WHAT'S IT GOOD FOR? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
And speaking of nothing, nothing about our brief (so far) war with Iran makes sense to me. So I waited for further developments, which indeed, kept coming. But they have yet to add up to anything logical (which means that it’s of a piece with the last three years of craziness). If there’s a moral to the story, it might be, don’t push your luck.
Donald Trump, after apparently dodging the Mueller bullet, pushed his luck when he tried to extort the government of Ukraine. He got busted and then impeached. Naturally, he’d like to change the subject. But how?
Iran also pushed its luck, launching a raid in Iraq that resulted in an American casualty. Trump apparently felt like he had to respond quickly, to avoid looking weak. But how? One early leak suggests that Trump’s top military advisors give him a list of options, with one crazy outlier – assassinate the second most powerful man in Iran. They claim to have been surprised that he opted for the assassination. If that’s true – and very little in the official story has been true so far – then those advisors are idiots. Everything about Trump’s public behavior since 2016 suggests that he always doubles down on crazy. So Trump issues the kill order, and Soleimani was terminated with extreme prejudice. It was the one aspect of the whole affair that seems to have gone according to plan.
(Even if it was an old plan. Today comes a report from the New York Times that Trump issued the hit on Soleimani seven months ago. Which would mean that the raid in Iraq had nothing to do with the assassination. Possible. Even plausible. But it drives the last nail in the coffin of the administration’s claim that they acted in the face of an imminent threat.)
Soleimani’s assassination took the Iraqi government by surprise, and they began to get nervous. Iraqi leaders began to wonder if maybe they could work with Iran more effectively without having to worry about Donald Trump mucking things up. It was quite a remarkable development, considering that the two cultures have been bitter rivals since 539 BCE, when the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon. The two countries fought a bloody eight-year in the 1980s. But with Donald Trump as the alternative, Iraq is apparently willing to let regional bygones be bygones.
The United States responded to the eviction notice by having some unknown government functionary draw up a plan, which was summarized in a memo. It was short on specifics, but it clearly referred to the prospect of an American troop withdrawal. Oopsie! The memo turned out to have been just a draft! “An honest mistake,” as General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it.
The Trump Administration specializes in mistakes, but honest ones are rare. Let us pause for a moment to recognize the achievement.
(Milley is the gruff soldier whose job it is to stay close to Donald Trump and look dyspeptic. I can sympathize. After all, I’ve made an honest mistake or two myself.)
Meanwhile, the world waited for Iran’s response. It wasn’t long in coming. Or was it? On Tuesday, Iran fired some missiles in the general direction of an American base in Iraq. Damage was minimal, and Trump tweeted an all-clear. I’m skeptical. Trump is always about instant gratification. Iran plays a long game. I worry that Iran’s seemingly inept response to the assassination of a top government official was designed to give Trump a way to save face while de-escalating the immediate crisis. If Iran is plotting revenge, it will come at a time and place of their own choosing.
Of course, America will be unprepared for this development, because Donald Trump has left a lot of senior security positions unfilled, and populated the rest with cronies, hacks, and grifters. Conservative Iran experts were particularly anathema, since most of them publicly opposed Trump’s nomination. Better to rely on the advice of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a man with firm views on the Rapture, but minimal experience in foreign policy.
I suppose it’s time to weigh in on the ritual denunciation of General Qasem Soleimani. By all accounts, he was good at his job, which was to make life unpleasant for Americans, up to and including killing some of us. Yes, he had blood on his hands. No, that didn’t make it strategically smart to kill him.
For a hundred years at least, European powers have inserted themselves into the affairs of the peoples of the Middle East. First the British and French carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I. They drew the proverbial lines in the sand, creating artificial countries with no regard for history, or for the ethnic rivalries that inevitably developed. America was admitted to the Great Powers club after we smashed the Axis in World War II. We’ll show those tired old Europeans how to treat sovereign nations like pieces on a chess board. How hard could it be to outsmart resource-rich third world countries?
Spoiler alert: it was harder than we thought.
We usually met with early success, but sooner or later, the chickens came home to roost. Our liberating army always turned into an occupying army, and what looked like an easy victory became a stalemate, or an outright defeat.
It’s fitting, perhaps, that we’re now flexing on Iran, because Iran was the place where we began our career as post-war imperialists. In 1951, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized the country’s petroleum reserves. Well, we can’t have that, can we? Dwight Eisenhower was no Trump, but they did share one priority: take the oil.
Thus it was that, in 1953, we supported a coup that gave power to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. We went back to business as usual. Money was made. Who could have guessed that it wouldn’t go on forever?
Hey, in 1953, America was riding high. We’d just inaugurated a new president – a war hero, no less – and we were ready to embark upon the fun adventures that awaited us in Vietnam. And in Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and so on. You never ask questions when God’s on your side, so instead of learning from our mistakes, we kept repeating them. It was inevitable that we’d find ourselves back in the Middle East, where it all started.
None of the countries we picked fights with could beat us on the battlefield. America is good at winning wars. We just have no idea what to do next. We suck at being an occupying army, and our adversaries have figured us out. They understand that the best way to get rid of us is to bleed us to death, one booby trap at a time.
Better men than Donald Trump have failed because they were overconfident about their ability to predict and control events. Now he’s knocked over a very large domino, and we have no idea where the trail of destruction will lead.
Well, we know one place it led. Trigger-happy Iranian military forces shot down a commercial plane near Tehran. They bear the primary responsibility for the deaths of the 176 victims. But before we get too cocky about Iran’s deadly screw-up, Americans would do well to remember that in 1988, we were responsible for a similar disaster. The U.S. Navy mistakenly shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 aboard. Ronald Reagan was president then, but I’m sure Republicans will soon launch an investigation that will reveal secret evidence implicating Barack Obama and the Clintons.
Still, although he doesn’t bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the lives lost in Ukraine Airlines flight 752, Donald Trump isn’t blameless in the matter. He chose to dial the tension with Iran up to maximum. Trump created the conditions for this tragedy, and he too has blood on his hands.
How much blood, we don’t know, because it’s gradually becoming clear that this wasn’t a one-off assassination. It turns out that an attempt to kill a second senior Iranian military official in Yemen failed. We don’t know how many other missions Trump authorized, or whether they were successful.
The only thing we know for sure is that we can’t trust anything the Trump administration says.
In the absence of truth, what we’re left with is irony. We have irony to spare. The mass protests in Tehran are aimed not at Trump or America, but against the Iranian government. Iranians are furious about the destruction of Ukraine Airlines 752, and the three days of official cover-up before the regime confessed to being responsible. In a single stroke, Iran lost the high ground even among its own citizens. Instead of rallying around their country’s leadership, Iranians are calling for regime change.
And then there’s the strange-bedfellows story of Qasem Soleimani and Ivanka Trump. Between 2011-2015, Ivanka and Soleimani were indirect partners in a business deal in Azerbaijan. For reasons that remain officially mysterious, the Trump Organization wanted to build a hotel in Baku, the capitol city, in a neighborhood that is not known for its grand hotels.
Ivanka’s immediate local partners included the Mammadov family, who could bring influence to bear in the political arena as well as in extra-legal activities. FOREIGN POLICY magazine called the Mammadovs “the Corleones of the Caspian.” The Mammadovs have ties to the Darvishi family in Iran, who in turn are connected to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The Quds Force is the strategic arm of the Revolutionary Guard, and it was led by Qasem Soleimani. He would certainly have been briefed on Trump Tower Baku.
Considering all the shady characters involved (definitely including the Trumps), plus the inauspicious location of the hotel, it makes sense to me that the owners expected to recoup their investment not via a tourism boom in Azerbaijan, but as a regional go-to site for laundering dirty money generated by the mining, oil, and construction activity. And why not, since laundering mob money had become the basis of the Trump family fortune. As long as they get their cut, the Trumps aren’t squeamish about where money comes from, or where it goes.
Donald Trump, who claims to be above the law, is about to meet the law of unintended consequences. All we can do is pray that the worst consequences fall on him.