If you squint, Trump has a certain genius in foolish war on Iran | Opinion
With a cease fire in the war with Iran, it is a good moment to turn away from the singular lack of planning, strategy and diplomacy that has become the hallmark of the Trump Doctrine in foreign affairs and look at what might have been right about the whole fiasco.
Donald Trump has a penchant for daring to do badly needed things that the more typical Republicans of the Bush-MCain-Romney mold would never have attempted, but maybe should have. It is true that Trump launched a foolish war against Iran, but Iran has been at war with the world and most particularly the United States for going on 50 years.
Normally the Trump administration is, well, rather short on facts, but here’s some of the timeline Marco Rubio’s State Department posted online in the early hours of our attack:
November 1979: Iranian students, backed by the regime, seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran — taking 66 Americans hostage in a 444-day standoff.
April 1983: The Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed terrorist group, carried out a suicide car bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 17 Americans.
October 1983: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed 241 U.S. military personnel — including 220 U.S. Marines and 21 other service personnel — in a truck bombing at a Marine compound in Beirut.
March 1984: Iran-backed Islamic Jihad terrorists kidnapped CIA station chief William Buckley on his way to work in Beirut, ultimately killing him the following year.
September 1984: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed 23 innocent people — including two American service members — in a car bomb attack at the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut.
December 1984: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists hijacked Kuwait Airways Flight 221 en route to Pakistan, diverting it to Tehran — where they brutally tortured and killed two American officials.
June 1985: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847 on its way from Athens to Rome, torturing a U.S. Navy diver before shooting him point-blank in the head and tossing his body onto the Beirut airport tarmac.
July 1989: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed U.S. Marine Col. William Higgins after kidnapping him the previous year while serving with a United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon.
And that’s just the 1980s. There were more dead Americans in every decade since. Check here for the rest.
Those attacks, big and small, are all real. Presidents for a couple generations have said that Iran is the world’s foremost funder and facilitator of terrorism. When was somebody going to do something to end this?
I understand that Trump did it all wrong, not to mention the fact that he promised he wouldn’t get us embroiled in wars overseas. He didn’t lift a finger to get Congress or the public on board with his war, a minimum necessity to have our staying power in conflict be credible.
But I think we underestimate Trump’s genius at seeing hard truths that responsible political leaders just refused to see and that, in retrospect, are completely obvious. Let’s hope Trump hasn’t messed this up so badly that a new American president can’t go in and finish putting an end to Iran’s war on us. I think Iran has killed enough Americans.
David Mastio is a columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
