On Feb. 28, Donald Trump launched the war with Iran, a conflict that the American president expected to last about four weeks. Six months later, there’s no end in sight, and the Republican who carelessly started an unnecessary military offensive appears to have no idea how to end the debacle of his own making.
As a new Reuters report summarized, “Six months after the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, the war that President Donald Trump has called a ‘little excursion’ has become a deeply unpopular stalemate that threatens to derail his presidency.”
With this in mind, he’s apparently embraced the one phrase he should go out of his way to avoid. The New York Times reported:
President Trump shared on Truth Social what appeared to be an A.I.-rendered image of him standing over two signs in a war zone. One sign, next to former President George W. Bush, stated, “MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED 2001-2021.” Another sign, next to what appeared to be Iran’s former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, read, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 2026.” It was unclear what Trump meant by the post.
One of the things that stood out from the message was the specific time frame, 2001 through 2021, that the incumbent president derided as a failure. It was a curious choice, since it included Trump’s first term but not Joe Biden’s term.
More important, however, was that the online item was also plainly wrong. A litany of words come to mind when describing the U.S. mission in Iran, but “accomplished” isn’t among them.
The president launched the war convinced that he could simply bomb Iran until it agreed to an “unconditional surrender.” He similarly set out to achieve five specific objectives, nearly all of which have gone unmet. As the aforementioned Reuters report added, “Iran has not surrendered, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted, and there is no clear path to ending the conflict that Trump once predicted would be over in four weeks.”
But let’s also take a moment to consider Trump’s adoption of a phrase he really ought to remember.
Whether he understands this or not, “Mission Accomplished” was the text on the banner above George W. Bush’s head in 2003 when the president declared the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq. Bush never literally spoke the words “mission accomplished” in his remarks, but their prevalence in his carefully choreographed event was unsubtle — and the phrase haunted the rest of his presidency.
Conditions in Iraq deteriorated, the death toll mounted, and the arguments in support of the invasion evaporated, and that two-word banner became a byword for the premature celebration of a conflict that was at its beginning, not its end.
“Mission Accomplished” became a warning to future presidents tempted by hubris. (Even Bush himself later conceded the message was a “mistake.”) It’s a warning Trump has either failed to understand or chosen to ignore.
As for the political and electoral context, with 10 weeks remaining before the midterm elections, I’d love to know how many Republican incumbents and candidates are willing to endorse the president’s absurd boast about the deadly, destabilizing war.
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