For the past two decades, disastrous Middle East wars have been synonymous with the name Bush. The current US president seems determined to now make them synonymous with the name Trump.
It is widely understood that the US war with Iran that the Donald Trump White House is barreling toward, and the regime collapse that seems to have become the unofficial goal of the Israeli government, would be terrible for everyone involved, and for the same reasons as the Iraq War was twenty years ago: massive civilian death in yet another Muslim-majority country that will inflame a new round of anti-American terrorism; US troops and even civilians needlessly sacrificed as they become targets of reprisal in the region and possibly beyond; a violent internal power struggle involving ethno-sectarian violence and a tug of war for influence by foreign powers; and a flood of weapons and desperate, angry people leaving Iran’s borders that destabilizes neighboring countries, nearby regions, and even the very same Western countries backing this war.
Trump himself knows all this very well because he watched it all play out with George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion and, taking the political temperature a decade’s worth of chaos later, used it to viciously pounce on Bush’s brother in the 2016 Republican primary. “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, alright? . . . [W]e can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty,” he said on the debate stage, shocking the Washington establishment. “We should have never been in Iraq, we have destabilized the Middle East.”
“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction — there were none. And they knew there were none,” he added for good measure.
This was the kind of talk in 2016 that earned Trump the furious hatred of Republican neoconservatives. “It was a disgrace,” lamented Fox News host Mark Levin at the time, who spent the rest of the race bashing Trump and vowing not to vote for him….
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
