War with Iran Appears Inevitable

Trump is being roundly criticized (see "With Oil Under Attack, Trump’s Deference to Saudis Returns" by Peter Baker and David Sanger) for his tweet granting U.S. war powers to Saudi Arabia.

“Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!”

[snip]

The notion of the United States doing the bidding of the Saudis has a long, bristling history. Critics complained that Saudi Arabia effectively hired out the American military to protect itself from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and reverse his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The Saudi government even forked over $16 billion to reimburse the United States for about a quarter of the cost of the war that followed in 1991 — along with Kuwait, the most of any country.

The resentment felt over the years by American officials crossed the ideological spectrum, summed up pithily in a leaked 2010 cable by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The Saudis, Mr. Gates told the French foreign minister at the time, always want to “fight the Iranians to the last American.”

Among those who seemed to share the sentiment in the past was a New York businessman and television entertainer named Donald J. Trump.

“Saudi Arabia should fight their own wars, which they won’t, or pay us an absolute fortune to protect them and their great wealth-$ trillion!” he tweeted in 2014.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has made Saudi Arabia his closest ally in the Middle East other than Israel, and has strongly supported its multifront struggle with Iran for dominance in the region. He has also left little doubt about the primacy of money in the relationship, openly citing the value of arms contracts in explaining why he would not criticize the Saudi government for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing.

Trump is merely tweeting the obvious. Saudi Arabia is one of two foreign powers that control U.S. foreign policy, Israel being the other. The U.S. continues to cover up Saudi responsibility for 9/11.

With the Houthis warning that more attacks could come at any moment, and most of the Trump administration signaling that a retaliatory strike against Iran is in the works, the question becomes how large of an Iranian response will there be. Iran has been promising for months a gigantic counter-attack. It might not be as gigantic as advertised, but it will definitely be an escalation, so much so that Trump will have to escalate even more.

Trump is doomed. Congress will be forced to impeach. The electorate is almost uniformly opposed to a war on Iran.