President Donald Trump was unequivocal. If the Iranian government massacred protesters, the U.S. military would come to their assistance. “Help is on the way,” he declared. It was not to be, at least in the days that followed.
Trump claimed victory by suggesting his pressure made military action unnecessary. “They didn’t hang anyone. They canceled the hangings,” he said. Iranian protesters, frankly, do not know what Trump is talking about. The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, a group focused on Iran, reported that the regime had executed 52 prisoners in the days leading up to Trump’s declaration. Ahmad Khatami, an adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, delivered a Jan. 16 sermon on Khamenei’s behalf. “Armed hypocrites … should be put to death,” he declared. Many already have been, as reports emerge that security forces raided hospitals to shoot wounded protesters.
Trump is a cipher who has never felt bound by his rhetoric. He may truly have abandoned his promise to help Iranians, in which case he repeats the error of President George H.W. Bush, who, in February 1991, called on Iraqis to rise up against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, only to stand down as the Iraqi president turned his tanks and helicopter gunships on his own people.
Trump may also be buying time — after all, he subsequently called for regime change. In this case, however, he replicates one of President Bill Clinton’s greatest errors. On March 24, 1999, President Bill Clinton addressed the nation from the Oval Office. “My fellow Americans, today our Armed Forces joined our NATO allies in air strikes against Serbian forces responsible for the brutality in Kosovo,” he declared. He spoke of how Serbian forces “have intensified their attacks, burning down Kosovar Albanian villages and murdering civilians,” leading a quarter million to flee. Clinton assured Americans that he would rely on air power. “I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war,” he said.
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Clinton’s pledge may have been sincere, but it did not last. On April 13, 1999, Clinton appeared in the Rose Garden to claim both short-term success and a need to ramp up U.S. military involvement. “We are taking our allied air campaign to the next level, with more aircraft in the region, with a British carrier joining our USS Roosevelt and a French carrier in the area,” he explained. “Our humanitarian effort is also increasing to meet the daunting challenge of providing food and shelter for the hundreds of thousands of refugees.”
Journalists questioned whether that changed Clinton’s calculations about boots on the ground. “There are any number of problems with providing aid from the air,” Clinton acknowledged, citing both the danger to U.S. aircraft dropping supplies and Serbs who might intercept dropped pallets. The problem was that Clinton’s aides based their strategy so much upon wishful thinking that, when the president made his decision, the Pentagon did not have necessary equipment in place to support it. It would be four weeks before the United States could move Apache helicopters to Albania, and another two weeks to get them up and running.
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Here, the parallel may be to the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group, which is en route from the South China Sea to the Middle East. In each case, the president changed policy but fumbled its prerequisite by failing to have necessary assets in place.
In each case, the reasons were the same: The White House hoped for the best, but worried that if they planned for the worst, critics would accuse them of warmongering or betraying diplomacy. The difference is that many of the critics responsible for failing to put assets in place on the off-chance the president might need them came not from the press corps, but Secretary of War Peter Hegseth’s own circle of aides. Frankly, Hegseth, who prides himself on freeing the Pentagon from the constraints of political correctness, should have known better. Now, both Trump and the Iranian people will pay a price.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.