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In the run up to the Iraq War, President George W. Bush characterized Saddam Hussein as a “madman” who would lash out indiscriminately at the US, Israel, and other nations if not stopped.
Negotiations were impossible, Bush argued, because Hussein was driven by uncontainable animus and bloodlust.
“His word is no good,” Bush concluded, “and he’s a brute.”
Over the years the United States government and various analysts have labeled a range of designated enemies — Iraq, North Korea, Iran — as not just evil, but irrational, unpredictable, and therefore beyond the reach of diplomacy. As with Bush and Hussein, these characterizations often were as much excuse and rationalization for violence as analysis.
But we have at last found a global villain who matches the bugbear — an ill-informed violent despot who seems to enjoy carnage for its own sake, and who has the power and the will to project terror and violence anywhere on earth for any reason or for none.
That global villain is, of course, President Donald Trump.
Trump’s attacks on Iran this weekend — joined by Israel — are terrifying not just because they resulted in the deaths of numerous civilians, not just because he is flirting with a massive regional conflict, and not even because his war of aggression is flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional.
They are terrifying because they seem untethered alike from policy goals and logic. Trump offered a range of half-hearted explanations for his rush to war, but the conflicting excuses only underlined the obvious truth — he attacked Iran because he felt like it.
Nuclear weapons? Regime change? Who knows.
Many commenters have pointed out that Trump has done little to nothing to explain the case for war to the American people or to Congress. Even Republican leaders admitted they had no idea what Trump was doing or why.
“I’m learning like you are as the news unfolds exactly what’s happening,” Sen. John Cornyn stammered on Saturday.
Many statements from Democratic senators and representatives have highlighted Trump’s failure to provide a rationale for his actions and details of his plan.
“The administration has not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a (much too mild) statement.
In his statement, Schumer mentions America’s longstanding concerns about the possibility that Iran might develop a nuclear weapon. These nuclear fears are about as close as Trump has come to an actual reason for the strikes — but that explanation makes no sense.
In June 2025, after he had (also illegally) bombed Iran for the first time, Trump claimed he had “obliterated” the nation’s nuclear weapon’s program. In his State of the Union address last week he claimed Iran wants “to start [the program] all over again,” but there’s no evidence they have even tried to enrich uranium.