Trump’s war of choice in Iran |
Trump’s war of choice in Iran
Early Saturday morning, wearing a white baseball cap, President Trump informed the American people, “A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.”
That’s only part of the story. Trump did not tell the people that this war was unnecessary, was illegally begun without congressional authorization or even consultation and had been undertaken absent any direct threat to the U.S.
Although Trump has yet to give the public a full accounting of the rationale behind his war, the few arguments he has tossed out don’t hold up.
We had to bomb Iran now, Trump has insisted, to eliminate “imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” That is not true. Iran did not pose any direct threat to the United States. Nor does Iran possess, as Trump claims, long-range missiles that “could soon reach the American homeland.” At best, according to an unclassified 2025 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, Iran could develop a “militarily-viable” intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the east coast of the United States by 2035.
The phrase “imminent threat” also rings hollow when the U.S. bombed Iran as recently as June 2025. At the time, Trump declared “Operation Midnight Hammer” a total success in obliterating Iran’s nuclear capacity. If we were really so successful then, why the need to bomb Iran again eight months later? He was either lying then, or he’s lying now.
Speaking of “imminent threat,” what about North Korea? True, nobody wants to see Iran develop a nuclear bomb or intercontinental missiles. But North Korea, hardly an ally of the U.S. and led by a ruthless dictator, has had nuclear weapons for 20 years. According to the New York Times, it has 60 or more nuclear weapons and regularly tests missiles designed to reach Los Angeles or Chicago.
If that is no “imminent threat,” then what was the real reason for rushing into war with Iran now? As reported by the Washington Post over the weekend, the only motivation was to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. According to the Post, intelligence that Khamenei would be meeting with his leadership team above ground, and not in his bunker, triggered “a weeks-long lobbying effort by an unusual pair of U.S. allies in the Middle East — Israel and Saudia Arabia.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman urged Trump to take advantage of the opportunity to kill Khamenei. Trump agreed to do their dirty work.
It is also not true, as Trump claims, that Iran “walked away from the table” without agreeing to abandon plans to build a nuclear bomb. In fact, as late as last Friday, negotiations between Iran and the U.S., moderated by Oman, were still underway in Geneva — with public assurances of progress being made. At the end of Friday’s session, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi reported: “Iran has agreed to zero stockpiles of highly-enriched uranium, the down-blending of its existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium inside Iran, and full verification access for the Atomic Energy Agency.”
That was a good deal — very close to the deal Iran signed with President Obama in 2015, out of which Trump had abruptly pulled in 2018. Iran didn’t walk away from making a new deal. The U.S. did — and it started bombing the next morning.
In fact, there is reason to believe that the entire Geneva operation was only a smokescreen, designed to fool Iran’s leaders into thinking the U.S. was negotiating in good faith. Clearly, the decision to bomb Iran had already been made before the State of the Union, while the Trump administration was still pretending to be seriously interested in diplomacy.
Needless to say, this is just the opposite of what self-described “peace candidate” Trump promised. In 2016, he said, “regime change is a proven, absolute failure.” On election night November 2024, he promised: “I’m not going to start a war.” Yet in the last year, Trump has bombed seven countries: Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Venezuela, and Iran (twice now). He has effected “regime change” in Venezuela and is trying now in Iran, which he says could drag on for four or five weeks.
In November, Americans will decide whether this is what they voted for. Meanwhile, there is no doubt. The U.S. is at war with Iran for one reason only: Because Trump started it. This is his war of choice.
Bill Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”
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