Forget Kaiser Wilhelm II’s blank check to Austria-Hungary to wage war on Serbia in 1914; forget Adolf Hitler invading the Soviet Union in 1941 and then declaring war on the United States just to complete his imbecility. President Donald Trump’s decision to authorize, on Israeli urging, the assassination of the Supreme Spiritual Guide of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tops them all.

Even by the contemptible standards of all our beloved neo-cons—in my 40 years covering Washington, they have multiplied like fleas, but not for much longer—the sheer stupidity and superfluousness of this act defies belief.

After all, Khamenei was a dying man: He was in the last stages of cancer and he and everyone else knew it; he was also 86 years old. There was nothing he craved more in life than to be a heroic martyr for his faith. And the neo-con geniuses who surround President Trump, along with the fatal fake Greek chorus of fake macho warriors and “geniuses” on Fox News night after night—have now granted him his most ardent wish.

What will be the consequences of this fateful act? First, Trump has likely signed his own death warrant and those of innumerable other U.S. and Western leaders. Every devout Shi’ite in the world and many others will crave the president’s death now—and those of endless other U.S. and Western leaders too.

A crucial taboo has been broken. A line has been breached. The Rubicon has been crossed. The leaders of nations are no longer exempt, at least in theory, from being openly eliminated by the agents and followers of other great powers and creeds.

There is no going back now.

Second, Trump and his top national security team have incredibly managed to outdo even George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in their self-destructive incompetence. They have snatched catastrophic defeat, not just for themselves but for the entire Western World, out of the jaws of victory.

Prior to the U.S.-Israeli invasion, Iran was facing serious internal problems, provoked in good measure by devastating U.s. sanctions applied on the country. And while a lot of the anti-regime protests may have been triggered by The National Endowment For Democracy (NED) and covert manipulation, I do not dismiss the accounts of thousands of protesters shot in recent weeks in pro-democracy protests as all manufactured Western lies. The Islamic Republic for decades has been in that stage of exhausted cynicism and fragile recovery that all the radical revolutions of modern times have gone through.

This was the equivalent of the Directorate period in France in the 1790s, the New Economic Policy period in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the brief Hundred Flowers blooming premature spring in China in the 1950s and even the 1920s Weimar years in Germany after the Great Inflation and before the Great Depression—the period of grace was not long—in the 1920s.

But what followed in those cases? Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Adolf Hitler.

In Iran now, Moqtada al-Sadr—seasoned, implacable, patient – is waiting in the wings. All he has to do is let Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu with their love of their supposedly invincible air power to slay all his rivals for him first—as the psychotic clowns surely will.

All he has to do is let Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, with their love of their supposedly invincible air power, to slay all his rivals for him first—as the psychotic clowns surely will.

Third, Trump—like so many American leaders before him back to the risible Woodrow Wilson—sees the world in neat, tidy conceptual terms.

Wilson imagined two billion people around the globe ready to cast off their habits, cultures, societies and their very nature for thousands of years in order to follow his childish conception of national self-determination.

Trump imagines everything can be solved by printing more dollars—either to bankroll soaring budget deficits and $2 trillion annual defense budgets at home or bribe leaders around the world to pretend to believe yet more worthless American empty security assurances and solemn lies.

Iran may not respond today and tomorrow.

Or maybe it will. Who really knows?

But, most likely, there will be a brief period of chaos, when Trump’s and Netanyahu’s “strategy”—you cannot of course truly call it that—will appear to be working.

But what will then follow?

The U.S. and Western European industrial base to produce the aircraft, the “smart” weapons, the targeting devices for any sustained war against a target nation of 90 million people covering an area comparable to Western Europe simply does not exist.

All the inventories of air and land weapons have already been used up in sending them to drive endless waves of young Ukrainian men taught only self-limiting tactics by worthless U.S. and British commanders to their deaths for no good purpose.

Since the Ukraine War—Europe’s longest and worst since 1945—began, at least two million young Ukrainians have been sent to their deaths—for nothing. For none of the selfish, elitist and useless war aims that the genius planners in Washington, Brussels and London counted upon can ever now be realized.

This leads us to fatal flaw and stupidity number four.

It does not appear to have dawned on Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that they have no military game plan. Trump, as at least a fitful fan of the National Football League, should have realized that, in any war, you always need that.

In 1980, the far-from-saintly and peace-loving U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his far-from-genius National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski urged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. I was chief analyst—the only one, actually—at The Washington Times, monitoring the last three years of that war from January 1986 until its fitful conclusion in 1988.

There was zero competition for the job. None of the Olympian prognosticators on the newspaper thought the Iran-Iraq War—the region’s bloodiest in all its history—was really important. None of them thought it was worth their precious genius time.

All the self-styled high-flyers and visionary geniuses on the newspaper, especially its pampered neo-cons, obsessed instead on the really important Middle East news of the day, State Department official Dennis Ross’s endless genius plans to end the Israeli-Arab conflict peacefully and perfectly forever. Needless to say, that never happened.  

However, I learned, above all, two important things during those years:

First, never to despise or underestimate the bravery and endurance of ordinary Iraqi soldiers, Sunni and Shiite alike, when they were fighting for their homes, their families, their country and for a cause they truly believed in.

Second, that the idealism and wild passion of the Iranian people, when ignited by their own Shiite faith, was explosive, ferocious and unstoppable—except when there was a powerful enough counterforce to stop them.

For 400 years—from 1517 to 1917—that force was the Turkish Sunni Muslim Ottoman Empire, until the British Empire willfully destroyed it at the monomaniacal urging of a young Winston Churchill in his insatiable greed to claim the oil of both Iran and Iraq for the British Empire from 1911 to 1922. Then, through the 20^th century, it was Iraq: the eastern protective shield of the Sunni world.

However, in this enlightened 21^st century, President George W. Bush—who surely vies with Joe Biden as the dimmest of our esteemed chief executives—annihilated Iraq in 2003. Then Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gleefully approved the destruction of Syria as well in 2011.

Thee ghastly maneuvers may yet enable Iran, a country of 92 million people with one of the youngest and most dynamic populations in the world, to assert more of the regional hegemony that Washington most fears, and to have the backing of both Russia and China to boot.

Where are the disciplined, well-equipped, well-supplied U.S. and European armies of hundreds of thousands of Western combat troops to save Saudi Arabia from being overthrown, Israel from being causally eliminated? Egypt swept by new waves of extreme anti-Western religious fervor?

Why, there is no one at all, of course. No armies, no logistics systems, no military arsenals, no war plans, no contingency measures. Nothing, Nothing at all.

Additionally, with the removal of Khameini, who had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against development of nuclear weapons, Washington may have ensured that Iran will now develop a nuclear weapons program as an underpinning of its regional power.

These are among the ways that the Trump-Netanyahu policy may backfire. What is clear irregardless, is the illegality and immorality of Trump and Netanyahu’s action.

As of this writing, over 1,000 Iranian civilians have been killed, including dozens of school-girls who were murdered in a bombing attack that some U.S. media outlets and think-tanks somehow blame on Tehran.

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