Iran was already our enemy in the Middle East: What about Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE?

Iran wasn’t a threat to the United States when we joined with Israel in starting a war with the Islamic Republic two weeks ago.

It wasn’t a threat to the U.S. last summer when the U.S. and Israel bombed Iranian nuclear facilities to a degree that Donald Trump bragged about having “obliterated” the nation’s nuclear capabilities.

Not saying Iran was a friend rather than a sworn enemy, but it was a country with leaders positioning themselves as an enemy who were greatly weakened internally and regionally, which is why Trump and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to strike last summer, and again two weeks ago.

Trump and Netanyahu, and their teams, badly misread the weakness of the ruling clerics, and the strength of the internal opposition.

And also fundamentally misread how asymmetric wars are fought in the 21st century, with thinking that possessing stockpiles of weapons and trained troops allows the big boys to dictate whatever they want to everybody else.

To that point, Osama bin Laden’s Sept. 11 terrorists took down the World Trade Center with box cutters; Ukraine has held off the Russian Army for four years with drones, which is what Iran is using now to wreak havoc across the Middle East.

Iran isn’t what Iran was a generation ago, but it doesn’t need much to be able to upset the world order, as we’re very much well aware of in the here and now.

I can only imagine how happy the ruling royals of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE are with the way things are going – they’ve been working for years to present a peaceful, come-home-and-spend-money image of their lands to the West, with pro wrestling spectacles, comedy festivals and Formula 1 races, and because of Trump and Netanyahu, all of that is up in the air, if not at risk of being up in smoke.

More important, the primary source of their wealth is at direct threat, with Iran and its remaining allies shutting down shipping lanes, without a coordinated, pre-planned response from the U.S. or Israel, who seem to have presumed in its war planning that Iran would fall within a few hours, that there would then be someone internally who would step in and assume power, and that we’d already be living happily ever after.

The naivete of the Trump regime war planners and foreign policy team in this is, indeed, simply stunning.

They broke it, to borrow from the phrasing of Colin Powell, only, they don’t act like they’re aware that, because they broke it, they also bought it.

It seems to be the line of thinking that we can fix this by just browbeating the same NATO allies that Trump spent the winter months haranguing over Greenland into treating the world order that he ripped to shreds as their emergency, not his, and that people we’ve actively been telling to kiss our asses for the past 13 months will just come and bail us out.

Trump – main character flaw: he was never told when he did something wrong – isn’t aware that he can’t just snap his fingers and have former allies that he told to go straight to hell come to his aid.

And now, the Saudis, the Qataris, the Emiratis, who had spent the past 13 months fluffing Trump into carrying their water for them politically and economically, are finding out that he’s no longer the useful idiot they thought he was – and they’re finding this out the literal hard way, with explosions at airports and shopping centers, their ships stacked up in the Strait of Hormuz, their Western-friendly tourism events on hold, with no end in sight.

My fear here: while our former NATO allies have reason to know to be patient to wait out Trump, with the thought that Trump’s time at the top of U.S. politics, too, will pass, I don’t know that I trust oil sheikhs known to employ assassination teams the same way.

It wasn’t just bin Laden who was behind Sept. 11, after all.

There’s a reason the key Sept. 11 investigatory files are still classified, and almost certainly always will be.

These are people who had no problem using bone saws to behead a guy whose crime against their humanity was writing mean op-eds for The Washington Post.

We’re all being told to worry about Iran having sleeper cells here in the States ready to wreak havoc at any given moment.

The Iranians aren’t the only ones with motivation here, is what I’m getting at.