The president casually threatened another country with illegal military action on Friday:
“They won’t be enriching. If they enrich, then we’re going to have to do it the other way,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday.
“And I don’t really want to do it the other way but we’re going to have no choice,” he added. “There’s not going to be enrichment.”
Trump sometimes says that he doesn’t want to attack Iran, but he won’t stop making public threats tied to an extreme demand that Iran has already repeatedly rejected. He tries to make it seem as if Iran is forcing him to do something he would rather avoid, but absolutely no one is forcing Trump to make these threats or to follow through on them. If the president starts an illegal war with Iran, it will be a war of choice that will be terrible for U.S. interests.
American presidents love to frame their decisions to use force as something that has been forced on them by circumstances or by the perfidy of the other government. Many interventionist presidents of both parties have insisted that they didn’t want war at the same time that they were going out of their way to pick fights with countries on the other side of the planet. The most trigger-happy presidents have the greatest incentive to feign reluctance in using force.
George W. Bush disgracefully presented the pending invasion of Iraq as something that the Iraqi government had chosen: “Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it.” Of course that was a lie, like so many other things Bush said about Iraq. Bush had taken no measures to avoid war because he had no interest in avoiding it. He presented it that way to make it seem as if the U.S. wasn’t the aggressor when it definitely was.
All governments try to shift the blame for conflict to their adversaries, but it is even more ridiculous when ours does this because the U.S. has very rarely fought a war of necessity. When the U.S. has attacked another country in the past, our government’s hand has never been forced. If the U.S. were to attack Iran, it would be because the president wanted to attack.
Don’t let the president or his apologists trick you into believing that he wants to avoid war. If he truly wanted to avoid war, he would stop making obnoxious demands and he wouldn’t be threatening to attack Iran every time he talks about this subject. A president who didn’t want to attack Iran would find a way to compromise on the nuclear issue, and he would stop talking about blowing up their facilities.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
