US President Donald Trump’s decision to allow Israel to attack Iran is the worst miscalculation a US president has made since George W Bush invaded Iraq.

Bush’s decision heralded eight years of conflict in Iraq, killed at least 655,000 people, according to The Lancet, spawned an extreme group of Takfiri militants in the Islamic State group, and brought a major state to the verge of collapse from which it has yet to recover 14 years on.

Trump’s decision could yet prove to be more calamitous.

Allowing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran, when US envoys were engaged in negotiations with Tehran, places the US presidency on the same level of trustworthiness as Al Capone or Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

This is the way you behave if you are in charge of a drug cartel, not a global power.

Who now will trust the word of America? Sooner or later, a power in decline like the US will find it needs the trust of others.

True to form, Trump and his coterie have no inkling of what they have just done. They are gloating in the act of deceit they have just performed, laughing about duping Iranian diplomats while rushing hundreds of Hellfire missiles to the Israeli army and supplying it with real-time intelligence.

Israel’s drones caught their targets at home in bed or lured them to their headquarters, where they were wiped out. This is regarded in Tel Aviv and Washington as a coup. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington provided Israel with “exquisite intel”.

After bragging about their act of deception, Trump lectured Iranians to get back to the negotiating table or face even worse. “Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. God Bless You All!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

This is the dumbest thing the US president could say to a nation 92 million-strong with thousands of years of history behind them.

Yesterday Saddam, today Netanyahu

It is even more stupid if you consider what Iran went through for eight years when it was attacked by the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with western support.

It is this bitter experience, no less than the Islamic Republic’s ideology, that has fashioned Iran’s foreign policy. Its nuclear enrichment programme and its rocket arsenal were all burnished in the fire of the Iran-Iraq war.

Like Netanyahu, the Iraqi dictator launched a war when he deemed his neighbour to be at its most vulnerable.

On 22 September 1980, Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was still grappling with the post-revolutionary chaos. He did not have an army, much of which was dissolved when the Shah was toppled.

Iran had a combination of regular forces and the newly formed,........

© The Spine Times