Good afternoon, I’m Rachel Maddow. It is 1 p .m. Eastern time and you are joining MSNOW’s ongoing coverage of the United States, having apparently started a war with Iran for some reason. Your guess, your personal guess, sitting at home watching me right now, your personal guess is as good as any as to why the president of the United States has just started this war.
In terms of pure rational deduction about what he is doing here, we can basically rule out all of the reasons he has said he’s doing it. Is Iran on the precipice of having ballistic missiles that can reach the United States? Absolutely not. The United States is very far from Iran. One might even say it’s a whole continent away, which means a ballistic missile launched from Iran to hit us here would have to be an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Does Iran have ICBMs? Does Iran have intercontinental ballistic missiles? No, it does not. And there is no known evidence or even serious allegation that Iran is anywhere near developing that technology anytime soon. Even Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio has recently admitted that, admitting that the threat is only that maybe, quote, one day Iran might have that kind of capability?
One day, just like you or I might one day learn to fly or to time travel? Is Iran a week away from industrial-grade uranium enrichment as the president’s diminutive real estate friend, Steve Whitcoff, asserted this week when he was asked about the Iran talks. He is inexplicably part of on behalf of the United States government and the people of the United States despite his only relevant experience and training being that he is an old real estate friend of President Donald Trump. Is Iran, as Steve Whitcoff says, a week away from achieving industrial-grade uranium enrichment for their nuclear program? No, they are not.
No, they are not. Not only has there been no American or international evidence or intelligence made public that suggests even that they are doing that, but even the Trump administration says explicitly that that is not happening. Marco Rubio on Wednesday at a press conference in St. Kitts and Nevis told reporters, quote, they are not enriching right now. So why is this happening?
Have we just started a war with Iran because they have got some advanced nuclear program that’s rushing TOWARD A BOMB, ASK PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP, WHO INSISTS THAT THE LAST TIME HE ORDERED THE BOMBING OF IRAN IN JUNE, THAT QUOTE, TOTALLY OBLITERATED THEIR NUCLEAR IT’S HARD TO SAY THAT ANYTHING TOTALLY OBLITERATED, GONE, PULVERIZED, ERASED FROM THE EARTH MIGHT NOW SUDDENLY BE BACK AGAIN. AND SO THEREFORE A WAR MUST URGENTLY START TODAY. SO WHAT ARE WE DOING here, it’s not that they’re about to get us with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It’s not that they are enriching uranium to such a degree that it is dangerous and we must stop that. It’s not that But their nuclear program, which Trump says he obliterated, has somehow unobliterated itself and is now a pressing danger again.
Why did we just go to war with Iran. The president has said a couple of times in recent days that he just wants the Iranian government to say the words that they are not pursuing a nuclear bomb, suggesting that if they would just SAY THAT, THAT WOULD BE ENOUGH TO STOP THE UNITED STATES FROM STARTING A WAR WITH THEM. WELL, THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT ACTUALLY OVER AND OVER AGAIN KEEP SAYING THAT THEY ARE NOT developing a nuclear bomb they will say it whenever you like they say it whenever they are asked so that does not appear to be the reason either so why do you think President Donald Trump has just done this why do you think he has just started a war with Iran? Is it because his heart bleeds empathetically on a human level for the protesters in Iran who have been killed by their own government in such huge numbers in January and February of this year? Is it because Donald Trump really feels for the Iranian people?
Is it because his heart throbs with a passionate support for the right of free speech, and the right of people everywhere to protest against their own government and not face violence because of it. Is that what you think? If so, good morning. I hope you have slept well for this past decade in which you’ve been dead to the world but i mean just suspend disbelief for a moment just suppose that the reason the united states of america has just started this war with Iran is. Because, as the president said today in his weird pre-recorded video message in a baseball hat and a suit jacket that the White House released at 2 .
30 in the morning, because as the president said today in that stilted, strange statement squinting at the camera with his eyes shaded by the gigantic white hat he was wearing. He said that he’s doing this because he wants the people of Iran to rise up and overthrow their despotic government, at his instruction. And maybe they will. Maybe they will try. But Iran is a huge, complex country.
It is 92 million people. That is more than triple the population of Iraq or Afghanistan when we started our disastrous regime change wars in those two countries two decades ago. Iran in the massive, suffocating, brutal domestic security services that are happy to terrorize the Iranian people in the best in the worst of times which they have done in the last eight weeks. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has massive economic interests. They have a huge hold on multiple sectors of the Iranian economy.
And to state the obvious, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is not the kind of force that’s going to go poof if a Donald Trump airstrike manages to kill Iran’s supreme leader. If they do kill the supreme leader, which appears maybe to be what they tried to do earlier today, then what will happen? I mean, this isn’t Venezuela. There’s no vice Ayatollah who’s going to step in and take over the top job except she’ll take calls from Marco Rubio. What will happen then?
If you voted for Donald Trump for president because you believed the hype that he was America first, that he was against foreign wars, that he was definitely against regime change wars in foreign country. Well, again, good morning. I hope you slept well. But the president in this case says explicitly that this is a war we are waging for regime change. And the existing leader, Khomeini, who has been in place since 1989, there is no other person of that stature to just pop in place and say, OK, it’s done.
We’ve made that change. And so if you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government, if you wanted the beleaguered and oppressed Iranian people to organize very quickly into a new populist political force to rise up against, among other things, the security services there that have been massacring them by the thousands this month and last. If you wanted that to happen, you probably could have taken some steps to help that happening, to make sure they can organize and can communicate. Right? Maybe you would have turned the internet back on.
And when you, Donald Trump, in your baseball hat proclaimed on that weird TAPED MESSAGE TODAY THAT THE IRANIAN POLICE AND THE SECURITY FORCES AND THE REVOLUTIONARY GUARD MUST SURRENDER, THEY MUST LAY DOWN THEIR WEAPONS AS DONALD TRUMP SAID THIS MORNING AT 2 .30. IF THAT WAS WHAT YOU WANTED TO HAPPEN BECAUSE YOU You wanted the domestic security situation to become less dangerous for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government. If you actually wanted to make that happen, instead of just saying it, you as the U .S.
government may be you as the U .S. government in coalition with other allies that you might have bothered to bring on board, you might have given the Iranian police and Revolutionary Guard and Security Services some instructions on how to surrender and lay down their weapons. Some path to do that, which Trump did not. As I say, you might have taken steps to turn the Internet back on in Iran.
So the people there, the people, the Iranian people could reach each other and the world. And so the world could reach them too. If you actually wanted the Iranian people to have a chance rising up against the regime that has oppressed them for so many decades. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi language Voice of America communications platform and put it in the hands of a soft-focus election denier local news anchor, who is most famous for proclaiming the fraudulence of American elections. If this is a regime change war, as Trump says it is, because Trump is seriously hoping the Iranian people will complete the job for him.
It is worth knowing that there has been no serious or even unserious effort by the United States to make it possible, let alone plausible, for any uprising by the Iranian people to succeed. And so why did Donald Trump just start this war? Why is this HAPPENING. QUI VONO, WHO BENEFITS? IT’S ALWAYS USEFUL TO START THAT QUESTION IN ANY COUNTRY, WHO BENEFITS?
WHO WANTS IRAN BOMBED OFF THE MAP AND FOR THEIR own reasons. Who are Iran’s rivals and enemies? Perennially, it’s the Gulf Arab states, countries like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates in Qatar. You know, Qatar, the country that just gave Donald Trump a really, really nice $400 million plane, really a gilded flying palace for his own use both during the presidency, during his presidency and after Trump plans to take that plane with him and keep using it after he leaves office if he ever leaves office. And you remember United Arab Emirates, famous for recently structuring a totally pointless crypto financial transaction so that $2 billion of it would be stuffed into the Trump family’s otherwise worthless brand new crypto financial firm.
And, of course, you remember the Saudis who stuffed another $2 billion into the pockets of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, just as Trump’s first term in office came to a close. You might remember enough people were alarmed about that when it happened, that the Trump folks actually sort of bothered to come up with an excuse for what made that OK. They said, don’t worry, Jared will never again work for the U .S. government.
He’s never coming back to Washington. So it’s okay that he’s taken all this money from the Saudis now. We will never have to worry about having somebody involved in U .S. policy who has also just been given billions of dollars by Saudi Arabia, apparently for no reason.
Well, that was the explanation when he took all that money from the Saudis at the end of Trump’s first term. And now today, who has been leading the negotiations on behalf of the United States government with Iran before we just started this war with them today? I mean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in St. Kitts this week. It wasn’t him.
No, it was Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, recently paid billions of dollars by Iran’s chief rival, and nevertheless sitting there alongside Trump’s tiny real estate friend Steve Witkoff, who has sought recently to improve his considerable family fortunes by going to Qatar to seek money from its sovereign wealth fund. Weird that those talks didn’t work, right? It’s like if you were having a backyard dispute with your neighbor, hey, your new fence crosses YOU ARE HAVING A NEIGHBORLY AND THE COUNTRY IS CUT DOWN, THAT HEDGE YOU JUST CUT DOWN, HEY, THAT WAS MINE. YOU ARE HAVING A NEIGHBORLY DISPUTE WITH YOUR NEIGHBOR on your block. And the cops break down your door with a battering ram.
They arrest you and your whole family. They ransack your house, and then they lighted a fire and bulldoze it. And they tell your neighbor, hey, it’s all done. You can take his whole backyard, and you can take his house now too. And as you’re trying to figure out why this has just happened, you come to learn that your neighbor has been paying massive bribes to the police in your town.
Oh, that’s what’s going on. I mean, there’s a lot of attention on Israel and indeed Israel and the United States have worked together in the bombing campaign, not only the one that started today, but the campaign against Iran in June. But it is the Gulf Arab states who are arrayed against Iran, who want Iran removed as their regional rival. It is those countries that have been assiduously buying up members of the Trump family and the Trump administration with just astonishing amounts of cash in recent years, and particularly in recent months. And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not.
And that our American government hasn’t bothered to explain in terms that are even internally consistent LET ALONE RATIONAL OR SOUND. WHY DID DONALD TRUMP TODAY JUST START A WAR WITH IRAN? YOU TELL ME. THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD WRITES TODAY THAT in this second term, Trump’s, quote, appetite for military intervention grows with the eating. And that seems observably true.
Iran doesn’t have ballistic missiles that can reach us. Iran has not achieved some kind of breakthrough in nuclear enrichment. That is a new, sudden emergency. Iran isn’t about to have a nuclear bomb. And I think it’s fair to say this is not about Donald Trump’s emotional desire to provide support to the Iranian people.
If it were, we might actually be supporting the Iranian people. So why is it? Maybe it’s for oil as the president daydreams himself into another 19th century war fantasy of conquering some foreign land he doesn’t understand or care about, but he would like to rob them of their natural resources. Maybe he thinks Iran and its proud 92 million people will happily and easily become a new colony in an empire. An empire helmed by an American emperor.
Maybe that’s what he thinks. But as this now becomes the seventh country Trump has bombed, just since being back in office for one year. Cui bono. Who benefits? It seems like a disturbingly easy question to answer.
Why has the U .S. government been pushed in this direction? Follow the money. Why is Donald Trump willing to let that happen?
Well, with this president, sadly, we keep learning over and over and over again that the easiest answer is almost always the truest one. He does not play four-dimensional chess. There’s just him and what we know he’s like, Right. This president appears to have grown his enormous and excitable new appetite for military intervention in just this one year back in office, apparently because he just thinks war is easy. It’s exciting.
It earns him not only close attention but even occasionally plaudits from the very serious is people who are professionally inclined to believe that there’s some rationale, some strategery, some good thinking behind the start of every war, particularly in the Middle East. Starting a war, launching airstrikes, doing this sort of THING, IT GETS HIM A TON OF ATTENTION. HE GETS TO DO IT UNILATERALLY, HE CONTENDS. NATURALLY THERE’S NO QUESTION THAT HE WOULD SEEK A DECLARATION OF WAR FROM CONGRESS OR EVEN AN AUTHORIZATION FOR THE USE OF MILITARY FORCE. HE He sees war as something he gets to do on his own say-so in a baseball hat from home that is exciting, that is controversial, that it’s all about him and not for nothing.
It’s the world’s greatest change of subject. Today, Saturday is a weekday, it’s a school day in Iran as we start to get reports of the damages inside, not just Tehran, but elsewhere in Iran. The Internet is off in Iran. The government in Iran hasn’t advised its own people what to do as American can airstrikes start bombarding multiple cities? Donald Trump, when he was a private citizen, repeatedly in 2011, 2012 and 2013 said that then-President Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran in order to help his political prospects.
He kept saying over and over again that Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran in order to get re-elected, in order to help the Democratic Party’s political prospects. Donald Trump was wrong about that. Barack Obama didn’t start a war with Iran. But we know why Trump thought Obama should have done it. He said so.
He said that was exactly what Obama would need to do in order to get reelected, in order to put wind in his political sails. We know. We know what Donald Trump thought would be the salutary domestic political effect of a U .S. president starting a war with Iran.
And now today, as he is facing domestic political disaster in this year’s elections. Now today, our wildly unpopular U .S. president has started that war himself. Why do you think he did it?
Stay with us.
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