Over the weekend the United States and Israel launched a massive military assault on Iran. “Eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime — a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.” Within hours, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead, along with much of his senior command. As I record this on Monday, March 2, the Iranian Red Crescent says over 550 people have been killed in the bombings. We know of at least six American service members killed. There will likely be more as time goes on. There appears to have been a girls’ school that was bombed. The pictures from that, the grief of the parents is — it’s almost unbearable to look at. “My child was 10 years old. 10 years old.” I just think it’s so important to say it’s not all geopolitics. These are people, civilians, their lives, their homes, their children. The attack on Iran came less than two months after the United States military captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in an overnight raid on his compound in Caracas. America has deposed two sitting heads of state eight weeks apart. I have seen a lot of commentary accusing Donald Trump of hypocrisy. “We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change, wars around the globe, senseless war.” And now he is changing regimes left and right. But I think this is not quite a policy of regime change. This is not America invading Iraq or Afghanistan and restructuring the government ourselves. Maduro’s regime was left intact, aside from him. In an interview with The Times, Trump said that — quote — “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.” He said, “Everybody’s kept their job except for two people.” Trump has called for the Iranian people to rise up against their government, but he’s also said he intends to resume talks with the existing Iranian regime. He said he had a few choices for who might lead Iran next, but they appear to have been killed in the initial bombings. The Iranian regime was monstrous, but Trump is not insisting that it be changed, nor is his administration. “This is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change.” I don’t think what we’re seeing here is a policy of regime change. I would call this head- on-a-pike foreign policy. America is proving that we can easily reach into weaker countries and kill or capture their heads of state. We will not be dissuaded from doing that by international law or fear of unforeseen consequences or the difficulty of persuading the American people or the United States Congress of the need for war. On that, we won’t even try. We don’t particularly care who replaces the people we killed. We will not insist that they come from outside the regime nor that they are elected democratically. We care merely that whoever comes next fears us enough to be compliant when we make a demand — that they know that they might be the next head on a pike. Trump’s belief appears to be that he can decapitate these regimes and control their successors and do so without events spinning out of his control. He appears to believe that it was idiocy or cowardice or a respect for international rules that prevented his predecessors from replacing foreign leaders they loathed with more pliable subordinates. Trump is a man who has not read much history but who certainly intends to make it. But what if Iran is not Venezuela? What if the Iranian people rise up, as Trump has asked them to do, and are slaughtered by the Iranian military? What if it descends into civil war, as happened in Iraq, where America had troops on the ground and yet hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed? What if it goes the way of Libya or Yemen or Syria? Who will pay the cost if he’s wrong?
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