The war in Iran—so recently “ended”
to the back-slapping acclaim of the administration that started it—is
definitely back on. Iran attacked an air base in Jordan and other sites over the weekend,
killing a total of three American soldiers (another service member was missing as of
Sunday). The United States retaliated; Iran retaliated back. The New York
Times described
the countries as having “edged closer to a wider war.”Donald Trump actually makes a fair
point when he reminds people that Vietnam lasted a decade and cost 58,000
American lives (and two million Vietnamese ones, which he doesn’t mention as
often). Iran isn’t close to being a “quagmire” just yet—not even a Dubya-style
one. People can get a little overwrought when discussing these things.Having said that, though, the
future looks pretty grim. I mean, we’ve got Trump doing the one thing he said
he’d never do: running a war. Knowing what we know about his attention span,
his decision-making process, his willed ignorance of history, his refusal to
read briefing papers, and his habit of responding to the last thing he saw on
Fox News or Newsmax, we have plenty of reason to be worried here—and by “we,” I don’t
mean liberals or Democrats or even Americans. I mean the world.Let’s sort through the possible
scenarios. Granted, they are extremely unlikely to involve 58,000 American
deaths. But Vietnam was probably the largest military tragedy in the history of
this country. There are other, less costly ways to lose a war. The United
States lost around 4,400 service members in Iraq. That’s minuscule compared to
Vietnam, but it’s still a war we largely lost (the military objective of
toppling Saddam Hussein was achieved, but at a huge and off-the-books financial
cost, and Iraq today is at best a kinda-sorta democracy). So, some possible scenarios, from
least bad to worst:Trump bombs some civilian installations like power
stations, commits a few war crimes but nothing that deeply shocks and appalls
world opinion (bombing Pickaxe
Mountain, for example); Iran finds a way to exert fuller control over the
Strait of Hormuz; gas prices go up again, and Wall Street gets jittery; and
Trump finds an exit ramp. In other words, we just rerun the conflict we’ve
already watched transpire.Or, Trump may decide to do a massive bombing raid on
Kharg Island, the distribution point for 90 percent of Iran’s oil and natural
gas. He bombed
Kharg back in March, but that raid deliberately did not involve attacks on
the island’s oil and gas infrastructure. Would Trump simply repeat that—an
attack that had little discernible impact on events—or would he raise the
stakes and hit the oil and gas installations this time? There has also been
talk of a full-scale invasion of the island by U.S. troops. Doctor Testosterone
over at the Pentagon probably can’t wait. Trump is surely holding off on both
of these options because he knows full well that either would likely send gas
prices soaring to the heavens and have other negative effects on the global
economy. But Iran could do something that makes Trump change his mind, makes
him feel he needs to do something dramatic, give Fox and Newsmax some A1 footage of things going boom.An even worse scenario would see both sides escalating
until some utterly predictable “unpredictable” thing happens. A U.S. bomb hits
another school, or a town square, and a few hundred civilians die. Iran kills
some critical mass of American soldiers—a couple hundred, say. Slowly, or maybe
not so slowly, this becomes a real shooting war, the kind of conflict that leads
the news every night and has no plausible end in sight.Finally, there is the possibility that Trump gets
impatient over a war he thought he was going to win in two weeks, and he takes
drastic action that truly does shock world opinion. The wholesale bombing of
civilian infrastructure. Bombing of civilian targets resulting in heavy
casualties. The metaphorical “nuclear option” in this scenario would be quite
literally nuclear. When people think of nuclear war, they think of the planet
being blown to smithereens. But in fact, the United States has many small,
tactical, variable-yield nuclear weapons in its arsenal, much smaller than the
bomb dropped on Hiroshima (15 kilotons). I know—no one thinks this will happen,
no one takes it remotely seriously. And they’re probably right. I’m just
saying—with Donald Trump (and Pete Hegseth), never say never. I’m sure if you’d
told the experts two years ago that the United States of America would start
downing small watercraft in the Caribbean without apparent justification, going
so far in at least one case as to strike
a vessel a second time to kill the survivors, you’d have been greeted with
condescending laughter.I don’t think conscience would
constrain Trump from dropping a message-sending little nuke on Qom. I mean,
come on. I do however think there is one force that would constrain him:
the stock market. That’s what he cares about at the end of the day. He has to
know, all his ridiculous and offensive bluster aside, that he really screwed
the pooch here. His war didn’t end in two weeks. Incredible as it must have
seemed to him, the Iranian people did not rise up as one in gratitude to Trump
and overthrow the mullahs. (Those who thought that was a possibility seemed to
have missed the part where the ruling regime brutally put down—that is to say, slaughtered—the
protest movement that for a time gained worldwide attention.) Now he has to
find a way out of this without causing a global depression.So that’s probably what he’ll do.
Trump Always Chickens Out. He has more important things on his mind, at least
more important to him: money to steal, lucre to rake in while still in office,
a ballroom to build, a Reflecting Pool to fix (after re-ruining it), an
election to rig, tens of thousands of brown people to harass and detain and,
when deemed necessary, kill.But as this war restarts, we would
do well to remember two things. First, war is always unpredictable; things
happen that the experts said would never happen, and before you know it, the
casualties are mounting, and the warmakers are screaming about patriotism.
Second, Trump is Trump—a vain man-child who rarely thinks more than an hour or
so ahead. At any given moment, he’ll do what he thinks he needs to do to get
out of whatever immediate jam he’s put himself in. That’s why we’re in this war
in the first place. And that’s why Donald Trump running a real-live war is the
world’s worst nightmare.