Trump Has Pushed The World To The Brink. Not Even He Knows What Comes Next

“This document prompts serious and urgent questions about the timing, manner and justification of the Administration’s decision to engage in hostilities against Iran”, Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Saturday, after the Trump administration sent formal notification to Congress of the drone strike that killed Iran’s second-most powerful man.

Pelosi also said it was “highly unusual” that the White House would classify the entire document, a decision she says “suggests that the Congress and the American people are being left in the dark about our national security”.

Under the War Powers Act, Trump had 48 hours to inform lawmakers after introducing military forces into armed conflict overseas.

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There was no word Saturday on whether the administration planned to release a nonclassified version to the public, in keeping with Trump officials’ refusal to explain how, exactly, the threat posed by Qassem Soleimani was any more grave this week than at any other time in the past 15 years.

Some have suggested there is no such explanation. Trump, skeptics say, seized on the opportunity afforded by the death of a US contractor last week and the subsequent protests at the US embassy in Baghdad to create a distraction aimed at deflecting public attention from the impeachment drama. Bear in mind, US airstrikes had already killed dozens of Kataib Hezbollah fighters in retaliation for the rocket attacks that killed the contractor. The US took at least 25 lives last week prior to killing Soleimani.

“The question is why now? Soleimani’s whereabouts have been known before [and] his resume of killing-by-proxy is not a secret”, The New York Times‘s Rukmini Callimachi wrote Saturday. “[It’s] hard to decouple his killing from the impeachment saga”.

If part of Trump’s timing was aimed at distracting the public, it would be ironic. New reporting suggests that in October, Soleimani instructed Shia militia in Iraq to escalate attacks on US personnel in order to create a distraction from the protests in Tahrir Square, where demonstrators who had initially focused on broader issues had begun to direct their anger at Iranian influence. Both Trump and Soleimani, then, may have resorted to violence in order to deal with PR problems.

It remains to be seen whether America will unite around Trump, but what’s certain is that Iran, just weeks removed from protests which left as many as 1,500 dead in a brutal government crackdown, is now rallying around the regime. Here’s The Times:

In cities across Iran, tens of thousands packed the streets to mourn Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. Black-clad women and men beat their chests and clutched photos of him. A black flag went up on the golden dome of Imam Reza shrine in the city of Mashhad, one of the holiest sites of Shiite Islam.

Just a few weeks earlier, the streets were filled with protesters angry with their leaders over the flailing economy and the country’s international isolation.

[…]

Suddenly, with one targeted assassination, the nation rallied behind its leaders.

Young and old. Rich and poor. Hard-liner and reformer, General Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful military leader, was almost universally admired and had near cult figure status. After being killed in Baghdad on Friday in a drone strike ordered by President Trump, his image is now plastered across Tehran, shrouded in black drapes.

As I wrote Friday, this was perhaps an even greater risk for the Trump administration than the chancing of a military conflict. Indeed, I’ve repeatedly suggested over the past two years that killing Soleimani would derail any momentum moderates still had in Iran following Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the nuclear deal. I was still warning about the inevitability of Iranians closing ranks as late as Friday evening. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a column I published elsewhere:

Over the medium- to longer-term, the situation between Washington and Tehran seems binary. Either Soleimani’s death will galvanize public support for the regime at a time when it was slipping following the deadly fuel protests, hardening the resolve of the theocracy and making the situation immeasurably more precarious for the West, or the opposite will occur, where that means the Commander’s demise will mark a turning point beyond which the populace sees an opportunity to rise up in the absence of a figure whose mystique was a key element in preserving an increasingly shaky status quo.

I would venture that the former is far more likely than the latter. 

The linked article from The Times suggests that assessment is a strikingly accurate portrayal of what’s going on across Iran right now.

And yet Trump has already abandoned even the pretense of deescalation. Here is what the president tweeted on Saturday evening:

Iran is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets as revenge for our ridding the world of their terrorist leader who had just killed an American, & badly wounded many others, not to mention all of the people he had killed over his lifetime, including recently……..hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have………targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

That, from the man who, on Friday, insisted that the extraterritorial assassination of a (previously) living legend revered in Iran even by those who longed to throw off the very regime he dedicated his life to preserving, was somehow designed to “prevent a war, not start one”.

Like so many other episodes of the Trump show, this is a situation where the president seemingly cannot accept that everything which is theoretically a good idea is not feasible if one wants to guard against potentially disastrous knock-on effects in the event something goes wrong.

Besides Soleimani’s assassination, another example is Trump’s childlike effort to endear himself to Pyongyang. In theory, befriending Kim Jong-Un in the interest of promoting denuclearization on the Korean peninsula is a good idea. In practice, it is almost sure to go awry, and the consequences could be, among other things, a nuclear holocaust in Seoul.

That raises another concerning issue about the latest international crisis triggered by Trump’s penchant for trusting his “gut” over the advice of people with the expertise to help America’s leaders make informed decisions.

Trump is famously predisposed to falling in love (literally, by his own joking admission) with strongmen, autocrats and, in Kim’s case, outright totalitarians. There is a very strong case to be made that were it not for the unique circumstances surrounding the standoff with Iran (specifically, the link to the Obama administration, the desire to “prove” his allegiance to Israel and the necessity of pandering to the royals in Riyadh), Trump would be more than willing to look past Soleimani’s history of bloodletting and the regime’s treatment of its people. After all, there is no sense in which Iran’s leadership is more overbearing than Kim Jong-Un. Similarly, there is a very good argument for asserting that Saudi Arabia is a far more backward society than Iran. And outward appearances aside, it’s hard to see how Xi Jinping is any less of an authoritarian than Khamenei.

Of course, the rest of the world is not as gullible as the millions of Americans who voted to put Trump in a position where he can order drone strikes with the potential to spark a global conflict that puts America’s enlisted young men and women in harm’s way. At no time over the past 72 hours has any government official with the exception of those from Russia, Syria, Iraq and Iran itself, claimed that Qassem Soleimani was a blameless hero. In fact, the vast majority of governments around the world have said exactly the opposite.

The problem, then, isn’t that the world is somehow blind to Soleimani’s bloody career. Rather, the problem is that the world is by now acutely aware of the Trump administration’s penchant for dishonesty and incompetence. Soleimani was the mastermind behind the regional ambitions of a nation which, at various intervals, has been fairly close to acquiring a nuclear weapon and has suggested, in no uncertain terms, that it intends to relegate Israel and the US to the dustbin of history. That’s scary. But, depending on who you are, it’s not nearly as scary as a famously buffoonish real estate developer-turned D-list reality TV show host wielding the awesome power of the United States military to boost his ego. That is the kind of thing with the potential to bring on the actual apocalypse – and this is one time when alluding to the apocalypse is not an exaggeration.

Susan Rice summed it up pretty effectively in an Op-Ed published Saturday:

In deciding to eliminate General Suleimani, Mr. Trump and his team argue they were acting in self-defense to thwart imminent attacks on Americans in Iraq and the region. This may be true, as General Suleimani was a ruthless murderer and terrorist with much American blood on his hands. Unfortunately, it’s hard to place confidence in the representations of an administration that lies almost daily about matters large and small and, even in this critical instance, failed to brief, much less consult, bipartisan leaders in Congress.

Second, even if the killing of General Suleimani is justified by self-defense, it doesn’t make it strategically wise. Given the demonstrably haphazard and shortsighted nature of the Trump administration’s national security decision-making process (including calling off strikes against Iran 10 minutes before impact, inviting the Taliban to Camp David and abandoning the Kurds), it’s doubtful the administration spent much time gaming out the second and third order consequences of their action or preparing to protect American military and diplomatic personnel in the region.

Importantly – and this is something that most of Trump’s critics have a hard time admitting, even as it does not require the contention that the president is doing anything right – none of the above is to say that his decisions and the unorthodox way in which he conducts America’s affairs won’t ultimately work out for the better or even make the world a safer place. Things can go right accidentally, and, perhaps more germane, things sometimes work out in spite of someone.

But with each brazen, haphazard or, in some cases, downright bizarre, decision, the odds move further and further against such an outcome – the chances of the stars aligning in a favorable way that would see history smile on Trump’s time in office get slimmer and slimmer.

Trump has, over his now three years in office, i) exchanged public threats of nuclear annihilation with a child despot (Kim) who starved his people to the brink of cannibalism and executed his own advisers with anti-aircraft guns, only to make nice later during a trio of face-to-face meetings, ii) threatened to destroy the economy of a NATO ally run by one of the most ruthlessly savvy political operators known to man (Erdogan), only to turn around a year later and let the same man slaughter America’s closest allies in war-torn Syria, iii) plunged the US into an economic Cold War with the second-most powerful man on Earth (Xi Jinping), iv) blackmailed a foreign government (Ukraine) with $391 million in taxpayer money in order to smear a former vice president on the way to getting himself impeached, and, now, v) assassinated the most feared intelligence operative on the planet (Soleimani).

How sustainable is this? How long can this possibly go on before it all falls apart on Trump and, ultimately, the country he represents?

Who knows, maybe the answer to the latter question is “forever”.

But as Qassem Soleimani can attest, we are all only human, after all. And even the most cunning among us run out of luck eventually.

By virtue of the office he holds, Trump is at virtually no risk of coming to any harm himself, but the same cannot be said for America’s servicemen and women, or for the country’s diplomats abroad. The tragic irony is that the administration claims to be acting to protect Americans stationed overseas, despite the fact that Mike Pompeo’s State department showed no qualms about cutting career diplomats loose at the behest of Rudy Giuliani and his now-jailed associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman last year. Ask Marie Yovanovitch how much Trump cares about America’s diplomatic personnel.

One thing we know for sure is that at least for the next week, Trump has reinforced Khamenei’s narrative that America is a nefarious global bully hell-bent on the destruction of the Iranian people.

“Every major political actor within Iran, from reformist to hard-liner, is saying this is a great loss”, Ariane Tabatabai, an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation focused on the Middle East and Iran, told The Times of Soleimani’s death.

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, an Iranian author who The Times notes has stood up for artistic freedom, put it as follows: “Iran once again lost one of its most honorable children”.

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