Thoughts About the "A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight" President

Iran May Be Today, But Who Knows What Tomorrow Will Bring

Tom Engelhardt, Substack

Hey, President Donald Trump couldn’t have made it clearer that he wanted to go to war with Iran, could he?

You would think that even he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to start a war with that country, given the US record of (not) winning wars anywhere on Earth since World War II ended 80-plus years ago, not to speak of his repeated promises, when running for office again in 2024, that, unlike just about every president in recent times, there would be “no new wars,” not all-American ones anyway, once he was back in office—nope, nowhere on Earth. (Whew! That was a lot to get into a single Trumpian sentence!)

As “our” president bragged after his first term in 2023, “I was the only president in modern history who did not have any new wars.” (Okay, he did indeed fight ISIS for a while in Syria, but that, at least, was a passing moment.) And yet, just in case you missed it, here’s what he said relatively recently about Iran when questioned by an interviewer about the possibility of sending U.S. troops there: “I absolutely feel that, yes, I don’t think there’s any question.”

Oh, wait, excuse me, I got confused (something that does happen to 82-year-olds). He actually said that in — yes! — 1980. Can you believe it? Admittedly, at that time, Iran was holding some U.S. diplomats and other Americans prisoner. Still, how strange that it’s actually been on his mind for quite so long and, of course, in 1980 he wasn’t president of the United States yet and so couldn’t put his passing thoughts into action. Now, of course, he is, a second time around and so… sigh… he has indeed gone to war with that country (no matter that Iran hasn’t held a U.S. diplomat in almost half a century)… and so… sigh… here we are — or do I mean here we no longer are, or even here we aren’t?

When it comes to war, it seems as if there simply is no learning curve, no curve at all in fact, for American presidents and certainly not for the one who now has the urge, among other things, to raise the Pentagon’s yearly budget from a mere trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars annually to a mere trillion and a half dollars (no, that is not a misprint!) a year, the largest suggested single year increase since the Korean War more than three-quarters of a century ago! (And no matter how many times I see that $1.5 trillion figure, I still can’t believe that he truly plans to try to do that, though I’m afraid that tells you more about me, despite my endless years covering American wars and military budgets, than it does about Donald J. Trump.)