A PRE-ORDAINED FAILURE

No President attacked Iran before because they knew regime change wasn’t possible unless we put boots on the ground. The Iranian people will pay for this for years, and so will we.

The worst part of our war against Iran is not what’s happening to the oil supply; the worst thing is what‘s happening to the Iranian people.

Early this year, President Trump told Iranians to keep taking to the streets … that “help is on the way.” And many believed him at the cost of their lives. Shortly after the war started, U.S. officials admitted that “regime change is not achievable” - a fact that had been made clear to U.S. Presidents by our military intelligence for years. It was never possible to bomb away the IRGC.

Trump’s promise was just another bogus social media post. And who knows, maybe he believed it was true at the time. He seems to have gotten to the point where even he doesn’t know when he’s lying and when he’s telling the truth. Something that stood out in the movie The Apprentice, about Trump’s relationship with his mentor Roy Cohn, is the idea that the only truth is what you say it is. There are no objective facts, and if there are then they don’t matter. Trump is known to have told quite a few people over the years that if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it.

The problem is, the American presidency is not a TV reality show. Life in Iran is not a set that breaks down for lunch. The utterances of a U.S. President can mean life or death to people around the world, and from shutting down the USAID to life in Iran, people have died and are dying as a consequence of Trump’s words and wishes. This is true of all presidents, by the way, but before this even the worst Presidential decisions - Bush invading Iraq, even Eisenhower okaying the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran - were made by people who in their own way, however mistaken, thought they were doing the right thing for the world. When has Trump ever made a decision based on his idea of “doing the right thing” for anyone but himself, his family, or his cronies? That is not the way his mind works.

The President now says that the war in Iran has been a victory for the United States, with Hegseth declaring “we’ve achieved our military objectives.” What a political mindfuck. For if after us achieving those military objectives Iran is still on track to build a nuclear weapon, the IRGC is still in power, and they’re opening and closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, then we have not only not achieved anything…we have actually walked backwards. Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, while by no means perfect, now looks like a stroke of genius.

President Trump has clearly grown bored with this war (every little boy grows tired of his toy soldiers after a while), preferring instead to attack the Pope and create memes of himself as Jesus. He says we have achieved regime change, having killed the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the beginning of the war. Khamenei has been replaced however by his son Mojtaba Khamenei, whose wife and at least one of his sons were killed in the same strike that killed his father. So is anyone under the impression he’ll be nicer? Clearly not. The regime change we have achieved is to leaders even meaner, more furious, and now ramping up its public executions of some of Iran’s most brilliant and creative citizens. If what they were doing before was horrific, what they’re doing now is apparently even more atrocious. Pete Hegseth is obsessed with the word “lethality” and the Iranian leadership seems bent on showing him what that means.

Look at any news site in the United States, those leaning left or those leaning right, and you’ll see that the vast majority of Iran coverage is concerned with the international movement of oil or any increase in American gas prices. You will see very little about the suffering of the Iranian people, which if anything is likely to increase now. We should never have gone into this war unless we knew for sure that we could free them, and every President has known that unless we were willing to put boots on the ground then we couldn’t. No American President has been in a position to do that, which is why no President before this one has. This war was a pre-ordained failure.

As things stand now, there’s a very good chance we’ve only made things worse…for the Iranians, and even ultimately for us. No matter what the President does now - no matter how he finds a way to wash his hands of this mess he created - the people of Iran will be punished for his false promises. Much like in Afghanistan, people believed us… they trusted us…and in the end we betrayed them with barely a, “Yeah, that’s sad but we tried.”

The Iranian people will pay for this for years, and so will we. World opinion is done with us now. A superpower has become a laughing stock, and that is a world-shattering shift. People knew we were hypocritical at times, but never before has the world’s perception been that America is a weak and baldfaced liar. It will take years to undo that perception, and our children will pay for it greatly. All because we put a veritable child in the White House.