No action of a U.S. president spreads so much agony on the innocent than taking the nation to war. America has fought many different kinds of wars, those of necessity and those of choice. With his attack on Iran, President Donald Trump has taken the nation into another war of stupidity.
Candidate Trump pledged to keep America out of war. Then fresh off his snatching of Venezuela’s president in January, Trump decided he liked capturing or killing heads of state.
Seeing an opportunity, President Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel dangled an even bigger prize in front of a man who lives for prizes — regime change in Iran. For Trump, taking out the Islamic theocracy in Iran would be even bigger than a Nobel Prize or a free luxury 747 from Qatar.
As soon as Trump ordered missiles and bombs dropped on Iran, we heard the echoes of the last U.S. president to drag the nation into a war of stupidity in the Middle East — George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Now, like then, there were lies about imminent risk. Trump’s warnings about Iran’s revived nuclear bomb strategy and its plan for a long-range ballistic missile to strike the U.S. homeland turned out to be as real as Bush’s mythical weapons of mass destruction.
There were the big delusional promises of what would come after we attacked. Bush told us we would be welcomed liberators in Iraq and sent us into an eight-year bloody quagmire. Trump told us that killing the Ayatollah could lead his regime to surrender its weapons to the same unarmed Iranian people they had just massacred by the thousands.
Here we are again. A president has taken us to war based on fantasy and blind ego. Three weeks in, it is hard to imagine a war carried out with more uncertainties.
In the first hours, an American Tomahawk missile exploded into an elementary school for girls adjacent to an Iranian military base, killing at least 175 people, most of them children. In classic Trump form, he denied the U.S. had anything to do with it. Then, as the facts came in, he said he was fine with it.
Trump’s defense secretary, former Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth, gleefully eliminated the Pentagon protocols designed to avoid accidental killings. He boasted, “Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it.”
This is who we are now, a country that bombs school children, with neither accountability or apology.
A dozen nations across the Middle East have been pulled into the war, with missiles falling on the innocent everywhere. A friend of mine who leads a UNICEF office in the region told me: “Indeed, the lives of millions of children and people have been put on the line with consequences that will last for generations … for what?”
U.S. and Israeli firepower outmatch that of the Iranian regime, but Iran is quite adept at making its adversaries pay a huge cost for all our supposed winning.
Pentagon officials disclosed last week that Trump’s war had already cost more than $11 billion, with nearly $1 billion more added each day. That is more than the U.S. spends in a year on the National Cancer Institute. By disrupting global oil supplies with attacks on oil tankers and blocking the Strait of Hormuz shipping lane, the Iranian regime has also begun to cripple the global economy.
The war’s soaring oil prices have shuttered gas stations in some countries, interrupted supply chains for food, sent stock markets tumbling, and led Trump to drop sanctions against buying Russian oil, proceeds of which finance its war against Ukraine.
The American public, which can be oblivious to the effects of wars on people beyond our borders, may finally tune in to the stupidity of Trump’s war as the price of gasoline shoots up at the pump and rising energy costs jack up prices for almost everything else. Chants of USA! USA! USA! tend to fade when people can’t afford their daily commute.
Should Iran be kept from a nuclear weapon? Would the Iranian people and the world be better off with a democracy than the brutal regime in place? Yes, to both.
But there are ways to prevent Iranian nukes that don’t involve decimating millions of lives and sending the world into economic convulsions. And you can’t create a democracy by raining missiles down from above.
Once again, it is up to the American people to pull our country out of a needless war. We can begin by filling the streets of our cities and towns in the upcoming national “No Kings” protest on March 28, and by supporting candidates this fall who have some basic common sense.
We have been here before. We have seen the lies and known the cost of a war of stupidity. The question now is whether the American people will be wiser than those who have sent us once more into the Middle East turmoil.