In the waning days of 1990, a few months after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I sat on a sunlit terrace in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates, overlooking the glittering waters of a Persian Gulf once again turned to a theatre of war.
The lunch before us was extravagant: the host, whom I was interviewing for The Wall Street Journal, was a senior Emirati government official. I had asked him if the Gulf states were going to contribute forces in the effort to oust the Iraqis.
“You think I want to send my teen-aged son to die for Kuwait?” he replied, then chuckled. “We have our white slaves from America to do that.”
I almost choked on my lobster claw. This was an on-the-record interview, and the quote was going right into the newspaper.
I recalled that conversation when reports emerged last week that Saudi Arabia’s leader, Mohammed bin Salman, was urging Trump to send United States ground forces to Iran. It was the only way, he reportedly argued, to assure that the region was not left with an unstable, desperate, unpredictable and even more radicalised Iran.
Like every government except Trump’s and Netanyahu’s, the Saudis hadn’t wanted this war. But what they want even less is a TACO move (Trump Always Chickens Out) by a president realising he’d catastrophically miscalculated Iranian grit and guile, watching his already dismal approval ratings tanking, along with the world’s economies. He had made a feckless decision to wage war. He might make an equally feckless decision to declare “mission accomplished”, leaving an unholy mess. It was on-brand for this president.
Yet Saudi Arabia has one of the best funded and equipped militaries in the world, along with more than a quarter of a million active-duty troops. The UAE, having learnt from the 1990s example of Kuwait, has since developed a high-tech, highly trained military, introduced compulsory military service, and is said to be potentially the most lethal force in the Middle East, after Israel.
Yet it is the “white slaves” (including, of course, many Americans of colour) who may once again be put in harm’s way in an attempt, most likely doomed, to clean up the mess Trump has created. Thirteen have already died, dozens suffered injuries, but those numbers would soar if the Saudis were to get their wish for a ground war.
And they very well might. On Easter Sunday, of all days, came Trump’s profane post on social media, threatening that the US would commit the war crime of obliterating Iran’s civilian infrastructure if the Strait of Hormuz were not reopened.
The F-bomb and its adjacent profanities brought back another memory: Barack Obama’s tan suit, worn at a 2014 press conference discussing Islamic State terrorism. That sartorial choice was “unpresidential”, fulminated Fox News. One commentator on Fox went so far as to claim it “confirmed he was a Marxist”.
There has been no fulmination from Fox about the unpresidential nature of Trump’s deranged post on Truth Social. On Monday, Fox buried scant mentions amid saturation coverage of the successful rescue of the downed airman. An airman who was placed in mortal peril because of an illegal war, whose plane was shot down even though the president had told the world only days before that Iran’s air defences were “literally obliterated” and that Iran was left with “no air defence whatsoever”.
When Trump was elected, I expected the worst. I expected, for example, that he would implement the draconian policy objectives of Project 2025 – the far right’s blueprint for eviscerating civil rights, social and environmental programs, and indeed more than half of its stated objectives have already been realised.
But this war I did not expect. It was the one thing Trump was clear on: no more costly, lethal foreign wars on his watch. And so now he has done the near impossible: exceeded my worst expectations with a war based on the lie of imminent nuclear threat. A war of extreme cruelty and massive incompetence.
I hope that somewhere in our own government, behind all the cautious, carefully worded public calls for de-escalation, some real conversations are going on. This is no longer the United States with which we allied in World War II. No longer the country we’ve long (maybe too long) looked to for security. It’s become a dangerous, destabilising force, doing grave damage to our economy and threatening, through the dreadful deal that is AUKUS, to suck us into future wars we should have no part of.
AUKUS was the Morrison government’s bad deal. The best time to have ordered a review – of its flimsy costings (including the opportunity costs of such vast expenditure), its unrealistic assessments of shipbuilding capacity in both the US and the UK, and its dire strategic implications – was right after the Albanese government was first elected. The second-best time? Right now.
Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist.
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