An Iranian flag rises from the rubble of a damaged police station damaged on Tuesday in Tehran.

They don’t call it the Department of War for nothing.

The Trump administration’s self-renamed Department of Defense is living up to its MAGA moniker by waging war with Iran.

The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran with airstrikes on Saturday. The reasons are wobbly: to thwart Iran’s nuclear weapons program or to topple the country’s dictatorship and free its people or to defend Israel.

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And conveniently for President Donald Trump, war is now the big news story, and questions about the president and the Epstein files have dropped off the radar.

So far, there’s no end in sight to the war.

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Trump said Monday that the war could last four to five weeks or, “Whatever it takes … we have capability to go far longer than that.” 

Of course, nobody wants war, except maybe the Department of War, and Trump is taking flak from parts of MAGA who don’t believe putting America First includes fighting in the Middle East or letting Israel unduly dictate U.S. policy.

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That all said, many Iranians in Iran and elsewhere are grateful that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the first wave of airstrikes on Saturday. Khamenei and the Islamic Republic have ruled Iran with an iron fist since taking power in 1979. 

Smoke rises after a strike in Tehran on Tuesday. The United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran on Saturday.

Amin Ahmadi, who was born in Iran and came to the U.S. as a college student in the 1980s, said in an Open Forum on Tuesday that the attack on his native country is justified to derail Iran’s nuclear ambitions and change the ruling regime.

“The United States has finally chosen to confront facts,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, while Islamophobia in the U.S. is not new, it has spiked during Trump’s second term. The war with Iran comes during Ramadan, making the holy month this year “an increasingly disturbing and dangerous environment” for Muslim Americans, Zahra Billoo and Ismail Allison of the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote in an Open Forum on Thursday.

“Far-right politicians have been busy resurrecting the conspiracy theory that American Muslims are part of a secret global plot to somehow impose ‘sharia law’ on the United States,” they wrote of Muslim religious practices. “Of course, this makes no sense whatsoever.”

Stoking fear and hate comes with consequences. Billoo and Allison pointed out that so far during this Ramadan, a Pennsylvania mosque was shot at, and a mosque in Florida received violent threats.

Billoo and Allison oppose the U.S. getting into “another forever” war, something Army veteran Joseph Holsworth experienced firsthand. He served a tour in Afghanistan and two tours in Iraq.

“The early stages of the conflict with Iran feel to me like Iraq all over again,” Holsworth wrote in an Open Forum on Tuesday.

Indeed, if the U.S. objective is regime change, it cannot be achieved with airpower alone, according to Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor.

“It has never — and I’m choosing my words carefully — it has never worked,” Pape, an expert on the use of airpower, told Time magazine.

When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003, Holsworth was serving in Iraq.

“We thought we’d be packing our gear and heading home in a couple of weeks,” Holsworth wrote. “But the war didn’t suddenly end.”

If recent history is any indication, America is in for a long haul in Iran.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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