Trump: Iran War Is an Open-Ended, Regime-Change War, Followed by Nation-Building
The America First president vows he will play a key role in approving Iran's new leaders; the U.S. and its allies will rebuild Iran; and the war goal is to 'Make Iran Great Again.'
Every new war that the U.S. wages — at least over the past six decades — is accompanied by a series of official lies, shifting and inconsistent claims about the war’s goals, and constant exaggerations about the grand progress toward glorious victory. Now, a full week into the Iran War started by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his partner, the American President Donald Trump, this war already equals, if not surpasses, the brazen war propaganda that instigated and fueled those prior ones.
For the first few days, Trump’s most loyal supporters insisted — over and over — that this was not even a war at all. Americans have been so accustomed to a state of constant, endless war that when some watch their government heavily bombing another country, deliberately killing its leaders, sinking its navy, all while the U.S. President warns that “bombs will be dropping everywhere,” this somehow does not count as a “war.” We are told by supporters of the Iran War that whatever Iran has been doing to the U.S. constitutes a vicious, 47-year terrorist war against the U.S., but when the U.S. sends a “massive armada” to Iran and then attacks it with aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and 2,000-pound bombs, that this is somehow not a war? O.K.
That insulting not-a-war propaganda was crushed, thankfully, by a rather large obstacle. Namely, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth began calling it a war and invoking war clichés virtually from the start. Israel has always described it as a war. And now President Trump is also calling it a war. That ought to end this rhetorical tactic among all but the most shamelessly dishonest.
Once that defensive wall fell, defenders of this new Netanyahu-Trump war resorted to a new rationale: Fine, it is a war. But it will be a very short one. It will not be like Iraq. Donald Trump is not George W. Bush.
One problem for this rationalization is that this is more or less exactly what Bush 43’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on February 7, 2003, less than a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, when he was asked at a press conference how long he thought the war would last:
Supporters of the new Iran War have a response to this as well. This new war, they insist, is completely different from prior wars, including the Iraq War. They insist on this distinction even though most of the people who sold the Iraq War in 2002-3 are selling this new war now, based on the same exact scripts they used then (we examined yesterday how Fox News exhumed key Iraq War architect and saleswoman Condoleezza Rice from whatever underground lair in which she lurks these days, all to cheer Trump’s new Iran War based on the same exact claims she used to sell the Iraq War, all as Fox News assumed the war cheerleader role yet again).
War defenders argue that this time we are not there for regime change or nation-building. One problem with that claim is that the war was sold from the start based on the need to rid the Iranians of their murderous, tyrannical regime and liberate them. During his middle-of-the-night war announcement on Truth Social, Trump told Iranians: “[The] hour of your freedom is at hand.” If this war is not a regime-change war, then how would it possibly liberate Iranians?
The evidence is now overwhelming that it was a U.S. airstrike — likely guided and governed by Anthropic’s A.I. — that bombed that elementary school on the second day of the war, “liberating” 150 Iranian school girls (from life). But that is not the type of liberation that was promised by those who instigated this war. That could come only from regime change and the building of freedom and democracy.
But on Friday, this war defense — this is not a regime-change war or nation-building — ran into a much larger problem. Trump himself explicitly stated that the supreme goal and aim of the war he started is regime change, followed by nation-building. He also made clear he does not care how long it takes to achieve this: weeks, months, or even longer if necessary. Here is what the President posted on Truth Social about this:
To summarize: there is no end to this new war with Iran absent “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”. The last time the U.S. obtained that was when it dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945.
Trump quickly added — not for the first time — that he must have a key role in approving Iran’s new leaders (yesterday, he vetoed the possibility of the Shah of Iran’s son parachuting into Iran, a country he has not visited for 45 years, in order to rule). Trump then explained the plan of the U.S. and regional allies (meaning Persian Gulf dictators) is to “work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of disaster” and “make it economically bigger and stronger than ever before.”
In sum, Trump said, the U.S. will “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” Trump deserves credit for calling his movement by the right acronym — MIGA — though it seems clear that the “I” stands for a different foreign country. As Trump himself put it during one of the 2024 campaign events organized by his Israeli-American billionaire donor, Miriam Adelson:
But how about the core, defining promise of Trump to Make America Great Again? Trump seems to be struggling more and more with that pledge. In an interview with TIME Magazine today, Trump said that his new war in Iran would likely result in more American deaths, including at home (the evidence is now strong that the horrific shooting last week at a bar in Austin, Texas — which killed three Americans and wounded more than a dozen — was motivated by a desire for retaliation for the U.S. attacking Iran).
Trump also stressed on Friday that he is open to ordering American ground troops to invade Iran, and that this war can only end with a new government in Tehran that is acceptable to Trump. As TIME put it:
In his interview with TIME, Trump says his goals are to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat once and for all, to dismantle its ballistic-missile program, and to install a Western-friendly government. “We have to be able to deal with sane and rational people,” he says. Yet Trump launched a war before making a case to the country or to Congress, and his Administration has offered unclear — and at times contradictory — explanations of the mission’s objectives. The most unnerving possibility is that Operation Epic Fury is not the culmination of his shift toward a war presidency, but rather the beginning of a new chapter . . . .
If the regime endures, or violently suppresses unrest again, the U.S. could face a decision it has tried to avoid: whether to send in ground forces to finish the job.
Trump has not ruled out that possibility. He has said he believes the objectives of the campaign could be achieved within four or five weeks, though he concedes the timeline could stretch longer. The war will continue, he suggests, until those objectives are accomplished. “I have no time limits on anything,” he says. “I want to get it done.”
Trump also found the time to be interviewed by CNN, and he made similar claims to that outlet. Trump said he does not care if Iranians enjoy freedom or democracy. Rather, “he’s looking for new leadership that will treat the United States and Israel well, even if that’s a religious leader and it’s not a democratic state.” This, of course, was exactly the objective when the CIA overthrew Iran’s elected president in 1953 and then spent twenty-five years financing, protecting, and propping up this tyrannical, savage, U.S./Israel puppet regime.
The rage among Iranians from this U.S. interference and imposition of dictatorship is what led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and decades of seething hatred for the U.S. Apparently, the Trump administration — or, more accurately, Netanyahu — decided that this was a good model to replicate.
Trump’s grandiose visions about the scope of this war and its regime-change goals come as Americans are increasingly suffering economically, both prior to the war and increasingly as a result of the war itself. Even leaving aside the $50 billion (at minimum) that the Congressional GOP and White House want to pay for just the couple of weeks of this war, these headlines from today’s New York Times illustrate what is happening to Americans while Trump pursues his new joint U.S./Israel Middle East war:
As should be expected (as is completely understandable), Israel’s most extreme loyalists — including those who never wanted Trump to win in large part due to their belief that Marco Rubio or Ron DeSantis would better serve Israel — are now heaping effusive praise on Trump as the greatest President in decades, if not ever.
If that point needed any greater clarity, nobody was happier about Trump’s regime-change announcement for Iran than Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), whose sole dream appears to be to send Americans into one foreign country after the next to bomb, kill, invade, and overthrow.
For a long time, Graham was supposedly anathema to the America First movement, the embodiment of the D.C. warmongers Trump so flamboyantly vowed to vanquish. But that was before the second term of the Trump presidency became the presidency of Ben Shapiro, AIPAC, Palantir, Netanyahu, and those exact D.C. warmongers whom Trump and MAGA long insisted they loathed.
Ignore what Trump says. The goal is to turn Iran into a failed state, much like what was done to Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
They wven used the same bullshit excuses about terrorism, WMDs and freedom.
You don't know that, Glenn so don't say it. Not letting Khamanei's son in there is not boots on the ground, nation building. Nor does he intend that. We understand some of you do not believe Iran was a threat, but most of us do not agree. We want their military rendered essentially nonexistent. If it goes past that, he'll hear about it. We believe his actions have been America First so far and don't believe Reuters polls.