US bombs Iran, goes into another distant war

TOI correspondent from Washington: Washington DC's military machine has whipped up another war. A nation whose power elites are credited with an insatiable appetite for death and destruction was dragged into another distant conflict by a President who ironically came to power claiming to be a peacemaker while railing against the capital's warmongers.

Soon after he sent six B-52 stealth bombers half-way across the world to attack Iran with the dubious claim that it was making nuclear weapons, US President Donald Trump said in a TV address that the "strikes were a spectacular military success" and Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities "have been completely and totally obliterated."

"Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not. Future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier," he warned, promising more punishment on a country that insists its nuclear program is civilian in nature.

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Iran confirmed the strikes but said it had evacuated the sites some time ago and transferred enriched uranium reserves, suggesting that the strikes might not have entirely destroyed its ability to reconstitute the program.

Nuclear monitors in the region also reported no signs of contamination or radiation leaks at the targeted sites (Isfahan, Fordow, and Natanz), making follow-up attacks inevitable unless Iran meets the Trump demand for "complete surrender."

In fact, Trump promised as much, saying, "Remember, there are many targets left. Tonight’s was the most difficult of them all, by far, and perhaps the most lethal. But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill. Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes."

Many analysts, including some aligned with Trump on all other issues, say allegations of Iran making a bomb are pure drivel, with echoes of similar trumped up Bush era charges against Iraq that sucked the US into another war in 2003. Even some of Trump's hardcore MAGA supporters are accusing him of being suckered by phony narrative propagated by paranoid Israeli hardliners and neurotic Jewish nativists.

"Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war. There would not be bombs falling on the people of Israel if Netanyahu had not dropped bombs on the people of Iran first. Israel is a nuclear armed nation. This is not our fight. Peace is the answer," raged Marjorie Taylor Greene, a MAGA lawmaker who is gradually exiting from the Trump orbit.

But pro-Israeli elements in the US maintain that the Jewish state, its 0.1 per cent of landmass in the Middle-East buffeted by 22 Arab/Muslim nations, cannot afford the slightest risk in its existential crisis.

Trump eventually fell in line with the view after initial skepticism, sharing encomiums with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who initiated the war. "We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before, and we’ve gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel," Trump said.

Trump minions fall in line

Except for a few stragglers, President Trump's MAGA minions, including many who believed in his "no foreign war" pledge, quickly fell in line the party supremo. Among them was Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's intelligence czar, who as recently as March had testified before Congress that the US intel community "continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003."

After Trump twice smacked her down saying "I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one," Gabbard quickly reversed course and accused the media of intentionally taking her testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division. "America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly. President Trump has been clear that can’t happen, and I agree," she said.

For her compliance, critics dubbed her "Trump's Powell" alluding to then President Bush's Secretary of State Colin Powell who famously made a dodgy case before the United Nations Security Council to justify military action against Iraq alleging possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and ties to terrorism.

Also lining up behind the President, literally, were vice-president JD Vance and two cabinet principals, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had initially dissociated US from Israel's precipitate action. All three stood behind Trump in his 10 p.m TV address, abiding by his turnaround on keeping US out of distant wars.

In his brief address and a pair of social media posts, the US President gloated about the reach, power, and precision of the American attack, saying "there is not another military in the World that could have done this."

"This is an HISTORIC MOMENT FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ISRAEL, AND THE WORLD. IRAN MUST NOW AGREE TO END THIS WAR," Trump wrote, even thought it was Israel which began the war with US backing.

But the American public was less impressed by yet another distant war, two of which (Afghanistan and Iraq), besides other random interventions, has cost them trillions of dollars and put the country $36 trillion in debt. A Washington Post insta-poll found Americans opposing US airstrikes by a 20 percentage-point margin — 45 percent to 25 percent — with a sizable 30 percent saying they are unsure.