Personal Stories on Iran as I Hope Trump Doesn’t Attack

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I hope President Trump doesn’t drag us into the Israel-Iran War. Where’s the Declaration of War by Congress, as mandated by the Constitution? But who follows that defunct document?

This is just the “regime-change war” Trump promised the past years he wouldn’t involve us in. It’s the main reason I voted for him – six times, three primaries and two generals. Yet here we are.

All I can do is provide a little perspective. When the Iranian Revolution hit in Jan.-Feb. 1979, I was 23 and studying Russian at the Defense Language Institute in beautiful Monterey. I never met him personally, but walking around was this one student wearing the unform of the Iranian Air Force. He wore this sweeping service cap, the Russian name for which we learned was фуражка (furazhka). So I always thought of him as Lt. Furazhka. One day, he walked by in civvies. I figured he became an asset to our intel agencies.

One of the other students was tall, maybe 6’5”, but his wife was about 5’2”. A couple of years earlier he had taken a bicycle ride through Iran, and marveled at the modern expressways the Shah had constructed, linking the country together, much like America’s interstates. I pointed out to him maybe that wasn’t such a great idea for a traditional Islamist society that was poor and couldn’t afford it; that it caused social disruption and was bankrupting the country, despite its vast oil wealth. He was having none of it: it was a great social advancement.

Shortly after I finished the Russian course, then cryptographic training in Texas and Massachusetts. I went back to my family in Michigan on leave before shipping out to my unit in Frankfurt, Germany. I saw Russell Kirk, the conservative philosopher who had been my teacher at Hillsdale College. I recounted my conversation with the other student on Iran. He said he had heard similar things from friends who were scholars of Iran.

My thinking previously had been influenced by Kirk. He hated cars and branded them “mechanical jacobins,” after the French revolutionaries. At Hillsdale, I had the privilege of driving him a couple of times to and from his beautiful ancestral home in Mecosta. We aways took Michigan back roads, stopping at little side shops and restaurants. He talked about how our own interstates had ripped up our major cities, including Detroit.

So when I saw him in 1979, we talked about that again, especially how such a rapid imposition contributed to Iran’s revolution. The Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader, while in exile in Paris had used another modern technology, cassette tapes, to send his message of revolutionary Islamic reaction back to Iran, where it took seed among the people. It’s sort of like how today’s protesters in U.S. cities use social media to get out their revolutionary message.

I bring this up because I have been reading stories such as this one, “28 photos show what Iran looked like before the 1979 revolution turned the nation into an Islamic republic.” It looks like America in the 1950s – not the 1970s. And nobody is going back to either decade, there or here.

But, supposedly, if Trump just bombs Iran enough, the people will rise up and install the Shah’s son and he will bring about a constitutional monarchy on the order of the United Kingdom. Not today’s UK, of course, which in 2025 is a hellscape; but the UK of the Beatles or Churchill. That’s the premise between ultra-hawk John Bolton’s piece this week in the Wall Street Journal, “Iran’s Ayatollahs Are Weaker Than Ever: Israel’s strike hasn’t led to the nationalist pro-regime response predicted by Tehran’s apologists in the West.”

Regime change in Iran would mean a descent into the anarchic madness of today’s Damascus, Tripoli, Kabul and Baghdad, ongoing victims of U.S. regime-change operations. The Iranians know that. They also remember Operation Ajax from 1953, when the CIA and MI6 overthrew the legitimate, elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and put in power Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his brutal Savak secret police.

Iran’s current ayatollah regime also has prepared for this war since the end of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, which killed around 1 million on each side. Back then, the U.S. backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, later transformed into the Evil Dictator of two wars. The Iraq War begun in 2003 was especially idiotic, as it displaced the minority secular Sunni Islamic government of Saddam with the majority Shiites, who are allied to the Shiites in Tehran.

And now we’re supposed to trust Bolton, Lindsey Graham, Mike Pence and the other neocon architects of the Iraq War disaster about a similar policy toward Iran?

I hope somebody is telling Trump all this stuff before he gets us stuck into another Middle East war that will waste trillions. Before the Iraq War started more than two decades ago, we actually were balancing federal budgets. The $7 trillion cost of the war began the zoom up to $37 trillion debt. Or $37,000,000,000,000.00.

A new war well could bankrupt us. But at a minimum, it would consume the rest of the Trump administration, almost guarantee a return of Democratic majorities in Congress, followed by more impeachment resolutions on flimsy pretexts. Trump was right when he tweeted the following in 2019, about the ISIS terrorists, an offshoot of the Al Qaeda terrorists who blew up our building on Sept. 11, 2001. Just last fall, Biden facilitated ISIS taking over Syria.

We’ll soon know if Trump follows his own advice. Here’s his tweet from Oct. 7, 2019: