By Mick Le Moignan
IF my grandmother’s theory is correct, Donald Trump’s nose is much bigger than it looks on TV. And the reason for his childish outbursts of rage is probably a badly burnt backside from his pants being on fire. Trump and truth have long been strangers.
In June last year, the official White House website announced: “The world is far safer after President Donald J Trump’s highly successful, decisive precision strikes against the Iranian regime’s key nuclear facilities.” Note: not the US armed forces’ strikes, but Trump’s.
He boasted: “Monumental damage was done to all nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term! … The biggest damage took place far below ground level. Bullseye!”
On 1 March, the same website announced: “In a bold and necessary exercise of American strength, President Donald J Trump authorised Operation Epic Fury – a precise, overwhelming military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime…”
Why was an encore needed after the June strikes nine months ago?
This is not a war. In the US, only Congress can declare war. It brings to mind Putin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine, now in its fifth terrible year.
As a public beggar for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump claims not to be a warmonger. He wrote a book called “The Art of the Deal” and promotes himself as a deal-making master. His onslaught against Iran seems to be a negotiating ploy.
Since the 2016 US election, it seems to me that Trump has been Putin’s puppet. He exempted Russia from his absurd system of self-harming tariffs, withdrew US military support for Ukraine and sends his “special envoy”, Steve Witkoff, to conduct endless, pointless “peace” negotiations. I think that if Putin told Trump to bark, he’d go “woof”.
Strings also appear to be being pulled by another alleged war criminal, Binyamin Netanyahu. Let’s not forget that the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest in 2024, claiming he is responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israeli intelligence discovered that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would meet many of his senior advisers in person on the morning of 28 February. It seems to me that Netanyahu used this information as bait to lure Trump into unleashing Operation Epic Fury. A little collateral damage was only to be expected. About 165 innocent people, many of them children, whose school was near the Iranian naval base at Minab, also fell victim to Trump’s fury. So much for “precision strikes”.
Apart from supporting his mate Netanyahu, what was the purpose of this attack? The White House website gives clues to his further ambitions, to “destroy its ballistic missile arsenal, degrade its proxy terror networks, and cripple its naval forces”. These are understandable aims for the belligerent state of Israel, but not needed to protect Americans.
Maybe Trump was motivated by an idealistic desire to free the Iranian people from an oppressive regime that has murdered tens of thousands of its citizens for expressing dissent. He urged them to “take over their government” – but the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which operates separately from the Iranian Army and reports directly to the Supreme Leader, has other ideas. In the absence of American “boots on the ground”, any attempt at counter-revolution will be doomed to failure.
From all we know about Trump, it seems unlikely that his motivation would be humanitarian empathy. Could Iran’s oil be the attraction? We know his illegal kidnapping of Venezuela’s dictator, Nicholas Maduro, was partly motivated by personal malice – and more by a wish to control that country’s oil revenues. It seems that in Trump’s worldview, personal profit is more desirable than foreign regime change.
He may be venturing down the Bush/Blair rabbit-hole, sacrificing American and other lives on the pretence of ridding the world of “weapons of mass destruction”. He and his odious Secretary for War, Pete Hegseth, have said they plan to keep the conflict short and not commit American ground forces, but how else will they achieve their aims – whatever they are?
The key to all Middle Eastern oil, gas and fertiliser exports is the Strait of Hormuz – notably Kharg Island, the deep-water port where tankers load oil piped under the sea from mainland Iran. Perhaps Trump and Hegseth plan to seize Kharg – but they will find it better defended by the IRGC and harder to ship to New York. The IRGC might even destroy their own oil infrastructure, rather than hand it to Trump. That would be an unprecedented economic and environmental disaster for the world.
Armageddon on Kharg would certainly boost the value of American and Venezuelan oil and gas reserves. Trump might see that as a win. In what some political commentators have called “Trump’s Marie Antoinette moment”, he said: “We make a lot of money when petrol prices go up!”
World leaders have greeted the war with muted shock. Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, spoke up; Australia’s Anthony Albanese gave a half-hearted salute; but most are terrified of Trump’s anger. He derided Prime Minister Keir Starmer as being “no Winston Churchill”. Starmer was too polite to point out that Trump is no Franklin Roosevelt.
Visitors sometimes say Australia is “too far away”. These days, many of us wouldn’t mind being even further away from the megalomania of “Mad King Donald”. As modern transport and communications make the world smaller, we desperately need an effective, rules-based global order.
In the past century, democratic nations united, at a cost of 70-80 million lives, to bring down fascist dictators. As we drift ever closer to the Third World War, who can we trust to save us from the domination of ruthless, greedy, self-deluding overlords?
What moral or legal justification can allow a nation to overthrow another nation’s government, however oppressive it may be? If a maverick regime falls under the sway of a “supreme leader”, who lets his personal, masked praetorian guard kill protesters at will, if it ignores the advice of its highly educated scientists, doctors and economists to its own detriment, can another nation legitimately overthrow that regime? And would Americans thank us if we did?
