This morning, the United States of America effectively declared war on the Islamic Republic of Iran (technically only Congress can declare war but bypassing Congress is something Trump has no compunction about doing).
This brings the enmity that has defined their relationship for the past half-century to a violent head, perhaps where it was always destined to go. At the time of writing, there have been strikes in multiple Iranian cities, inside Israel and in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. Factor in the recent eruption of war between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the entire region is truly on fire.
In his speech to the American people announcing the beginning of ‘major military operations’, Trump explicitly framed the conflict in domestic terms by reciting a litany of the actions of the Islamic Republic against the United States and its allies, many of which cost American lives and even calling back to the Iranian hostage crisis, a psychologically searing episode for Americans at the time.
Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime — a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.
Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world.
For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries.
Among the regime’s very first acts was to back a violent takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of American hostages for 444 days.
In 1983, Iran’s proxies carried out the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel.
In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole (where) many died.
Iranian forces killed and maimed hundreds of American service members in Iraq.
The regime’s proxies have continued to launch countless attacks against American forces stationed in the Middle East in recent years, as well as US naval and commercial vessels and international shipping lands.
It’s been mass terror, and we’re not going to put up with it any longer.
Trump goes on to accuse the Iranians of helping with preparations for the October 7th atrocity, of trying to develop missiles that could strike ‘our very good friends and allies in Europe’ (so Russia and Hungary respectively then…) and, of course, of trying to build a nuclear weapon. All of these facts together are his casus belli
Trump has spent the past few weeks massing the greatest concentration of American firepower in the Middle East since the Iraq War including two carrier strike groups, fleets of warplanes and the redeployment of sophisticated anti-misslie defenses to ring American assets in the region. The talks held recently in attempt to avert war were clearly going to go nowhere, though everyone participated in the charade for their own reasons.
And now, the fight has begun. What are the United States war goals?
Overall, the United States is clearly aiming for regime change. The chain of events that occurred since October 7th have dismantled the network of proxies Iran established (and in which they invested huge sums of money that could have been spent on their own people) whose existence was to deter precisely this outcome.
The thinking was, attack Iran, our allies will open the gates of hell. However, with these proxies massively degraded, Iran has been left vulnerable because they are unable to deter anything right now. The war between Israel and Iran last summer also weakened Iran’s air defences and they have been unable to repair or replace what was damaged.
President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign (including the recent restoration of onerous sanctions under the snapback mechanism) contributed to the outbreak of the recent waves of protests, and the regime’s exceptionally bloody response to those protests has drained whatever remained of their legitimacy with their own population.
In other words, the Islamic Republic has never been so vulnerable. Whether American attacks will provide the opening the public requires to finally topple the Regime, or whether a rally around the flag effect will fortify the government through the conflict remains to be seen.
If regime change is not achievable, Trump will instead settle for satisfactory resolutions on the three issues his envoys brought up at the recent negotiations.
Firstly, he wants the Iranian nuclear program permanently neutered so that he can be sure the Iranian regime will never build a nuclear weapon.
Secondly, he wants limits placed on Iran’s ballistic missile program. Lacking any real alternatives, the Iranians have invested heavily in their missile program as a way to project power, threaten their enemies and maintain a level of deterrence. Many of those missiles will now be fired at American assets in the Middle East as well as Israel.
Those assets are located in Arab countries that were doing their utmost to avert the outbreak of war (those efforts have clearly failed) and thus these countries will also be subjected to attack by Iran. How they respond and whether they get dragged in is yet to be seen.
Third, Trump wants an end to their support for their proxy network that has contributed to the chaos in the Middle East. That means no more support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis or anyone else, which would greatly inhibit those movements (and probably lead to the effective collapse of some of them).
Taken together, Trump’s secondary goal is therefore Iran’s geopolitical surrender.
Iran’s war goal is much simpler. Survive.
The regime will declare victory if it can endure the barrage falling upon it right now, no matter what concessions it will have to make to get Trump to stop. Whilst Iran cannot win this war outright, they can inflict immense pain not only on the Americans by attacking their assets in the region but on the rest of the world as well.
The price for oil is bound to increase in the wake of the conflict, and Iran may exercise the doomsday option of mining the Straits of Hormuz, choking the global oil supply and precipitating a planet wide economic crisis.
‘If we’re going down, we are taking you all down with us’ is not just a corny line from overwrought dramas but a viable military strategy. Even those of us based in Ireland will likely not escape the reverberations of what is unfolding right now.
They also know Trump wants a short war given his domestic considerations, his base is notoriously hostile to foreign entanglements. That’s why he waited till he had so much firepower concentrated before beginning the conflict, to pack as much force into as concentrated a time period as possible.
The longer Iran drags this war out, the greater the chance Trump will accede to face-saving compromise.
In conclusion I wish to reiterate once again that I absolutely despise President Trump and I regard him as unfit for the office he holds. Furthermore, I regard the government of his co-belligerent Israel as a genocidal regime whose members will hopefully find themselves facing justice at some point in the years to come for their atrocities.
But just because those two nations are now waging war on Iran, that doesn’t mean I am going to be cheering the Iranians on or doing a miniature celebration should the Iranians score a lucky shot, downing an American jet or sinking an American vessel.
I will be honest in saying that I regard the Iranian regime as an evil, wretched malignancy spreading terror at home and poison abroad. They recently slaughtered thousands of their own people to keep a decrepit theocrat in power for a little longer with some credible estimates saying that the number killed exceeded thirty thousand people.
If the Americans and the Israelis topple this regime, or if one of their bombs manages to find its way to landing on the Ayatollah’s head during these hostilities, I won’t shed any tears whatsoever.
As for where my sympathies lie, they lie squarely with the people of Iran who have endured so much these past few weeks…and months…and decades and who don’t deserve to be subject to random death from the air, nor do from the actions of their own security forces as they protest injustice.
If there is any justice to be had amidst this horror, it is that Iran may finally free itself from the shackles of the Islamic Republic and that they can rejoin the international community in freedom and dignity.
Of course, cynic that I am, I absolutely have no doubt that they the outcome will be considerably less ideal than that, ranging from the regime triumphing, to a collapse into chaos, to a military regime Trump can do business with (and still happy to put the boot on public aspirations) coming to power. I hope for the best though even in these darkest moments.
I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.
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