The case for each U.S. war in the Middle East over the past 35 years has had progressively weaker rationale and international support. The aggression against Iran launched Saturday has almost none of either, writes Joe Lauria.
Trump at last Tuesday’s State of the Union address in which he barely mentioned Iran. (ABC News screenshot/YouTube)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Donald Trump has launched a major war of aggression in the Middle East against Iran and in the preceding weeks made almost no effort, in contrast to previous U.S. wars in the region, to build a case to unleash what could be a history-altering conflagration.
The size and scope of this U.S. attack is being compared to the First and Second Gulf Wars. A look back at the lead-up to those two U.S. wars shows that the clarity of the rationale for war and its legal arguments weakened for each succeeding conflict. The case for each U.S. war in the Middle East over the past 35 years has has had a progressively weaker rationale and international support. The aggression against Iran launched today has almost none.
While George H.W. Bush in 1990-91 secured U.N. Security Council and U.S. Congressional authorizations for force; built a coalition of 35 nations and made major speeches trying to make his case for war, George W. Bush in 2003 got only a Congressional resolution after failing at the U.N.; put together a coalition of only four nations and his administration’s speeches to make their case were proven to be full of lies.
Trump, on the other hand, has no casus belli for this attack, no legal authorizations and no coalition. He made no addresses to the American people explaining why he will risk American and other people’s lives. In his one-hour and 48-minutes speech to the nation on Tuesday he made barely mentioned Iran at all.
The First Gulf War
In making the case for the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, U.S. President George H.W. Bush went to the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. Congress and before the American people.
He had arms twisted at the U.N., especially Yemen’s, whose ambassador was told his No vote would be the most expensive vote Yemen had ever cast. It turned out to be one of only two No votes, Cuba being the other.
Security Council Resolution 678 passed on Nov. 29, 1990 authorizing the U.S. to go to war by 12 votes in favor (including the Soviet Union), two against and one abstention (China).
The U.S. then completed shut down its aid program to Yemen, which amounted to about $70 million. Cuba was already under a U.S. embargo since 1962.
From Aug. 8, 1990, (two days after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait) to Jan. 16, 1991 (to announce the initiation of hostilities), Bush made three major addresses to the nation and one to the U.N. General Assembly on Oct. 1, 1990. He gave his reasons for going to war, the main one being to eject Iraq from Kuwait.
Bush then went to Congress, which authorized him to take military action against Iraq with a resolution passed on Jan. 12, 1991 and signed by Bush two days later.
Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, meanwhile had put together a coalition of 35 nations to go to war with the U.S. on Jan. 17, 1991.
Setting a Trap
April 18,1991: Demolished vehicles line Highway 80, also known as the “Highway of Death”, the route fleeing Iraqi forces took as they retreated fom Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. (Joe Coleman,/Air Force Magazine,/Wikimedia Commons)
Of course there is evidence that the United States wanted Iraq to invade Kuwait all along.
April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, had given clear signal given to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein on July 25, 1990 that the U.S. would do nothing to stop him from invading Kuwait eight days later.
She told Saddam that the U.S. had no “opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” But it wasn’t just Glaspie that left the door open to Kuwait. The Washington Post reported on Sept. 17, 1990:
“In the same week that Ambassador April Glaspie met a menacing tirade from Saddam with respectful and sympathetic responses, Secretary of State James Baker’s top public affairs aide, Margaret Tutwiler, and his chief assistant for the Middle East, John Kelly, both publicly said that the United States was not obligated to come to Kuwait’s aid if the emirate were attacked. They also failed to voice clear support for Kuwait’s territorial integrity in the face of Saddam’s threats.”
Following the 1979 Islamist revolution in Tehran that overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, the United States sought to contain Iran by supplying billions of dollars in aid, intelligence, dual-use technology and training to Iraq, which invaded Iran in 1980, spurring an eight-year long brutal war. The devastating conflict ended in a virtual stalemate in 1988 after the loss of one to two million people.
Though neither side won the war, Saddam’s military remained strong enough to be a menace to U.S. interests in the region. The Glaspie trap was to allow Saddam to invade Kuwait to give the U.S. a reason to destroy Iraq’s military, such as retreating Iraqi soldiers being essentially shot in the back in the massacre on the Highway of Death.
The Second Gulf War
Feb. 5, 2002: U.S.President George W. Bush, right, and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair trying to sell the invasion of Iraq at a joint news conference at Prairie Chap in Crawford, Texas. (The U.S. National Archives)
George W. Bush failed to get the same authorization from the U.N. Security Council that his father did, despite, or perhaps because of, then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s vial display in the Security Council chamber.
Powell tried to convince the Council of the lies of Iraq’s WMD that Bush and other members of his administration were spewing, principally Iraq’s non-existent WMD. The Bush administration never established a case that Saddam Hussein, despite his domestic brutality, was in any way a threat to the United States.
Bush could not therefore invoke the self-defense Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. He needed a Security Council resolution.
But Bush did not have his father’s invasion of Kuwait as a reason and needed to fabricate a casus belli. Despite revelations of U.S. spying on Security Council members to try to manipulate their vote, the Council refused as U.S. allies Germany and France joined with Russia and China to oppose the invasion.
The U.S. Congress did give Bush authorization to use force, but whereas his father had assembled a coalition of 35 nations, W. Bush could only get Iraq’s former colonial master Britain, plus Poland and Australia on board.
Trump’s War on Iran
Trump announcing his aggression against Iran in a video released at 2:30 am EST Saturday morning. (Truth Social)
Twenty-three years after the Bush invasion of Iraq on false intelligence and little international support, Donald Trump has begun a war of aggression against Iran with no intelligence and no international support.
Trump didn’t even bother to go to the U.N. Security Council, where Russia and China would have justly vetoed a resolution as Iran is no threat to the United States. And he didn’t bother going to Congress either, where not only does his party have a majority in both Houses, but almost all Democrats are slavishly devoted to Israel too.
At Trump’s State of the Union address last Tuesday, the only time the Democrats stood up to applause was when Trump said the few words he did against Iran. It remains a mystery why he did not seek authorization from Congress for this war. Perhaps Trump is just an authoritarian who thinks he’s above even pro forma democracy. For him, international law and the U.S. Constitution are just nuisances.
In his pre-recorded, 8-minute video announcing the war, which was released at 2:30 am Washington time Saturday, Trump — dressed as if for a golf outing — dredged up the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq by Iranian-backed militia as reasons for his unprovoked attack. Had the U.S. (and Britain) not overthrown a democratically-elected Iranian leader in 1953 there may never have been a 1979 Iranian Revolution and if the U.S. had not invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003, there would have been no roadside bombs.
Trump falsely said Iran has rejected every opportunity to “renounce their nuclear ambitions,” ignoring that he tore up a 2015 international nuclear deal that was working to monitor Iran’s reduced enrichment.
In a very weak imitation of the George W. Bush’s farce, Trump uttered some words at the joint session on Tuesday about Iran wanting to get a nuclear weapon, a ballistic missile to reach the United States and being the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism.
All three are huge, W. Bush-worthy lies. The Sunni Gulf monarchies are the biggest terrorism backers. U.S. intelligence has clearly stated that Iran is not working on a nuclear weapon, nor is there intelligence saying it is actively working on a ballistic missile that can hit the U.S. Benjamin Netanyahu peddled that tale about Iran building an ICBM that can hit New York in “three or four years” at the U.N. General Assembly more than 10 years ago. In October he again floated that lie.
The New York Times played an important role in paving the way for the 2003 invasion. Its reporting was so false that in May 2004 it was forced to publish a front-page apology to its readers. But this time, the Times published an article explicitly reporting that Trump’s arguments for war against Iran were false. The newspaper reported:
“As they made their public case for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran had restarted its nuclear program, had enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days and was developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States.
All three of these claims are either false or unproven.
American and European government officials, international weapons monitoring groups and reports from American intelligence agencies give a far different picture of the urgency of the Iran threat than the one the White House presented in the days leading up to Saturday’s strikes.”
We have come a very long way since the last major U.S. catastrophe in the Middle East.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
Its a big case now ?
Is it airtight or knot ?
This of course is a logical progression. For decades, they’ve been able to lie to take the nation to war. There is “Genocide in Serbia”, to “Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq”, to name just two prominent examples. Once the American people allowed the politicians to lie to them in such a blatant fashion, it was only just the next step that they would move on to not even bothering to make a case. They were not really forced to really make a case when they were just lying.
If the American people had insisted actually following the rules, and had insisted that the American people must be treated with respect in a democracy, then the system would never have gotten to this point. Putting their foot down and not accepting this nonsense by Just Saying No would have made the leaders treat the people with respect. They did have to treat the people with respect for a couple of decades, and they called that “The Vietnam Syndrome”.
An aside: Did Nancy ever Just Say No to Ronnie in opposition to any of his despicable acts?
CNN HEADLINE 3/2:
Live Updates: The president says the US military is ‘knocking the crap’ out of Iran as the war spirals across the Middle East.
Let’s tell that to the parents of the 150 slaughtered schoolgirls in southern Iran. Does this psychopath have even the slightest sense of humanity in him?
Uh, you do realize the inherent contradiction in that last sentence, don’t ya? I don’t know if you know the meaning, or if ‘psychopath’ is just a name in your arsenal that you call someone, but you did hit the nail exactly on its head. Except for the fact that its in the form of a question?
War Powers Act, law passed by the U.S. Congress on November 7, 1973, over the veto of Pres. Richard Nixon. The joint measure was called the War Powers Resolution, though the title of the Senate-approved bill, War Powers Act, became widely used.
Quick Facts
Date:
November 7, 1973
Location:
United States
The act sought to restrain the president’s ability to commit U.S. forces overseas by requiring the executive branch to consult with and report to Congress before involving U.S. forces in foreign hostilities. Widely considered a measure for preventing “future Vietnams,” it was nonetheless generally resisted or ignored by subsequent presidents, many of whom regarded it as an unconstitutional usurpation of their executive authority.
Since the passage of this joint resolution, presidents have tended to take actions that have been “consistent with” rather than “pursuant to” the provisions of the act—in some cases, seeking congressional approval for military action without invoking the law itself. Members of Congress have complained that they have not been given timely notification of or sufficient details regarding some military engagements.
Some legislators have gone to court (unsuccessfully) to seek adjudication of what they believe to have been violations of the act. Increasingly, presidents have identified resolutions taken by the United Nations or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as justification for military intervention.
(Source: Britannica.com)
Just who are the two humanlike apes indeed, in the lead photo, with the identical imbecilic smiles, sitting behind the one at the mic pointing his foremost oratorical weapon, speaking his inanities to a half full hall – as in intoxicated, other assorted, coerced, apelike species, applauding in unison, dressed and parading their wares around, in the finery of their Congressional coats of armor?
In a world seen with perspective, apes are fine contributing members of their eco-communities. It is our species that deserves the pejorative description.
My apologies to you and yours for misclassifying – demeaning, lumping together ‘human doings’ in the taxonomic hierarchical sense, one of the highest domains of living organisms, with, namely the one specific species – Apes.
As a single species Homo sapiens (Human beings) represent an insignificant share of total Earth life (0.01%) but controls the vast majority of mammalian biomass.
No doubt, humans and apes are extremely close biologically, sharing roughly 98% to 99% of their DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos, which are our closest living relatives. We share a common ancestor that lived approximately 5 to 7 million years ago, making us part of the same hominid family.
It is today, however, now quite apparent that some in the “wee ‘categorey’” of our closest living relatives have reverted to an earlier stage in “our” evolution.
It is obvious too, that it is definitely NOT the species specific category of ‘Apes’.
I’m hoping that my next lifetime is not on a world with a simian species as the dominant lifeform. They seem to like to screech at each other and throw feces at each other. And nothing changes as they ‘evolve’, except they can amplify their screeches and project them around the world at the speed of light. And instead of throwing feces, they throw high explosives or nukes at each other.
I want my next lifetime to be on a world where the dominant species is something like dolphins. Got to be an improvement of the bizarre oxymoron of intelligent monkeys. Hopefully my Karma survives this intact enough that in my next life there are no more friggin monkeys. I’d settle for intelligent white mice. But please, no more intelligent monkeys.
Pretty picture those 3 , i had similiar thoughts
Vance holding up the light pole and the little guy on the right looking over the back
seat on the way to church ,
The fat one in the center Beating these two idiots and telling them to behave in church today ,
What is Vance on? That don’t look like a legal smile.
Johnson seems to have an amphetamine sort of intensity in that photo, but Vance is just flying somewhere.
Just who are the two humanlike apes in the lead photo?
Not sure. They look vaguely familiar. The guy in the front needs to fire his cosmetician.
Case? We don’t need no steenking case.
Treason & tantrum,
and no adults in Congress.
I can only pray for the innocent children and the misguided sailors …
Trump openly stated he can do anything he wants. It is not as if numerous Presidents haven’t arbitrarily fired off big beautiful missile Big beautiful missile barrages of 100 or so against Iraq as Bush Sr on the day before leaving office or Clinton to Afghanistan supposedly after bin Laden or Trump at Syria. Letting things like the Tonken Gulf attack for political election year gain give the impression Trump must be right and US elections may be the biggest imminent threat to the entire world. The main state sponsor of terrorism and a rogue empire as throughout western history of religious empires.
The goal is to dominate the industrial world via control of the oil supply. The only surprise is that unlike Venezuela they don’t come right out and say so.
If he said this was his goal a month ago, and has not said otherwise since, why would anyone believe that it is not the case here even if he does not say it (again)?
Besides, the real goal is bigger than that. Its the domination of the entire world by Wall Street. Oil is just one of several sectors of Wall Street.
As the Great Progressive President used to say …. Bully, Bully.
Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!
Geopolitics by tantrum seems a silly simplicity, but may be the most correct understanding. I’ve just read the opinions of two hands full of “ the world’s leading experts on the Middle East”; I am not comforted!
I am reminded more of watching parents giving in to a strategical screaming child at the candy display in a grocery store than of responsible humans responding to dangerous levels of misperception, coercion and powerful self-interest. But this tantrum has not the fear of embarrassment of loud childish demand, but rather the destructive power of thousands of tons of explosives and sophisticated delivery systems…but, is still a tantrum!
It remains the same model: demand, display, force response, be outraged at response (no matter what the response is), escalate; repeat until one gets the chocolate bar, the acquiescence of a city, the domination of others or the hegemonic control of the world. It must be realized that it is the needs of a disturbed, abused child acting out in the body of a grown sociopath with an internationally powerful military that desires to dominate this moment.
Appeasement does not work.
Depends on the situation. One day my son came to the car from school (8th grade) with blood on his face. A gang of boys had surrounded him and one boy who especially disliked him hit him. I asked if he fought back, not as a recommendation just information. He said that if he hit the boy, the whole gang would have jumped him. There was a clear power imbalance and a willingness to inflict damage. In our present geopolitics, the bully has the power to inflict great pain if the attacked nation(s) fight back too hard or well. They have little choice but to appease or accept existential danger and be willing to die fighting— and that includes many thousands of their civilian population since today’s wars hold whole populations hostage. When the only rule is ‘violence makes right’ (the correct formulation!) and there is no institutional force beyond and more powerful than the deliverers of violence, measured appeasement has to be an option (with no certainty). That is the terrible truth of mutually assured destruction; the argument that seemed to act as a stay against aggression has been turned on its head and now being used by the bully as a protection for his violence.
“We have come a very long way since the last major U.S. catastrophe in the Middle East.”
A long spiral down. Listening to a clip of Trump’s so-called reasons for dropping “many many bombs” on Iran early this morning I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Not because it was funny but because he sounded so weak, so pathetic & fake. A little later I heard Scott Ritter describe him as sounding not like a confident head of state leading his country into war but rather like a weak, fat, old man. Trump, what a Chump.
“We have come a very long way …”
Hmm, seems like the same bottom of the same $#!^hole to me. Of course, I was a protestor who was outraged and getting sprayed with pepper based chemical munitions for my trouble way back then. Maybe if I’d believed in myths like democracy, freedom and the united nations back then, I could say its been a long way. But, pepper spray in the eyes has the ability to make one see very clearly.
We Need the Triple Double CI Threat with past Whistle Blowing experience With no fear or crybaby tendencies .
When in doubt FedSmoker is your man .LOL
Hypothetical Approach to the Epstein Files
If Fedsmoker were alive to uncover the Epstein files, his approach would not be through mainstream journalism or legal channels, but rather a direct, high-risk confrontation with the entities holding the information:
Direct Confrontation: He would likely drive his “chariot” to the homes of involved officials, or to the offices of the FBI or Department of Justice, and attempt to “interview” them directly on camera.
Relentless Harassment of Officials: He would not accept redacted documents or “no comment” responses. He would likely accuse officials of being “dirty” and complicit in the crimes to their faces, filming their reactions.
Uncovering “The Chariots”: He would focus on the flight logs and logistics (“chariots”) to personally document every stop and person involved, attempting to bypass official narratives.
No-Fear “Whistleblowing”: He would have zero fear of legal repercussions, often initiating contact by filming without consent and ignoring orders to cease and desist.
In short, Fedsmoker would treat the Epstein scandal as a massive, nationwide “dirty cop” situation, likely to cause immense disruption to the entities attempting to control the release of information.
Only Congress can declare war. Trump should be impeached immediately!
No option to share this article on UpScrolled, the only decent social media, the only one I am using.
Can you please rectify this?
Many thanks!