Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran has no legal mandate and no clear objective | Donald Trump

The first war of Donald Trump’s Peace Corps era has begun; Amid diplomatic efforts to avoid conflict and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public, an unprovoked attempt at regime change in cooperation with Israel began, with no legal basis.

Trump’s recorded eight-minute speech wearing his distinctive red baseball cap after the first bombs fell made clear that this would not be a limited attack aimed at persuading Tehran to make concessions at the negotiating table. He warned that if Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) did not surrender, they would be killed and the country’s armed forces, missile and navy destroyed.

Then the way will be opened for the Iranian opposition and the country’s ethnic minorities to revolt and overthrow the regime.

“It is time for all Iranian people (Persians, Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Baluchis, and Akhwahs) to be free from the burden of tyranny and create a free and peace-seeking Iran,” Trump said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who coordinated the missiles as well as the message, said his country joined the war “to eliminate the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran.”

The maximalist goals of the joint strike cast doubt on whether there was any prospect of success at US-Iran talks in previous weeks, where delegates had discussed possible limits on uranium enrichment. Those talks, the last round on Thursday, had been conducted under the shadow of what Trump has called the “beautiful armada” in the Middle East, the largest US force in the region since the ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq, and now it looks like only a full surrender by Iran could stop the release of these assembled Americans.

Trump has long opposed the madness of the Iraq war. He twice campaigned on a platform aimed at ending US military entanglement abroad and aggressively lobbied to be awarded the Nobel peace prize based on the unrealistic claim that he had ended eight wars.

Just 10 days before the start of the war, he hosted the inaugural meeting of the Peace Board, which was supposed to resolve conflicts not only in the Middle East but around the world. That meeting brought leaders and senior officials from 27 different states, most of them autocracies, to Washington to praise peacemaker Trump.

They heard Tony Blair, the live link to the Iraq fiasco of 23 years ago, declare Trump’s vision for the Middle East as “the best, indeed the only hope, for Gaza, the region and the world.”

But by then many of Washington’s traditional allies in Europe and beyond had become deeply suspicious of Trump’s intentions and stayed away. The Peace Board was sold to the UN Security Council in November as the only way to end the slaughter in Gaza, but it was clear that this was a bait-and-switch scam long before the first missiles were fired at Iran. The UN thought it was buying one thing, but it sold something quite different: a rival body to the Security Council but for which Trump would be responsible.

An attack on Iran is a clear violation of the UN charter in the absence of any credible and imminent threat from Iran to the United States. In an effort to legitimize himself, Trump made generalizations, denouncing Tehran’s leadership as “a vicious group of very bitter, terrible people” and 47 years of hostility between the United States and the Islamic Republic.

Weakened by a joint attack by the United States and Israel that weakened its defenses last June, Iran has arguably never posed less of a threat in this half-century than it does now; Decades of sanctions combined with economic migration brought mass protests to the streets.

But Trump does not need to justify himself at the Peace Committee. There are no rules except those that give Trump the power to make them up as he pleases. It has become increasingly clear that the board is primarily a tool for the president’s political and financial interests, not a forum for resolving conflicts. Governments that signed on as board members now find themselves complicit in a war that few would want.

It’s not clear exactly what transformed Trump from a president of peace to a president of war, but there are clues. He faces setbacks at home, a dwindling popularity as midterm elections approach and, most recently, a rebuke from a normally friendly high court over his authority to use tariffs as his favorite foreign policy tool.

Wilbur Ross, who was Commerce Secretary during Trump’s first term, said the court defeat raises the possibility of an attack on Iran.

“I don’t think he can be seen as taking that loss and backing down on Iran,” Ross told the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, the cloud of suspicion over Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has not dissipated despite the justice department’s best efforts to proportionate the flow of revelations about the sex-criminal financier’s child trafficking operations.

“I’m really worried, because when he gets in trouble like this, he almost goes crazy,” Democratic senator Chuck Schumer told MS Now television a few days before the war broke out. “I’m worried about what he might do in Iran, who knows?”

Abroad, Trump appeared to give up his pursuit of the Nobel peace prize, warning last month that he no longer felt “obliged to think only about peace” to Norway’s prime minister (who has no say in awarding the prize).

For Trump, who has been far more successful as a reality show character than as a real estate developer, war has begun to look like a better distraction than peace. He was excited by the daring and successful raid on Venezuela in January, in which US special forces removed the country’s leader Nicolás Maduro from the country without a single casualty.

Trump is clearly counting on the spectacular feat, which will be broadcast live in Iran, to take his country with him after the event. Before his announcement, recorded overnight, the administration had made no real effort to present a compelling case to Congress or the country at a time when polls showed only a quarter of U.S. voters supported a new war in the Middle East.

Regular on-camera press briefings at the Pentagon were historic before previous conflicts, but the recently renamed war department had not held such a meeting since December.

With Tuesday’s annual State of the Union address coinciding with the peak of US military preparations, there was some expectation that Trump would use the opportunity to make a case for war. However, he spent only three minutes of the record total time of one hour and 47 minutes in Iran.

Congress, which theoretically had the constitutional authority to decide whether America should go to war, was almost completely sidelined. Eight congressional leaders from both parties were briefed on classified information just hours before Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State of the Union address. But Democratic senators came out saying they had not been given a good reason why the country should go to war now.

The road to war in Iraq in 2003 was paved with lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. The path to a new conflict in Iran after 23 years is largely through inconsistency or silence.

Trump has made clear that he expects the Iranian people to become agents of regime change after US and Israeli bombs weaken existing power structures. We have no intention of attacking from land. He warned the public in his recorded statement to expect some U.S. casualties, but it is unclear how many military deaths voters, including Trump’s own supporters, would accept in such an obvious election war.

Faced with the possibility of his party’s defeat in November’s elections, the president chose to take the biggest gamble of his presidency.

History shows that it is very difficult to topple entrenched regimes by aerial bombardment alone, and now that it has been made clear to the government in Tehran that it is in an existential struggle, it can be expected to try to inflict maximum damage on the aggressors with everything it has.

“The Iranians concluded that restraint was interpreted as weakness and invited further aggression,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, adding that Iran’s capacity to harm its enemies had not truly been tested.

“In the 12-day war, the Iranians did not use any of the military capabilities they had developed over many years to target US assets, such as short-range missiles, cruise missiles, naval forces, unmanned aerial vehicles, underwater drones, anti-ship ballistic missiles and cruise missiles,” Vaez said.

Iranian forces will have a wide range of targets nearby, including military and commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz or the broader Gulf. Selective targeting has proven effective for Tehran’s allies, Houthi forces in Yemen, who narrowly missed a US aircraft carrier with one of their missiles.

The Houthis may take part in Iran’s response, aware that the defeat of the Tehran regime will deprive them of sponsors. Although much weakened by Israeli bombardment last year, Hezbollah has rebuilt some of its strength and may also choose to join for similar reasons.

“During years of war games in Washington, the Pentagon and all the think tanks, without exception, one or two US warships have been sunk,” Vaez said.

“Obviously this would push Trump to retaliate devastatingly. Only then would he start another major war in the Middle East,” he added.

“There’s no way Trump can call this a victory. It will completely overshadow his presidency.”