Has Trump started another forever war? Not if Americans can help it

South China Morning Post

5 hours ago

Being a buzzkill is an unfortunate but necessary part of my job. As much as I know first-hand the joy of finding that perfect quote to emphasise a point, I also know that all too often said quote is too good to be true.
Some errors I've weeded out during the editing process over the years: 'Be the change you wish to see in the world'; there's no written trace of Mahatma Gandhi having said this. 'Jaw, jaw is better than war, war'; that was Harold Macmillan rather than Winston Churchill. 'Let China sleep. For when she wakes, the world will tremble'; this wasn't from Napoleon Bonaparte but a line from the 1963 Charlton Heston film 55 Days at Peking.
It's in this spirit that I need to check myself as well. Like other Americans who maintain an address in the reality-based world, I was aghast to wake on Sunday to the news that US President Donald Trump had authorised
air strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities , another illegal act of war by a US president aided and abetted by a Congress eager to hasten its own irrelevance.
It felt like 2003 and the
invasion of Iraq all over again, and not just because conservatives are once more treating the
civil rights of sexual minorities like a chew toy. Taking to social media, I reflexively reached for a quote popularly attributed to Karl Marx: 'History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.'
Here's the thing, though. That's not quite what Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. More importantly, this will not be an exact repeat of 2003 – it has the potential to be much worse, yet at the same time there is more reason to be hopeful.