When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American ‘rats’ were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him.
The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-era ‘forever wars’ are no more. Plus, these days the comedy communications come from the American Commander-in-Chief.
At the weekend, as missiles rained across the Middle East, Trump’s cabinet officials mostly avoided attention-grabbing interviews. The boss, however, embarked on his own heroic PR campaign. Taking questions from just about any reporter who happened to call, he launched a devastating series of pre-emptive strikes against any media narrative that threatened to make sense.
After the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei, intelligence sources intimated that the US had been cultivating a senior insider to take over the dictatorship, à la Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. But Comical Donnie promptly informed ABC that the attack on Tehran’s leadership compound had been ‘so successful it knocked out most of candidates… It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.’
Operation Epic Fury could go on for four to five weeks, he said. The mission was ‘ahead of schedule’, yet might go on ‘far longer’. Timelines are for losers. ‘Wars can be fought “forever”,’ Trump promised on social media in the early hours of Tuesday. ‘I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,’ he told the New York Post.
Team Trump usually delights in the President’s ability to set the media’s hair on fire. By Monday, however, after three US fighter jets were shot down in a friendly fire incident over Kuwait, it wasn’t just pompous liberals or conservative ‘panicans’ suffering narrative whiplash. Deep in the belly of Trumpworld, loud grumblings could be heard.
‘Off the record, there is no plan,’ said one former Trump official, during a Pentagon briefing presented by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. ‘They’re all completely freaking out,’ added another source who is close to the administration. ‘This could easily lead to nuclear war. Soon.’
America First insiders who oppose the Iran strikes know who they blame most: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ‘Bibi forced [Trump] to do it,’ says the same source. ‘He didn’t want to at all.’
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA darling turned critic of Trump, declared: ‘We are no longer a nation divided by left and right, we are now a nation divided by those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance.’
Trump’s war allies are quick to dismiss ‘MTG’ and others as anti-Semitic cranks. On Fox News on Monday evening, Netanyahu laughed off the suggestion that he had ‘dragged’ the US President into a conflict: ‘That’s ridiculous. Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world.’ The next day Trump said: ‘If anything I might have forced Israel’s hand.’
Yet Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his first significant statement since the bombing began, did seem to confirm that America launched Epic Fury because Israel was going to attack Iran regardless. ‘If Iran was attacked – and we believe they would be attacked,’ he said, ‘they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.’
Asked if that meant America had been forced to act because of impending Israeli action, Rubio equivocated: ‘Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions… but this had to happen no matter what… two things can be true.’
Which is more true, though? And whose war is it anyway? For the growing number of Israel-sceptics in America, and for those within the Make America Great Again movement who suspect that the President is putting the interests of a foreign country above his own, Rubio’s first answer is exactly the evidence they craved.
Others wonder what must be going through the mind of Vice-President J.D. Vance, an Iraq veteran and critic of neoconservative warmongering, who played a big part in the failed bid to resolve the Iranian question through diplomacy.
After an unusually quiet weekend, Vance popped up on Fox News on Monday, an hour before Bibi, to reiterate that America could never, ever allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon. ‘There is just no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective,’ he said. The Vice-President’s office declined to comment on an anonymous claim in the New York Times that, on 18 February, he’d advised the administration ‘to go big and go fast’ on any strike against Iran. Another source suggested that Vance had been ‘sidelined’. He said: ‘POTUS thinks he’s goofy.’
More hawkish insiders say Vance is sanguine about strikes, that American hostility towards the Iranian regime runs deeper than the ‘paleocon’ – i.e., anti-neocon – view allows, and that Trump understands the people far better than the wacky voices you hear on right-wing podcasts. That’s what the man himself believes, too. ‘I think MAGA is Trump,’ he told yet another journalist by phone on Monday. ‘And MAGA loves what I’m doing – every aspect of it… This is a detour that we have to take in order to keep our country safe.’
The word ‘detour’ is telling. It may be true that the patriotic impulse to crush freedom’s enemies runs deeper than any qualms about repeating the mistakes of Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. But the available polling suggests that the public opposed striking Iran, and parts of Trump’s 2024 coalition are already breaking away. Key figures of the Make America Healthy Again movement – though not its leader, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr – have begun a ‘Health not War’ campaign demanding that Trump seeks congressional authorisation on the Iran operation.
What Trump and Vance know but won’t say is that if the conflict cannot be resolved quickly, and if its consequences on the global economy can be felt as November’s midterm elections approach, the Republican party will suffer and Trump 2.0 could fall apart. And all the talk about Israel will become ever more toxic.
