I began TomDispatch in November 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on my city, New York, and on Washington, D.C., and soon after, the Bush administration decided to essentially invade Afghanistan. And it should seem strange indeed that, in the wake (an all too appropriate word!) of that war, which finally ended in disaster 20 years later and the no less disastrous war in Iraq, this country -- and especially the "peace president" who once swore that regime change was "a proven, absolute failure" -- should have the urge to fight on (ever more unsuccessfully, of course), this time in Iran, by launching Operation Epic Fury. As Julian Borger and Andrew Roth of the Guardian grimly reported, President Trump "amassed the biggest military force in the Middle East since [George W.] Bush led the invasion of Iraq 23 years earlier" and (with the help of Benjamin Netanyahu) "became the first U.S. leader since Bush to lead a regime change war against a major adversary."
Worse yet, count on this: having used the U.S. military to steal (and yes, that's certainly the right word for it) the president of Venezuela and his wife, and having now launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran, President Trump already seems to be preparing to follow up by taking out Cuba in some fashion. As he put it recently, "As we achieve a historic transformation in Venezuela, we're also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba. Cuba's at the end of the line, they're very much at the end of the line. They have no money. They have no oil. They have a bad philosophy; they have a bad regime that's been bad for a long time." All I can think is: uh-oh.
And lest you imagine that that's it for the "peace president," don't forget that there's always Greenland! Now, with all of that in mind and the nightmare in Gaza still underway, let TomDispatch regular Patrick Strickland explore just how Donald Trump, with a helping hand from Benjamin Netanyahu, has "relaunched the long, lethal American tradition of military intervention abroad." Sigh" Tom
Why Donald Trump Just Can't Stop Going to War
When Imperial America Offers Help, It Just Might Get You Killed
After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that "help is on the way." On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs on a country of some 93 million people. Trump soon put out a video address, telling Iranians that "the hour of your freedom is at hand." Around the time that video appeared, Iranians in the city of Minab were sorting through the corpses of more than 165 people killed in an airstrike on an elementary school for girls.
That same day, an airstrike killed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an 86-year-old who was supposedly already in poor health. Throughout the ensuing days, American and Israeli attacks struck hospitals, historic sites, and more schools. In response, Iran aimed its drones and missiles at American military bases and allies across the Gulf region.
What kind of help, exactly, did Trump mean?
What Washington calls help is often disastrous and the U.S. has a long history of offering (and refusing) to help Iran. During the Abadan Crisis of 1951 to 1954, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the country's oil industry, which had been under near-complete British control for decades. The United Kingdom responded with a crushing economic embargo, legal challenges, and a naval buildup off the Iranian coast. Mosaddegh repeatedly appealed to Dwight D. Eisenhower for help, but the American president declined to step in.
Some two weeks later, the CIA toppled Mosaddegh's government with the backing of the British intelligence agency MI6. In effect, that coup d'e'tat -- one of at least 72 the U.S. facilitated or attempted to facilitate globally in the Cold War years -- opened the path for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, to reinstall his monarchical autocracy. In his private diary, Eisenhower reflected that "we helped bring about " the restoration of the Shah to power in Iran and the elimination of Mossadegh" The things we did were 'covert.' If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear."
The CIA wouldn't publicly acknowledge its role in the coup until several decades later, but Iranians had little doubt. During his quarter-century reign, the Shah outlawed most political parties, jailed dissidents, and made liberal use of torture. In 1979, a revolution unseated the Shah, but the Islamic Republic that followed only continued his practice of mass repression, torture, and extrajudicial killings. Later, when Iran and Iraq went to war in 1980, the U.S. clandestinely gave each side enough support to ensure neither could win. Worse yet, at the tail end of that conflict, American intelligence officials provided the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with the positions of Iranian soldiers, despite Washington's knowledge that Hussein intended to use chemical weapons on them.
Donald Trump has long styled himself as distinctly anti-war, but both of his administrations have kept Tehran squarely in their crosshairs. An American president, after all, is still an American president. Since returning to office in January 2025, he has relaunched the long, lethal American tradition of military intervention abroad. "We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end -- and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into," he said during his inaugural speech. Over the next year, though, he proceeded to bomb seven countries, threaten a slate of nations from Latin America to Europe, and even kidnap Venezuelan President Nicola's Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. All the while, he bragged of supposedly ending eight wars.
One of the wars the president insists he ended was Israel's two-year assault on the Gaza Strip. By the time a U.S.-brokered ceasefire came into effect there in October 2025, Israeli attacks on the coastal enclave had, according to the Gaza health ministry, killed more than 70,000 people. The truce, however, proved to be distinctly one-sided. As of early March of this year, the United Nations estimated that more than 600 Palestinians had been killed and more than 1,600 wounded in Gaza since the ceasefire was implemented. In Lebanon, where a ceasefire went into effect in November 2024, the U.N. had tallied more than 15,000 Israeli ceasefire violations and hundreds of deaths as of late February.
In the United States, war is, of course, a bipartisan affair. The Biden and Trump administrations would, for instance, send Israel more than $21 billion in military aid during the first two years of the war in Gaza. On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump would lean into anti-interventionist rhetoric, warning that a Kamala Harris presidency would drag the U.S. into World War III. Harris's silence on Gaza evidently cost her a significant number of votes and Trump returned to the Oval Office.
Many Trump voters hoped he would avoid foreign entanglements. Instead, he has deepened the U.S. involvement in conflicts abroad, while deploying federal troops domestically to fight what he's called an "invasion from within."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
