2020, outlets were reporting that “Iran is now enriching more uranium than it did before it agreed to the landmark nuclear deal with world powers in 2015, President Hassan Rouhani said Thursday.” It went from 3.67 percent to 60 percent. In other words: Trump made this problem. Entirely and solely. By pulling out of the JCPOA in 2018, he ensured that Iran would start breaking the terms of the deal. He’s the one who made Iran strong. Then, eight years later, he comes back to us and says, Bad Iran! They broke the terms of the deal! They’re too strong. We must invade them. But it’s actually even worse than that. Because we didn’t invade Iran because they broke the terms of the deal. We invaded Iran because Trump, having conquered (in his mind) America, needed to conquer farther reaches. Venezuela got him thinking, Hey, this war stuff is kinda fun. So he figured he’d be the guy who toppled the hated regime. A few bombs. Easy-peasy.It was only when it became clear that it wasn’t easy that Trump settled on his current rationale for the war (that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon). Because at first, the rationale was regime change. And we took out the supreme leader, and Trump probably thought well, that was that. But that just handed everything to the supreme leader’s son, who is more radical, and whose father, wife, and son we killed by U.S. bombs. So when it became clear even to Trump that the regime wasn’t going to change, he settled on the rationale about nuclear weapons. And he’s actually been reasonably consistent about it over the last, oh, three weeks or so; shown far more discipline on this one point than he’s ever shown on anything.It’s a fine rationale. I agree with it, in fact. But there’s a little problem with it. Namely, that Iran is today a hell of a lot closer to nuclear weapons than it was in 2015, after Obama’s deal. So Trump, who created this problem, now tells us that he may have to solve it by eliminating Persian civilization, one of the great civilizations in the history of humanity (these last 47 years, not even a blink of an eye in human history, notwithstanding).The United States has fought a lot of dumb and unnecessary wars. And it’s fought a lot of wars that cost more lives than this one has so far. But this one has to be the most unnecessary war of all.