Trump orders strikes without approval; risks wider war in the Middle East
In an unprecedented gambit, the United States joined Israel in its war against Iran with American bombers destroying three nuclear sites in Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan on Sunday morning Middle Eastern time. While it is hard to predict what the consequences would be, it is crystal clear that this is one man’s decision.
A US President who, in his poll campaign, had promised to avoid the kind of disasters associated with America going to war in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, ordered these powerful strikes against nuclear fuel enhancing facilities without Congressional approval. For all their love or hate for Donald Trump, the people are not thought to be behind this escalation that portends another “forever war” in a faraway land.
The fears of the war spreading quickly in the region were real as Iran threw more of its armaments at Israel, perhaps because this is the first available reprisal as its capacity to hit back at the US may be limited currently to attacking American bases in the Middle East and, perhaps mining the Strait of Hormuz and launching suicidal attacks in the region through its weakened proxies.
Morally, what Israel and now the US have done against Iran’s feared nuclear fuel enrichment processes, that may have been aimed at making a bomb, is wrong. Netanyahu has scarcely provided any proof of how near Iran was to producing a nuclear warhead, though the ageing supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have often parroted the line of “death to Israel and death to the USA” while hinting that Iranian bombs would be made to obliterate enemies.
The government of Iran has been maintaining that its nuclear programme is only for peaceful purposes, though why hundreds of centrifuges would be needed in protected sites for generating nuclear power has not been explained. The theocracy had, however, never made a secret of an ambitious nuclear programme on which billions of dollars have been spent, and which may have been destroyed for years to come.
In this era of war of ballistic missiles and guided drones and nukes staying in silos, territorial integrity has not been respected, not since February 2022 when Russia’s Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and Israel responded to a horrific attack on its civilians by Hamas militants from Gaza on October 7, 2023, and extended it to targeted attacks on Iran and Lebanon and against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
And yet there is no real justification for any of the wars that are raging now.
The US President, who some said should be impeached for ordering the strikes on Iran without legislative authorisation, would like to have us believe that this is the end of America’s involvement in the Iran war if Iran desists from attacking US forces. But then that is qualified by the comment — “There will either be peace or there will be tragedy for Iran.”
Who would have believed that Trump, who repeatedly trumpeted his credentials as a peacemaker and was angling for the Nobel Peace Prize, would order his stealth bombers to fly thousands of miles to enter Israel’s war with Iran that was in response to an existential threat in Iranian nuclear bombs, which Israel and Trump said Iran was capable of assembling in a couple of weeks.
Having torn up the nuclear treaty of 2015 that Iran had signed with the Obama regime, Trump has not just destroyed, for now, Iran’s ability to make a nuclear bomb but also wrecked all avenues for dialogue and diplomacy. With an avowed peacemaker turning warmonger, the chance of peace in the volatile region has gone up in smoke along with the dust kicked up by the bunker-buster bombs.
A world weary of war in 2025 will only see more of it.
