US is again betting that installing ‘our sonuvabitch' will neutralise an adversary. It never does

Irish Times

6 hours ago

In the surreal world of
Donald Trump
and
Binyamin Netanyahu
, war starts and ends on social media, with the flick of a post on Truth Social.
Midnight Hammer, the name chosen by Washington for its June 22nd bombing raids on
Iran
, might have been better suited to a porn film. Everything in Sheriff Trump's wild west is oversized – the world's most expensive warplanes delivered the world's heaviest ordnance on the world's longest bombing raid constituting 'ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY'. Except it wasn't.
In his inaugural address last January, Trump gave the impression he had learned from past errors, promising to 'measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into'.
If Trump were capable of contemplation, he might ask himself why, roughly every 20 years,
Israel
and the US attempt to remake the Middle East, with catastrophic consequences. A brief reminder of past misadventures:
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June 1982
Israel invades Lebanon
with the goal of stopping attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers and tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians are killed. Israeli occupation forces remain in much of the country for 18 years, until they are driven out in humiliation by Hizbullah, an Iranian-backed Shia Muslim militia.
March 2003
The
US invades Iraq
with the goal of destroying Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and more than 4,000 US troops are killed during the invasion, ensuing civil war and eight-year occupation, which costs more than $3 trillion. Iran becomes the main power in Iraq.
June 13th, 2025
Binyamin Netanyahu begins bombing Iran, on the dubious pretext that Iran is about to make a nuclear weapon. Israel has never owned up to owning hundreds of nuclear warheads that it has never submitted for inspection. Trump, who doesn't follow through on his own ultimatums to
Vladimir Putin
, waits only three days of a two-week grace period before dropping 14 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, or MOPs, on Iranian nuclear sites.
Trump calls Iran 'the world's No 1 state sponsor of terror'. But these days, it is Trump's buddies, Putin and Netanyahu, who practise state terror against Ukraine and Gaza.
If there really were no other way to spare the world from a hypothetical Iranian bomb, one might have concluded – as
German chancellor Friedrich Merz did in an obscene remark
– that Israel was 'doing our dirty work for us', or 'Drecksarbeit', as he put it. Nato secretary general Mark Rutte also
praised the illegal attacks
. Under Trump, the West has lost its moral compass.
Painstaking negotiations, not brute force, are the only way to defuse a nuclear threat. Diplomacy achieved the 2015 accord known as the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action treaty (JCPOA)
, which Iran abided by until Trump discarded the agreement at Netanyahu's urging.
It was Netanyahu who commissioned the 1996 Clean Break report advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, upon which US neocons based the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This month's war on Iran was reportedly inspired by Restoring Deterrence: Destabilising the Iranian Regime,
a study
by the British academic researcher Barak Seener, published by a rightwing think tank in London.
The belief that we can neutralise an adversary by installing 'our sonuvabitch' is a dangerous, recurring delusion. In 1982 Israel and the US attempted to impose the soon-to-be slain Maronite militia leader Bachir Gemayel to lead Lebanon. In 2003 the US groomed
Ahmad Chalabi
, a corrupt banker who propagated the myth of Saddam's WMDs, for Baghdad.
Now
Israel dreams
of restoring the Pahlavi dynasty, 46 years after the late Shah and his family were driven out by Islamic revolution. The Shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, now aged 64, visited Jerusalem with his mother Farah Diba
at the invitation
of the Israeli Likud cabinet minister Gila Gamliel in 2023. 'The Iranian people love Israel, and they want the Ayatollah regime to be replaced,' Gamaliel told the Jerusalem Post
in March.
Trump harbours the same fantasy: 'It's not politically correct to use the term 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime Change??? MIGA!!!' he posted on Truth Social.
On June 23rd Reza Pahlavi predicted at a press conference in Paris that the Tehran regime would fall this year. Israel's heritage minister, Amihai Eliyahu of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party,
said
, 'The fact that we are co-operating with the opposition in Iran today is a blessing.'
After an estimated 800 Iranians and 30 Israelis were killed, Trump blithely congratulated his Israeli allies and the country he had just bombed for their 'Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence'. Hours later he lashed out at both for apparent ceasefire violations, saying they 'don't know what the f*** they are doing.'
Trump flew to The Hague, where he was feted by royalty and fawned over by Nato's secretary general. Thirty-one of Nato's 32 member states – only Spain's socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, objected – caved in to Trump's long-time demand that they
devote 5 per cent
of GDP to defence. And those extra hundreds of billions had better be spent on US hardware. There was not a squeak of criticism for Russia's assault on Ukraine, because Trump hates it when you insult his buddies. He denounced corruption charges against Netanyahu as 'a witch hunt'.
Trump directed his venom at 'FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES' for reporting
preliminary findings
by the US Defence Intelligence Agency that 12 days of sound and fury had delayed Iran's nuclear programme by at best a few months.
CIA director John Ratcliffe flew to Trump's rescue, insisting that Operation Midnight Hammer set back Iran's nuclear programme by years. We segued from the verge of a third world war into farce, with Trump, Netanyahu and Iran's supreme leader all claiming victory.
Trump and Netanyahu must learn there is no such thing as a quick fix in the Middle East. We've come full circle to the original dilemma: negotiations or a new forever war.