By allowing Israel to bomb Iran, Trump is pushing Tehran to go nuclear

Middle East Eye

8 hours ago

US President Donald Trump's decision to allow Israel to attack Iran is the worst miscalculation a US president has made since George W Bush invaded Iraq.
Bush's decision heralded eight years of conflict in Iraq, killed at least 655,000 people, according to The Lancet, spawned an extreme group of Takfiri militants in the Islamic State group and brought a major state to the verge of collapse from which it has yet to recover 14 years on.
Trump's decision could yet prove to be more calamitous.
Allowing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran, when US envoys were engaged in negotiations with Tehran, places the US presidency on the same level of trustworthiness as Al Capone or Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
This is the way you behave if you are in charge of a drug cartel, not a global power.
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Who now will trust the word of America? Sooner or later, a power in decline like the US will find it needs the trust of others.
True to form, Trump and his coterie have no inkling of what they have just done. They are gloating in the act of deceit they have just performed, laughing about duping Iranian diplomats while rushing hundreds of Hellfire missiles to the Israeli army and supplying it with real-time intelligence.
Israel's drones caught their targets at home in bed or lured them to their headquarters, where they were wiped out. This is regarded in Tel Aviv and Washington as a coup. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington provided Israel with "exquisite intel".
After bragging about their act of deception, Trump lectured Iranians to get back to the negotiating table or face even worse. "Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. God Bless You All!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.
This is the dumbest thing the US president could say to a nation 92 million-strong with thousands of years of history behind them.
Yesterday Saddam, today Netanyahu
It is even more stupid if you consider what Iran went through for eight years when it was attacked by the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with western support.
It is this bitter experience, no less than the Islamic Republic's ideology, that has fashioned Iran's foreign policy. Its nuclear enrichment programme and its rocket arsenal were all burnished in the fire of the Iran-Iraq war.
Like Netanyahu, the Iraqi dictator launched a war when he deemed his neighbour to be at its most vulnerable.
On 22 September 1980, Iran's then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was still grappling with the post-revolutionary chaos. He did not have an army, much of which was dissolved when the Shah was toppled.
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Iran had a combination of regular forces and the newly formed, untested Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), but it was so short of weapons that they were passed from one soldier to another as they fell in waves on the front line.
Saddam's forces initially made rapid advances, but they were slowly pushed back at a huge cost in lives. Like Netanyahu today, Saddam was supported by the US and Europe.
He got the means to manufacture the chemical weapons from German companies, which provided the technology and precursor chemicals needed to manufacture mustard gas, sarin, tabun and other chemical agents.
Western cover for Saddam continued even after the gassing of Kurds in Halabja.
My late and much-missed colleague Richard Beeston of The Times recounted how two British diplomats attempted to persuade him that nothing really happened there.
Three years into the war, late US President Ronald Reagan sent his then-bright young thing, Donald Rumsfeld, to shake hands with Saddam.
National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 114 of 26 November 1983 stated the US objective. It only wanted to protect its military forces and its oil supplies in the Gulf. Saddam's chemical weapons were of no concern to Rumsfeld or Reagan.
But an entire generation of Iranians will never forget those gas attacks from which veterans suffer to this day.
Deep defence strategy
And it was this bloody and savage war, which Iran eventually won, that forged the determination of Tehran to train and build a network of armed groups from the Mediterranean to its borders as a form of deep defence.
Plainly, Iran's "axis of resistance" may be weaker today than it was two years ago. The senior leadership of the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah, along with their homes and families, were mapped and selected for targets by Mossad long before the Hamas attack on 7 October.
Neither Iran nor Hezbollah's leadership wanted to get into a full-blown war with Israel after the Hamas attack... Their moderation was interpreted by Netanyahu as weakness
Some of that took place in Syria, where Hezbollah exposed its ranks to agents working for Israel in the Syrian and Russian military intelligence.
But not all of it.
The fact that Hezbollah is today unable to come to Iran's aid in the darkest hour of the mother ship is the clearest testimony to the defeat it suffered at Israel's hands.
Its units on the border fought bravely and kept the elite Israeli commando units like the Golani Brigade pegged down to a few kilometres of the border. Nonetheless, the ceasefire it signed in November of last year signalled a defeat unlike anything it has suffered before.
But by the same token, what has come to be viewed in Lebanon today as Hezbollah's and Iran's strategic mistakes - by not replying to Israel's attacks earlier and more forcibly, or by maintaining the belief that Hezbollah could achieve some sort of balance of power with Israel - could equally be read now as strategic restraint.
Neither Iran nor Hezbollah leadership wanted to get into a full-blown war with Israel after the Hamas attack, and its leaders said so plainly.
Their moderation was interpreted by Netanyahu as weakness. The lack of a heavy response by Iran was read as an encouragement to go for the jugular.
Which is where we are now.
A long war?
Like Saddam in 1980 or Bush in 2003, Netanyahu is placing all his bets on a short war and an early capitulation by Iran.
But unlike any war Israel has fought since 1973, Israeli warplanes are attacking a real army and a real state.
Iran has strategic depth. It has its enrichment centrifuges buried half a mile underground at some of its five sites. It could close the Straits of Hormuz, through which 21 percent of the global petroleum liquids transit, within the blink of an eye. It also has powerful allies in Russia and China.
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The Ukrainians say that Russia has launched over 8,000 Iranian Shahed drones since the war broke out in February 2022.
The time may soon come when the Iranian leadership asks Russia to return the favour by supplying it with S-400 air defence batteries, especially in light of statements by the Israeli army declaring its jets had operational freedom over the skies of western Iran.
Russian President Vladimir Putin already believes he is at war with the West, his relationship with Trump notwithstanding, and that MI6 was responsible for the Ukrainian attack on Russian long-range bombers. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, all but said as much.
Putin's relationship with Netanyahu, which was once so close that the Israelis stopped the supply of Russian air defence systems to Iran, is shot to pieces.
When a delegation from Hamas arrived in Moscow after the 7 October attacks, Putin passed a message of thanks for this "birthday gift", my sources tell me. Putin was born on the same day in 1952.
Would Russia allow Israel, supplied by the US, to topple Iran after the loss of Bashar al-Assad in Syria?
It's a question that Netanyahu and Trump should consider. Trump had a 50-minute talk with Putin over the weekend.
Netanyahu should also consider what he would do if the war lasts more than two weeks and Iran does not wave the white flag.
So should those Gulf states that spent $4.5 trillion on US arms contracts and bungs into Trump's own pockets, thinking they had dissuaded America from attacking Ansar Allah (the Houthi movement) in Yemen.
The longer the war goes on, the greater the risk of the fire spreading throughout the supremely vulnerable oil and gas installations of the Gulf.
Israel has just attacked Iran's installations at Fajr Jam Gas Refinery and South Pars gas field in Bushehr province. Iran replied by hitting the oil refineries around Haifa.
Dragging the US into war
In Israel itself, a mood of euphoria at having wiped out Iranian military and nuclear leadership has quickly dissipated, as Iran has inflicted on parts of central Israel the sort of destruction Israel has visited on Gaza and Lebanon.
For the second night running, Israelis have been experiencing the sort of terror they have inflicted on their neighbours. They are quickly discovering what it is like to lose the impunity they have assumed was their birthright.
Even if this war stops, the price of peace and the stabilisation of Iran's nuclear enrichment programme has just gone up
If Israel continues to be battered by Iranian missiles night after night, Netanyahu will increasingly think of how he can get the US directly involved in the war.
A false flag drone attack on a US base in Iraq would be a tempting option for Netanyahu and one which he has doubtless already considered. Trump so far has been putty in his hands.
As far as the future of nuclear enrichment in Iran is concerned, Netanyahu and Trump's unilateral attack, if successful, will provide the biggest incentive Iran can possibly have to get a viable bomb as quickly as possible.
The relative weakness of Tehran's conventional arms and its vulnerability to F-35s will provide the same logic to a battered Iran, as it did to Putin, who thought - at one stage in the war in Ukraine - he was on the verge of losing Crimea. He threatened to use a tactical nuclear missile, and Joe Biden's team took that threat seriously.
If Trump and Netanyahu think they are dissuading Iran from getting a bomb by dismantling their conventional means of self-defence, they are sorely mistaken.
Any nuclear strategist who has war-gamed these scenarios will tell you that the weaker and less reliable conventional forces are, the more reliant a nuclear power is on its nuclear bombs and the readier it is to use them as a weapon of first resort.
There is no indication yet that this is the thinking of Iran's supreme leader or the government, but public opinion in Iran - even before the attack - is turning to a clear majority in favour of getting the bomb.
Trump said the US would not tolerate a North Korea in the Gulf, but that is what he might achieve by allowing Israel to bomb Iran.
Even if this war stops, the price of peace and the stabilisation of Iran's nuclear enrichment programme has just gone up.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.