Early Saturday morning, air strikes rained down on Iran, as the United States and Israel launched a joint operation against military installations across the country. The attack follows weeks of indirect negotiations that ended in stalemate. “They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions,” President Donald Trump proclaimed this morning. “We can’t take it anymore.” On Saturday afternoon, Trump announced that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed.
Earlier today, The Free Press’s Rafaela Siewert spoke live with Douglas Murray, Michael Oren, and others to unpack the latest developments and what they mean for an already fragile global order. Watch the full livestream here. And don’t miss the rest of our coverage of this extraordinary moment, including Haviv Rettig Gur on how the Islamic Republic will fall, and Eli Lake on why this is the biggest gamble of Trump’s presidency. But first, Niall Ferguson explains why this is not a replay of the 2003 invasion of Iraq—and why America is more interested in “regime alteration” than regime change. —The Editors
Since the news of the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran this morning, I have been thinking a lot about a song in the 2004 movie Team America:World Police. The movie was co-written by the creators of South Park and follows a group of heroic American puppets waging kinetic war on Islamic terrorists, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, and liberal Hollywood, leaving cataclysmic collateral damage (the Eiffel Tower, Cairo, the Sphinx) in their wake. But the real highlight is a song called “America, Fuck Yeah.” Here’s how it goes:
America, fuck yeah
Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day, yeah
America, fuck yeah
Freedom is the only way, yeah
Terrorists, your game is through
’Cause now you have to answer to …
America, fuck yeah
So lick my butt and suck on my balls
America, fuck yeah
What you gonna do when we come for you now?
It’s the dream that we all share
It’s the hope for tomorrow
Fuck yeah
Team America was an ambivalent movie at the time. That was what made it funny. It simultaneously mocked the liberal opponents of an aggressive foreign policy and the neoconservatives who advocated policies such as regime change in Iraq. The South Park team understood before many commentators that the United States has a track record of coming to save the day and leaving a trail of devastation.
For the habitual critics of U.S. foreign policy in general and Donald Trump’s in particular, the analogy between today’s air raids against Iran and the invasion of Iraq nearly 23 years ago is too obvious to be resisted.
