On normal Saturdays in Georgetown, lines of people on the streets meant high demand for the neighbourhood’s eponymous cupcake shop. But the scenes on K Street, stretching down to the waterfront, reflected the extraordinary events in the Middle East, with hundreds of celebrants bearing Iranian flags and celebrating the violent death of the supreme leader of Iran.
It was 8.30pm Eastern Time when Iranian state media confirmed what already been widely reported: that the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed during the wave of missile attacks which destroyed his compound in Tehran.
The Georgetown celebrations mirrored outbreaks of Iranian-American jubilation across the country at the unimaginably sudden end to a leader whose demonstrable brutality towards his own people was exceeded only by his visceral hatred of the United States.
Khamenei’s death is the coup de grace of what was a second precise and audacious Israeli-US military strike on Iran inside a year. The erasure of a figure who was the last of the original cast of the 47-year-old Islamic Republic regime instantly thrusts Iran, and the Middle East, on to a different trajectory. But as international governments and Middle East authorities struggled to catch up the speed of events, there was general agreement that nobody can forecast with any accuracy as to where the new dispensation will bring the region – or why the Trump administration has decided to act now.
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Within the US, the military strikes were the source of general perplexion. Once again, president Donald Trump had issued an order which represents a startling reversal of his 2024 election campaign vows to keep the US out of the “forever wars”. Once again, a military action against a foreign state had been ordered without congressional approval.
The official White House rationale for the strikes was clear: that Iran, under Khamenei, was in the process of developing nuclear capabilities and ballistic missiles capable of striking American targets. It’s a claim that national security analysts and Middle East experts are dubious about.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio clarified that the bipartisan “gang of eight”, which is privy to highly classified intelligence, was informed of the imminent threats hours before the missiles rained down on Iran. One of those, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, posted a video message on Saturday asking: “Has Donald Trump just put us into another forever war in the Middle East?”. Warner said he had seen “no imminent threat to the U.S. that would justify putting American troops in harm’s way”.
The general response from the Democrats was, by necessity, compromised and equivocal. Virtually all leading figures welcomed the demise of Khamenei, whose final act of consequence was to oversee the brutal slaughter of thousands of Iranian protesters. But it was tempered by questions about the legality of the administration’s action.
“You won’t hear many Republicans saying it out loud today but the war powers resolution that should come before us this week is a bipartisan resolution. I’ve heard a lot of Republicans say behind the scenes that if Biden were doing this kind of stuff, just operating unilaterally without consulting Congress, they would be up in arms,” Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulton said on Saturday evening.
“That’s a quote: up in arms. So, the reality is that the constitution does still matter in a Democracy. And the constitution is clear; Congress decides whether we go to war or not, not the president. Let’s be clear: this isn’t just a unilateral operation in relation to an imminent threat. That’s what they claimed in relation to Venezuela. That’s not what they are trying to claim today. The president himself has said: this is a war.”
The Washington/Tel Aviv vision that bombing Iran will somehow trigger a popular uprising is not strategy – it’s wishful thinking
— Ali Vaez
In public, Republicans have hailed the operation as the most conspicuous example yet of Trump’s strength of leadership. If nothing else, this decision will lay to rest the “Trump Always Chickens Out” epithet that went viral after his flip-flopping over tariff punishments last year. Although clever, it never rang true: if Trump were prone to chickening out, he would never have descended the golden escalator a decade ago, when he announced himself a presidential candidate to international mirth and derision.
He has brought the US into this engagement with Iran at a period when his personal approval ratings are at all-time low and despite polling showing that a mere 20 per cent of Americans approve of US military intervention in Iran.
Another broad interpretation of the strikes is that Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has once again shaped US foreign policy to his own liking. Trump had indicated during the week that he was not happy with the progress of the peace talks in Geneva, mediated by Oman, in which it became clear that the Iranian regime was unwilling to cede to the US demands: a destruction of Iran’s nuclear sites and the delivery of enriched uranium to the US.
On both his middle-of-the night television address and again on Truth Social, Trump urged Iranian citizens to seize this void in the Islamic regime. “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, military and other security and police forces no longer want to fight and are looking for immunity from us,” he said on Truth Social.
There are 90 million people in Iran, but it remains unclear how they are expected to stage a concerted uprising just weeks after thousands of protesters were slaughtered by the military wings of the regime. And it remains to be seen if the Trump administration has any plan to facilitate Iranian citizens in regaining control from the regime.
Ali Vaez, head of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, told the New Yorker magazine on Saturday that the Washington/Tel Aviv vision “that bombing Iran will somehow trigger a popular uprising is not strategy – it’s wishful thinking”.
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But Trump has long been a proponent of wishful thinking. Once again, he has trusted his extraordinary instincts for the calculated gamble. And once again, it has generated an unanswerable series of questions and potential outcomes. It was obvious from last January that whenever Trump does leave the Oval Office, the impact of his second term on US domestic politics would be seismic.
Trump may feel that killing the Ayatollah in what amounts to a third audacious US military operation in under a year can give him the defining presidential moment he has been grappling with since returning to office.
It’s a contrary decision by a president who has portrayed himself as the peace president and openly lobbied the Nobel committee for its prestigious Peace Prize – which, of course, they declined to award to him. But that didn’t prevent him from obtaining the medal anyway.
