Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

For the ancient Greek dramatists, hubris — overweening pride — was the tragic flaw that brought down the hero, the king or warrior blind to the destruction wrought by his own actions. Whether you see President Trump as a hero or not, hubris is the almost inevitable cause of his decision to launch a war for no clear reason, with no comprehensible purpose and — most of all — no plausible way to bring it to an end.

It’s been observed that Trump’s pronouncements before the initial bombing of Iran on Feb. 28 are eerily similar to Vladimir Putin’s before invading Ukraine in 2022, unprovoked aggression that was denounced by the entire West and our NATO allies. What’s not often mentioned is that while Putin is Russia’s unchallenged dictator, Trump is, at least theoretically, constrained by Congress and the courts, which have largely failed in their duty.

It’s instructive to compare war-making by the last three Republican presidents. George H.W. Bush somewhat belatedly decided that Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait — what the dictator called Iraq’s “19th province” — could not be allowed to stand.

Bush organized an impressive coalition of NATO allies and obtained congressional approval and a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing an invasion. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm routed Iraq’s army and restored Kuwait’s government. Bush resisted entreaties from his own advisors — chiefly Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — to “finish the job” by invading Iraq and deposing Saddam.

When George W. Bush took office in 2001 and the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington  occurred the same year, the hawks convinced him to expand U.S. retaliation from Afghanistan, where the Taliban sheltered Osama bin Laden, into Iraq, despite no actual connection to the terrorist attacks.

Instead, the administration cooked up a theory Saddam was building nuclear weapons — which proved to be false. He had also terminated his arsenal of poison gas, the “weapons of mass destruction” that turned the U.S. against its one-time ally and bulwark, along with Saudi Arabia, against Iran’s revolutionary Islamic regime.

Bush couldn’t obtain U.N. support, and Britain was the only European ally to join Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, though he did get authorization from Congress. The mayhem following Bush’s premature declaration of “Mission Accomplished” also resulted in an Iraqi government allied to this day with Iran. No more bulwark.

Trump has dispensed with the niceties and ordered military action without even notifying lawmakers. Seemingly assured of a prostrate Republican Congress and a compliant  Supreme Court, he’s taken the country to war with no plausible reason. Again hardly noticed is that, seen from anything other than an American perspective, Trump’s attack on Iran is hard to distinguish in international law from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

If Trump truly wanted to contain and eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, he would have kept the agreement laboriously negotiated at the end of the Obama administration specifying intrusive inspections and consequences if Iran failed to comply. Instead, in Trump’s first term he abrogated the agreement, declaring he would devise a better one — a promise with as much reality as his pledge to create a health care program to replace the Affordable Care Act.

Trump’s second rationale, regime change, will prove equally illusory, as already demonstrated by the replacement of Iran’s elderly supreme leader by his even more hardline son. Relentless bombing doesn’t prompt uprisings to replace an existing regime, as the U.S. discovered in Vietnam long ago, and Benjamin Netanyahu is demonstrating in Gaza today.

What is incontestable is the economic disruption all too evident early in Operation Epic Fury, which sounds like a video game. We have soaring oil prices, chaos in Lebanon and other Middle Eastern nations and fear of worse to come. Trump resists even obvious actions to calm oil price jitters, such as pledging to use strategic petroleum reserves, which Europe supports but Trump doesn’t, at least not yet.

“Hitting them harder,” the administration’s response to every adverse development, is a short-term strategy. Trump seems averse to an actual invasion, but short of backing down — something not in his playbook — it may be his remaining option. Expecting Iran to surrender or sue for peace is also doomed to failure.

Instead, we have an open-ended commitment to war with a flimsy pretext and not even majority support from the voters. Destruction seems certain and how far it will go is beyond anyone’s ability to predict. Wars are terribly easy to begin, but impossible to control and difficult to end.

America still struggles with the wounds of Vietnam and Iraq, wars that utterly failed in their objectives. We’ll know soon enough whether Iran will join those tragedies.