Contributor: U.S. attack on Iran echoes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

It was more than disconcerting to hear Iran’s foreign minister sound like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky circa 2022 on Sunday. But that’s the comparison that immediately came to mind when Abbas Araghchi said George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week”: “What the United States is doing is an act of aggression. What we are doing is an act of self-defense. There are huge differences between the two.”

All you have to do is replace the United States with Russia and it is all too clear who and what we have become. An aggressive nation killing people on Caribbean fishing boats without evidence or due process. This captures and overthrows the Venezuelan president, then claims Venezuela’s oil. This assassinates Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, triggering retaliatory attacks by Iran across the Middle East.

There are of course differences. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and started the war that still rages, he targeted the democratically elected leader of a sovereign nation, intending to seize territory and install a Russian puppet at the top. In contrast, President Trump took out a theocratic dictator who in January had his security forces crush massive protests against him with deadly forceleading to thousands of deaths.

And yet. Trump started this war with no constitutional authority. THE power It is up to Congress to declare war or authorize the use of force, and unless America has been attackthis must happen in advance. Trump has also failed to marshal consistent or convincing evidence of Iran’s nuclear capability – a purported justification for this chosen war. And he embarked on this with seemingly no concern for human lives and the consequences which so far include sheet music of children and other civilians killed in Iran; American military losses, including six deaths; And Iranian strikes in at least 10 countries: Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Cyprus and Oman.

When Trump suggested in a short address Friday to the nation that there could be deaths and injuries in the United States, his words seemed routine and hollow. “This happens a lot in war,” he said. “But we’re not doing this for now. We’re doing this for the future.”

The future? What future? Many of us remember President George W. Bush’s grandiose ideas about exporting democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump’s “future” looks more like a return to the eternal wars and failures of the past. Exactly what the “America First” candidate says sworn to avoid in his winning campaigns of 2016 and 2024.

Do you remember the Green Zone? The American protected zone in Baghdad during the Iraq War? It is now the site of the American Embassy, ​​and last weekend it was also the site of pro-Iranian protesters – some waving flags of pro-Iranian armed groups, others throwing stones – were met with tear gas as they attempted to storm the embassy.

The very words “Green Zone” are a depressing reminder of the lessons too many of our leaders never learn. Iraq was an unfortunate misadventure, another war of choice, another war based on faulty assumptions about weapons – in the case of 2003, Iraq was non-existent. stocks chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction; now, a nuclear program that conveniently always seems on the verge of being dangerous. And even more unfortunately, Bush started the war in Iraq while he was still at the beginning of what would become a 20 years war in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Afghanistan was a theocracy controlled by the extremist Taliban. Bush & Co. did not decide to simply bomb the camps where the Taliban were training terrorists. They decided to occupy Afghanistan and try to bring it into the modern era, with equal rights for girls and women. Wasn’t it nice to think so? And naive, especially after the Soviet Union spent a decade of combat in Afghanistan to put the communist allies in control, before withdrawing its troops in 1989 amid failure.

One of the most devastating documents I have seen is a 2020 State Department report on human rights violations in Afghanistan. It was 19 years after we dropped the first bombs on the Taliban and began our quest to transform Afghanistan into a 21st century country where girls could go to school and grow up to find jobs, run for office, and wear what they wanted.

Beyond the Taliban’s raw brutality towards women, I wrote in 2021, the report cites injustice, neglect, and cruelty on the part of local governments and agencies: “Women imprisoned because they reported being victims of crimes, or at the request of family members, or as proxies for male relatives convicted of crimes. And the inevitable, terrible conclusion: no matter how long America stays, we can’t “make a country care about its own women.” Only Afghanistan could do it.

If Iran’s foreign minister was right to say Sunday that there would be successors to Khamenei’s regime and continuity in the Islamic Republic, Trump hopes coopt successors like he did in Venezuela, with his new best friend Delcy Rodriguez? If the Iranian resistance fighters (part of the population, but not all) miraculously manage to organize and advance, will they get money or troops from Trump? Or does he just want Iranian oil?

Unfortunately for them, our president will most likely conclude, as usual, that power is what matters most, and he will make deals with those who hold it – whether socialists in Venezuela, autocrats in Iran, or Putin in Russia.

Jill Laurent is a journalist and author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Break Through Gridlock.” Blue sky: @jilldlawrence