When President Donald Trump called on Iranian demonstrators to “KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER THE INSTITUTIONS” in early January and pledged “HELP IS ON THE WAY,” I feared a shameful episode of American betrayal was about to be repeated.
“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he had promised these brave Iranians, fed up with decades of corruption and repression by the ayatollahs.
Human rights activists report that these words encouraged many ordinary Iranians to come to the streets.
My mind flashed back to January 1991, when President George H.W. Bush urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein, as U.S. troops were liberating Kuwait, then allowed the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites who responded to be slaughtered by the thousands. On assignment in Iraq, I saw the bloody consequences, which undermined U.S. forces during the 2003 Iraq War.
Sure enough, history is repeating itself, this time in Iran. TACO Trump ignored the impact his braggadocio has on real people and reneged on his promises to the Iranians. Many thousands of demonstrators who believed him were shot dead in the streets by regime forces, and many more thousands jailed, beaten, and tortured.
Human rights groups estimate the number of dead at a minimum of 5,000, but we won’t know if the number is much higher until the regime stops blocking the internet. Iranian officials insist, contrary to Trump’s claims, that they won’t halt executions.
If Trump had moved quickly to do the possible — aid the protesters with satellite connections, isolate Iran at the United Nations, organize tighter sanctions against their oil sales and shadow fleet, cripple their military and government with cyberattacks — he might have made a difference. He still could.
Instead, convinced of his own brilliance, surrounded by incompetent advisers, and possessed of a mistaken belief that he has the power to reorder the world, he has tweeted cheap rhetoric that only provoked more regime brutality on young people in the streets.
The consequence of betraying Iran’s citizen uprising will have ripple effects that Trump is unable to foresee.
“We’re in a very difficult situation,” I was told by Suzanne Maloney, a leading Iran expert who directs the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution. “President Trump raised hopes without a strategy or the tools to carry it out. The tools [a massive U.S. armada dispatched to the region] have arrived too late to make a difference for the demonstrators on the street.”
Now that the uprising has been crushed, Trump no longer mentions the murdered protesters. Compassion is not his thing.
Instead, the president is seeking a deal with the ayatollahs to completely abandon their nuclear program, cut back their missile program, and stop meddling in the region.
In other words, as in Venezuela, the regime could remain if it bowed to the United States. The demands themselves lay out highly desirable objectives, but the regime recognizes that meeting them would leave them totally at the mercy of the U.S. and Israel. So it will probably delay or reject them.
Then what? Trump has likely boxed himself into conducting military strikes. Yet, bombs alone aren’t likely to unseat a government in which the military still has plenty of weapons and sees its fate as tied to the Islamic Republic. More likely, U.S. strikes would provoke a wider regional war, with attacks on U.S. bases in Arab countries and on Israel.
“Trump sees Venezuela as a model,” Maloney said, and indeed POTUS has said so. But in Venezuela, the CIA had inside sources who betrayed Nicolás Maduro and made his extraction possible. Moreover, the United States had previous contacts with Maduro’s vice president, swapping one dictator for another so long as she was willing to let Trump control Venezuelan oil profits. One limited strike, no messy follow-up with ground troops.
Iran, on the other hand, would be brutal, long, and messy, probably requiring U.S. ground troops, something Trump rightly won’t consider.
In Iran, said Maloney, “with the Revolutionary Guards and the clerical elite, there is not a pathway to a pro-Western leader who will bow to the U.S. They are going to go down fighting.”
As for Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran, who has some popularity in Iran, he has lived in exile in the United States since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and has no organization inside his homeland. U.S. experience with overhyped Iraqi exiles in 2003 taught diplomatic officials a bitter lesson, about which Trump is probably totally unaware.
Even if Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, were miraculously slain, no one can guarantee what would come after. This is why the Saudis are urging Washington not to pursue regime change, and closing their airspace to any U.S. warplanes headed for Tehran.
Meantime, the trials and future executions of protesters will go forward.
So let me return to the bitter consequences of betraying allies who believed in the promises of the U.S.
The Shiites of southern Iraq never forgot Bush 41’s betrayal, during which he allowed a defeated Saddam to retain military helicopters that were used to slaughter at least 10,000 of their people who had answered the president’s call.
In 2003, just after the U.S. invasion, I returned to Najaf, the heart of Iraq’s south, where George W. Bush expected the Shiite population to welcome American troops. Instead, clerics and merchants recalled bitterly how their fathers and uncles had been slain in 1991. “You owe us,” one Najaf leader told me. “So kill Saddam and get out of Iraq, or we will turn on you, too.”
Instead, we remained in Iraq for years, and Shiite militias ultimately took revenge on our soldiers for the earlier betrayal.
Perhaps the population of Iran will be more forgiving if Trump devises a strategy that will help them, not cause more slaughter. But he doesn’t have much time.
