(Dobbs) Three Wars That Have Outlasted Your Ego-Driven OptimismThe complaints aren’t about how long the Iran war is lasting, they are about the fact that we’re in it at all.
Congratulations, Mr. President. Tomorrow marks exactly three months since you started the war with Iran, and it’s still a war. Monday night’s “self-defense strikes” against the Islamic Republic leave no doubt. Especially after Iran said in response to these new attacks, it would “leave no act of hostility unanswered.” So, notwithstanding ceasefires and negotiations with the enemy and fluctuating claims that peace is at hand, it is still a war. The United States has tens of thousands of troops and hundred of ships and planes in the war zone, “locked and loaded” as you blustered last week. With your consistent compulsion to underestimate what Iran will endure to fight this war, which leaves your major goals unfulfilled, peace might be farther down the road than you pretend it is. You confidently assured us at the outset that this was only “a little excursion,” even just “a mini-war.” On its first full day you said it would last “four to five weeks.” Then, two months later, “The war is going to be over in three days, my prediction.” Naive hopes or flat-out lies. Last Saturday you said that a deal to end the war is “largely negotiated,” but that didn’t last two days before you attacked again. You keep assuring us the end is in sight, then you show why Iran doesn’t trust a word you say. True, there could be a breakthrough at any hour on any day, but the way things have been going, you are the only one who sees it. You’ve told us before that a deal was imminent, until you pivoted to saying Iran had to wave the white flag “before there is nothing left.” You whined when Americans started feeling the pinch in their pocketbooks and started to complain. In early May your defense was to post a chart comparing the length of this war to the length of most other wars the United States has fought. When a reporter asked about the duration of the Iran war so far, your answer was, “So we were in Vietnam for 18 years, Iraq for many years. I’ve been doing this for six weeks.” Mr. President, you miss the point. You capriciously started a war we didn’t have to fight. The complaints aren’t about how long it’s lasting, they are about the fact that we’re in it at all. And for what? At the cost of tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives including thirteen members of the American military, Iran has the same regime, the same enriched uranium, and until you figure out how to break it open, it now controls the Strait of Hormuz which it didn’t control before the war. Tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars are tied up in ships that can’t move. You have caused chaos in economies around the world. Congratulations, Mr. President. We are three months into the war with Iran and the world’s not better off, it’s worse off. Meantime, there’s another war without end in which you could have made a difference, but between your overblown bombast about the art of the deal and your persistent if inexplicable subservience to the butcher who runs Russia, you haven’t. Russia attacked Ukraine more than four years ago now, but with your perilous equivocation about who our friends are and your intransigent ambition to overturn anything ever done by the good man who beat you in 2020, you decapitated American aid to our ally and the war just slogs along. Russia makes small advances, Ukraine makes small advances, the Ukrainian people endure ballistic bombardments that destroy their homes and take their lives, and soldiers on both sides keep burning up like kindling. Just Monday, the Russian Foreign Ministry promised more “systemic strikes” against Ukraine’s capital, Kiev. At a cabinet meeting last year, your secretary of state Marco Rubio delivered a dose of flattery about your stamp on the war in Ukraine, something that’s required of all your underlings to prove how loyal they are to you. “You’re the only leader in the planet,” he told you, “that can bring the two sides together.” Of course the cabinet meeting was televised. The trouble is, Rubio was lying through his teeth. You haven’t brought the two sides together. To the contrary, with Ukraine as with Iran, you have pivoted from focused to detached, and your sporadic efforts to bring peace have lasted no longer than your infamously childlike attention span. As with Iran, anything you say about mutually-agreed terms of a deal is quickly contradicted by the other side. More than four years in, all your promises to end the war, beginning with the blatant lie when you won the White House that you could “have that done in 24 hours,” have fallen flat. And lest we forgot, you never finished bringing peace to a third war, between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Last year you arranged a deal that led to the release of hostages by Hamas and of prisoners by Israel, and the pro forma declaration of a ceasefire. But hundreds have died since then because the ceasefire is regularly violated— on Monday, a new Israeli air strike on a Palestinian tent camp killed a Palestinian woman and a six-year-old girl— and one of the main ingredients to win Israel’s cooperation, the disarmament of Hamas, has not happened. Three wars you thought you could terminate quickly. Three wars that have outlasted your ego-inflated optimism. Why anyone would trust you is a mystery. Eventually, as they say, if you keep throwing darts at a dartboard, one will hit the bulls-eye. That might be the only thing that works for you, unless your arm gives out first. |