Donald Trump, Iran, Nuclear Warfare, and Biological Warfare

Our war against Iran began six months ago this week, and I think that history will surely record it as the most disastrous military conflict in our national history. The debacle ironically came amidst the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence.

Contrary to our often boastful patriotic narratives, many of our previous wars had certainly been less than victorious. We had fought Britain to a draw in the War of 1812 and achieved the same outcome against our opponents in the Korean War. We had been defeated in Vietnam, and in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks of 2001, we had launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, eventually losing both of them, the former after an astonishing twenty years of sustained effort. Nuclear War: A Scenario Jacobsen, Annie Best Price: $10.72 Buy New $14.96 (as of 07:41 UTC - Details)

But none of those latter three defeats had been military ones on the battlefield. Instead, in each case we had suffered endless continuing losses with no hope of accomplishing our original objectives, so after years of fruitless effort, we finally gave up and withdrew in considerable embarrassment. In effect, we only lost by failing to win, and those defeats seemed to produce few if any major negative consequences.

Although we suffered many casualties, squandered huge sums of money, and sacrificed some international respect, in no case did we lose any important strategic assets.

But the Iran War falls into an entirely different category, and does so in several different ways.

The Persian Gulf region and its vast natural resources constitute one of the most strategically vital areas of the world. For more than a half-century we had exerted dominant control over its energy supplies, control that had been greatly strengthened by our victorious 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. This was the major basis of the global petrodollar system, allowing us to maintain our reserve currency status along with all the many levers of power and influence that it provided.

So despite our gargantuan budget and trade deficits, we had the ability to print almost unlimited dollars without incurring massive domestic inflation because others readily accepted them as tokens of great value. Over the last six years, our accumulated national debt has almost doubled to a nearly unimaginable $40 trillion but with only minor domestic ill-effects.

However, this war may be ending our dominance over the Persian Gulf, probably with fateful consequences.

Although the war has continued, we have revised downward our primary strategic objective to something very different than the original goal under which we began the conflict. We are attempting to reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz to unfettered cargo traffic, while forcing Iran to relinquish its new control, allowing us to reestablish our own long decades of dominance. Biological War: A Scen... Jacobsen, Annie Buy New $35.00 (as of 04:51 UTC - Details)

Thus, we were now urgently seeking to return matters to the status quo before we had fired our first shots, and we are unlikely to achieve that goal. This is almost a textbook definition of defeat, reflecting the huge strategic reversal that we had already suffered.

A couple of months ago, a desperate President Donald Trump signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran aimed at ending the war. But the carefully negotiated provisions of that document were so extremely one-sided that they were almost universally regarded as amounting to an American surrender. Once others loudly declared this, our arrogant and mercurial president immediately began ignoring and violating its terms, thus soon reigniting the conflict.

In effect, our country has been militarily defeated but Trump has refused to acknowledge that reality, placing matters in a strange and perhaps especially dangerous situation.

No previous American war had ever been so unpopular from the very first day, and much of that was because Trump and his administration had made no effort to obtain broad public support before he began it.

Official Congressional declarations of war had long become passe, but presidents had traditionally sought at least some sort of political fig-leaf for their planned attacks.

Later historians have rightfully castigated President Lyndon Johnson for having fraudulently persuaded Congress to pass the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that he then used to justify our military involvement in Vietnam. When no Iraqi WMDs were found, President George W. Bush was vilified for “lying us into the Iraq War.” Nuclear Radiation Dete... Buy New $85.98 (as of 04:51 UTC - Details)

But in the case of Trump, those criticisms did not apply. Iran was a country the size of Western Europe with more than ninety million people, so the war was certainly our largest military undertaking at least since Vietnam. Yet Trump made no effort to obtain any sort of political approval but just began the war upon his sole authority, demonstrating the total collapse of our traditional constitutional system.

In some of his braggadocio, Trump has likened himself to Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun, and Genghis Khan. Obviously none of those powerful autocrats had ever been required to seek approval for the wars that they initiated, instead merely giving the order on their sole authority, and Trump felt that he could do the same.

One obvious reason that he avoided any effort to enlist support for his planned attack was that it would have forced him to forego the vital element of surprise.

Indeed, Trump later boasted that he had modeled his assault against Iran upon the notorious December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The necessary element of surprise would have been lost had he sought to enlist the support of the American people, let alone negotiated with Congress to grant him the necessary legal authority. So he never considered taking those steps.

Throughout our long Cold War against the USSR and during the decades that followed, strategists had always considered the military scenario of a decapitating first strike. This concept was widely discussed in the media and even included in the plotlines of countless popular films, television shows, and fictional thrillers. However, prior to Trump, I’m not sure that anyone in modern world history had ever actually carried out such a bold and ruthless operation.

But Trump began the conflict by suddenly killing most of Iran’s top political and military leaders in the massive wave of missile strikes that constituted our official declaration of war.

The impact of Trump’s unexpected initial attack was further magnified by the circumstances under which it took place. Trump had lured the Iranians into peace negotiations, pressing them for major concessions, and they had expressed their willingness to make these. But such a crucial decision obviously required that their top leadership meet together in one location to debate the proposal, thereby rendering them vulnerable to all being killed in the decapitating strikes that began the war.

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