The MAGA faithful, well-schooled over the years in spotting what they believe to be instances of liberal “hypocrisy,” have taken to the interwebs since Saturday to say things like: Just look at all those overjoyed Iranians, you stupid libtards. Does this not make you happy? Is this not what the United States of America is supposed to be for? Is your hatred of Donald Trump so all-consuming that you’d rather see this operation fail, and the democratic aspirations of those poor Iranians, their breasts pounding with hope for the first time in decades, crushed?
These are the kinds of questions that seem, to MAGA loyalists, to be conversation-enders—absolutely open-and-shut. But they are not open and shut at all. In fact, they’re quite jejune. If you know or bother to recall a little history—of the world, of the region, indeed of U.S.-Iran relations—you know enough to know that those celebrations, while absolutely, 100 percent understandable coming from members of the Iranian diaspora who have relatives who are either living grim lives or are in prison or perhaps dead, are alas premature.
I’ll get to that history, but first, in the interest of transparency, let me answer the three questions I posed above. First, yes, the sight of Iranians celebrating is a nice thing to see, although only to a point, as I’ll explain. Second, yes, the spread of liberal democracy is what the United States of America is supposed to stand for; it simply isn’t clear to me (and many millions of others) that things are quite that simple here. We’ve observed Trump for over a decade after all, and he has shown no such commitment to either democracy or liberation—he would just prefer for more people to be living under his book, as opposed to someone else’s.
And it might surprise you to learn myanswer to the third question: No, actually. I consider Trump a walking malignancy in virtually every imaginable way, a cruel charlatan and sociopath who has done untold damage to the nation and world over the years. But if the Islamic Republic were to fall tomorrow and Iran were to turn into another Sweden, and Trump got all the credit for it, I’d be very happy for the long-suffering people of Iran and would likely even admit that Trump did a good thing!
Alas, there isn’t much chance of that happening. The odds are better than even that those hopeful people dancing in the streets Saturday will be disappointed. Perhaps crushed. I’m afraid history tells us so.
Many of the people of Ukraine cheered the Wehrmacht when the Germans marched through in 1941. Why shouldn’t they have? The Germans were there to topple Stalin, who had starved four million of them to death in the prior decade. The Germans will save us from Dzhugashvili’s madness, many Ukrainians thought; indeed, quite a few became fascist fighters, under the leadership of the odious Stepan Bandera.
Well … things didn’t quite work out as hoped. The Nazis’ economic exploitation of Ukraine was remorseless, their treatment of the population extremely violent and punitive. Ukrainians were Slavic and considered Untermenschen (under-men) by the Germans. QED. Eric Koch, chosen by Hitler to be the Ukrainian Reichskommissar, once said: “Even if I find a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot.”
Well, an interesting story, you say, but pretty remote from 2026 Iran. Not really, but—as you wish. So let’s consider the example of Iraq in 2003.
Then, as now, there was much celebrating by Iraqis across the world when George W. Bush announced the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was fueled in part by the grotesquely irresponsible promises of people like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz that the war would last about as long as one of Cher’s marriages.
Chances are you know what happened. Or is your memory really that short? The war was a disaster for the United States for four years before the 2007 troop surge reduced the violence. As many as 200,000 Iraqis died. The whole mess, which the likes of Perle and Wolfowitz told us would pay for itself, cost the United States more than $2 trillion.
Is Iraq a democracy today? Maybe, if you squint at it the right way. They have elections (which may be more than we can soon say). But the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute, which rates all the countries of the world on a set of democratic measures, calls Iraq an “electoral autocracy” (the third worst of four categories) and places it in the bottom 30 to 40 percent of countries on its Liberal Democracy Index.
Better than life under Saddam? Yes, but not by nearly as much as those 2003 Iraqis would have hoped. And that’s after many years of civil war and turmoil. Even cursory knowledge of this history ought to be enough to prevent any industrial-scale MAGA finger-wagging at those of us who aren’t popping champagne corks just yet.
Finally, there are lessons to be learned from the last time an Iranian government fell. That was the Shah’s regime, of course, back in 1979, when Iran flipped from being a corrupt and savage American client state under the Shah to being a corrupt and savage bane of America under Ayatollah Khomeini. If you’re so inclined, read this brilliant and detailed BBC report from 2016, when new documents became available, about how the Carter administration tried and failed to manage the transition from the one to the other.
Khomeini, in exile in Paris, made lovely promises. “You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans,” he said. He vowed that his Islamic Republic would be “a humanitarian one, which will benefit the cause of peace and tranquility for all mankind.”
The central tension in Iran then was between the military and the clerics. The Carter team, once it gave up on the Shah, tried to manage events such that a new regime led by Khomeini would be Islamist but not radically so and would reach certain accommodations with secular parties and the generals. The military made a number of concessions, the BBC wrote, but: “All the concessions made by the military weren’t enough for Khomeini. On 15 February four senior military generals were summarily executed on the rooftop of a high school. It was just the beginning of a slew of executions.”
The point is—these situations are easy to misjudge and extremely hard to manage by presidents who aren’t corrupt criminals. Power reverts toward the extremes in such cases because power gravitates toward people with money and guns, and peace-loving liberals who want secular democracy to flourish tend not to have stockpiled a lot of either of those things.
Ah, but the MAGA acolyte will scoff—that was weak Jimmy Carter, not our latter-day Rambo, Trump. Think that if you wish. But two points. First, Carter is hardly the only president to have misjudges such situations. Johnson in Vietnam, Reagan in Central America, Bush in Iraq, Obama in Libya—these situations were all different, but they have one thing in common: an outcome considerably at odds with the one the president was trying to achieve and sold to the American people.
Second, there is the matter of Trump himself. He knows nothing about Iran. That BBC article is around 4,000 words. I’d be shocked if he’s read half that many words about this country’s long and often glorious history. And it remains a mystery how he flip-flopped, to use a phrase Republicans once favored, from saying no wars to bleating: “The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” That is so thoroughly neoconnish in sentiment that Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld couldn’t have said it better.
I understand why Iranians are trying to be hopeful. The regime that has been destroying their country for 47 years is a nightmare. But this situation calls for a public that remembers a little history and demands democratic accountability. Trump has plenty of applauding seals.
