Why trigger-happy Trump may regret bombing Iran (again) ...Middle East

IN WASHINGTON DC – President Donald Trump has started the year in trigger-happy mood.  

His new “might-is-right” approach to global affairs was heralded by his military raid on Caracas and the audacious capture of former Venezeulan president Nicolás Maduro. He continues to flex, suggesting that military options may yet be used to seize Greenland. He rattled the windows in Syria again over the weekend, launching fresh air strikes on Islamic State targets. And at home, he spent the past several days vigorously defending a trigger-happy immigration agent who – in an earlier era – would be facing murder charges over the killing of 37-year old Minneapolis motorist Renee Nicole Good. 

But now, Trump faces an even more serious test of his shoot-first, evade-questions-later policy. Will the author of the “Donroe Doctrine” now authorise air strikes on far-off Iran, where Washington believes there is a real possibility that the hardline clerical regime is close to collapse? Or will he exercise uncharacteristic restraint, and take the advice of some of his strategists who are warning that any US involvement could only inflame the situation and put protestors at risk of violent reprisals. 

“Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before”, Trump wrote on his social media account on Saturday. “The USA stands ready to help!!!” he said. That is notably vaguer language that he used days earlier. On 2 January, he warned that the United States military was “locked and loaded”, promising that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue”. So far, reports that cannot be independently confirmed claim that at least 217 protesters have been killed by the regime as it tries to suppress rapidly spiralling protests, but no American military action has yet materialised. 

Trump was reportedly briefed over the weekend about a range of military options available to him. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Trump was mulling tactical strikes that specifically target elements of the country’s security services already engaged in violence against demonstrators. It is also reported that Pentagon planners are also considering attacks on non-military sites across the country. 

He is scheduled to be briefed by senior administration officials on Tuesday on specific options to respond to the protests, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing US officials. This might include not only military strikes but military strikes deploying secretive cyber weapons against Iranian military and civilian sites, placing more sanctions on the government and boosting anti-government sources online, it reported.

The Iranian government is now warning that it will not hesitate to attack US military bases in the region if Trump strikes Iran first. With air force and navy personnel in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar, the White House knows that American military personnel are within reach of Iranian missiles. Last June, when Trump authorised the use of bunker-busting bombs to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites, the regime was able to strike Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, home to about 10,000 American troops. 

Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, warned on Sunday that the country could target shipping lanes in the Middle East over any US military attack, and indicated that Israel might also come under Iranian assault. Trump and his military chiefs may consider that bluster at a time when the Iranian military has its hands full trying to restore order within the country. But a clerical Shia regime battling for its very future may decide it has little to lose by also taking on the United States and its regional allies. 

Trump faces far-reaching choices in the hours ahead. He has spoken approvingly of Iranian protesters who have invoked his name, and urged the United States to ride to their movement’s rescue. On Wednesday, demonstrators symbolically renamed a captured street in Tehran after America’s President, and others issued appeals to him for US protection.  

But those very protesters could equally be put at further risk by being tied directly to the United States. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is already warning that protesters “are ruining their own streets…in order to please the President of the United States”. He said Trump’s hands were “stained with the blood of Iranians”, and threatened a fresh crackdown. Iran’s Attorney General, Mohammad Movahedi Azad, called on prosecutors to target “those who, by betraying the nation and creating insecurity, seek foreign domination over the country. Proceedings must be conducted without leniency, compassion or indulgence,” he demanded. 

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Trump may also be mindful that some members of his own Make America Great Again base are still asking questions about why the United States should be – in the President’s words – “running Venezuela”, and why that is an “America First” policy priority. The White House can at least point to Venezuela’s geographic positioning in the Western hemisphere that Trump is vowing to “dominate”. Iran does not neatly fit the bill, and the “day after” a US military assault could be even less predictable than future governing arrangements in Caracas. 

Trump must now weigh up the possibility of being the American President who contributes militarily to the toppling of the Iranian regime, versus triggering mass reprisals against the country’s protesters and sparking wider regional instability. His trigger-happy nature is not designed for the Iranian context. Yet so far this year, it has been his only modus operandi. 

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