Trump’s war: Just what is it for?

“Said the President, he’s got his war
Folks don’t know just what it’s for
No one gives us rhyme or reason
You have one doubt, they call it treason
I said we’re chicken feathers, all without one gut
Tryin’ to make it real, but compared to what?”
— from “Compared to What?,” protest song written by Gene McDaniels and sung by numerous artists, including Roberta Flack on her 1969 album “First Take”

On Saturday at the National Mall here in Washington, members of the Iranian diaspora gathered to celebrate the death of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to honor Iranian citizens killed in their government’s crackdown on domestic protests in January, and to express their hopes for the end of the murderous theocracy.

And they also lionized Donald Trump, the American president who launched the present war against Iran in conjunction with Israel. In fact, as the organizers were setting up for the rally, loudspeakers boomed out a freshly cut and catchy song that included Trump’s words announcing that “Ayatollah Khamenei is DEAD!” Pre-revolution Iranian flags fluttered in the breeze sweeping across the expanse of the Mall, and a central area was adorned with portraits of Iranians killed in the recent crackdown.

I share those Iranians hopes that their home country will be freed from the grip of the bloodthirsty machinery that has controlled it since the Islamic revolution of 1979. But the atmosphere on Saturday was fragrant with nostalgia for an Iran that may never be recaptured or perhaps rightly ought not to be recreated. Prominent at the rally was the portrait of Reza Pahlavi, the U.S.-domiciled son of the late Shah of Iran, who fled that country as the revolution gathered steam.

Pre-revolution Iran was a place in which many of today’s exiles no doubt believe they would feel comfortable, but it was hostile to the many who went on to man the ramparts of the theocratic and cruelly puritanical state that the revolution created. Those to whom dynastic Iran was hostile had to deal with, and in many cases died under, the tender mercies of the shah’s secret police, SAVAK, the Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State. One person’s idyll is another’s hell.

As I watched those diaspora Iranians gathering on Saturday, I witnessed the unfurling of a banner that read: “Trump was right about everything. Wake up, America.” Many of them clearly have placed their faith in Donald Trump. But, to paraphrase some dire words from JRR Tolkien, they may all of them yet be deceived. This man Trump is faithless and untrustworthy. I believe this war was undertaken to gratify his egoistic vision of himself as a man of consequence and also to satisfy the desire of Benjamin Netanyahu and the other Israeli hawks to cut off the head of the Iranian theocratic snake.

Trump has no clear plan to deal with the global mess that he is creating with this war of choice. Now there is even talk of arming Iran’s Kurds to help to fight the Iranian government. This American formula is a doomed and disastrous prescription. How did it work out, say, in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union invaded that country?

As economic, political and social pressures against Trump build here at home and out in the wider world, he will seek an easy exit and will claim that his ends have been achieved. What the hopeful Iranians here and in Iran itself are likely to end up with, in my opinion, is a nuclear deal that looks very much like the Obama-era deal that Trump tore up when he took office the first time.

In that outcome, the Iranian theocracy and militarists will get to preserve their system and their tyranny, which will be more vicious than ever in its domestic vengefulness, and the resident Iranians and the diaspora will have a deeply shattered country, broken dreams and an even deeper well of disappointment. And Iranians too numerous to count will have been killed for nothing in Trump’s ego-driven war.

And, of course, the anger and enmity of those who hate the United States and its ally Israel will have been stoked to unprecedented volcanic intensity.

But Trump and Netanyahu will crow that they have done good work in Iran.