In the surreal world of Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu, war starts and ends on social media, with the flick of a post on Truth Social.
Midnight Hammer, the name chosen by Washington for its June 22nd bombing raids on Iran, might have been better suited to a porn film. Everything in Sheriff Trump’s wild west is oversized – the world’s most expensive warplanes delivered the world’s heaviest ordnance on the world’s longest bombing raid constituting “ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY”. Except it wasn’t.
In his inaugural address last January, Trump gave the impression he had learned from past errors, promising to “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”.
If Trump were capable of contemplation, he might ask himself why, roughly every 20 years, Israel and the US attempt to remake the Middle East, with catastrophic consequences. A brief reminder of past misadventures:
Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett: Two Irish artist friends who rewrote the rules of 20th century art
Ireland’s only LGBTQ+ salon: ‘We’re doing something that makes people feel comfortable where they otherwise wouldn’t’
Senator George Mitchell: The man Ian Paisley called ‘a foreigner and a pro-Irish republican’
The 10 best Irish albums of 2025 so far
- June 1982 Israel invades Lebanon with the goal of stopping attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers and tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians are killed. Israeli occupation forces remain in much of the country for 18 years, until they are driven out in humiliation by Hizbullah, an Iranian-backed Shia Muslim militia.
- March 2003 The US invades Iraq with the goal of destroying Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and more than 4,000 US troops are killed during the invasion, ensuing civil war and eight-year occupation, which costs more than $3 trillion. Iran becomes the main power in Iraq.
- June 13th, 2025 Binyamin Netanyahu begins bombing Iran, on the dubious pretext that Iran is about to make a nuclear weapon. Israel has never owned up to owning hundreds of nuclear warheads that it has never submitted for inspection. Trump, who doesn’t follow through on his own ultimatums to Vladimir Putin, waits only three days of a two-week grace period before dropping 14 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, or MOPs, on Iranian nuclear sites.
Trump calls Iran “the world’s No 1 state sponsor of terror”. But these days, it is Trump’s buddies, Putin and Netanyahu, who practise state terror against Ukraine and Gaza.
If there really were no other way to spare the world from a hypothetical Iranian bomb, one might have concluded – as German chancellor Friedrich Merz did in an obscene remark – that Israel was “doing our dirty work for us”, or “Drecksarbeit”, as he put it. Nato secretary general Mark Rutte also praised the illegal attacks. Under Trump, the West has lost its moral compass.
Painstaking negotiations, not brute force, are the only way to defuse a nuclear threat. Diplomacy achieved the 2015 accord known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action treaty (JCPOA), which Iran abided by until Trump discarded the agreement at Netanyahu’s urging.
It was Netanyahu who commissioned the 1996 Clean Break report advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, upon which US neocons based the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This month’s war on Iran was reportedly inspired by Restoring Deterrence: Destabilising the Iranian Regime, a study by the British academic researcher Barak Seener, published by a rightwing think tank in London.
The belief that we can neutralise an adversary by installing “our sonuvabitch” is a dangerous, recurring delusion. In 1982 Israel and the US attempted to impose the soon-to-be slain Maronite militia leader Bachir Gemayel to lead Lebanon. In 2003 the US groomed Ahmad Chalabi, a corrupt banker who propagated the myth of Saddam’s WMDs, for Baghdad.
Now Israel dreams of restoring the Pahlavi dynasty, 46 years after the late Shah and his family were driven out by Islamic revolution. The Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, now aged 64, visited Jerusalem with his mother Farah Diba at the invitation of the Israeli Likud cabinet minister Gila Gamliel in 2023. “The Iranian people love Israel, and they want the Ayatollah regime to be replaced,” Gamaliel told the Jerusalem Post in March.
Trump harbours the same fantasy: “It’s not politically correct to use the term ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime Change??? MIGA!!!” he posted on Truth Social.
On June 23rd Reza Pahlavi predicted at a press conference in Paris that the Tehran regime would fall this year. Israel’s heritage minister, Amihai Eliyahu of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, said, “The fact that we are co-operating with the opposition in Iran today is a blessing.”
After an estimated 800 Iranians and 30 Israelis were killed, Trump blithely congratulated his Israeli allies and the country he had just bombed for their “Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence”. Hours later he lashed out at both for apparent ceasefire violations, saying they “don’t know what the f*** they are doing.”
Trump flew to The Hague, where he was feted by royalty and fawned over by Nato’s secretary general. Thirty-one of Nato’s 32 member states – only Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, objected – caved in to Trump’s long-time demand that they devote 5 per cent of GDP to defence. And those extra hundreds of billions had better be spent on US hardware. There was not a squeak of criticism for Russia’s assault on Ukraine, because Trump hates it when you insult his buddies. He denounced corruption charges against Netanyahu as “a witch hunt”.
Trump directed his venom at “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES” for reporting preliminary findings by the US Defence Intelligence Agency that 12 days of sound and fury had delayed Iran’s nuclear programme by at best a few months.
CIA director John Ratcliffe flew to Trump’s rescue, insisting that Operation Midnight Hammer set back Iran’s nuclear programme by years. We segued from the verge of a third world war into farce, with Trump, Netanyahu and Iran’s supreme leader all claiming victory.
Trump and Netanyahu must learn there is no such thing as a quick fix in the Middle East. We’ve come full circle to the original dilemma: negotiations or a new forever war.
