If that was the best case President Donald Trump could make for why launching a war against Iran was necessary, it’s clearer why he didn’t bother to make it before he started the war a month ago.
In a prime-time address from the White House, a decidedly lethargic president argued both that the war was necessary — lest Iran rain destruction down on America and much of the world — and that the war is going great and will soon be over. If there is anyone not already on board with Trump’s war who would have been convinced by that speech, it’s hard to imagine who and where they are.
If there is anyone not already on board with Trump’s war who would have been convinced by that speech, it’s hard to imagine who and where they are.
The speech featured many of Trump’s familiar rhetorical tics. The military, he said, has delivered “victories like few people had ever seen before,” while Iran was about to obtain “a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before.” Everyone, apparently, is in awe: “The whole world is watching, and they can’t believe the power, strength, and brilliance, they just can’t believe what they’re seeing.” And before you know it, the war will be just a memory. “We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.”
And the global energy crisis the war touched off? Not Trump’s fault, certainly. “This short-term increase” in gas prices, he said, “has been entirely the result of the Iranian regime launching deranged terror attacks at oil tankers.” It’s hard to consider those attacks “deranged” when they were both utterly predictable and have given Iran the best leverage it has to force an end to the conflict on favorable terms.
Trump also insisted that “We’re now totally independent of the Middle East” and “America has plenty of gas. We have so much gas,” and therefore don’t have to worry about the restriction in oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz. This would be news to anyone who has filled up their gas tank in the past few weeks.
But a significant chunk of Trump’s speech was given over to a fact-challenged attack on the international nuclear agreement reached with Iran when Barack Obama was president. It’s worth reminding ourselves of that history, because it show a path we could have taken, had Trump not been so foolish and jealous of Obama.
On May 8, 2018, Trump pulled the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multinational deal to restrict and monitor Iran’s nuclear program that was painstakingly negotiated and finalized in mid-2015, with the help of China, Russia, France, Germany, Britain and the European Union. Trump’s own advisers then, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis, had pleaded with him not to abandon the agreement, arguing that it was keeping Iran’s nuclear ambitions in check. But Trump killed it, claiming that the Iranian regime would quickly come crawling back and give in. “They are going to want to make a new and lasting deal,” he said. But no new agreement ever materialized.








