TAP (The American Prospect) - March 2 , 2026 - Meyerson on TAP -- Harold Meyerson -Editor at large

 The American Prospect (TAP)

 Today on TAP

March 2, 2026

MEYERSON ON TAP Iraq, Iran, Irate We’ve seen this picture before. Since Donald Trump became president again, our foreign and military policy can be summed up as Decapitations ‘R’ Us. Trump’s battle plan for his war on Iran appears modeled on his plan for Venezuela: take out the leader and hope that his replacement is tractable. On Sunday morning, Trump told The Atlantic that he was eager to talk with whichever Iranian leaders are still alive. Of course, he noted, “Most of those people are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone, because that was a big—that was a big hit. They should have done it sooner.” Again, that follows the Venezuelan model: take out the top guy and deal with what remains of the top guy’s machine. That has left Venezuelans, at least for now, saddled with the same Maduro-istas as before, just under new management. And if Trump tries to reach a deal with Iran’s still-all-too-powerful theocrats, they, like their Venezuelan peers, will be distinctly disinclined to dismantle their rule. Such are the limits of government decapitations. They are not a form of regime change. Absent the ability of the populace to take the power that should be theirs, decapitations may just be a form of upward mobility for the regime’s surviving elites, now that there are unfilled slots above them. There’s no question that Trump wants his war short; otherwise, the casualties will surely grow to include the Republicans’ congressional majorities. On Saturday, his administration issued assurances that the war would not extend beyond the weekend. On Sunday, the administration amended that time frame to four weeks. Iran is raining missiles and drones on U.S. military facilities in the region, and on Israel and the Sunni Arab nations, too, all of which are sustaining casualties. If that rain keeps up, the U.S. will see its war extend beyond the weekend and beyond four weeks—for all we or anyone else knows, well beyond. Shortly after American troops, under the orders of George W. Bush, toppled the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, Bush held a rally on a carrier festooned with a giant sign: “Mission Accomplished.” It was nowhere near to being accomplished, of course; the vast majority of American and Iraqi casualties were still to come. Indeed, as a consequence of that war, the Iranian influence over Iraq ballooned, and it remains outsized to this day. Trump is plainly yearning to unfurl his own Mission Accomplished banner (unlike Bush’s, probably with his picture on it). It would be, to put it mildly, surprising if it isn’t just as calamitously inaccurate as Bush’s. But the decapitation machine rolls on. According to a report in The New York Times last Thursday, Trump’s policy toward Cuba seeks to replace President Miguel Díaz-Canel with somebody else from the current regime. The Times reports that Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently told an associate that “the U.S. had struggled to identify a Cuban equivalent to Delcy Rodríguez of Venezuela, the former vice president who succeeded Mr. Maduro and has been cooperating with the Trump administration’s moves to control the country’s oil.” (Iran, you may have noticed, also has oil.)

Trump’s thinking behind his preference for decapitations remains shrouded in mystery. (To be sure, that presupposes there’s thinking behind the shroud.) His general predisposition to monarchial rule, which remains the best way to describe his view of the presidency, may have led him to conclude that whacking heads of government actually is tantamount to regime change. Or he may be so fearful of the Democrats taking Congress come November, and his apparent inability to convince voters that they’ve never had it so good, that he’s desperately seeking cred for vanquishing foreign foes, regardless of whether they pose any threat to the United States. Or his metric of presidential greatness is rooted in the 19th century, when taking territory from other nations or defeating them in one-sided wars (Mexico, Spain, the Philippines) was Mt. Rushmore material. Or all of the above. The one thing of which we can be certain is that Trump’s decapitation strategy is inherently unable to answer the brink-of-war question frequently posed by military professionals: Tell me how this ends. In the case of Iran, Trump’s political risks seem to outweigh the possible political benefits. Only a tiny segment of the American electorate was hoping for this war, as was not the case when we invaded Iraq—according to a University of Maryland poll from February, just 21 percent of Americans supported a possible war on Iran, as compared to the 73 percent who initially supported the Iraq War—and no segment of the American electorate is likely to change its votes if the war goes as Trump wishes. On the other hand, virtually every segment of the American electorate is concerned about the cost of living, and if oil and gas prices rise due to the turmoil in the Strait of Hormuz, Trump’s already low approval rating will descend even more. Finally, there’s the little detail that Trump has yet to explain to the public, in a way that’s even minimally plausible: why we’ve gone to war with Iran. As such, it almost doesn’t rise to the level of a war of choice: Unless Trump can come up with a compelling reason, it’s more a war of impulse. (In fairness, I must note that W.’s decision to make war on Iraq was at least partly rooted in personal impulse, too, as he wished to make Saddam Hussein pay for threatening the life of his father.) For Bibi Netanyahu, by contrast, this war is a matter of personal political survival. Polls show his government trailing behind his largely centrist opponents, and retaining the prime minister’s position remains his best bet to stay out of the clink if he’s convicted of corruption charges. Weakening Iran militarily, even if regime change remains beyond Israeli and American capacity, will certainly help him—at least, more than it will help Trump. (Netanyahu need not worry about his legacy: Last Friday, Gallup released a poll that showed, for the first time ever, that more Americans—41 percent—say they sympathize more with the Palestinians than those—36 percent—who say they sympathize more with the Israelis. This is Bibi’s defining geopolitical achievement.) From a strictly American viewpoint, however, our Middle Eastern wars share a disturbing lack of raison d’être. No doubt that Saddam Hussein and Iran’s ayatollahs were horrendous leaders who inflicted horrors on their subjects, but neither posed a threat to the United States, despite claims that both were developing nuclear weapons (debunked after the invasion in Iraq failed to find any; debunked before we went to war against Iran, by none other than Trump, who barely eight months ago asserted that we’d destroyed Iran’s nuclear capacity). Devoid of reasons, creatures of impulse, our presidents apparently can’t help themselves from blowing up someplace in the Middle East, no matter how many times it ends in bloody disaster. Harold Meyerson Editor-at-Large