It was beyond disconcerting to hear the Iranian foreign minister on Sunday sounding like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky circa 2022. But that’s the comparison that instantly sprang to mind when Abbas Araghchi told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week”: “What the United States is doing is an act of aggression. What we are doing is the act of self-defense. There are huge differences between these two.”
All you have to do is substitute Russia for the United States and it is all too clear who and what we have become. An aggressor nation that kills people on Caribbean fishing boats without evidence or due process. That captures and removes the Venezuelan president, then lays claim to Venezuela’s oil. That assassinates Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sparking retaliatory attacks by Iran across the Middle East.
There are, of course, differences. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and started the war that’s still raging, he targeted the democratically elected leader of a sovereign nation, with the intent of seizing territory and installing a Russian puppet at the top. By contrast, President Trump took out a theocratic dictator who in January told his security forces to crush mass protests against him with lethal force, leading to thousands of deaths.
And yet. Trump started this war with no constitutional authority. The power to declare war or authorize the use of force rests with Congress, and unless America has been attacked, that must happen in advance. Nor has Trump mustered any consistency or convincing evidence about Iran’s nuclear capacity — one purported rationale for this war of choice. And he has embarked on it with little apparent concern about lives and consequences that so far include scores of children and other civilians killed in Iran; U.S. military casualties, among them six dead; and Iranian strikes on at least 10 nations: Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Cyprus and Oman.
When Trump suggested in a short address to the nation Friday that there could be U.S. deaths and casualties, his words sounded rote and empty. “That often happens in war,” he said. “But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future.”
The future? What future? Many of us remember President George W. Bush’s grandiose notions of exporting democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump’s “future” seems more like a return to the forever wars and failures of the past. Exactly what the “America First” candidate vowed to avoid in his winning 2016 and 2024 campaigns.
Remember the Green Zone? The protected U.S. zone in Baghdad during the Iraq war? Now it’s the site of the U.S. Embassy, and last weekend, also the site of pro-Iran protesters — some waving flags of armed pro-Iran groups, some throwing stones — met by tear gas as they tried to storm toward the embassy.
Just the words “Green Zone” are a depressing reminder of lessons too many of our leaders never learn. Iraq was an unfortunate misadventure, another war of choice, another war based on incorrect assumptions about weaponry — in the 2003 case, Iraq’s nonexistent stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction; now, a nuclear program that seems conveniently always on the cusp of being dangerous. And even more unfortunately, Bush began the Iraq war while still at the beginning of what would become a 20-year war in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Afghanistan was a theocracy controlled by the extremist Taliban. Bush & Co. did not decide to simply bomb the camps where the Taliban were training terrorists. They decided to occupy Afghanistan and try to drag it into the modern age, complete with equal rights for girls and women. Wasn’t it pretty to think so? And naive, especially after the Soviet Union spent a decade fighting in Afghanistan to put communist allies in charge, before withdrawing its troops in 1989 amid failure.
One of the most devastating documents I’ve seen was a 2020 State Department report on human rights abuses in Afghanistan. That was 19 years after we dropped the first bombs on the Taliban and began our quest to transform Afghanistan into a 21st-century country where girls could go to school and grow up to get jobs, run for office and wear whatever they wanted.
Beyond the raw brutality of the Taliban toward women, I wrote in 2021, the report cited injustice, negligence and cruelty by local governments and agencies: “Women imprisoned because they reported being victims of crimes, or at the request of family members, or as proxies for male relatives convicted of crimes.” And the inevitable, awful conclusion: No matter how long America stayed, we could not “make a country care about its own women.” Only Afghanistan could do that.
If Iran’s foreign minister was accurate in his insistence Sunday that there will be Khamenei regime successors and Islamic Republic continuity, does Trump hope to co-opt the successors as he did in Venezuela, with his new best friend Delcy Rodriguez? If the Iranian resisters (some but not all of the populace) miraculously manage to organize and make headway, will they get any money or troops from Trump? Or does he simply want Iran’s oil?
Sadly for them, our president most likely will conclude, as usual, that power is what matters most, and he’ll make deals with whoever has it — whether they’re socialists in Venezuela, autocrats in Iran or Putin in Russia.
Jill Lawrence is a journalist and the author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.” Bluesky: @jilldlawrence
