The Iraq invasion and the bombing of Iran are acts of desperation — the conduct of a wounded, uncertain nation that went on the defensive when the Twin Towers went down and history arrived on its shores.
Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump in the Situation Room on Saturday during U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. (The White House /Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
I have heard many unhinged speeches by American presidents over the years, but — no risk of exaggeration here — Donald Trump’s as he declared “a spectacular military success” after seven B–2 bombers attacked three nuclear sites in Iran Saturday night is the barmiest of my lifetime.
“The nuclear threat posed by the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror?” “The bully of the Middle East?” There was this by way of a plunge into the crowded precincts of American paranoia:
“They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs. That was their specialty. We lost over a thousand people and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate.”
And for the good people out in Peoria, a decisive majority of whom, the polls say, oppose American aggression against the Islamic Republic: “I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military.”
Let me remind readers, as rhetoric this base makes it easy to forget: The speaker of these words is the 47th president of the United States. Yes, the commander-in-chief.
It is difficult to take Trump’s four minutes in front of the microphone late Saturday evening the slightest bit seriously. But we must, precisely because what Trump had to say to his nation was so utterly unserious.
Donald Trump, to put this point another way, turns out to be worse than Donald Trump.
It is natural, for those with some sense of history to compare Trump’s my-God-and-my-military talk with the more craven moments of the McCarthyist 1950s, or with the John Birchers. I say it is more useful to think of that famous remark Karl Rove made during an interview conducted by Ron Suskind a year and seven months after the Bush II regime invaded Iraq.
“Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush” was published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine in October 2004. Suskind identifies Rove, then an adviser to the Bush White House, as “the aide,” but it was soon enough known it was he Suskind had interviewed.
The memorable passage in the Suskind piece is this:
“Guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
America had by then given Iraqis and the rest of the world a bitter display of what results when a nation purports to conjure realities to its liking. Trump now takes on the same preposterous project, as the ungrounded language cited above indicates.
Bush II failed extravagantly in Iraq, and Trump’s new adventure cannot but come to the same fate.
Creating reality, as if the irreducible foundations of cognition and logic are mere irritants to be set aside, may look like the very zenith of hubristic power. It is not.
Reverberations of 9/11
At Ground Zero in New York, Sept. 14, 2001, Bush says “voices calling for justice from across the country will be heard.” Rescue workers chant, “U.S.A, U.S.A.” (Bush Presidential Library/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
The Iraq invasion and the bombing of Iran are to be read as acts of desperation — the conduct of a wounded, uncertain nation that assumed the defensive crouch when the Twin Towers went down in 2001 and history arrived on its shores — history, that process America all along thought was the burden of others.
We must bear this always in mind. Desperation is the mulch wherein recklessness germinates.
“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” Trump declared Saturday evening. Does this remind you of anything?
Maybe Bush II’s ridiculous appearance, in a bomber jacket no less after landing on board, to declare on an aircraft carrier off San Diego a few days after the Iraq invasion began, “Mission accomplished?” An infamous bit of staging,
We are already well down from “completely and totally.” By Sunday morning the Pentagon was trading in “severe damage,” catch-all vocabulary such that there is no telling what it means.
Casting further doubt on the state of matters, a digital publication called Amwaj.media reported Sunday afternoon that Washington had advised Tehran in advance of its intent to bomb and indicated the limits of its targeting. Citing “a high-ranking Iranian political source,” Amwaj said this source “also confirmed that the targeted sites were evacuated, with ‘most’ of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium kept in secure locations.”
Amwaj.media has its head office in Britain and publishes news and comment on West Asia in Arabic, Farsi and English. I cannot verify this report, but I am not at all inclined to discount it. It conforms, certainly, with the Trump regime’s vigorous efforts to stress that it does not seek a full-out war with the Islamic Republic.
“We have no idea where this war will go,” The New York Times declared in the headline atop an opinion piece published in its Sunday editions. “It may appear like a tactical victory less than four hours after the bombs began to fall,” W.J. Hennigan writes, “but projecting any sense of finality about this ordeal is wildly premature.”
This is so by way of facts on the ground, as the expression goes. It is certainly unclear how “the Jewish state” will take it if Iran’s nuclear program has been damaged but remains extant. The Zionist fanatics who started all this seem willing to settle for nothing short of Trump’s “completely and totally.”
Please Donate to the
Spring Fund Drive!
But I see finality aplenty when I turn the weekend’s events 180° and consider them from this perspective. Whatever the destruction at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz by way of the “bunker busters” those B–2s dropped, the damage the Trump regime has done to itself and the nation it pretends to govern is nearly too extravagant to reckon.
Remember “Nous sommes tous Américains,” that celebrated headline atop an editorial Le Monde published shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks? I did not then think the United States had enjoyed the world’s approval so unreservedly for decades.
The slide began two years later, with Bush II’s wanton, unquestionably illegal invasion of Iraq. The policy cliques could not since have squandered the residual good will of the postwar decades more efficiently had they tried.
It was not a question of trying, of course. It has been a question since 2001 of those planning and executing U.S. policy simply not giving a damn what the rest of the world thinks — or wanting even to know what the rest of the world thinks.
Power Is All
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine briefing the press at the Pentagon on Sunday about the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. (DoD/Alexander Kubitza/Public Domain)
Trump just decisively clarified the point, in my judgment. Nothing other than power matters to the Americans now. If this has been true since 2001, Trump makes clear there is no turning back from this: Power is all the United States has left to give the world — or impose upon it.
“There’s no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close,” Trump declared triumphantly Saturday night. “There has never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago.”
What a thing to boast of. So hopelessly out of sync with the 21st century. No, no other military could have done what the American did at the weekend, and no other military would ever be sent on such a mission.
I cannot imagine what some metric of global good will toward America would register now that Trump has led the United States into what looks like another war. If “completely and totally obliterated” were on the dial, the needle would be close.
As widely reported, Trump colluded with the Israelis to deceive Tehran with the suggestion that talks toward a diplomatic settlement of the nuclear question would proceed in Oman two Sundays ago. And as the Iranians prepared for another round of negotiations, Israel launched its attacks the preceding Friday.
Sucker-punching. This now seems part of America’s diplomatic repertoire.
It is hard to believe any American administration would be this craven, but Trump did the same thing again when he stated last week he would take two weeks to give diplomacy a last chance. It was a matter of a few days before the B–2s flew.
When Seymour Hersh predicted this in “What I have been told is coming in Iran,” published in his Substack newsletter last Friday, I confess I thought Sy’s neck was out a touch too far this time. I leave readers to finish the thought.
The Washington policy cliques have been more or less indifferent to statecraft for decades. Diplomacy is for the weak nations, the powerful having no need of it, former U.N. chief Boutros Boutros Ghali wrote insightfully in his memoirs. Trump just burned the bridges diplomats are supposed to build — all of them.
Who — the Russians, the Chinese, the Africans, the Latin Americans, the Europeans, the East Asians, the Indians — who will engage the Americans diplomatically any longer but with deep suspicions, deep reservations, and a profound reluctance to trust? Not to mention a well of contempt.
This is grave far beyond the Iranians, in my view. Contrary to appearances these past 25 years, diplomacy is an essential 21st century technology. B–2s and bunker busters do not seem so to me. High-technology weaponry is deployed at an ever-rising cost.
Incessant breaches of international law, cavalier abuses of the sovereignty of other nations: This will go on for who knows how long. But Trump and his people and the neoconservatives who appear to control them just went some distance destroying all possibility that the U.S. might participate in the making of a new world order.
This matters nil in Washington now, but such an order materializes as we speak, and the day will come when this foreclosed prospect will be up for regret.
I read something else in Trump’s Saturday night speech. To me it was the culmination of weeks of irrationality, a frenzy of it that led — just as the Israelis hoped it would — to senseless attacks with no logical justification.
There seems to me another kind of finality to what Trump just did. He has destroyed — completely and totally, I fear to say — rational thought as the basis of action in the name of what historians of our time will record as a rear-guard defense of raw power.
A late-phase imperium cannot do what Trump just did and then return to sound deliberations, measured policy, sophisticated statecraft. I do not now see a path to any such return.
America has long been — since 2001, again — on the way into an era of unreality, as we may as well call it. Trump just gave the nation a final shove and slammed the door behind it, to put my point another way.
When the bunker busters fell Saturday night the Trump regime created a reality all right. Look at it. Take a hard look. This is essential if some new direction is to be discovered.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Please Donate to the
Spring Fund Drive!
‘Completely & Totally Obliterated’
They were clearly referring to the truth.
In our age of information wars, psy-ops and propaganda narratives.
6.24.25, headline, Trump on Israel, Iran continuing fight: ‘They don’t know what the f??? they’re doing.” DJ “Big $hot” Trump.
“Nous Sommes Tous Américains” (We’re All Americans), by Jean-Marie Colombani. No doubt, things have changed. Imo, the world says, “F/Trump. F/Israel. F/NATO. F/the USCongress. F/the US Empire.”
DJ Trump “boasting,” “There’s no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close,” Trump declared triumphantly Saturday night. “There has never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago,” got his big, fat, elephant ass handed to him!
…… “LIAR!!!” ‘No Boots on the Ground’ was USPresident, BHObama’s, “thing!” aka The “Obama Doctrine” emphasizing the use of air power & surgical strikes rather than deploying ground troops in military conflicts, reflecting a cautious approach to military intervention. This doctrine aims to 1) Avoid long-term entanglements, 2) Focus on limited, targeted actions to achieve specific objectives without committing large numbers of soldiers on the ground.”
…… “ “You know, when I said no boots on the ground, I think the American people understood generally that we’re not going to do an Iraq-style invasion of Iraq or Syria with battalions that are moving across the desert.” BHObama, the Commander-N-$peech. How BHObama knew how Americans “interpreted his pledges,” is a f/mystery!!!
Concluding, all their, USPresidents’, 42’s-47’s, truths are one (1) big f/lie! “Trump did the same thing again when he stated last week he would take two weeks to give diplomacy a last chance. It was a matter of a few days before the B–2s flew.”
“[WHO]— the Russians, the Chinese, the Africans, the Latin Americans, the Europeans, the East Asians, the Indians — who will engage the Americans diplomatically any longer but with deep suspicions, deep reservations, and a profound reluctance to trust? Not to mention a well of contempt.” PATRICK LAWRENCE.
No doubt, all eyes are on, DJ “the Smelly Cat” Trump’s next victim, the NATO $ummit. Onward & Upwards!
Millions of innocent lives would become saved were the consequential differences between the United States/Israel/West and Iranians to become settled in a sane, formal academic debate. Such a debate would have as its focus the participants’ best intellectual attempts to answer the following fundamental question: “How important are moral, philosophical and/or spiritual perspectives in the context of creating positive, peaceful international relations?”
The historic debate participants, United States President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, can easily participate via technology from different locations on Earth. Professors of philosophy/religion from the top universities in America and Iran are certainly capable of agreement on the proper format for conducting a very, very serious debate.
What political leader would reject the opportunity to go down in history as the heroic leader who saved millions of innocent lives and, in the process, set the historic course for “completely and totally obliterating war”: eternal peace on Earth?
“[T]he conduct of a wounded, uncertain nation that assumed the defensive crouch when the Twin Towers went down in 2001”.
I beg to differ. Not when Saigon fell in 1975?
Pat.
This is a thought-provoking point, more than worthy of consideration and debate. Thanks for sending it, and thanks to all other commenting.
P.L.
The dominance of money power in the US caused the abject moral failure that prevents “sound deliberations” and “burned the bridges” of diplomacy, precluding any US role in forming a better world order.
The US lost international credibility because its government and mass media are completely corrupted by money power: it has no morality, only commercial propaganda that money=virtue despite being gained primarily by lying, cheating, and stealing. We have a government of legalized bribery that elevates tyrants over ignorant tribalists, a corruptocracy not a democracy. Any hope of recovery requires getting money power out of government and mass media.
The reforms needed include:
1. Constitutional amendments prohibiting election or media funding beyond limited Individual donations;
2. Checks and balances Within each functional branch, because they do not have powers to balance each other;
3. Public and mass media education to identify and avoid social and economic dependency upon tribal groups.
The problem in passing such reforms is convincing politicians that they can still be re-elected by those means.
I share your focus on money. Zionism has been around for over a century, but American political decisions have weaponized it. First NAFTA marked the eventual death of domestic industrial viability, then de-regulation of banks laid the groundwork for the explosive shift from labor-based capitalism to finance capitalism. A couple of decades of lower and lower tax rates, and, the SCOTUS ruling on unmetered money in elections, and voila, billionaires can own the commercial media, the political parties…. and, why not the world?
I’d sure like to know by name all the zionists considered to be members of the deep state….among all those billionaires, who are the zionists?And, then, who are those zionists controlling the mainstream media – paper, TV? Then, who are the zionists on University Boards of Trustees- particularly in those advanced academic institutions who have zealously gone after dissenters to the Zionist’s twisted pitch conflating Zionism with anti-semitism and gotten away with it because there are other Zionists controlling the mechanisms of power- judicial, police, governmental. Who are the Zionists at the heads of corporations constituting the military-industrial-infotainment-digital complex? Who are the Zionists like Blinken close to the current President as Blinken was to Biden? Controlling, managing the “information” in the President’s ear?
To be pro-Palestinian is to be supportive of their well being. As simple as that. But the USA today is savaging its own population and its on Constitution by sucking up to the twisted manipulative Pro-Zionist project of destroying people who in their hearts weep over the utter viciousness crushing them by the berserk annihilating Israeli Zionist Colonialist government. Imagine for a moment. AIPAC and all the power Zionists were not “Zionists” but communists, atheists … who acted precisely as every Zionist above has done in service of the Zionist Colonialist World Project. Would they have gotten away with doing the harm these Zionists have been and are doing to our own rights? professors? students? foreign policy (that serves not the USA interests but puts Israel’s above our own)? Fraternities rooted essentially outside the USA but heavily actively alive in the USA to manipulate in service to their roots is like a cancer on the American body politic. Isn’t it?
Name one Iranian action in the past two decades that was destructive of the USA. Then, name the frequency of times over the last 30 years when the nutcase Netanyahu ranted that Iran was one month away from developing a nuclear weapon. And how about information about how Israel got their nuclear weapon(s)?
According to Martin Armstrong’s Socrates computer,
it’s just our time to disappear as a major power.
And those in seats of power aren’t helping us either.
It looks like the Bible Prophecies may come true.
But I won’t be here to see it.
What we have seen these past few days is part of the “Project For A New American Century” to take over the Middle Eastern countries who act independently, as Americans don’t respect the national sovereignty of other nations around the globe, as too many indulged in the “Exceptional people” Kool-Aid cocktail that killing and maiming is great and might is right!
We support, along with the dumbed-down Europeans, the Holocaust in Palestine which the UN condones feebly, but does nothing to stop it. Meanwhile many articles, speeches, conferences, and countless opinions will go on and on, while the bombing, death, destruction, misery and suffering continues thanks to the world’s only super-bully and Israel. Welcome to the New Dark Ages, folks!
The neolib Dem party won’t want to appear soft on bellicosity; besides, they’ve been in on it for decades. Explicitly since the Biden Dept. of State was run by neocons, a fact the few remaining faithful D voters and nice progressives who did the “No King” demonstrations don’t want to see. Much easier to blame Trump. This U.S. monoparty enables neocons to pursue their lust for empire, for a unipolar world. Their tunnel vision prevents truth from interrupting their fantasies of total power. So of course the assertion “we create our own reality.” When someone tells you who they are…
It was bad enough with the Best and Brightest arrogant Dems. Those driven by certainty and control are always sure they’re right. The Dunning-Kruger effect among them must be enormous. Especially in a Trump admin rife with incompetence because the main qualification is loyalty. Then add their alliance with extremist right wing Christians eager for End Times. The entire cabal fine with destroying half the planet to preserve their beliefs. An end may get here quicker than the overconfident have planned and in a very different form than their limited ideation can possibly conceive.
Empirical fact to be decided by the future: will this be another Iraq/Afghn/VNam or:
like Dresden, Hiroshima, Panama, and Grenada, in which two powers greater than Iran, surrendered with regime change and all are better off for it.
It looks like we’re skipping the prolonged and exiguous ground wars in Europe and the Pacific, and skipping ahead to the new strategy, letting our proxies in Ukraine and Israel be the suffering tip of our spear.
Understand, with all respect to Tel Aviv and Kyev, I care more for NYC.
The ‘regime’ realizing its days are counted…clock ticking.
It appears our “leaders” are litttle more than adolescents living out their infantile aggressive fantasies. Rational thought plays no role in their impulsive decisions. The world could possibly face a nuclear holocaust because of these maniacs, but they probably would see this as the fulfillment of some Biblical forcast, so its ok if we succomb to radiation clouds. Its 2025, and hard to believe this is happening.
Always believing that the next regime change war will be another Grenada- or Panama-style micro-militarist cakewalk in general (somehow allowing the United States to “kick the Afghanistan and Iraq syndrome” in much the same manner as it attempted to “kick the Vietnam syndrome”), and that Iran will not almost certainly descend into an extended period of instability and civil war as a product of a “successful” US regime change there in particular (not least with the non-starter of getting large segments of Iranians to embrace the likes of Reza Pahlavi, Maryam Rajavi, or Masih Alinejad as prospective successors to the velayat-e faqih clerical regime), is the height of Roveian magical thinking.
“First, dying empires often plunge into costly, sometimes disastrous military misadventures in a desperate attempt to recover their fast fading imperial glory. And, second, they tend toward political extremism as the painful loss of empire overseas demoralizes the citizenry back home.”
Source:
Alfred W. McCoy, “Micro-Militarism and Decline of Democracy,” The Progressive, June 13, 2018
Appreciate your research and contributions from Professor A.McCoy
Happy to have found his work on U Tube
Foreign Policy discussions so important today.