Expect tragedy if a Trump-inspired uprising fails in Iran

 During January’s mass demonstrations in Iran, President Trump addressed the Iranian people.  “Iranian Patriots, keep protesting — take over your institutions!!! Help is on its way.”  

At the outset of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, he again urged Iranians to “Take over your government. It will be yours to take.”  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a similar call for Iranians “to take to the streets.” 

But without direct American support, including boots on the ground, any such uprising may be doomed. Former CIA director and retired four-star U.S. Army general David Petraeus points out that ordinary Iranians “do not have arms, organization, or real military capability.” Iranian military and paramilitary forces, who total nearly a million armed men, have a monopoly on violence.

Trump and Netanyahu may be setting the stage for a humanitarian and moral disaster. Witness what happened after the U.S. and its coalition partners drove Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War. President George H. W. Bush, unwilling to send ground troops into Iraq to depose Hussein, called on the “Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”  Coalition airplanes dropped leaflets urging Iraqi soldiers and civilians to come into the streets and “bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”

The debacle that followed was brilliantly dramatized in the 1999 movie, “Three Kings,” set in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. The movie follows four American soldiers — played by George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze — who discover that Kuwaiti gold stolen by Hussein’s forces is hidden in military bunkers in Iraq close to their base. They plan to steal the gold — and at this point, their fictional story intersects with real history.

In response to Bush, Iraqi Shias in the South and Kurdish rebels in the North rose up. Both were met with brutal force by Hussein’s forces. The U.S. military, which dominated the skies over Iraq, not only failed to support the uprising but also allowed Hussein’s forces to fly helicopters, which they used as gunships to massacre tens of thousands of rebels.

That real-life betrayal became the plot pivot of “Three Kings.” Clooney’s character and his men arrive at the bunkers and witness the Iraqi military beating, torturing, and murdering men and women. Upon seeing the American soldiers, a group of Shias, surrounded by corpses, begin to scream hysterically. “Why do President leave us now? There are too many bodies. Where is America now?”

Shocked by the Iraqi brutality, the Americans demonstrate more moral fiber than the Bush administration. They help the Iraqis escape, even though it ends their quest for gold and costs one soldier his life.

What Trump will do if the Iranians heed his call to revolt is anybody’s guess. In one moment, he insists that “all I want is freedom” for the Iranian people, but in another asserts that Iran doesn’t have to be a democracy or even give up its clerical regime so long as it “treats the U.S. and Israel well,” whatever that means. 

But if, like Bush, Trump looks the other way while Iranians fight for their freedom, and after he urged them to do just that, we will once again witness the horrific scenes that go hand-in-hand with failed uprisings against brutal dictatorships.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”

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