Hundreds of civilians dead in the Middle East, and Trump’s bloodthirsty glee only grows as he promises “big wave” of attacks are yet to come
The bombs have been falling on Iran for three days now. At least 500 people are dead, and over 165 of them are girls under 10 who were killed when an Israeli strike leveled their school on the first day of the attack.
Smoke hangs over major cities in Iran. The IRGC is raining missiles and suicide drones on American bases and Arab cities almost non-stop. Airports are shuttered across the region, and the civilian casualty is rising with every sortie and launch.
Donald Trump, speaking from the safe confines of the White House on Monday, couldn’t sound more delighted about all of it.
“We’re knocking the crap out of them,” he told CNN reporters in a nine-minute interview. “I think it’s going very well. It’s very powerful. We’ve got the greatest military in the world and we’re using it.”
That last line tells you everything about where Trump’s head is right now. Not with the dead children, or with the six American soldiers killed so far. And certainly not with the hundreds of thousands of civilians sheltering in basements across a country of 90 million people. No, Trump is thinking about how powerful he looks.
And if you thought this was already an insane escalation while the two countries were in the middle of negotiating another nuclear deal, Trump was happy to assure you that it’s nothing compared to what’s coming.
“We haven’t even started hitting them hard,” he said. “The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon.”
That will probably end in the deaths of countless other civilians and non-military people, and Iran’s response will no doubt be even deadlier than before.
How long will the war go on?
Remember when Trump told the protestors in Iran that “help is on the way?” Well, it turns out the help he was referring to involved watching their cities being leveled similar to the scenes of carnage in Gaza.
The Trump administration is justifying the attack by declaring that Iran’s nuclear and missile programs were a threat to the United States. The same missile program that he said he’d destroyed literally hundreds of times over the past six months. As for the military threat, the Pentagon has confirmed to Congress there was no indication Iran was about to attack the United States first.
This was a war of choice, chosen by Trump, incited by Benjamin Netanyahu (who basically said that the U.S. attack on Iran was a 40-year dream come true) and framed as an emergency to fool the public.
The humanitarian picture on the ground is dire and getting worse. Iran has vowed a “long war.” Trump says he expects it to be wrapped up in about four weeks — and has also declined to rule out sending ground troops. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who somehow remains the man in charge of the most powerful military on Earth, echoed that ambiguity: “Four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up. It could move back.”
Why is the U.S. hellbent on a war with Iran?
The fingerprints of that long-standing Israeli agenda are all over this. Netanyahu has spent over two decades warning that Iran was perpetually on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon, a claim that has been wrong for two decades.
He promoted the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He torpedoed the Obama nuclear deal in 2015. And analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations note that the decision to launch Operation Epic Fury was almost certainly finalized during Netanyahu’s visit to Washington two weeks ago. The attack was planned weeks before the negotiations between the Iranian convoy and Steve Witkoff. Israel finally got its war.
Experts aren’t mincing their words. “This is another Israeli war that the US is launching,” Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, told Al Jazeera.
That leaves us with the inevitable question of what the actual plan is. Congress never authorized this war. Trump never sought a declaration. Sen. Elizabeth Warren called it “dangerous and illegal,” demanding an immediate war powers vote.
Even Republicans are cracking. Rep. Thomas Massie flatly declared the war “not America First,” and Sen. Rand Paul — citing his oath of office — said he “must oppose another Presidential war.”
Sen. Tim Kaine asked what should be the defining question of this moment: “Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East?”
The big wave is coming. As usual, the victims will be the civilians on the ground. You know, the people who didn’t even have the financial means to leave danger zones and seek shelter somewhere safer until it all blows over. And the man has the audacity to ask why the Nobel committee isn’t tripping over itself to hand him a peace prize.
(featured image: YouTube/ABC News)
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